Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [50]
There were shouts of jubilation when they poured gasoline on the police and set them on fire. Doña Medea joins the chorus of joy. The neighborhood has defeated the violence that came from outside with the violence that comes from inside. Two of the police burn alive with screams that silence the sirens. The television cameras transmit everything. Live. The helicopters of His Honor the Mayor and His Excellency the President fly like crack-crazed bumblebees over the mob, letting it happen, confirming in the eyes of the neighborhood that we’re right to kill the officers of the law. That the neighborhood rules itself and knows the score. From the air, could they see clearly the police burned by the people in the neighborhood? Will they come to collect what’s left of the law: the blue trousers and shoes with metal tips? Sizzling in a burning pyre. Bonfires of branches and straw.
“Burn them!”
“We don’t need the government!”
“We’re neighborhoods free to buy and beat up, mock and murder, bellow and bite the dust!”
“After them!”
“Watch out, you rich sons of bitches, you bastard politicians!”
“After them!”
“Get a good look at us on your TVs.”
“Look at us without any papers.”
“Better off that way.”
“Oh dear God.” Doña Medea falls and is dragged along by the noise of the crowd. “Don’t let them use my bones for a club.”
The lynching is seen by the entire country, but Doña Medea has eyes for only one man. A man birthed by the crowd because the crowd doesn’t know that in the smoke and the blood and the shriek of the sirens, there is another voice muffled by blows.
She hears it. How could she not hear it. She’s listened to it her whole life. If it shouts now with rage and despair and defeat, it once sang very nicely. It was a very pretty voice. Now the voice is being muffled by blows in the nocturnal crowd from the neighborhood watched over by the forces of law and order that are provoking the power of disorder in the smoke and fog from tires set on fire and cars overturned and policemen burned alive sizzling with the smell of hair and rubber and indigestible guts. Releasing with their death the collective smell of deep-frying ears of corn warm tortillas armpits feet farts overalls rebozos sawdust hay leather wet wood burning tiles. Bursting from knifed stomachs are the countless insignias of death.
4. From the time he was a boy, Maximiliano Batalla sang very well. He would go out to the courtyard, and while he showered with buckets of water, he sang popular songs. When he was a boy, they came to propose that he sing in the choir of the Church of the Immaculate Conception. He said no because his songs were only for his mama.
Doña Medea (how naive of me) believed that this filial song would last her whole life because the strength of a son depends on the strength of his mother. No matter how aggressive the son’s and how anguished the mother’s. It’s inherited. After all, Maximiliano had been weaned with pulque, and so he was free to go out and search for milk. Medea looked at Max, and the boy must have felt that so much love compensated for a poverty subject to the national proverb:
“We’ve been eating tortillas and beans for centuries, son. How little we need to survive.”
If Maximiliano was happy, it was because he didn’t ask for anything. A calm child, perhaps resigned. How little we need to survive.
Now, years later, Doña Medea believes she committed a serious, a very serious, mistake. Giving Maxi a doll she happened to find in the market. A Baby Jesus dressed as a cowboy.