Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [51]
A happy child.
Except at the age of fifteen, he came home visibly upset and sprang the question on Doña Medea:
“Who’s my father?”
She shrugged. Maximiliano was so gentle and intelligent that the question seemed superfluous in a relationship as tender as the one between mother and son. Except that this time the kid insisted:
“I want to know whose son I am.”
“You’re my son,” Doña Medea responded with smiling naturalness.
“And the Holy Spirit’s?” the boy said with an attitude of false devotion.
“Go on,” Medea said with a smile, totally missing the point. “Sing ‘Cucurrucucú Paloma.’ ”
“ ‘Paloma Negra’ would be better.”
“No, that’s very sad.”
“Well, they say I’m the child of sadness.”
“Who says that?”
“Can’t you guess? At school.”
“Tell them to go—”
“Fuck themselves? But I already live with my fucking mother.”
“Oh, son! What devil’s gotten into you?”
“The devil of shame, Señora.”
Maximiliano lasted another year in the shanty at the rear of the parking lot. She tried to calm him down. She took him to church to encourage him to sing in the choir. Maxi lied through his teeth to the priest. Medea resigned herself. She gave him a cowboy outfit just like the one on Baby Jesus. She papered the bedroom with photographs of Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante that she found at the flea market. She made vows to the Immaculate Conception so her son would love his mother again. She always knew—you know her—that these external acts weren’t enough, weren’t important. If the boy’s love had been lost, she wasn’t going to get it back with little gifts. Something beat in the heart of Doña Medea, which was the certainty that no matter how independent or distant her son became, he would need his mother to bring out the strength that even the most powerful were missing. Call it whatever you like. Tenderness. Patience. Acceptance of the unexpected. Calibration of the definitive stumbling block.
In Doña Medea’s imagined scenario, Maximiliano was going to be the son who protected his mother. When they asked him about his father, Maxi got into fistfights with his classmates, and he fought hard, no one was braver. The head of the school told Medea about it in a recriminatory way. She felt pride more than anything else, because she knew that her son’s rage had its roots in the nervous strength of his mother. In the reserves of pure resistance in Doña Medea. Maximiliano learned to fight because his mother was protecting him, even if he didn’t know it.
I believe you understand that this certainty never abandoned the mother. And she had great need of her faith when her son left without saying goodbye.
She didn’t see him again. She heard about him through the kind of chorus that, without wanting to, accompanies every city dweller and is transmitted from voice to voice, passing through indifferent ears unaware of their function as transmitters of news until, with no intention at all, it reaches the distant ear of the person for whom it is intended. In this way, the city and its neighborhoods form an involuntary aureole of desires, memories, conundrums, redundancies, playful instances that create an arc suspended over each neighborhood, each street, each family, and each life. We know it, you and I feel it. There is absolutely no need to separate the personal from the collective, the lived from the dreamed, what needs to be done from what has already been done. The city is generous and embraces everything, from the smallest to the biggest, from the most secret to the most public, from the most personal to the most social. There’s no point in trying to divide and separate anything from what a great city like ours creates. Only ideology separates without respecting the whole, my friend. You know that. Ideology makes comrades of imbeciles and wise men. But you already know that.
And so, thanks to the silent chorus of the city, Doña Medea learned that Maxi had joined a mariachi band on Plaza Garibaldi, and because he was the baby of the group, they gave him a luxurious black cowboy outfit with silver buttons and the eagle and serpent embroidered