“You’re so flighty, you make me laugh sometimes, but other times—”
“I annoy you … I just love the idea!”
He left without another word. What did he think of her? Did he remember the young woman he met at the Casino ball at Xalapa? The promise he made her that he would educate her, teach her to be a woman in the city and in the world? Would he remember the young mother who wanted to accompany him in his work, identify herself with him, prove that in their married life the two of them shared the life of the world, the life of work?
This idea weighed more and more on Laura Díaz. Her husband had rejected her, had not carried out the promise that they would be together in everything, united in bed, in being parents, but also in work, in that part of the whole that eats up the life of each day the way children eat the sections of an orange, transforming all the rest—bed and being parents, matrimony and dreams—into minutes to be counted and finally into empty skins to be discarded.
“The mute obedience of impassioned souls.”
Laura blamed herself. She remembered the child from Catemaco, the girl from Veracruz, the young woman from Xalapa, and in each she saw the growing promise that culminated in her wedding eight years before. Ever since then I’ve shrunk instead of growing, I’ve been turning into a little dwarf, as if he didn’t deserve me, as if he’d done me a favor, he didn’t ask me to do it, he didn’t impose it on me, I asked for it, and I imposed it on myself in order to be worthy of him. Now I know I wanted to be worthy of a mystery, I didn’t know him, I was impressed by him physically, his way of speaking, of taking control of the monster of the crowd, I was impressed by that speech he gave in our Xalapa house in honor of the Catalan woman. That’s what I fell in love with—to jump from my love to knowledge of the person I loved, love as a trampoline of knowing, its labyrinth, my God, I’ve spent eight years trying to penetrate a mystery that isn’t mysterious, for my husband is what he seems to be, not more, what appears is what he is, there’s nothing more to discover, I’ll ask the audience whom the leader López Greene speaks to, the man is for real, what he tells them is true, there’s nothing hidden behind his words, his words are his entire truth, every last bit, believe in him, there is no one more authentic, what you see is what he is, what he says is nothing more.
From Laura he demanded out of habit what had satisfied him before. Little by little, she stopped feeling satisfied with what had once satisfied both of them.
“When I met you, I thought I didn’t deserve you. What do you think of that? Why don’t you answer?”
“I thought I could change you.”
“So what you bought in Xalapa seems pretty paltry to you now.”
“You don’t understand. We all progress, we all can either better ourselves or get worse.”
“Are you saying you wanted to change me?”
“For the good.”
“All right then, tell me something, honestly. Am I a good wife and mother? When I wanted to work with you, didn’t you stop me with that little stroll through hell you set up for me? What more did you want?”
“Someone to confide in,” said Juan Francisco, and first he got out of bed, but then quickly looked back at Laura with shining eyes and, with a grimace of pain, threw himself into his wife’s arms.
“My love, my love.”
That year, President Obregón was succeeded by Plutarco Elas Calles, another Sonora man, another one of the Agua Prieta triumvirate. The Revolution had been carried out to the chant of FREE VOTES, NO REELECTION because Porfirio Díaz had kept himself in office for three decades with fraudulent reelections. Now, ex-President Obregón wanted to abrogate his own ineligibility and return to the throne of the eagle and serpent. Many said it would betray one of the principles of the Revolution. But the rationale of power had its way. The Constitution was amended to allow a former president’s reelection. Everyone had been certain that the three Sonora men would take turns at being President until they died of old age, just like Don Porfirio Daz, unless another Madero, another revolution, came along.
“Morones wants us union men to back General Obregón’s reelection. I’d like to discuss it with you,” said Juan Francisco to the union leaders gathered once again in his house, as they did every month of every year. In the little living room, Laura put aside her book.
“Morones is an opportunist. He doesn’t think the way we do. He hates the anarcho-syndicalists. He adores the corporate unionists who thicken the government’s broth. If we support Obregón, our independence is over. He’ll turn us into little lambs or he’ll lead us to slaughter, which is pretty much the same thing.”
“You’re right, Palomo. What are we going to be, Juan Francisco, independent, militant unions or corporate sectors of the official labor movement? I want all of you to tell me,” said another of those faceless voices that Laura struggled vainly to link, when they came in, when they left, with the faces filing through the little living room.
“Dammit, Juan Francisco—and begging the pardon of the lady in the next room—we are the heirs of Light, of the Red Tribunal, the House of the Workers of the World, the Red Battalions of the Revolution. Are we going to end up as lackeys to a government that uses us just to put on fancy revolutionary airs? Revolutionary? Hooey is what I say.”
“What’s in our best interest?” Laura heard her husband’s voice. “To achieve what we want, a better life for the workers? Or are we going to wear ourselves out, fighting the government, wasting our energy in squabbles, and letting others turn the promises of the Revolution into realities? Are we going to lose our chance?”
“We’re going to lose everything, right down to our long Johns.”
“Does anyone here believe in the soul?”
“A revolution becomes legitimate on its own and engenders rights, comrades,” Juan Francisco summed up. “Obregón has the support of those who made the Revolution. Even Zapata’s and Villa’s people support him. He figured out a way to win them over. Are we going to be the exception?”
“I think we should be, Juan Francisco. The workers’ movement was born to be the exception. Come on, pal, don’t keep us from being the ones who get to rain on the government’s parade.”
For her entire life as a young married woman she’d been listening to the same discussion: it was like going to church every Sunday to hear the same sermon. Habit, Laura once thought, has to have meaning, it must become ritual. She went back over the ritual moments in her own life—birth, childhood, puberty, marriage, death—she was thirty years old, and she’d known them all by now, a personal knowledge, a knowledge that intimately touched her family. It became a collective knowledge, as if the entire nation could not bring itself to divorce its bride: death; that July day when Juan Francisco returned home unexpectedly sometime around six in the afternoon, completely upset, and said, “President Obregón was assassinated at a banquet.”
“Who did it?”
“A Catholic.”
“Was he killed?”
“Who? Obregón? I already said he was.”
“No, I mean the killer.”
“No, he’s in jail. His name is Toral. A fanatic.”
Of all the coincidences she’d experienced in her life until that moment, none alarmed Laura so much as the one that began with the sound, one afternoon, of a hand lightly knocking at the door of the house. María de la O had taken the boys to the park; Juan Francisco was returning later and later from work. The dining-room discussions had yielded to the need to act: Obregón was dead; he and Calles had divided power between them, so now only one of the strong men was left. Had Calles murdered Obregón? Was Mexico an endless chain of sacrifices, each one engendering the next, and the last certain of its eventual destiny; to be the same as the act that created it—death to reach power, death to leave it?
“Just look, Juan Francisco, Morones and the CROM are overjoyed because Obregón is dead. Morones wants to be a presidential candidate.”
“That fatso will need a double—sized chair ??
?”
“No jokes, Palomo. No reelection was the sacred principle.”
“Cut it out, Pánfilo. Don’t use religious expressions, it really—”
“I’m telling you to be serious. The untouchable principle is that all right?—of the Revolution. Calles betrayed Morones’ presidential hopes to help out his buddy Obregón. Who comes out ahead because of the crime? Just ask yourself that simple question. Who comes out ahead?”
“Calles and Morones. And who takes all the blame? The Catholics.”
“But you’ve always been anticlerical, Palomo. You criticize the peasants for being so Catholic.”
“For that very reason, I’m telling you there’s no better way to strengthen the Church than by persecuting it. That’s what I’m afraid of now.”
“Why is Calles persecuting the Church now? The Turk is no jackass.”
“To nip the fat guy’s rage in the bud, José Miguel. He had to find some way to show he’s revolutionary.”
“Now I don’t understand anything.”
“Understand this. In Mexico, even cripples are acrobats.”
“Okay, but don’t you forget something else. Politics is the art of swallowing toads without making a face.”
She was as white as the moon, and her whiteness emphasized her thick, continuous, black eyebrows, which ran across her forehead and cast more of a shadow over the circles under her eyes, circles like the shadow of her immense eyes, as black as they say sin is black, although the eyes of this woman were swimming in a lake of omens. She was dressed in black, with long skirts and low-heeled shoes, her blouse buttoned up to her neck, and a black shawl nervously covering her back, tightly but carelessly wrapped, slipping down to her waist. Her disarray embarrassed her, as if it gave her a clownish air, and made her readjust the shawl over her shoulders, though not over her hair, which was divided strictly by a center part and gathered into a bun at the nape of her neck, where long, loose hairs had escaped as if a secret part of her were rebelling against the discipline of her costume. The loosened hairs were not as black as the tight hairdo of this pale, nervous woman, as if they were announcing something, antennas for some undesired news.
“Excuse me, but I was told a maid was needed here.”
“No, miss, in this house we don’t exploit anyone.” Laura smiled with her ever more irrepressible irony. Was irony her only possible defense against flat and unrelieved routine, in itself neither degrading nor exalting, but stretching out as long as the horizon of her years?
“I know you need help, ma’am.”
“Look, I just told you—”
She said nothing more because the white, sunken-eyed woman dressed in black thrust herself into the garage. She begged silence with her eyes and clasped Laura’s hands alarmingly, then closed her eyes as if facing a physical catastrophe, while in the street a group of metallic soldiers came running, breaking the pavement with the force of their boots, sounding like steel as they marched over steel streets in a soulless city. the woman trembled in Laura’s arms.
“Please, ma’am.”
Laura looked into her eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Carmela.”
“Well, I don’t see why a squad of soldiers should be hunting through the streets for a maid named Carmela.”
“Ma’am, I—”
“Not a word, Carmela. At the back of the patio, there’s an empty maid’s room. Let’s fix it up. It’s filled with old newspapers. Put them next to the boiler. Can you cook?”
“I know how to make communion wafers, ma’am.”
“I’ll teach you. Where are you from?”
“Guadalajara.”
“Say that your parents are from Veracruz.”
“They’re dead.”
“Well then, say they were from Veracruz. I need subjects so I can protect you, Carmela. Things to talk about. Follow my lead.”
“May God reward you, ma’am.”
Juan Francisco reacted most docilely to Carmela’s presence. Laura did not have to give him any explanations. He himself had acknowledged he was unaware of things, rarely alert to the needs of the house, to Laura’s fatigue, to her interest in books and painting. The boys were growing and needed their mother to educate them. María de la O was getting old and tired out.
“Why don’t you all go to Xalapa to rest? Carmela can take care of me here in the house.”
Laura Daz looked over at the attic of her old house in Xalapa, visible from the second-story terrace of the boardinghouse where her mother Leticia and her Aunts Hilda and Virginia now lived and worked. Middle age was no longer creeping up on the Kelsen sisters: it had trapped them, they were leaving time itself behind.
Laura loved them, she realized in the narrow parlor where Leticia had gathered, rather inelegantly, her personal furniture, the wicker chairs from her marriage, the marble console, the paintings of the rascal and the dog. Hilda had a huge, rose-colored double chin adorned with white hairs, but her eyes were still very blue despite the thick glasses that from time to time slipped down her straight nose.
“I’m going blind, Laura. It’s a blessing I can’t see my hands, look at my hands, they look like the knots sailors make on the docks, like the roots of an old tree. How can I play the piano like this? At least I have Aunt Virginia, who reads to me.”
Virginia kept her eyes wide open, as if in shock about something, and her hands resting on a kidskin binding, as if it were the skin of a beloved being. She tapped her fingers in time with the blinking of her very black, alert eyes. Was she waiting for the arrival of something imminent or the entrance of some unexpected but providential being? God, a mailman, a lover, a publisher? All those possibilities passed simultaneously before Aunt Virginia’s all too lively eyes.
“You never spoke to Minister Vasconcelos about publishing my book of poems?”
“Aunt Virginia, Vasconcelos isn’t a minister anymore. He’s in opposition to Calles’ government. Besides, I’ve never met him.”
“I don’t know anything about politics. Why don’t the poets govern us?”
“Because they don’t know how to swallow toads without making a face,” laughed Laura.
“What? What are you saying? Are you insane or what? Nett Affe!”
Although the three sisters had decided to run the boarding house, in reality only Leticia worked at it. Weak, nervous, tall, holding her back very straight, her hair graying, a woman of few words but of eloquent punctuality in the execution of all tasks, she had the menus ready, the rooms clean, the plants watered. All with the active help of Zampaya, who went on bringing joy to the house with his dances and songs from who knew where:
ora la cachimbá-bimbá-bimbá
ora la cachimbábá
now my black girl dance to me
now my black girl dance away
Laura was shocked to see the wiry gray hair on the black man’s head. She was sure Zampaya was secretly in contact with a sect of dancing witches and an interminable chorus of invisible voices. These are the people with whom we went to give my brother Santiago’s body to the sea, these are the people with whom we are witnesses. Then Laura looked toward the attic, thought about Armonía Aznar here in Xalapa, and, who knows why?, she thought about Carmela with no last name in the maid’s room in Mexico City.
Leticia especially looked after old acquaintances from Veracruz passing through Xalapa. But now, with the arrival of Laura and María de la O, in addition to the presence of Aunts Hilda and Virginia, the two permanent and penniless guests, there was room for only two guests. Laura was astonished to see once more the now adult red-haired tennis player, the big fellow with strong, svelte, hairy legs who had abused the girls at the San Cayetano dances.
He greeted her with a gesture of excuse and submission as unexpected as his presence. He was a traveling salesman, he said, selling automobile tires on the Córdoba-Orizaba-Xalapa-Veracruz circuit. At least he hadn’t been sent to that hell the port of Coatzacoalcos. The company gave him his own car—his face lit
up, as it had when he’d frenetically danced the cakewalk in 1915—though of course it wasn’t his hut the company’s.
The lights went out.
The other guest was, Leticia told her, an old man, he never leaves his room, I bring his meals to him.
One afternoon, Leticia was busy with something at the door and left the guest’s tray of food in the kitchen, where it was getting cold. Not thinking anything of it, Laura picked up the tray and took it to the guest, who never allowed himself to be seen.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed with something in his hands that he hid as soon as he heard Laura’s footsteps. She managed to detect the unmistakable sound of rosary beads. When she set the tray down, she felt a tremor run through her entire body, a chill of sudden recognition through veils and more veils of oblivion, time, and, in this case, disdain. Laura’s memory had to make a gigantic leap backward to identify the young priest from Puebla, dark-skinned and intolerant, who’d disappeared one day with the church’s treasure.
“Why, it’s you, the priest.”
“You are Laura, isn’t that right? Please, don’t raise your voice. Don’t get your mother into trouble.”
“Father Elzevir.”
The priest clasped Laura’s hands. “How can you remember? You were just a child.”
There was no need to ask him what he was doing hidden away there. “Please, don’t raise your voice. Don’t get your mother into trouble.” He said she didn’t have to ask him anything. He would tell her he didn’t get very far with what he’d stolen. He was a coward. He admitted it. When the police were about to catch him, he thought it would be better to submit to the pity of the Church, for Don Porfirio’s police had none.
“I asked forgiveness, and it was granted to me. I confessed and was absolved. I repented and again entered the community of my Church. But I felt it was all too easy. It was true and profound, but easy. I had to pay for the evil I’d committed, my temptation. My illusion. God our master did me the favor of sending me this punishment, Calles’ religious persecution.”