Los años con Laura Díaz

  Like Obregón, Orozco too was one-armed, as well as nearsighted and sad. Laura admired him because he painted the walls in the Prepa as if he were someone else, with a vigorous hand and his eyes unblinkingly fixed on the sun: he painted with what he lacked. An unclouded vision, another Orozco inhabiting the body of this Orozco, guided him, illuminated him, challenged Laura Díaz to imagine what the fiery, fugitive genius must be that governed the painter’s body, communicating an invisible fire to the disabled, shortsighted artist with his severe lips and bitter brow.

  By contrast, Laura in her new outfit, with its bodice embroidered with precious stones and its short skirt, had barely sat down on the stairway in the National Palace to watch Diego Rivera paint when the artist became distracted, staring at her with an intensity that made her blush.

  “You’ve got the face of a boy or a madonna. I don’t know which. You choose. Who are you?” asked Rivera during a break.

  “I’m a girl.” Laura smiled. “And I have two sons.”

  “I’ve got two girls. Let’s marry off the four of them, and when we’re both free of brats I’ll paint you as neither a woman nor a man but a hermaphrodite. Do you realize what the advantage is? You can love yourself both ways.”

  He was the opposite of Orozco. He was an immense, fat, tall frog with bulging, sleepy eyes. And when she turned up another day dressed in black with a black ribbon tied over her hair because of the death of her father, Fernando Daz, in Xalapa, one of Rivera’s assistants asked her to leave: the maestro feared the evil eye and couldn’t paint while making the sign of the horns to exorcise bad luck.

  “Oh, I see … because I’m in mourning. You must be very superstitious, red maestro, if a woman in black can frighten you.”

  She hadn’t had time to get to Xalapa for the funeral. Her mother, Leticia, sent her a telegram. You have your own obligations, Laura, a husband and two sons. Don’t make the trip. Why didn’t she add anything else, your father thought of you before dying, said your name, regained his speech for the last time just to say Laura, God gave him that gift at the end, he spoke again?

  “He was a decent man, Laura,” said Juan Francisco. “You know how he helped us.”

  “He did it for Santiago’s sake,” Laura retorted, the telegram in one hand and the other pushing aside the curtain so she could peer out through the almost black rain of late afternoon, as if to see all the way to a cemetery in Xalapa. The snowy peaks of Mexico City’s two volcanoes were bobbing above the storm.

  When Aunt María de la O came home, she said that God knew what He was doing, Fernando Daz wanted to die in order not to be in the way, she knew this because the two of them understood each other clearly, with just a look, direct and intelligent, how could it be otherwise with the man who had saved her mother, supported her, and given her a dignified old age.

  “Is your mother still alive?”

  María de la O became upset, shook her head, said I don’t know, I don’t know, but one morning when Laura stayed home to make the beds and the aunt took the boy and the baby in the carriage out for a stroll, she found under María de la O’s mattress an old daguerreotype of a slim, good-looking black woman in a low-cut dress, with a spark on her lips, a challenge in her eyes, a wasp waist, and breasts like hard melons. She quickly put it back when she heard María de la O return, tired after only three blocks, hobbling on her swollen ankles.

  “Oooh, the altitude here, Laurita.”

  The altitude and its airless air. The rain and its refreshing air. It was like the beat of Mexico’s heart, sun and rain, rain and sun, systole and diastole, every day. Thank heaven the nights were rainy and the days clear. On weekends, Xavier Icaza would visit and teach them how to drive the Ford that the CROM had given Juan Francisco.

  Laura turned out to be a better driver than her oversized, awkward husband, who almost didn’t fit in the seat and had no place to put his knees. She seemed to have an instinctive talent for driving and could now take the boys on excursions to Xochimilco to see the canals, to Tenayuca to see the pyramid, and to wander around the barns at Milpa Alta and smell that unique aroma of udders and straw and moist backs and drink warm milk fresh from the cow.

  One day, ducking out of the rain after she’d left the National Palace (where Rivera had readmitted her as soon as she stopped wearing mourning), Laura took the car parked on Calle de La Moneda and drove down the recently rebaptized Avenida Madero, the former Calle de Plateros, admiring as she went the colonial mansions along it, with their fiery tezontle tiles and matte marble, and then to Alameda and Paseo de la Reforma, where the architecture became frenchified, where beautiful villas had high mansard roofs and formal gardens.

  A feeling of comfort settled over her. Her life as a married woman was comfortable, satisfactory, she had two handsome sons and an extraordinary husband—difficult at times because he was an honest man with character, a man who wouldn’t give in, but an always loving man, preoccupied, burdened by his work, but who created no problems for her. As she maneuvered to the left at the Niza traffic circle to make her way to Avenida de los Insurgentes and her house on Avenida Sonora, her comfort began to discomfit her. Everything was too calm, too good, something had to happen …

  “You believe in presentiments, omens, don’t you, Auntie?”

  “Well, I do believe in sentiments, and your aunts tell me theirs in letter after letter, Hilda and Virginia and your mother down there together, busy with their guests, they sit down to write letters and they feel different. I think they don’t even realize what they tell me, and sometimes that offends me, they write to me as if I weren’t myself, as if by writing to me they could talk to each other, dearie, I’m just the pretext, Hilda can’t play the piano anymore because of her arthritis, so she tells me how the music goes through her head, look here, read, how good God is, or how bad, I don’t know, because He allows me to remember Chopin’s nocturnes, note by note, in my head, absolutely exact, but He won’t let me listen to the music outside my head, have you heard of that new thing, the Victrola? Chopin screeches on those records or whatever you call them, but in my head his music is crystalline and sad, as if the purity of the sound depended on the melancholy of one’s soul, don’t you hear it, sister, don’t you hear me? If I knew that someone was hearing Chopin in their head with the same clarity I hear him in mine, I’d be happy, María de la O, I’d be sharing what I love most, I don’t enjoy it all by myself, I wish I could share my musical happiness with someone, with more than one person, and I can’t any longer, my fate was not the one I wanted, perhaps it’s the one I imagined without wanting it, do you hear me, sister? Only a humble prayer, an impotent plea like Chopin’s, who people say imagined his last nocturne when a storm forced him inside a church, do you understand my plea, sister? and Virginia doesn’t talk to me but won’t accept dying without having had anything published, Laura, couldn’t your husband ask Minister Vasconcelos to publish your Aunt Virginia’s poems? Have you seen how pretty those books are with green covers that he brought out at the university? Don’t you think you could ask? Because even though out of pride Virginia never mentions these things to me, what Hilda writes to me is exactly what Virginia feels, except that the poetess has no words and the pianist does, because, as Hilda says, my music is my words and, as Virginia answers her, my words are my silence … Only your mother, Leticia, complains of nothing, but she isn’t happy, either.”

  Laura felt insufficient. She decided to ask Juan Francisco to let her work with him at what he was doing, at his side, helping him at least half the day, the two of them working together, organizing the workers, and he said fine but first come with me for a few days to see if you like it.

  They were together only forty-eight hours. The old city was a jumble of small shops, shoemakers, blacksmiths, carpenters, potters, disabled veterans of the revolutionary wars, old camp followers now without men who sold tamales and drinks on the corners, murmuring corridos and the names of lost battles, a viceregal city with a proletarian pulse, its palac
es now tenements, its wide portals now cluttered with sweet shops and lottery stands, shops that sold anything and everything, saddle makers, ancient inns turned into shelters where vagrants and criminals, homeless beggars and disoriented old people slept in a repugnant collective fog older than the perfume in the streets, where prostitutes plied their trade, leaning against entryways, open to suggestions and propositions, a whorish perfume identical to the scent of funeral parlors, gardenias and penises, both erect, pulque shops reeking of vomit and stray-dog urine, battalions of loose, mangy beasts poking around in garbage dumps that grew and grew, ever grayer and more purulent, like huge, cancerous lungs that would someday suffocate the entire city. Garbage had overflowed from the few canals left from the Aztec city, the assassinated city. People said they’d be drained and filled in with asphalt.

  “Where would you like to begin, Laura?”

  “You tell me, Juan Francisco.”

  “You want me to tell you? Begin at home. Run your own house properly, girl, and you’ll make more of a contribution than if you come to these neighborhoods to organize and save people—who by the way won’t thank you for your trouble. Leave the work to me. This is not for you.”

  He was right. But that evening, back in her house, Laura Daz was in a high state of excitement, not understanding very well why, as if the trip to a city that was both hers and not hers had aroused the passion of her childhood years with which she’d loved and explored the forest and its giant stone women covered with lianas and jewels, the trees and their gods hidden among laurels, and in Veracruz, the passion she’d shared with Santiago that had only grown in the years since his death, and in Xalapa the passion from Orlando’s languid body that she’d rejected, the passion in her father’s broken body that she’d tenaciously embraced. And now Juan Francisco, Mexico City, her house, the boys, and a request dashed by her husband the way you swat a fly: let me become impassioned with you and with what you’re doing, Juan Francisco.

  He may be right. He didn’t understand me. But even so he has to give something more to what is stirring in my soul. I love everything I have and wouldn’t exchange it for anything in the world. But I want something else. What is it?

  He was asking for the mute obedience of an impassioned soul.

  “Where’s the car, Juan Francisco?”

  “I gave it back. Don’t give me that look. The comrades asked me for it. They don’t want me to accept anything from the official union. They call it corruption.”

  7.

  Avenida Sonora: 1928

  WHAT WAS HE THINKING about? What was she thinking about?

  He was impenetrable, like a sphere of knives. She could only know what he was thinking about by knowing what she was thinking about. What did she think about when he—repeating something that irritated her more and more and discredited him—accused her of not having gone up to the attic in Xalapa to see the Catalan anarchist. Finally, she tired of it, gave up, set aside her own reasons, and began to note, in a small graph-paper notebook she used to keep household accounts, each time he, with no provocation on her part, would remind her of this omission. It was no longer a scolding but a nervous habit, like the involuntary squinting of eyes that were fixed, without their own light. What did she think when she heard yet again the same speech she’d been hearing now for nine years, so fresh, so powerful the first times, then more difficult to understand because more difficult to hear, excessively rationalist, as she waited in vain for the dream of the speech, not the speech itself but the dream of the speech, especially when she realized that, as a mother, she could speak to her sons Santiago and Danton only in dreams, in fables. Their father’s speech had lost the dream. It was an insomniac speech. Juan Francisco’s words did not sleep. They kept watch.

  “Mama, I’m afraid, look through the window. The sun isn’t there anymore. Where did the sun go? Did the sun die?”

  “Juan Francisco, don’t talk to me as if I were an audience of a thousand people. I’m just one person. Laura. Your wife.”

  “You don’t admire me the way you did before. Before, you used to admire me.”

  She wanted to love him. What was happening to her? What was it that was happening, which she neither knew nor understood?

  “Who understands women? Short ideas and long hair.”

  She wasn’t going to waste time telling him what the boys understood each time they told a story or asked a question, that words are born from imagination and pleasure, they aren’t for an audience of thousands of people or a plaza filled with flags, they are for you and for me. To whom are you speaking, Juan Francisco? She always saw him at a podium and the podium was a pedestal and that was where she’d placed him herself from the day they married. No one but she had put him there, not the Revolution, not the working class, not the unions, not the government; she was the vestal of the temple named Juan Francisco López Greene, and she’d asked her husband to be worthy of the devotion of the wife. But a temple is a place for repeated ceremonies. And what is repeated becomes boring unless faith sustains it.

  It wasn’t that Laura lost faith in Juan Francisco. She was simply being honest with herself, registering the irritations of connubial life, what couple doesn’t get irritated over the course of time? It was normal after eight years of marriage. At first they hadn’t known each other, and everything was a surprise. Now she wished she could recover the astonishment and novelty, but she realized that the second time around astonishment is habit and novelty is nostalgia. Was it her fault? She’d begun by admiring the public figure. Then she’d tried to penetrate it, only to find that behind the public figure was another public figure and another behind that one, until she realized that the dazzling orator, leader of the masses, was the real figure, there was no trick, no other personality to find, she’d have to resign herself to living with a man who treated his wife and children as a grateful audience. The problem was that the figure on the podium also slept in the conjugal bed, and one evening contact between their feet under the sheets made her, involuntarily, pull hers back, her husband’s elbows began to disgust her, she would stare at that articulation of wrinkles between the upper arm and forearm and imagine all of him as an enormous elbow, a loose hide from head to foot.

  “I’m sorry. I’m tired. Not tonight.”

  “Why didn’t you say something? Should we hire a maid? I thought that between you and your aunt you managed the house very well.”

  “That’s true, Juan Francisco. There’s no need for maids. You have Mar��a de la O and me. You shouldn’t have maids. You serve the working class.”

  “How well you understand things, Laura.”

  “Know something, Auntie?” she dared to say to María de la O. “Sometimes I miss life in Veracruz. It was more fun.”

  The aunt did not agree, simply looked attentively at Laura, and then Laura laughed as if to say the matter was of no importance.

  “You stay here with the boys. I’ll go to the market.”

  It was not a bother; she found it amusing to go to the Parián in Colonia Roma, because it broke the household routine, which in truth was no routine. Laura loved her aunt, adored her sons, and was delighted to watch them grow. The market was a miniature forest where she could find all the things that delighted her, flowers and fruits, so various and abundant in Mexico, the azucenas and gladiolas, the Madonna lilies, the “clouds” and pansies, the mangos, papaya, vanilla that she thought about when she made love: the mamey, the quince, the tejocote, the pineapple, limes and lemons, guanábana, oranges, the black zapotes and the little zapotes: the tastes, shapes, flavors of markets filled her with joy and with nostalgia for her childhood and youth.

  “But I’m only thirty years old.”

  She was pensive as she returned from the Parián to Avenida Sonora and asked herself, Is there something more? Is this all there is? She answered herself with a slight shrug of her shoulders and walked faster, not even thinking about the weight of the baskets. If there was no more automobile, it was because Juan Fra
ncisco was honorable and had returned the gift to the CROM. She remembered that it had not been his idea to return it. The comrades had asked him to do it. Don’t accept gifts from the official union. Don’t become corrupt. It hadn’t been a voluntary act on his part. They’d asked him to do it.

  “Juan Francisco, would you have returned the car if your comrades hadn’t asked you to?”

  “I serve the working class. That’s that.”

  “Sweetheart, why do you depend on injustice so much?”

  “You already know I don’t like—”

  “My poor Juan Francisco, what would become of you in a just world?”

  “Spare me the condescension. Sometimes I just can’t figure you out. Hurry up and make breakfast, I’ve got an important meeting today.”

  “Not a day passes without an important meeting. Not a month. Not a year. Every minute there’s an important meeting.”

  What did he think of her? Was Laura only a habit of his, a sexual rite, mute obedience, expected gratitude?

  “I mean, how good it is that you have people to defend. That’s your strength. It pours out of you. I love to see you come home tired.”

  “You’re incomprehensible.”

  “What are you talking about? I love it when you fall asleep on my breasts, and I love the idea that I restore your strength. Your work drains you even if you don’t realize it.”