Carlos Fuentes - Happy Families

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.”