Sometimes Sandokán isn’t lovable. He tries to hurt you.
“What have you given me, Papa? What do you want me to give to you? How are you going to pay me for being abandoned? Just tell me that.”
“Don’t repeat my dialogues,” you say irritably.
“Seriously, Father, do you understand? You had everything, I’ve had nothing.”
The boy says this with a wooden face.
At other times you’re busy doing what you have never done. You cook. You keep the house clean. You pretend this is another role, just as if you were — it might have happened — the headwaiter at a restaurant.
Sandokán interrupts. You tell him to let you work. He turns his back.
“Whenever I want to tell you something that matters to me, you say you’re in a hurry.”
Where have you heard that same complaint before?
Your son wants to join you, aggressively. He falls flat on his face. You run to help him. He resists. He struggles with you. In the end he embraces you. You embrace each other.
“You ought to be dead,” the son tells the father, and you refrain from repeating the phrase because it compromises Cielo, your wife, Sandokán’s mother, who also tried to kill her son in the cradle before she fled.
“Have pity on me,” you say instead to your son, knowing that these are, in turn, the words the boy wants to say and cannot.
Sandokán looks at you with unexpected, invasive tenderness. “You know? Now both our feelings are hurt.”
He culminated his remark by extending his leg in order to trip you. This becomes Sandokán’s greatest diversion. Making you fall. At first you are resigned. It is difficult for you to scold him. You don’t dare to slap him. Little by little, you prefer to accept the prank. Finally, you celebrate it. You laugh each time Sandokán, with the agility of a pirate from the Island of Tortuga, extends his leg and makes you fall. The strength the boy has developed in his legs is surprising. Beneath the comfortable shirt he always wears, you see two robust limbs, very developed, almost hairless, statuesque, almost marble-like, streaked with blue veins. So that half of his body lives intensely, from the neck up and from his navel down. So that perhaps you were right to stop Cielo de la Mora from drowning your son in the bath or throwing him into a trash can or. .
This means you will let Sandokán make you fall, and you will laugh because in this way, you celebrate the life of the boy, his presence in the world. Nothing less than that: his presence in the world. And little by little, Alejandro, you begin to realize that your son’s individuality was the most faithful mirror of the life that still was yours, that leaving the movie sets was not a death certificate, as you believed before, but a window that opened to let air, sun, birds, rain, pollen, bees into the closed tomb of a movie set reeking of sawdust, cardboard, glue, the hair of wigs made with the tresses of corpses, period costumes never sent to the cleaner, stained under the arms and between the legs, the clothing of extras, the others, the surplus, the replaceable, the dispensable.
Now you’re the extra in your final film, Alejandro. Except that your secret resignation — or can it be your will? — to disappear into the vast anonymous nation of failure has been frustrated by the encounter with your son, by the spirit of comedy that Sandokán displays in a situation that, instead of causing pity, he transforms into a prelude to a limited though hoped-for adventure: that of reuniting with you and initiating your real life together.
Hoped for and despaired over: Each fall that Sandokán makes you take is an invitation to the pending adventure. Is the child in fact father to the man? Where did you read that? Who said it to you? You confuse your dialogues on the screen with your words in life. You look in the mirror and accept that you’ll never escape this dilemma: speaking as if you were acting, acting as if you were speaking. Now, when you fulfill the rite of shaving each morning, you begin to believe that your old face is being lost, though not in a banal way because of the simple passage of time, but in another, more mysterious way, closer to both real life and theatrical representation. You feel that you have surpassed all the faces of your life, those of the actor and those of the man, those of the star and those of the lover, those of the role and those of flesh and blood.
All your faces are becoming superimposed in this poor, worn mirror with the rusting frame and insincere reflections. You are, in this moment you live through with fear like a throbbing announcement of approaching death, everything you have been. You are resigned to this fatality. You are grateful for it as well. You never imagined that the perfect film — simultaneous and successive, instantaneous and discursive — of all your moments would be presented to you in life. You enjoy this, even if you are resigned to the fatality of summarizing your entire past. Even if you suspect it signifies that you won’t have a future.
It is the moment when your son appears behind you in the mirror and looks at you looking at yourself. And you look at him looking at you. He looks at himself in you. He places his small, stunted hand on your shoulder. You feel the pressure of his cold fingers as part of your own flesh.
5. The Plaza de los Arcos de Belén near the Salto del Agua attracts the same working-class audience that frequents the so-called frivolous theaters in the center of the city as well as the anonymous bars, the dens where they still sing boleros, the dance halls where the danzón and the cha-cha-cha survive, the old lunchrooms with awnings that serve pozole, the few Chinese cafés that remain.
It is a peculiarity of this city that the arches and the canal that once ran through here celebrate the memory of an old lacustrine capital whose springs began to dry up until the entire valley was transformed into a saucer of dust surrounded by thirst and dead trees. Not long ago they finished setting up here one of those fairs that in every neighborhood of the immense capital of Mexico are, at times, the only solace of people of no means, which are the immense majority. My father and I see the numerous reality of our people in the Zócalo on the night of September 15, in the Villa de Guadalupe on December 12, on Sundays in Chapultepec, at any hour in the great human serpent of Tacuba in the center, of Andrés Molina in Santa Anita, of the Highway de la Piedad, the Highway de Tlalpan, the Highway Ignacio Zaragoza going to Puebla, and the Indios Verdes going north.
There are people.
There is an audience.
The fair at the Arcos de Belén has been assembling all kinds of attractions, from the wheel of fortune to the octopus, from the carousel to fortune-telling birds, from hawkers of remedies — sciatica, impotence, nightmares, calluses, bad blood, good life — to the wizards and diviners stationed at the corners with their crystal balls and starcovered pointed hats and several mariachi groups (the young star of the ranchera Maximiliano Batalla) and bolero singers (the retired songstress Elvira Morales). Weight lifters, failed tenors, big-bellied odalisques, certified veterans of the Revolution and improbable horsemen of the Empire, declaimers of immensely popular verses (Toast of the Bohemian; Nocturne for Rosario; Margarita, the Sea Is Beautiful). Reciters of the Constitution, memorizers of the telephone book, voices with the singsong of the lottery, with the buzz of neighborhood gossip, the acidity of balcony slanderers, the tears of unemployed circus clowns.
People come here five times a week, five nights in a row (the authorities don’t give seven-day permits in order to exercise authority in something). They come to have a good time with the spectacle of the armless teenager who, with long, strong legs, trips the old musketeer who threatens him with a little aluminum sword, and each time the old man attacks the boy, he extends his leg and makes the musketeer ostentatiously take a tremendous fall, to the delight of the audience. Applause whistles and shouts.