“You know that already.”
Which is why on that night, moved by a strange mixture of reasoning and presentiment, Medea Batalla leaves her poor house, which no one else has entered since her son left.
What’s going on?
Why is everyone leaving their houses, why are businesses closing, why do all the traffic signals stay green? Why are the streets flooded with people, with shouts, with howling sirens?
She knows the people in the neighborhood. She just hasn’t known them so enraged. The neighbors move forward, men and women, they move forward like a single tiger, they move forward with no order but with the strength of a groundswell. They move forward and surround the police. The police threaten with raised fists and voices without timbre, muffled by the growing uproar. People tighten the circle, you aren’t the police, you’re kidnappers, we’ve come to protect you, from what? We can protect ourselves. They told us there are drugs here, you people are drug traffickers. Look, you crooks in uniform, we rule ourselves here, the fewer cops the better, we know how to protect ourselves. The circle is closing, and Medea Batalla, without wanting to, becomes part of the wave. They pull her, they push her, they shove her aside violently, they flatten her like gum against the moving wall of the entire neighborhood surrounding the five policemen who protest with less and less energy. There are drugs, we’re going to search the houses, we’re going to protect you. We can protect ourselves, you’re not police, you’re kidnappers, you’re cradle snatchers. Zero violence, Señora, zero remorse, cops, we know who you are, for weeks you’ve been taking pictures when school lets out. Child robbers, you don’t get out of here alive. Beat them to death. Don’t let them escape. Look at that one trying to get on the roof of the car. Grab him. Pull him off. Kick him. Knock him down. To the ground. Hit him. Motherfuckers. The assholes are bleeding. Now douse them with gasoline. Set them on fire. Nothing should be left of them but the ashes of a shadow, the decal of their profile, the ghost of their bones. Burn them alive. Let them fry. Let them sizzle.
There were shouts of jubilation when they poured gasoline on the police and set them on fire. Doña Medea joins the chorus of joy. The neighborhood has defeated the violence that came from outside with the violence that comes from inside. Two of the police burn alive with screams that silence the sirens. The television cameras transmit everything. Live. The helicopters of His Honor the Mayor and His Excellency the President fly like crack-crazed bumblebees over the mob, letting it happen, confirming in the eyes of the neighborhood that we’re right to kill the officers of the law. That the neighborhood rules itself and knows the score. From the air, could they see clearly the police burned by the people in the neighborhood? Will they come to collect what’s left of the law: the blue trousers and shoes with metal tips? Sizzling in a burning pyre. Bonfires of branches and straw.
“Burn them!”
“We don’t need the government!”
“We’re neighborhoods free to buy and beat up, mock and murder, bellow and bite the dust!”
“After them!”
“Watch out, you rich sons of bitches, you bastard politicians!”
“After them!”
“Get a good look at us on your TVs.”
“Look at us without any papers.”
“Better off that way.”
“Oh dear God.” Doña Medea falls and is dragged along by the noise of the crowd. “Don’t let them use my bones for a club.”
The lynching is seen by the entire country, but Doña Medea has eyes for only one man. A man birthed by the crowd because the crowd doesn’t know that in the smoke and the blood and the shriek of the sirens, there is another voice muffled by blows.
She hears it. How could she not hear it. She’s listened to it her whole life. If it shouts now with rage and despair and defeat, it once sang very nicely. It was a very pretty voice. Now the voice is being muffled by blows in the nocturnal crowd from the neighborhood watched over by the forces of law and order that are provoking the power of disorder in the smoke and fog from tires set on fire and cars overturned and policemen burned alive sizzling with the smell of hair and rubber and indigestible guts. Releasing with their death the collective smell of deep-frying ears of corn warm tortillas armpits feet farts overalls rebozos sawdust hay leather wet wood burning tiles. Bursting from knifed stomachs are the countless insignias of death.
4. From the time he was a boy, Maximiliano Batalla sang very well. He would go out to the courtyard, and while he showered with buckets of water, he sang popular songs. When he was a boy, they came to propose that he sing in the choir of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. He said no because his songs were only for his mama.
Doña Medea (how naive of me) believed that this filial song would last her whole life because the strength of a son depends on the strength of his mother. No matter how aggressive the son’s and how anguished the mother’s. It’s inherited. After all, Maximiliano had been weaned with pulque, and so he was free to go out and search for milk. Medea looked at Max, and the boy must have felt that so much love compensated for a poverty subject to the national proverb:
“We’ve been eating tortillas and beans for centuries, son. How little we need to survive.”
If Maximiliano was happy, it was because he didn’t ask for anything. A calm child, perhaps resigned. How little we need to survive.
Now, years later, Doña Medea believes she committed a serious, a very serious, mistake. Giving Maxi a doll she happened to find in the market. A Baby Jesus dressed as a cowboy.
A happy child.
Except at the age of fifteen, he came home visibly upset and sprang the question on Doña Medea:
“Who’s my father?”
She shrugged. Maximiliano was so gentle and intelligent that the question seemed superfluous in a relationship as tender as the one between mother and son. Except that this time the kid insisted:
“I want to know whose son I am.”
“You’re my son,” Doña Medea responded with smiling naturalness.
“And the Holy Spirit’s?” the boy said with an attitude of false devotion.
“Go on,” Medea said with a smile, totally missing the point. “Sing ‘Cucurrucucú Paloma.’ ”
“ ‘Paloma Negra’ would be better.”
“No, that’s very sad.”
“Well, they say I’m the child of sadness.”
“Who says that?”
“Can’t you guess? At school.”
“Tell them to go—”
“Fuck themselves? But I already live with my fucking mother.”
“Oh, son! What devil’s gotten into you?”
“The devil of shame, Señora.”
Maximiliano lasted another year in the shanty at the rear of the parking lot. She tried to calm him down. She took him to church to encourage him to sing in the choir. Maxi lied through his teeth to the priest. Medea resigned herself. She gave him a cowboy outfit just like the one on Baby Jesus. She papered the bedroom with photographs of Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante that she found at the flea market. She made vows to the Immaculate Conception so her son would love his mother again. She always knew—you know her—that these external acts weren’t enough, weren’t important. If the boy’s love had been lost, she wasn’t going to get it back with little gifts. Something beat in the heart of Doña Medea, which was the certainty that no matter how independent or distant her son became, he would need his mother to bring out the strength that even the most powerful were missing. Call it whatever you like. Tenderness. Patience. Acceptance of the unexpected. Calibration of the definitive stumbling block.
In Doña Medea’s imagined scenario, Maximiliano was going to be the son who protected his mother. When they asked him about his father, Maxi got into fistfights with his classmates, and he fought hard, no one was braver. The head of the school told Medea about it in a recriminatory way. She felt pride more than anything else, because she knew that her son’s rage had its roots in the nervous strength of his mother. In th
e reserves of pure resistance in Doña Medea. Maximiliano learned to fight because his mother was protecting him, even if he didn’t know it.
I believe you understand that this certainty never abandoned the mother. And she had great need of her faith when her son left without saying goodbye.
She didn’t see him again. She heard about him through the kind of chorus that, without wanting to, accompanies every city dweller and is transmitted from voice to voice, passing through indifferent ears unaware of their function as transmitters of news until, with no intention at all, it reaches the distant ear of the person for whom it is intended. In this way, the city and its neighborhoods form an involuntary aureole of desires, memories, conundrums, redundancies, playful instances that create an arc suspended over each neighborhood, each street, each family, and each life. We know it, you and I feel it. There is absolutely no need to separate the personal from the collective, the lived from the dreamed, what needs to be done from what has already been done. The city is generous and embraces everything, from the smallest to the biggest, from the most secret to the most public, from the most personal to the most social. There’s no point in trying to divide and separate anything from what a great city like ours creates. Only ideology separates without respecting the whole, my friend. You know that. Ideology makes comrades of imbeciles and wise men. But you already know that.
And so, thanks to the silent chorus of the city, Doña Medea learned that Maxi had joined a mariachi band on Plaza Garibaldi, and because he was the baby of the group, they gave him a luxurious black cowboy outfit with silver buttons and the eagle and serpent embroidered on the back. A tricolor tie and a black hat edged in silver.
He looked so young and handsome that they pushed him to the front of the group because he attracted the rich girls driving by in big convertible Lincolns in that time before widespread violence, and they would hire him to sing to the call of “My God how cute he looks when they dress him up like a cowboy” and to catch the whisper of “I woke again in your arms.”
This was how Maximiliano Batalla became a man, except for the benders on the Callejón de San Camilito. Being a man doesn’t mean not being a child anymore but beginning to be a criminal. There are about five hundred musicians registered at Plaza Garibaldi to offer their services to those who request them, whether beside the car parked right on the square, or to serenade a girl in Las Lomas de Chapultepec, or sometimes, with luck, to play at a posh get-together, and other times, but without luck, to liven up a dull party.
It doesn’t matter. Guitars, trumpets, violins, and double bass guitars are enough to live an absolutely terrific life and embody, night after night, the mariachi’s lyrics.
The mariachi sings a happy tune.
Sound of the guitar, bass guitar croons.
The violin sighs, and I do, too.
Except that at the age of twenty, with five years as a mariachi behind him, Maxi had come to feel that the suit of lights—comparable only to a bullfighter’s—and the free sex with motorized women and girls and the occasional drinks in cantinas were no longer enough. Because in Maxi there was a hidden need, and this was the need for danger. He came to feel that if he wasn’t exposed to danger, what he did made no sense. And had no future or past, since danger was as much an inheritance from his mother as the defiance she deserved.
How and when he left the group that chose him when he was a boy after he had left home, to join the mariachi band called the Taste of the Land, you and I are in no position to tell. The fact is that the young man of twenty-one, very clean-shaven, very smooth-skinned, without the pockmarks of adolescence or the scars of experience on his angel’s face, and no false modesty in his devil’s body, and with a pair of eyes stolen from the altar to the Holy Child Reappeared, became the perfect bait for the band of cryptomariachis who used him, with his innocent appearance, to hire out the services of their orchestra for five thousand pesos in advance. Maxi took the money and left the clients in the lurch. Just like that. With the superior idea of earning a living without working. Though Maximiliano Batalla liked to sing and would have done it with no need to steal. But his colleagues didn’t like that idea. The sweet thing was to make the dough without wearing out your voice. The money was divided up among the other four false mariachis, a thousand pesos apiece.
It was only a matter of time before the five swindlers were caught, and though El Florido and El Pifas managed to avoid prison, El Tasajeado (for being ugly) and El Cacomixtle (for being stupid) were sent to jail, while they offered handsome Maxi the chance to redeem himself by joining the undercover police force, where his angelic appearance and sentimental voice would be perfectly suited to policemen who dedicated themselves to extortion, intimidation, and bearing false witness. Who wouldn’t believe beautiful Maxi?
They posted him in the neighborhood where he was born. He objected. He’d be recognized. They would, literally, fuck him over. They threatened him. That was why he would be there: because he knew everybody, and nobody, after ten years, would recognize him. He left a little weenie and came back a full-fledged prick. That was the joke. He’d go from house to house threatening and proposing. Everybody’s fine if you give us half the drugs, the alcohol, the girls, or if you prefer, the blow, the booze, and the babes. Taking contributions, paying the tax on peace, the police officers and Maxi were becoming rich when they committed the huge mistake of watching the little district school on the pretext that the same things being sold there were what they had come to offer.
And then the neighbors, criminals as well as honorable people, asked themselves, What do these bastards want? To take our children by surprise, plant drugs on them, force them into prostitution? In their doubt, the community decided to act, set an example, and do away with the five officers.
Two were burned alive.
Three were beaten.
Among them, Maximiliano Batalla.
A blow to the neck with a club knocked him down and left him permanently mute.
5. Doña Medea took him, bleeding and dazed like the Holy Christ of the Afflicted, in her arms. Staggering, mother and son reached the ramshackle living quarters hidden at the rear of a parking lot. Maxi leaned against the cars, staining the windshields with his red hands, howling like a beautiful animal that knows it is not only wounded but lost and not only lost but extinguished forever. He was the ghost of the mariachi. At the very most.
He couldn’t see clearly through the cloud of blood that covered his eyes. Perhaps he didn’t even know where he was, unless he recognized the familiar smells, though these were pretty common. Epazote leaves. Thyme. Marjoram. All the herbs in Doña Medea’s kitchen, which was everybody’s kitchen. Because she—you know her character—had not identified herself. She helped her son in the way Veronica would have helped Christ. Invisible. Silent. Unexpected but tolerated . . . Because beaten virility is not defeated virility but manhood prepared to start the next fight. Though looking at Maxi, Doña Medea didn’t believe this cock would crow again.
Something happened that was both remarkable and foreseeable. As the days passed, her son began recovering his senses. Doña Medea administered herbs, bandages, pozoles, and essences of rattlesnake. Badly beaten and close to death, Maxi at first could hear the comings and goings of his unknown mother without attributing them to her. Then he smelled the stews, and perhaps he recognized something familiar in the flavor of the soups that Medea fed him with a spoon. Finally, the swelling of his eyes went down, and he could look around. Then one of two things happened. He acknowledged and refused to admit or didn’t acknowledge and admitted. What was it he accepted if that was true? That he wasn’t master of his own person. His mortally slow movements betrayed him. He didn’t know where he was. Or he pretended not to know.
Medea did not acknowledge him and did not allow herself to be acknowledged. A very ancient wisdom in her person told her it was better not to. If Maxi wanted to acknowledge her, he would have to do it on his own. She would not lend herself to any emotional bribery.
Such was the strength of her character that after the dreadful experiences of recent days, she extracted from herself, as if from those old abandoned mines whose only treasure is mystery, the silver that for so long had been thought exhausted.
Maxi heard. Maxi smelled. Maxi felt. At last Maxi saw. Medea waited eagerly for her son to sing. She did some useless things. She played a Cuco Sánchez record. She stirred up the canaries. She whistled the tango “Madreselva.” All in vain. Maxi stayed there, lying on the cot with two serapes covering him and the Picot Songbook as a pillow. A distant look and a closed mouth.
This was when Medea told herself that great evils demand great remedies.
She went to see the woman who managed a nearby restaurant to ask to borrow the wheelchair reserved for disabled patrons. Back in her house, she struggled to sit Maxi in the chair and pushed it out to the street.
She knew very well where she was headed.
She wagered her destiny and her son’s on the auspicious date of November 22, the day of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of musicians.
She entered the Church of the Immaculate Conception. An entire wall was dedicated to the ex-votos expressing gratitude for miracles ranging from saving someone from an automobile accident to resurrection two days after death. Would Medea Batalla have the occasion to add her own ex-voto to the gallery? Would the Virgin return a mariachi’s voice to her son?
Mother and son reached the altar. Maximiliano seemed entranced and distant, as if being alive were miracle enough. Doña Medea hoped for the miracle. She didn’t take it for granted.
She knelt in front of the image of the Virgin dressed in blue with embroidered stars and the half-moon at her feet. It was a miracle-working image. People said it had brought back to life the daughter of an acrobat at the fair who fell from her chair and was run through the chest by stakes but was saved when the image of the Virgin appeared at the top of the Ferris wheel.