The Years with Laura Diaz

7.

Avenida Sonora: 1928

WHAT WAS HE THINKING about? What was she thinking about?

He was impenetrable, like a sphere of knives. She could only know what he was thinking about by knowing what she was thinking about. What did she think about when he-repeating something that irritated her more and more and discredited him-accused her of not having gone up to the attic in Xalapa to see the Catalan anarchist. Finally, she tired of it, gave up, set aside her own reasons, and began to note, in a small graph-paper notebook she used to keep household accounts, each time he, with no provocation on her part, would remind her of this omission. It was no longer a scolding but a nervous habit, like the involuntary squinting of eyes that were fixed, without their own light. What did she think when she heard yet again the same speech she’d been hearing now for nine years, so fresh, so powerful the first times, then more difficult to understand because more difficult to hear, excessively rationalist, as she waited in vain for the dream of the speech, not the speech itself but the dream of the speech, especially when she realized that, as a mother, she could speak to her sons Santiago and Danton only in dreams, in fables. Their father’s speech had lost the dream. It was an insomniac speech. Juan Francisco’s words did not sleep. They kept watch.

“Mama, I’m afraid, look through the window. The sun isn’t there anymore. Where did the sun go? Did the sun die?”

“Juan Francisco, don’t talk to me as if I were an audience of a thousand people. I’m just one person. Laura. Your wife.”

“You don’t admire me the way you did before. Before, you used to admire me.”

She wanted to love him. What was happening to her? What was it that was happening, which she neither knew nor understood?

“Who understands women? Short ideas and long hair.”

She wasn’t going to waste time telling him what the boys understood each time they told a story or asked a question, that words are born from imagination and pleasure, they aren’t for an audience of thousands of people or a plaza filled with flags, they are for you and for me. To whom are you speaking, Juan Francisco? She always saw him at a podium and the podium was a pedestal and that was where she’d placed him herself from the day they married. No one but she had put him there, not the Revolution, not the working class, not the unions, not the government; she was the vestal of the temple named Juan Francisco López Greene, and she’d asked her husband to be worthy of the devotion of the wife. But a temple is a place for repeated ceremonies. And what is repeated becomes boring unless faith sustains it.

It wasn’t that Laura lost faith in Juan Francisco. She was simply being honest with herself, registering the irritations of connubial life, what couple doesn’t get irritated over the course of time? It was normal after eight years of marriage. At first they hadn’t known each other, and everything was a surprise. Now she wished she could recover the astonishment and novelty, but she realized that the second time around astonishment is habit and novelty is nostalgia. Was it her fault? She’d begun by admiring the public figure. Then she’d tried to penetrate it, only to find that behind the public figure was another public figure and another behind that one, until she realized that the dazzling orator, leader of the masses, was the real figure, there was no trick, no other personality to find, she’d have to resign herself to living with a man who treated his wife and children as a grateful audience. The problem was that the figure on the podium also slept in the conjugal bed, and one evening contact between their feet under the sheets made her, involuntarily, pull hers back, her husband’s elbows began to disgust her, she would stare at that articulation of wrinkles between the upper arm and forearm and imagine all of him as an enormous elbow, a loose hide from head to foot.

“I’m sorry. I’m tired. Not tonight.”

“Why didn’t you say something? Should we hire a maid? I thought that between you and your aunt you managed the house very well.”

“That’s true, Juan Francisco. There’s no need for maids. You have Mar��a de la O and me. You shouldn’t have maids. You serve the working class.”

“How well you understand things, Laura.”

“Know something, Auntie?” she dared to say to María de la O. “Sometimes I miss life in Veracruz. It was more fun.”

The aunt did not agree, simply looked attentively at Laura, and then Laura laughed as if to say the matter was of no importance.

“You stay here with the boys. I’ll go to the market.”

It was not a bother; she found it amusing to go to the Parián in Colonia Roma, because it broke the household routine, which in truth was no routine. Laura loved her aunt, adored her sons, and was delighted to watch them grow. The market was a miniature forest where she could find all the things that delighted her, flowers and fruits, so various and abundant in Mexico, the azucenas and gladiolas, the Madonna lilies, the “clouds” and pansies, the mangos, papaya, vanilla that she thought about when she made love: the mamey, the quince, the tejocote, the pineapple, limes and lemons, guanábana, oranges, the black zapotes and the little zapotes: the tastes, shapes, flavors of markets filled her with joy and with nostalgia for her childhood and youth.

“But I’m only thirty years old.”

She was pensive as she returned from the Parián to Avenida Sonora and asked herself, Is there something more? Is this all there is? She answered herself with a slight shrug of her shoulders and walked faster, not even thinking about the weight of the baskets. If there was no more automobile, it was because Juan Francisco was honorable and had returned the gift to the CROM. She remembered that it had not been his idea to return it. The comrades had asked him to do it. Don’t accept gifts from the official union. Don’t become corrupt. It hadn’t been a voluntary act on his part. They’d asked him to do it.

“Juan Francisco, would you have returned the car if your comrades hadn’t asked you to?”

“I serve the working class. That’s that.”

“Sweetheart, why do you depend on injustice so much?”

“You already know I don’t like-”

“My poor Juan Francisco, what would become of you in a just world?”

“Spare me the condescension. Sometimes I just can’t figure you out. Hurry up and make breakfast, I’ve got an important meeting today.”

“Not a day passes without an important meeting. Not a month. Not a year. Every minute there’s an important meeting.”

What did he think of her? Was Laura only a habit of his, a sexual rite, mute obedience, expected gratitude?

“I mean, how good it is that you have people to defend. That’s your strength. It pours out of you. I love to see you come home tired.”

“You’re incomprehensible.”

“What are you talking about? I love it when you fall asleep on my breasts, and I love the idea that I restore your strength. Your work drains you even if you don’t realize it.”

“You’re so flighty, you make me laugh sometimes, but other times-”

“I annoy you… I just love the idea!”

He left without another word. What did he think of her? Did he remember the young woman he met at the Casino ball at Xalapa? The promise he made her that he would educate her, teach her to be a woman in the city and in the world? Would he remember the young mother who wanted to accompany him in his work, identify herself with him, prove that in their married life the two of them shared the life of the world, the life of work?

This idea weighed more and more on Laura Díaz. Her husband had rejected her, had not carried out the promise that they would be together in everything, united in bed, in being parents, but also in work, in that part of the whole that eats up the life of each day the way children eat the sections of an orange, transforming all the rest-bed and being parents, matrimony and dreams-into minutes to be counted and finally into empty skins to be discarded.

“The mute obedience of impassioned souls.”

Laura blamed herself. She remembered the child from Catemaco, the girl from Veracruz, the young woman from Xalapa, and in each she saw the growing promise that culminated in her wedding eight years before. Ever since then I’ve shrunk instead of growing, I’ve been turning into a little dwarf, as if he didn’t deserve me, as if he’d done me a favor, he didn’t ask me to do it, he didn’t impose it on me, I asked for it, and I imposed it on myself in order to be worthy of him. Now I know I wanted to be worthy of a mystery, I didn’t know him, I was impressed by him physically, his way of speaking, of taking control of the monster of the crowd, I was impressed by that speech he gave in our Xalapa house in honor of the Catalan woman. That’s what I fell in love with-to jump from my love to knowledge of the person I loved, love as a trampoline of knowing, its labyrinth, my God, I’ve spent eight years trying to penetrate a mystery that isn’t mysterious, for my husband is what he seems to be, not more, what appears is what he is, there’s nothing more to discover, I’ll ask the audience whom the leader López Greene speaks to, the man is for real, what he tells them is true, there’s nothing hidden behind his words, his words are his entire truth, every last bit, believe in him, there is no one more authentic, what you see is what he is, what he says is nothing more.

From Laura he demanded out of habit what had satisfied him before. Little by little, she stopped feeling satisfied with what had once satisfied both of them.

“When I met you, I thought I didn’t deserve you. What do you think of that? Why don’t you answer?”

“I thought I could change you.”

“So what you bought in Xalapa seems pretty paltry to you now.”

“You don’t understand. We all progress, we all can either better ourselves or get worse.”

“Are you saying you wanted to change me?”

“For the good.”

“All right then, tell me something, honestly. Am I a good wife and mother? When I wanted to work with you, didn’t you stop me with that little stroll through hell you set up for me? What more did you want?”

“Someone to confide in,” said Juan Francisco, and first he got out of bed, but then quickly looked back at Laura with shining eyes and, with a grimace of pain, threw himself into his wife’s arms.

“My love, my love.”

That year, President Obregón was succeeded by Plutarco El as Calles, another Sonora man, another one of the Agua Prieta triumvirate. The Revolution had been carried out to the chant of FREE VOTES, NO REELECTION because Porfirio Díaz had kept himself in office for three decades with fraudulent reelections. Now, ex-President Obregón wanted to abrogate his own ineligibility and return to the throne of the eagle and serpent. Many said it would betray one of the principles of the Revolution. But the rationale of power had its way. The Constitution was amended to allow a former president’s reelection. Everyone had been certain that the three Sonora men would take turns at being President until they died of old age, just like Don Porfirio D az, unless another Madero, another revolution, came along.

“Morones wants us union men to back General Obregón’s reelection. I’d like to discuss it with you,” said Juan Francisco to the union leaders gathered once again in his house, as they did every month of every year. In the little living room, Laura put aside her book.

“Morones is an opportunist. He doesn’t think the way we do. He hates the anarcho-syndicalists. He adores the corporate unionists who thicken the government’s broth. If we support Obregón, our independence is over. He’ll turn us into little lambs or he’ll lead us to slaughter, which is pretty much the same thing.”

“You’re right, Palomo. What are we going to be, Juan Francisco, independent, militant unions or corporate sectors of the official labor movement? I want all of you to tell me,” said another of those faceless voices that Laura struggled vainly to link, when they came in, when they left, with the faces filing through the little living room.

“Dammit, Juan Francisco-and begging the pardon of the lady in the next room-we are the heirs of Light, of the Red Tribunal, the House of the Workers of the World, the Red Battalions of the Revolution. Are we going to end up as lackeys to a government that uses us just to put on fancy revolutionary airs? Revolutionary? Hooey is what I say.”

“What’s in our best interest?” Laura heard her husband’s voice. “To achieve what we want, a better life for the workers? Or are we going to wear ourselves out, fighting the government, wasting our energy in squabbles, and letting others turn the promises of the Revolution into realities? Are we going to lose our chance?”

“We’re going to lose everything, right down to our long Johns.”

“Does anyone here believe in the soul?”

“A revolution becomes legitimate on its own and engenders rights, comrades,” Juan Francisco summed up. “Obregón has the support of those who made the Revolution. Even Zapata’s and Villa’s people support him. He figured out a way to win them over. Are we going to be the exception?”

“I think we should be, Juan Francisco. The workers’ movement was born to be the exception. Come on, pal, don’t keep us from being the ones who get to rain on the government’s parade.”

For her entire life as a young married woman she’d been listening to the same discussion: it was like going to church every Sunday to hear the same sermon. Habit, Laura once thought, has to have meaning, it must become ritual. She went back over the ritual moments in her own life-birth, childhood, puberty, marriage, death-she was thirty years old, and she’d known them all by now, a personal knowledge, a knowledge that intimately touched her family. It became a collective knowledge, as if the entire nation could not bring itself to divorce its bride: death; that July day when Juan Francisco returned home unexpectedly sometime around six in the afternoon, completely upset, and said, “President Obregón was assassinated at a banquet.”

“Who did it?”

“A Catholic.”

“Was he killed?”

“Who? Obregón? I already said he was.”

“No, I mean the killer.”

“No, he’s in jail. His name is Toral. A fanatic.”

Of all the coincidences she’d experienced in her life until that moment, none alarmed Laura so much as the one that began with the sound, one afternoon, of a hand lightly knocking at the door of the house. María de la O had taken the boys to the park; Juan Francisco was returning later and later from work. The dining-room discussions had yielded to the need to act: Obregón was dead; he and Calles had divided power between them, so now only one of the strong men was left. Had Calles murdered Obregón? Was Mexico an endless chain of sacrifices, each one engendering the next, and the last certain of its eventual destiny; to be the same as the act that created it-death to reach power, death to leave it?

“Just look, Juan Francisco, Morones and the CROM are overjoyed because Obregón is dead. Morones wants to be a presidential candidate.”

“That fatso will need a double-sized chair…”

“No jokes, Palomo. No reelection was the sacred principle.”

“Cut it out, Pánfilo. Don’t use religious expressions, it really-”

“I’m telling you to be serious. The untouchable principle is that all right?-of the Revolution. Calles betrayed Morones’ presidential hopes to help out his buddy Obregón. Who comes out ahead because of the crime? Just ask yourself that simple question. Who comes out ahead?”

“Calles and Morones. And who takes all the blame? The Catholics.”

“But you’ve always been anticlerical, Palomo. You criticize the peasants for being so Catholic.”

“For that very reason, I’m telling you there’s no better way to strengthen the Church than by persecuting it. That’s what I’m afraid of now.”

“Why is Calles persecuting the Church now? The Turk is no jackass.”

“To nip the fat guy’s rage in the bud, José Miguel. He had to find some way to show he’s revolutionary.”

“Now I don’t understand anything.”

“Understand this. In Mexico, even cripples are acrobats.”

“Okay, but don’t you forget something else. Politics is the art of swallowing toads without making a face.”

She was as white as the moon, and her whiteness emphasized her thick, continuous, black eyebrows, which ran across her forehead and cast more of a shadow over the circles under her eyes, circles like the shadow of her immense eyes, as black as they say sin is black, although the eyes of this woman were swimming in a lake of omens. She was dressed in black, with long skirts and low-heeled shoes, her blouse buttoned up to her neck, and a black shawl nervously covering her back, tightly but carelessly wrapped, slipping down to her waist. Her disarray embarrassed her, as if it gave her a clownish air, and made her readjust the shawl over her shoulders, though not over her hair, which was divided strictly by a center part and gathered into a bun at the nape of her neck, where long, loose hairs had escaped as if a secret part of her were rebelling against the discipline of her costume. The loosened hairs were not as black as the tight hairdo of this pale, nervous woman, as if they were announcing something, antennas for some undesired news.

“Excuse me, but I was told a maid was needed here.”

“No, miss, in this house we don’t exploit anyone.” Laura smiled with her ever more irrepressible irony. Was irony her only possible defense against flat and unrelieved routine, in itself neither degrading nor exalting, but stretching out as long as the horizon of her years?

“I know you need help, ma’am.”

“Look, I just told you-”

She said nothing more because the white, sunken-eyed woman dressed in black thrust herself into the garage. She begged silence with her eyes and clasped Laura’s hands alarmingly, then closed her eyes as if facing a physical catastrophe, while in the street a group of metallic soldiers came running, breaking the pavement with the force of their boots, sounding like steel as they marched over steel streets in a soulless city. the woman trembled in Laura’s arms.

“Please, ma’am.”

Laura looked into her eyes. “What’s your name?”

“Carmela.”

“Well, I don’t see why a squad of soldiers should be hunting through the streets for a maid named Carmela.”

“Ma’am, I-”

“Not a word, Carmela. At the back of the patio, there’s an empty maid’s room. Let’s fix it up. It’s filled with old newspapers. Put them next to the boiler. Can you cook?”

“I know how to make communion wafers, ma’am.”

“I’ll teach you. Where are you from?”

“Guadalajara.”

“Say that your parents are from Veracruz.”

“They’re dead.”

“Well then, say they were from Veracruz. I need subjects so I can protect you, Carmela. Things to talk about. Follow my lead.”

“May God reward you, ma’am.”

Juan Francisco reacted most docilely to Carmela’s presence. Laura did not have to give him any explanations. He himself had acknowledged he was unaware of things, rarely alert to the needs of the house, to Laura’s fatigue, to her interest in books and painting. The boys were growing and needed their mother to educate them. María de la O was getting old and tired out.

“Why don’t you all go to Xalapa to rest? Carmela can take care of me here in the house.”

Laura D az looked over at the attic of her old house in Xalapa, visible from the second-story terrace of the boardinghouse where her mother Leticia and her Aunts Hilda and Virginia now lived and worked. Middle age was no longer creeping up on the Kelsen sisters: it had trapped them, they were leaving time itself behind.

Laura loved them, she realized in the narrow parlor where Leticia had gathered, rather inelegantly, her personal furniture, the wicker chairs from her marriage, the marble console, the paintings of the rascal and the dog. Hilda had a huge, rose-colored double chin adorned with white hairs, but her eyes were still very blue despite the thick glasses that from time to time slipped down her straight nose.

“I’m going blind, Laura. It’s a blessing I can’t see my hands, look at my hands, they look like the knots sailors make on the docks, like the roots of an old tree. How can I play the piano like this? At least I have Aunt Virginia, who reads to me.”

Virginia kept her eyes wide open, as if in shock about something, and her hands resting on a kidskin binding, as if it were the skin of a beloved being. She tapped her fingers in time with the blinking of her very black, alert eyes. Was she waiting for the arrival of something imminent or the entrance of some unexpected but providential being? God, a mailman, a lover, a publisher? All those possibilities passed simultaneously before Aunt Virginia’s all too lively eyes.

“You never spoke to Minister Vasconcelos about publishing my book of poems?”

“Aunt Virginia, Vasconcelos isn’t a minister anymore. He’s in opposition to Calles’ government. Besides, I’ve never met him.”

“I don’t know anything about politics. Why don’t the poets govern us?”

“Because they don’t know how to swallow toads without making a face,” laughed Laura.

“What? What are you saying? Are you insane or what? Nett Affe!”

Although the three sisters had decided to run the boarding house, in reality only Leticia worked at it. Weak, nervous, tall, holding her back very straight, her hair graying, a woman of few words but of eloquent punctuality in the execution of all tasks, she had the menus ready, the rooms clean, the plants watered. All with the active help of Zampaya, who went on bringing joy to the house with his dances and songs from who knew where:

ora la cachimbá-bimbá-bimbá

ora la cachimbábá

now my black girl dance to me

now my black girl dance away

Laura was shocked to see the wiry gray hair on the black man’s head. She was sure Zampaya was secretly in contact with a sect of dancing witches and an interminable chorus of invisible voices. These are the people with whom we went to give my brother Santiago’s body to the sea, these are the people with whom we are witnesses. Then Laura looked toward the attic, thought about Armonía Aznar here in Xalapa, and, who knows why?, she thought about Carmela with no last name in the maid’s room in Mexico City.

Leticia especially looked after old acquaintances from Veracruz passing through Xalapa. But now, with the arrival of Laura and María de la O, in addition to the presence of Aunts Hilda and Virginia, the two permanent and penniless guests, there was room for only two guests. Laura was astonished to see once more the now adult red-haired tennis player, the big fellow with strong, svelte, hairy legs who had abused the girls at the San Cayetano dances.

He greeted her with a gesture of excuse and submission as unexpected as his presence. He was a traveling salesman, he said, selling automobile tires on the Córdoba-Orizaba-Xalapa-Veracruz circuit. At least he hadn’t been sent to that hell the port of Coatzacoalcos. The company gave him his own car-his face lit up, as it had when he’d frenetically danced the cakewalk in 1915-though of course it wasn’t his hut the company’s.

The lights went out.

The other guest was, Leticia told her, an old man, he never leaves his room, I bring his meals to him.

One afternoon, Leticia was busy with something at the door and left the guest’s tray of food in the kitchen, where it was getting cold. Not thinking anything of it, Laura picked up the tray and took it to the guest, who never allowed himself to be seen.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed with something in his hands that he hid as soon as he heard Laura’s footsteps. She managed to detect the unmistakable sound of rosary beads. When she set the tray down, she felt a tremor run through her entire body, a chill of sudden recognition through veils and more veils of oblivion, time, and, in this case, disdain. Laura’s memory had to make a gigantic leap backward to identify the young priest from Puebla, dark-skinned and intolerant, who’d disappeared one day with the church’s treasure.

“Why, it’s you, the priest.”

“You are Laura, isn’t that right? Please, don’t raise your voice. Don’t get your mother into trouble.”

“Father Elzevir.”

The priest clasped Laura’s hands. “How can you remember? You were just a child.”

There was no need to ask him what he was doing hidden away there. “Please, don’t raise your voice. Don’t get your mother into trouble.” He said she didn’t have to ask him anything. He would tell her he didn’t get very far with what he’d stolen. He was a coward. He admitted it. When the police were about to catch him, he thought it would be better to submit to the pity of the Church, for Don Porfirio’s police had none.

“I asked forgiveness, and it was granted to me. I confessed and was absolved. I repented and again entered the community of my Church. But I felt it was all too easy. It was true and profound, but easy. I had to pay for the evil I’d committed, my temptation. My illusion. God our master did me the favor of sending me this punishment, Calles’ religious persecution.”

He looked at Laura with the eyes of a conquered Indian. “Now I feel guiltier than ever. I have nightmares. I’m sure God punished me for my sacrilege by causing this persecution to fall on His Church. I believe I am responsible, because of my individual act, for a collective evil. I believe it profoundly.”

“Father, you have no reason to confess to me.”

“Oh, but I do.” Elzevir squeezed Laura’s hands, which he’d never stopped holding. “Oh, but I do. You were a child. But who better than a child can I ask for forgiveness for the tumult of my soul? Will you forgive me?”

“Yes, Father, I never made charges against you, but my mother-”

“Your mother and your aunts have understood. They have forgiven me. That’s why I’m here. Without them, I would have been shot.”

“I’m saying you did me no harm. Excuse me, but I’d forgotten all about you.”

“But that was the harm. Don’t you see? Being forgotten is the harm. I sowed scandal in my parish, and if my parish forgets it, the reason is that the scandal penetrated so deeply that it was forgotten and forgiven.”

“My mother has forgiven you,” Laura interrupted, somewhat confused by the priest’s logic.

“No, she keeps me alive here, puts a roof over my head, and feeds me, all so I can know the mercy I did not bestow on my flock. Your mother is a living reproach for which I am thankful. I don’t want any one to forgive me.”

“Father, my sons have not had their first communion. The fact is that my husband… would be outraged… if I even asked his permission. Wouldn’t you like to-?”

“Why are you really asking me for this?”

“I want to be part of an exceptional rite, Father. Routine is killing me.” Laura turned away, wailing. It was somewhere between raving and weeping.

In truth, she felt a deep satisfaction in participating in a ceremony missing from her married life, knowing she was going against her husband’s implicit wishes. Juan Francisco neither went to Mass nor spoke of religion. Neither did Laura or the boys. Only María de la O kept some religious pictures stuck in her mirror, which Juan Francisco, without saying so, considered the relics of a hypocritical old woman.

“I don’t oppose it, but still, I have to ask why,” Leticia wondered.

“The world becomes too flat without ceremonies to mark the passage of time.”

“Are you so afraid of losing track of the years?”

“Yes, Mutti. I fear time without hours. That’s what death must be like.”

Leticia, her three sisters, and Laura gathered together in the priest’s bedroom with Santiago and Danton.

“This is my body, this is my blood,” Elzevir intoned, and put pieces of bread in the mouths of the boys, now seven and six, amused because they’d been brought to a dark bedroom to eat bits of roll and hear words in Latin. They preferred running through the gardens of Xalapa, Los Berros and Juárez Park, watched over as always by their dark-skinned aunt; they felt they owned this tranquil city, a space without danger, a territory that gave them the freedom forbidden them in Mexico City, with its streets filled with trucks and wise guys and toughs from whose challenges Santiago had to protect his younger brother.

“Why are you looking so hard at the roof of that house, Mama?”

“No reason, Santiago. I lived there when I was young with your grandparents.”

“I’d like to have a birdcage like that at home. I’d be the owner of the castle and defend you against the bad guys, Mama.”

“Santiago, do you remember the maid I hired back in Mexico City before leaving for Xalapa? Now, when you go back, I want you to treat Carmela with respect.”

“Carmela. Sure, Mama.”

Laura had a premonition. She asked María de la O to stay a few more days in Xalapa with the boys while she went back to Mexico City to straighten up the house. “It must be a mess, with Juan Francisco all alone there and he so busy with politics. As soon as I have things in hand, I’ll send for you.”

“Laura.”

“Yes, Mutti.”

“Look what you forgot when you got married.”

It was the Chinese doll Li Po. True. She hadn’t thought of the doll since she’d gone.

“Oh, Mama, how sad it makes me that I forgot her.” She hid her real sadness with a false laugh. “I think it’s because I turned into my husband’s Li Po.”

“Do you want to take her with you?”

“No, Mutti. It’s better for her to stay here in her place until I come hack.”

“Do you really think you’ll be coming back, dear?”

Neither Carmela nor Juan Francisco was in the little house on Avenida Sonora when Laura arrived around midday from the Buenavista station after the usual delay on the trains.

She felt a difference in the house. A silence. An absence. Naturally: the boys and her cherished aunt were the noise, the joy of the place. She picked up the newspaper jammed under the garage door. She planned a solitary day. Would she go to the Cine Royal? Let’s just see what’s going on.

She opened El Universal and found the photograph of “Carmela.” Gloria Soriano, a Carmelite nun, had been arrested as a conspirator in the assassination of President-elect Alvaro Obregón. She had been discovered in a home near the Bosque de Chapultepec. When she tried to escape, the police shot her in the back. The nun had died instantly.

Laura spent the remaining hours of the day in the dining room staring fixedly at this photo of the very white woman with the deep shadows under her very black eyes. Sunset came, and even though she could no longer see the photo, she did not turn on the light. She knew the face by heart. It was the face of a moral ransom. If Juan Francisco had reproached her all those years for not having visited the Catalan anarchist in the attic, how could he reproach her now for having given sanctuary to a nun being hunted down? Of course he wouldn’t, they would both finally share a combative humanity, Laura told herself, repeating the word “combative.”

Juan Francisco returned at 11 p.m. The house was in darkness. The big dark man tossed his hat on the sofa, sighed, and turned on the light. He was visibly startled when he saw Laura sitting there with the newspaper open in front of her.

“Oh, you’re hack.”

Laura nodded.

“Did you see that item about the nun Soriano?” asked López Greene.

“No. I saw the item about the anarchist Aznar.”

“I don’t follow.”

“When you came to Xalapa to unveil the plaque in the attic, you praised my father for having protected Armon a Aznar. That’s when I really met you and fell in love.”

“Of course. She was a heroine of the working class.”

“You aren’t going to praise me for giving sanctuary to a heroine of the religious persecution?”

“A nun who assassinates presidents.”

“An anarchist who assassinates tsars and princes?”

“No, Armon a fought for the workers. Your Carmela fought for the priests.”

“Oh, so she’s my Carmela, not yours.”

“No, she’s not mine.”

“She’s not human, Juan Francisco, but someone from another planet?”

“Just from an outdated era, that’s all.”

“Unworthy of your protection.”

“A criminal. Besides, if she’d just stayed put here as I asked her, the shoot-to-kill law wouldn’t have been applied to her.”

“I didn’t know that the police of the Revolution kill people the same way the dictatorship did, shooting them in the hack.”

“There would have been a trial, I told her that, just as there was for the assassin Toral and his accomplice Mother Conchita-another woman, as you see.”

“You must have wanted to get on someone’s good side, Juan Francisco. Whose? Because you’ll be on my bad side forever.”

She didn’t want to hear his explanations, and Juan Francisco didn’t dare give any. Laura packed a suitcase, walked out to the street, hailed a cab, and gave the driver the address of her girlhood friend Elizabeth García-Dupont.

Juan Francisco rushed after her, opened the taxi door with a bang, grabbed her by the arm, tried to pull her from the car, and slapped her in the face. The cabby got out, shoved Juan Francisco to the ground, and pulled away as quickly as he could.

The friend of her adolescence received Laura with joy, hugs, courtesy, tenderness, and kisses-everything Laura hoped for. Laura moved in with Elizabeth, in her modern apartment in Colonia Hipódromo. Later, in their nightclothes, they told each other their stories. Elizabeth had just divorced the famous Eduardo Caraza, who had blithely danced with her at the balls in the San Cayetano hacienda and just as blithely brought her along when they married and moved to Mexico City because Caraza was a friend of the Treasury Minister, Alberto Pani, who was miraculously putting the nation’s finances in order after the inflation during the Revolution, when every group had printed its own paper money, the famous “funny money.” Eduardo Caraza thought he was irresistible, even calling himself “God’s gift to women,” and told Elizabeth he’d done her a great favor by marrying her.

“That’s what I get for begging.”

“Consider yourself fortunate, my sweet. You’ve got me, but I need lots of women. It’s better we understand each other.”

“Well, I’ve got you, but I also need other men.”

“Elizabeth, you’re talking like a whore.”

“In that case, my dear Lalo, you’re talking like a primp.”

“Forgive me, I didn’t mean to offend you. I was just joking.”

“I’ve never heard you speak more seriously. You did offend me, and I’d be a fool to stay around and suffer more humiliations after listening to your philosophy of life. It seems you have the right to everything and I to nothing. I’m a whore, but you’re a ladies’ man. I’m a disgrace, but you’re what they call a gentleman, no matter what happens, correct? Bye-bye.”

Fortunately, they had no children. How could they, when Lalo wore himself out in orgies and wandered in at six in the morning limp as a wet noodle?

“Juan Francisco never played that trick, he always respected me. Until tonight, when he tried to slap me.”

“Tried? Take a look at your cheek.”

“Well, he did slap me. But he’s not that way.”

“Dearest Laura, I can see that if we go on like this you’ll forgive him everything and in less than a week you’ll be back in the cage. Instead, let’s have some fun. I’m inviting you to the Lyric Theater to see potbellied Roberto Soto in The Fall of Napoleon. It’s a satire on that union man Morones, and they say you’ll laugh your head off. It makes fun of everybody. Let’s go before it’s closed down.”

They got a box so they’d be more protected. Roberto Soto was the very image of Luis Napoleon Morones, with double everything-chin, belly, lips, cheek, eyelids. The setting was the union leader’s mansion in Tlalpam. He walked on dressed as an altar boy and singing “When I was an altar boy.” Instantly, nine or ten half-naked girls in banana skirts-the kind Josephine Baker made famous in Paris in the Folies-Bergère-and little stars glued to their nipples pulled off the altar-boy robes and began singing “Long Live the Proletariat!” while a tall, dark man wearing overalls served champagne to Soto-Morones.

“Thanks, dear brother López Greene, you’ve helped me better than anyone. I ask only that you change your name to López Red just to be in complete harmony, understand? Because we’re all red here and certainly not green-goes, right, girls?”

“Mutti, take care of the boys until I write again. And Auntie María de la O should stay with you too. I’ll send money. I have to reorganize my life, dearest Mutti. I’ll tell you everything. Meanwhile, Li Po can watch over you. You were right.”