The small lean-to (he hasn't learned to call it a hovel yet, but it's there on the tip of his tongue, like prendre vous; there are some things you learn through social osmosis) has finally reached that baking hot stage that signifies that it's seven-o-clock, and she starts having one of her fits. He can tell, even from where he's sitting on the floor with scraps of a potato, because her eyes go limpid and wide and her posture slides so completely she's become another person; her lips fall open and her jaw goes a little slack, and he doesn't know that this is the expression that make men go mad over his whore mother. She doesn't look like she's fucking crazy, that she will seize the paring knife from him before the night is out and threaten him with it, before turning him around and clasping him to her bosom, and brandishing the very same weapon (for that's what it's become) at unseen assailants.
So, instead of doing what normal people do, and leave the crazy person alone, he goes and fetches a glass of water from the faucet they built their house around (because he obviously hasn't learned his lesson from the hundreds or so other times that when he does this there is equal possibility that this glass will break, and she will try to cut his throat with it), and brings it to her. She's usually lucid enough to retrieve the glass from him, which she is in this situation, so she does, eyes wide and unreadable, childish, and drinks from the shit deeply. He wonders, sometimes, if it's the foul water that's done her in like this; sometimes, he's thought of finding a long drop into a shallow stream, and if that's not crazy (a ten-year-old thinking of ending his own life), he isn't sure what is. But he doesn't quite know this yet at ten-and-a-half, doesn't really know how messed up that really is, but looking back on it has since realized it, and has colored the way he looks at those days.
She's having another delusion again (though he doesn't know it's called that in those days, just knows that she sometimes has bad ideas, and sometimes ideas that frighten him, but it's his Mama, and- and then he has to stop thinking about that) because when she looks at him, she smiles, and she only smiles at him when she sees him, your father when she looks at her son. She always says it that way, too, him, your father, never gives his name. That is shortly before her delusion spirals, and from her elated, manic high, she meets that enlightened trough, and she then tells him she's never going to be able to tell him, your father the wonderful thing they have together- a baby. A son.
After that, she hates him, and tells him so, face so abruptly crumpling it's as if someone is reaching inside of her head and shoving all the dark things out onto the surface, like ink spots. She hates him, she hates him, because because of him, she's never going to wear fine things and go to parties on him, your father's arm, and she wraps those tiny hands around his tiny throat until he can't breathe and shakes him until his head hits the stovepipe, and he learns to hate the bastard of a father he never had.
When he meets the man himself, it's like prendre vous again (he's beginning to wonder if, maybe, he has inherited some of that bitch's crazy blood, because he certainly felt as if there is something wrong with feeling as if you know a person you've never met before; it's got nothing to do with social osmosis, he lived in a fucking slum, and before he thinks about it too much, he pours himself another drink); he thinks he knows the man, but has never met him before, couldn't have possibly, because, he thinks, he could never forget what kind, what fucking weak eyes this man has. Ultimately, he's disappointed that the man he never met before is nothing like the man his mother promised him to be. Though, honestly, he isn't sure he wants to know what burning lips and strong hands this man he never met before has.
"I named him Xanxus." She says, and she's cycling again, he can tell, her eyes shining, mouth lax, hand cupping the back of his head to conceal the fact that it's in supplication. "Two X's. For the Tenth Boss." The man who he's never met before crouches down in front of the child who's supposed to be his son, puts his hands on that tiny chest, and says the first thing in the boy's short life that has ever made any sense.
"There's no mistaking it. You're my son." And, for a few seconds, he doesn't hate the bastard as much as he'd been taught to. And takes the boy who's supposed to be his son to a place very, very far away from the little lean-to.
When he's thirteen, he hasn't forgotten about that hovel (he knows the proper word know, and shoves a knife into anyone around him who says it in context with his name in the same sentence), and finds it again when he loses the old bastard's men in the lower sections of town. He doesn't know why he's there, maybe to make sure it hadn't been some sort of dream (to see if that madness was still alive), and when she sees him, she drops to her knees and he does too without really knowing why, becoming weak-kneed at the prospect of something he can only see in the shine of her eyes. She cries over and over again about her lost baby, and holds his face to her breasts, and he can't understand why he suddenly feels like he's eight again, waiting for imminent death.
When he's fourteen, and he comes to the hovel of his own accord (it's a word he can say easily now, because it has nothing to do with him), and he knows it's seven o clock (because it's baking hot) because of the pocket watch he tucks into his front pocket, and she's sitting in the chair by the woodstove, and her posture is slumped and her face is lax, and there is a bright line of red across her throat. He feels his breath hitch, and thinks he is going to scream, but then he turns away from the mess and can only feel tired. He leans against the hovel's doorframe, and maybe he really has inherited that bitch's crazy blood, because he stands there for a very long time without knowing it, until the old man with those fucking weak eyes is standing in front of him, cupping his face.
"It couldn't be helped." He says, and his voice breaks, and the boy with two X's in his name snarls. Maybe, he thinks later, he really did inherit that crazy bitch's bad blood, because he keeps thinking about her face then, until the night he stops thinking altogether.
And he keeps thinking about her, even after all those years, even after he was certain the ice would have trapped that part of him in his mind for good, even after he was given entirely different scars altogether to define him (not those that people couldn't see), and figured it was fitting that he (the boy with two X's in his name) was finally as disfigured on the outside as he was on the inside.
And he wonders, as he pours himself his tenth glass of tequila that night, if he really did inherit that crazy bitch's bad blood because, in the middle of the sum and total of what he really was (and the Varia Headquarters at midnight had had new meeting, suddenly), amidst all that he had worked for, that would be the only conceivable reason he would be thinking about a hovel at seven-o-clock.
If you think of Xanxus in this way, suddenly, he makes a lot more sense