The Years With Laura Diaz

18. Avenida Sonora: 1950

THERE COMES A MOMENT in life when nothing but loving the dead has any importance. We have to do everything we can for the dead. You and I together, we can suffer because the dead person is absent. Their presence is not absolute. Their absence is the only absolute. But the desire we have for the dead person is neither presence nor absence. There is no one left in my house, Jorge. If you want to believe my solitude is what returned me to you, I give you permission to do so.

My husband, Juan Francisco, died.

My auntie, María de la O, died.

But the death of my adored son Santiago is the only real death for me, it comprises all the others, gives them meaning.

My auntie’s death actually gives me joy. She died as she wished, in her beloved Veracruz, dancing danzones with a tiny man named Matias Matadamas, who dressed all in powder blue to take her out in the public square twice a week dancing the danzón on the space of a single brick.

The real death of Juan Francisco had occurred long before. His inanimate body merely confirmed it. He approached death dragging his feet, saying to me, “I can’t think of anything,” asking me, “Should we have married, you and I?” Because the day he died I asked him if we could finally stop hurting each other.

“I’ve lost too much time hating you.”

“And I, forgetting you.”

Who said what, Jorge? He or I? I don’t know anymore. I don’t know which of us said, “If you don’t tell me I deserved your hatred, I won’t tell you you deserved to be forgotten.”

I want to believe I didn’t love him when he died. Ever since I went back to him after you left for Cuba, I always asked myself, Why does he accept me again? Is he weak or perverse? Is he making a profession of his failure so he can get the only form of love left to him — the compassion of others? How could I abandon such a weak man?

Every day, my son Santiago makes me think that everything I love is dead.

I console myself the way we all do. Time will pass. Gradually, able to bear the absence.

Then I react violently. I don’t want my pain to fade, ever. I want the absence of my son always, always, to be intolerable.

Then my pride takes control of me. I wonder if a love with no other foundation but memory won’t ultimately become tolerable, I wonder if a love that always wants pain should subdue that caress of memory and demand a void, a great void in which there is no room for memory or tenderness and where absence, knowing him to be absent, will admit no consolation.

It came from where she least expected it. Pity.

It was Juan Francisco’s tears over the body of Santiago. The father mourned the death of the son as if no one in the world had loved him more, more secretly, less openly. Why had he kept his distance from Santiago and drawn so close to Danton? To suffer less when Santiago died? Did he weep because he was never close to him, or did he weep because he loved him more than he loved anyone and only death allowed him to show it?

Seeing the father weep over the body of the son returned to Laura’s memory one verbal slap after another, as if everything her husband and she had said to hurt each other over the years was being repeated, more venomously, at that very moment, marrying you was like turning the other cheek to destiny, don’t talk to me as if you were a saint talking to a temptress, speak to me, look me in the eye, why didn’t you judge me for my will to love you, Juan Francisco, instead of condemning me for the adultery? I have no idea why I thought you an exciting, brave man, that’s what they said about you, you were always “they say about him,” a whisper, never a reality, between the two of us there was never love, only illusion, mirages, which never last, not love based on respect and admiration, life with you has overpowered me, you’ve left me perplexed and sick, I don’t hate you, you just tire me out, you love me too much, a real lover should never love one too much, should never cloy, Juan Francisco, our marriage is dead, either everything or nothing killed it, who knows? But let’s start burying it, dearest, because it stinks to high heaven.

And now she could say thank you, thanks to your all too facile adoration I was able to achieve something better, that constant expectation which requires passion, thanks to you I reached Jorge Maura, the difference between you let me understand and love Jorge as I could never love you.

“I thought I had more strength than I do, Laura. Forgive me.”

“I can’t condemn the best of myself to the grave of memory. You forgive me.”

And now she saw him weeping over the body of the exhausted son. She would have wanted to ask his forgiveness for having been unable, for thirty years, to penetrate beyond appearances, legends, the mystery of his origins, the myth of his past, the betrayal of his present.

It was terrible that they were finally able to speak thanks to the death of their son.

It was terrible for them to identify themselves, Laura and Juan Francisco, revealing that both, in secret, were staring with equal love at Santiago the Younger, thinking the same thoughts, he has everything, good looks, talent, generosity, everything but health, everything but life and time to live it. Only now did father and mother discover that both had refused to pity Santiago because in this house no one was permitted to pity anyone. We can betray with pity those whom we love.

“Is that why you favored Danton so openly, Juan Francisco?”

Laura had boasted of the eloquent silence between mother and son. Solitude and quietude had united them. Was that also true about the relation of Santiago to Juan Francisco? Was being explicit about what was taking place more than an offense? Was it a betrayal? Mother and son lived a skein of complicities, shared thoughts, ways of saying thank you, everything but compassion — damned, forbidden compassion … did the father also live and feel this, at a distance, celebrating the other son, father of both?

Every mother knows there are children who take care of themselves. Trying to protect them is an effrontery. That was how it was with Danton. To her, his father’s nearness to him seemed an abuse; Juan Francisco understood nothing, gave everything to the son who needed nothing, Danton who almost from infancy played all day unaware of what might be happening in the shadows and silence of their home where his brother lived. But Laura knew instinctively that even if Danton needed no attention and Santiago did, an excessive display of it would have been more offensive and damaging to the weak boy than to the strong one. That wasn’t the problem. Danton moved through the world adjusting everything to his own advantage. Santiago disregarded everything except what he considered essential to his painting, his music, his poetry, his Van Gogh and his Egon Schiele, his Baudelaire and his Rimbaud, his Schubert …

Now, seeing both father and son, Juan Francisco and Danton, weeping over the handsome, ascetic body of the young Santiago, Laura realized that the brothers had loved each other but were too modest to show it — brotherly love is virile; sometimes it must wait until the moment of death to show itself as love, affection, tenderness … Now she blamed herself. Had Laura Díaz stolen all her glories from the world just to give them solely to Santiago? All the virtue for the weak brother? Didn’t the strong brother also deserve something? Had she in reality lost two sons?

“Did I ever tell you,” said Juan Francisco after the funeral, “that one night I surprised them talking to each other like men? Both were saying, ‘We’re all we need.’ They were declaring themselves independent of you and of me, Laura. How incredible to surprise your sons in the very moment when they are declaring independence. Except that Santiago really meant what he said. All he needed was himself. Danton’s different. He needs success, money, society. He needs more than himself; he’s fooling himself. That’s why he needs us more than ever.”

Would there be time to correct thirty years of errors in a shared life with two adult sons, one already dead? Santiago wrote a poem just before he died that Laura showed to Juan Francisco, especially one line: “We are translated lives.” What did it mean? What did those everyday phrases the boy used mean? Don’t leave the cage door open, those are homing pigeons in there and they won’t leave, but cats are different, they go and come back to hurt … “The sun doesn’t always hit me on the head.” Perhaps they meant that Santiago knew how to detach himself from himself, transform himself, discover the other within. She discovered it, too, but didn’t tell him. What about you, Juan Francisco?

“My sons are my biography, Laura. I don’t have any other.”

“What about me?”

“You’re part of it too, darling.”

Was that Juan Francisco’s secret, that his life had no secret because he had no past, that his life was only external, the fame of Juan Francisco the orator, the leader, the revolutionary? And behind it, what was there that opened up behind it? Nothing?

“There was a girl in Villahermosa who suffered from mongolism. She would threaten people, hit them, and spit, all violently. Her mother had to put blinders on her, as if she were a horse, so she couldn’t see the world and could calm down.”

“Was she your neighbor in Tabasco?”

No, he didn’t have neighbors, he said, shaking his head.

“Who are you? Where are you from? Are you ever going to tell me?”

Again, he shook his head.

“Don’t you realize that separates us, Juan Francisco? Just when we’re on the verge of understanding each other you deny me the story of your life once again?”

This time he nodded his head.

“What did you do, Juan Francisco? Were you a hero who simply got tired? Was your heroism a lie? Do you know that’s what I’ve come to believe? What myth are you going to transmit to your sons, the living and the dead one, too — have you thought about that? What are you going to leave us? The whole truth? A half-truth? The good part? The bad? Which part goes to Danton, who’s alive? Which to Santiago, who’s dead?”

She knew that only time, which fades like smoke, would reveal her husband’s jealously guarded secret. How many times had they each invited the other to give up? Could they ever say, I’m giving everything to you, right now?

“Later you’ll understand,” said the man. He was more and more beaten down.

“Do you realize what you’re making me do? You’re making me ask you questions. What must I give you, Juan Francisco, what do you want from me? Would you like me to call you ‘sweetheart’ and ‘my love’ again, even though you know I reserve those words for another man and for my sons, they’re not your words, you’re my husband, Juan Francisco, not my tenderness, my dear one, my love (my hidalgo, my adored little Spanish boy …)?”

She feared — or only wanted to believe — that at a certain moment Juan Francisco would shake off his lethargy and touch her with another voice, the voice, new and old at the same time, of the end. She schooled herself in patience for the end to come, visibly approaching in the physical collapse of this oversized man with wide shoulders and immense hands, short torso and long legs, like others in his caste. His caste: Laura wanted to attribute something to Juan Francisco, at least race, caste, descent, family, father, mother, lovers, first wife, illegitimate or legitimate children, what difference did it make? One day, she was on the verge of taking the Interoceanic train back to Veracruz and from there going by boat and highway to Tabasco to consult registries, but that made her feel like a contemptible busybody. So she followed her daily routine, helping Frida Kahlo, in more pain than ever, with one leg amputated, a prisoner of her bed and wheelchair, and she went to gatherings hosted by the Riveras in honor of the new wave of exiles — Americans persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

A new war had begun, the Cold War. Churchill had recognized it in a famous speech: “An iron curtain has descended over Europe …” Stalin proved that the democracies’ suspicions of the Soviet Union were well founded. The old dictator’s paranoia led him to commit delirious crimes: he jailed and ordered the execution not of his nonexistent enemies but of his friends, out of fear that one day they might become enemies. He carried out preventive assassination and imprisonment, cruel and horribly unnecessary. Yet Picasso painted the “realistic” portrait of Stalin with a dove, because devotees of that strange monster — so argued about during the evenings with Domingo Vidal, Basilio Baltazar, and Jorge Maura in the Café de Paris during the Spanish Civil War — believed he was now champion of peace, enemy of U.S. imperialism. For their part, Americans invented their own anti-Communist paranoia and saw Stalinist agents under every rug, on every New York stage, and in every Hollywood film.

The new exiles began gathering at the Riveras’ house, but many stopped coming because Diego’s Marxist logorrhea bored them and they were indignant about Frida’s devotion to Uncle Joe, to whom she dedicated a portrait and unlimited praise despite the fact that (or perhaps because) Stalin had had her lover Leon Trotsky murdered.

Laura Díaz remembered Jorge Maura’s words — there’s no need to change life, no need to transform the world. We have to diversify life. We have to give up the illusion that a recovered unity is the key to a new paradise. We have to see difference as a value. Difference strengthens identity. Jorge Maura had said he found himself between two truths: that the world was going to save itself, and that the world was doomed. Both are true: capitalism’s corrupt society is doomed, but the revolution’s ideal society is also doomed.

“Believe in the opportunities of freedom,” said a warm voice behind Laura, a voice that dominated the debates (profound) and conversations (flat) at the Riveras’ house. “Remember that politics is secondary to personal integrity. Without personal integrity the social life is not worth living.”

“Jorge!” exclaimed Laura in a shock of disbelief, spinning around to see the face of a still young-looking man with thick hair and brows that were no longer black as they once had been but spattered with white.

“No. I’m sorry to disappoint you. Basilio. Basilio Baltazar. Remember me?”

They hugged each other with an emotion like that attending a new birth, as if they’d both in some way been reborn in that instant and, in the emotion of their meeting, could fall in love and again be the young people they had been fifteen years earlier. But now they were both accompanied, Laura Díaz by Jorge Maura, Basilio Baltazar by Pilar Méndez. And Jorge, on his island, forever accompanied by the other Mends — Raquel.

They looked at each other with immense tenderness, unable to speak for a few moments.

“See?” Basilio smiled behind his moist eyes. “We never escape our problems. We never stop persecuting or being persecuted.”

“Yes, I do see,” she said in a broken voice.

“There are some terrific people among these gringos. They’re almost all film or theater directors, writers, not to mention a few veterans of our war and the Lincoln Brigade. Remember?”

“How could I forget, Basilio?”

“Most of them live in Cuernavaca. Why don’t we go down one weekend and talk to them.”

All Laura could do was kiss the cheek of her old friend the Spanish anarchist, as if she were once again kissing Jorge Maura, as if she were seeing for the first time the always hidden face of Armonía Aznar, as if from the bottom of the gulf arose the face of her adored brother, the first Santiago. Basilio was the catalyst of a past Laura missed terribly but considered lost forever.

“I don’t think so. You make our past into a present, Basilio. Thanks.”

Going to Cuernavaca to argue about politics, but this time with Americans instead of Spaniards or Mexican labor leaders betrayed by the Revolution, by Calles and Morones … the idea tired and depressed her as she returned that night to the family house on Avenida Sonora, now so solitary without María de la O and Santiago, both dead, Danton married and living, as he always wanted to, in Las Lomas de Chapultepec. Laura, in an aesthetic fit, had sworn she’d never set foot in his house.

“You said you were going to change your in-laws’ taste, Danton.”

“Just wait a while, Mama. It’s a period of adjustment, an accommodation. I have to make my father-in-law happy so I can dominate him. Don Aspirin’s half senile. Don’t worry, at least we got rid of the fountains on the terrace.”

“What about your wife?”

“Mama, I swear poor Magda was so completely ignorant I had to finish her toilet training.”

“You’re as vulgar as they come.” But Laura couldn’t keep from laughing.

“I’ve actually got her convinced that the stork will be bringing the baby.”

“What baby?” said Laura, hugging her son.

I’m fifty-two and I’m going to be a grandmother, she kept saying to herself on the way home from the Coyoacán party and Basilio Baltazar. She’d been forty when she met Jorge Maura. Now I live alone with Juan Francisco, but I am going to be a grandmother.

The mere sight of Juan Francisco in bathrobe and slippers opening the door reminded her that she was, like it or not, a wife. She instantly rejected a repugnant but all too noble idea that had flashed through her mind. We only survive at home. Only those who stay at home survive. Out in the world, chasing the light, the fireflies burn up and die. That had to be what her grandfather must have thought, the old German Don Felipe Kelsen, who crossed the ocean to lock himself away in the Catemaco coffee plantation never to leave again. Was he happier than his descendants? Children shouldn’t be judged by their parents, much less the grandchildren. The idea that the generation gap has never been greater is false. The world has always been made up of generations standing on opposite sides of an abyss. It’s also made up of couples divided at times by clamorous silences, like the one that separated Grandfather Felipe from his beautiful and mutilated Doña Cosima, whose self absorbed gaze was never distracted — Laura knew from the time she was a child — from the dangerous and dashing bandit of Papantla. Seeing Juan Francisco in his robe and slippers open the door — old slippers with a hole for the big toe on his right foot to air, the chenille robe with gaudy stripes like a serape turned into a towel — she was seized with laughter thinking that her husband might be the secret child of that highwayman from the era of Benito Juárez.

“What the devil are you laughing at?”

“At the idea that we’re going to be grandparents, old boy,” she said, giggling hysterically.

In some unconscious way, the news of his daughter-in-law’s pregnancy buried Juan Francisco for good. It was as if the announcement of an imminent birth demanded the sacrifice of a hasty death, so that the child could take the space now uselessly occupied by the old man; he was now sixty-nine. Well, that was an educated guess, said Laura, smiling, because no one had ever seen his birth certificate. She saw him as dead beginning the night when he opened the door of their solitary home. Which is to say, she took away the time left to him.

Now there would be no time for a few sad caresses.

She saw him close the door, double-lock it and slide the bolt, as if there were something worthy of being stolen in that sad, poor place.

Now there would be no time to say that after all he’d had a happy life.

He shuffled off to the kitchen to make the coffee that both put him to sleep and gave him the sensation of doing something useful, something he could do on his own without Laura’s help.

Now there would be no time to change that winter smile.

He sipped his coffee slowly, moistening the remnants of a roll in it.

Now there would be no time to rejuvenate a soul that had become old. Not even believing in the immortality of the soul would make it conceivable that Juan Francisco’s might survive.

He cleaned his teeth with a toothpick.

Now there would be no time for a new and first look of love, neither sought nor foreseen yet astonishing.

He left the kitchen and glanced at the old newspapers saved for the hot-water heater.

Now there would be no time for the pity the old deserve even when they’ve lost love and respect.

He crossed the room filled with the velvet-covered furniture where years ago Laura had whiled away long hours while her husband argued labor politics in the dining room.

Now there would be no time to become indignant when results and not words were demanded of him.

He made a half turn back to the dining room, as if he’d left something behind, a memory, a promise.

Now there would be no time to justify himself, saying he’d joined the official party to convince those in power of the error of their ways.

Stumbling, he grabbed the banister on the stairway.

Now there would be no time to try to change things from within the government and the party.

Each stair took a century.

Now there would be no time to feel himself judged by her.

Each stair had turned to stone.

Now there would be no time to feel himself condemned or satisfied that it was only she who judged him, no one else.

He managed to reach the second floor.

Now there would be no time for his own conscience to condemn him.

He felt disoriented. Where was the bedroom? Which door led to the bathroom?

Now there would be no time to recover the prestige he’d accumulated over years and lost in an instant, as if nothing counted but that instant when the world turns its back on you.

Ah yes, this was the bathroom.

Now there would be no time to hear her say, What did you do today? and to answer the usual thing, You know.

He knocked modestly at the door.

Now there would be no time to keep an eye on her every moment during the day, to have her followed by detectives, to humiliate her a bit because he loved her too much.

He went into the bathroom.

Now there would be no time for her to pass from tedium and disdain to love and tenderness. No more time.

He looked at himself in the mirror.

Now there would be no time for the workers to love him, for him to feel loved by the workers.

He took down his razor, the shaving soap, and brush.

Now there would be no time to relive the historic days of the Río Blanco strikes.

Slowly he worked up a lather with the moistened brush and the soap.

Now there would be no time to form the Red Battalions of the Revolution again.

He spread the lather on his cheeks, upper lip, and neck.

Now there would be no time to revive the House of the Workers of the World.

Slowly he shaved.

Now there would be no time for his revolutionary deeds to be recognized, because now no one remembered anymore.

He was in the habit of shaving at night before going to bed, so as to save time in the morning before going to work.

Now there would be no time for them to give him his rightful place, fucking bastards, he was someone, he did things, he deserved a place.

He finished shaving.

Now there would be no time to admit failure.

He dried his face with a towel.

Now there would be no time to ask, Where did I go wrong?

He laughed into the mirror for a long time.

Now there would be no time to open a door to love.

He looked at an old man he didn’t recognize, another man who was himself emerging from the depth of the mirror to meet him now.

Now there would be no time to say I love you.

He looked at the wrinkled cheeks, defeated chin, curiously elongated ears, the sacks under his eyes, the gray hair everywhere — on his ears, his head, his lips, like frozen hay, a weather-beaten old pine tree.

He felt a huge desire, painful and pleasurable at the same time, to sit down and shit.

Now there would be no time to fulfill the promise of an admirable, glorious destiny he could bequeath.

He lowered the trousers of the striped pajamas that Danton had given him for his birthday and sat down on the toilet.

Now there would be no time …

He pushed hard and fell forward, his bowels emptied and his heart stopped.

Damned weather-beaten old pine tree.

At Juan Francisco’s wake, Laura set about forgetting her husband, erasing all the memories that weighed on her like an early tombstone on the grave of her marriage, but instead of grieving for Juan Francisco, she closed her eyes, standing next to the coffin, and thought about the pain of giving birth, thought about how her sons were born — so much pain and such an eternity between contraction and contraction for the elder son, smooth as swallowing caramel cream for the second, liquid and smooth like melted butter … but with her hand on her husband’s coffin, she decided to live the pain of childbirth, not that of death, realizing that someone else’s pain, the death of others, ends up being just that in our minds, someone else’s, neither Danton nor Santiago felt his mother’s birth pangs, for them entering the world was a cry of neither happiness nor sadness, the victory cry of the newborn, his Here I am!, while the mother was the one who suffered, and perhaps like her in the terrible traumas when Santiago was on the way, she shouted without caring whether the doctor and nurses heard her, “Damn it all! Why did I have a child? this is horrible! why didn’t anyone tell me? I can’t bear this, I can’t bear this, just kill me, I want to die, damn brat, I hope he dies too …”

And now Juan Francisco was dead and didn’t know it. He felt no pain at all.

Nor did she. Which is why she preferred remembering the pain of giving birth, so that those who came to the wake — old comrades, union men, minor government functionaries, the odd deputy, and, in brutal contrast, Danton’s family and rich friends — could see in her face the traces of a shared pain, but this was false since the pain, the real pain, can be felt only by the one who feels it, the woman giving birth, not the doctor who helps her or the child being born, only the man being shot feels the bullets penetrate him, not the firing squad or the officer giving the order, only the sick person feels it, not the nurses …

Who knows why, Laura recalled the image of the Spanish woman Pilar Méndez at the gates to Santa Fe de Palencia, shouting in the middle of the night so that her father would show her no mercy, only justice as political fanaticism conceived it, shot at sunrise for betraying the Republic and aiding the Cause. Like her, Laura wished she could shout, but not for her husband, not for her sons, for herself, remembering her own pains, banal and terrible, in giving birth, indescribable and impossible to share. They say pain destroys language. It can only be a shout, a whimper, a disembodied voice. Those who speak of pain don’t feel it. Those who possess the language of pain describe the pain of others. True pain has no words, but Laura Díaz, the night of her husband’s wake, did not want to shout.

Her eyes still shut, she remembered other cadavers, those of the two Santiagos, Santiago Díaz Obregón, her half brother, shot in Veracruz at the age of twenty, and Santiago López-Díaz, her son, dead at the age of twenty-six in Mexico City. Two handsome dead men, equally beautiful. She dedicated her mourning to them. That night, her two Santiagos, the Elder and the Younger, gathered together the dispersion of the world spilled out in no order over the years so as to give it proper form, the form of two young, handsome bodies. But it’s one thing to be a body and another to be beautiful.

The comrade workers wanted to lay the red flag with the hammer and sickle over Juan Francisco’s coffin. Laura refused. Symbols were superfluous. There was no need to identify her husband with a red rag that could be put to better use in a bull ring.

The comrades walked out, offended but silent.

The priest officiating at the wake offered to say the rosary.

“My husband wasn’t a believer.”

“God receives all of us in His mercy.”

Laura Díaz pulled off the crucifix adorning the lid of the coffin and handed it to the priest.

“My husband was anticlerical.”

“Madam, don’t offend us. The cross is sacred.”

“Take it. The cross is a rack of torture. Why don’t you put a little gallows on the coffin, or a guillotine. In France, Jesus Christ would have been guillotined, right?”

The murmur of horror and disapproval that arose from the pews where Danton’s family and friends were seated satisfied Laura. She knew she’d done something unnecessary, provocative. It was a natural reaction. She couldn’t have repressed it. It gave her pleasure. It seemed, suddenly, like an act of emancipation, the beginning of something new. After all, who was she now if not a solitary woman, a widow, companionless, with no family but a distant son now captive in a world Laura Díaz found detestable?

People began to leave, humiliated or offended. Laura exchanged glances with the only person looking at her fondly. It was Basilio Baltazar. But before they could speak to each other, a decrepit small man, shrunken like a badly washed sweater, wrapped in a cape too big for him, a tiny man with features both well defined and faded by time, with little clumps of matted hair above his ears, like frozen grass, handed Laura a letter, telling her in a voice from the depths of time, Read it, Laura, it’s about your husband …

There was no date, but the handwriting was old-fashioned, ecclesiastical, more appropriate for noting baptisms and funerals, life’s alphas and omegas, than for communicating with another person. She read the letter that night.

Dear Laura, may I address you that way? After all, I’ve known you since you were a child, and even though the difference in our ages is a thousand years, my memory of you remains fresh. I know that your husband, Juan Francisco, died keeping the secret of his origin as if it were something shameful or disgraceful. But do you realize he died the same way, anonymously, making no noise? Could you yourself, if I were to ask you today, give an account of your husband’s life over the past twenty years? You’d find yourself in the same situation as he did. There’d be nothing to tell. Do you think the vast majority of those who come into this world have something extraordinary to tell about their lives? Are they, therefore, less important, less worthy of respect and, sometimes, of love? I write you, my dear friend, whom I’ve known since you were a girl, to ask you to stop torturing yourself thinking about what Juan Francisco López Greene was before he met and married you. Before making a name for himself as a fighter for justice in the Veracruz strikes and when the Red Battalions were created during the Revolution. That was your husband’s life. Those twenty years of glory, eloquence, fearlessness, they were his life. He had no life before or after his moment of glory, if you’ll permit me to call it that. With you, he sought the safe harbor for a tired hero. Did you give him the peace he silently begged of you? Or did you demand of him what he could no longer give? A tired hero who’d lived something no one lives twice, his moment of glory. He came from far away and from the depths of society, Laura. When I met him, he was a little boy in Macuspana, wandering around like an animal with no master, no family, stealing food here and there when bananas, which Tabasco gives freely to the hungriest of the poor, weren’t enough for him. I took him in. I dressed him. I taught him to read and write. You know well that this is common practice in Mexico. The young priest teaches a poor boy to read and write the language the boy will use against our Holy Mother Church as a man. That was the case with Benito Juárez, and that was the case with López Greene. That last name. Where did he get it, when he had neither father nor mother nor sister nor brother? “I heard it, Father …” López is a very common name in Hispanic genealogy, and Greene is a name found frequently among families in Tabasco that descend from English pirates of colonial times, when Sir Henry Morgan himself attacked the coast of the Gulf of Campeche and sacked the ports whence Mexico’s gold and silver were shipped to Spain. And Juan? Again, the commonest name in the Spanish language. But Francisco because I taught him the virtues of the most admirable saint in Christendom, the man from Assisi … Ah, my dear girl Laura, St. Francis abandoned a life of luxury and pleasure to become God’s jester. I took the opposite route, as you know. Sometimes faith falters. There would be no faith without doubt. I was young when I came to Catemaco to take the place of a beloved parish priest, you remember him, Father Jesus Morales. I’ll confess several things. I was annoyed by the aura of sanctity surrounding Father Morales. I was very young, imaginative, even perverse. If St. Francis went from sin to sanctity, I would do the same, perhaps in reverse, I’d be a perverse, sinful priest, what horrors did I not pour into your ear, Laura, defying the greatest commandment of Our Lord Jesus Christ, not to scandalize children? What greater crime than running off with the treasure of the poorest, offerings to the Holy Child of Zongolica? Believe me, Laura, I sinned to be holy. That was my project, my perverted Franciscanism, if you prefer. I was defrocked, and that’s how you found me, surviving on my stolen money as your mother’s guest, may God have her in His glory, in Xalapa. You must have said something to your husband. He remembered me. He came looking for me. He thanked me for my teaching. He knew about my sin. He confessed his own. He betrayed the nun who called herself Carmela, Sister Gloria Soriano, implicated in the assassination of President-elect Alvaro Obregón. He did it out of revolutionary conviction, he said. The policy then was to extinguish the clericalism that in Mexico had exploited the poor and supported the exploiters. He didn’t hesitate to turn her in: it was his obligation. He never thought that you, Laura — you weren’t even a believer — would take it so seriously. How strange, but how wrong. We never measure the moral consequences of our acts. We think we’re obeying the mandates of ideology, whether we’re revolutionaries, clericalists, liberals, conservatives, Cristeros, and what slips through our fingers is the precious liquid we call, for lack of a better word, “the soul.” Your brutal reaction to his betrayal of Gloria Soriano at first disconcerted Juan Francisco and then depressed him. It was like the tombstone over his career. He was finished. He did ridiculous things, like hiring a detective to spy on you. He repented of his silliness, I assure you. But once a priest always a priest, you know that not even if they cut off my fingertips I could never give up hearing confessions and absolving people of their sins. Laura: Juan Francisco asked me to forgive his betrayal of Gloria Soriano. It was his way of thanking me for having taken in a barefoot, ignorant boy and educated him sixty-five years ago, just imagine. But he did something else. He returned the treasure of the Holy Child of Zongolica. One afternoon, as they came into the church for vespers, the townspeople found the jewelry, the offerings, everything they’d given and saved, back in its proper place. You never knew, because Catemaco news never leaves Catemaco. But the bedazzled town attributed it to a miracle wrought by the Holy Child, capable of re-creating His own treasure and returning it to where it belonged. It was as if He’d said, If I made you wait it was so you would feel the absence of my offerings and rejoice even more when you recovered them. How did you pay for all that? I asked Juan Francisco. With contributions from the workers, he confessed. Did they know? No, I told them it was for victims of an epidemic after the Usumacinta River flooded. No one ever kept any accounts. Laura, I hope you’ll return to your hometown to see how beautiful the altar is thanks to Juan Francisco. Laura, forgive men who have nothing more to give than what they carry within them. Sometimes the well runs dry. As with me, I’m. running out of communions. I don’t think we’ll ever see each other again. I don’t want us to see each other again. It was very hard for me to appear today before you at the funeral parlor. How good it was you didn’t recognize me. Damn, I don’t even recognize myself!

Remember, with a drop of tenderness,

ELZEVIR ALMONTE

That weekend, Basilio Baltazar rented a car, and the two of them drove to Cuernavaca, Laura and her old friend the Spanish anarchist.