Happy Families (25 page)

“It’s ridiculous. It’s hot. Only in Nicaragua do women wear fox to the opera in spite of the heat.”

“Darling,” you intervened, carefully buttoned up, “it’s precisely to give the impression that Mexico isn’t a tropical country, a banana republic, but that it’s cold here, like in Europe.”

She laughed at you, turned, and got into a taxi while you murmured: “It’s to show that we’re civilized—”

“It’s to hide what we really are,” she said from the taxi.

3. In her goodbye letter, Cielo de la Mora said things like these. She had fallen in love with a photograph. “Even before I met you, even before I had seen you on the screen. An actor has to be admired from a distance. The truth is, fame muddies ordinary affection. At least let’s save the child from our quarrels. From hostility. From humiliations.”

You remembered other things you had forgotten.

“Whenever I want to tell you something that matters to me, Alejandro, you say you’re in a hurry, you leave, you don’t listen to me.”

And now she was writing to say she was leaving you for good.

“How can I explain my desire to get away, to stop being the woman I was with you, to begin a new life?”

She didn’t take the child with her. Everything else was an excuse. The truth is, she abandoned the child. Before Sandokán was born (given this name in homage to the adventure novels of Emilio Salgari), you told yourself in secret that you wouldn’t marry Cielo.

“Suppose I marry her and she gets a divorce and then leaves Mexico with the child.”

Now she had gone, but without the child. Free. Like a bird that knows only the calendar of the seasons, the call of warm air, the rejection of the cold habitat. Leaving three-month-old Sandokán in your care.

You deceived yourself. You thought, like a good father, that you would tend to your son with affection. It was another of your interminable stupidities, Alejandro. You don’t realize the number of moronic things you do. They’re like the idiotic rosary of your existence. I know you’ll never accept this. You beat yourself up. How are you going to admit that your life is a farce, that it exists only in the way it exists for Cielo de la Mora, as an inert portrait of celebrity? Now you had a great chance to redeem yourself as a man, as a father, as a human being: Let it all go, Alejandro, leave your career and dedicate yourself to your son, Sandokán.

If at some moment this idea passed through your mind (and I believe it passed, it’s clear to you it did), it lasted less time than the proverbial winter swallow. Your good intentions did not survive fortyeight hours. An invalid child, monstrous and deformed, did not fit in the big screen of your life. Now you could put the blame on Cielo de la Mora for having taken thalidomide, her innocent pills for her nerves. There was no valid justification. There is none for the deficiencies of a son. The mother had abandoned father and son. She fled in exchange for nothing, because nothing was waiting for her: no fame or money, no (perhaps) new boyfriend (at least you wanted to believe that). The mother could not bear (malgré Mia Farrow) the company in a concealed cradle of the baby with little arms sprouting out of his armpits, the child condemned to depend on others, his tiny hands close only to his face but not to his sex, or his ass, or a cup, or a knife, or a movie script. The pages of the most recent script
—Sandokán the Tiger of Malaysia,
your son’s homonym—were opening in your hands. You felt immense anguish (unusual for you). The pirate leaps from one ship to another, fights with his sword, cuts the mooring lines of his own vessel, rescues Honorata van Gould, makes her his, fornicates with her, Alejandro, you say, Honorata give me your sweet siren’s ass Honorata let me kiss your furry diadem, you can, Alejandro, he, your son, never, not ever. Life was
denied
to him. At that moment you understood why Cielo de la Mora had left. She feared the death of Sandokán. She feared it because she herself wanted to offer it to him: Die, little baby, so you won’t suffer in life, I’m drowning you, baby, so you can go back to heaven, I’m abandoning you, honey, so you won’t blame your mother or know her or even know her name.

4. “Never talk to him about his mama.”

You said that to Sagrario Algarra, the old character actress of Mexican movies, who was prepared to take care of Sandokán Sevilla de la Mora while you took care of filmofornication, and the mother, well, consider her dead.

As a young woman, Sagrario Algarra had played the long-suffering mother and the loving grandmother. She became celebrated—indispensable—as the “featherbrained woman” in old melodramas. Paradoxically, when she aged, she could no longer play—because she feared being identical to them—old women’s roles. She became coquettish. She decided to rejuvenate. Perhaps she wanted to avenge her anticipated old age in the movies and recover in her own biographical seniority the illusion of the youth “that art denied me.”

She would say this with a sigh.

“Your career is over, Sagrario,” you would reply with compassion.

“Yours, too, Alejandro, it’s just that you don’t know it yet.”

You’re tenacious, it’s true. You’re stubborn. It’s difficult for you to abandon what you have been, what fame has given you, money and the capacity for squandering both things: fame and money. What isn’t at all difficult for you is to abandon your son, leaving him in the care of Sagrario Algarra, be frank, Alejandro, you keep Sandokán at a distance because you don’t tolerate disease in any of its forms, especially if it deforms. How could it be otherwise? You represent virile health, duels with a blade, pursuits on horseback, leaps from one mast to another, the sword that marks the walls of California with your eponymous Z.

Besides, you agonize over the difficulty of approaching your son and explaining to him the absence of his mother; what could you tell the child when he believed that Sagrario was his mama and Sagrario protested that she was not a mother because she had no grandmother?

“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.