“You are very young,” said Laura with provincial courtesy.
“We must be the same age, a trifle over thirty, right?”
Laura Daz nodded and wordlessly accepted the invitation to join the ash-blond woman on the sofa, who arranged a pillow next to her with one hand as she picked up her glass of whiskey with the other.
“Laura Rivière.”
“Laura Díaz.”
“Yes, Orlando told me.”
“Then you know each other?”
“He’s an interesting man. But with no hair. I keep telling him to shave his head completely. Then he wouldn’t be merely interesting but dangerous.”
“Shall I confess something? He’s always made me afraid.”
“Let’s speak as friends, please. Me too. Know why? Let me tell you. There never was a first time.”
“No.”
“I wasn’t asking you, my dear. I was affirming it. I wouldn’t have the nerve with him.”
“Me either.”
“But you should. I’ve never seen a look like the one he aims at you. Besides, I swear it’s more dangerous to close doors than to open them.” Laura Rivière caressed her neck, adorned with brilliant stones. “Did you know? Ever since I separated from my husband, I’ve kept an antique shop. Come see me some time.”
“I live with Elizabeth.”
“Not forever, correct?”
“Correct.”
“What are you going to do with yourself?”
“I don’t know. That’s my dilemma.”
“I’d advise you not to postpone the impossible, dear namesake. It’s better to make things over as you please, in your own time. Take a chance. Look, here comes your friend Elizabeth.”
Laura looked around her: No one was left, even Carmen Cortina had gone to greener pastures with her court. Where? To listen to mariachis at the Tenampa? To hire a show with a cast of whores at the Bandit Woman? To drink rum in votive lamps under a sagging roof? To dance to the music of Luis Arcaraz’s orchestra in the new Hotel Reforma? To listen to Juan Arvizu, the Tenor with the Voice of Silk, in the old Hotel Regis?
Laura Rivière fixed her hair so it covered half her face, and Elizabeth Garca-Dupont, ex-wife of Caraza, told Laura Díaz, ex-wife of López Greene, “I’m really, really sorry, honey, but I’ve got something set up for tonight at home, you know what I mean, even good girls need to let their hair down sometimes, ha-ha, just this once, but I’ve taken care of you, I booked you a room at the Hotel Regis, here’s the key, go on over and call me in the morning.”
She wasn’t surprised, when she opened the hotel-room door, to find Orlando Ximénez naked, a towel wrapped around his waist. She was immediately surprised that she could like another man, not that another man could like her, that was something she took for granted, her mirror didn’t simply reflect her image back to her but prolonged it through a shadow of beauty, a speaking phantom that gave her courage—as in this exact moment—to go beyond herself, to go through the mirror like Alice, only to discover that every mirror has another mirror behind it and every reflection of Laura Daz has another image patiently waiting for her to stretch out her hand, touch it, and feel it flee to the next destiny.
She looked down at Orlando naked on the bed and would have wanted to ask him, How many destinies do we have?
He was waiting for her, and she imagined an infinite masculine variety, the same variety men imagine in women but women are forbidden to express publicly, only in the most secret intimacy: I like more than one man, I like several men, because I’m a woman, not because I’m a slut.
She began by taking off her rings. She wanted to arrive with clean, agile hands, eager for the body of Orlando, and he from the bed was trying to decipher Laura, his fist clenched and the gold ring with the initials OX daring her, that’s it, reproaching her for the years lost for love, the postponed meeting, this time, yes, now, yes, and she saying yes to him as she took off her own rings, especially those from her marriage to Juan Francisco and the diamond from her grandmother Cosima Kelsen, who was left without fingers because of the amorous machete of the Hunk from Papantla, Laura dropping her rings on the rug, on the way to Orlando’s bed, like Little Red Riding Hood lost in the forest dropping bread crumbs, and the birds, all without exception birds of prey, all of them beautiful predators, will eat the bread crumbs, erasing the trail, telling the lost little girl, “There’s no way back, you’re in the cave of the wolf.”
9.
The Interoceanic Train: 1932
ON THE SAME TRAIN that had brought her, a newlywed, from Xalapa to Mexico City, Laura was now returning. This time it was by day, not night, and she was alone. Her last companions in the capital, before she got to the Colonia station, had been a pack of dogs that both followed and preceded her, threatening mostly because meeting a pack of dogs was such a novelty. She hadn’t realized two things. First, the city had dried out: one after another, the lakes and canals—Texcoco, La Viga, La Verónica, the moribund tributaries of the Aztec lake—had filled with garbage, then dirt from construction sites, and finally asphalt. The city in a lake had died forever, inexplicably in Laura’s imagination, because she sometimes dreamed of a pyramid surrounded by water.
Second, Mexico City had been invaded by dogs, mixed breeds of no breeding at all, lost, disoriented, objects of simultaneous fear and compassion. Once fine collies, galloping Great Danes, or degenerated German shepherds had mixed together in a vast pack of hounds with no collars, direction, owners, identity. Families with pedigreed dogs had left the capital with the Revolution and let their pets loose to run away—or to die, of loyalty or of hunger. Behind several fancy houses in Colonia Roma and on Paseo de la Reforma one found the bodies of dogs still chained, locked in their doghouses, unable either to eat or to flee. Everyone—dogs and masters—had bet on disloyalty as long as it meant survival.
“They’ve grown up on their own, with no training at all. No dog knows if it has a pedigree, Laura, and if their masters return—and they’re beginning to, mostly from Paris, a few from New York, by the drove from Havana—they’ll never get them back.”
Thus according to Orlando. On the train, she tried to erase the image of the abandoned dogs, but it was a vision that prevailed over all the images of her life with Orlando in the eighteen months that had passed since they slept together for the first time in the Hotel Regis and then stayed on, with Orlando paying for the room and the services. Together they began the social life that he called “observations for my novel,” although Laura sometimes wondered whether her lover really enjoyed the facile frivolity that reigned in Mexico City at peace after twenty years of revolutionary fear, or if Orlando’s tour through all the urban strata was part of a secret plan, like his intermediary relationship with the Catalan anarchist Armonía Aznar.
She never asked him. She wouldn’t dare. That was the difference between him and Juan Francisco, who gave reports on everything that happened to him, turning them into speeches. Orlando never said what he was doing. Laura was likely to know what was going to happen, never what already had. Neither his relationship with the old anarchist in the attic nor that with the brother executed in Veracruz. How easy it would have been for Orlando to brag about the first and take advantage of the second. A heroic aura surrounded anyone linked to Armona Aznar and Santiago Díaz. Why didn’t Orlando profit from that splendor?
Watching him sleep, exhausted, defenseless under her wide-awake eyes, Laura imagined many things. Public modesty, for starters: he would call it elegance, reserve, though with plenty of satiric barbs aimed at himself and poisonous epigrams aimed at society. She did not hesitate to call it modesty, the modesty of a man who was intensely immodest in his sexuality: perhaps it was related to his commitment to the secrecy required by the political cause—but which one?—anarchism, syndicalism, no reelection, the revolution or rather the Revolution, capitalized to show that it had turned everything in Mexico upside down, the immense mural which they all had lived in, a mural like Diego Rivera’
s, with cavalry charges and murders, fights and battles, endless heroism and equal ruination, retreats and advances, huggings and stabbings … ? She remembered how as a young married woman she’d discovered the new mural art and had seen Diego painting in the National Palace.
“He threw me out, Orlando, because I was wearing black after Father died.”
“Ever feel nostalgic for Xalapa?”
“I have you. Why would I feel nostalgia?”
“For your sons. Your mother.”
“And my old aunts.” Laura smiled, because Orlando was speaking to her with unaccustomed solemnity. “To think that Diego Rivera is superstitious.”
“Yes, your old aunts, Laura …”
Was he a mysterious hero? Was he a discreet friend? And also, was he a sentimental fellow? Everything that Laura might imagine each morning about the “real” Orlando, the “real” Orlando destroyed each night. Like a vampire, the innocent and loving angel of dawn was transformed into an offensive devil with a poison tongue and a cynical eye as soon as the sun set. True, he never treated her badly, and Laura could still feel the slap her husband, Juan Francisco, had given her that evening when he tried to pull her out of the taxi. She would never forget it. Never forgive it. A man has no idea what a slap in the face means to a woman, an unpunished abuse, the worst offense, cowardice, an offense to the beauty that every single woman holds and exposes in her face … Orlando never made her the butt of irony or cruel jests, but he did oblige her to be present at night to the negation of the daytime Orlando—discreet, sentimental, erotic, sober in his treatment of the feminine body, as if it were his own, Orlando who could be simultaneously passionate and respectful to the feminine body united to his own.
“Get ready,” he said without looking at her, grasping her arm firmly, as if they were two Christians entering the lions’ ring. “Brace yourself, my dear,” in English. “This is the Circus Maximus, but instead of lions roaring, you hear cows mooing, lambs bleating. And yes, the howl of wolves may be detected. Avanti, popolo romano. Here comes our hostess. Just look at her. Just look. It’s Carmen Cortina. Three verbs suffice to define her. She drinks. She smokes. She ages.”
“Darlings! What a pleasure to see you again … and still together! Miracles, miracles …”
“Carmen. Stop drinking. Stop smoking. You’re aging yourself.”
“Orlando!” The hostess burst out laughing. “What would I do without you? You speak the same truths as my mama, may she rest in peace.”
Outside the night was stormy and inside it was enervating.
“Think what you like and don’t expect me to speak well of my friends,” said the lugubrious painter to the critic dressed in white, who intoned his aforementioned “We are all ridiculous.”
“That’s not what I mean. It’s that I only have indefensible friends. If they’re worthy of my friendship, they can’t be worthy of my defense. No one is worth that much.”
“All ridiculous.”
“That isn’t the problem,” added a young philosophy professor with a hard-earned reputation as an indiscriminate seducer. “The important thing is to have a bad reputation. That constitutes public virtue in today’s Mexico. Whether your name is Plutarco Elías Calles or Andrea Negrete,” said Ambrosio O’Higgins. That was the name of this tall, blond, vexed specialist in Husserl, whose personal phenomenology was a permanent grimace of displeasure and eyes which, though sleepy, were filled with obvious intentionality.
“Well, no one can beat you in that category,” said the resuscitated Andrea Negrete, who after the failure of her last film, Life Is a Vale of Tears (subtitled But Women Suffer More than Men), had taken refuge in a convent in her native state, Durango, that was run by her grandmother’s sister and inhabited exclusively by eleven of her cousins.
“Neither my aunt the abbess nor my cousins the nuns realized that, counting me, there were thirteen of us at the refectory table. Each one is a saint, completely without malice. The one dying of fear was me. I was afraid I would choke on the mole. Because the fact is, the best restaurant in Mexico is the convent of my aunt Sor María Auxiliadora, I swear it.”
She kissed her fingers, and she made the sign of the cross, and Laura closed her eyes, imagining once again the amorous machete stroke of the Hunk of Papantla, the severed fingers of Grandmother Cosima, the mutilated nails dripping blood into the bandit’s hat.
“Well, no one can beat you in that category,” said the actress to the philosopher.
“Not so. You can,” answered the young man with the Irish name and the paralytically arched eyebrow.
“Let’s see if together we can draw even.” Andrea smiled.
“To do that I’d have to get a little gray.” O’Higgins took out his pipe. “Both above and below. Please note, I said get gray, not get laid.”
“My boy, you’re so good you don’t need morality.”
Andrea turned her back on them only to find the sailor with the short pants and the girl movie star covered with curls. They exchanged subtle threats.
“One day I’m going to take out my knife and leave you looking like a sieve.”
“Know what your problem is, sweetheart? You’ve only got one ass and you want to shit in twenty pots.”
“Do you see what I see, Orlando? Just look at that incredibly handsome fellow.”
Orlando agreed with Laura, and they both stared at the bestlooking young man at the party.
“Know what? Since we arrived, he’s done nothing but look at himself in the mirror.”
“But, Laura, we’re all looking at ourselves in the mirror. The trouble is we don’t always see the reflection. Look at Andrea Negrete. She’s been posing by herself for twenty minutes as if everyone were admiring her, but no one’s paying the slightest attention.”
“Except you, the man who notices everything.” Laura caressed her lover’s chin.
“And the handsome boy looking at himself in the mirror all the time without speaking with anyone.” Orlando made an abrupt gesture. “Andrea, go stand behind that kid.”
“The Adonis?”
“You know him?”
“He doesn’t speak to anyone. Just looks at himself in the mirror.”
“Would you stand behind him? Please?”
“What are you asking me to do?”
“Appear to him. Be his reflection. That’s what he’s looking for. Be his ghost. I’ll bet you sleep with him this very night.”
“Darling, you’re tempting me.”
Laura Rivière came in with an arrogant, dark-skinned man “in the prime of life,” as Orlando said to Laura Daz, a millionaire and very powerful politician, Artemio Cruz, Laura’s lover. Carmen Cortina went over to gossip with them. “And no one can explain why he doesn’t leave his wife, a provincial vulgarian from Puebla—and, Laurita, that’s no reflection on you—when he possesses, I underline possesses, one of the most distinguished women in our society.”
“C’est fou, la vie!” Carmen blurted out, exasperated—Carmen the Blind, as Orlando called her, when tedium overcame his fading good humor.
“Laura darling.” Elizabeth came over to her companion from the Xalapa balls. “Did you see who just came in? See how they whisper in each other’s ear? What does Artemio Cruz want to tell Laura Rivière that he doesn’t have the courage to tell her out loud? Oh, and a word of advice, darling, if you want to catch a fellow, don’t talk, just breathe, that’s all, panting just slightly, like this … I mention it because sometimes I hear you raising your voice.”
“But, Elizabeth, I’m with a man …”
“You never know. You never know … But I didn’t come to give you breathing lessons, just to tell you to go on sending me the bills for everything, the hairdresser, clothes, don’t be stingy, honey, that fat-lipped Caraza left me well set up, spending is one of my pleasures, and I don’t want anyone to say a friend of mine is Orlando Ximénez’s kept woman.”
Laura, with the hint of a bitter smile, asked Elizabeth, “Why are you offending me?”
“Offending you? Offending someone who’s been my friend forever? Jesus!” Elizabeth patted dry the drops of perspiration in the cleavage between her powerful breasts.
“So, you’re cutting me out of your life.”
“Don’t take it that way.”
“I promised I’d pay you. You know my situation.”
“Let’s wait for the next revolution, dearie. Maybe things will go better for your husband then. Deputy from the state of Tabasco, isn’t that right? Don’t make me laugh. All you get out of Tabasco are priest baiters who drink tequila, not gentlemen who pay the rent.”
Laura turned her back on Elizabeth and took Orlando’s hand with the urgency of someone in flight. Smiling, Orlando caressed Laura’s hand.
“You don’t want to run into the terrible Artemio Cruz in the elevator, do you? They say he’s a shark, and around here, darling, I’m the only one who chews on you.”
“Look at him. What an arrogant man. He just walked out on Laura!”
“I tell you he’s a shark. And sharks never stop moving, because if they do they sink and die at the bottom of the sea.”
The two Lauras spontaneously sought each other out. “The two Lauras have a look of sadness. What, as Ruben Darío might have said, might be wrong with a princess who looks so sad?” Orlando whispered and went off to get drinks for all of them.
“Why do we put up with this social whirl?” asked the blond woman point-blank.
“Out of fear, I think,” answered Laura Díaz.
“Fear of speaking, fear of telling the truth, fear we’ll be laughed at? You know what I mean? No one here came without being armed with jokes or funny stories or wit. Those are the swords they use to defend themselves. It’s a tournament where the prize is fame, money, sex, and, most of all, feeling you’re cleverer than the next person. Is that what you want, Laura Díaz?”
Laura vigorously shook her head. No.
“ …?”
“Then save yourself, and quickly.”