The Years With Laura Diaz

15. Colonia Roma: 1941

WHEN JORGE MAURA LEFT, Laura Díaz returned to her home and no longer went out at night, no longer disappeared for eternal days. She was disconcerted. She hadn’t told Juan Francisco the truth, and at first she reproached herself. I did the right thing, it all turned out badly. It was a good thing I was cautious. Was I a coward? Was I very clever? Should I have told Juan Francisco everything, betting he’d accept it, risking a break and then finding myself alone again with neither of them, neither Jorge nor Juan Francisco? Didn’t Maura say this was a matter of our intimate life, that it was sacred, that there was no reason, no moral imperative, obliging either of us to tell about our intimacy?

Back in the house on Avenida Sonora, she spent a great deal of time looking at herself in the mirror. Her face hadn’t changed despite the storms rocking it from within. Until now. But from that moment on, she was sometimes the girl she was before and other times an unknown woman — a changed woman. How would her sons, her husband, see her? Santiago and Danton did not look at her, avoided her eyes, walked quickly, sometimes running the way boys run, skipping along as if they were still children, but not joyfully. They were running away from her, so they wouldn’t have to admit either her presence or her absence.

So they don’t have to admit I wasn’t faithful. That their mother was unfaithful.

They didn’t look at her, but she listened to them. The house wasn’t large, and the silence amplified the echoes; the house turned into a seashell.

“Why the hell did Papa and Mama get married?”

She had no other company but the mirrors. She looked at herself and saw more than two ages. She saw two personalities. She saw the rational Laura and the impulsive Laura, a vital Laura and a spineless Laura. She saw her conscience and her desire, locked in battle on a glass surface, smooth as those frozen lakes where battles were fought in Russian movies. She would have gone off with Jorge Maura if he’d asked, gone away with him, abandoned everything …

One afternoon, she was sitting on the little balcony that looked out over Avenida Sonora. She took four more chairs out there and put a fifth in the middle for herself. After a while, Auntie María de la O came in, dragging her feet, and sat next to her, sighing. Then López Greene came home from the union, found them there, and sat down next to Laura. Later on, the boys came home from school, saw the unusual scene, and took the two remaining chairs, one at each end.

It isn’t their mother who’s convoking them, Laura herself said, the place and the time of day convoke us. Mexico City, an afternoon in 1941, when the shadows lengthen and the very white volcanoes seem to float over a burning bed of clouds, and the barrel organ plays that old song “Los Golondrinas,” and posters for the recent election campaign — AVILA CAMACHO/ALMAZÁN — have begun to peel, and that first afternoon of the silent reencounter of the family contains all the afternoons to come, afternoons of dust storms and afternoons of rains that settle the unquiet dust and perfume the Valley where the city, indecisive between its past and future, is located; the barrel organ plays “Amor Chiquito,” the maids hanging out the wash on the terraces sing “I’m walking along the tropical path,” and teenagers in the street dance tambora and more tambora but what will be will be, cabs go by, ice trucks pass, and vendors with their jicamas sprinkled with lemon and chile powder, the candy vendor sets up, Adams Chicklets, Mimi bars, Mexican treats—jamoncillo and sweet potato — the kiosk closes down with its alarming headlines about the war the Allies are losing and its comics about Blondie and Dagwood and its exotic Argentine ladies’ magazines, Leoplán and El Hogar, and for children, Billiken, neighborhood movie theaters announce Mexican films with Sara García, the Soler brothers, Sofa Alvarez, Gloria Marín, and Arturo de Córdoba, the boys, on the sly, would buy cigarettes — Alas, Faros, and Delicados — at the tobacco stand on the corner, all the kids would play hopscotch, trying to land peach pits in improvised holes, exchange bottle caps from Orange Crush, grape Chaparritas; green buses from the Roma — Piedad line race the brown-and-cream buses from the Roma-Mérida line: the Bosque de Chapultepec with an atmosphere of moss and eucalyptus rises up behind the Bauhaus-style houses, continues to ascend to the symbolic miracle of the Alcázar, where Danton and Santiago go every afternoon before coming home, as if they were really conquering an abrupt, mysterious castle reached by scaling steep paths and asphalt roads, and linked routes that hold the surprise of the grand esplanade above the city, its pigeon flights, and its mysterious rooms filled with nineteenth-century furniture.

The boys are sitting next to Laura, Juan Francisco, and the old aunt, thankful that the city offers them this repertory of movement, color, aromas, song, and the crown of Mexico, a castle that reminds all of them that there is more than we imagine in the world, there is more …

Jorge Maura disappeared, and something she would agree to call “reality,” but very much in quotation marks, reappeared behind the romantic fog. Her husband was the first reality. He’s the one who reappears first, telling the boys (Santiago is twenty, Danton nineteen), “I love her.”

He accepts me, she said, cruelly and ungenerously, he accepts me even though I never told him the truth, he accepts me because he knows that his own cruelty and crudeness sanctioned my freedom, the idea that “I should have married a baker who doesn’t care about the rolls he makes.” Then she realized that his declaring he loved her in the presence of his sons was proof of his failure and at the same time also proof of his possible nobility. Laura Díaz embraced the idea of a regeneration for all of them, parents and sons, by means of a love she had lived with such intensity that now she had enough left over to give away to her own.

She would wake up next to her husband — they’d begun sleeping together again — and hear her husband’s first words, every morning. “Something’s not right.”

Those words saved him and reconciled her. To make her happy, Juan Francisco, thanks to a rediscovered nobility that was perhaps innate in him, was the one who spoke to Danton and Santiago about their mother, recalling when they met, what she was like, how nervous, how independent, telling them they should try to understand her. Laura was offended when she heard him; she should have thanked her husband for interceding, but his intercession offended her, however briefly, and then in the afternoon ceremony — when they sat down in the dusk of the Valley of Mexico, opposite Chapultepec Castle and the volcanoes, which was now the way they all found to say, We’re together despite everything — she said out loud one afternoon: “I fell in love with a man. That’s why I didn’t come home. I was with that man. I would have given my life for him. I would have abandoned all of you for him. But he left me. That’s why I’m back here with you. I could have stayed by myself, but I was afraid. I came back looking for protection. I felt abandoned. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m asking that at your age, boys, you begin to understand that life isn’t easy, that we all make mistakes and wound those we love because we love ourselves more than we love anything else, including the person who fills us with passion at a given moment. Each of you, when the time comes, will want to follow your own path and not the one your father or I would have wanted. Think about me when you do that. Forgive me.”

There were no words, no emotions. Only María de la O allowed old memories to pass through her eyes, now clouded by cataracts, memories of a girl in a Veracruz brothel and a gentleman who rescued her from abandonment and integrated her into this family, overcoming the prejudices of race, of class, and of an immoral morality that in the name of convention takes life instead of giving it.

Laura and Juan Francisco invited each other to surrender, and the boys stopped running, fighting, skipping to avoid their mother’s face. Santiago slept and lived with the door to his bedroom open, something entirely new to his mother, who interpreted it as an act of freedom and transparency, although it was also, perhaps, a culpable rebellion: I have nothing to hide. Danton would laugh at him: What’s your next stunt going to be? Going to jerk off in the middle of the street? No, answered his older brother, I’m trying to say that we’re enough on our own. Who, you and I? I’d like that, Danton. Well, I’m enough on my own, but with the door closed just in case; come and see the pictures I’ve cut out of Vea whenever you like, incredible babes, unbelievably sexy …

Just as Laura would look at herself in the mirror when she came home, almost always thinking that her face didn’t change no matter how many vicissitudes rocked it, she discovered that Santiago looked at himself as well, especially in windows, and seemed surprised at himself and by himself, as if he were constantly discovering another person there with him. Perhaps only his mother thought those things. Santiago was no longer a boy. He was something new. Laura, in front of the mirror, confirmed that sometimes she was the unknown woman — a changeling. Would her son see her that way? She was going to be forty-three.

She didn’t dare go in his room. The open door was an invitation but a jealous one, even, paradoxically, a prohibition. Look at me, but don’t come in. He was drawing. With a round mirror so he could look at himself out of the corner of his eye and create — not copy, not reproduce — the face of Santiago which his mother recognized and memorized only when she saw the self-portrait her son was drawing: the sketch became Santiago’s true face, revealed it, forced Laura to realize that she’d gone, returned, and hadn’t really looked at her sons. How right they were not to look at her, to run, to sneak off when she didn’t look at them, either; they reproached her more for not looking at them than they did for not living with them: they wanted to be seen by her, and since she didn’t see them, Santiago discovered himself first in a mirror that seemed to supply the gaze he would have wanted to receive from his parents, his brother, society, always hostile to the adolescent who bursts into it with his insolent promise and ignorant self-sufficiency. A portrait and then a self-portrait.

And Danton — could there be any doubt? — discovered himself in the brightly lit store window of the city.

She returned as if they didn’t exist, as if they’d never felt forgotten or hurt or eager to communicate to her what Santiago was making in that moment: a portrait she could have known during her absence, a portrait the son could have sent to his mother if Laura, as she’d wished, had gone to live with her Spaniard, her “hidalgo.”

Look, Mother. This is who I am. Never come back again.

Laura imagined that she’d never have another face to give her son but the one her son was giving her now: wide forehead, amber eyes set far apart, not dark as in reality, straight nose and thin, defiant lips, straight hair, messy, of a rich, lustrous chestnut, tremulous chin; even in the self-portrait the chin that wanted to bolt from the face, brave but exposed to all the blows of the world. He was Santiago the Younger.

He had several books open and arranged around him. Van Gogh and Egon Schiele.

Where did you get them? Who gave them to you?

The German Bookstore here in Colonia Hipódromo.

Laura was about to call him a chip off the old block, your German stock’s coming to the surface, but he anticipated her: Don’t worry, they’re German Jews in exile in Mexico.

In the nick of time.

Yes, Mama, in the nick of time.

She described Santiago’s features, which the self-portrait translated and facilitated for her, but she didn’t take note of the thickness of the strokes, the somber light that allowed the spectator to approach that tragic, predestined face, as if the young artist had discovered that a face revealed the tragic necessity of each life, but also its possible freedom to overcome failures. Laura stared at that portrait of her son by her son and thought about the tragedy of Raquel Mendes-Alemán and Jorge Maura’s tragedy with her. Was there a difference between the dark fatality of Raquel’s destiny, which she shared with the entire Jewish people, and the dramatic, honorable but ultimately superfluous response of the Spanish hidalgo Jorge Maura, who went to Havana to save Raquel just as he’d tried to save Pilar in Spain? Along with his self-portrait, Santiago gave Laura a light, an answer she wanted to make her own. We have to make time for the things that have taken place. We have to allow pain to become knowledge in some way. Why did her son’s self-portrait presage these ideas?

So he and she were equals. Santiago looked at her and in a matter-of-fact way accepted her looking at him from his bedroom doorway.

She didn’t separate them. They were different. Santiago assimilated everything; Danton rejected, eliminated whatever crossed his path or blocked his way: he could make a pompous teacher look ridiculous in class or, during recess, thrash a classmate he found annoying. Nevertheless, it was Santiago who better resisted the impositions the world put on him, while Danton was the one who finally accepted them after staging a violent rejection. Danton was the protagonist in the dramas about personal liberty, puberty’s declarations of independence, I’m grown up now, it’s my life, not yours, I’ll come home when I like because I control my own time, and it was he who came home drunk, it was he who took the beatings and got gonorrhea, he who shamefacedly begged for money; he was the freer of the two brothers but also the more dependent. He made a show of himself, the more easily to give in.

While still a student, Santiago got a job working on the restoration of frescoes by José Clemente Orozco, and then Laura introduced him to Frida and Diego, so he could be Rivera’s assistant on the National Palace mural project. Santiago punctually turned his salary over to his mother, as if he were a child in Dickens being exploited in a tannery. She would laugh and promise to put it aside only for him.

“It will be our little secret.”

“I hope it won’t be the only one,” said Santiago, impulsively kissing her.

“You love him more because he forgave you,” said Danton insolently. Laura couldn’t stop herself from slapping him across the face.

“I won’t say another word,” said Danton.

Laura Díaz had hidden her passion for Jorge Maura, her passion with Jorge Maura, and she now decided not to hide her passion for and with her son Santiago, almost as an unconscious compensation for the silence that had surrounded her love of Maura. She wouldn’t deny she preferred Santiago over Danton. She also knew it wasn’t conventionally acceptable. “Either they’re both your sons or both your stepsons.” It didn’t matter. Near him, watching him work at home, go out, come back on time, hand over his money, tell her his projects: this proximity wove itself into a complicity between mother and son, which was also a preference, a word that means putting ahead. Santiago began to occupy that place in Laura’s life, the first place. It was almost as if with the fading of Jorge Maura’s love, which revealed her to herself as Laura, Díaz, a unique woman, a passionate woman, a woman who would leave everything for her lover’s sake, all her passion had transferred to Santiago, not the passion of the mother for the son because that was only love and even preference, but the passion of the boy for life and for creation: that’s what Laura began to make hers because Santiago was giving it to her independently of himself, free of any vanity.

Santiago, her son, the second Santiago, was what he did, loved what he did, gave what he did. He was swiftly progressing, assimilating what he’d only seen in reproductions, books, and magazines, or studying the Mexican murals. He’s discovering the other who’s inside him. His mother is discovering him at the same time. Santiago trembled with creative anticipation whenever he had a blank piece of paper before him or, later, when he stood at the easel Laura gave him for his birthday.

He transmits his tremor. He infuses excitement into the canvas he takes possession of in the same way he excites anyone watching him. He’s a committed being.

Laura was beginning to live all too much from her son’s artistic tremor. Watching him work and progress, she allowed herself to be infected by anticipation, as if it were a fever the boy was carrying. But he was a happy boy. He liked to eat and asked for all sorts of Mexican snacks, inviting Laura to Yucatán banquets at the Circulo del Sureste in Lucerna Street with their papadzules in egg and almond sauce or sweet Neapolitan cheese, inviting her to the courtyard of the Bellinghausen restaurant on Londres Street during the season when maguey worms were served with guacamole, followed by eggnog flans, inviting her to the Danubio on Uruguay Street to enjoy scallops with a dash of lemon or with thick chipotle chile sauce — aromatic and better than all the mustards in the world.

I’ll pay, Mama, let me shoot this time.

Danton’s angry stare harassed them, the dragging footsteps of Juan Francisco’s old slippers harassed them. Laura didn’t care in the least, because life with Santiago was perfection itself for Laura Daz this year of 1941, when she recovered her home and prolonged, sometimes with feelings of guilt, her love for Maura in her love for Santiago, knowing too that this Santiago the Second was the continuation of her love for Santiago the First, as if there were no power in heaven or on earth that could force her into a pause, a blameworthy or redemptive solitude, either. The hiatus separating brother, lover, and son was imperceptible. It lasted during a pair of afternoons on a balcony facing the vibrant park and the extinguished volcanoes.

“I’m going to Havana to rescue Raquel Mendes-Alemán. The Prinz Eugen was not allowed in U.S. waters, and the Cubans do what the Americans tell them to do. The ship is going to sail back to Germany. This time, no one will get out alive. Once again, Hitler set a trap for the democracies. He told them, Well now, look here, I’m sending you a boatload of Jews, give them asylum. Now he’ll say, Just look, you don’t want them either. Well, I want them even less, so they’ll all go to their deaths and so much for that little problem. Laura, if I get there on time, I can save Raquel.”

Will we ever make peace, Juan Francisco?

What more do you want from me? I let you come back to my house. I asked our sons to respect you.

Don’t you realize that someone else is living in this house with us?

No. Whose ghost is that?

Two ghosts. You and I. Before.

I have no idea what to do. Calm down, will you? How’s your work going?

Well. The Riveras have no idea how to manage paperwork and need someone to answer letters, save documents, review contracts.

Good. Congratulations. It doesn’t take up too much time?

Three times a week. I want to put a lot of work in here in the house.

Her husband’s “good” meant “it’s about time,” but Laura paid no attention. Sometimes she thought that marrying him was like turning the other cheek to destiny. It turned what was and perhaps always should have been an enigma, a distance, into a daily reality: the mystery of Juan Francisco López Greene’s true life. She wouldn’t ask him aloud what she’d asked herself so many times. What did her husband do? Where did he fail? Was he a hero who had tired of being one?

Someday you’ll understand, he’d say.

Someday I’ll understand, she repeated until she convinced herself the expression was her own.

Laura. I’m tired, I get a good salary from the Workers Confederation and the Union Congress. We lack for nothing here at home. If you want to take care of Diego and Frida, that’s up to you. Do you also want me to be the hero of 1908, of 1917, of the House of the Workers of the World and the Red Battalions? I can make you a list of the heroes of the Revolution. It has treated all of us justly, except the dead.

I want to know. Were you really a hero?

Juan Francisco began to laugh, he laughed his head off, coughed up phlegm and roared.

No, there were no heroes, and if there were, they were killed off right away and they were honored with statues. Really ugly ones, too, so no one would go on believing in them. In this country, even the statues are phony. They’re all made of copper — you just have to scrape off the gilt. What do you expect from me? Why don’t you simply respect what I was and leave it at that, dammit?

I’m making an effort to understand you, Juan Francisco. Since you won’t tell me where you came from, at least tell me what you are today.

A guard. A guardian of order. An administrator of stability. We won the Revolution. It’s cost us a lot to achieve peace and to have a process of peaceful succession in power without military coups. We’re redistributing land, we have education, roads … Don’t you think that’s something? Would you want me to oppose all that? To end up like all those dissatisfied generals — Serrano and Arnulfo Gómez, Escobar and Saturnino Cedillo — or the philosopher Vasconcelos? They didn’t even get to be heroes. They just burned out. What do you want from me, Laura?

I’m just looking for a little hole in your armor, where I can love you, Juan Francisco. I’m that stupid.

A little hole? Why, I’m a sieve, my dear!

She tried to explain to Santiago, as the boy painted, that she was delighted by his artistic spirit. She told him while his father’s words were still ringing in her ears.

“Diego uses the word élan. He lived in France for a long time.”

Santiago was painting, unabashed, a man and a woman, naked but separated, standing, staring at each other, exploring each other with their eyes. Their arms were crossed. Laura told Santiago it was very difficult for a couple to love each other forever because the spirits of two people are almost never equal. There is a moment of total identification that impassions us, a balance between the two which, unfortunately, is only a revelation that one of the two will break the balance.

“I want you to understand that about your father and me.”

“Well, Mama, all you did was to anticipate him. You made him understand you were not going to he the sad one. You left that role to him.”

Santiago cleaned his brushes and looked at his mother.

“And the day he dies, who’ll be anticipating whom?”

How could I abandon a man so weak, Laura said to herself, then responded with strength and modesty: no, what we’ve got to do is to change the rules of the game, rules made by men for men and for women because only they legislate for both sexes, because the rules men make are valid both for the faithful and domestic life of women and for the unfaithful and errant life of men. The woman is always guilty of submission in one case, and in the other of rebelliousness; guilty of a fidelity that lets life pass by while she’s stretched out in a cold grave with a man who doesn’t desire her, or guilty of the infidelity of seeking pleasure with another in the same way her husband does, a sin for her, a prize for him, he’s called Don Juan and she Doña Puta, my God, Juan Francisco, why didn’t you cheat on me in style, with some great love, instead of being a camp follower for your boss Fatso Morones? Why didn’t you have a love with a woman as great, as strong, as brave as Jorge Maura, my own love?

With Danton, Juan Francisco had a relationship that paralleled Laura’s with Santiago: the family formed two parties. The old man — he’d turned sixty but looked seventy — forgave every one of his younger son’s tricks, gave him money, and sat him down so they both could see each other’s face. He did that because neither ever opened his mouth, at least not in the presence of their two rivals in the house, Laura and Santiago. Despite the silence, Laura suspected that Juan Francisco and Danton said things to each other. The old auntie, mute by act of will, confirmed this suspicion one afternoon at the healing ceremony, at the balcony, the repeated, unifying family ritual. María de la O insisted on sitting between the father and the younger brother, separating them, but she didn’t take her eyes off Laura. Then, when the elderly mulatta, dressed as always in black, had Laura’s attention, she rapidly moved her own eyes, like a dark eagle whose vision was split down the middle and who could see simultaneously in two directions. Several times she glanced from Juan Francisco to Danton and from the son to the father, which said to Laura something like “they understand each other,” which Laura already knew, or “they’re the same,” which was hard to imagine: the agile, party-loving, carefree Danton seemed the complete opposite of the parsimonious, withdrawn, and anguished Juan Francisco. Where was the relationship? Yet María de la O’s intuitions were rarely mistaken.

One night, when Santiago fell asleep next to his recently acquired easel — this one a gift from Diego Rivera — Laura, who was allowed to watch him paint, covered him with a blanket and cushioned his head as best she could, very softly caressing his unfurrowed brow. Leaving his room, she heard laughter and whispering in her bedroom. She walked in without knocking and found Juan Francisco and Danton on the floor, sitting with their legs crossed, studying a spread-out map of the state of Tabasco.

“Excuse me,” interrupted Laura. “It’s late, and you have school tomorrow, Danton.”

The boy laughed. “My best school is right here with my dad.”

They’d been drinking. The bottle of Potrero rum was half empty, and Juan Francisco’s alcoholic heaviness kept him from raising the hand he’d stretched out over the surface of his home state.

“Off to bed now, my fine young gentleman.”

“Oh, what a pain. We were having so much fun.”

“But, son, tomorrow you won’t be able to hold your head up if you don’t get some sleep.”

“Fun, son, head, dead,” rhymed Danton as he marched off.

Laura stared hard at her husband and the map.

“What place is that right under your finger?” Laura smiled. “Let me see. Macuspana. Was that just an accident, or does that mean something to you?”

“It’s a place hidden in the forest.”

“That much I can imagine. What’s it mean to you?”

“Elzevir Almonte.”

Laura couldn’t speak. Like an arrow, her mind flew back to the figure of the priest from Puebla who appeared one day in Catemaco to sow intolerance, impose ridiculous moral restrictions, disturb innocence in the confessional, and disappear another fine day with the offerings to the Holy Child of Zongolica.

“Elzevir Almonte,” repeated Laura in a trance, remembering the priest’s question that day in confession: Would you like to see your father’s sex, child?

“He took refuge in Tabasco. He passed himself off as a layman, of course, and no one knew where he got his money. He would go to Villahermosa once a month and the next, day pay off all his debts in one shot. The day my mother died there was no priest in the entire zone. I ran everywhere shouting, My mother wants to confess, wants to go to heaven, isn’t there a padre to bless her? It was then Almonte revealed he was a priest and gave my mother the last rites. I’ll never forget the expression of peace on my poor old mother’s face. She died thanking me for sending her to heaven. Why did you hide out here? I asked Father Elzevir. He told me, and I told him, it’s time you redeemed yourself. I brought him to the Rio Blanco strike. He attended the workers left wounded by the rural police. The army had killed two hundred of them. Almonte blessed each and every one. They couldn’t stop him even if they were in a hurry to load the corpses onto open cars and dump them into the sea at Veracruz. But Father Elzevir was indefatigable. He got together with Margarito Ramirez, a brave worker who set fire to the company store. Then he became an outlaw on two fronts. The Church was hunting him down because of his robbery in Catemaco, the government because of his rebellion at Rio Blanco. I ended up asking myself, What good are these priests? Everything Father Elzevir did he could have done without the Church. My mother was going to die with or without a blessing. Porfirio Díaz’s army killed the Rio Blanco workers and threw them into the sea with or without a priest’s blessing, and Margarita Ramírez had no need of the priest to set fire to the store. In all good faith, I asked myself what the hell the purpose of the Church was. As if to confirm my doubts, Elzevir showed what he was made of. He went to Veracruz, and declared that everything that happened at Rio Blanco was an ‘anarchist conspiracy’ and appeared in the newspapers alongside the U.S. consul congratulating the government for its ‘decisive action.’ He would have done anything to get a pardon for his robbery and for running away from Catemaco. He had betrayal in his veins. He used me when he thought we were going to win, and he betrayed us as soon as we lost. He didn’t know we’d win in the long run. I came to despise him and acquired a profound hatred for the Church. That explains why I approved the persecution unleashed by Calles and why I turned in the nun Soriano. They’re a plague, and we’ve got to be implacable with them.”

“You don’t owe them anything?”

“I do owe Elzevir Almonte something. He told me all about your family. He described you as the most beautiful girl in Veracruz. I think he desired you. He told me how you’d make your confession with him. He even aroused me. I decided to meet you, Laura. I went to Xalapa to meet you.”

Juan Francisco carefully folded the map. He was already in his pajamas and went to bed without another word.

Laura couldn’t sleep. She was thinking hard about the immense impunity a reputation based on old sentiments can give one, as if, having drunk life’s hemlock, there is nothing left but to sit back and wait for death. Do we have to suffer in order to be someone? Do we receive it or seek it out? Perhaps Juan Francisco, without realizing, would have taken the story of Father Almonte — whom she’d thought of as a refugee, more a shadow than a man, in Mutti Leticia’s boardinghouse in Xalapa — as more a pain than a sin. Who knows what deep religious roots each individual and each family had in Mexico? Maybe rebelling against religion was a way of being religious. And the Revolution itself, with its national ceremonies, its civil saints and its warrior martyrs: wasn’t it a parallel, lay church — just as confident that it was the depository and dispenser of health as was the Apostolic and Holy Roman Church that had educated, protected, and exploited Mexicans all at the same time since the Conquest? But in the end none of that explained or justified betraying a woman who’d been granted asylum in a home, her home, the home of Laura Daz.

Juan Francisco was unforgivable. He would die — Laura closed her eyes to fall asleep — without his wife’s forgiveness. That night, she felt herself to be more the sister of Gloria Soriano than the wife of Juan Francisco López Greene. More the sister than the wife, more the sis …

The fact is — she went on caviling when morning came — she didn’t want to attribute the change in her husband’s life, from energetic and generous labor tribune in the Revolution to second-rate politico and functionary, merely and simply to the need for survival. Perhaps the game that father and son were playing with the map held the key to Juan Francisco, beyond the poor saga of Father Almonte, beyond Danton, who could be very secretive or very much a chatterbox, even a braggart, if that suited his self-esteem, reputation, and convenience. No, she was not going to disguise sympathies and differences in this house; here people would speak the truth from now on, just as she did, giving an example for them all. She’d confessed before her family and, instead of losing respect, had won it.

That weekend she said exactly that to Danton. “I was very frank, son.”

“You confess before a husband who’s impotent, one son who’s gay, another who’s drunk, and an aunt born in a whorehouse. Wow, what bravery!”

She’d slapped him once. She’d sworn never to do it again.

“What do you want me to tell you about my father? If you slept with him, you could find out all his secrets. Be braver, Mama. I’m telling you the truth.”

“You’re a miserable little worm.”

“No, I’m hoping to graduate and be a big worm, just you wait and see. Just as Kiko Mendive says in his song: guachachacharachá!” He improvised a little dance step, straightened his blue-and-yellow-striped tie, and said, “Don’t worry, Mama, as far as the world is concerned, every man for himself, my brother and I can take care of ourselves. We’re okay. We’re not going to be a burden to you.”

Laura hid her doubts. Danton was going to need all the help in the world, and since the world helps no one for free, he would have to pay. A feeling of profound revulsion toward her younger son flowed over her. She asked herself the useless questions: Where does that come from? What is there in Juan Francisco’s blood? Because in mine …

Santiago entered a febrile stage in his life. He neglected his job with Rivera at the National Palace and transformed his bedroom into a studio reeking aggressively of oil paints and turpentine. Entering his space was like stepping into a savage forest of fir trees, pines, larches, and terebinths. The walls were smeared as if they were a concave extension of the canvases, the bed was covered by a sheet hiding the prostrate body of another Santiago, who slept while his twin the artist painted. The window was darkened by a flight of birds attracted to a rendezvous as irresistible as the call to the south during the autumn equinox, and Santiago recited aloud as he painted, himself attracted by a kind of southern gravity:

a branch was born like an island,

a leaf was shaped like a sword,

a flower was lightning and medusa,

a cluster rounded off its resume,

a root descended into the darkness.

It was the twilight of the iguana.

Then he’d say disconnected things while he painted: “All artists are tame animals; I’m a wild animal.” And it was true. He was a man with a head of long hair and a boyish, scattered beard and a high, clear, fevered brow and eyes filled with a love so intense they frightened Laura, who was finding a perfectly new being in her son, on him “the initials of the earth were inscribed,” because Santiago her son was the “young warrior of darkness and copper” in the Canto General, by the greatest poet in the Americas, Pablo Neruda, which had just been published in Mexico. Mother and son read it together, and she remembered the nights of fire in Madrid that Jorge Maura had evoked, Neruda on a roof in flames under the bombs of fascist planes, in a European world returned to the elemental ode of our America in perpetual destruction and re-creation, “a thousand years of air, months, weeks of air,” “the high place of the human aurora: the tallest vessel that contained the silence of a life of stone after so many lives.” Those words fed the life and work of her son.

She wanted to be just. Her two sons had already burst into extremes, both Santiago and Danton were taking shape in places of the dawn, and they were both “tall vessels” for the promising silence of two nascent lives. Until then, she’d believed in people, older than she or her contemporaries, as intelligible beings. Her sons were, prodigiously, adventurously, mysteries. She asked herself if at any moment in the years with Laura Daz she herself had been as indecipherable for her parents as her sons seemed to her now. She vainly sought an explanation from those who could understand her — María de la O, who certainly had lived on the extreme edge of life, the frontier of abandonment that had no night or day, or her own husband, Juan Fancisco, about whom she knew only a legend, first, and then a spoiled myth, and finally an old rancor, cohabiting with a resignation she’d learned to accept.

Despite everything, the alliances between parents and sons became stronger in a natural way; in every home there are gravitational fields as strong as those of the stars — which don’t fall, Maura explained to her once, precisely because some attract others, lean on each other, maintain their integrity despite the tenacious, irresistible force of a universe that is permanently expanding, from beginning (if it really had a beginning) to end (if it really will have an end).

“Gravity doesn’t mean falling, as is commonly thought, Laura. It’s attraction. Attraction not only unites us but makes us bigger.”

Laura and Santiago gave each other mutual support. The son’s artistic project found an echo in the mother’s moral frankness, and Laura’s return to her frustrated marriage was completely justified thanks to her creative union with her son. Santiago saw in his mother a decision to be free that corresponded to his own impulse to paint. The union between Juan Francisco and Danton, on the other hand, was based first on a certain masculine pride on the father’s part — this was the playboy, tough-guy son who was always in love, just like the heroes of the wildly popular Jorge Negrete movies the two went to see together in downtown theaters: the recently opened Chinese Palace on Iturbide Street, a mausoleum of papier-mâché pagodas, smiling Buddhas, and starry heavens (sine qua non for a “movie cathedral” of the time) the Alameda and the Colonial, with their viceregal, baroque references, the Lindavista and the Lido, with their Hollywood pretensions, “streamlined,” as society ladies said of their outfits, their cars, and their kitchens. The father loved inviting his son out for a strong dose of all those challenges to honor, displays of horseback-riding skill, barroom brawls, and serenades to saintly girlfriends. Both of them melted, gaping at Gloria Marín’s liquid eyes — she’d just prayed to the Virgin that her man might show up. Because a charro from Jalisco, even if he thought he was conquering the woman, was always the one who was conquered, thanks to the womanly arts, suffering on the gallows of an all-devouring virginity from a legion of Guadalajara maidens named Esther Fernández, María Luisa Zea, or Consuelito Frank.

Danton knew his father would enjoy his tales of bars, challenges, and serenades which, at the suburban level, reenacted the movie deeds of the Singing Cowboy. In school, he was punished for such escapades. Juan Francisco celebrated them, however, and the son gave thanks, wondering whether his father was nostalgic for the adventures of his own youth or if, thanks to the son, he was enjoying for the first time the youth he had missed. Juan Francisco never spoke of his intimate past. If Laura was betting that her husband would reveal the secrets of his origin to their younger son, she was mistaken. There was a sealed zone in López Greene’s life story, the very awakening of his personality: had he always been the attractive, eloquent, brave leader she met in the Xalapa Casino when she was twenty-one, or was there something before and behind the glory, a blank space that would explain the silent, indifferent, and fearful man who now lived with her?

Juan Francisco taught the son he coddled about the glorious history of the workers movement against the dictatorship of Porfirio Daz. After 1867, when Maximilian’s empire fell, Benito Juárez found himself face to face, right here in Mexico City, with well-organized groups of anarchists who had secretly come in with the Hungarian, Austrian, Czech, and French troops who supported the Habsburg archduke. They stayed here when the French withdrew and Juárez had Maximilian shot. Those anarchists had grouped artisans into Resistance Societies. In 1870 the Grand Circle of Mexican Workers was constituted, then in 1876 a secret Bakunin group, The Social, celebrated the first general workers congress in the Mexican Republic.

“So you see, my boy, the Mexican workers movement wasn’t born yesterday, even though it had to struggle against ancient colonial prejudices. There was an anarchist delegate, Soledad Soria. They tried to nullify her membership because the presence of a woman violated tradition, they said. The Congress grew to have eighty thousand members, just imagine. Something to be proud of. It was logical that President Díaz began to repress them, especially in the terrible putting down of miners in Cananea. Don Porfirio began his repression there because the American groups that dominated the copper company had sent in almost a hundred armed men from Arizona, rangers, to protect American property. It’s always the same old song from the gringos. They invade a country to protect life and property. The miners also wanted the same old thing, an eight-hour day, wages, housing, schools. They, too, wanted life and property. They were massacred. But it was there that the Díaz dictatorship cracked for good. They didn’t calculate that a single crack can bring down an entire building.”

Juan Francisco was delighted to have an attentive audience, his own son, for whom he could rehearse those heroic stories of the Mexican workers movement, culminating in the textile strike at Rio Blanco in 1907, where Don Porfirio’s Finance Minister, Yves Limantour, supported the French owners and planned to prohibit uncensored books, require passports to enter and leave the factory, as if it were a foreign country, and note in company documents the rebellious history of each worker.

“Once again it was a woman, Margarita Romero by name, who led the march to the company store and set it on fire. The army came in and shot two hundred workers. The troops set up their garrison in Veracruz, and it was then that I came to organized the resistance.”

“What did you do before, Papa?”

“I think my story begins with the Revolution. Before that, I have no biography, my boy.”

He brought Danton to the offices of the CTM, to a cubicle where he received telephone calls, which always ended with his saying “yes, sir,” “just as you say,” and “an order is an order, sir,” before he went off to Congress to communicate to the labor deputies the orders of the President and Secretary of State.

That’s how he spent the day. But en route from the union offices to the Chamber and then back, Danton saw a world he didn’t like. It all seemed a circus of complicities, a minuet of agreements dictated from above by the real powers and repeated below mechanically in Congress and the unions, without argument or doubt but in an interminable circle of hugs, pats on the back, secrets whispered into ears, envelopes with official seals, occasional bursts of laughter, vulgar horseplay that had the obvious purpose of salvaging the leaders’ and deputies’ ill-treated masculinity, constant dates for grand banquets that might end at midnight in the House of the Lady Bandit, winks of “you know what I mean” in matters of sex and money, and Juan Francisco circulating among all this.

“It’s orders …”

“It’s convenient …”

“Of course they’re communal lands, but the beachfront hotels will give jobs to the whole community …”

“The hospital, the school, the highway — these will all integrate your region better, Congressman, especially the highway, which will run right next to your property …”

“Well, yes, I do know it’s his lady’s whim, but let’s give in. What do we have to lose? The Secretary will be grateful to us for the rest of his life …”

“No, there’s an interest higher up that wants to stop this strike. It’s over, understand? Everything can be achieved through laws and conciliation, without fights. You have to realize, Mr. Congressman, that the government’s raison d’être is to ensure stability and social peace in Mexico. That, today, is what revolutionary means.”

“Yes, I know President Cárdenas promised you a cooperative, comrades. And we’re going to have it. The problem is that the requirements of production demand a strong leadership nationally linked to the CTM and the Party of the Mexican Revolution. If we don’t have that, comrades, we’ll be swallowed up by priests and landowners, as always.”

“Have faith.”

Wasn’t he going to request a sightly more elegant office?

No, Juan Francisco told Danton, a spot like this is appropriate for me, modest, and better to work from. This way I don’t offend anyone.

But I thought you made money to show off.

Then you should work as a contractor or a businessman. Those people can do what they like.

Why?

Because they create jobs. That’s the formula.

And you?

We all have to play the role assigned us. That’s the law of the world. Which do you like, son: businessman, newspaperman, soldier …?

None of those, Papa.

Well, what do you want to do?

Whatever I have to.