Happy Families
“Your mama abandoned us, she went off with another man, that’s why I abandoned her, too, Sandokán, I wasn’t going to be less than her, I’m Alejandro Sevilla the superstar, I’m the one who abandons women, no woman abandons me.”
And resigned:
“I abandoned her. I wasn’t going to be less than her. I’m not some dumb prick.”
Sagrario Algarra laughed at him: “Don’t be stupid, Alejandro. Don’t say that to your son.”
“Then what? Where do I begin?”
“Tell him the truth. You aren’t a great star anymore. Understand? You’re in the same situation as your son. Both of you have been abandoned.”
“We still have you, my faithful Sagrario.”
“The hell with that faithful bullshit. I’ve had enough. I’m leaving. You stay with your little monster.”
“In any event, thanks for taking care of him for me.”
“Thanks? Ask the kid if he thanks me for watching him while he sleeps, visiting him every night with a light in my hand, curious, Alejandro, sick to know what he did at night with those little hands that couldn’t reach his sex, how he masturbated, if he rubbed up against the mattress or maybe under the shower, you know, waiting for the running water to excite his penis and punishing myself, Alejandro, for my lack of courage, for not taking his sex in my hands, jerking him off myself, or sucking it, Alejandro, and since I didn’t have the courage, I punished him and I punished myself, I was violent with him, at midnight I would take him to the bathroom so a cold shower would drive out his bad thoughts, humiliating him, Alejandro, laughing out loud and asking him, ‘Who ties your shoes for you?’ Go on, try it yourself.”
She wiped her nose with a dishcloth. “I wanted to be a stepmother, not a mother. A she-wolf, not a grandmother. Use your son to get out of the prison of my old movies.”
Sagrario Algarra assumed facial features illuminated by a strong nocturnal radiance. It was her best part (her bespart). Innocent granny transformed into stony Medusa.
“And what did you tell him about me?”
“That you would come to see him one day. What did you expect me to say?”
“And it was true. I did come, Sagrario.”
“But you always pretended to be somebody else. The musketeer, the corsair.”
“It was to amuse him. A child’s fantasy is—”
“You confused him. One year you made him think that Christmas was December 28, another year that it was November 20, taking advantage of the sports parade, all depending on your convenience, a bad man, a bad father.”
“Take it easy, Sagrario, this isn’t a movie.”
Was the old actress so shrewd that she knew to announce her departure from the apartment in the Cuauhtémoc district on the same day Mexigrama told Alejandro Sevilla his career no longer had a future?
Exit Sagrario. Enter Alejandro.
Sandokán looked at his father without surprise. Sagrario had taken him to see all of Alejandro Sevilla’s films from the time the boy was five until now, when he was turning sixteen. Still, when you entered the huge room with no separating walls, remodeled so the boy would not have to open doors or go up and down stairs—an apartment that opened onto a small garden of flowerpots and unmovable tiles, a kind of penthouse on the roof of the building, hermetically separated from the lower floors by a private elevator—you saw that your son did not know or recognize you. His glance had more rationality than the voice of the producers: “Retire, Alejandro, don’t be a fool.”
You can never describe to anyone, Alejandro, the embarrassing difficulty of that reencounter, if not first encounter, with a boy whom you hadn’t seen for five years, when Sandokán had not yet entered puberty and you didn’t know what to say to prepare him as you supposed a good father should. The fact is, you knew only the lines of the parts you hated most—the mature father of the family giving advice to his rebellious, carousing, rock-and-roll children—and a strange delicacy never before seen in you kept you from talking to your son. You had imagined him as a deformed replacement for James Dean.
You shouldn’t have been afraid. The boy began to speak as if he had waited a long time for this moment to arrive—because the time of the encounter was exactly that, an apparition, a phantom, a ghost that brought together in an instant all the dead hours, resuscitated all the defeated calendars only for the reality of this moment, and moved all the clocks ahead just to move them back to the time that had been lost.
You looked at each other without saying anything. Your son’s eyes were directed at the wall.
“Thank you for the Christmas present, Papa.”
It was a mobile in the style of Calder, and Sandokán’s eyes said clearly that nothing had occupied more of his time than the observation of the always distinct movements of the large, multicolored toy that gave a second air to the very atmosphere of the uniform room. A space without obstacles between the bed and the chairs, the table and the terrace, the electronic equipment whose use Sandokán immediately demonstrated with the agility that his condition gave to his bare feet. He was dressed in a long white undershirt that covered his sex and buttocks, allowing him to urinate and defecate without using his hands.
The boy laughed and turned on a kind of mechanized roll of towels, letting it be understood that this was enough to clean himself.
Embarrassed, you went to help your son. Sandokán rejected you. His initial friendly smile had turned into a grimace.
“You told me to hang the mobile from the ceiling just to frighten me, didn’t you?” You couldn’t even mutter a reply. You choked on the words, and there was no immediate correspondence with the dialogues appropriate to an encounter between father and son in the movies.
You said nothing, looked for the bed that Sagrario Algarra had abandoned, opened your suitcase, and began to arrange your things. Sandokán watched you in silence. You moved forward as if you were entering a new life, which is why you find yourself at this moment looking at yourself in the mirror of the small bathroom adjoining the large room, looking there for D’Artagnan, for the Count of Monte Cristo, and finding only a sixty-one-year-old man who is losing everything, his hair, his teeth, the firmness of his flesh, the impetuosity of his glance . . .
Your fame, was it the truth or a lie for your own son? You didn’t know. You had to discover your son beginning with a deluded question: Does my son know me only through my fame? Said another way: Does my son love or hate me?
Things began to reach their level and proportion during the weeks that followed. Sandokán mocked you, warned you, “Be careful, Papa, I put a needle in the soup” or “Watch out, I put glass in the orange juice.” It wasn’t true. Sandokán could not do anything in the kitchen. From now on that was your job. In a single stroke, you came down from the illusory world of fictitious adventures to the unfortunate world of small domestic misadventures. You did not have the money to pay a full-time maid, you had barely enough for a weekly cleaner, a dark-skinned young girl in flip-flops who didn’t recognize you, or even look at you, no matter how ridiculously you assumed a musketeer’s poses with a broom in your fist in front of her.
In the meantime, you realized that Sandokán put on an innocent face, but a malevolent intention lodged between his eyes and his mouth. If there is hatred in Sandokán’s expression, you surprise yourself discovering that if hatred is a manifestation of evil, it is possible to find unexpected beauty in the face of someone who absolutely does not wish you well. You surprise yourself, Alejandro, formulating a clear idea that becomes an outgrowth of your long speeches in the movies.
Your idea of the boy distracted by his physical deformity, you hadn’t noticed the classic beauty of his face. Now you know why. Sandokán is identical to his mother, your Nica wife Cielo de la Mora. The jet-black hair. The transparent white skin. Even the birthmark beside his mouth.
Naturally, you didn’t want to find your wife in your son. The young man had never seen a photograph of his mother. The only woman he had seen up close was the sour Sagrario. He can’t
compare—and if he knew, if he knew that his mother had reappeared in the living portrait of her son, would Sandokán be more lovable, more understanding with the papa who had come home without a cent, my boy, because I threw it all away on tramps and traveling, on the great spree of my life, dammit, even on Sagrario’s salary, I didn’t know how to save, I didn’t know how to invest, for me there was no tomorrow.
“Because there was the moment of your pictures, Father, there time doesn’t pass, there you never grow old.”
You attribute this to your son. You think that if what you think he thinks is true, your son has seen your movies, it isn’t Sagrario’s pious lie.
“Yes, Sagrario took me to see you whenever you were showing.” Sandokán laughed. “I never thought I’d know you in person.”
“But I’ve come a few times, son.”
“Always in disguise. Not now. Now I see you for the first time. I don’t know”—he stopped smiling—“if I prefer the truth to the lie.”
At that moment you decide you are not going to surrender, Alejandro. Something new in you—abandoning the play, leaving representation behind—sprang up in you unexpectedly, guiding you in an imperfect way toward your son’s personality, which was the path of affection. And for you this was a huge, joyful revelation.
“Know something, Papa? I had a dream that I’d escape, run away from the house. But I couldn’t do it alone. Then . . . look . . . open . . .”
He indicated a suitcase under his bed. You opened it. It was filled with postcards.
“I asked Sagrario to find me cards from everywhere. She knows a lot of strange people. Look. Istanbul, Paris, Rio de Janeiro . . .”
He smiled in satisfaction. “I’ve been everywhere, Papa, and besides . . .”
He sat down in front of a lectern. A volume lay open on it. Sandokán pressed a pedal, and the pages moved.
“ ‘On February 24, 1813, the lookout in the port of Marseille announced the arrival of the Faraón, proceeding from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples . . .’ ”
He looked at you. “You see? I’ve been to the same places you have. Except the book is earlier than the movie. I beat you!”
Sometimes Sandokán isn’t lovable. He tries to hurt you.
“What have you given me, Papa? What do you want me to give to you? How are you going to pay me for being abandoned? Just tell me that.”
“Don’t repeat my dialogues,” you say irritably.
“Seriously, Father, do you understand? You had everything, I’ve had nothing.”
The boy says this with a wooden face.
At other times you’re busy doing what you have never done. You cook. You keep the house clean. You pretend this is another role, just as if you were—it might have happened—the headwaiter at a restaurant.
Sandokán interrupts. You tell him to let you work. He turns his back.
“Whenever I want to tell you something that matters to me, you say you’re in a hurry.”
Where have you heard that same complaint before?
Your son wants to join you, aggressively. He falls flat on his face. You run to help him. He resists. He struggles with you. In the end he embraces you. You embrace each other.
“You ought to be dead,” the son tells the father, and you refrain from repeating the phrase because it compromises Cielo, your wife, Sandokán’s mother, who also tried to kill her son in the cradle before she fled.
“Have pity on me,” you say instead to your son, knowing that these are, in turn, the words the boy wants to say and cannot.
Sandokán looks at you with unexpected, invasive tenderness. “You know? Now both our feelings are hurt.”
He culminated his remark by extending his leg in order to trip you. This becomes Sandokán’s greatest diversion. Making you fall. At first you are resigned. It is difficult for you to scold him. You don’t dare to slap him. Little by little, you prefer to accept the prank. Finally, you celebrate it. You laugh each time Sandokán, with the agility of a pirate from the Island of Tortuga, extends his leg and makes you fall. The strength the boy has developed in his legs is surprising. Beneath the comfortable shirt he always wears, you see two robust limbs, very developed, almost hairless, statuesque, almost marble-like, streaked with blue veins. So that half of his body lives intensely, from the neck up and from his navel down. So that perhaps you were right to stop Cielo de la Mora from drowning your son in the bath or throwing him into a trash can or . . .
This means you will let Sandokán make you fall, and you will laugh because in this way, you celebrate the life of the boy, his presence in the world. Nothing less than that: his presence in the world. And little by little, Alejandro, you begin to realize that your son’s individuality was the most faithful mirror of the life that still was yours, that leaving the movie sets was not a death certificate, as you believed before, but a window that opened to let air, sun, birds, rain, pollen, bees into the closed tomb of a movie set reeking of sawdust, cardboard, glue, the hair of wigs made with the tresses of corpses, period costumes never sent to the cleaner, stained under the arms and between the legs, the clothing of extras, the others, the surplus, the replaceable, the dispensable.
Now you’re the extra in your final film, Alejandro. Except that your secret resignation—or can it be your will?—to disappear into the vast anonymous nation of failure has been frustrated by the encounter with your son, by the spirit of comedy that Sandokán displays in a situation that, instead of causing pity, he transforms into a prelude to a limited though hoped-for adventure: that of reuniting with you and initiating your real life together.
Hoped for and despaired over: Each fall that Sandokán makes you take is an invitation to the pending adventure. Is the child in fact father to the man? Where did you read that? Who said it to you? You confuse your dialogues on the screen with your words in life. You look in the mirror and accept that you’ll never escape this dilemma: speaking as if you were acting, acting as if you were speaking. Now, when you fulfill the rite of shaving each morning, you begin to believe that your old face is being lost, though not in a banal way because of the simple passage of time, but in another, more mysterious way, closer to both real life and theatrical representation. You feel that you have surpassed all the faces of your life, those of the actor and those of the man, those of the star and those of the lover, those of the role and those of flesh and blood.
All your faces are becoming superimposed in this poor, worn mirror with the rusting frame and insincere reflections. You are, in this moment you live through with fear like a throbbing announcement of approaching death, everything you have been. You are resigned to this fatality. You are grateful for it as well. You never imagined that the perfect film—simultaneous and successive, instantaneous and discursive—of all your moments would be presented to you in life. You enjoy this, even if you are resigned to the fatality of summarizing your entire past. Even if you suspect it signifies that you won’t have a future.
It is the moment when your son appears behind you in the mirror and looks at you looking at yourself. And you look at him looking at you. He looks at himself in you. He places his small, stunted hand on your shoulder. You feel the pressure of his cold fingers as part of your own flesh.
5. The Plaza de los Arcos de Belén near the Salto del Agua attracts the same working-class audience that frequents the so-called frivolous theaters in the center of the city as well as the anonymous bars, the dens where they still sing boleros, the dance halls where the danzón and the cha-cha-cha survive, the old lunchrooms with awnings that serve pozole, the few Chinese cafés that remain.
It is a peculiarity of this city that the arches and the canal that once ran through here celebrate the memory of an old lacustrine capital whose springs began to dry up until the entire valley was transformed into a saucer of dust surrounded by thirst and dead trees. Not long ago they finished setting up here one of those fairs that in every neighborhood of the immense capital of Mexico are, at times, the only solace of people of no means, whic
h are the immense majority. My father and I see the numerous reality of our people in the Zócalo on the night of September 15, in the Villa de Guadalupe on December 12, on Sundays in Chapultepec, at any hour in the great human serpent of Tacuba in the center, of Andrés Molina in Santa Anita, of the Highway de la Piedad, the Highway de Tlalpan, the Highway Ignacio Zaragoza going to Puebla, and the Indios Verdes going north.
There are people.
There is an audience.
The fair at the Arcos de Belén has been assembling all kinds of attractions, from the wheel of fortune to the octopus, from the carousel to fortune-telling birds, from hawkers of remedies—sciatica, impotence, nightmares, calluses, bad blood, good life—to the wizards and diviners stationed at the corners with their crystal balls and starcovered pointed hats and several mariachi groups (the young star of the ranchera Maximiliano Batalla) and bolero singers (the retired songstress Elvira Morales). Weight lifters, failed tenors, big-bellied odalisques, certified veterans of the Revolution and improbable horsemen of the Empire, declaimers of immensely popular verses (Toast of the Bohemian; Nocturne for Rosario; Margarita, the Sea Is Beautiful). Reciters of the Constitution, memorizers of the telephone book, voices with the singsong of the lottery, with the buzz of neighborhood gossip, the acidity of balcony slanderers, the tears of unemployed circus clowns.
People come here five times a week, five nights in a row (the authorities don’t give seven-day permits in order to exercise authority in something). They come to have a good time with the spectacle of the armless teenager who, with long, strong legs, trips the old musketeer who threatens him with a little aluminum sword, and each time the old man attacks the boy, he extends his leg and makes the musketeer ostentatiously take a tremendous fall, to the delight of the audience. Applause whistles and shouts.
“How much?”
“Whatever you wish.”
6. In this way, my father and I managed to save enough to buy a VCR, and now the two of us can enjoy old movies brought back to life, clean, remastered, and in Dolby Digital, together we can see Edmundo Dantés escape the Castle of If in the shroud of Abbot Faria, D’Artagnan presenting the jewels of the Duke of Buckingham to the queen, Emilio de Rocabruna approaching the coast of Maracaibo under the black flags of the corsairs.