Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [54]
Mother and son reached the altar. Maximiliano seemed entranced and distant, as if being alive were miracle enough. Doña Medea hoped for the miracle. She didn’t take it for granted.
She knelt in front of the image of the Virgin dressed in blue with embroidered stars and the half-moon at her feet. It was a miracle-working image. People said it had brought back to life the daughter of an acrobat at the fair who fell from her chair and was run through the chest by stakes but was saved when the image of the Virgin appeared at the top of the Ferris wheel.
Now Medea asked for a new but lesser miracle: that the Virgin return his voice to her son. That Maxi sing again. That the mariachi not remain mute, with catastrophic consequences for everyone: the world, the nation, music, Maxi, and Mede.
Medea spoke to the Virgin by speaking to her son. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t love me, Maxi. Your real mother is the Virgin.”
And to the Virgin: “Mother of God, give my son’s voice back to him so he can praise you.”
And to Maximiliano: “Go on, Maxi, go on, don’t you see that Our Lady is asking you to do it? Don’t be stubborn!”
Then they say—you haven’t heard about it?—that the miracle happened. The Virgin extended her hand to Medea Batalla and gave her a bunch of tiny keys. “This is so you can enter my house, Medea.”
She took the keys, kissed them, placed them on Maxi’s lips, and said: “Go on, son. Sing. The Virgin has given you back your voice.”
But Maxi didn’t open his mouth. He only opened his eyes, still partly bewildered and partly absent. And yet the Virgin looked at him. Maxi did not look back. But Medea did. The mother looked at the Virgin as she would have liked her son to look at her. In that look, Medea brought together her entire life, her excessive loves, the joy of giving birth twenty-five years before, the relief of the snake’s rattle, the tiny tasks of washing other people’s clothes, the midsize ones of making pottery, the large ones of assisting women in the neighborhood to give birth. Everything assembled in that moment of the meeting of the Virgin and the son, son of Medea and son of María, the mariachi who lost his voice because of a blow from a club on the day of the riot, the singer who now, if the Virgin really was a miracle worker, would recover his voice right here.
There was an enormous silence.
Everything was illuminated.
Each ex-voto caught fire like a lamp of hope.
The candles shone.
Maximiliano remained silent.
Medea opened her mouth and began to sing:
Peacock you are a courier
going to Real del Oro,
Peacock if they ask you,
Peacock tell them I’m weeping
tears of my own blood
for a son whom I adore.
Medea sang in front of the candles with an unconscious desire for her breath to extinguish them. But the candles did not go out. They grew with Medea’s song. They became animated with the life of her voice. A voice that was clear, strong, and sonorous enough to animate a yard full of roosters. A man’s voice, a mariachi’s voice. A voice that came out of the mariachi’s mother, illuminating the ex-votos, the candles, the keys that the Virgin gave her, the bit of the key with the image of the supper in Jerusalem.
A voice that filled the entire city with light.
6. Doña Medea Batalla is naked in a cell at the police station. All she is wearing is a diaper held up with pins. She was pulled along in the general roundup on the day of the disturbances. The cops, the blues—the gendarmes, as she called them, betraying her own verbal antiquity. But the residents closest to the trouble were brought in, stripped, locked up. At least they allowed her to keep the shameful diaper that she was resigned to using to protect herself from incontinence.
Now Medea is waiting for you to come and rescue her. To pay the fine. She had to give your name. Who else could she mention? The undertaker at the funeral home? The managers of restaurants? The lovers who died in pulque taverns? The mariachi band the Taste of the Land? The son she thought she caught a glimpse of in the mob the night before?