The Years with Laura Diaz

11.

Avenida Sonora: 1934

ONE FINE DAY, Aunts Hilda and Virginia disappeared.

Leticia got up at six in the morning, as she usually did, and prepared breakfast-mangos and quinces, mameys and peaches, huevos rancheros, bran bread, café con leche-which at seven o’clock she would arrange on the table at the places marked by the napkins rolled into silver rings.

She glanced sadly-later she realized her melancholy was a premonition-at the places set for her three sisters and the silver initials, H, V, MO. When they failed to appear by seven-fifteen, she went to María de la O’s room and awakened her.

“I’m sorry. I had very annoying dreams.”

“What did you dream about?”

“About a wave… I don’t know,” said the almost embarrassed Auntie. “Damn dreams, why do they leave us so quickly?”

Leticia went right to Hilda’s door, where her knock was not answered. She opened it slightly and saw that the bed hadn’t been slept in. She opened the armoire doors and noticed that one hanger was bare, the one that normally held the long white nightgown with the lacy bodice which Leticia had washed and ironed thousands of times. But the perfectly ordered ranks of slippers and high-top shoes were complete, like an army at ease.

She rushed in anguish to Virginia’s room, certain she wouldn’t find a messy bed there, either. What she did find was a note in an envelope addressed to her, leaning against the mirror:

Dear Little Sister: Hilda couldn’t be what she wished, and neither could I. Yesterday, we looked in the mirror and thought the same thing. Why wait with “Christian” patience for the fatal moment, why not have the valor to walk toward death instead of giving it the satisfaction of knocking at our door one evening? Sitting here in Xalapa, taken care of by your goodness and your efforts, we were fading like two burned-down candles. Both of us wanted to do something that would be the equivalent of what we could not accomplish in life. Our sister stared at her arthritic fingers and hummed a Chopin Nocturne. I looked at the shadows under my eyes, in each wrinkle I counted a poem that was never published. We looked at each other and realized what we were both thinking-so many years living together, just imagine, we haven’t separated since we were born, so we can guess each other’s thoughts! Last night, you may remember, the four of us sat down to play cards in the living room. It was my turn to shuffle (Hilda can’t because of the condition of her fingers), and I began to feel ill, the way someone should feel who enters their final moments without knowing it, but no matter how ill I felt, I couldn’t stop shuffling, I went on aimlessly, until you and María de la O began to stare in astonishment, and then I shuffled frantically, as if my life depended on mixing the cards, and you, Leticia, said the fatal phrase, repeated that sweet, old, terrible saying: A little old lady once died shuffling cards.

Then I looked at Hilda and she at me, and we understood each other. You and our other sister were elsewhere, out of our world.

Looking at the cards. You led with the king of clubs.

Hilda and I looked at each other from the depths of our souls… don’t try to find us. Last night, the two of us put on our white nightgowns, left our feet bare, woke up Zampaya and told him to drive us, in the Isotta, to the sea, to the lake where we were born. He put up no resistance. He looked at us as if we were insane for going out in our nightgowns. But he would always do what any one of us would tell him. So when you wake up and read this letter, you will not find either Hilda or me or Zampaya or the car. Zampaya will let us out where we tell him to do so, and the two of us will lose ourselves, barefoot in the forest, with no plan, no money, no bread basket, barefoot and wearing our nightgowns only out of modesty. If you love us, you will not look for us. Respect our wishes. We want to make death into art. The last. The only. Don’t deprive us of that pleasure. With love from your sisters

VIRGINIA AND HILDA

“Your aunts were never seen again,” said Leticia to Laura. “The car was found on a curve in the Acayucan road. Zampaya was found stabbed to death in, forgive me, daughter, the same bordello where María de la O grew up. Don’t look at me like that. These are absolute mysteries, and I’m not going to be the one to clear them up. Enough headaches with what I already know, no need to add to them with what I don’t know.”

Laura had come to Xalapa the moment she found out about the disappearance of her maiden aunts, although she didn’t yet know the terrible fate of the man who’d been the family’s faithful servant for so many years. It was as if the evil spirit of María de la O’s mother had returned, black as her skin, to take revenge on everyone who kept her from a life that, as her own daughter acknowledged, she exalted madly: “I was so happy when I was a whore. Fuck everyone who made me into a proper lady!”

Leticia went ahead and told Laura everything Laura had known for years. Mutti never bothered with gossip or with ferreting out information. She faced things as they turned up. She didn’t have to ask because she understood everything and, as she’d just said, what she didn’t understand she could imagine.

Back in her Veracruz home, Laura understood retrospectively, as if she were looking at a broken sun dial, that because of her aunts’ fate and her mother’s attitude Leticia knew everything about the failure of her marriage to Juan Francisco, about how her rebellion against her husband had dissolved in Elizabeth’s protective treatment and how she’d drifted from there into her empty, prolonged, and ultimately useless relationship with Orlando; yet weren’t those indispensable stages, if in themselves dispensable, in accumulating isolated instants of perception that, added together, would lead her to a new awareness, still vague, still misty, of things? The sun dial was inseparable from the shade dial.

Leticia took advantage of the flight of the old maids to look deep into Laura’s eyes and silently ask her to do the thing that Laura quickly expressed: It’s very hard for you and Auntie to take care of two boys who will soon be thirteen and fourteen. I’m going to take them back to Mexico City. You and Auntie too.

“No, Laura, we’ll stay here. We look after each other. You’ll have to remake your home on your own.”

“Yes, Mutti. Juan Francisco is waiting for all of us in the house on Avenida Sonora. But I already told you, if you and your sister want to come with us, we’ll get a larger house, so don’t give it a second thought.”

“Get used to living without us.” Leticia smiled. “I don’t want to leave the state of Veracruz ever again. Mexico City horrifies me.”

Did one have to explain to Leticia that since Orlando had abandoned her she’d decided to rebuild her home with Juan Francisco, not out of weakness but through a strong, essential act of will that summed up for her the lessons she’d learned from her life with Orlando? She’d reproached her husband for a lack of basic sincerity, for not admitting his cowardice in not confessing a betrayal that would forever make him odious in her eyes and make her odious to herself, since the excuses she could invent when she married the labor leader now seemed insufficient to her, no matter whether youth and inexperience might justify them.

That afternoon, close to her mother in the old city of her adolescence, Laura would have wanted to say this to Mutti, but Leticia herself stopped her with a definitive conclusion: “If you want, you can leave the boys here until you settle things with your husband and you resume your married life together. But you already know that.”

The two women were both about to say “Well?” but realized that without having to say a word they each knew everything, Leticia about Laura’s failed marriage, and Laura about having to go back to living with Juan Francisco despite everything, to give their home and their sons a second chance. Then Laura remembered that yes, she’d been on the verge of saying that she’d wasted these last years of her life recklessly deceiving herself, that flagrant disillusion had led her to lies: she’d felt justified in abandoning her home and handing herself over to what those two worlds-the internal one of her own rage and the external one of Mexico City society-exalted as an acceptable vendetta for a humiliated woman: pleasure and independence.

Now Laura didn’t know whether either enjoyment or freedom had ever really been hers. Staying with Elizabeth so long that generosity had turned into patronage, then irritation, and finally disdain. Bound over to the love of Orlando until passion revealed itself as games and trickery. Exploring a new society of artists, of old-family people or new money arrivistes who, it’s true, never fooled her, for at Carmen Cortina’s parties appearance was essence and reality its mask.

Being useful, feeling herself to be useful, imagining she was good for something-that brought her under the wing of the Kahlo-Rivera clan, but all her gratitude toward the extraordinary couple who took her in at a bad moment and treated her as a friend and comrade could not disguise the truth that Laura was ancillary to the two artists’ world, she was a replaceable part in a perfectly lubricated geometry like those machines of glittering steel that Diego celebrated in Detroit, but a machine on a fragile base, fragile like Frida Kahlo’s wounded legs. They could take care of themselves. Laura would always love them, but she had no illusions: they loved but did not need her.

“What do I need, Mama? Who needs me?” asked Laura, after telling Leticia all these things-everything she’d sworn not to tell her and now, having blurted them out so quickly, vertiginously, clasping her mother’s strong and diligent hands, not knowing if she’d actually said it all or if Leticia once again had divined her feelings and ideas without Laura’s saying a word.

“Well?” asked Leticia, and Laura knew she knew.

“So the boys should stay here?”

“Only while you find your husband again.”

“And what if we can’t understand each other, which is very possible?”

“The fact is, the two of you will never understand each other. That’s the problem. The important thing is for you to take on the burden of something real and decide to save it instead of waiting for someone to save you. Which is what you’ve done until now. Excuse me for saying so.”

“Even if I know it will turn out badly again.”

Leticia nodded. “Sometimes we have to do things knowing beforehand we’re going to fail.”

“What do I get from that, Mutti?”

“I’d say the opportunity to become yourself, to leave your failed efforts behind. You won’t go through them again.”

“I should walk into a disaster with my eyes wide open, is that what you’re asking of me?”

“We have to finish things. You’re leaving too much unfinished, too many loose ends. Be yourself, not someone else’s toy, even if it costs you dearly to be a little more authentic.”

“It wasn’t authentic, everything that’s happened to me since I left Orlando?”

This time, Leticia did no more than hand the Chinese doll to her daughter.

“Here. The last time you came, you forgot it. Now Miss Frida needs it.”

Laura took Li Po, kissed the sleeping Danton and Santiago, and returned to what had already been finished before she came to Xalapa so alarmed at the disappearance of her aunts.

They spent the first night sleeping together side by side as if in a tomb, without warmth, without recrimination but without touching, agreeing to say some things, to arrive at certain compromises. They wouldn’t rule out opportunities for sex but by the same token wouldn’t define it as an obligation. Instead they would begin, once again lying side by side, with some questions and tentative affirmations, you understand, Juan Francisco, that before I met you I already knew you because of what people said, you never bragged about anything, I can’t accuse you of that, on the contrary, you appeared in the Xalapa Casino with a simplicity I found very attractive, you didn’t try to impress me, I was already impressed by the brave and exciting man who in my imagination took the place of the sacrificed heroism of my brother Santiago, you survived to continue the struggle in the name of my blood, it wasn’t your fault that you didn’t measure up to my illusions, it was my fault, I hope this time we can live together you and I with no wishful thinking. I never felt love from you, Laura, only respect, admiration, and fantasy, not passion, passion doesn’t last but respect and admiration do, and if that’s lost, well, what’s left, Laura? Living without passion or admiration, I’d say, Juan Francisco, but with respect, respect for what we really are, without illusions and for the sake of our sons who aren’t to blame for anything and whom we bring into the world without asking their permission. Is that the pact between you and me? No, something more, try to allay my fear, I’m afraid of you because you slapped me, swear you’ll never hit me again no matter what happens between us, you can’t imagine the terror a woman feels when a man starts beating her. That’s my principal condition. Don’t worry, I thought I had more strength than I really do have, forgive me.

And then time for some sad caresses on his part and she allowing him some tenderness out of gratitude, before reacting with shame and sitting up in bed. I mustn’t trick you, Juan Francisco, I have to begin like this, I want to tell you everything that happened to me since you informed on that nun Gloria Soriano and then slapped my face in the street when I walked out, I want you to know who I slept with, whom I desired, with whom I experienced pleasure; I want you to understand completely everything I’ve done while I was away so that you can finally answer a question for me which you haven’t yet answered, why did you pass judgment on me for my will to love you but not condemn me for sleeping with someone else? I’m asking you now, Juan Francisco, before telling you everything before everything that happened happens again, are you going to judge me again this time for my will to love you, to come back to you? or are you ready right now to condemn me if I sleep with someone else again? do you have the nerve to answer me? I’m a bitch through and through, I’ll admit that, but listen to what I’m asking you, will you have the courage not to judge me if I cheat on you-for the first time or the next time, that’s the thing you don’t know, right? You’ll never know if what I confess to you is true or if I’ve just made it up to take revenge on you, although I can give you names and addresses, you can find out if I’m lying or telling the truth about my love life after I left you, but that doesn’t change what I asked you in any way, will you not judge me ever again? I’m asking you that as retribution, in the name of the nun you turned in and the cause you betrayed, I’ll forgive you that, will you forgive me? are you capable of that?……………………………………

Juan Francisco did not break the long silence that followed Laura’s words until he got out of bed, buttoned up his blue-and-white-striped pajamas, took some water from the pitcher, drank it, and sat on the edge of the bed. The room was cold-it was the thunderstorm season-and hail, as thick as it was unexpected, was drumming on the roof. Through the open window flowed a newly fresh aroma of jacarandas, overcoming with its sensuality the billowing curtains and the little puddle forming under the window. Then Juan Francisco’s words began, very slowly, as if he were a man without a past-where did he come from, who were his parents, why had he never revealed his origins?

“I always knew I was strong on the outside and weak on the inside. I knew it when I was just a kid. That’s why I made such a huge effort to show the rest of the world I was strong. You especially. Because I knew early on the fears and weaknesses I had inside. You’ve heard of Demosthenes, how he overcame his timid stutter walking along the beach with pebbles in his mouth until he could overpower the noise of the waves with his voice and make himself into the most famous public orator in Greece. That’s what happened to me. I made myself strong because I was weak. What you can’t know, Laura, is how long you can keep winning against fear. Because fear is sickly, and when the world offers you gifts to calm you down-money, power, or sensuality, all together or one at a time, it doesn’t matter-there’s no way around it, you’re grateful the world isn’t sorry for you and you go on yielding the real strength you won when you had nothing to the false strength of the world which is starting to talk to you. Then the weakness ends up overpowering you, almost without your realizing it. If you help me, perhaps I can achieve a balance and be-not as strong as you thought when you met me but not as weak as you thought when you abandoned me.”

Laura was not going to argue about who caused the break. If he went on thinking he’d been abandoned, she’d be compassionate and resign herself to seeing him play that part, and try not to lose even more respect for him. But he, in turn, would have to put up with all her truths, even the cruelest ones, not out of cruelty but so that the two of them could live from then on in the truth, disagreeable as it might be, and especially so that Danton and Santiago could live in a family without lies. Laura recalled Leticia, her mother, and wanted to be like her, to have the gift of understanding everything without using unnecessary words.

When she returned from Xalapa, she brought the Chinese doll to Frida Kahlo. The Coyoacán house was empty. Laura walked into the garden and called out, “Is there anyone at home?” And the tiny voice of a maid answered, “No, miss, there’s no one here.” The couple was still in New York, where Rivera was working on the Rockefeller Center frescoes, so Laura put Li Po on Frida’s bed and added nothing, no note, nothing; Frida would understand, it was Laura’s gift to the lost child. She tried to imagine the purity of the Oriental doll’s ivory amid the tropical undergrowth that would soon invade the bedroom: monkeys, said Frida, parrots, daisies, hairless dogs, ocelots, and a jungle of lianas and orchids.

She had the boys sent from Xalapa. Punctilious, Santiago and Danton followed Leticia’s precise and practical instructions and took the Interoceanic train to the Buenavista station, where Laura and Juan Francisco were waiting for them. The boys’ nature, which Laura already knew, was a surprise for Juan Francisco, although it was for Laura, too, in the sense that each of them was rapidly accentuating his personal traits-Danton, clownish and bold, gave his parents two hasty kisses on the cheek and ran off to buy candy, shouting, why did Grand-mama give us money when there were no Larín chocolates or Minnie Mouse lollipops on the train, but anyway the old skinflint only gave us a few cents; then ran to a kiosk and asked for the most recent issues of his favorite magazines, Pepín and Chamaco Chico, but when he realized he didn’t have enough money, resigned himself to buying the latest copy of Los Supersabios. Juan Francisco put his hand in his pocket to pay for the magazines, but Laura stopped him. Then Danton turned his back on them and ran down the street ahead of the rest of the family.

Santiago was different. He greeted his parents with a handshake that established an uncrossable space and kept kisses at bay. He allowed Laura to put her hand on his shoulder to guide him to the exit and wasn’t too embarrassed to let Juan Francisco carry the two small valises to the black Buick parked on the street. The two boys were noticeably uncomfortable, but since they didn’t want to attribute their discomfort to being with their parents, they kept on running their index fingers under their stiff collars and along the ties of the formal suits Doña Leticia had dressed them in: striped three-button jackets, knickers, knee-high argyle socks, coffee-colored square-toed shoes with hooks.

Everyone was silent during the trip from the station to Avenida Sonora, Danton absorbed in his comic book, Santiago bravely watching the majestic city pass by-the recently inaugurated monument to the Revolution, which people compared to a gigantic gasoline station, Paseo de la Reforma and all the traffic circles that seemed to do the breathing for everyone, from Caballito, the equestrian statue of Charles IV of Spain at the intersection with Juárez, Bucareli and Ejido, Christopher Columbus and his impassive circle of monks and public scribes, to the proud statue of Cuauhtémoc brandishing his spear at the intersection with Insurgentes; all along the great avenue lined with trees, footpaths, bridle paths for morning riders who at this hour were slowly plodding along, and sumptuous private mansions with Parisian facades and decorations. When they left Paseo de la Reforma, they entered the elegant streets of Colonia Roma with its two story stone houses: garages at street level and reception rooms visible thanks to the white-framed balcony windows left open so the maids, with their complicated braids and blue uniforms, could air the interior rooms and shake out the carpets.

As they went along, Santiago read the names of the streets-Niza, Génova, Amberes, Praga-until they reached the Bosque de Chapultepec-not even there did Danton raise his eyes from his comics-and thence to their home on Avenida Sonora. To Santiago, it was like a dream-the entrance to the great park of eucalyptus and pine trees, flanked by stone lions in repose and crowned by the mythic Castle where Moctezuma had his baths, from whose parapets the Boy Heroes of the Military School threw themselves rather than surrender the Alcazar to the Yankees in 1848, where all the rulers of Mexico lived, from the Habsburg emperor Maximilian to Abelardo Rodriguez, the casino godfather, to the new President, Lázaro Cárdenas, who decided that such luxury was not for him and moved, in good republican fashion, to the modest villa at the foot of the Castle, Los Pinos.

Over the course of a second breakfast, the boys listened impassively to the new order of their lives, although the spark in Danton’s eyes silently announced that he would contest each chore with some unpredictable mischief. Santiago’s eyes refused to admit either strangeness or shock; he filled the void, in Laura’s astute reading of her son, with nostalgia for Xalapa, for Grandmother Leticia, for Aunt María de la O. Would the young Santiago have to leave things behind in order to miss them? Laura surprised herself in thinking that-as she observed her elder son’s serious face with its fine features, his chestnut hair so like that of his dead uncle, so different from Danton’s swarthy appearance, his cinnamon complexion, his thick dark eyebrows, his black hair held in check with brilliantine. The only curious detail was that Santiago the fair had black eyes, while the dark-skinned Danton had pale green eyes, almost yellow, like a cat’s.

Laura sighed. The object of nostalgia was always the past; there was never nostalgia for the future. Even so, Santiago’s gaze lit up and went out like one of those new neon signs on Avenida Juárez: I miss what is going to come…

They would attend the Gordon School, on Avenida Mazatlán, not far from the house. Juan Francisco would drive them in the Buick in the morning, and they would return at 5 p.m. in the orange school bus. The list of school supplies had been acquired, Eberhard pencils from Switzerland, pens with no name or national origin, meant to be dipped in desk inkwells, graph-paper notebooks for arithmetic, lined paper for essays; a national history textbook by the anticlerical Teja Zabre as if to compensate for the mathematics book by the Marist monk Anfossi; English readings, Spanish grammar, and the green books of general history by the French authors Malet and Isaac. Knapsacks. The sandwiches of beans, sardines, and chiles; the usual orange; the injunction never to buy sweets because they give you cavities…

Laura wanted to fill her day with her new chores. But night lay in wait for her, then dawn knocked at her door, and even in the middle of the night she could not say, The darkness belongs to us.

She reproached herself. “I can’t condemn the best of myself to the grave of memory.” But the silent solicitude of her husband-“How little I ask of you. Let me feel I’m needed”-could not calm Laura’s recurring irritation during her time alone, when the boys were at school and Juan Francisco at the union, “How easy life would be without a husband and children.” She went to Coyoacán when the Riveras came back, preceded by the black clouds of a new scandal in New York, where Diego had painted the faces of Marx and Lenin in the Rockefeller Center murals, Nelson Rockefeller asked Diego to erase the effigy of the Soviet leader, Diego refused but offered to balance Lenin’s head with Lincoln’s head, and it ended when twelve armed guards ordered the painter to stop work and handed him a check for $14,000 (“COMMUNIST PAINTER GETS RICH ON CAPITALIST DOLLARS”). The unions tried to save the mural, but the Rockefellers ordered it chiseled out of existence and thrown into the garbage. Good, said the U.S. Communist Party: Rivera’s fresco is “counterrevolutionary.” Diego and Frida returned to Mexico, he depressed, she cursing “Gringolandia.” They were all back, but there was no longer space for Laura: Diego wanted to get even with the gringos with another mural; Frida had painted a sorrowful self-portrait as an empty Tehuana dress hung amid soulless skyscrapers on the Mexican-U.S. border, Hi, Laura, how are you? come see us whenever you like, see you soon.

Life without a husband or children. Only one irritation, like a fly that insists on landing on one’s nose again and again, chased away but tenacious: Laura knew well what life was like without Juan Francisco and the boys, and hadn’t found anything greater or better in that alternative than in her renovated existence as wife and mother-but if only Juan Francisco didn’t insist on combining (so obviously) the conviction that Laura was judging him with the obligation he felt to love her. Her husband was anchoring himself at an unmoving buoy. On the one hand, the excessive adoration he decided to show Laura to compensate for his mistakes of the past irritated her, because it was a way of asking forgiveness yet resolved itself in something quite different: “I don’t hate him, he tires me, he loves me too much, a man shouldn’t love a woman too much, there’s an intelligent balance that Juan Francisco lacks, he has to learn that there’s a limit between the need a woman has to be loved and her suspicion that she isn’t loved as much as it might seem.”

Juan Francisco, with his terms of endearment, his courtesy toward her, his diligent paternal concern for the sons he hadn’t seen for six years, his new obligation to explain to Laura what he’d been doing all day without ever asking her for explanations, his insinuating heavyhanded way of asking for love, touching Laura’s foot with his own under the sheets, suddenly emerging naked from the bathroom, searching like a fool for his pajamas, unaware that he was now carrying a spare tire around his waist, unaware that he’d lost his essential dark, mestizo slenderness, even making her take the initiative, speedily bringing the act to its conclusion, mechanically fulfilling his conjugal obligations…

She resigned herself to it all, until the day when a shadow began to manifest itself, first immaterial in the traffic on the avenue, then more visible on the sidewalk across the street, finally showing itself completely a few steps behind her, as Laura made her daily journey to the Parián market. She did not want to hire a maid. The memory of the nun Gloria Soriano pained her too much. Domestic chores filled her solitary hours. The surprising thing in this discovery is that Laura, once she realized she was being followed by one of her husband’s lackeys, did not take it seriously. And that affected her more than if it had really mattered to her. Instead, for her it opened a street as narrow as the avenue where they lived was wide. She decided not to shadow him physically-as he, stupidly, was doing to her-but to use a more powerful weapon, moral shadowing.

Lázaro Cárdenas, a general from Michoacán, ex-governor of his state and head of the official party, had been elected President of Mexico. Everyone thought he would be just one more of the puppets shamelessly manipulated by the Maximum Chief of the Revolution, General Plutarco Elías Calles. The joke was so public that during a preceding presidency, some joker had hung a sign on the door of the presidential residence at Chapultepec: THE PRESIDENT LIVES HERE. THE MAN WHO GIVES THE ORDERS LIVES ACROSS THE STREET. Then President Abelardo Rodríguez, considered yet another of the Maximum Chief’s servants, repressed strike after strike, first the telegraph workers, then the day laborers from New Lombardy and New Italy in Michoacán, farm workers of Italian background who were accustomed to the struggles being waged by Antonio Gramsci’s Communist Party, and finally the national movement of agricultural workers in Chiapas, Veracruz, Puebla, and Nuevo León: President Rodriguez ordered that the strikers be fired and sent soldiers to take their place; the courts, dominated by the executive branch, declared all these strikes “unjustified.” The army and the paramilitary thugs working for the government murdered several workers from the Italo-Mexican communities, and Abelardo Rodriguez sent the national strike leaders, who were fighting for a minimum wage, to the desolate penal colony on the Islas Mar as, among them the young writer José Revueltas.

Luis Napoleón Morones’ old CROM grew weaker and weaker, incapable of defending the workers. At the same time the star of their new leader, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, rose. Lombardo-once a Thomist philosopher and now a Marxist, a thin man with an ascetic air and sad eyes, forelock dangling over them, and a pipe in his mouth-as head of the General Confederation of Mexican Workers and Peasants created an alternative for the real workers’ struggle: workers struggling for land, good wages, collectively negotiated contracts, began to group themselves with the GCMW, and since Cárdenas had supported union struggles in Michoacán, everything was now expected to change: no longer Calles and Morones but Cárdenas and Lombardo.

“And union independence, Juan Francisco, where is it?” Laura heard the only old comrade who still visited her husband say one night, the now beaten-down Pánfilo, who couldn’t even find a place to spit since Laura had had the hideous copper spittoons removed.

Juan Francisco repeated something that by now was his credo: “In Mexico, things change from within, not from without.”

“When are you going to learn?” Pánfilo answered with a sigh.

Cárdenas was beginning to show signs of independence and Calles signs of irritation. Caught between them, Juan Francisco seemed uncertain as to which direction the workers’ movement would take and what his position in it would be. Laura noted his disquiet and asked him over and over, with an air of legitimate concern: If there’s a break between Calles and Cárdenas, which side will you be on? And he had no choice but to fall back on his old bad habit, political rhetoric: the Revolution is united, there will never be a break among its leaders. But the Revolution has already broken with many of your old ideals, Juan Francisco, when you were an anarcho-syndicalist (and the images of the Xalapa attic and the walled-up life of Armonía Aznar and her mysterious relationship with Orlando and Juan Francisco’s funeral oration all returned to her in a wave), and he would say, like a true believer repeating the credo, you have to influence things from within, try it from outside and you’ll be squashed like a bug, the battles are waged within the system.

“You have to know how to adapt, isn’t that so?”

“All the time. Of course. Politics is the art of compromise.”

“Of compromise,” she repeated in a most serious tone.

“Yes.”

So as not to acknowledge what was happening, one had to keep one’s heart in the dark. Juan Francisco could explain that political necessity forced him into compromises with the government.

“With all governments? With any government?”

… She could not ask him if his conscience was condemning him. He would have wanted to admit that he wasn’t afraid of the opinions others might have but he was afraid of Laura Díaz, of being judged again by her. Then, one night, the two of them exploded again.

“I’m sick and tired of your judging me.”

“And I’m sick and tired of your spying on me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’ve locked my soul in a basement.”

“Don’t feel so sorry for yourself, you make me pity you.”

“Don’t talk to me as if you were a saint talking to a sinner. Talk to the real me instead!”

“It’s outrageous that you ask me for results that have nothing to do with reality.”

“Stop imagining that I judge you.”

“As long as it’s only you who judges me, poor little you, it really doesn’t bother me, do you think I came back so you could forgive my sins?” She bit her tongue, night tracks me, sunrise frees me, she went to the boys’ bedroom to watch them sleep, to calm down.

Seeing them sleep.

It was enough to watch the two little heads sunk deep in the pillows, Santiago covered up to his chin, Danton uncovered and spread-eagled, as if even in sleep their two contrary personalities revealed themselves, and Laura D az asked herself, at that exact moment of her existence, did she have anything to teach her sons or at least the courage to ask them, what do you want to know, what can I tell you?

Sitting there opposite the twin beds, she could only tell them that they came into this world without being consulted and thus their parents’ freedom in creating them did not save them, creatures of a heritage of rancor, needs, and ignorance that their parents, no matter how they tried, could not erase without damaging their children’s freedom. It would be up to them to fight the earthly evils they’d inherited, and yet, she, the mother, could not step back, disappear, turn into the ghost of her own descendants. She had to resist in their name without ever showing it, remain invisible at the side of her sons, not to diminish the child’s honor, the responsibility of the son who must believe in his own freedom, know that he is forging his own destiny. What was left to her if not to keep watch discreetly, to be tolerant, and to ask as well for a long time to live and a short time to suffer, like Aunts Hilda and Virginia?

Sometimes she would spend the entire night watching them sleep, intent on accompanying her sons wherever they might go, like a very long shoreline where sea and beach are distinct but inseparable; the voyage might last only one night, but she hoped it would never end, and over the heads of her sons floated the question: How much time, how much time will God and men allow my sons on earth?

Seeing them sleep until the sun comes up and the light touches their heads because she herself can touch the sun with her hands, asking herself how many sunrises she and her sons will be able to endure. For each allotment of light had a silhouette of shadow.

Then Laura Díaz rose, disquieted by a mild vertigo, and stepped away from the beds where her sons slept, and she told herself (and almost told them)-so they would understand their own mother and not condemn her to pity first and oblivion later-that to be a mother, hated and liberated by the hatred of her sons, hated, perhaps, but fatally unforgettable, I must be active, ardent and active, but I still don’t know how, I can’t return to what I’ve already done, I want an authentic revelation, a revelation that will be an elevation, not a renunciation. How easy life would be without children or a husband! Again? This time for sure? Why not? Does the first effort at liberty use it up, a prior failure close the doors to possible happiness beyond the walls of home? Have I used up my destiny? Santiago, Danton: don’t leave me. Let me follow you wherever you go, whatever happens. I don’t want to be adored. I want to be awaited. Help me.