Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [106]
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