The show ended, and Mama’s friends clapped, then gushed about how smart and talented I was. I got more and more used to that praise over the following weeks, as my addition to Bisoy gave the show a ratings boost, and I began to get recognized on the street. A magazine even wrote a story about my relationship with Mama, which ran with a picture of her holding my hand as though she were taking me to school, the two of us an ideal image, her the envy of the country for having a child who was not only smart and white but also the star of a TV show, as I grew to understand that I was expected to play the same happy, clever boy not just on set but whenever I was in public. I sat with that magazine alone in our apartment and wondered whether her beaming face meant that Mama would never threaten to abandon me again.

—

I did a good enough job those first few months, as I got my script on the weekend and prepared my lines for two, sometimes three evenings of taping each week. Everyone was kind on set, Redford and other supporting characters like my TV grandfather and the maid, but I was especially drawn to my TV mom, Isabel Rivas, a dark actress with short wavy hair, whose modern, forward manner reminded me of Mama, not like the shy women in our province. But while my mother was chubby and eager to please, Isabel was slim and impossibly cool in her tube tops and tight jeans, and she often stroked my hair or kissed my cheek; she really was a more ideal version of Mama. Her life was also the subject of gossip magazines, always rumored to be with one debonair actor or another, which excited me in a way I couldn’t define.

I noticed that Isabel often disappeared whenever we were on break, so I once decided to follow her into a hallway to see what she was up to. She opened a back door, and by the time I caught up with her outside as a streetlamp lit her face, she already had a cigarette in her mouth, her back against our studio building, one of her sandaled feet resting on the wall.

“So why are you here?” she asked.

“I just wanted to say hello.”