The Years with Laura Diaz

Colonia Roma: 1957

1.

WHEN AN EARTHQUAKE SHOOK Mexico City in July 1957, Laura Díaz was staring out at the night from the roof ter race of her old house on Avenida Sonora. Breaking her own rule, she was smoking a cigarette. In honor of Harry. He’d died three years before, but her devout love had left her full of unanswered questions, had burdened her with blocked mental horizons. Her heart was still alive, but she had no man and had lost the one she loved. Also, she’d just turned fifty-nine.

The memory filled her days and sometimes, as now, her nights. Ever since Harry’s death and her return to Mexico City, she was sleeping less than she once had. The fate of her American lover obsessed her. She did not want to classify Harry Jaffe as a failure, because she didn’t want to blame his failure either on McCarthyite persecution or on his own internal collapse. She didn’t want to admit that persecution or no persecution Harry had stopped writing because he had had nothing to say. He’d taken refuge in the witch-hunt.

Her doubts persisted. Did the persecution begin just when Harry’s abilities failed him, or had he already lost them? Then was the persecution a mere pretext to turn sterility into heroism? It wasn’t his fault. He wanted to die in Spain, at the Jarama with his buddy Jim, when ideas and life were identical for him, when nothing separated them, when, Laura, I didn’t suffer this damned alienation…

From the terrace, as she thought about her poor Harry, Laura Díaz could contemplate, on her left, the dark tide of the sleeping forest, its treetops undulating like the breathing in and out of an ancient sleeping monarch on his throne of trees and crowned by his stone castle.

To the right, far away, the gilded Angel of Independence added to its own painted gleam the glow of spotlights outlining its air-borne silhouette, golden damsel of the Porfirio Díaz era disguised as a Greek goddess but representing, like a celestial transvestite, the virile angel of a feminine saga, Independence… The he/she Angel held up a laurel branch in his/her right hand, stretched his/her wings, and began a flight-but not the one intended, a flight that instead was catastrophic, brutal, and abrupt, from the top of the airy column into the very air, then crashing into shattered pieces at the base of its own pedestal, a fall like Lucifer’s, the ruined he/she Angel vanquished by the shaking earth.

Laura Díaz saw the Angel fall and-who knows why?-thought that it wasn’t the Angel but Antonieta Rivas Mercado, who had posed mythically for the sculptor Enrique Alciati, never imagining that one day her beautiful effigy, her entire body, would fall to pieces at the foot of the slender commemorative column. She watched the treetops ebb and flow and she watched the Angel fall but, more than anything else, she felt her own house creaking, snapping apart like the Angel’s wings, breaking into pieces like a fried tortilla between the teeth of the monstrous city-where she’d toured with Orlando Ximénez one night to see the face of its true misery, the invisible misery, the most horrible of all, the misery that didn’t dare show itself because it could beg for nothing, and because no one would give it anything anyway.

She waited for the earthquake to wear itself out.

The best thing to do was to stay where she was. There was no other way to fight that underground force, one had to resign oneself to it and then overcome it with its mirror opposite: immobility.

She’d only once before experienced a serious tremor, in 1943, when the city quavered because of an extraordinary event: as a peasant in Michoacán was plowing his field, smoke began to pour out of a hole, and out of the hole emerged, in just a few hours, as if the earth had really borne it, a baby volcano, Paricutín, vomiting stone, lava, sparks. Every night its glow was visible from farther and farther away. The Paricutín phenomenon was amusing, astonishing, but comprehensible precisely because so bizarre (the name of the place was unpronounceably Tarascan: Paranguaritécuaro, abbreviated to Paricutín). A country where a volcano can appear overnight, out of nowhere, is a country where anything can happen…

The 1957 earthquake was crueler, faster, dry, and it slashed the sleeping body of Mexico City like a machete. When calm returned, Laura carefully walked down the cast-iron circular stairs to the bedroom floor and found things scattered every which way: armoires and drawers, toothbrushes, glasses and soaps, pumice stones and sponges, and on the ground floor pictures hung at crazy angles, not a single light burning, plates broken, parsley knocked over, bottles of Electropura water smashed in pieces.

It was worse outside. When she stepped out onto the street, Laura could see the full and savage damage the house had suffered. The facade looked not so much smashed as if it had been slashed with a knife, peeled like an orange, uninhabitable…

The earthquake woke up the ghosts. The telephone worked. While Laura was eating a bean-and-sardine snack and having some grape juice, she had calls from Danton and Orlando.

She hadn’t seen her younger son since Juan Francisco’s wake, when she’d scandalized her daughter-in-law’s family and especially her daughter-in-law, Magdalena Ayub Longoria.

“I couldn’t care less what that bunch of snobs think,” Laura told her son.

“It doesn’t matter,” answered Danton. “Water and oil, you know… but don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

“Thank you. I wish we could see each other.”

“So do I.”

In the eyes of her in-laws the scandal grew when Laura went off to Cuernavaca with a gringo Communist, but Danton’s money was always there, punctually and abundantly. It was their agreement, and there was nothing more to say. Until the day of the earthquake.

“Are you all right, Mama?”

“I’m all right. The house is a ruin.”

“I’ll send builders around to look it over. Move into a hotel and then call me so I can take care of things.”

“Thanks. I’ll go to Diego Rivera’s.”

There was an uncomfortable silence, and then Danton, in a cheery voice, said, “The things that happen. The roof collapsed on top of Doña Carmen Cortina. While she was sleeping. Did you know her? Just imagine. Buried in her own bed, as flat as a pancake. Mexico, beautiful and adored! as the song goes. They say she was the life of the party back in the 1930s.”

A little while later, the telephone rang again, and Laura flinched. She remembered the two different telephone companies, Ericsson and Mexicana, with different lines and numbers, complicating everyone’s life, when she had Mexicana and Jorge Maura had Ericsson. Now there was only one telephone company, so today’s lovers, Laura thought nostalgically, were missing the excitement of the game, the telephone as disguise.

As if to put off the insistent caller, Laura tried to think about everything that had come into the world since her grandfather Philip Kelsen had left Germany in 1864: moving pictures, radio, cars, planes, telephones, telegraphs, television, penicillin, mimeograph machines, plastic, Coca Cola, long-playing records, nylon stockings…

Perhaps the sense of being in a catastrophe reminded her of Jorge Maura, and she began to associate the ringing phone with her own heartbeats and hesitated for a few moments. She was afraid to pick up the receiver. “Laura?” She tried to recognize the baritone voice, deliberately high pitched to sound more English, who greeted her saying, “It’s Orlando Ximénez speaking. You’ve heard about Carmen Cortina’s tragedy. She was crushed to death. While she was asleep. The roof fell in on her. We’re holding a wake for her in Gayosso’s, over on Sullivan Street. I thought, well, for old times’ sake…”

The man who stepped out of the taxi at seven that evening said hello from the edge of the sidewalk and then came toward her with an uncertain gait and a mobile smile, as if his mouth were a radio dial searching for the right station.

“Laura. It’s me, Orlando. Don’t you recognize me? Look.” He laughed as he showed her his hand and his gold ring with the initials OX. There was no other way she would have recognized him. He was totally bald and made no effort to hide it. The strange thing-the serious thing, Laura said to herself-was that the extreme smoothness of his skull, bare as a baby’s backside, contrasted brutally with his infinitely wrinkled face, crisscrossed by tiny lines running in all directions. A face that was an insane compass rose, its cardinal points not at north, east, south, and west but scattered in every direction, a cobweb with no symmetry.

Orlando Ximénez’s white skin and blond looks had put up a poor defense against the passage of the years; the wrinkles on his face were as uncountable as furrows in a field plowed for centuries and yielding poorer and poorer crops. Even so, he maintained the distinction of a slim, well-dressed body, with a double-breasted glen plaid suit and a black tie appropriate for the occasion, and-the coquettish touch, inveterate in him-a Liberty handkerchief peeking sans façon from his breast pocket. “Only vulgarians and men from Toluca wear matching ties and handkerchiefs,” he’d once said to her years before in San Cayetano and in the Hotel Regis.

“Laura dear,” he said, speaking first, seeing that she hadn’t recognized him right away, and after planting two fugitive little kisses on her cheeks, stepping back to observe her, keeping hold of her hands. “Let me get a look at you.”

He was the same old Orlando: he’d never let her have an advantage he could take for himself. Without a word from her, he went on, “How you’ve changed, Laura,” before she could blurt out, “How you’ve changed, Orlando.”

On the way to Sullivan Street (who the devil was Sullivan? An English composer of operettas? But he was always linked like a Siamese twin to Gilbert, the way Ortega was joined to Gasset, joked irrepressible Orlando), Laura’s old sweetheart spoke of Carmen Cortina’s horrible death and the mystery that had always surrounded her. The famous hostess of the 1930s, the woman whose energy had saved Mexican society from a drowsy convulsion (if you could say such a thing; I agree, it’s an oxymoron, Orlando said, smiling), had been bedridden for years with phlebitis, which immobilized her. The question was, could Carmen Cortina have gotten out of bed to save herself from the collapse, or did her physical prison condemn her to watch while the ceiling fell on her and crushed her? Well, well, why worry about the fine points? Like the cucaracha in the song, she just couldn’t walk…

“But I am a chatterbox,” he said in English, “forgive me.” Orlando laughed, caressing Laura Díaz’s bare fingers with his gloved hand.

Only when they stepped out of the taxi on Sullivan Street did he take her by the arm and whisper in her ear, don’t be frightened, Laura dear, you’re going to find all our old friends from twenty-five years ago, but you won’t recognize them. If you’re in doubt, just squeeze my arm-don’t let go of me, je t’en prie-and I’ll whisper in your ear who’s who.

“Have you read Proust’s The Past Recaptured? No? Well, it’s the same situation. The narrator returns to a Parisian salon thirty years later and no longer recognizes the intimate friends of his youth. Face to face with the old marionettes, says Proust’s narrator, he has to use not only his eyes but his memory. Old age is like death, he adds. Some face it with indifference, not because they’re braver than the rest but because they have less imagination.”

Orlando made a show of looking for the name Carmen Cortina on the chapel directory.

“Of course, the difference between us and Proust is that he finds old age and the passage of time in an elegant salon in French high society, while you and I, proudly Mexican, find them in a funeral parlor.”

There was no intrusive smell of flowers to nauseate the guests at the wake. So the perfumes on the women asserted themselves all the more offensively. They were like the last clouds in a sky about to fade forever into night, as one by one they passed before Carmen Cortina’s open coffin, where she lay as reconstructed by the mortician, put back together piece by minute piece, looking neither like herself nor like any living being seen before. She was a window-display dummy, as if her turbulent career as a social hostess had prepared her for this final moment, this last act in what had been in life a permanent stage show: a mannequin reposing on white silk cushions under clear plastic, hair carefully tinted mahogany, cheeks smooth and pink, mouth obscenely swollen and half open in a smile that seemed to lick death as if it were a lollipop, nose stuffed with cotton balls, to keep what remained of Carmen’s vital juices from leaking out, eyes closed-but without the glasses that as hostess she had wielded with the wisdom of the elegantly blind-as if they were darts, or a replacement finger, or an exhausted pennant, or a menacing stiletto, but always as the baton with which Carmen Cortina conducted her brilliant social operetta.

Without those glasses Laura Díaz did not recognize Carmen. She was on the verge of suggesting to Orlando-caught up in her first boyfriend’s unshakably festive tone-that some charitable soul should put glasses on the cadaver. Carmen was quite capable of opening her eyes. Of coming back to life. Now Laura failed to recognize a woman with a mother-of-pearl complexion and overflowing corpulence who was being pushed along in a wheelchair by the painter Tizoc Ambriz, recognizable because his picture appeared so frequently on the culture and society pages, though he was transformed, given the color, tautness, and texture of his skin, into a scaly black-and-silver sardine. Thin and small, he was dressed, as always, in blue denim-trousers, shirt, and jacket-as if to stand out while at the same time, in contradiction, imposing a fashion.

He devoutly pushed the wheelchair of the woman with drowsy eyes, invisible eyebrows, hut-Oh! exclaimed Orlando-no longer a face of perfect symmetry with that eternal maturity which presumes eternal youth, as she had been thirty years earlier, at the very edge of an opulence that Laura’s companion had once compared to a piece of fruit at the peak of ripeness, freshly cut from the branch.

“It’s Andrea Negrete. Don’t you remember the vernissage of her portrait by Tizoc in Carmen’s little flat? She was nude-in the painting of course-with two white streaks at her temples and her pubis also painted white, bragging about having gone gray in the groin-can you imagine. Dear, dear, now she doesn’t have any use for dye.”

“Eat me,” Andrea whispered to Orlando as they entered the room where a priest was leading the prayer for the dead in front of a dozen of Carmen Cortina’s friends.

“Eat me.”

“Peel me.”

“You vulgarian,” laughed the actress, while the whisper of Lux per petua luceat eis vaguely drowned out the comments and gossip.

The painter Tizoc Ambriz, on the other hand, had lost all facial expression. He was an idol, a diminutive Tezcatlipoca, Puck of the Aztecs, condemned to wander like a ghost through the bewitched nights of México-Tenochtitlán.

Tizoc looked toward the entrance, where a tall, dark young man with curly hair was coming in with a woman on his arm, a woman swollen in every roll of her obesity and reworked in every centimeter of her epidermis. She made her way forward proudly, even impertinently, on the arm of her ephebe, showing off how light her step was despite the immensity of her weight. She sailed like a galleon in Spain’s Invincible Armada over the tempestuous seas of life. Her tiny feet supported a solid fleshly sphere crowned by a minuscule head with blond curls framing a sculpted, surgically enhanced, restored, composed, replaced, and displaced face-stretched like a balloon about to burst yet lacking expression, a pure mask fixed by invisible pins around her ears and stitched under a chin that had eliminated the double chin visibly struggling to be reborn.

“Laura, Laura dearest!” exclaimed this nightmare apparition wrapped in black veils and dripping with jewelry. My God, who can it be? Laura asked herself. I don’t remember her! Then she realized that the scarred blimp wasn’t greeting her but was lightly making her way to someone behind her, and Laura turned to follow this living advertisement for face-lifts and saw her kiss on both cheeks a woman who was her opposite, a thin, small lady in a black suit, with pearls and a tiny pillbox hat from which hung a black veil so close to her skin that it seemed an integral part of her face.

“Laura Rivière, how happy I am to see you,” exclaimed the scarfaced fatty.

“What a pleasure, Elizabeth,” answered Laura Rivière, discreetly drawing away from the exuberant Elizabeth García-Dupont, formerly Caraza. Laura Díaz was astonished: it was her adolescent pal in Xalapa, whose mother, Doña Lucía Dupont, had said, Girls, never show your boobs, as she stuffed Elizabeth into her old-fashioned ball gown, rose-colored with layer upon layer of infinitely floating tulle…

(Laura has no problems because she’s flat, Mama, but I…

(Elizabeth, child, don’t shame me.

(There’s nothing to be done about it. God, with your help, made me this way.)

She hadn’t recognized Laura just as Laura hadn’t recognized her, either because Laura-glancing at herself in the mortuary mirror-had changed just as much, or perhaps Elizabeth actually had recognized her but didn’t want to say hello because resentment, however old, was still alive. Or perhaps to avoid comparisons, lies, you haven’t changed a bit! How do you do it? Made a pact with the devil? The last time, in Ciro’s in the Hotel Reforma, Elizabeth had looked like an anorexic mummy.

Laura Díaz waited for Elizabeth Garcia to separate from Laura Rivière before approaching her namesake, offering her hand, receiving one that was dry, fine, and then she tried to recognize her in the depth of the black veil, in the very well-cared-for white skin below the cylindrical, low hat crowning her head instead of the languid ash-blond hair-cut of her youth.

“I’m Laura Díaz.”

“I’ve been waiting for you. You promised to call me.”

“I’m sorry. You told me to save myself.”

“Did you think I couldn’t help you?”

“You told me yourself, remember? It’s too late for me. I’m a prisoner. My body’s been captured by routine.”

“But if I could escape from my own body…” Laura Rivière smiled. “I detest it. That’s what I told you, you probably remember…”

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you.”

“So am I.”

“You know? We might have been friends.”

“Hélas.” Laura Rivière sighed. Then she turned away from Laura Díaz with a melancholy smile.

“She really loved Artemio Cruz,” Orlando Ximénez confided to Laura as he took her back to Avenida Sonora, threading their way through the rubble of the city. “She was a woman obsessed by light, lamps, light in interiors, yes, the proper arrangement of lamps, the exact wattage, how to illuminate faces. She’s her own self-portrait.”

(I can’t go on, my love. You have to choose.

(Be patient, Laura. Just realize… Don’t force me…

(To do what? Are you afraid of me?

(Aren’t we fine just as we are? Is something missing?

(Who knows? Artemio. It may well be that nothing’s missing.

(I didn’t deceive you. I didn’t force you.

(I didn’t transform you, which is different. You’re not ready. I’m getting tired.

(I love you. As I did the first day.

(It’s no longer the first day. No longer. Make the music louder.)

As she was getting out of the taxi, Orlando tried to kiss her. Laura felt the touch of those wrinkled lips, the nearness of that skin which looked like graph paper, like a weak, pink piece of meat on the grill. And she felt it repellent. She pushed him away, disgusted and shocked.

“I love you, Laura. As I did the first day.”

“It’s not the first day anymore. Now we know each other. Far too well. Goodbye, Orlando.”

And the mystery? Will they both die without Orlando’s ever revealing his secrets? Orlando, intimate friend of the first Santiago in Veracruz; Orlando, seducer of Laura because of that; mysterious mailman between the invisible anarchist Armonía Aznar and the world; Orlando, her lover and her Virgil in the infernal circles of Mexico City. It was impossible to attribute any mystery whatsoever to this out-of-fashion lounge lizard, mummified and banal, who had gone with her to Carmen Cortina’s wake, to the burial of an entire era in the history of Mexico City. She preferred to hold on to the mystery. The homage to “old times” nevertheless left Laura with a bitter taste in her mouth.

The electricity had been restored. She began to pick up fallen objects, pots and pans in the kitchen; she straightened up the dining room, then especially the living room, and the balcony where, when the family reconciled after Laura Díaz’s passion for Jorge Maura, she and her husband Juan Francisco, her sons Santiago and Danton, and the ancient auntie from Veracruz, María de la O, had watched the afternoons fade in the Bosque de Cohapultepec. She replaced the books knocked off their shelves. Out from between the pages of Bertram D. Wolfe’s biography of Diego Rivera had fallen the photograph Laura Díaz took of Frida Kahlo the day she died, July 13, 1954. The day Laura left Harry Jaffe alone in Tepoztlán and raced to the Riveras’ house in Coyoacán.

“Here,” Harry said, handing her a Leica. “I used it to take stills in Hollywood. Don’t come back without bringing me Frida Kahlo dead.”

She had restrained the rage Harry sometimes aroused in her. Frida was dying, amputated and ill, but even on her deathbed she’d gone on painting-right to the last moment. Harry was dying in a tropical valley, but he was too cowardly to pick up pen and paper. The main reason why Laura took the photo of Frida’s body was to show it to Harry and tell him, “She never stopped creating, not even on the day she died.”

But now Harry, too, was dead. So was Carmen Cortina, and the rage Laura felt toward Harry, like the sense of absurdity she felt seeing Carmen Cortina’s embalmed body, was turning, as she stared at the photo of Frida dead, into something more than love or admiration.

In her coffin, Frida Kahlo showed off her black hair braided with colored ribbons. Her ring-covered fingers and her arms laden with bracelets rested on a bosom decked out for the final journey in sumptuous necklaces of thin gold and silver from Morelia. Her pendant earrings of green turquoise no longer hung from her earlobes but lay at rest like her, mysteriously retaining the dead woman’s final warmth.

Frida Kahlo’s face did not change in death. Her eyes were closed but seemed alert, thanks to the inquisitive vivacity of her thick unbroken eyebrows, her trademark, that dangerous and fascinating whip. The thickness of her brows did not succeed in masking Frida’s mustache, the notorious and notable down on her upper lip that made you think that a penis, the twin of Diego’s, might be trying to spring up between her legs to confirm the probability, not just the illusion, that she was a hermaphrodite, and parthenogenic to boot, able to fertilize herself and generate with her own semen the new being that her feminine half would bear thanks to the vigor of her masculine half.

That’s how Laura Díaz photographed her, for Laura thought she was taking the picture of an inert body, not realizing that Frida Kahlo had already set out on the journey to Mictlan, the Mexican Indian underworld you can reach only if you are guided by three hundred ixcuintles, those hairless dogs Frida collected which now, motherless, were howling disconsolately on the patios and in the kitchens and on the roof terraces of the funeral home.

Frida Kahlo’s recumbent position was a deception. She was heading for Mictlan, an inferno that resembled a painting by Frida Kahlo but without the blood, the spines, and the martyrdom, without the operating rooms, the scalpels, the steel corsets, the amputations, without the fetuses-a hell only of flowers, of warm rains and hairless dogs, a hell piled high with pineapples, strawberries, oranges, mangos, guanábanas, mameys, lemons, papayas, zapotes, where she would arrive on foot, humble and haughty at the same time, with a sound body, cured, prior to hospitals, virgin of all accidents, greeting Señor Xolotl, ambassador of the Universal Republic of Mictlan, Chancellor and Plenipotentiary Minister of Death, that is, of THIS PLACE. How do you do, Señor Xolotl: that’s what Frida would be saying as she entered hell.

She entered hell. From her house in Coyoacán they took her, dead, to the National Palace of Fine Arts. There she was draped with the Communist flag, an act that led to the dismissal of the Institute director. Then she was brought to the crematorium: she was put into the oven-all decked out, dressed, bejeweled, with beribboned hair, the better to burn. And when the flames sprang up, Frida Kahlo’s body sat up, sat up as if she were going to chat with her oldest friends, the Caps group whose practical jokes had scandalized the National Preparatory School in the 1920s; as if she were getting ready to talk once again with Diego; that’s how Frida’s body sat up, animated by the crematorium flames. Her hair flamed like a halo. She smiled one last time at her friends, and dissolved.

All that remained to Laura Díaz was the photo she had taken of Frida Kahlo’s cadaver. It showed that death for Kahlo was a way to distance herself from everything ugly in this world, not to avoid it but to see it better; to discover the affinity of Frida, woman and artist, not with beauty but with truth.

She was dead, but through her closed eyes passed all the pain of her paintings, the horror more than the pain, according to some observers. No, in Laura Díaz’s photo, Frida Kahlo was the conduit of the pain and ugliness of hospitals, miscarriages, gangrene, amputations, drugs, immobile nightmares, the company of the devil, the wounded passage to a truth that becomes beautiful because it identifies our being with our essence, not with our appearance.

Frida gives form to the body: Laura photographed it.

Frida gathers together what is scattered: Laura photographed that integration.

Frida, like an all too infrequent phoenix, rises when touched by fire.

She was reborn to go off with the hairless dogs to the other neighborhood, to the land of Madam Baldy, La Pelona, Miss Toothy, La Dientona, Lady Toasty, La Tostada, Mistress Fancy, La Catrina, Charley’s Aunt.

She went dressed up for a party in Paradise.

2.

With the photo of dead Frida in one hand and the camera Harry had given her in the other, Laura looked at herself in the mirror of her new apartment on Plaza Rio de Janeiro, where she moved after the earthquake had made the old house on Avenida Sonora uninhabitable. Danton, who owned it, decided to demolish it and build in its place a twelve-story condominium.

“I thought your father and I were the owners of our home,” said Laura in surprise but under no illusions, the day Danton visited her to explain the new order of things.

“The property’s been mine for a long time,” answered Laura’s younger son.

The mother’s shock was an act; the real surprise was the physical change that had taken place in the thirty-five-year-old man she hadn’t seen since Juan Francisco’s funeral, when Laura’s in-laws ostracized her.

It wasn’t the few gray hairs at his temples or his slightly larger potbelly that had changed Danton but his insolent mien, a display of power he couldn’t hide, not even in the presence of his mother, although, perhaps-precisely-he exaggerated it because she was there. Everything, from his hair, which he wore in the same cut Marlon Brando had in Julius Caesar, to the charcoal-gray suit, the narrow English regimental tie, right down to his black Gucci loafers, affirmed power, self-confidence, the habit of being obeyed.

With nervous self-assurance, Danton stretched out his arms to show his ruby-colored cuff links.

“I’ve got my eye on a sweet apartment for you in Polanco, Mother.”

No, she insisted, I want to stay in Colonia Roma.

“It’s getting polluted very fast. The traffic congestion will be terrible. Besides, it’s out of fashion. And it’s where the earthquakes hit hardest.”

And for all those reasons I want to live here.

“Do you know what a condominium is? The one I’m building is the first in Mexico. It’s going to be the fashion. Vertical property is the future of this city, guaranteed. You should get in on it before it’s too late. Besides, those apartments you like in the Plaza aren’t for sale. They’re rentals.”

Precisely. She wanted to pay her own rent from now on, without his help.

“What are you going to live on?”

“How old do you think I am?”

“Don’t be so stubborn, Mother.”

“I thought my house belonged to me. Do you have to buy everything to be happy? Let me be happy in my own way.”

“Dying of hunger?”

“Independent.”

“Okay, but call if you need me.”

“Likewise.”

With the Leica in her hands, Laura Díaz reacted in the same way to the dissimilar deaths of first Frida Kahlo and then Carmen Cortina in the year of the earthquake. Orlando made her remember the invisible, lost city of an asphyxiating misery and degradation that he had taken her to see that night after the penthouse party on Paseo de la Reforma. Now, camera in hand, Laura walked the streets in the heart of Mexico City and found them simultaneously crowded and abandoned. Not only did she fail to find that lost city, the true beggars’ paradise, where Orlando had taken her to convince her that there was no hope, but she discovered that the visible city of the 1930s was now the real invisible or, at the least, abandoned, city, left behind by the incessant outward expansion of the capital. The first block around the Zócalo, great center of the city’s celebrations since the time of the Aztecs, wasn’t empty-there were no open spaces in Mexico City-but it had ceased to be the center and was just another neighborhood, the oldest and in a certain way the most prestigious because of its history and architecture. Now a new center was springing up around the fallen Angel of Independence, on both sides of Paseo de la Reforma, neighborhoods named either for rivers or for foreign cities: urban Colonia Juárez and fluvial Colonia Cuauhtémoc.

Two thousand new people a day were moving into Mexico City, sixty thousand new inhabitants a month fleeing hunger, arid farmland, injustice, unpunished crime, brutal political bosses, and indifference; the capital, meanwhile, was alluring, with its promises of well-being, even beauty. Didn’t the beer ads promise top-caliber blondes, and weren’t all the characters in the ever more popular television soap operas also blond, rich, well-dressed upper-class types?

For Laura, none of this answered her questions about the unstoppable migratory flow: Where did these people come from? What was their final destination? How did they live? Who were they?

That was Laura Díaz’s first great photo-essay. It summed up the experience of a lifetime-her provincial origins, her life as a young married woman, her two experiences of motherhood, her loves and what her loves brought her: the Spanish world of Maura, the terrible memory of Raquel’s martyrdom in Buchenwald, the merciless execution of Pilar at the walls of Santa Fe de Palencia, McCarthy’s persecution of Harry, the double death of Frida Kahlo, first immobile death and then resuscitation by fire-she poured it all into a single image taken in one of the nameless cities springing up like loose threads and patches on the great embroidered sackcloth that was Mexico City.

Lost cities, anonymous cities built on the outskirts of the dry valley, amid rocky fields and mesquite trees, with houses nailed together any which way, caves made of cardboard and flattened tin cans, dirt floors, poisoned water, and dying candles (until the people’s ingenuity discovered a technique for stealing electricity from streetlights and the pylons supporting high-tension power cables).

Which is why the first photograph Laura Díaz took, after Frida Kahlo’s body, was of the fallen Angel, the statue smashed to pieces at the foot of its slender column, the bodiless wings, the split, blinded face of the model who, according to legend, posed for it, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, who years after went to Notre Dame in Paris to commit suicide in front of an altar because of her love for the philosopher José Vasconcelos, Mexico’s first Minister of Education. Vasconcelos’ memoir, Ulises Criollo, had caused a sensation in 1935 because of its frankness, and Orlando, in one of his most felicitous remarks, said, “It’s a book you have to read standing up.”

When she photographed the broken figure of the Angel who was the philosopher’s lover, Laura Díaz had to measure the seasons-in a city of “perpetual spring” that seemed never to have one. She realized she hadn’t really taken notice of how the years had passed. The city has no seasons. January is cold. Dust storms in February. March blazes. It rains in summer. In October, the storms remind us that appearances are deceiving. December is transparent. January is cold.

She thought about the years she’d lived in Mexico City and began to superimpose Vasconcelos’ various faces on them-from the young, romantic student to the dashing intellectual guerrillero of the Revolution, to the noble educator with the interminable forehead who commissioned Diego Rivera to paint murals, to the Bergsonian philosopher of élan vital, to the Americanist of the “cosmic race,” to the presidential candidate who opposed the Maximum Chief Calles and his court jester Luis Napoleon Morones, the man who’d corrupted Juan Francisco, to the resentful exile who ended up, old and choleric, praising Franco and fascism and ordering his own books expurgated.

Vasconcelos was the mutable and dramatic image of revolutionary Mexico, and his fallen lover, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Angel of Independence, was the fixed, symbolic supernatural image of the nation in whose name the heroes who venerated her had fought, the same ones who’d fucked her. Today, both the philosopher and his angel were in ruins, in a city that neither would recognize and that Laura went out to photograph.

Laura was sleeping differently. Before, she had dreamed without reflecting but with concern. Now there was neither reflection nor concern. She slept as if everything had already happened. She slept like an old lady.

She reacted. She wanted to sleep again as if nothing had happened, as if her life would only begin when she woke up, as if love were still a pain unknown to her. She wanted to wake up with a desire to see anew each morning and to file what she was seeing in the most precise place in her feelings, where heart and head joined forces. Before, she’d seen without seeing. She didn’t know what to do with her everyday images, the daily coins that each day put in her empty hands.

Laura Díaz began to ask herself, What will I do next year? Before, when she was young, everything was unforeseen, natural, necessary, and, despite everything, pleasant. But Frida’s death especially made her remember her own past as if it were a blurry photo. The earthquake, seeing Orlando again, and the death of Carmen made her think, Can I give the past its lost focus, its absent clarity?

The city and death woke her up. Mexico surrounded her like a great, sleeping serpent. Laura woke next to the heavy breathing of the serpent that wrapped around her but did not suffocate her. She woke up and photographed the serpent.

She had photographed Frida dead. Now she photographed the family house on Avenida Sonora before it was demolished as her son had ordered. She photographed the splintered facade and the condemned interiors, too, the garage where Juan Francisco parked the car the CROM labor union had given him, the dining room where her husband had met with labor leaders, the living room where she would wait, patient as a Creole Penelope, for the moment of grace and solitude when her husband returned home, the threshold where the persecuted nun Gloria Soriano sought refuge, and the kitchen where Auntie María de la O maintained the traditions of Veracruz cuisine-the aromas of chile chipotle, purslane, and cumin still permeated the walls. Then there was the hot-water tank fueled by yellowed newspapers where all the figures of power, crime, and entertainment were gradually consumed, where the flames devoured Calles and Morones, Lombardo and Avila Camacho, Trotsky and Ramón Mercader, the murderer Chinta Aznar and the insane rapist and murderer Sobera de la Flor, the pudgy Roberto Soto and Cantinflas, Meche Barba the rumba dancer and Jorge Negrete the singing charro, the bargains at Puerto de Liverpool and the ads that told you Betterall’s Better at Making You Better (Mejor Mejora Mejoral) and Twenty Million Mexicans Can’t Be Wrong, the great bullfighters Manolete and Arruza, the city-planning accomplishments of the regent Ernesto Uruchurtu, and the swimmer Joaquin Capilla’s Olympic medal: fire consumed them all, just as death devoured the bedroom her son Santiago transformed into sacred space, a fountain of images, a cavern where shadows were reality, and paintings and drawings piled up; and Danton’s secret room, which no one could enter, an imagined room which could just as easily be decked out with pictures of naked women torn out of the magazine Vea as be kept with bare walls as a penitence, until he found his own fortune, as he did; and the matrimonial bedroom where Laura was overwhelmed by the images of the men she’d loved, why she’d loved them, how she’d loved them.

She went out to photograph the lost villages in the great city’s misery, and there she found herself, in the very act of photographing something totally alien to her own life. She found herself because she did not deny her fear, all alone with her Leica, of penetrating a world that lived in poverty but revealed itself in crime, first a man stabbed to death on a street of unquiet dust; fear of the ambulances with the howling, deafening noise of their sirens at the very edge of the territory of crime; women stomped to death by drunken husbands; newborn babies tossed on garbage dumps; old people abandoned and found dead on mats that later were used as their shrouds, stuck in a hole in the ground a week later, their bodies so dry that they didn’t even smell. Laura Díaz photographed all that and thanked Juan Francisco, despite everything, for having saved her from such a fate, the fate of the violence and misery around her.

She would go into a tavern in a lost city and find all the men shot to death, all having inexplicably killed each other as if in a caroming series of crimes, all anonymous-but now saved from oblivion by Laura’s photographs. She thanked Jorge Maura for having saved her from the violence of ideologies, from the fear a woman might have of the world of thought he had introduced her to. In her memory she had an impossible photo-of Jorge licking the monastery floor in Lanzarote, cleansing his own spirit of ideologies and of the bloody twentieth century.

Jorge Maura was the antidote to the violence the abandoned children lived in; she photographed them in sewers and tunnels, surprising their inexpungible beauty of childhood, as if her camera cleansed them the way Jorge had cleansed the monastery floor, children cleansed of snot, rheum, greasy hair, rachitic arms, heads hairless from mange, hands discolored by pinta, the tropical skin disease, bare feet with crusts of mud as their only shoes. And when she photographed them she also thanked Harry for the weakness of loyalties and for nostalgia for the unique, unrepeatable moment of heroism. She thought about the great photograph of the fallen Republican soldier taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War.

She’d turn up at local police stations and at hospitals. No one took any notice of an old, gray-haired lady with full skirts and worn-out sandals (it was she). They let her photograph a woman, not breathing, with an empty Coca-Cola bottle jammed between her thighs, a drug addict in his cell twisted with pain, scratching the walls and stuffing saltpeter into his nose, men and women beaten in their houses or in some alley, it was all the same, bloody, blinded by disorientation more than because their eyes were swollen from punches, clubbings, the arrival of the Black Marias, the entrance into the police station of whores and fags, transvestites and drug dealers, the nightly harvest of pimps…

Lives tossed through bar doors, house windows, thrown under the wheels of a bus. Disemboweled lives, with no possible gaze on them but that of Laura Díaz’s camera, Laura herself, Laura burdened with all her memories, her loves and loyalties, but no longer solitary Laura, now instead Laura on her own, dependent on no one, returning his filial checks to Danton, punctually paying the rent for her apartment on Plaza Rio de Janeiro, first selling her individual photographs and her articles to newspapers and magazines and individual buyers, then having her first show in Juan Martín’s gallery on Génova Street, finally under contract as one more star for the Magnum agency, which also represented Cartier-Bresson, Inge Morath, Robert Capa.

The artist of Mexico City’s grief but also its joy, Laura and a newborn boy dressed by his mother’s eyes as if he were the baby Jesus himself, Jesus reborn; Laura and a man with a scarred face and restrained violence piously kissing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe; Laura on the little pleasures and tragic premonitions of a debutante ball, a wedding, a baptism; Laura’s camera, depicting the instant, managed to depict the future of the instant: that was the strength of her art, an instantaneity with descendants, a plastic eye that restored tenderness and respect to vulgarity, and amorous vulnerability to the harshest violence. It wasn’t only the critics who said it: her admirers felt it, Laura Díaz, almost sixty years of age, is a great Mexican photographer, the best after Alvarez Bravo, high priestess of the invisible, she was called, the poet writing with light, the woman who learned to photograph what Posada could engrave.

When she achieved independence and fame, Laura Díaz kept the photo of the dead Frida for herself, that one she would never give out for publication, that photo was part of her rich, rich memory, the emotional archive of a life that had suddenly, in maturity, flourished like a plant that flowers late but perennially. The photograph of Frida was testimony to all the photographs Laura hadn’t taken in the years she’d lived with others; it was a talisman. Alongside Diego and Frida, without noticing it, as if in a dream, she had gained the artistic sensibility that flourished much later on, when many of the years with Laura Díaz had gone by.

She didn’t complain about that time or condemn it as a calendar of subjection to the world of men, how could she if in her pages lived the two Santiagos, her lovers Jorge Maura, Orlando Ximénez, and Harry Jaffe, her parents, her aunts, the jolly black sweeper Zampayita, and her poor but sympathetic, and (to her) compassionate, husband Juan Francisco? How could she forget them, but how could she not feel sorry that she had not photographed them. She imagined her own eye as a camera able to capture everything it saw and felt over the six decades of her life, and felt a chill of horror. Art was selection. Art meant losing almost everything in exchange for the salvation of very little.

It was impossible to have art and life at the same time, and in the end Laura Díaz was thankful that life had preceded art-for art, premature or even prodigal, might have killed life.

It was when she discovered something that should have been obvious, when she recovered her son Santiago’s paintings and drawings from the rubble of the family house on Avenida Sonora and brought them to her new apartment on Plaza Rio de Janeiro, when in among the mass of pencil and pastel drawings, sketches, and two dozen oil paintings, she discovered the canvas with the naked man and woman staring at each other without touching, desiring only each other but satisfied with the desire.

In her haste to abandon the fallen family home, to set herself up in her new apartment on Plaza Rio de Janeiro, to start her new, independent life, and go out to photograph Mexico City and the lives in it, following, she said to herself, the inspiration of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Laura had not stopped to take a close look at her own son’s paintings. Perhaps she felt so much love for Santiago the Younger that she preferred to distance herself from the physical proof of her son’s existence in order to keep him alive, if only in his mother’s soul. Perhaps she had to discover her own vocation to rediscover her son’s. Busy arranging her own photos, she went on to arrange Santiago’s paintings and drawings, and among the two dozen oils, this one, the naked couple staring at each other without touching, held her attention.

At first she was critical of the piece. The angular, prominent, twisted, and cruel outline of the figures derived from Santiago’s admiration for Egon Schiele and from his long study of the Viennese albums that had miraculously turned up at the German Bookstore in Colonia Hipódromo. The difference, Laura quickly noticed when she compared the books with the painting, was that Schiele’s figures were almost always unique, solitary, or, rarely, intertwined diabolically and innocently in a frozen physical union that was merely physiological and always-whether together or apart-airless, having no reference to any landscape, or room, or other space, as if in an ironic return by the most modern artist to the most ancient art, Schiele the blase Expressionist returned to Byzantine painting, where the figure of God the Pancreator is fixed before the creation of anything in the absolute void of solitary majesty.

This painting by the young Santiago took from Schiele’s tortured figures, no doubt of it, but also gave back to them, as in a renaissance of the Renaissance, the way that Giotto and Masaccio gave air, landscape, and location to the ancient iconography of Byzantium. The naked man in Santiago’s canvas-emaciated, pierced by invisible thorns, young, beardless, but with the face of an unconquerable malady, a corrosive sickness running through his unwounded body that was conquered from within for having been created without being consulted first-fixed his gaze on the belly of the naked woman, pregnant, blond (Laura quickly checked for resemblances in the books Santiago had collected), just like the Eves by Holbein and Cranach, resigned to passive conquest of the man with one less rib, even though this time they were deformed by desire. The earlier Eves were impassive, fatal, but this, the new Eve of Santiago the Younger, participated in the anguish of the convulsed, young, condemned Adam who stared intensely at her belly while she, Eve, stared intensely into his eyes, and neither-only now did Laura notice this obvious detail-had their feet on the ground.

They didn’t levitate. They ascended. Laura felt a deep emotion when she understood her son Santiago’s painting. This Adam and Eve did not fall. They ascended. At their feet, the skin of the apple and the skin of the serpent fused in a single mass. Adam and Eve left the garden of delights, but they did not fall into the inferno of pain and toil. Their sin was of another kind. They ascended. They rebelled against the divine decree-thou shall not eat this fruit-and instead of falling, they rose. Thanks to sex, rebellion, and love, Adam and Eve were the protagonists of the Ascent of Humanity, not its Fall. The evil of the world was believing that the first man and the first woman fell and condemned us to a heritage of vice. For Santiago the Younger, on the other hand, Adam and Eve’s guilt was not hereditary, wasn’t even guilt, and the drama of the Earthly Paradise was a triumph of human freedom over God’s tyranny. It wasn’t drama. It was history.

In the deepest part of the landscape in her son’s painting, Laura saw painted, very small, like Brueghel’s Icarus, a barque with black sails leaving the coasts of Eden behind with a single passenger, a tiny figure divided in a singular way: half of his face was angelic, the other half diabolical; one half blond, the other half red; but the body itself, wrapped in a cape as long as the sails, was shared by angel and demon, and both, Laura guessed, were God, with a cross in one hand and a pitchfork in the other: two instruments of torture and death. The lovers ascended. The one who fell was God, and the fall of God was what Santiago had painted: a departure, a distance, shock on the face of the Creator, who abandons Eden perplexed because His creatures have rebelled, because they have decided to ascend instead of fall, because they have mocked the perverse divine plan to create the world only in order to condemn it to sin, transmitted from generation to generation, so that men and women for all time will feel inferior to God, dependent on God, condemned by Him, and absolved-before falling again-only by God’s capricious grace.

On the back of the canvas, Santiago had written: “Art isn’t modern. Art is eternal. Egon Schiele.”

Line dominated color. Which is why the colors were so strong. The black ship. The red half of the Creator. The greenish red of the apple peel that was the mutable skin of the serpent. But Eve’s skin was as translucent as that of a Memling Virgin, while Adam’s was spotty, green, yellow, and sick, like an adolescent painted by Schiele.

The man stared at the woman. The woman stared at the sky. But neither of them was falling. Because both desired each other. There was that equivalence in the difference which Laura made her own, comparing her own emotions to those of her son, the young, dead artist.

She hung Santiago the Younger’s painting in her living room and understood for all time that the son was father of the mother, that, unwittingly, Laura Díaz the photographer owed more to her own son than to any other artist. At first she did not understand this, and the secret, unknown identification was for that reason all the stronger.

Now nothing mattered but the equivalence of the emotion.

3.

Show after show of photographs followed, sales first to newspapers and magazines and then in books.

Blessings of animals and birds.

Old men with huge mustaches gathered around singing corridos from the Revolution.

Flower vendors.

The crowded pools on St. John’s Day.

The life of a metalworker.

The life of a hospital nurse.

Her celebrated photograph of a dead gypsy woman with no lines on her hand, open under her breasts, a gypsy with an erased destiny.

And now something she owed Jorge Maura: a report on the exiled Spanish Republicans in Mexico.

Laura now realized that for years the Spanish Civil War had been the epicenter of her historical life, not the Mexican Revolution, which had passed through the state of Veracruz so mildly and tangentially, as if dying in the Gulf were a unique, moving, and untouchable privilege reserved for Laura’s older brother, Santiago Díaz, sole protagonist, as far as she was concerned, of the 1910 insurrection.

In Spain, on the other hand, Jorge Maura, Basilio Baltazar, and Domingo Vidal had fought, the young gringo, Jim, had died, and the sad gringo, Harry, had survived. In Spain, the beautiful and young Pilar Méndez was shot at the Roman gate of Santa Fe de Palencia by order of her own father, the Communist mayor Alvaro Méndez.

Bearing that heavy emotional weight, Laura began to photograph the faces of Spanish exile in Mexico. President Cárdenas had given sanctuary to a quarter million Republicans. Each time she photographed one of them, Laura remembered with emotion Jorge’s trip to Havana to rescue Raquel from the Prinz Eugen, anchored opposite Morro Castle.

Each one of her models could have suffered that fate: jail, torture, execution. She understood that.

She photographed the miracles of survival. She knew that’s who they were.

The philosopher José Gaos, disciple of Husserl like Jorge Maura and Raquel Mendes-Alemán, leaning on the iron railing above the patio of the Escuela de Mascarones, the philosopher with a patrician Roman head, bald and strong, as strong as his jaw, as strong as his pencil-thin lips, as skeptical as his myopic eyes behind their small, round glasses, suitable for a Franz Schubert of philosophy. Gaos leaning on the railing, and from the beautiful colonial patio the young men and women of the School of Philosophy raise their faces to look at the master with smiles of admiration and gratitude.

Luis Buñuel arranged to meet her in the bar of the Parador, where the director ordered perfect martinis from his favorite bartender, Córdoba, while he replayed the film of a cultural cycle through his memory, which went from the Student Residence in Madrid to the filming of Un Chien Andalou, in which Buñuel and Dali used the eye of a dead fish surrounded by eyelashes to simulate the heroine’s eye sliced open with a straight razor, to L’Age d’Or and its image of the ecclesiastical hierarchy transformed into petrified bone on the coast of Mallorca, to his participation in Parisian Surrealism in its New York exile, to Dalí’s denunciation (“Buñuel is a Communist, an atheist, a blasphemer, and an anarchist. How can you let him work in the Museum of Modern Art?”), to his arrival in Mexico with forty dollars in his pocket.

Humor, anger, and daydreams passed ceaselessly and simultaneously across Buñuel’s green eyes: his gaze stopped on a fixed point in his past, and Laura photographed a boy in the Aragonese village of Calanda playing drums on Good Friday until his hands bled, this to free himself from the sensual charm of the image of the Virgin of Pilar, inhabitant of his onanistic childhood bed.

Thanks to the intervention of the Basque writer Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, Laura photographed the marvelous poet from Málaga, Emilo Prados, in his modest apartment on Lerma Street. She’d met him before with Jorge Maura. Prados was hidden in a couple of rooms behind mountains of books and papers, sickness and exile etched in every line on his face, but able to transform suffering into two expressions Laura was able to photograph. The infinite sweetness of his face was that of an unredeemed Andalusian saint now veiled by a cascade of white locks and thick, aquarium-style glasses, as if the poet, embarrassed by his own innocence, wanted to conceal it. And you could see the lyric strength behind his suffering, poverty, disillusion, old age, and exile:

If I could give you

all the light of dawn…

Like the sun, I would

slowly pierce your breast,

until I emerged without blood

or pain into the night…

Manuel Pedroso, the wise old Andalusian who had been rector of the University of Seville, was adored by the small group of his young disciples who every day went with him as he walked from the Law School near the Zócalo to his small apartment on Amazonas Street. Laura left graphic testimony of that daily journey, as well as of gatherings in the master’s library, packed with ancient books that smelled of tropical tobacco. Francisco Franco’s troops had burned his library in Seville, but Pedroso recovered jewel after jewel in the secondhand bookstalls in La Lagunilla, Mexico City’s thieves’ market.

The books were stolen from him, other thieves stole from other people, but the books always returned, like nostalgic and unremitting lovers, to Pedroso’s long, thin hands, a gentleman painted by El Greco, hands always on the verge of tensing, warning, as if convoking a ceremony of thought. Laura captured Pedroso in the instant when he held out his hands with their long, beautiful fingers to beg for some light from the world, to bank the fires of intolerance, and to affirm his faith in his Mexican students.

Laura photographed a noisy, cheery, argumentative, and affectionate group of young exiles who adapted to Mexico but who never abandoned Spain, who always spoke with the Castilian lisp and let their eyes express the tenderness they felt for everything they had explicitly renounced: chocolate with the parish priest, the novels of Pérez Galdós, café discussion groups, old women in black, tasty treats like hot churros, cante hondo, and bullfights, the punctuality of church bells and funerals, the madness of families who took to their beds to avoid forever the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Laura photographed them in their perpetual, eternal arguments, as if they were Irishmen and didn’t know each other because they came from Madrid, Navarra, Galicia, and Barcelona and because their names were Oteyza, Serra Puig, Munoz de Baena, García Ascot, Xirau, Durán, Segovia, and Blanco Aguinaga.

But Laura Díaz’s favorite exile was a young woman whom Danton mentioned as having been the most interesting feminine presence in the Jockey Club in the 1940s. She lived with her husband, the poet and filmmaker Garcia Ascot, in a strange building at right angles to Villalongin Street, and her beauty was so perfect that Laura despaired either of finding her bad side or of being able to capture in one or a thousand photographs the charms of this fragile, svelte, and elegant woman, who walked around her house barefoot like a cat, followed by another cat that posed as her mistress’s double, both desired and envied by the entire feline race because of her aggressive profile and weak chin, her melancholy eyes and irrepressible, all-inclusive laugh.

María Luisa Elío had a secret. Her father had been in hiding since 1939, living in an attic in a village in Navarre, under sentence of death from Franco’s Falange. She could not speak of it, but her father dwelled in his daughter’s gaze, in her fabulously clear eyes, thanks to the pain, the secret, the wait for the phantom who might finally, one day, escape from Spain and show up in Mexico and for his daughter as what he was: a ghost incarnate and an oblivion remembered from an empty balcony.

Another ghost-carnal, this one, all too carnal, but in the end steadfast in the sensuous specter of his words-was Luis Cernuda, an elegant homosexual gentleman who would appear in Mexico City from time to time, who was always received by his colleague Octavio Paz, with whom he fought, his arrogance being outrageous while Paz’s was deceptive, but with whom he always in the end reconciled because of their shared poetic fervor. A consensus gradually formed: Luis Cernuda was the greatest Spanish poet of his generation. Laura Díaz tried to keep her distance from him, the better to see him stripped of the appearance (or disguise) he affected of a Madrid dandy. She asked him to read:

I want to live when love dies…

Just as your death awakens my desire for death

Just as your life awakened my desire for life

She missed Basilio Baltazar, but they kept missing each other-the dates of Laura’s shows didn’t coincide with Basilio’s university vacations, so Laura would hang an empty frame in the center of the exhibit with the name of her old friend next to it.

His absence was also homage to the absence of Jorge Maura, whose distance and anonymity Laura decided to respect, it being the wish of the man she’d loved most. Perhaps Basilio couldn’t appear among the portraits of Spanish exile without his comrade Jorge.

And Vidal? He wasn’t the only one who’d disappeared.

Malú Block, the gallery director, told Laura that something strange was going on. Every afternoon at around six o’clock, a woman in black would come to the gallery and stay for an entire hour-not a minute more, not a minute less, even though she never looked at her watch-opposite the empty frame for Basilio Baltazar’s missing portrait. Almost immobile, she would sometimes shift her weight from one foot to the other or she would step back a centimeter or turn her head, as if to formulate a better appreciation of what wasn’t there: Basilio’s effigy.

Laura hesitated between giving in to natural curiosity and being discreet. One afternoon, she went to the gallery and saw the woman in black standing opposite the empty frame. She didn’t dare approach her, but the woman herself, the mysterious visitor, half turned, as if attracted by the magnet in Laura’s eyes, and allowed herself to be seen: a woman about forty years old with blue eyes and long sandy-yellow hair.

She looked at Laura but didn’t smile, and Laura was grateful for the woman’s imperturbable seriousness because she feared what she might see if the enigmatic visitor opened her mouth. Such was the cold and nervous style of this visitor: she tried to hide the emotion of her gaze but did not quite succeed. She knew it and transferred the enigma to her mouth, closed in sorrow, sealed with manifest difficulty in order not to show… Her teeth? Laura wondered. Does this woman want to hide her teeth from me? If she could only be identified by her eyes, Laura Díaz, accustomed to discovering eyes and making them into metaphors, saw in them instantaneous moons, torches of straw and wood, lights on the mountain-and she stopped, biting her lower lip, as if to restrain her own memory, so as not to remember those words as spoken by Maura, Jorge Maura, in the Café de Paris almost twenty years before, with Domingo Vidal and Basilio Baltazar, the three of them safe in that bohemian setting on Avenida Cinco de Mayo yet at the same time exposed to the most brutal storms, like the hyenas and oxen and wind and lights on the mountain, whenever they opened their mouths.

“I am Laura Díaz. I took these photographs. May I assist you?”

The woman dressed in black turned to look at the empty frame where Basilio’s portrait should have been and told Laura, If you know this man, tell him I’ve returned.

She smiled then and showed her savagely ruined teeth.