Happy Families (13 page)

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.

Now Medea asked for a new but lesser miracle: that the Virgin return his voice to her son. That Maxi sing again. That the mariachi not remain mute, with catastrophic consequences for everyone: the world, the nation, music, Maxi, and Mede.

Medea spoke to the Virgin by speaking to her son. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t love me, Maxi. Your real mother is the Virgin.”

And to the Virgin: “Mother of God, give my son’s voice back to him so he can praise you.”

And to Maximiliano: “Go on, Maxi, go on, don’t you see that Our Lady is asking you to do it? Don’t be stubborn!”

Then they say—you haven’t heard about it?—that the miracle happened. The Virgin extended her hand to Medea Batalla and gave her a bunch of tiny keys. “This is so you can enter my house, Medea.”

She took the keys, kissed them, placed them on Maxi’s lips, and said: “Go on, son. Sing. The Virgin has given you back your voice.”

But Maxi didn’t open his mouth. He only opened his eyes, still partly bewildered and partly absent. And yet the Virgin looked at him. Maxi did not look back. But Medea did. The mother looked at the Virgin as she would have liked her son to look at her. In that look, Medea brought together her entire life, her excessive loves, the joy of giving birth twenty-five years before, the relief of the snake’s rattle, the tiny tasks of washing other people’s clothes, the midsize ones of making pottery, the large ones of assisting women in the neighborhood to give birth. Everything assembled in that moment of the meeting of the Virgin and the son, son of Medea and son of María, the mariachi who lost his voice because of a blow from a club on the day of the riot, the singer who now, if the Virgin really was a miracle worker, would recover his voice right here.

There was an enormous silence.

Everything was illuminated.

Each ex-voto caught fire like a lamp of hope.

The candles shone.

Maximiliano remained silent.

Medea opened her mouth and began to sing:

Peacock you are a courier

going to Real del Oro,

Peacock if they ask you,

Peacock tell them I’m weeping

tears of my own blood

for a son whom I adore.

Medea sang in front of the candles with an unconscious desire for her breath to extinguish them. But the candles did not go out. They grew with Medea’s song. They became animated with the life of her voice. A voice that was clear, strong, and sonorous enough to animate a yard full of roosters. A man’s voice, a mariachi’s voice. A voice that came out of the mariachi’s mother, illuminating the ex-votos, the candles, the keys that the Virgin gave her, the bit of the key with the image of the supper in Jerusalem.

A voice that filled the entire city with light.

6. Doña Medea Batalla is naked in a cell at the police station. All she is wearing is a diaper held up with pins. She was pulled along in the general roundup on the day of the disturbances. The cops, the blues—the gendarmes, as she called them, betraying her own verbal antiquity. But the residents closest to the trouble were brought in, stripped, locked up. At least they allowed her to keep the shameful diaper that she was resigned to using to protect herself from incontinence.

Now Medea is waiting for you to come and rescue her. To pay the fine. She had to give your name. Who else could she mention? The undertaker at the funeral home? The managers of restaurants? The lovers who died in pulque taverns? The mariachi band the Taste of the Land? The son she thought she caught a glimpse of in the mob the night before?

Of course not, Señor. Only you. You who were twenty when she was forty, and every man in the neighborhood followed her because of her fresh, dark beauty, guided by the black braid that reached down to Medea’s buttocks, don’t you remember, licentiate, Señor Stuckup? Did you lose your memory, Don Fop? Don’t you remember anymore how pretty Medea was and the decision she made to have a son only with you, the father of the mariachi? Have some shame. Only you can come to save her. Don’t be a prick. Acknowledge him. Take responsibility. For once in your damn life, Señor. Forget about who you are and become the man you were. For your mother’s sake.

And don’t give me the same old story:

“We’re in Mexico. Pray.”

You’d be better off taking a snake rattle.

Chorus of the Naked Honeymoon

Regino and Regina came to complain at the lost-luggage office at the airport, traveling on their honeymoon from Tuxtla Gutiérrez to Acapulco by way of Mexico City, how can they go without their suitcases, what’s going on, where are they, whew, sir, madam—Regino, Regina—don’t be impatient, in half an hour we’ll have them, in the meantime why don’t you have a nice cup of coffee, listen, the thirty minutes are up, what happened? where are they? and Regina thinking about the gorgeous underthings her girlfriends gave her with erotic intentions at the shower in Tuxtla and the airport, well, the suitcases haven’t come yet, you know, a car crash, where? in Chiapas on the runway at the airport so they never got on the plane no but the news is that the suitcases were destroyed but it was all new clothes, a bride’s clothes, do you know what I’m saying? ay, Señorita, what I recommend, please, I’m Señora, Señora, is that you don’t pack anything you’ll miss, but it’s my bridal trousseau, ay, if you only knew the kinds of things that get lost here, who knows what happened to your truss but sometimes what disappears are artificial limbs, medieval armor, even contraband dolls with drugs hidden in the removable head, what haven’t we seen here! and you’re complaining about losing a night-gown, show my wife more respect, yes Señor it’s just that, you know, there are more than two million people who lose suitcases every year at the airport so our advice is that people travel wearing what they’ll need I mean underwear shirts and socks and a small bag for packing what the family doesn’t want to lose and if you like take pictures of what you’re carrying in the suitcase and this way there’s no loss, you know, all the suitcases are the same all of them are black because that’s what’s fashionable and thank your lucky stars because once more than five hundred suitcases arrived for a Mr. Mazatlán because the gringos in Los Angeles thought it was a passenger and not an airport so if you want you can file a complaint with the warehouse in Scottsboro Alabama which is the cemetery for all lost suitcases in North America and listen what’s this couple complaining about as if they needed clothes for a honeymoon in Acapulco, what do they need that for

Sweethearts

Manuel Toledano boarded the ship in Venice to travel Trieste-Split-Dubrovnik for the next five days. The
vaporetto
took him from the hotel on the Grand Canal to the inner harbor, but in the traveler’s eyes, the ducal city remained an enduring, duplicated mirage. Leaving Venice behind, Manuel moved away from a fantasy that was transformed in his memory into a ghost of itself. He thought for a moment that perhaps the specter of Venice had more reality than the illusory municipal reality of streets, canals, squares, and churches.

The established
dogana
was a memory that all the trappings of Venice—the magnificence of the Pearl of the Adriatic—were the fruit of an ancestral simulation, a long-lasting taste for Italian theatricality. Venice wagered its dramatic stage setting—a sumptuous backdrop—on something that in the end was a commercial center as naked as the dock where Toledano set foot this morning with the sensation of stepping on forgotten solid ground, confirming in this way that Venice
was floating,
and the traveler there had to become accustomed to the rocking of stone.

The city, however, reserved for him, after farewells at customs, a last illusion, a radiance that rose like a veil over Venice: light, respiration, heartbeat, foam of the air, salivation of the sea.

After settling into his cabin, Manuel went for a walk on the deck. He did not want to miss the arrival in Trieste and the appearance, equally spectral, of Miramare, the longed-for seat of the sad imperial couple, Maximilian and Carlotta.

When the port came into view, Manuel discovered the palace and felt a lightning flash of pity for the innocence and illusion that separated those young princes, at once ingenuous and ambitious, from a life of hereditary tranquility in Europe and hurled them into a death of shrapnel and madness in Mexico.

They were, after all, only two unfortunate sweethearts.

“Look at the palace, baby . . . Oh, don’t be annoying. You’re so clumsy!”

There was a calamitous sound of abandoned chairs followed by a resigned sigh that turned into labored breathing. Manuel came around the corner on the deck and saw the woman attempting to pick up a capsized chair. He hurried to help her. The irritated lady could recline once more on her deck chair.

“
Grazie,
” she said to Manuel.

“You’re welcome, Señora,” Manuel said, smiling, but she didn’t return his amiability; she looked at him with curiosity and turned back to her feigned reading of a fashion magazine.

For an instant, however, their eyes had met with a question that Manuel, returning to his false lookout post at the railing (travelers travel as if the proper operation of the train, the plane, or the ship depends on them), dared to formulate in secret that the lady was Mexican, her verbal localisms betrayed her. Did he know her? Had he seen her before? And she, did she recognize him?

Manuel smiled at Trieste. Too often he had been mistaken, searching in the most hidden little light in aging eyes, in the weariest tone of a voice that had once been fresh, for a friendship from his youth . . .

Sometimes he guessed correctly: Are you Borras Barroso, basket-ball champion at the Francés Morelos Secondary School? And sometimes not: Didn’t you sit in the first row in the class on civil law at San Ildefonso? With men, it was a simple matter: yes or no. With women, it was more complicated: Don’t be fresh, Señor, your tactics are stale, excuse me, you’re mistaken and what a shame, I would like to have known you when you were a young man, or frankly, you’re an overconfident old man, very well preserved but a little inappropriate.

Sixty-five well-preserved years. Like marmalade . . .

The lady concentrated on her reading. Manuel looked at her out of the corner of his eye. They were probably the same age as well as the same nationality. Perhaps, with luck, at supper they’d be at the same table, there would be an opportunity to approach her naturally, courteously, without ridiculous or dangerous pretexts.

She didn’t appear at supper. The steamer was docked in Trieste all night. Perhaps she went down to a restaurant in the port. She. He kept thinking—had he seen her before? Where? When?

Memory ought to have supplementary lenses capable of superimposing, through layer after layer of skin, the faces prior to the present face, until the final face of death was unveiled. By the same token, this process ought to operate in reverse until it also showed the first profile, the one of a longed-for youth, along with the unrenounceable feeling that we once were young and because of that we once were happy, strong, attractive, unique . . .

But the past is a mist that moves invisibly over our heads without our realizing it. Until the day it rains.

Manuel’s heart still throbbed with the sensation of youthful fulfillment. He was not alarmed by that. He was astonished. Calendars, mirrors, above all the glances of those who no longer recognized him, could not vanquish the image that Manuel Toledano had of himself. His
interior
sight kept alive an
anterior
sight, that of his youth. It was a vision that he judged faithful, summonable, persistent in a thousand and one characteristics of his face remodeled by time.

If others did not see the Manuel Toledano that had been, he did. He was the best, most knowledgeable guardian of his own true image: that of his youth.

And she? Was his interior and anterior sight that of a memory that preserved, in faithful archives, the faces of his closest relatives, lost friends, forgotten sweethearts?

And she . . .

The following day, walking on the deck and avoiding the heroic Adriatic sun with a hand placed like a visor over his forehead, Manuel took advantage of the situation to direct surreptitious glances at the lady masked by her fashion magazine and unmasked by an impatient distraction, as if reading were the disguise for something else, a constantly deflected vigilance, a duty both troublesome and imperative . . . The woman turned the pages of the magazine without looking at them. She almost scratched at them as if memory were a sharp nail.

Finally—inevitably?—their eyes met, hers blinded by the glare from the sea, his by the shadow of his own hand. Manuel smiled at the lady. “Excuse me. It’s just that I heard you yesterday and told myself you’re Mexican.”

She nodded without saying a word.

He insisted, conscious that he was engaging in a dangerous piece of audacity. “That’s not all. I have the impression we’ve met before.”

He laughed at himself, half closing his eyes. Now came the resounding verbal slap, no we’ve never met, don’t be insolent and inappropriate, that ploy is very old.

She looked up. “Yes. I had the same impression.”

“I’m Manuel Toledano—”

“Manuel! Manolo!”

He nodded in surprise.

“Manuel, but I’m Lucy, Lucila Casares, don’t you remember?”

How could he not remember? Through Manuel’s head passed images at once sweet and violent, of his early youth, nineteen or twenty years old, ardent nights cooled only by the stars. Beaches. The perfume of young flesh, sweat washed by the sea and restored by kisses. Dancing pressed close, motionless, on the floor of the club La Perla in Acapulco. Illusive perfumes. Dead aromas.

Lucila Casares. He looked at her with infinite tenderness, now without a trace of surprise or wariness. He did not see a woman over sixty, his contemporary. He saw the girl with curly hair of an indefinable color, blond but dark, copper over gold, wheat over barley, small, sensual, conscious of every movement she made, Lucila of the soft arms and golden legs and the face lit forever by the tropics. Manuel felt the foam of melancholy on his lips. “Lucila . . .”

“It’s a miracle, Manuel!”

“Chance?”

“Whatever you call it. How wonderful!”

She made a coquettish gesture with her hand, gently patting the reclining chair next to hers and urging Manuel to sit down.

Manuel was afraid of one thing. That information about the present—the current life of a man and a woman in their sixties—would displace the delicious return to his early youth, the young love they both enjoyed so much. He, Manuel. She, Lucila.

“Is it really you, Manolo?”

“Yes, Lucila. Look, touch my hand. Don’t you recognize it?”

She denied it, smiling.

“That doesn’t change. The palm of the hand,” he insisted.

“Ah yes, the lifeline. They say it gets shorter with age.”

“No, it gets deeper.”

“Manuel, Manuel, what a surprise.”

“Like before, like Acapulco in 1949.”

She laughed. She brought a finger to her lips and widened her eyes in feigned alarm.

He laughed. “All right, Acapulco always.”

He felt he had a right to remember, and he asked her to join him. The Adriatic, a calm, high-colored sea, also offered an unrepeatable sky this morning. “Just think, I heard you before I knew you.”

“And when was that?”

“During the holidays in ’49. I was in the room next to yours at the Hotel Anáhuac. I heard you laugh. Well, what they call ‘giggle’ in English, that fresh, youthful, ingenuous laugh . . .”

“Deceptive,” Lucila said with a smile, raising an eyebrow mischievously.

But the meeting that same night at the cocktail party was no deception. He saw her approach, ethereal, radiant, with those tones of gold and copper that illuminated her from head to toe, a pretty girl, he saw her come in and said, “That can only be her, the girl in the next room,” and he went up to her and introduced himself.

“Manuel Toledano. Your neighbor, Señorita.”

“That’s too bad.”

He asked why, disconcerted.

“Yes,” the girl went on. “Walls separate us.”

They didn’t separate again during that unforgettable December in the year 1949 that was prolonged, following the festival of San Silvestre, in the January vacation and the tender, astonishing repetition of the first meeting, at the cocktail party, only you and I talked to each other looked at each other the others at the party didn’t exist they were talking nonsense from the first moment only you and I were there Lucila and Manuel Lucy and Manolo.

The days were long. The nights too short.

“We danced on the floor of La Perla, do you remember?”

“Do you remember the music they were playing?”

“I’m taking the tropical way . . .”

“The night restless, unquiet . . .”

“In the breeze that comes from the sea . . .”

“No, you’re wrong. First it says ‘With its perfume of dampness . . .’ ”

They both laughed.

“How vulgar,” said Lucila.

A small Acapulco, adolescent like them, half grown, always divided between hills and beach, poor and rich, native and tourist, still possessed, Acapulco, of a clean sea and clear nights, families that loved one another, and first courtships: warm, gentle water at Caleta and Caletilla, wild water at Revolcadero, pounding waves at the Playa de Hornos, silent waves at Puerto Marqués, stone cliffs at La Quebrada, recently opened hotels—Las Américas, Club de Pesca—and very old hotels—La Marina, La Quebrada—but sand castles, all of them.

“Boleros let us dance very close together.”

“I remember.”

“In the breeze that comes from the sea . . .”

“We hear the sound of a song . . .”

A vacation spot both daring and tranquil, wavering between its humble past and probable heavenly future. There already vibrated in the air at the airport another Acapulco of big planes, big millionaires, big celebrities. In 1949, not yet. Though the domestic calm of that time could not hide a social chasm deeper than the ravine of La Quebrada itself.

“I remember,” Manuel said with a smile.

“It’s true,” Lucy said.

The perfume of two bodies in bloom. The smell of the Acapulco sun. Manuel a contagious perspiration. Lucila a sweet perspiration. Both transformed by the brand-new experience of young love . . . A day when Lucy is sometimes with us and sometimes Manolo.

The perfect symmetry of the day and of life during a month’s vacation in Acapulco.

They spoke with preserved emotion, separated from the world by the voyage and joined to the earth by shared memory. Acapulco during the vacation of 1949. Acapulco is the awakening of the new decade of the fifties. A time of peace, illusion, confidence. And the two of them, Lucila and Manuel, embracing at the center of the world. What did they say to each other?

“I don’t remember. Do you?”

“What two puppies say to each other.” Manuel laughed. “What they do . . .”

“You know I was never happier in my life, Manolo.”

“Neither was I.”

“It’s wonderful that in five weeks you can live more than in fifty years . . . Forgive my frankness. Age authorizes what it was once forbidden to say.”

Detailed memories tumbled out, the beaches back then, Caleta during the day, Hornos at dusk, the children playing in the sand, the fathers walking along the sea wearing long trousers and short-sleeved shirts, the mothers in flowered dresses and straw hats, never in bathing suits, the fathers vigilant, watching the adolescents moving away from the beach, swimming to Roqueta Island where paternal glances did not reach where young love could ally itself with the one visible love young love in heat surrender of the soul more than of the body but senseless uncontrollable pounding of the pulse the flesh the look of closed eyes—do you remember Lucy do you remember Manolo?—the touch uncertain more than experienced and sensual exploratory and auroral, Lucy, Manolo, while from Caleta the fathers look anxiously toward the island and ask only will they be back in time for lunch? and the mothers will open their parasols even wider and the fathers will wave their panama hats asking them to come back come back it’s time . . .