Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [105]
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