The Years with Laura Diaz

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 Armon a 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 D az, 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.”

“It’s too late for me. I’m a prisoner. My body’s been captured by routine. But I swear that if I could escape from my own body… I detest it.” Laura Rivière exhaled with a muffled sigh. “You know where all this leads? To a permanent moral hangover. You end up hating yourself.”

“Look.” Orlando returned balancing three manhattans in the bowl of his joined hands. “The Maximum Actress and the Maximum Narcissus have made contact. I was right. Famous women were invented by innocent men.”

“No”-Laura Rivière took her glass-“by malicious men who condemned us to theatrics.”

“Darlings,” interrupted Carmen Cortina, “have I introduced you to Querubina de Landa yet?”

“No one is named Querubina de Landa,” said Orlando to Carmen, to the air, to the night, to the overextended Señorita Querubina de Landa, who was hanging on the arm of the philosophic playboy. Orlando casually skewered him: “They’re right to call you the Great Chicken Thief.”

“In the matter of names, my dear but ignorant Orlando, no one has said it better than Plato: There are conventional names, there are intrinsic names, and there are names that harmonize nature with necessity, as, for example, Laura Rivière and Laura Díaz. Good night.” O’Higgins bowed to one and all, patted the backside of the conventional, natural, harmoniously named Querubina de Landa, and said (in English), “Let’s, fuck.”

“I’ll bet her real name is Petra Pérez,” said the cordial hostess, as she ran off to greet an unusual couple entering the living room of the penthouse overlooking Paseo de la Reforma: a very old man on the arm of a perpetually tremulous lady.

Laura Díaz’s high heels sounded like hammers pounding on the sidewalk. She smiled, arm in arm with Orlando, and told him that they’d met in a Veracruz hacienda and ended up in a penthouse on Paseo de la Reforma, but with the same rules and aspirations in both places: to be admitted or disapproved by society and its empresses-Doña Genoveva Deschamps in San Cayetano, Carmen Cortina in Mexico City.

“Can’t we escape? We’ve been together now for eighteen months, my love.”

“For me, time doesn’t matter if I’m with you,” said the no longer very young and now balding Orlando Ximénez.

“Why is it you never wear a hat? You’re the only one.”

“For that very reason. To be the only one who doesn’t.”

They walked along the tree-lined part of the avenue that cold December night, on the earthen bridle path for early-morning riders.

“I still don’t know anything about you,” Laura dared to say, squeezing his hand harder.

“I’m not hiding anything from you. The only things you don’t know are the things you don’t want to know.”

“Orlando, night after night, like this evening, we hear only clichés, predictable, expected…”

“Keep going. Desperate.”

“You know something? I’ve just realized that in this world you’ve introduced me to it doesn’t matter how we end up. Tonight was interesting for me. The people who mattered most to each other were Laura Rivière and Artemio Cruz. Do you see? He walked out, the night ended badly. That was the most important thing that happened tonight.”

“Let me console you. You’re right. It doesn’t matter how we end up. The good thing will be that we don’t notice everything is over.”

“Oh, my love, I feel as if I’m falling down a collapsing staircase.”

Orlando hailed a taxi and gave the driver an address unknown to Laura. The cabby stared at the couple in astonishment: “You really want to go there, boss? Sure of that?”

In 1932, Mexico City streets emptied early. Punctual evening meals brought the entire family together. And families were tight-knit, as if the prolonged civil war-twenty unbroken years-had taught the clans to live in a state of fear, clinging to one another, waiting for the worst, for unemployment, expropriation, execution, kidnapping, rape, life savings erased in an instant, useless paper money, the arrogant confusion of the rebel factions. One society had disappeared. The new one was not yet clearly defined. City dwellers had one foot in the furrow of the plow and the other in ashes, as Musset said about post-Napoleonic France. The bad thing was that sometimes blood covered both furrow and ashes, erasing the lines between soil that would be sterile forever and seed that, to produce its fruits, had first to die.

Parties like those of the celebrated, shortsighted Carmen Cortina were a relief for a worldly elite that counted among its protagonists both Seeds and Ashes, those who survived the revolutionary catastrophe, those who lived thanks to it, and those who had died in it but had yet to realize it. Carmen’s parties were an exception, a rarity. Proper families would visit one another early, marry one another even earlier, and use both magnifying glass and strainer when letting in elements of the new revolutionary society… If a savage general from Sonora married a charming young lady from Sinaloa, relatives and family friends from Culiacán, the capital, were there immediately to approve or disapprove. General Obregón’s family had no social pretensions, and the One-armed Hero of Celaya would have been better off staying on his hacienda in Huatabampo and tending turkeys instead of getting entangled in reelection and death. The Calles family, on the other hand, did want to get into high society, cut a figure in it, present its daughters at the Churubusco Country Club and then marry them all-but of course!-in religious weddings (private ceremonies, naturally). The most notable and respected case was General Joaquin Amaro, the very model of the revolutionary warlord, an unequaled horseman (he looked like a centaur), an Indian with his neckerchief and pendant earring, ebony complexion, thick, sensual, and challenging lips and eyes lost in the origin of the tribes, who married a young lady of the best northern society and as a wedding gift promised he would learn French and good manners.

There was always a goodly supply of playboys, and if there was no money anymore to send them abroad to study, they now went to the San Ildefonso Law School or the Santo Domingo School of Medicine, if they were poor; or if they were affluent, they studied architecture. All these schools were in the old center of the city, in a quarter surrounded by bars, cabarets, and bordellos. The Mexico City of the poor was like an invisible anthill that ran day and night, a Mexico City crowded with men still wearing huge straw hats and huaraches or overalls and shawls: that’s what my husband, Juan Francisco, showed me when he took me to see the barrios and convinced me the problems were so gigantic that it was better I stay home and look after my sons.

“Your husband didn’t show you anything,” said Orlando Ximénez with unexpected ferocity, grabbing Laura’s wrist and making her get out in the middle of a partly built-up lot-that was the brutal shock, the paradox: here were streets, here were houses, yet this was a wasteland within the city, a ruin built of dust, conceived as a ruin, a pyramid of sand on whose flanks, invisible at first sight, began to appear incomplete silhouettes, forms difficult to name, a half-made world, and Laura and Orlando made their way through this gray urban mystery, Orlando leading Laura by the hand like Virgil with Beatrice-not Dante; another Laura, not Petrarch’s; making her look, look, now you can see them, they’re coming out of holes, emerging from the garbage, tell me, Laura, what could you do for that woman over there called the Frog, who hops because her torso is crushed against her thighs, look at her, forced to hop like a frog in search of edible garbage, what could you do for that man over there who drags himself along the street with no nose, no arms, no legs, like a human snake? and look at them now because it’s night, because they only come out when there’s no light, because they fear the sun, because during the day they live locked in fear, so as not to be seen, what are they, Laura? take a good look: are they dwarfs, children? they’re children, but they won’t grow any more, they’re dead children with rigor mortis, on their feet but half buried in the dust, tell me, Laura, did your husband show you this, or did he only show you the pretty side of poverty, the workers with their cheap shirts, the whores with their powder, the organ grinders and locksmiths, the tamale sellers and the saddlers? is that his working class? Do you want to rebel against your husband? hate him because he didn’t give you a chance to do something for others, treated you with contempt? well then, I’ll give you the chance, take you by the shoulders, Laura, and make you open your eyes, what, what can you do against all this? why don’t you and I spend our evenings here, with the Frog and the Snake and the children who won’t grow and who fear the sun, instead of with Carmen Cortina and Querubina de Landa and Fatso del Valle and the actress who dyes her pubic hair white, why not?

Laura held on tight to Orlando and released a flood of tears she’d been holding in, she said, since the day she was born, since she’d lost the first person she’d loved and asked herself, why do the people I love die, why were they born…?

“What can one do? There are thousands, millions of them, perhaps Juan Francisco is right. Where would you begin? What can you do for all these people?”

“Tell me.”

“Choose the very poorest. Just one, Laura. Choose one and you’ll save them all.”

Laura D az watching the calcified plateau pass by from the window of the Pullman car as she goes home, goes to the state of Veracruz, far from the pyramid of sand out of which-like caterpillars, cockroaches, crabs, along invisible rough paths sprouting in the night from holes like chancres-the frog women, snake men, and rachitic children made their way.

Until that night, she hadn’t really believed in misery. We live protected lives, we’re conditioned to see only what we want to see. That’s what Laura said to Orlando. Now, on her way to Xalapa, she herself felt the anguished need for someone who would take pity on her: she was experiencing an urgent longing for pity, knowing that what she was asking for herself, her portion of compassion, was what was expected of her in the house on Bocanegra Street, a touch of compassion, a bit of attention for everyone forgotten-mother, aunts, two sons-all in order not to tell them the truth, to keep up the original fiction, it was better that Danton and Santiago grow up well looked after, in a provincial city, while Laura and Juan Francisco sorted out their lives, their careers, in a difficult Mexico City, in a most difficult country emerging from the furrows, the ashes, the blood of the Revolution… Only Auntie María de la O knew the truth, but above all she knew that discretion is the truth that hurts no one.

The four women were sitting in the old armchairs with wicker backs that the family had dragged with them all the way from the port of Veracruz. Zampaya opened the coach gate for her, and he was Laura’s first shock: the jolly dancing man had white hair, and his broom was no longer for him to dance with, “putting your arm around your partner’s waist if she lets you,” but now a cane on which the old family retainer rested his mutilated greeting, his “Miss Laura!” instantly hushed when Laura put her finger over her lips while the black man carried Miss’s valise and she let him do it to keep his self-respect, even though he could barely move it.

Laura wanted to see them first from the living-room door without their seeing her, the four sisters sitting in silence behind the worn-out curtains: Aunt Hilda nervously moving her arthritic fingers as if playing a muted piano; Aunt Virginia silently muttering a poem she was too weak to consign to paper; Auntie María de la O self-absorbed, staring at her fat ankles; and only Mutti working, Leticia. knitting a thick house coat that extended over her knees, protecting her, as she knitted, from Xalapa’s December chill, when the fogs of Perote Peak combine with those of the dams, the fountains, the brooks that join together in the fertile subtropical zone between the mountains and the coast.

When she looked up to examine her work, Leticia saw Laura’s eyes and exclaimed, Daughter, my daughter, as she painfully rose while Laura ran to hug her: Don’t move, Mutti, don’t wear yourself out, no one get up, please, and, if she had stood up, would Aunt Hilda have suffocated herself with the ribbon embedded in her double chin that narrowed her myopic eyes even more behind the glasses thick as fishbowls? Would Aunt Virginia have split open? Her face plastered with rice powder was no longer a powdered wrinkle but a wrinkled powder. Would Auntie María de la O have collapsed on the tile floor, recently mopped, her swollen ankles no longer supporting her?

But Leticia did stand up, straight as an arrow, parallel to the walls of the house, her house, hers, her posture telling Laura of her attitude, the house is mine, I keep it clean, tidy, active, modest but sufficient. Nothing is needed here.

“We need you, daughter. Your sons need you.”

Laura embraced her, kissed her, remained silent. She wasn’t going to remind her that they, mother and daughter, had lived for twelve years in Catemaco, separated from her father, Fernando, and her brother, Santiago, and that reasons given in the past could be invoked in the present. Even so, yesterday’s present was not today’s past. Carmen Cortina’s parties swiftly passed through Laura’s mind, at full speed, like the stray dogs near the railroad station; perhaps the dogs secretly admired the speed of the locomotives; perhaps Carmen Cortina’s guests were just another pack of homeless animals.

“The boys are at school. They’ll be home soon.”

“How are their studies going?”

“They’re with the Misses Ramos, of course.”

Laura was going to exclaim, My God, the ladies haven’t died yet!, but that would have been another blunder, a faux pas as Carmen Cortina would say, Carmen whose world seemed to be disappearing into the most distant and invisible unreality. Laura smiled within. That had been her world, during the year and a half of her love affair with Orlando Ximénez, the daily or rather nightly world of Laura and Orlando together.

Laura and Orlando. How different that couple sounded here in the Xalapa house, in Veracruz, in the resuscitated memory of Santiago the first. She was surprised to find herself thinking in such terms, for her brother had been shot when he was only twenty, but the new Santiago coming into the living room with his backpack was a little gentleman of eleven, as serious as a portrait and direct in his first announcement:

“Danton was kept after school. He has to copy twenty pages without a single ink blot.”

The Misses Ramos would always be the same, but Santiago hadn’t seen his mother in four years, though he immediately understood who she was. He did not run over to embrace her. He let her come to him, kneel down and kiss him. The child’s face never changed. With a look, Laura asked for help from the four women.

“That’s the way Santiago is,” said Mutti Leticia. “I’ve never met so serious a child.”

He kissed Laura’s hand: who taught him that, the Misses Ramos, or was it innate courtesy, his distance? Then he scampered out. Laura rejoiced at that childish act; her son skipped in and skipped out, even though he spoke like a judge.

Dinner was slow and painful. Danton sent word with a maid that he was going to sleep at a friend’s house, and Laura did not want to play the part of the active and emancipated woman from the capital or upset the ambulatory siesta that was her aunts’ waking hours; nor did she want to offend her mother’s admirable and nervous activity, because it was Leticia who cooked, ran about, and served while Zampaya sang his songs in the patio. In the absence of conversation, a peculiar smell, a boardinghouse smell, was taking over everywhere; it was the dead smell of many solitary nights, many hasty visits, many corners where, despite Mutti’s efforts and Zampaya’s broom, dust, time, and oblivion were piling up.

Because there were no guests at the moment-although one or two a week always turned up, which, along with the help Laura sent for the boys, allowed the house to be maintained modestly-the daughter listened to her mother with growing unease, longing to be alone with her, with her mother Leticia, but also with each of the women in this house without men-to shake them out of the apathy of their eternal siesta. But thinking that was not only an offense for them, but hypocrisy on Laura’s part, who, after all, had lived on Elizabeth’s charity for two years, dividing the monthly allowance sent by Juan Francisco, deputy of the Regional Workers Confederation of Mexico, among payments to Elizabeth, her personal expenses, and a little for her sons given refuge in Xalapa-while Laura slept until noon after staying up until three in the morning, never hearing Orlando when he rose earlier to attend to his mysterious affairs. Laura had fooled herself by reading in bed, telling herself that she wasn’t wasting time, that she was educating herself, reading what she should have read as an adolescent: after discovering Carlos Pellicer, reading Pablo Neruda, Federico Garc a Lorca, and going back to read Quevedo, Garcilaso de la Vega… with Orlando she would go to the Palace of Fine Arts to listen to Carlos Chávez conducting music that was all new for her, because in her memory there only floated like some perfume the Chopin Aunt Hilda played in Catemaco, and now Bach, Beethoven, and Berlioz along with Ponce, Revueltas, and Villalobos combined into a vast musical Mass; no, she hadn’t wasted her time at Carmen Cortina’s parties, in reading books or listening to concerts; she had simultaneously allowed her most interior and deep personal thoughts to flow, with the purpose-she said to herself-of locating herself in the world, understanding the changes in her life, proposing solid goals to herself, more certain than the easy exit-as it seemed to her now, stretched out once again on her adolescent bed, again hugging Li Po-of married life with Juan Francisco or even the very pleasant bohemian life with Orlando, something more for her sons Santiago and Danton, a more mature mother, more self-assured…

Now she was back at home, and this was the best thing she could have done, return to her roots and quietly sit down to a frothy soda in Don Antonio C. Báez’s La Jalapeña, where a sign assured Don Antonio’s customers: “This establishment does not use saccharine to sweeten its waters.” She could peruse the displays in the Ollivier Brothers shop where La Opera corsets were still for sale. Browsing in Don Raúl Basáñez’s bookshop La Moderna, she could leaf through the European illustrated magazines her father, Fernando D az, awaited with such high expectation on the docks of Veracruz. She sauntered into Wagner and Lieven, opposite Juárez Park, to buy her Aunt Hilda, music by a composer she perhaps did not know, Maurice Ravel, whose works Orlando and Laura had heard conducted by Carlos Chávez in the Palace of Fine Arts.

The older women acted as if nothing had happened. That was their strength. They would forever be living on the coffee plantation owned by Don Felipe Kelsen, born in Darmstadt in the Rhineland. At dinner, they moved their hands around as if the table service were made of silver and not tin, the plates of porcelain and not pottery, the tablecloth of linen and not cotton. There was something they hadn’t given up: each woman had her own starched linen napkin, carefully folded into a silver ring marked with her initials, V, H, MO, or L, elegantly and elaborately engraved. That was the first thing each one picked up when they sat down to table. It was their pride, their life preserver, the seal of rank. It was the mark of the Kelsens-before husbands, before confirmed celibacy, before death. The silver napkin ring was personality, tradition, memory, affirmation for each one of them and for them all.

A silver napkin ring holding a carefully folded napkin that was clean, crackling with starch. At table, they acted as if nothing had happened.

Laura began to chat with each of them, one at a time, alone, always with the feeling she was hunting them down. They were nervous, fleeing birds from two past seasons, Laura’s and their own. Virginia and Hilda resembled each other more than even they knew. From the pianist aunt, once she’d repeated for the thousandth time her complaint against their father, Felipe Kelsen-that he hadn’t allowed her to stay in Germany to study music-Laura extracted the more profound complaint, I’m a leftover old woman, Laura, a hopeless spinster, and do you know why? Because I spent my life convinced that men would prefer me if I denied them any hope. At the Candlemas party in Tlacotalpan I was besieged-it was there your parents met, remember? -and I took it upon myself, out of pure pride, to make the men who courted me understand that I was inaccessible.

“I’m sorry, Ricardo. Next Saturday, I’m returning to Germany to study the piano.”

“You’re very sweet, Heriberto, but I already have a boyfriend in Germany. We write to each other every day. Any day now, he’ll come to me or I’ll return to him.”

“It isn’t that I don’t like you, Alberto, but you’re just not in my class. You may kiss me if you like, but it will be a farewell kiss.”

And when she turned up at the next Candlemas party without a boyfriend, Ricardo made fun of her, Heriberto appeared with a local girl, and Alberto was already married. Aunt Hilda’s aquamarine eyes filled with tears that flowed from behind her thick glasses, clouded over like the foggy highway to Perote. She finished with the all too familiar adage: Laura, don’t forget the old. Being young means not being faithful and forgetting others.

Aunt Virginia forced herself to stroll around the patio-she could no longer leave the house because of the understandable fear aging people have of falling down, breaking a leg, and not getting up until the Last Judgment. She spent hours putting on powder, and only when she felt herself to be perfectly arranged would she emerge to make the rounds of the patio, reciting in an inaudible voice her own poems or others’-it was impossible to tell which.

“Shall I come with you on your walks, Aunt Virginia?”

“No, don’t come with me.”

“Why?”

“You’re only doing it out of charity. I forbid you.”

“But no. Out of tenderness.”

“Come, come, don’t get me used to your compassion. I live in fear I’ll be the last one left in this house and I’ll die here alone. If I call you when you’re in Mexico City, will you come to see me so I won’t die alone?”

“Of course, I promise.”

“Liar. That day you’ll have a commitment you can’t get out of, you’ll be far away, dancing the fox-trot, and it won’t matter a whit whether I’m dead or alive.”

“Aunt Virginia, I swear I’ll come.”

“Don’t swear in vain, it’s sacrilegious. Why did you have children if you don’t take care of them? Didn’t you promise to look after them?”

“Life is difficult, Aunt Virginia. Sometimes-”

“Nonsense. The difficult thing is loving people. Your own people, understand? Not abandoning them, not forcing anyone to beg a bit of charity before dying, sacre bleu!”

She stopped and fixed her black-diamond eyes on Laura, eyes the more notable because of the quantity of face powder around them.

“You never got Minister Vasconcelos to publish my poems. That’s how you fulfill your promises, ingrate. I’ll die without anyone’s having recited my poems but me.”

She turned her back, with a timorous movement, on her niece.

Laura recounted the conversation with Aunt Virginia to María de la O, who could only say, “Pity, daughter, a little pity for the old left with no love or respect from others.”

“You’re the only one who knows the truth, Auntie. Tell me what I should do.”

“Let me think it over. I don’t want to make a mistake.”

She looked down at her swollen ankles, and burst out laughing.

At night, Laura felt pain and fear, had trouble falling asleep, and, like Aunt Virginia, perambulated alone around the patio, barefoot so she wouldn’t make noise or interrupt the sobs and memory-infused cries that escaped, unknowingly, from the bedrooms where the four sisters slept.

Which would be the first to go? Which the last? Laura swore to herself that no matter where she was, she would take care of the last sister, have the survivor live with her or come to be with her here, and not let Aunt Virginia’s fear be realized: “I’m afraid of being the last and dying alone.”

A nocturnal patio where the nightmares of the four women gathered together.

It was hard for Laura to include her mother, Leticia, in this chorus of fear. She reproached herself when she admitted that she hoped that if one of the four were left alone it would be either Mutti or Auntie. Aunts Hilda and Virginia had become insane and impossible; both, the niece was convinced, were virgins. María de la O was not.

“My mother made me sleep with her customers beginning when I was eleven.”

Laura had felt neither horror nor compassion when Auntie confessed this; it was years earlier, in the house on Avenida Sonora. She knew that the generous, warm-hearted mulatta was telling her so Laura would understand how much Grandfather Felipe Kelsen’s bastard daughter owed to the simple humanity of Grandmother Cosima Reiter-identical to her own despite differences of age, class, and race-and to the generosity of Laura’s father, Fernando Díaz. The niece went to embrace and kiss her aunt, but María de la O stopped her with an outstretched arm: she didn’t want compassion, and Laura only kissed the open palm of the admonitory hand.

Leticia was the last. Laura, back at home, desired with all her heart that Mutti would be the last to die, because she never complained, never gave up, kept the boardinghouse clean and in working order, and without her, Laura could imagine the other three castaways wandering through the corridors like souls in torment while dirty dishes piled up in the kitchen with its braziers, herbs grew unweeded in the garden, the larder emptied out and died of hunger, cats took over the house, and flies covered the sleeping faces of Virginia, Hilda, and María de la O with buzzing masks.

“Yes, we all face a future that has no tenderness,” Leticia said unexpectedly one afternoon while Laura was helping her wash dishes, adding, after a brief pause, that she was happy Laura was back at home.

“Mutti, I’ve felt so much nostalgia for my childhood, for the inside spaces especially. How they stay with you, even though they fade: a bedroom, a dresser, a water pitcher, that horrible pair of pictures-the brat and the dog-I have no idea why you keep them.”

“Nothing reminds me more of your father, and I don’t know why, because he wasn’t like them at all.”

“Neither a brat nor a beauty?” Laura smiled.

“That’s not it. They’re just things I associate with him. I can’t sit down to eat without seeing him at the head of the table with those pictures behind him.”

“Did you love each other a lot?”

“We love each other a lot, Laura.”

She took her daughter’s hand and asked her if she thought the past condemned us to death.

“One day you’ll see how much the past matters in order to go on living and, for those who loved each other, to go on loving each other.”

Although she managed to reestablish intimacy with her past, Laura could not establish contact with her own sons. Santiago was a perfect little gentleman, courteous and prematurely serious. Danton was a little devil who didn’t take his mother seriously or, for that matter, unseriously. It was as if she were just one more aunt in a harem with no sultan. Laura didn’t know how to talk to them, to attract them, and she felt the failure was all on her side, an emotional insufficiency that she, and not her sons, had somehow to fill.

Put another way, the younger son, at the age of ten, behaved as if he were the sultan, the prince of the house who had no need to prove anything and could act capriciously and demand (and get) the acquiescence of the four women, who looked on him rather fearfully. At the same time, they looked on the older brother with genuine tenderness. Danton seemed to take pride in the almost frightened reticence that his aunts and grandmother showed in dealing with him, although María de la O once muttered, What this brat needs is a good spanking. The next time he didn’t even bother to tell them he wasn’t going to be sleeping at home, Grandmother Leticia did give him a spanking, to which the child responded by saying he wouldn’t forget the insult.

“I’m not insulting you, snot-nose, I’m just giving you a spanking. I reserve insults for important people, you idiot.”

It was the only time Laura ever saw her mother be violent, and in that act all the lack of authority, all the lack that had begun to mark her own existence, became manifest, as if it were Laura who deserved the spanking for not being the one to discipline her unruly child.

Santiago viewed everything with a serious eye, and sometimes it seemed that the boy was restraining a sigh, resigned but disapproving, with regard to his younger brother.

Laura tried to bring them together to go on walks or play with her. They both stubbornly resisted. They didn’t take offense and didn’t reject her: they rejected each other and acted like rivals in opposing gangs. Laura recalled the old family discord between pro-German and pro-Allied factions during the Great War, but this was different. This was a war of character, of personality. Whom did Santiago the older resemble, whom Danton the younger? Actually, they should have been reversed, with Danton older and Santiago younger, the second Santiago. Would he be like his young uncle who’d been shot soon after his twentieth birthday? Would Danton be ambitious like his father, Juan Francisco, but would he be strong, not weak and ambitious like his father, who was happy with so little?

She had no idea how to talk to them, no idea how to attract them, and she felt that the lack was entirely hers, that it was her emotional insufficiency, not her sons’, and that she would have to fill it.

“I promise you, Mutti,” she said to Leticia as she bid them goodbye, “I’m going to put my life in order so the boys can come back to us.”

She emphasized the plural, and Leticia raised an eyebrow with feigned surprise, reproaching her daughter for that deceitful “us.” It was a wordless way of telling her that that was the difference between you two and your father and me: we put up with separation because we loved each other so much. But Laura had a sharp, undesired premonition when she repeated, “Back to us, to Juan Francisco and me.”

When she took the return train to Mexico City, she knew that she’d lied, that she was going to seek a destiny for herself and her sons without Juan Francisco, that reconciliation with her husband would be the easy way out and the worst thing for the boys’ future.

She lowered the window on the Pullman car, and saw herself and Juan Francisco seated in the Isotta-Fraschini that Xavier Icaza had given them as a wedding present, useless but elegant, and that they had given, also uselessly, to the four Kelsen sisters, who no longer left their house; the car was now in the hands of Zampaya, who could show off from time to time driving it around or taking the boys on a little excursion. She saw the four Kelsen sisters sitting there: they’d made the supreme effort to see her off along with the two boys. Danton didn’t look at her, pretending instead to drive the car and making extravagant noises with his mouth and nose. She would never forget Santiago’s gaze. He was his own ghost.

The train pulled out, and Laura felt a sudden anguish. There weren’t only four women in the Xalapa house. Li Po! She’d forgotten Li Po! Where was the Chinese doll, why didn’t she look for it or think about it? She tried to shout, to ask, but the train pulled out while handkerchiefs were waved.

“Can you imagine a leader in the workers’ movement with a luxury car imported from Europe parked in his garage? Forget about it, Laura. Give it to your mama and your aunts.”