Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [52]
He looked so young and handsome that they pushed him to the front of the group because he attracted the rich girls driving by in big convertible Lincolns in that time before widespread violence, and they would hire him to sing to the call of “My God how cute he looks when they dress him up like a cowboy” and to catch the whisper of “I woke again in your arms.”
This was how Maximiliano Batalla became a man, except for the benders on the Callejón de San Camilito. Being a man doesn’t mean not being a child anymore but beginning to be a criminal. There are about five hundred musicians registered at Plaza Garibaldi to offer their services to those who request them, whether beside the car parked right on the square, or to serenade a girl in Las Lomas de Chapultepec, or sometimes, with luck, to play at a posh get-together, and other times, but without luck, to liven up a dull party.
It doesn’t matter. Guitars, trumpets, violins, and double bass guitars are enough to live an absolutely terrific life and embody, night after night, the mariachi’s lyrics.
The mariachi sings a happy tune.
Sound of the guitar, bass guitar croons.
The violin sighs, and I do, too.
Except that at the age of twenty, with five years as a mariachi behind him, Maxi had come to feel that the suit of lights—comparable only to a bullfighter’s—and the free sex with motorized women and girls and the occasional drinks in cantinas were no longer enough. Because in Maxi there was a hidden need, and this was the need for danger. He came to feel that if he wasn’t exposed to danger, what he did made no sense. And had no future or past, since danger was as much an inheritance from his mother as the defiance she deserved.
How and when he left the group that chose him when he was a boy after he had left home, to join the mariachi band called the Taste of the Land, you and I are in no position to tell. The fact is that the young man of twenty-one, very clean-shaven, very smooth-skinned, without the pockmarks of adolescence or the scars of experience on his angel’s face, and no false modesty in his devil’s body, and with a pair of eyes stolen from the altar to the Holy Child Reappeared, became the perfect bait for the band of cryptomariachis who used him, with his innocent appearance, to hire out the services of their orchestra for five thousand pesos in advance. Maxi took the money and left the clients in the lurch. Just like that. With the superior idea of earning a living without working. Though Maximiliano Batalla liked to sing and would have done it with no need to steal. But his colleagues didn’t like that idea. The sweet thing was to make the dough without wearing out your voice. The money was divided up among the other four false mariachis, a thousand pesos apiece.
It was only a matter of time before the five swindlers were caught, and though El Florido and El Pifas managed to avoid prison, El Tasajeado (for being ugly) and El Cacomixtle (for being stupid) were sent to jail, while they offered handsome Maxi the chance to redeem himself by joining the undercover police force, where his angelic appearance and sentimental voice would be perfectly suited to policemen who dedicated themselves to extortion, intimidation, and bearing false witness. Who wouldn’t believe beautiful Maxi?
They posted him in the neighborhood where he was born. He objected. He’d be recognized. They would, literally, fuck him over. They threatened him. That was why he would be there: because he knew everybody, and nobody, after ten years, would recognize him. He left a little weenie and came back a full-fledged prick. That was the joke. He’d go from house to house threatening and proposing. Everybody’s fine if you give us half the drugs, the alcohol, the girls, or if you prefer, the blow, the booze, and the babes. Taking contributions, paying the tax on peace, the police officers and Maxi were becoming rich when they committed the huge mistake of watching the little district school on the pretext that the same things being sold