Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [107]
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.
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