Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [53]
And then the neighbors, criminals as well as honorable people, asked themselves, What do these bastards want? To take our children by surprise, plant drugs on them, force them into prostitution? In their doubt, the community decided to act, set an example, and do away with the five officers.
Two were burned alive.
Three were beaten.
Among them, Maximiliano Batalla.
A blow to the neck with a club knocked him down and left him permanently mute.
5. Doña Medea took him, bleeding and dazed like the Holy Christ of the Afflicted, in her arms. Staggering, mother and son reached the ramshackle living quarters hidden at the rear of a parking lot. Maxi leaned against the cars, staining the windshields with his red hands, howling like a beautiful animal that knows it is not only wounded but lost and not only lost but extinguished forever. He was the ghost of the mariachi. At the very most.
He couldn’t see clearly through the cloud of blood that covered his eyes. Perhaps he didn’t even know where he was, unless he recognized the familiar smells, though these were pretty common. Epazote leaves. Thyme. Marjoram. All the herbs in Doña Medea’s kitchen, which was everybody’s kitchen. Because she—you know her character—had not identified herself. She helped her son in the way Veronica would have helped Christ. Invisible. Silent. Unexpected but tolerated . . . Because beaten virility is not defeated virility but manhood prepared to start the next fight. Though looking at Maxi, Doña Medea didn’t believe this cock would crow again.
Something happened that was both remarkable and foreseeable. As the days passed, her son began recovering his senses. Doña Medea administered herbs, bandages, pozoles, and essences of rattlesnake. Badly beaten and close to death, Maxi at first could hear the comings and goings of his unknown mother without attributing them to her. Then he smelled the stews, and perhaps he recognized something familiar in the flavor of the soups that Medea fed him with a spoon. Finally, the swelling of his eyes went down, and he could look around. Then one of two things happened. He acknowledged and refused to admit or didn’t acknowledge and admitted. What was it he accepted if that was true? That he wasn’t master of his own person. His mortally slow movements betrayed him. He didn’t know where he was. Or he pretended not to know.
Medea did not acknowledge him and did not allow herself to be acknowledged. A very ancient wisdom in her person told her it was better not to. If Maxi wanted to acknowledge her, he would have to do it on his own. She would not lend herself to any emotional bribery. Such was the strength of her character that after the dreadful experiences of recent days, she extracted from herself, as if from those old abandoned mines whose only treasure is mystery, the silver that for so long had been thought exhausted.
Maxi heard. Maxi smelled. Maxi felt. At last Maxi saw. Medea waited eagerly for her son to sing. She did some useless things. She played a Cuco Sánchez record. She stirred up the canaries. She whistled the tango “Madreselva.” All in vain. Maxi stayed there, lying on the cot with two serapes covering him and the Picot Songbook as a pillow. A distant look and a closed mouth.
This was when Medea told herself that great evils demand great remedies.
She went to see the woman who managed a nearby restaurant to ask to borrow the wheelchair reserved for disabled patrons. Back in her house, she struggled to sit Maxi in the chair and pushed it out to the street.
She knew very well where she was headed.
She wagered her destiny and her son’s on the auspicious date of November 22, the day of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of musicians.
She entered the Church of the Immaculate Conception. An entire wall was dedicated to the ex-votos expressing gratitude for miracles ranging from saving someone from an automobile accident to resurrection two days after death. Would Medea Batalla have the occasion to add her own ex-voto to the gallery? Would the Virgin return a mariachi