Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

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.