The Years With Laura Diaz

13. Café de Paris: 1939

“I HAVE TO TELL you about Raquel Alemán.”

He also told her about his comrades in the Republican cause who were in Mexico on missions different from his. They would meet in a very centrally located place, the Café de Paris on Avenida Cinco de Mayo. It was also the haunt of Mexican intellectuals then, led by a man of great wit and unlimited sarcasm, the poet Octavio Barreda, who was married to a sister of Lupe Marín, Diego, Rivera’s wife before Frida Kahlo. Carmen Barreda would sit in the Café de Paris and listen to her husband’s ironies and jokes without changing expression. She never laughed, and he seemed to thank her for it; it was the best commentary on his dry, deadpan humor; it was fitting that he translated Eliot’s The Waste Land into Spanish.

Everyone expected a great work from him, but it never came. He was a biting critic, a promoter of literary magazines, and a man of great physical distinction — tall, thin, with the features of a hero of the independence movement, light brown skin, and very green, flashing eyes. He was at a table with Xavier Villaurrutia and José Gorostiza, two marvelous poets. The prolific Villaurrutia gave the impression that his poetry, because so spare, was sparse. In point of fact, he was composing a thick volume in which Mexico City took on a nocturnal and amorous sensibility that before him no one had achieved:

Dreaming, dreaming the night, the street, the staircase and the shout of the statue as it turns the corner. Running toward the statue and finding only the shout, wanting to touch the shout and finding only the echo, wanting to grasp the echo and finding only the wall, and running toward the wall only to touch a mirror.

Villaurrutia was small, fragile, always about to be hurt by mysterious and unnamable forces. He spent his life in his poetry. By contrast, Gorostiza — solid, sarcastic, and silent — was the author of one great, long poem, Death Without End, which many thought the best Mexican poem since those written by the nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in the seventeenth century. Its subject was death and form, the form — a glass — postponing death, the water imposing itself, tremulously, as the very condition of life, its flow. Between form and flow stands man, contained in the profile of his vital morality “filled with myself, besieged in my own skin by an ungraspable god who suffocates me.”

There were serious sympathies and antipathies among these Mexican writers, and the source of the discord seemed to be Jaime Torres Bodet, a poet-novelist who could not decide between literature and bureaucracy, who ultimately chose the latter, but who never renounced his literary ambition. Barreda sometimes posed as a Chinese laundry man and spy, Dr. Fu Chan Li, and would say to Gorostiza, affecting a Chinese pronunciation: “You watchee out fol Toles.”

“What’s toles?”

“Toles Bodet.”

Which is to say that Jorge Maura and his friends made themselves at home in this Mexican replica of a Madrid tertulia—a word, Villaurrutia recalled, derived from Tertullian, the Church father who in the second century A.D. liked to gather with his friends in Socratic discussion groups — although it was hard to imagine a discussion with someone as dogmatic as Tertullian, for whom the Church, possessor of the truth, had no need to argue about anything. Barreda improvised, or recalled in Tertullian’s honor, a funny verse:

Dressed as if to go to a tertulia,

Judith departed for Betulia …

Our discussions try to be Socratic, but sometimes they become Tertullianesque, Jorge Maura warned Laura Daz before going to the café. The other Socratic or Tertullian discussants were Basilio Baltazar, a young man in his thirties, dark-skinned, with thick hair, dark brows, shining eyes, and a smile like sunshine; and Domingo Vidal, whose face and years on earth seemed to have been hacked out with a hatchet. He seemed to have emerged from a stone calendar. He shaved his head and let his features expand in an aggressive, mobile way, as if to compensate for the sleepy sweetness in his thick-lidded eyes.

“Well, my hidalgo, won’t my presence annoy your comrades?”

“I want you to be there, Laura.”

“At least you could warn them.”

“They already know you’re coming with me because you are me and that’s that. And if they don’t understand, they can get lost.”

That afternoon they were going to discuss a theme: the role of the Communist Party in the war. Vidal, Jorge pointed out to Laura as they went into the café, would speak for the Communists and Baltazar for the anarchists. That was arranged.

“And you?”

“Listen to me and decide for yourself.”

The two discussants greeted Laura with open hearts. She was surprised that they both talked of the war as if they were living a year or two before what was currently taking place. The Republic was not only staring defeat in the face. This was defeat. On the other hand, from a distance, Octavio Barreda’s face expressed simple curiosity: who was with that gal Laura Díaz, who’d gone with the Riveras to Detroit when Frida lost the child? Villaurrutia and Gorostiza shrugged.

A dialogue began that Laura could instantly see was scripted or anyway predictable, as if each discussant had a role in a play. But then even this impression had already been determined by what Maura had said. Vidal began, as if following an invisible cue, arguing that the Communists had saved the Republic in 1936 and 1937, that without them Madrid would have fallen in the winter of 1937. Neither the militias nor the people’s army could have withstood the street disorder in Madrid and in the factories, the lack of food and transportation, without the order imposed by the Party.

“You’re forgetting all the others,” Baltazar reminded him. “Those who agreed that the Republic should be saved but who did not agree with you.”

Vidal furrowed his brow but burst into laughter. It wasn’t a matter of disagreement but of doing what was most effective to save the Republic. We Communists imposed order on those who wanted anarchic pluralism in the midst of war, people like you, Baltazar.

“Was a series of small-scale civil wars preferable — anarchists on one side, militiamen on the other, Communists against everyone else, and everyone against us, handing victory to the enemy, who was surely united?” Vidal scratched his unshaven chin.

Basilio Baltazar was silent for a moment, and Laura thought, This man’s trying to remember his lines, but his confusion is authentic and perhaps the mistake is mine, and this has to do with a pain I don’t know.

“But the fact is, we’ve lost,” said the melancholy Basilio after a time.

“We probably would have lost sooner without Communist discipline,” said Vidal in an all too neutral tone, as if he respected Basilio’s absent pain, anticipating the anarchist’s likely question: Are you asking whether we lost because the Communist Party put its interests and the interests of the Soviet Union above those of the collective interests of the Spanish people? Well, I’ll respond by saying that the interests of the Party and the Spanish people coincided, that the Soviet Union helped all of us, not only the Party, with arms and funds. All of us.

“The Communist Party helped Spain,” concluded Vidal, and he started hard at Jorge Maura, as if everyone knew that the next speech was his, except that Basilio Baltazar interrupted on a sudden impulse. Unforeseen by anyone but all the more notable because he asked his question in a hushed tone: “But what was Spain? I say it wasn’t only the Communists, it was us, the anarchists, it was liberals, and parliamentary democrats, but the Party first isolated and then annihilated everyone who wasn’t Communist, then strengthened itself and imposed its will by weakening the other Republicans and mocking any hope that wasn’t the Party’s. They preached unity but practiced division.

“That’s why we lost,” said Baltazar after a pause, his eyes averted, so averted that Laura guessed night away that this was something more personal than a political argument.

“You’re very quiet, Maura,” Vidal turned to say, respecting Baltazar’s silence.

“Well”—Jorge smiled—“I see that I’m drinking coffee and Vidal has a beer, but Basilio has already grown fond of tequila.”

“I don’t want to disguise the fact that we disagree.”

“No,” said Vidal.

“Not at all,” said Baltazar rather quickly.

Maura thought that Spain was more than Spain. He’d always held that opinion. Spain was the rehearsal for the fascists’ general war against the entire world. If Spain fell, Europe and the rest of the world would fall …

(“I have to tell you about Raquel Alemán.”)

“Excuse me for being the devil’s advocate.” Vidal smiled in his peculiar way. He was the first man to enter a café in extremely formal Mexico City wearing a sweater of rough wool, as if he’d just come from a factory. “Just imagine if the revolution had triumphed in Spain. What would have happened then? Well, then Germany would have invaded us,” said the devil.

“But Germany has already invaded us,” Basilio Baltazar interrupted, with his quiet desperation. “Spain is already occupied by Hitler. What are you defending or fearing, comrade?”

“What I fear is a disorganized Republican triumph that only post pones the fascists’ true, permanent triumph.”

Vidal drank his beer like a camel who’s happened on an oasis in the desert.

“You mean that would be better than Franco, so we could fight him later in a general war against the Italians, the Germans, and the Spanish fascists?” Basilio’s tone suggested an even higher level of desperation.

“That’s what my devil says, Basilio. The Nazis fooled the whole world. They’re soaking up all of Europe, and no one puts up any resistance. The French and English are either naive or cowards, and they think that they can negotiate with Hitler. It’s only here that the Nazis don’t fool anyone.”

“Here? In Mexico?” Laura smiled to relieve the tension.

“Pardon, pardon mille fois,” laughed Vidal. “Only in Spain.”

“No, excuse me, please.” Laura smiled again. “I understand your ‘here,’ Mr. Vidal. I would have said ‘here in Mexico’ if I were in Spain.”

“What are you drinking?” Basilio asked her.

“Chocolate. It’s a custom of ours. You grind it first, then add hot water. My Mutti, I mean, my mother …”

“Well.” Vidal went back to his argument. “Let’s have thick chocolate and clear conclusions, if you don’t mind. If the Nazis win in Spain, perhaps Europe will wake up. They’ll see the horror. We already know what it is. Perhaps in order to win the big war we have to lose the battle of Spain so as to alert the world against this evil. Spain, the battle, la petite guerre d’Espagne.” Vidal twisted his lips and suppressed a smile.

Jorge slept badly, talking in his sleep all night, got up to drink water, then to urinate, then to sit in an armchair with a distracted look on his face, observed by naked Laura, also nervous, satisfied after sex with Jorge but sensing with alarm that the sex was not for her, but a way of seeking relief …

“Talk to me. I want to know. I have a right to know, Jorge. I love you. What’s happening? What happened?”

It is a beautiful but harsh nation, as if dying slowly and not wanting anyone to see its agony but at the same time wanting a witness of its mortal beauty. The marks of centuries are stamped on its face, one after another starting with the Iberians, a savage gold helmet with the same value as a clay pot. A Roman gate that endures, eaten away by time and by storms, like a marker of power and a notice of legitimacy. A great medieval city wall, the belt around the Castilian town and its defense against Islam — which nonetheless seeps in everywhere, in the Spanish words for pillow, for terrace, for the bath of cleanliness and for abominable pleasures, for the artichoke whose leaves we pull off like an edible carnation, in the semicircular arches of Christian churches, in the Moorish decoration on doors and windows near the synagogue — empty, ruined, persecuted internally by abandonment and oblivion …

Surrounded by its twelfth-century wall, the town of Santa Fe de Palencia has a unique center, a kind of urban navel from which flows the entire history of a community. Its main plaza is a bullring, an arena of very yellow sand waiting for the other color of the Spanish flag to be poured onto it, a plaza that instead of having seats on the sunny or shady side is surrounded by houses with huge shuttered windows, open on Sundays so that people can watch the bullfights, which give vitality and strength to the town. There is only one way into the large, enclosed plaza.

The three Republican soldiers have entered this singular town center, where the mayor, Don Alvaro Méndez, a Communist, is waiting for them. He is not uniformed, but wears a short vest over his big belly, a collarless shirt, and spurless boots. His most attractive feature is his face, with its bushy eyebrows, arched like the entrance to a mosque; his eyes have been veiled for some time by aging eyelids, one would have to search for the hard, secret shine in the depths of that invisible gaze. The faces of the three soldiers are, in contrast, open, frank, and astonished. The old man reads them and says I’m only doing my duty, you saw the Roman gate? it’s not a party question, it’s a matter of law, this city is legal because it is Republican, it isn’t a city in revolt on the side of fascism, it’s a city governed legitimately by an elected Communist mayor, I, Alvaro Méndez, who must do his duty, no matter how terrible and painful it may be.

“It’s unjust,” said Basilio Baltazar through his tightly closed teeth.

“I’ll tell you something, Basilio, and I’m not going to repeat it,” said the mayor, standing in the center of the bullring with its yellow sand and closed windows, with curious women in black peering through the cracks. “There is fidelity in obeying just orders, but there is a higher fidelity in obeying unjust orders.”

“No.” Basilio held back the shout boiling in his throat. “The greater fidelity consists in disobeying unjust orders.”

She betrayed us, said the mayor. She informed the enemy about Republican positions in the mountains. Look at those lights up there, look at those fires on the mountains, flying from peak to peak, fed by all of us in the name of all of us, think of those fires as instant moons, those torches of wood and hay, giving birth to others, a pelt of fire: well, those are the fiery fences of the Republic, the wall we’ve imposed on ourselves to protect us from the fascists. “She told them.” The mayor’s voice trembled with a rage more fiery than the peaks. “She told them that if they put out those lights we’d be fooled and lower our guard. She told them to put out the fires on the mountains, kill the Republican torch bearers one by one, and then you’ll be able to take this seduced, defenseless town in the name of Franco, our savior.”

His snakelike eyelids interrogated each of the soldiers. He wanted to be fair. He listened to the arguments. A noisily opened balcony window and a heartrending shriek interrupted them. A woman appeared with a moon-colored face and eyes the color of blackberries, dressed all in black, her head covered, her skin worn transparent by use, like a sheet of paper on which more has been erased than written. Méndez, mayor of Santa Fe de Palencia, paid no attention. He repeated: Speak up.

“Save her in the name of honor,” said Jorge Maura.

“I love Pilar,” Basilio Baltazar shouted, more loudly than the woman on the balcony “Save her in the name of love.”

“She must die in the name of justice.” The mayor planted his hoot on the immaculate sand and stared, looking for support, at the Communist Vidal.

“Save her despite politics,” he said.

“Unfavorable winds.” The old man tried to smile, but he remained, ultimately, hieratic. “Unfavorable.”

Then the woman on the balcony shouted, Have pity! And the mayor told everyone not to confuse his obligation to justice with his wife’s anger, and the woman shouted again from the balcony, You only have obligations as a mayor and a Communist? And the old man again ignored her, speaking only to Vidal, Baltazar, and Maura, I don’t obey my feelings, I obey Spain and the Party.

“Have you no compassion?” shouted the woman.

“It’s your fault, Clemencia, you educated her to be a Catholic against my wishes,” the mayor answered finally, turning his back to the woman on the balcony.

“Don’t embitter what is left of my life, Alvaro.”

“Bah! Family discord doesn’t take precedence over law.”

“Sometimes discord is born not of hatred but of too much love,” shouted Clemencia, removing the shawl covering her head and revealing her tousled white hair and her ears overflowing with prophecies. “Our daughter stands exposed, at the city gates. What are you going to do with her?”

“She’s no longer your daughter. She’s my wife,” said Basilio Baltazar.

That night, someone let the oxen into the Santa Fe plaza. The fires on the mountain began to go out.

“The sky is full of lies,” said Clemencia in an opaque voice before closing the balcony shutters.

(“I must tell you about Pilar Méndez.”)

There seemed to be only one theme at the next meeting in the Café de Paris: violence, its origins, its gestation, its offspring, its relationship with good and evil. Maura espoused the most difficult argument, that it is impossible to ascribe all evil to the fascists, let’s not forget Republican violence, the assassination of Cardinal Soldevila in Zaragoza by the anarchists, the Socialists beating to death members of Franco’s Falange as they exercised on the grounds of the Casa de Campo in 1934—they poked out their eyeballs and urinated in the sockets, that’s what our side did, comrades.

“They were ours.”

“And didn’t the fascists later on kill the girl who urinated on their dead?”

“That’s my argument, comrades,” said Maura, taking the hand of his Mexican lover. “The escalation of Spanish violence always takes us to the war of all against all.”

“How right the Catalan escamots were in 1934, when they cut the railroad lines to separate Catalonia from Spain forever.” Basilio stared at the joined hands of Jorge and Laura—“Good for you!”—but he felt pain and envy.

Vidal roared with a laugh as woolly as his sweater. “So we all kill one another behind closed doors in a jolly regional style while the world jerks off!”

Jorge let go of Laura’s hand and threw his arm over Vidal’s shoulder. I’m not forgetting the mass murders perpetrated by Franco’s people in Badajoz, the murder of Federico Garca Lorca, or Guernica. That, comrades, was my prologue.

“Friends, forget the political violence of the past. Forget Spain’s supposed political fatality. This is a war, but it isn’t even ours; it’s been taken away from us; we’re nothing but a rehearsal. Our enemies come from outside Spain; Franco is a puppet, but Hitler, unless we stop him, will conquer the world. Remember, I studied in Germany and saw how the Nazis organized. Forget our miserable Spanish violence. Just wait and see real violence. The violence of evil. Evil, that’s right, with a capital E, organized like a factory in the Ruhr Valley. Our violence is going to look like flamenco dancing or bullfighting,” said Jorge Maura.

(“I have to tell you about Raquel Alemán.”)

“And you, Laura Daz? You haven’t said a word.”

She looked down for an instant and then gazed tenderly at each one. Finally, she spoke: “I really enjoy seeing that the hardest fought discussion among men always reveals what they have in common.”

The three of them blushed simultaneously. Basilio Baltazar saved the situation, which she had not fully understood. “You two are very much in love. How do you measure love in the context of all that’s taking place?”

Vidal joined in. “Rephrase the question like this: Does only personal happiness count and not the disaster about to engulf millions of people?”

“I’m asking a different question, Mr. Vidal,” Laura pointed out.

“Just Vidal. How formal you Mexicans are.”

“Well then, Mr. Just Vidal. Can the love two people share make up for all the unhappiness in the world?”

The three men exchanged a look of modesty and compassion.

“Yes, I suppose there are ways of redeeming the world, whether we’re as solitary as our friend Basilio or as affiliated as I am,” Vidal responded, with mixed humility and arrogance.

(“I have to tell you about Pilar Méndez.”)

What the Communist said at the end, Laura, Jorge said to her as the two of them strolled alone along Avenida Cinco de Mayo, is true but troubling.

She told him he seemed reticent — eloquent, of course, but reticent almost always. He was a different Jorge Maura, another one, and she liked him, she swore she did, but she wanted to pause for a moment on the Maura in the café, understand his silence, share the reasons for his silence.

“You know that none of us dares express his true doubts,” countered Maura, walking toward the Venetian-style building that was Mexico City’s main post office. “The Communists were the strongest because they have the fewest doubts. But that’s why it’s easier for them to commit historical crimes. Don’t misunderstand me. Nazis and Communists are not the same thing. The difference is that Hitler believes in evil, evil is his gospel — conquest, genocide, racism. But Stalin must say he believes in the good, in the freedom of labor, in the disappearance of the state, and in giving to each according to his needs. He recites the gospel of the civil god.”

“Is that why he fools so many people?”

“Hitler recites the gospel of the devil. He commits his crimes in the name of evil: that’s his horror. It’s never been seen before. Those who follow him must share his malevolent will, all of them — Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, aristocrats like Papen, low-class scum like Ernst Röhm, Prussian Junkers like Keitel. Stalin commits his crimes in the name of the good, and I don’t know if that isn’t an even greater horror, because those who follow him act in good faith; they’re not fascists but people who are usually good, and when they realize what the Stalinist horror is, Stalin himself eliminates them. Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, all the comrades of the heroic period. Those who refused to follow Stalin because they preferred to follow true Communism all the way to exile or death: aren’t they heroes — Bukharin, Trot sky, Kamenev? Name one Nazi who’s abandoned Hitler out of fidelity to National Socialism.”

“And what about you, Jorge, my little Spanish boy?”

“Me, Laura, my little Mexican girl, I’m a Spanish intellectual and, if you like, a gentleman, an aristó, of the kind Robespierre had guillotined.”

“You have a divided soul, my little Spanish gentleman.”

“No, I certainly comprehend the Nazi evil as well as the Stalinist betrayal. But I’m also conscious of the nobility of the Spanish Republic, how it is simply trying to make Spain into a normal modern country, with mutual respect, getting along with one another, and trying to solve our problems, which, damn it all, have been with us since the Goths. And to that essential nobility of the Republic, I sacrifice my doubts, Laura my love. Between the Nazi evil and the Communist betrayal, I’ll choose the Republican heroism of that young gringo (as you call them), that young Jim, who came to the Jarama to die for us.”

“Jorge, I’m not an idiot. Someone else suffered for the three of you. Something else links you, Baltazar, and Vidal.”

(“I have to tell you about Pilar Méndez.”)

Standing with her back to the wall that ran around Santa Fe de Palencia, wrapped in a mantle of savage black skins, her blond hair tossed by the swirling wind from the mountain, Pilar Méndez watched the hilltop bonfires go out one by one. She did not smile to affirm her triumph — treason to her father, victory for her, strengthening her conviction that to help her side was like helping God — though her spirits sank when she heard the footsteps of the three Republican soldiers advancing from the Roman gate to that space of restless dust and bellowing oxen which she, Pilar Méndez, occupied in the name of her God, beyond any political faith, because the Nationals and the Falange were with God and they, the others, her father, Don Alvaro, and the three soldiers, were victims of the devil without knowing it, thinking they were on the good side, it was they, all of them, the reds, who burned down churches and shot priests and raped nuns: Domingo, Vidal, Jorge Maura, and Basilio Baltazar, her love, her burning tenderness, the man in her life, her husband already without any need of sacraments, walking through the dust and the oxen and the wind and the dead fires toward her, the woman standing fast against the wall of the dying city wrapped in a long mantle of dead black animals, a Spanish blonde, a Visigothic goddess with blue eyes and a mane as yellow as the sand in the bullring.

What were these three men going to say to her?

What could they say?

Not a word. Only the sight of Basilio Baltazar like a double arrow of life’s inseparable pain and pleasure. Her lover felt like a price, the price one paid to invert the order of life, which was love, thought Pilar Méndez as she watched the three men approach.

Basilio knelt and wrapped his arms around her knees, endlessly repeating my love my love my cunt my tits don’t take anything away my treasure, Pilar I adore you.

“You, Domingo Vidal, Communist enemy?” asked Pilar to the other man, to strengthen herself against Basilio Baltazar’s amatory grief.

Vidal nodded his shaved head, his militia cap in his hands, as if Pilar were the Virgin of Sorrows.

“You, Jorge Maura, aristocrat traitor, gone over to the reds?”

Jorge embraced her, and she howled like an animal, yet an animal capable of repugnance, but Maura said, I’m not letting you go, you must understand, you’re sentenced to death, understand me? you’re to be executed at dawn, your own father has ordered you shot, your father the mayor your father Alvaro Méndez, he’s going to kill you despite all our begging, despite your mother …

Pilar Méndez’s insane laugh pulled a horrified Baltazar to his feet. My mother? laughed Pilar like some wild animal, a most beautiful hyena, a Medusa without a gaze, my mother, is there anyone who desires my death more than my badly named mother Clemencia, the pig, she who made me devout until death, she who implanted the idea of sin and hell in me? that woman doesn’t want my life, she wants my martyr’s death, the death of a virgin who believes, the fool, virgin, Basilio, you hear her, Basilio, what do you win by the fact that Clemencia my mother saw us the afternoon you tore out my virginity, you nibbled it bite by bite, you spit out my bloody membrane as if it were snot or a rotten host, Basilio, remember? and you penetrated me the way a wolf penetrates a she-wolf from behind, up the ass, without seeing my face; that you remember, in the old house without furniture where you took me, my adored love, my only man, you think you have the right to save me when my own mother wants me dead, a martyr for the Movement, a saint who saves her own conscience, Clemencia the well named, the mother who hates me because I didn’t marry as she wished, I gave myself to a poor boy with suspicious ideas, my handsome, adored Basilio Baltazar, why have you come here, what are you and your friends trying to do, you’ve gone mad, you don’t know you’re all my enemies, you don’t know I’m against you, I’d have all of you shot in the name of Spain and Franco, I don’t want thorns to grow on the old paths of Spanish death, I want to wash them away with my blood …

Vidal brutally covered her mouth as if he were closing a sewer, Maura made her cross her arms, Baltazar again knelt at her feet. Each of them had his own words, but they all said the same thing, we want to save you, come with us, look at the fires that have still not gone out on the hills, we’ll find refuge there, your father has done his duty, he’s given the order for you to be shot at dawn, we aren’t going to do our duty, come with us, let us save you, Pilar, even if the price is our own death.

“Why, Jorge?” asked Laura Díaz.

In spite of the war. In spite of the Republic. In spite of her father’s will. My daughter must die in the name of justice said the mayor of Santa Fe de Palencia. She must be saved in the name of love said Basilio Baltazar. She must be saved in spite of political logic said Domingo Vidal. She must be saved in the name of honor said Jorge Maura.

“My two friends looked at me and understood. I didn’t have to explain. It isn’t enough that we do things in the name of love or justice. It is honor that sanctioned us. Honor in exchange for justice? That’s the dilemma I saw on the face of Domingo Vidal. Betrayal or beauty? That’s what Basilio Baltazar’s loving eyes were asking me. I looked at the three of them, stripped of everything but the bare skin of truth, that fatal afternoon against the medieval walls and the Roman gate, surrounded by mountains that were going out, I saw the three, Pilar, Basilio, Domingo, as an emblematic group, Laura, the reason why no one but I understood then and now you too because I’m telling you. This is the reason. The need for beauty supersedes the need for justice. The interlocking trio — woman, lover, adversary — was not resolving itself in either justice or love; it was an act of necessary beauty, based on honor.”

What can the duration of a sculpture be when it is incarnated not by statues but by living beings threatened with death?

Sculptural perfection — honor and beauty triumphing over betrayal and justice — dissolved when Jorge whispered to the woman, Run away with us to the mountains, save yourself, because if you don’t the four of us will die here together, and she, between her clenched teeth, answered, I’m human, I haven’t learned anything; even though Basilio begged, nothing is won without compassion, come with us, run away, there’s time; and she, I’m like a dog for death, I smell it and I follow it until I get killed, I’m not going to give the three of you the satisfaction, I can smell death, all the graves in this country are open, there’s no home left to us but the grave.

“Your father and mother at least. Save yourself for them.”

Pilar stared at them with an incendiary shock on her face and began to laugh insanely. “But you understand nothing. Do you think I’m dying just out of loyalty to the Movement?”

Her laughter kept her apart for a few seconds. “I’m dying so my father and mother will hate each other forever. So they’ll never forgive each other.”

(I have to tell you about Pilar Méndez.)

“I think you’re one of those men who are only loyal to themselves if they’re loyal to their friends,” said Laura, leaning her head against Jorge’s shoulder.

“No.” He sighed with fatigue. “I’m a man who’s angry with himself because he doesn’t know how to explain the truth and avoid lies.”

“Perhaps you’re strong because you doubt things, my Spanish boy. I think I figured that out tonight.”

They crossed Aquiles Serdán and passed under the marble portico of the Palace of Fine Arts.

“I just said it now in the café, my love, we’re all condemned. I confess I hate all systems, mine and the others’.”

VIDAL: Now do you see? Victory will not be achieved without order. Let’s win or lose now, victorious today or defeated tomorrow, we’re going to need order and unity, hierarchies of command and discipline. Without them, we’ll always be beaten, because they do have order, unity, command, and discipline.

BALTAZAR: Well, in that case, what’s the difference between Hitler’s implacable discipline and Stalin’s?

VIDAL: The ends, Basilio. Hitler wants a world of slaves. Stalin wants a world of free men. Even though their means may be equally violent, their ends are totally different.

“Vidal’s right,” laughed Laura. “You’re closer to the anarchist than to the Communist.”

Jorge stopped short opposite a poster at the Palace of Fine Arts. “No one was playing a part this afternoon, Laura. Vidal really is a Communist. Basilio really is an anarchist. I didn’t tell you the truth. I thought that way the two of us, you and I, could stand at a certain distance from the debate.”

They stood in silence for a while, staring at the poster’s black letters on yellow paper, improperly fastened to a wooden frame unworthy of the marbles and bronzes in the Palace of Fine Arts. Jorge looked at Laura.

“Forgive me. How beautiful you are.”

Carlos Chávez was going to conduct his own Indian Symphony and Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges. The pianist Nikita Magaloff would interpret Chopin’s First Concerto, the one Aunt Hilda rehearsed so futilely in Catemaco.

“How I wish no one on our side had ever committed a single crime.”

“That’s how Armonía Aznar must have been — a woman I met, or rather never met. I had to guess how she was. Thank you for opening yourself to me without mysteries, without locked doors. Thanks, my hidalgo. You make me feel better, cleaner, clearer in my head.”

“I’m sorry. It’s like vaudeville. We meet and repeat the same trite lines, like one of those Madrid comedies by Munoz Seca. You saw it today: each one knew exactly what he should say. Perhaps that’s how we’ll exorcise our disgust. I don’t know.”

He hugged her in the Fine Arts portico, the two of them surrounded by the brownish-black Mexican night, sudden and vicious. “I’m getting tired of this interminable fight. I’d like to live with no more country than my soul, with no more country …”

They made a half turn and went back to Cinco de Mayo, their arms around each other’s waists. Their words were slowly extinguished, like the lights in the candy shops, bookstores, luggage emporia, as the streetlamps came on, opening a path of light all the way to Herrera’s cathedral, where on the previous March 18 they’d celebrated the nationalization of Mexico’s oil — she and Juan Francisco, Santiago and Danton, and Jorge at a distance, greeting her with his hat in his hand and, on high, a personal greeting that was also a political celebration, above the heads of the crowd, greeting and saying goodbye at the same time, saying I love you and goodbye, I’ve come back and I still love you.

At the Café de Paris, Barreda, who had been watching them, asked Gorostiza, and Villaurrutia to guess what the Spaniards had been talking about. Politics? Art? No, wine jugs. He recited another pair of verses from the Bible turned into rhyme by a mad Spaniard, the description of Balthazar’s Feast:

Burgundy, Rhine, Pinot Blanc:

Sausage? All you could want.

Villaurrutia said he didn’t find Mexican jokes about Spaniards funny, and Gorostiza asked why there was this ill will against a country that gave us its culture, its language, even its mixed blood …

“Go ask Cuauhtémoc how it went with the Spaniards at dinnertime,” laughed Barreda. “Toasted tootsies!”

“No.” Gorostiza smiled. “The thing is, we don’t like to admit that the winners are right. We Mexicans have been defeated too often. We like loving the defeated. They’re ours. They’re us.”

“Are there winners in history?” asked Villaurrutia, he himself defeated by sleep or languor or death, God knows, thought the beautiful, intelligent, and taciturn Carmen Barreda.