Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [109]
Sandokán looks at you with unexpected, invasive tenderness. “You know? Now both our feelings are hurt.”
He culminated his remark by extending his leg in order to trip you. This becomes Sandokán’s greatest diversion. Making you fall. At first you are resigned. It is difficult for you to scold him. You don’t dare to slap him. Little by little, you prefer to accept the prank. Finally, you celebrate it. You laugh each time Sandokán, with the agility of a pirate from the Island of Tortuga, extends his leg and makes you fall. The strength the boy has developed in his legs is surprising. Beneath the comfortable shirt he always wears, you see two robust limbs, very developed, almost hairless, statuesque, almost marble-like, streaked with blue veins. So that half of his body lives intensely, from the neck up and from his navel down. So that perhaps you were right to stop Cielo de la Mora from drowning your son in the bath or throwing him into a trash can or . . .
This means you will let Sandokán make you fall, and you will laugh because in this way, you celebrate the life of the boy, his presence in the world. Nothing less than that: his presence in the world. And little by little, Alejandro, you begin to realize that your son’s individuality was the most faithful mirror of the life that still was yours, that leaving the movie sets was not a death certificate, as you believed before, but a window that opened to let air, sun, birds, rain, pollen, bees into the closed tomb of a movie set reeking of sawdust, cardboard, glue, the hair of wigs made with the tresses of corpses, period costumes never sent to the cleaner, stained under the arms and between the legs, the clothing of extras, the others, the surplus, the replaceable, the dispensable.
Now you’re the extra in your final film, Alejandro. Except that your secret resignation—or can it be your will?—to disappear into the vast anonymous nation of failure has been frustrated by the encounter with your son, by the spirit of comedy that Sandokán displays in a situation that, instead of causing pity, he transforms into a prelude to a limited though hoped-for adventure: that of reuniting with you and initiating your real life together.
Hoped for and despaired over: Each fall that Sandokán makes you take is an invitation to the pending adventure. Is the child in fact father to the man? Where did you read that? Who said it to you? You confuse your dialogues on the screen with your words in life. You look in the mirror and accept that you’ll never escape this dilemma: speaking as if you were acting, acting as if you were speaking. Now, when you fulfill the rite of shaving each morning, you begin to believe that your old face is being lost, though not in a banal way because of the simple passage of time, but in another, more mysterious way, closer to both real life and theatrical representation. You feel that you have surpassed all the faces of your life, those of the actor and those of the man, those of the star and those of the lover, those of the role and those of flesh and blood.
All your faces are becoming superimposed in this poor, worn mirror with the rusting frame and insincere reflections. You are, in this moment you live through with fear like a throbbing announcement of approaching death, everything you have been. You are resigned to this fatality. You are grateful for it as well. You never imagined that the perfect film—simultaneous and successive, instantaneous and discursive—of all your moments would be presented to you in life. You enjoy this, even if you are resigned to the fatality of summarizing your entire past. Even if you suspect it signifies that you won’t have a future.
It is the moment when your son appears behind you in the mirror and looks at you looking at yourself. And you look at him looking at you. He looks at himself in you. He places his small, stunted hand on your shoulder. You feel the pressure of his cold fingers as part of your own flesh.
5. The Plaza de los Arcos de Bel