Pretty Boy
The Story of Bonzo Madrid
by Orson Scott Card
How do you systematically destroy a child with love? It's not something
that any parent aspires to do, yet a surprising number come perilously close to
achieving it. Many a child escapes destruction only through his own disbelief
in his parents' worship. If I am a god, these children say, then there are no
gods, or such gods as there be are weak and feeble things.
In short, it is their own depressive personalities that save them. They are
self-atheists.
You know you have begun badly when you parents name you Bonito --
"Pretty Boy."
Well, perhaps they named you after a species of tuna. But when you are
pampered and coddled and adored, you soon become quite sure that the tuna
was named after you, and not the other way around.
In the cathedral in Toledo, he was baptized with the name Tomas
Benedito Bonito de Madrid y Valencia.
"An alliance between two cities!" his father proclaimed, though everyone
knew that to have two cities in your name was a sign of low, not high, pedigree.
Only if his ancestors had been lords of those cities would the names have
meant anything except that somebody's ancestors were a butcher from Madrid
and an orange picker from Valencia who moved somewhere else and came to be
known by their city of origin.
But in truth Bonito's father, Amaro, did not care for his ancestry, or at
least not his specific ancestry. It was enough for him to claim Spain as his
family.
