Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

“Isn’t it?”

“And never walk under trees at night.”

“It’s driving me crazy.”

Of course she understands all this. That’s exactly why she is the way she is, does what she does. To live a life different from everybody else’s. To believe that even though her example of charitable availability benefits no one, at least it creates something like an aura of kindly normality in a neighborhood with no standard but evil.

“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.