The Years with Laura Diaz

16.

Chapultepec-Polanco: 1947

THE INAUGURATION of President Miguel Alemán in December 1946 coincided with an astonishing event in the Avenida Sonora household. Aunt María de la O started speaking again. “He’s from Veracruz, a jarocho,” she said-of the new, young, elegant head of state, the first civilian President, after a series of military men.

Everyone-Laura D az, Juan Francisco, Santiago, Danton-was taken aback, but Aunt María’s surprises didn’t stop there: for no reason at all, she started dancing la bamba at all hours of the day or night, her swollen ankles notwithstanding.

“No fool like an old fool,” said a scornful Danton.

Then, at the beginning of the new year, María de la O made her sensational announcement: “The time of sadness is over. I’m going back to live in Veracruz. An old beau of mine from the port has asked me to marry him. He’s my age, though I don’t know exactly what my age is, because Mama never registered me. She wanted me to grow up quickly and follow her in the crazy life. Silly cunt, I hope she’s sizzling in hell. All I know is that Matías Matadamas-that’s my boyfriend-can dance the danzón like an angel, and he’s promised to take me dancing twice a week in the city square, right along with everyone else.”

“Nobody’s named Matías Matadamas,” said Danton the wet blanket.

“You little snot,” replied Auntie. “For your information, St. Matías was the last apostle, the one who took the place of Judas the Traitor after the crucifixion so there would be an even dozen.”

“Apostle and boyfriend all at the last minute!” Danton laughed. “As if Jesus Christ were a peddler who sold saints cheaper by the dozen.”

“Just you wait and see if the last minute isn’t sometimes the first, you disbeliever.” María de la O was berating him, but truth to tell, she was not in the mood for reproofs. What she wanted was to be dancing bulerías. “I can just see myself, holding on to him tight,” she went on with her best daydream air, “cheek to cheek, dancing on a brick, which is how you should dance the danzón, barely moving your body, just your feet, your feet tapping out the beat, slow, delicious, sexy. Oh boy, family, I am going to live!”

Nobody could explain Aunt María de la O’s miracle; nobody could thwart her will or even take her to the train, much less to Veracruz.

“He’s my boyfriend. He’s my life. My time has come. I’m tired of being a parasite. From now to the grave, pure Caribbean fun and nights on the town. A little old lady died shuffling cards. To hell with that! Not me!”

With those words, a not unusual proof that the tongues of the old loosen up when there’s nothing to lose, she boarded the Interoceanic train almost with relief, a renewed woman, a miracle.

Even though Auntie’s chair was empty, Laura Díaz insisted on continuing the afternoon ceremony of sitting at the balcony and observing the to-and-fro of the city. It had changed little between the inauguration of General Avila Camacho and that of Mr. Alemán. During the war, Mexico had become a Latin American Lisbon (Casablanca with nopales, quipped Orlando), a refuge for the many men and women fleeing from the European conflict. Two hundred thousand Spanish Republicans came, and Laura told herself that Jorge Maura’s labors had not been in vain. The cream of the Spanish intelligentsia arrived, a terrible bloodletting for the contemptible Franco dictatorship but a magnificent transfusion for Mexico’s university life, literature, art, and science. In exchange for shelter, the Spanish Republicans renovated Mexico’s culture-a wonderful example of the universalism that saves cultures from nationalist viruses.

In a small apartment on Lerma Street, the great poet Emilio Prados, with his blind man’s glasses and his tangled, graying mane, lived modestly. Prados had already foreseen the “flight” and “arrival” in his beautiful poems about the “persecuted body,” which Laura memorized and recited to Santiago. The poet wanted to flee, he said, “tired of hiding in the branches… tired of this wound. There are limits.” As Laura recited, she heard the voice of Jorge Maura reaching her from far off, as if poetry were the only form of true actuality allowed by the eternal God to His poor mortal creatures. Prados, Jorge Maura, Laura D az, and perhaps Santiago López-Díaz as he listened to her read the poems-they all wanted to arrive “with my rigid body… that flows like a river without water, walking on foot through a dream with five sharp flames nailed to my chest.”

Coming and going, tricked out like an Englishman taking a stroll, was Luis Cernuda with his houndstooth jackets and Duke of Windsor ties, his slicked-down hair and French movie-star mustache, scattering the most beautiful erotic poems in the Spanish language along the streets of Mexico City. Now it was Santiago who read to his mother, running feverishly from one poem to the next, never finishing one, finding the perfect line, the unforgettable words:

What a sad noise two bodies make when they love.

I could knock down their body, leaving only the truth of your love…

I know no freedom but the freedom of being imprisoned in someone…

I kissed his tracks…

Luis Bun uel was in Mexico City, too, expelled from New York because of the gossip and calumny there of his former friend Salvador Dal, now anagrammed into Avida Dollars. Laura D az learned about him from Jorge Maura, who had shown her Bun uel’s film about the Las Hurdes region in Spain, a film of unbearable pain and abandonment that the Republic itself censored.

And on Amazonas Street lived Don Manuel Pedroso, former rector of the University of Seville, surrounded by first editions of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, with his students at his feet. Danton, brought to one of Pedroso’s tertulias by a fellow student in the law school, remarked to his friend as they walked along Paseo de la Reforma to dine at the Bellinghausen restaurant on Londres Street, “He’s a charming old man. But his ideas are utopian. That stuff’s not for me.”

At the next table, Max Aub was eating with other exiled writers. He looked focused: short, curly hair, immense forehead, eyes lost in the depth of a glass swimming pool, and expressions impossible to separate, like the faces on a coin, where heads was his frown and tails his smile. Aub had shared adventures with André Malraux during the war and predicted for Franco a “true death” that would be totally unrelated to any calendar date, because for the dictator it would be, more than a surprise, an ignorance of his own death.

“My mother knows him,” said Danton to his classmate. “She’s in with the intellectuals because she works with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.”

“And because she was the girlfriend of a Spanish Communist spy,” said the friend, though that was the last thing he said, because Danton broke his nose with a punch. Chairs were turned over, tablecloths were stained, and Laura Díaz’s son angrily shook off the waiters and departed the restaurant.

The torero Manolete, now living in Mexico, was bringing crowds to the bullfights. A Francoist, he was actually El Greco’s last creation: thin, sad, stylized, Manuel Rodríguez “Manolete” was skillful in a priestly way. He fought standing tall, immutable, vertical as a candle. His rival was Pepe Luis Vázquez, Juan Francisco explained to Danton when father and son went to the new Plaza Monumental Mexico along with sixty thousand fans to see Manolete, Pepe Luis being the orthodox Sevillan and Manolete the unorthodox Córdoban, who broke the classic rules by not extending the muleta-the short staff on which the red cape is hung-to calm and control the bull, who didn’t take risks to make the bull enter the space of the fight, who stood still, calmed and ordered, never moving from his place, exposed to the bull, who was bringing the fight to him. And when the bull charged this unmoving bullfighter, the entire stadium gasped in anguish, held its breath, and exploded into an olé of victory when the marvelous Manolete broke the tension with an extremely slow-moving attack and sank his sword into the bull’s body. Did you see that? Juan Francisco asked his son as they walked, in the crush of the crowd, out of the Plaza through the honeycomb of crisscrossing long passageways. Did you see that? He fought the whole time face to face, never bending, dominating the bull from below, our hearts all skipped a beat watching him fight! But Danton remembered only one lesson: The bull and the bullfighter saw each other’s face. They were two faces of death. Only apparently did the bull die and the bullfighter survive. The truth is, the man was mortal and the animal immortal, the hull went on and on and on, charged and charged and charged, again and again, blinded by the sun, and the sand stained by the blood of a single immortal bull who saw generation after generation of mortal bullfighters pass on. When would Manolete die, in what ring would he find the death that he only apparently dealt each bull, what would be the name of the bull that would kill Manolete, where was it waiting for him?

“Manolete casts a spell on the bull,” said a melancholic Juan Francisco, dining alone with Danton in El Parador after the bullfight.

The son wanted to keep to himself the lesson of that afternoon when he saw Manolete fight: triumph and glory are passing things; we have to kill one bull after another so as to put off our own final defeat, the day when our bull kills us, we have to win ear and tail and exit in triumph every day of our lives.

“They say people are selling their cars and their mattresses to buy tickets to the Plaza to see Manolete. Could that be true?” he asked.

“For the first time, there are three programs a week in the Plaza,” said his father. “There must be a reason.”

The dashing bullfighter strolled around the centers of Mexico City’s cosmopolitan nightlife-the Casanova, the Minuit, the Sans Souci-accompanied by Fernanda Montel, a Valkyrian woman who balanced the depth of her décolletés with the height of her hairdos, genuine towers dyed blue, green, rose. In Coyoacán, the dethroned King Carol of Romania, with his drooping mustache, oyster eyes, and receding chin, walked his poodles with his lover, Magda Lupescu, more attentive to her silver fox furs than to her exiled king. From a table at Ciro’s, in the Hotel Reforma, Carmen Cortina made battle plans with her old allies-the actress Andrea Negrete, Butt del Rosal, and the English painter Felicity Smith-to recruit all the international fauna the tides of war had beached in Mexico. God bless you, Adolf Hitler! sighed the hostess to her group, seated not far from Ciro’s owner, a dwarf with a tiepin named A. C. Blumenthal, front man for Bugsy Siegel, the Hollywood gangster, whose discarded lover, Virginia Hill, owner of a tremulous chin and faded hair and that sudden sadness which attacks some women from the city of Los Angeles, was drinking martini after martini, and martinis were what the novelist John Steinbeck, his Gordon’s Gin eyes filled with lost battles and now in Mexico for the filming of his novella The Pearl, served in a bottle to his tame crocodile, thus outdoing the boastful audacity of the film’s director, Emilio (the Indian) Fernández, fond of using a pistol to threaten anyone who disagreed with his plot ideas, who was in love with the actress Olivia de Havilland, in whose honor he had a street renamed “Sweet Olivia”-where he built a castle with his earnings from successes like Flor Silvestre, María Candelaria, Enamorada.

Laura D az had to go to Ciro’s because Diego Rivera was painting a series of female nudes there, all inspired by Rivera’s own starry love, the actress Paulette Goddard, an intelligent, ambitious woman who spoke to Laura only in order to ignore Diego and annoy him, while Laura, in turn, scrutinized Ciro’s clientele with an irony as sweet as the street where “El Indio” Fernández lived: people she hadn’t seen in fifteen years, Carmen Cortina’s group, and the satellites coming and going from her table: the painter from Guadalajara, Tizoc Ambriz, who stubbornly dressed as a young railroad worker though he was fifty. Indelible marks of time were printed on their faces, but they were invulnerable in their pretensions, stuck in their reality like a pantheon of wax figures: two tone Andrea, now quite plump; the once fat and jowly Spaniard Onomástico Galán, now deflated and wrinkled, like a used condom; the British painter James Saxon looking more and more like the entire House of Windsor; and her old companion from Xalapa, Elizabeth García-Dupont, ex-wife of Caraza, now thin as a mummy, one hand trembling and the other clutching a young man: dark, mustached, and imperturbably pimpish.

A hand touched Laura Díaz’s shoulder. She recognized Laura Rivière, Artemio Cruz’s lover, who had overcome the fifteen years that had passed thanks to the elegant opalescent beauty concentrated in her unaging melancholy eyes.

“Come see me whenever you like. Why haven’t you ever visited?”

And then, homburg hat in hand, Orlando Ximénez came in. Laura, could not measure time; the only face she could confer on Orlando was the same youthful one he’d had at the dances at San Cayetano more than thirty years before. She felt a mild vertigo seeing the image of the boy who made love to her on the terraces scented with nocturnal oranges and sleeping coffee trees; she excused herself and left.

Gravitating toward something is not the same as falling toward it; it’s drawing closer, it’s when you draw close, Laura told Danton, who had thought, after the day with his father at the CTM and the Chamber of Deputies, This isn’t for me, but my dad’s right, what is for me? He too was gazing out from the balcony overlooking the Bosque de Chapultepec, and he knew that on the other side of the park was Las Lomas de Chapultepec section. That’s where the rich people lived, new and old money, he didn’t care, it was there that new mansions with swimming pools and lawns for garden parties and society weddings were being built, three-car garages, interior decoration by Pani and Paco el de La Granja, wardrobes by Valdés Peza, hats by Henri de Chatillon, flowers by Matsumoto, and banquets catered by Mayita.

How could a simple poor boy like himself, whose poverty was neither old nor new, get into those places? Because that’s what Danton López-Díaz wanted to do. He gave due attention to his father’s modest suggestions: should he be a politician, a businessman, a journalist, a military officer? Then he decided to create his own destiny-that is, his own fortune. And since in Mexico it was hard to acquire class without money, the young economics student decided he had no option but to acquire money with class. Leafing through the society magazines was enough to make him see the difference. There was the new society created by the Revolution, rich, living in Las Lomas de Chapultepec, insecure but daring, dark skinned but cosmetically lightened, impertinently showing off its recently acquired wealth for good or ill: dark men-soldiers, politicians, impresarios-married to light women-creoles in distress, long-suffering. The revolutionaries, in their armed descent from the north, had harvested the prettiest virginal buds from Hermosillo and Culiacán, from Torreón and San Luis, from Zacatecas and El Baj o. Mothers of their children. Vestals of their homes. Resigned to the affairs of their powerful sultans.

And then there was the old, aristocratic, and impoverished society that lived on streets with the names of European cities, between Avenida Insurgentes and Paseo de la Reforma. Their houses were small but elegant, built around 1918-20, two-story buildings with stone facades, balconies, coach houses, and, overlooking the street, a piano nobile where one might glimpse mementos from the past-paintings and portraits, medals in velvet-lined frames, bibelots, mirrors darkened with age. Behind the public spaces, the mystery of the bedrooms, the unknown nature of the daily life of people who had once owned haciendas the size of Belgium, taken away by Zapata, Villa, and Cárdenas. Where did they bathe? How did they cook? How did they survive the catastrophe that had destroyed their world?

But oh how they prayed. That was visible. Every Sunday, just after one, the boys and girls of this “good society” met to go to Mass in La Votiva church on the corner of Génova and Reforma. Later, chatting, flirting, making plans to eat, where? At El Parador de José Luis around the corner on Niza? At Luisito Mun oz’s 1-2-3 on Liverpool? At the Jockey Club at the Américas Hippodrome? At the home of one of those people with picturesquely intimate names-Gifty, Princess, Miss Chubby, Missy, Froggy, Skinny, Cheeky, Diver, Kitty? In Mexico, only aristocrats and thugs were known by their nicknames. What was the name of that highwayman who sliced off the fingers of Danton’s great-grandmother with a machete? The Hunk from where?

Danton explored, calculated, and decided to begin there: one o’clock Mass in the white-and-blue La Votiva, Moorish as a repentant mosque.

The first time, no one turned around to see who he was. The second time, people looked at him with puzzled astonishment. The third time, a tall blond boy came over and asked who he was.

“I’m López.”

“López?”

“Yes, López, the most well-known name in the telephone book.”

That got a laugh out of the boy, who threw his head of wavy hair back, revealing a long neck where his Adam’s apple bounced up and down.

“López! López! López what?”

“Díaz.”

“And? What else?”

“Greene. And Kelsen.”

“Listen, everybody, this guy’s got more last names than all of us put together. Come have lunch at the Jockey. You look picturesque to me.”

“Thanks, but I already have a date. Next Sunday perhaps.”

“Perhaps? You mean the way it is in the bolero, ‘perhaps-perhaps-perhaps.’ You talk like a bolero, I mean like a song, not like a shoeshine boy.”

“And what’s your name, blondie?”

“Blondie! He calls me blondie! People call me the Curate.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because Papa cures people. He’s a doctor. My second last name is Landa. I’m a descendant of the last city governor in the ancien régime. It’s my mother’s name.”

“And what’s your father’s name?”

“No jokes, now.”

“But you’re the one making jokes, sonny.”

“Sonny! He called me sonny! Ha-ha! No, I’m called the Curate, my father’s named López too, just like yours. Now that’s amusing, really amusing! We’re namesakes in reverse! It’s fate! Anastasio López-Landa. Don’t forget next Sunday. You seem like a good guy. But buy yourself a better tie. The ones you’ve been wearing look like a flag.”

What would a “better” tie look like? Whom to ask? The next Sunday, Danton turned up in church in riding clothes, jodhpurs and boots, a coffee-colored jacket, an open shirt. And with a riding crop in his hand.

“Where do you ride? Hmm… What did you say your name was?”

“López, like you. Danton.”

“The guillotine, ha-hal Your parents must really be something!”

“A joke a minute. The Atayde circus hires them when things get rough.”

“Ha-ha-ha, Danton! You’re a real scream, you know,” said the other López, shifting into English.

“Yeah, I’m the cat’s pajamas,” said Danton,. A line from an American movie comedy.

“Listen, everybody, this guy knows everything. He’s the bee’s knees! He’s Tarzan’s mama!”

“Of course. Me Columbus. Cristobal Col��n!”

“And my sons are Crystal Balls, ha-ha! Look, I live right around the corner here on Amberes. Come with me, and I’ll lend you a tie, old sport.”

Danton turned La Votiva and the Jockey into his Sunday obligations, more sacred than taking communion-just to stay on the right side of his new acquaintances-without the benefit of confession.

At first his presence was disconcerting. He made a detailed study of the way the boys dressed. He did not let himself be put off by the girls’ cool manners, though he’d never seen he who knew only eternal mournings and the flowered silk outfits provincial women wore-so many young ladies in suits or kilts with sweaters, a cardigan over a matching sweater, and a pearl necklace on top of everything else. A Spanish girl, María Luisa Elio, attracted attention with her beauty and elegance; she was ash blond, slim as a little bullfighter, in a black beret like Michèle Morgan in the French movies they all went to see at the Trans-Lux Prado, a checked jacket, pleated skirt, and she leaned on an umbrella.

Danton was confident in his potency, his virility, in the very fact that he stood out. He was as dark as a gypsy and hadn’t lost his childhood long eyelashes, which now more than ever shaded his green eyes and olive cheeks, his short nose, and his full, feminine lips. He was about five feet ten and tended to be square, like a sportsman, but with the hands of a pianist-so he’d been told-like those of Aunt Hilda, who played Chopin in Catemaco. Danton would say, rather vulgarly, “These thoroughbred mares need a good branding,” and he’d ask Juan Francisco for money, he couldn’t walk in like a beggar every Sunday, he too had to shoot from time to time, I’ve got new friends, Dad, high-class, you don’t want me to make the whole family look bad, do you? And look, I do my work all week, I never miss an eight o’clock class, I take my exams right on schedule and get A or A minus, I have a good head for economics, I swear, Papa, whatever you lend me now I’ll give back with compound interest, I swear… When have I ever let you down?

The first rows at the Hippodrome were occupied by generals nostalgic for their own, now ancient, cavalry charges; then came big businessmen who’d arrived even more recently than the soldiers, men who’d made their fortunes, paradoxically, with the radical reforms of President Lázaro Cárdenas, thanks to which the peons, who had been locked into their social position, had left the haciendas and worked for almost nothing in new factories in Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Mexico City. Less paradoxically, the new fortunes had been made because of war, monopolies, Mexico’s export of strategic materials, the rising cost of food…

Linking these groups was a small Italian named Bruno Pagliai, smiling and elegant, manager of the racetrack and possessor of an irresistible furberia that dominated, restrained, and shamed the rustic malice of even the most hard-boiled Mexican general or millionaire. Yet there persisted a clear discrimination. The world of La Votiva, of the Curate (López-Landa) and his friends, dominated the bar, the armchairs, the dance floor, and it left to the merely rich the healthy out door life of the racetrack. The sons and daughters of generals and tycoons were also left on the outs: they weren’t taken seriously; they were-as Miss Chatis Larrazábal put it-“not our kind, dear.” But among those who weren’t “our kind,” Danton one day discovered the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen in his life, a dream.

The “dream” was a beauty of a kind not found in Mexico, Levantine or Oriental, from that part of the world that the Malet and Isaac general-history textbooks called “Asia Minor.” Magdalena Ayub Longoria’s “Asia Minor” transformed her apparent defects-continuous eyebrows, prominent nose, square jaw-into a counterpoint or frame for eyes worthy of an Arabian princess, dreamy and velvety, eloquent beneath oiled and erotic eyelids, like a hidden sex. Her smile was so warm, sweet, and ingenuous that it would justify the veil and seraglio concealing her from everyone but her master. She was tall, slim, but she hinted here and there at roundnesses now scarcely imaginable: thus did Danton describe her to himself.

His imagination was on the mark.

The first time he saw her, she was sipping a “Shirley Temple,” and from that moment on he called her “my dream.” Magdalena Ayub was the daughter of a merchant from Syria or Lebanon-Mexicans always referred to them as “Turks”-named Simón Ayub, who’d come to Mexico barely twenty years before and now had a colossal fortune and the most vulgar neo-baroque mansion in Colonia Polanco. How had he accumulated his cash? By taking over markets that had been monopolies in the days of Obregón and Calles and were enhanced during the war by artificially elevated prices: for henequen, an essential rope-making fiber, for the Allies, bought cheap from Yucatán communal farms and sold dear to the gringos; vegetables exported during the winter for Yankee soldiers; pharmaceutical factories set up when gringo medicines stopped coming and anyway could be manufactured more cheaply in Mexico, even introducing sulfa drugs and penicillin. He was the inventor of black thread and perhaps even of aspirin itself! Which is why he was dubbed Aspirin Ayub, recalling, it may be, the Revolutionary general who cured his soldiers’ headaches with a bullet to the forehead.

And even if he was uglier than the wrong end of a mule, he’d married a pretty woman from the north, from some border town, one of those women who could tempt the Pope and make St. Joseph a bigamist. Doña Magdalena Longoria de Ayub. Danton looked her over, because everyone said that after a while your girlfriend starts looking like your mother-in-law-all girlfriends, all mothers-in-law. And big Magdalena, who really was big, passed the test. Danton told the Curate, López-Landa, that she was “ripe” or, more biblically, that her cups overfloweth.

“I swear, Dan, look over there at the mother and the daughter in their box. You tell me which you’d rather have.”

“If I’m lucky, both of them,” said Danton, with a manhattan in one hand and a Pall Mall in the other.

He approached the daughter and succeeded. He asked her to dance. He removed her from the isolation of the new and brought her into the community of the old. He himself was shocked it should be he, Danton López-Díaz (and Greene and Kelsen), who led the fortunate princess by the hand into the exclusive circle of the kings of ruin.

“May I introduce Magdalena Ayub? We’re to be married.”

Her mouth fell open with all the astonishment a nineteen-year-old can muster. The boy was joking. They’d just met.

“Listen, honey. Do you want to go back to your box with your folks to watch the mares run? Or would you like to be a fine mare, as they call these snooty girls over here? Would anyone but me have dared to go over to your box, say hello to your parents, and ask you to dance? What happens next? I who presented you to society, I who am not from society-so you see what the man you’re going to marry is like, my dream-I get what I want. See? And you don’t have the kind of ovaries-dreadful expression, but that’s the kind of fellow I am and you might as well get used to it-to be living alone without me, abandoned in this world. What do you think of that? Do you need me or what, honeybunch?”

They went to dances, danced cheek to cheek, she began allowing him to take “liberties”-to caress her back, her neck, to tickle her smoothly shaved underarm, to nibble her earlobe; then came the first kiss, the second, thousands of kisses, the entreaty, just on the outside, my dream, no, Dan, I’m having my period, just between your legs, my dream, I’ll use my handkerchief, don’t be frightened, yes, my love, oh, my dream, I like you too much, I didn’t know anything about these things, I’d never met anyone like you, how strong you are, how sure of yourself, how ambitious…

“I do have one weakness, Magdalena.”

“What is it, my love?”

“I’ll do anything that will make people admire me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I’ll make you feel someone’s admiring you. I swear. You won’t need anything else.”

Blue moon, I saw you standing alone

Magdalena’s family looked him over from head to toe. Insolently, he did the same to them.

“This house could use a good redecorating,” he declared, looking with disdain at the baroque display of stucco, the false altars, and the wrought iron in the Polanco mansion. “Well, at least when you’re living with me you’ll be surrounded by good taste, my dream.”

“Is that right?” thundered Ayub furiously. “And who’s going to finance all your luxury, my fine little gentleman?”

“Why, you are, my generous father-in-law.”

“My daughter doesn’t require generosity. She requires comfort,” blurted out the northern mother, idiotically haughty

“What your daughter needs is a man who will respect and defend her and not make her feel inferior and isolated, which is what you two have accomplished, bad parents that you are.” Danton strode out, slamming the door so hard that he almost broke the vases adorned with the image of Pope Pius XII blessing the city, the world, and the Ayub Longoria family.

He was to come back. Poor Malenita wouldn’t leave her bedroom. She wouldn’t eat anything. She cried all day long, well, like Mary Magdalene.

“I’m not asking for a handout, Don Simon. Let me, both of you, explain, and please, sir, don’t look at me with that expression of impatience, because it makes me impatient. Control yourself. In this matter, you’re not doing me the great favor. I’m doing you the favor, and I’ll explain why, excuse me… I’m offering your daughter what she isn’t and would like to be. She’s already rich. What she doesn’t have is acceptance. She just isn’t accepted.”

“Now I’ve heard everything. You, you poor devil, are a nobody.”

“Since we’re now speaking familiarly, Don Aspirin, let me tell you something: I’m what you can no longer be. Exactly. I’m what’s coming. The future. For twenty years, you’ve had your way around here. But realize this, dearest father-in-law, you came to this country when Enrico Caruso was singing at El Toreo. Your time is over. The war’s over. Now a new world is coming. We’re not going to be able to monopolize anything anymore. Now there’s going to be surplus production in the United States. We’re not going to be indispensable allies. We’re going back to being dispensable beggars. Am I getting through to you, my Aspirin?”

“Let’s both be polite, Mr. Danton, please.”

“As I was saying. Now either we’re going to live off the internal market or we’re not going to live. Now we have to create wealth right here, as well as the people to buy what we’re going to produce.”

“We? Aren’t you abusing the plural, Danton?”

“We, we who love each other so much, yes, sir, Don Simon, sir. You and I, if you’ll bear with me, if instead of dominating the henequen market and exploiting the poor Mayas, you invest in chains of restaurants, wholesale department stores, the things people consume-cheap soft drinks in a tropical country full of thirsty people, vacuum cleaners to reduce the workload of the lady of the house, refrigerators so food doesn’t spoil instead of those inconvenient iceboxes that melt all over the place, radios to bring entertainment to the poorest of the poor… we’re going to be a middle-class country, don’t you see that? Get with the program, boss, don’t settle for small potatoes.”

“You’re very eloquent, Danton. Go on.”

“Seriously? Furniture, tinned foods, cheap clothes in good taste instead of serapes and huaraches, decent restaurants in gringo style with soda fountains and everything, no more stalls or Chinese-run cafés, cheap cars for everyone, no more buses for the poor and Cadillacs for the rich. Did you know my great-grandfather was German? Well, remember this name. Volkswagen, the people’s car. Let the German factories reopen here, and you buy up the license for VW in Mexico, give half the stock to me, and we’re all home free, Don Aspirin-no more headaches. I swear!”

All of them know each other, Danton explained to Laura, Juan Francisco, and Santiago. But that’s all they know. Themselves, themselves, themselves. I’m going to show them today’s world, those miserable mummies from the age of Don Porfirio. I’ve learned to imitate tones of voice, you know, ways of dressing, verbal crutches like saying “ciao” or “Lord help me” and “voiturette.” I’ve dissected society the way you cut up a steak in a restaurant. Look: I found out with the Lopez-Landa kid that a guy will admire in another guy what he isn’t. That’s what I found out, and what I offered the Jockey Club set was what they aren’t, and that made me interesting to them. I’m offering the same thing to Magdalena, offering her what she isn’t but would like to be, rich but glamorous. I let her know: you aren’t what you could be, my dream, but I’ll make it all come true. The Ayubs thought that they were doing me a big favor and that they could put obstacles in my path. Baloney. In this life, you’ve got to sign your difficulties over to other people as if they were a gift. That’s the big joke.”

“Your mom and dad don’t like me, my dream.”

“I’ll make them like you, Danton.”

“I don’t want to make that kind of trouble for you.”

“It’s no trouble. That will be my gift to you, my love, my Dan…”

Their wealth is cruel, laughed Danton, speaking to his parents and his brother. They’ve been hoarding cash for a day that will never come. They’ve forgotten the reasons why they became rich. I’m going to revive that memory. Now those reasons are mine. Mama, Papa: I’m getting married next month, as soon as I finish my economics degree. I’m a success, why don’t you congratulate me?

My brother dazzles me, said Santiago to Laura, he makes me feel inferior and stupid, he has all the answers ahead of time, while I think of them too late, when it’s all over. Why should I be like that?

She said the two of them were very different. Danton was made for the outside world, but you were made for the interior world, Santiago, where answers don’t have to be instantaneous or charming, because what really matter are the questions.

“And sometimes there are no answers.” Santiago smiled from bed. “Only questions. You’re right.”

“I know, son. But I believe in you.”

He got out of bed with difficulty and went over to his easel. It was hard to tell the tremor of fever from the tremor of creative anticipation. Sitting in front of the canvas, he transmitted that fever, that doubt. Laura watched him and felt him in her own skin. It’s normal, that’s how he’s been since he discovered his artistic vocation. Every day he surprises himself, feels transformed, discovers the other who’s within him.

“I discover him too, Juan Francisco, but I don’t tell him. You should try to be with him a little.”

Juan Francisco shook his head. He didn’t want to admit it, but Santiago lived in a world he didn’t understand. He didn’t know what to say to his own son, they were never close. Wasn’t it a deception to be near him now, because he was sick?

“It’s more than that, Juan Francisco. Santiago isn’t just sick.”

Juan Francisco didn’t understand that being an artist was synonymous with being sick. It was like imagining a double mirror which, while being itself, has two faces, each one reflecting a different reality, sickness and art, not necessarily twin realities but occasionally, yes, fraternal realities. Which came first, which nourished Santiago’s uneasy days, art or sickness?

Laura watched her son as he slept. She liked to be next to the bed when Santiago awakened. What she saw was this: he awakened surprised, but it was impossible to know if it was the surprise of waking up alive or the shock of having one more day to paint.

She felt excluded from that daily choice, and she confessed she’d have liked to be part of what Santiago chose each day: Lauras, my mother, Laura D az is part of my day. She would spend it with him, next to him, she’d given up everything to take care of him, but Santiago did not openly recognize that company, she was only in his company, or, as Laura would say, he let her in but without thanking her.

“Perhaps he’s got nothing to thank me for, and I should understand and respect that.”

One afternoon, he felt strong and asked Laura to help him to the balcony where the family held its afternoon gatherings. He’d lost so much weight that she could have carried him as she hadn’t since he was small, before he went away with Mutti and the aunts in Xalapa. Now the mother could reproach herself for that abandonment, for her spurious reasons-Juan Francisco was beginning his political career, there was no time for the boys, and worse, Laura Díaz was going to live her independent life, her sons were excess baggage like her husband, she was a provincial girl married young to a man seventeen years older than she; it was her turn to live, take risks, learn, was the nun Gloria Soriano merely a pretext for her to leave home? The time with Orlando Ximénez and Carmen Cortina, with Diego and Frida in Detroit, was no time to be carrying around a child who himself carried so much promise, this Santiago with a brow so clear that glory, creation, and beauty could be read there. Never, she swore to herself, would she neglect to take care of this child, who always, always contained all the promise, all the beauty, all the tenderness, and all the creation in the world.

Now the lost time suddenly materialized before her with the face of guilt. Was that why Santiago did not express gratitude: had her maternal care come too late? Being a mother excluded any desire for gratitude or recognition. It should be enough in itself without argument or expectation, like the instant of sufficient tenderness.

Laura sat down with her son opposite the urban landscape. It really was undergoing a transformation: like a forest of proliferating mushrooms, skyscrapers were popping up everywhere, the old cabs were changed for taxis whose meters seemed incomprehensible and made their clients suspicious, the broken-down buses were replaced by gigantic vehicles belching black smoke like bat breath, yellow trolleys with their varnished yellow wooden benches and their route maps were replaced by threatening electric buses that looked like prehistoric beasts.

People no longer came home to eat at two in the afternoon and went back to work at five. They began living the gringo novelty of the unbroken workday. Organ grinders were disappearing, along with ragmen and knife and scissor sharpeners. Street-corner stores and tobacco stands were dying, and the rival telephone companies finally united: Laura remembered Jorge Maura (she barely ever thought of him now) and lost track of what Santiago was saying on the balcony, sitting barefoot in his robe. I love you, city, my city, I love you because you dare to show your soul in your body, I love you because you think with your skin, because you won’t let me see you if I haven’t dreamed you first, like the conquistadors, because even if you’ve been left dry, lake city, you have compassion, and you fill my hands with water when I have to put up with tears, because you let me name you only by seeing you and see you only by naming you, thank you for inventing me so I could try to reinvent you, Mexico City, thank you for letting me speak to you without guitars and colors and bullets, sing to you with promises of dust, promises of wind, promises never to forget you, promises to revive you even if I disappear, promises to name you, promises to see you in the dark, Mexico City, in exchange for a single gift from you: keep on seeing me when I’m no longer here, sitting on the balcony, with my mother next to me…

“To whom are you speaking, son?”

“To your beautiful hands, Mama.”

… To the childhood that was my second mother, to the youth which happens only once, to the nights I shall no longer see, to the dreams I leave her so the city will care for them, to Mexico City which will go on waiting for me forever…

“I love you, city, I love you.”

Laura, leading him back to bed, understood that everything her son was saying to the world he was saying to her. He didn’t have to be explicit; words might betray him. Brought out into the open, a love that could live without words in the deep, moist terrain of daily company might dry out. The silence between the two of them could be eloquent.

“I don’t want to be a pain, I don’t want to be a bother.”

Silence. Tranquillity. Solitude. That’s what unites us, thought Laura, holding Santiago’s burning hand in her own. There is no greater respect or tenderness than that of being together and silent, living together but living the one for the other without ever saying so. With no need to say so. Being explicit might betray that deep tenderness which was only revealed in a skein of complicities, suppositions, and acts of grace.

Laura and Santiago saw all this while he was dying, both of them knowing he was dying, but both accomplices, knowing, and thankful one for the other because the only thing they wordlessly decided to eliminate was compassion. The shining eyes of the boy, sinking deeper and deeper by the day, asked the world and the mother, the two forever identified in the son’s spirit: Who has the right to take pity on me? Don’t betray me with pity… I’ll be a man to the end.

It was hard for her not to feel sorry for her son, not only not showing her sorrow but eliminating it from her spirit and from her very eyes. Not just hiding it, but not having it, because Santiago’s wide-awake, electric senses could detect it instantly. It’s possible to betray with compassion; those were words Laura would repeat as she fell asleep, now every night on a cot next to her feverish and emaciated son, the son of promise, the adored child.

“My son, what do you need, what can I do for you?”

“Nothing, Mama, what can I do for you?”

“You know I wish I could steal all the glories and virtues from the world and give them to you.”

“Thank you. But you already did, didn’t you know?”

“What else? Something else?”

What else. Something else. Sitting on the edge of Santiago’s bed, Laura D az suddenly recalled a conversation between the two brothers she had accidentally overheard when Santiago, who always left his bedroom door open, was, extraordinarily, talking to Danton.

Papa and Mama are all confused about us, surmised Danton, they imagine too many roads for each of us… How good it is our ambitions don’t conflict, replied Santiago, so we don’t take any shortcuts… Even so, Danton persisted, you think your ambition is good and mine is bad, right? No, Santiago made clear, it isn’t that yours is bad and mine good or vice versa; we’re condemned to carry them out, or at least to try to. Condemned? Danton laughed. Condemned?

Now Danton was married to Magdalena Ayub Longoria and was living, as he’d always wished, on Avenida de Los Virreyes in Las Lomas de Chapultepec. He’d been spared the neo-baroque horrors of Polanco but not because of his in-laws’ wishes. Even so, he dreamed of living in a house with straight lines and undistracting geometries. Laura saw her second son less and less. She rationalized that he too was guilty for not visiting her but acknowledged she was anxiously looking after Santiago. She didn’t have to seek him out because there he was, weakened by recurring sicknesses, right at home. He wasn’t her prisoner. Santiago was a young artist with a destiny no one could destroy because it was the destiny of art, of artworks that would ultimately outlive the artist.

Touching Santiago’s fevered forehead, Laura wondered, nevertheless, if this young artist, her son, hadn’t brought together beginning and ending too quickly. The tortured and erotic figures in his paintings weren’t a promise but a conclusion. They weren’t a beginning but, irremediably, an ending. They were all finished works. Understanding that anguished her, because Laura Díaz wanted to see in her son the complete realization of a personality whose felicity depended on his creativity It was unfair that his body was betraying him, and that the body, calamitously, didn’t depend on will-Santiago’s or his mother’s.

But she was in no mood to give up. She watched her abstracted, absorbed son working, painting alone and only for himself, as it should be, whatever the fate of the painting may be, my son is going to reveal his gifts, but will not have time for his conquests, he’s going to work, to imagine, but will not have time to produce: his painting is an inevitability, that’s the reward, my son doesn’t take the place of another, and no one can take his place in what he and he alone can do, it doesn’t matter for how long; there is no frustration in his work, even if his life is cut short, his progress is astonishing, dedicating oneself to art means one revelation after another, going from surprise to surprise.

“Everything good is work,” the young Santiago would say as he painted. “The artist doesn’t exist.”

“You’re an artist,” Laura said boldly to him. “Your brother is a mercenary. That’s the difference.”

Santiago laughed, almost accusing her of being vulgarly obvious.

“No, Mama, it’s good that we’re different instead of being divided from within.”

She repented her banality. She didn’t want to make comparisons, neither critical nor reductive. She wanted to tell him it’s been wonderful watching you grow, change, generate new life, I never want to ask myself, could my son have been great? Because you already are great, I watch you paint, and I see you as if you were going to live to be one hundred, my adored son, I listened to you from the first moment, ever since you asked me without saying a word, mother, father, brother, help me to get what’s inside me out, let me present myself.

She never fully understood that request, especially when she remembered another overheard conversation between the brothers, when Danton told Santiago that the good thing about the body is that it can satisfy us at any moment, and Santiago told him it can also betray us at any moment; and that’s why you’ve got to catch pleasure on the fly, replied Danton, and Santiago: “Other satisfactions cost dearly, you have to work for them,” and then both in one voice: “They escape from us,” followed by a shared fraternal laugh.

Danton was afraid of nothing but sickness and death. That’s true of many men. They can fight hand to hand in a trench but be unable to endure witnessing the pain of childbirth. He sought and found pretexts for not visiting his parents’ house on Avenida Sonora. He preferred to telephone, ask for Santiago even though Santiago hated telephones-the most horrifying distraction ever invented to torture artists, how great it was when he was a boy and there were the two systems, Ericsson and Mexicana, when it was hard to communicate.

He looked at Laura.

That was before the sicknesses followed one after the other ever more rapidly, and the doctors could find no explanation for the boy’s increasing weakness, his low resistance to infection, the incomprehensible wearing down of his immunological system, and what the doctors didn’t say, what only Laura D az said, my son has to live out his own life, I’ll see to that, nothing-not sicknesses, not useless medicines, not medical advice-matters to me, what I must give my son is everything my son should have if he were going to live for a hundred years, I’m going to give my son the love, the satisfaction, the conviction that he lacked nothing in the years of his life, nothing, nothing, nothing.

She watched over him at night as he slept, wondering, what can I save of my son the artist that will last beyond the echo of death? Surprised, she admitted that she wanted not only that her son might have what he deserved but that she, Laura Díaz, might have what her son could give her. He needed to receive. She did, too. She wanted to give. Did he?

Like all painters, Santiago the Younger, when he could still move freely, liked to step back from his paintings, to see them at a certain distance.

“I look for them as if they were lovers, but I re-create them as ghosts.” He tried to laugh.

She answered those words in silence later on, when Santiago could no longer get out of bed, and she had to lie down next to him to console him, to be literally at his side, supporting him. “I don’t want to be deprived of you.”

She didn’t want to be deprived, she meant, of that part of herself that was her son.

“Tell me your plans, your ideas.”

“You speak as if I were going to live a hundred years.”

“A century fits into a day of success,” whispered Laura, with no fear of banality.

Santiago simply laughed. “Is being successful worthwhile?”

“No,” she surmised. “Sometimes absence, silence are better.”

Laura was not going to compile a list of things a boy of great talent, dying at the age of twenty-six, was not going to do, to know, to enjoy. The young painter was like a frame without a painting which she would have liked to fill with her own experiences and with their shared promises, she would have liked to bring her son to Detroit to see Diego’s mural in the Arts Institute, she would have liked both of them to go to the legendary museums, the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Mauritshuis, the Prado.

She would have wanted…

Sleeping with you, entering your bed, extracting from nearness and dreams the forms, visions, challenges, the very strength I wish I could give you when I touch you, when I whisper in your ear, your final weakness threatens me more than it does you and I want to test your strength, tell you that your strength and mine depend on each other, that my caresses, Santiago, are your caresses, those you didn’t have, will never have, accept my nearness, accept the body of your mother, do nothing, son, I bore you, I carried you inside me, I am you and you are me, what I do is what you would do, your heat is my heat, my body is your body, do nothing, I’ll do it for you, say nothing, I’ll say it for you, forget this night, I’ll remember it always for you.

“My son, what do you need, what can I do for you?”

“Nothing, Mama, what can I do for you?”

“You know I wish I could steal all the glories and virtues from the world and give them to you.”

“Thank you. But you already did, didn’t you know?”

They wouldn’t say it, ever. Santiago loved as if he were dreaming. Laura dreamed as if she were loving. Their bodies became again as they were at the beginning, the seed of each one in the womb of the other. She was reborn in him. He killed her in one single night. She did not want to think about anything. She allowed fugitive, whirling, lost images to pass through her mind, the perfume of the rain in Xalapa, the tree of smoke in Catemaco, the jewel-encrusted goddess in El Zapotal, the bloody hands washing themselves in the river, the green stick in the desert, the araucaria tree in Veracruz, the river flowing with a shriek into the Gulf, the five chairs on the balcony opposite Chapultepec, the six place settings and the napkins rolled up in their silver rings, the doll Li Po, Santiago her brother sinking dead into the sea, the severed fingers of Grandmother Cosima, the arthritic fingers of Aunt Hilda trying to play the piano, the ink-stained fingers of the poet aunt, Virginia, the urgent busy fingers of Mutti Leticia preparing a huachinango in the Catemaco, the Veracruz, the Xalapa kitchens, Auntie’s swollen feet dancing danzones in the Plaza de Armas, Orlando’s open arms inviting her to waltz at the hacienda, the love of Jorge, love, love…

“Thank you. Didn’t you know?”

“What else? Something else.”

“Don’t leave the birdcages open.”

“They’d come back. They are good and loving birds.”

“But cats aren’t like that.”

She hugged him tight. She did not close her eyes, hugging her son. She looked around, the white frames, the already finished paintings leaning one against the other like sleeping infantrymen, an army of colors, a parade of possible looks that would be able or never would be able to give their momentary life to the canvas, each one the owner of a double existence, that of being looked at and not.

“I dreamed about what happens to the paintings when they lock up the museums and they’re left alone all night.”

That was Santiago the Younger’s theme. The naked couples that look at each other and never touch, as if they knew, modestly, they were being looked at. The bodies in his paintings were not beautiful, not classical, they had a certain emaciated, even demonic aspect. They were a temptation, not that of coupling but that of being seen, surprised, in the moment of constituting themselves as a couple. That was their beauty, expressed in pale gray or very tenuous rose tones, where the flesh stood out like an intrusion unforeseen by God, as if in the artistic world of Santiago, God had not conceived of this intruder, his rival, the human being.

“Don’t think I’m just resigning myself to not living. I’m not. resigning myself to not working. I don’t know, for days now, the sun hasn’t shone on my head in the morning as it used to before. Would you open the curtains, Mama?”

After opening the curtains so the light would come in, Laura turned around to look at Santiago’s bed. Her son was no longer there. All that remained was a silent lament floating in the air.