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 on the back. A tricolor tie and a black hat edged in silver.
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 there were what they had come to offer.
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.