The Years With Laura Diaz

22. Plaza Río de Janeiro: 1966

LAURA DÍAZ’S GRANDSON, SANTIAGO López-Ayub, and his girlfriend, Lourdes Alfaro, came to live with her at Christmas in 1966. The apartment was old but spacious, the building itself a relic from the previous century that had survived the implacable transformation of Mexico City, from the town of pastel colors and two-story buildings which Laura first saw when she arrived as a new bride in 1922, to what it was now, a blind giant, growing and destroying everything in its path, demolishing the nineteenth-century French architecture, the eighteenth-century neoclassical architecture, and the seventeenth-century baroque architecture. In some sort of grand regressive reckoning, the past was being burned away until there appeared, pulsing like a forgotten, awful, painful wound, the very sediment of the Aztec city.

Laura was not merely ignoring the impudence of her generous, though hardly disinterested, son Danton when she rejected his help and set herself up in the old building on Plaza Rio de Janeiro, adapting the flat to her work needs — with living space but also a darkroom, an archive, space for her illustrated reference works. She had, for the first time in her life, the famous “room of one’s own” that Virginia Woolf had said women deserved so they could have their sacred zone, their minimal redoubt of independence: a sovereign island of their own.

After she’d left the family house on Avenida Sonora and grown accustomed to living alone and free as she went from being fifty-nine to being sixty-seven with a profession and a livelihood, gratified by fame and success, Laura did not feel threatened by the renewed youth Santiago and Lourdes offered her, and she was pleased by how easy it was for the three of them to share household chores, by the understandable but unexpected richness which their after-dinner conversations developed, by the sharing of their experiences, desires, and similar tastes that living together afforded them right from the first moment the third Santiago appeared at Laura’s door and said, Grandmother, I can’t live with my father anymore and I don’t have enough money to live alone and take care of my girlfriend.

“Hello. Let me introduce myself. I’m your grandson Santiago, and this is my girlfriend, Lourdes, and we’ve come to ask you to put us up.” Santiago smiled with Danton’s strong, white teeth but with his uncle’s sweet, melancholy eyes. He had an elegant, even excessive way of moving, too, that reminded Laura of the dissimulating affectation of the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Revolution in Veracruz, Santiago the Elder.

Lourdes Alfaro by comparison was modestly beautiful and dressed the way all young people dressed nowadays, in pants and a T-shirt — one day with the face of Che Guevara, Mick Jagger the next — a long mane of black hair and no makeup whatsoever. She was small and shapely, a “tiny mistress full of virtues,” an epithet which, Laura recalled, Jorge Maura used to quote from the medieval Archpriest of Hita’s Book of Good Love when he teased her about her own Teutonic stature.

The presence of the young lovers in her house was enough to gladden Laura Díaz’s heart, and she opened her arms to the couple — they had a right to happiness now and not after twenty years of violence and unhappiness, as had been the case with Laura and Jorge, or with Basilio Baltazar and Pilar Méndez (now reunited as Jorge and Laura could never have dreamed of being, since destiny can’t succeed twice in turning a tragedy into a happy ending).

The third Santiago and Lourdes for all these reasons had all the rights in the world, in the eyes of Laura Díaz. The boy, whom she’d never met before, given Danton’s stubborn rancor and his wife’s arrogance, now told her about himself, told her he knew and admired her, because, he said, he was going into his first year of law school and didn’t have the artistic talent of either his grandmother or his uncle Santiago, who’d died so young …

“That painting of the couple looking at each other, is it his?”

“Yes.”

“What a great talent, Grandmother.”

“Yes.”

He didn’t sing his own virtues, but Lourdes told Laura one night while she was preparing dinner — saffron rice and drumsticks — Santiago is a tough guy, a real man, considering how young he is, Doña Laura, nothing fazes him … at one point I thought I’d just be a burden to him, given his career, and especially given his relations with his parents, but you should have seen, Doña Laura, how firmly Santiago faced up to them and made me feel that he needed me, that instead of a burden I was someone he could lean on, that he respected me.

They’d met at the school dances Santiago liked more than the parties organized by his parents and his parents’ friends, where everything was about exclusivity and only children of “well-known families” were invited. But at the school dances, social barriers fell and buddies studying the same subjects could meet regardless of their wealth or their family connections. Along with the boys came girlfriends, sisters, and the odd maiden aunt — the tradition of “chaperons” wouldn’t die …

Danton approved of those gatherings. Lasting friendships were made in school, and even though your mother’d prefer that you went to parties only with people of our class, if you notice, son, the people who govern us never come from the upper classes, they develop at the bottom or in the middle class, and it’s important for you to know them when you can help them, because one day, I assure you, they’ll help you. In Danton’s eyes, poor friends could be a good investment.

“Mexico is a country open to talent, Santiago. Don’t forget that.”

In his first year at law school, Santiago met Lourdes. She was in nursing school and came from Puerto Escondido, a beach town on the Oaxaca coast where her parents had a modest hotel with the best temazcal in the region, she said.

“What’s that?”

“A steam bath with fragrant herbs that cleanses you of all toxins.”

“I think that’s just what I need. When are you going to invite me?”

“Whenever you like.”

“Sounds good.”

Together they went to Puerto Escondido and they fell in love there, facing the Pacific, which meets the steep bluffs along a treacherously sandy, sweet beach, but in fact it’s an abyss where anyone can quickly lose his footing, with no support to withstand the swift currents, which caught Santiago and dragged him, more in anguish than in danger, until Lourdes dove into the water, hooked an arm around the boy’s neck, swam with her free arm, helping him to get to shore, and there, exhausted but excited, they exchanged their first kiss.

“You tell me that with your voice trembling,” said Laura.

“It’s that I’m afraid, Doña Laura.”

“Forget the dona. You make me older than I am.”

“Okay, Laura.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Santiago’s papa is a very hard man, Laura, he won’t put up with anything he himself hasn’t ordered, he becomes like a panther, and it’s something terrifying.”

“He’s not as fierce as you think, that little cat. He roars and scares you until you roar back and put him in his place.”

“I don’t know how.”

“I do, my dear. I do. Don’t you worry.”

The creep actually went down to Puerto Escondido, Grandmother, usually he sends one of his thugs to scare people, but this time he went himself in his private plane to see Lourdes’ family and tell them not to get any big ideas, this thing with his son was nothing but a rebellious, spoiled brat’s adventure, he asked them to explain that to their daughter, that Santiago shouldn’t fool her, she should be careful, he might make her pregnant and then walk out on her, but pregnant or not he was going to walk out on her.

“Your son has never said anything like that to us,” said Lourdes’ father.

“Well, I’m saying it, and I’m the one who gives the orders.”

“I would like to hear it from your son.”

“He can’t speak for himself. He’s just a confused kid.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Don’t be stubborn, Mr. Alfaro. Don’t be stubborn. I’m not playing around. How much do you want?”

Face to face with Santiago, Danton did not treat him as a “confused kid.” He simply presented “reality” to him. He was an only child since unfortunately his mother couldn’t have a second child, which would have killed her, Santiago was her dream, her cherished filial love, but he, Danton, as a father, had to be more severe and objective, couldn’t afford the luxury of sentimentality.

“You’re going to inherit my fortune. It’s wonderful you’re studying law, though I’d suggest some postgraduate work in economics and business administration in the United States. It’s only natural that a father would like to have his son carry on in his place, and I’m sure you won’t fail me. Neither me nor your mother, who adores you.”

She was a woman whose beauty had evaporated—“like the dew,” she herself was in the habit of saying. Magdalena Ayub de López-Díaz, until the high noon of her life, kept the attractions that so seduced Danton during those Sundays at the Jockey Club: her obvious defects — unbroken eyebrows, prominent nose, square jaw — in counterpoint to her Arab princess eyes, dreamy, velvety, with their olive eloquence under their glossy lids, provocative, like a hidden sex. By contrast, most of the marriageable young ladies of that period, pretty but all too “decent,” left the nuns’ school as if someone had stamped a nihil obstat on a secret part of their body and elevated it to the public category of “face.” A knee, an elbow, or an ankle could serve as models for the sweet, acceptable, insipid faces of the Sacred Heart schoolgirls whom their beaux called “chicks” (a corruption of “chic”). Their features, joked the young Danton, were useful but faded.

Magdalena Ayub—“my dream,” Danton called her when he courted her — was different. She was, besides, the mother of the third Santiago, whose birth instantly erased forever the remains of the youthful charms of Don Danton’s lady wife. She was weighed down by the sentence of the doctors: one more child would kill you, ma’am. She kept her unbroken eyebrows and her hips widened.

Santiago grew up with that stigma: I almost killed my mother when I was born, and I have destroyed any chance of life for possible sisters or brothers. But Danton turned guilt into obligation. Santiago, being an only child, having almost torn away his mother’s life to have his own, now had to do the right thing. Danton asked nothing special from his son: he had to study, graduate, marry a girl of his own class, add to the family fortune, ensure the survival of the species.

“And give me a calm and satisfied old age. I think I deserve one, after all my years of work.”

He spoke with one hand in the side pocket of his blue pin-striped double-breasted suit, the other caressing his lapel. His face was like his suit: buttoned up, double-breasted, striped, with his bluish beard and brows and still-black hair. He was, altogether, a midnight blue man. He never looked at his shoes. They glistened. No need to look.

The third Santiago did not dispute the chart drawn for him by his father until he fell in love with Lourdes, when Danton reacted with a brutality and lack of elegance that the son, from that moment, began to see as attributes of a father he’d loved and whom he’d thanked for so much — the allowance, the four-door Renault, the novelty of the American Express card (with a spending limit), the freedom to wear Macazaga suits (though Santiago preferred leather jackets and jeans) — without judging the motives, acts, justifications or errors in the “that’s the way things are” mode of his father’s words; his father was a man anchored in the security of his economic position and his personal morals, with the nerve to say to his son, “You will follow my path,” and to his son’s girlfriend, “You’re nothing but a stone in the road, get out of the way or I’ll kick you out of the way.”

His father’s attitude riled the young Santiago, enraged him at first, but then encouraged him to do things that had never occurred to him before. He became aware of his own moral nature, and aware that Lourdes too was aware of it: they wouldn’t sleep together until the situation was quite clear; they wouldn’t cheat each other, either with a baby “by mistake” or with sex as mere defiance. Santiago began to ponder, Who is my father, what has my father got that he should have this absolute power over people and this self-confidence?

He told Lourdes, Let’s outsmart him, mi amor, let’s stop seeing each other every day, only in secret on Friday evenings, so the old boy doesn’t get suspicious.

Santiago told Danton, fine, he’d study law, but he also wanted to learn practical things, and to do that he should work in his father’s office. Danton’s satisfaction with his son’s attitude blinded him. He couldn’t imagine any danger in letting his own son into the offices of Cooperative Resource Allotment Partnership (CRAP), a building of glittering glass and stainless steel on Paseo de la Reforma, a few yards from the statue of Christopher Columbus and the Monument to the Revolution. It had once been the site of the Paris-style house with the mansard roof where Butt del Rosal had awaited snow in Mexico — that old aristocrat of the Don Porfirio days whose trick was to eat his gelatin monocle at Carmen Cortina’s soirees. But Paseo de la Reforma — the avenue that the Empress Carlota had created to connect her residence in Chapultepec Castle as Maximilian’s consort with the center of the city (she conceived it as a reproduction of the Avenue Louise in her native Brussels) — was coming to resemble a street in Houston or Dallas, lined with more and more skyscrapers, parking lots, and fast-food outlets.

There, Santiago would learn the business, let him explore every floor, get to know everything, he’s the boss’s son …

He became friends with the file clerk who was mad about bullfighting by giving him season tickets — that year Joselito Huerta and Manuel Capetillo were the stars. He became friends with the telephone operators by getting them passes to the Churubusco Studios so they could watch Libertad Lamarque make her movies: the same Argentine tango singer who’d brought tears to the eyes of Harry Jaffe in Cuernavaca.

Who was this Miss Artemisa who called Don Danton every day? Why did they treat her so deferentially when Santiago wasn’t there and so secretively when he was around? Who was the man his father treated with respect bordering on servility, yes, sir, we’re here to serve you, sir, whatever you say, sir, so strikingly different from those who received only his usual rapid, implacable, and unadorned commands: I need it this minute, Gutierritos, don’t fall asleep on me now, there’s no room for lazy fuckers here and you look like the laziest fucker I’ve ever seen, what’s wrong with you, Fonseca, did the sheets stick to your skin or what, I expect you in a half minute or you’d better start thinking about another job; which differed in turn from those who got the more serious threats, If you have any consideration for your wife and children, I’d recommend you do what I tell you, no, I’m not giving you some orders, I’m commanding you, that’s the way I deal with errand boys, and you, Reynoso, just remember the papers are in my possession and all I have to do is give them to Excelsior to publish and you’ll be up shit’s creek.

“As you say, sir.”

“Get that report up to me on the double.”

“Don’t stick your nose in someone else’s business, you bastard, or you’re going to wake up someday with your balls in your mouth and your tongue up your ass.”

As he penetrated the metal-and-glass labyrinth his father dominated, Santiago searched with equal tenderness and voracity — two names of need but also of love — for Lourdes’ affection. They held hands at the movies, they stared deep into each other’s eyes in cafeterias, they kissed in Santiago’s car, they petted in the darkness, but they waited until they could live together to join completely. They agreed on that, no matter how strange and at times even ridiculous it might seem, sometimes to one, sometimes to the other, sometimes to both. They had something in common. Postponing the act excited them. Imagining each other.

Who was Miss Artemisa?

She had a deep sugary voice, and the finishing touch was when she’d say on the telephone to Danton, “I wuve wou, Tonton, I wuve wou, my widdle sugar pwum.” Santiago almost died laughing when he listened illicitly to this saccharine dialogue, and his laughter redoubled when the severe Don Danton said to his widdle sugar pwum, “What are my little titties up to, how’s my little lazy balls, what does my little Tricky eat to make her kisses taste so pricky?” “I suck bananas every Thursday,” answered the hoarse, professionally tender voice. Lourdes, said Santiago, this is really getting good, let’s find out who this Artemisa or Tricky is and what she really tastes like. My old man takes the cake, I swear!

Santiago wasn’t thinking about the fact that the forgotten Doña Magdalena was being cheated on, he wasn’t a puritan, but I’m curious, Lourdes, and so am I, laughed the fresh and nubile girl from Oaxaca as the two of them waited for Danton to leave the office one Thursday night, when dear old Papa took the inconspicuous Chevrolet out alone, with no chauffeur, and drove to Darwin Street in the Nueva Anzures neighborhood, followed by Santiago and Lourdes in a rented Ford so no one would notice.

Danton parked and went into a house with plaster statues of Apollo and Venus in the entry way. The door closed, and mystery reigned. After a while, music and laughter could be heard. The lights went on and off capriciously.

They came back one morning when a gardener was clipping hedges around the entrance and a maid was dusting the erotic statues. The front door was ajar. Lourdes and Santiago caught a glimpse of a normal bourgeois living room with brocade armchairs and vases filled with calla lilies, marble floors, and a staircase right out of a Mexican movie.

Suddenly at the top of the stairs appeared an arrogant young man with closely cropped hair wearing a silk dressing gown, a cravat at the neck, and — an extravagant detail — putting on white gloves.

“What do you want?” he asked, his brow highly arched and very well plucked, in contrast to his hoarse voice. “Who are you?”

“So sorry, we’re at the wrong house,” said Lourdes.

“Jerks,” muttered the man with the gloves.

I guess it’s all right, said CRAP’s file clerk to Santiago, if you’re the boss’s son, go right ahead.

Every afternoon, while his father prolonged his lunches at the Focolare, the Rivoli, or the Ambassadeurs, Santiago went very carefully, yet despite everything painfully, through the company’s papers, passing them, as it were, through a strainer of mixed repugnance and love, because, as the young student ceaselessly repeated to himself, He’s my father, I’ve lived on this money, this money educated me, these deals are the roof and floors of my house, I drive a brand-new Renault thanks to my father’s business …

“Let’s act as if we’re secret lovers,” Santiago said to Lourdes. “Imagine we don’t want to be seen.”

“By whom? By each other?”

“No! Come on, honey, I mean this seriously. Where would we go if we didn’t want to be seen?”

“Santiago, don’t be silly. Just follow your father’s car!” She laughed.

Chez Soi was a spacious dark place on Avenida de los Insurgentes, with lots of room between tables, only intimate lighting with a small, low lamp at each table: it was perpetual twilight. Red-and-white-checked tablecloths gave the French touch.

Lourdes and Santiago followed Danton and watched him go to Chez Soi three weeks in a row, punctually at nine every Tuesday evening. But he entered and left alone.

One night, Santiago and Lourdes went at eight-thirty, sat down, and ordered rum and Cokes. The French waiter looked down at them scornfully. There were couples at every table but one. A woman with an outrageous décolleté, proudly showing off half her bosom, raised an arm to arrange her abundant reddish hair, revealing a perfectly shaved armpit, took out a compact and touched up her abundantly whitened face around her plucked eyebrows, her arrogant eyes, and her exaggeratedly wide mouth, like a Joan Crawford in decline. The curious thing was that she did all this without taking off her white gloves.

When Danton made his entrance, he kissed her on the lips and sat down next to her. Lourdes and Santiago were off in a dark corner and had already paid their check. That night, they drove the Renault to the Oaxaca coast. Santiago drove all night without saying a word, wide awake, negotiating the endless serpent of curves linking Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Puerto Escondido. Lourdes slept with her head on his shoulder, but Santiago had eyes only for the dark forms of the landscape, the great backbones of the mountain range, the wild, abundant body of the country in all its contrasts: pine forests and clay deserts, basalt walls and crowns of snow, immense organ cactuses, sudden spurts of jacaranda. A desolate geography, without villages or inhabitants. The country yet to be created busy destroying itself first.

The sea appeared at eight in the morning. No one was on the beach; Lourdes awakened with a cry of joy, this is the best beach on the coast, she said, stripping to go in, then Santiago took off his clothes and together they went naked into the sea, the Pacific was their sheet, their kisses deeper than the green, placid waters, they felt their bodies supported over the sandy bottom and excited by the saline vigor, and Lourdes raised her legs when she felt the tip of Santiago’s penis rubbing her clitoris, wrapped her legs around him as he embraced and entered her in the sea, thrusting hard against her mons as women like it while he felt himself within her as men like it, and they came and they washed and they frightened off the seagulls.

As soon as you can, learn the rules of the game, Danton had said to Santiago when he began working at CRAP. Those who want to rise by going into the PRI have to be content with whatever comes their way. It’s true. They’re seasoning for any sauce. Whatever’s offered them, they take. One day you can be a high official, the next Secretary of State, and the day after that a mere bridge and road inspector. It doesn’t matter. They have to swallow everything. Discipline pays off. Or not. But they don’t have an alternative. That’s where the common code begins for everyone, those who are rising and those who already have it made. Never make an enemy of someone who has power or who might have it, son. If you’re going to get into a fight, it should be over something serious, not just a joke. Don’t make waves, son. This country can only navigate in a Sargasso Sea. The calmer it is, the more we believe we’re making progress. It’s kept secret and it’s a paradox, I agree. Never say anything in public that might make for controversy. We don’t have problems here, Mexico progresses in peace. There’s national unity, and anyone who acts up and disturbs the peace pays dearly for it. We’re living the Mexican miracle. We want something more than a chicken in every pot, as the gringos say. We want a fully stocked refrigerator in every home and, if possible, stocked with products purchased in the supermarkets of your grandfather, Don Aspirin, God bless him. I convinced him that business has to be big business. Dear Don Aspirin, he was a small-time player.

He poured two fingers of Chivas Regal into a heavy cut crystal tumbler, took a sip, and went on.

“I’m going to make sure you’re well connected, Santiago, don’t you worry. We all have to begin young, but the hard thing is to last it out. Look, the politicians also begin young, but most of them don’t last. We businessmen begin young and last a lifetime. No one chooses us, and as long as we don’t say anything in public, we’re neither seen nor criticized. You don’t have to make a splash. Publicity and self-promotion are forms of rebellion in our system. Forget that stuff. Don’t ever risk yourself by saying something you’ll be sorry for the next day. Your thoughts, keep them for yourself. And no witnesses.”

Santiago accepted the glass his father handed him and emptied it in one swallow.

“That’s what I like to see,” laughed Danton. “You have everything. Be discreet. Don’t take chances. Put money on all the horses, but stay close to the winner when the big race comes around, the presidential succession. Loyalty means nothing, being attentive and courteous does. Take advantage of the first three years of the six-year term to make deals. Then come the falling-off, the craziness, the dreams of being reelected or winning the Nobel Prize. And Presidents go nuts. You have to accommodate yourself to the successor, who, even if the incumbent chose him, will tear his predecessor apart, along with his family and friends, the moment he sits on the presidential throne. Sail in silence, Santiago. We’re the secret continuity. They’re the noisy divisiveness — and sometimes ruinous, of course.”

He should take this girl out dancing, and that one out to dinner. This Perengana’s papa is one of Don Danton’s partners and has a modest fortune of fifty million dollars, but Loli Parada’s papa has around two hundred million, and even though he’s less manipulable than the partner, he adores his daughter and would give her everything …

Everything? Santiago asked his father. What do you call everything, Father? Shit, you don’t even follow your own advice, Papa asshole, you leave too many papers around, even if you do hide them well, your files are full of evidence you’ve been storing up to blackmail the people you did favors for and refresh the memories of those you owe favors to; both ways you were corrupt, you old bastard, don’t look at me like that, I’m not going to be cautious, fucker, I have photocopies of all your stinking maneuvers, I know by heart every bribe you got from a Secretary of State to take care of a public matter as if it were private, every commission you got for being an intermediary and straw man in an illegal real estate deal in Acapulco, every check you received for being a front for gringos investing in activities from which foreigners are barred, every peso you banked for taking over community lands of Indians who were evicted while peasants were murdered so that a President and his partners could develop tourism there; I know about the murder of independent union leaders and of stubborn agrarian leaders, you were paid for it all and you paid everybody, my father, you son of a bitch, you haven’t committed a legal act in your fucking life, you live off the system and the system lives off you, you’re proven guilty by the evidence you needed to condemn everyone who either served you or was served by you, but the secret’s out now, old bastard, I have copies of everything, don’t worry, I’m not going to give anything to the newspapers, what would I get from that? I’m not going to say a word, unless you go crazier than you already have, asshole, and have me killed, and in that case everything’s set to see the light of day, and not here, where you pay off the press, shitty corrupter that you are, but in the United States, where it will really hurt you, where you’ll be ruined, son of a bitch, because you launder money for Yankee and Mexican criminals, because you break the sacred laws of the sacred American democracy, you bribe their bankers, you send little presents to their congressmen, motherfucker, you even have your own personal lobby in Washington, I swear I actually admire you, Papa, you’re better than Willie Mays, you touch all the bases, I also swear I have even more contempt for the fucking system you’ve helped to build than I do for you, you and those like you are rotten to the core, from the President to the last policeman you’re rottener than a piece of dry shit that you’ve divided up among yourselves for forty years and you’ve been feeding us all, go fuck yourself Don Danton López-Díaz! I don’t want to eat shit, I don’t want a cent from you, I don’t want to see your fucking face ever again in my life, I don’t want to see a single one of your partners, or any leaders of the CTM, or redeemers of the CNC, or bankers saved from ruin by the government, not a single one … I swear, I’m going to fight against all of you, and if something happens to me, something worse is going to happen to you, Papa dear.

Santiago threw the copies of the papers into his father’s face, Danton mute, trembling, his cramped fingers reflexively poised over the alarm buttons though he couldn’t move, reduced to the brutal impotence his son wanted for him.

“Remember. There’re copies of every single document. In Mexico. In the United States. In a safe place. You’d better protect me, Papa, because you have no other protection than your disobedient son. Fuck you!”

And Santiago embraced his father, embraced him and whispered into his ear, I love you, Papa, you know that despite everything I love you, you old bastard.

Laura Díaz presided over the table that Christmas night of 1966. She sat at the head of the table, the two couples on either side. She felt secure, perfected in some way by the symmetry of love between her grandchildren on one side and her friends on the other. She was no longer alone. On her right, her grandson Santiago and his girlfriend Lourdes announced they would be getting married on New Year’s Eve, he would look for a job, and meanwhile …

“No,” Laura interrupted him. “This is your house, Santiago. You and your wife should stay here and bring joy to the life of an old woman …”

Because having the third Santiago with her was like having the other two, the elder and the younger, brother and son. They should have their child, Santiago should finish his studies. For her it was a party, filling the house with love, noise …

“Your Uncle Santiago never shut his bedroom door.”

To fill the house with happy love. Right from the start, Laura wanted to protect the young, handsome couple, perhaps because on her left was sitting the couple who had waited thirty years to reunite and be happy.

Basilio Baltazar had gone gray, but he still had the dark, precisely outlined gypsy profile of his youth. Pilar Méndez, on the other hand, showed the ravages of a life of bad luck and deprivation. Not physical deprivation, she hadn’t gone hungry, but an internal desolation: her face was etched with the doubts, the divided loyalties, the constant obligation to choose and then to bind up with love the wounds caused by family cruelty, so factious and also fantastic. The woman with the ash-blond hair and bad teeth, beautiful still with her Iberian profile, with all the mixed encounters — Islamic and Goth, Jew and Roman — carried on her face like a map of her homeland, also still bore the signs of those hard words, declaimed as if in an ancient tragedy staged opposite the classical background of the Roman gate to Santa Fe.

“The greater fidelity consists in disobeying unjust orders.”

“Save her in the name of honor.”

“Have mercy.”

“Heaven is full of lies.”

“I’m dying so that my father and mother will hate each other forever.”

“She must die in the name of justice.”

“What part of pain doesn’t come from God?”

Laura said to Pilar that the grandchildren, Santiago and Lourdes, had a right to hear about the drama that had taken place in Santa Fe in 1937.

“It’s a very old story,” said Pilar.

“There’s no story of the past that’s not repeated in our time.” Laura caressed the Spanish woman’s hand. “I really mean that.”

Pilar said she hadn’t complained when facing death hack then, and she wouldn’t do so now. Complaint only augments pain. Enough is enough.

“We thought she’d been shot at dawn outside the city walls,” said Basilio. “We thought so for thirty years.”

“Why did you believe it?” asked Pilar.

“Because that’s what your father told us. He was one of us, the Communist mayor of Santa Fe, so of course we believed him.”

“There’s no better fate than to die unknown,” said Pilar, looking at the young Santiago.

“Why is that, ma’am?”

“Because if you’re identified, Santiago, you have to apologize for some people and condemn others and you end up betraying them all.”

Basilio wanted to tell the young people what he’d already told Laura, about how he’d asked for emergency leave and had rushed back to Mexico to see his wife, his Pilar. Don Alvaro Méndez, Pilar’s father, had faked his daughter’s execution that morning and had hidden her in a ruined house out in the Sierra de Gredos, where she’d lack for nothing for the duration of the war; the owners of the neighboring farm were impartial, friends of both Don Alvaro and his wife, Doña Clemencia. They wouldn’t betray anyone. Even so, Pilar’s father said nothing to his wife, who remained convinced that her daughter was a Martyr to the Movement. That’s how she described it when Franco triumphed. Don Alvaro was executed on the very spot where his daughter was supposed to have died. The mother cultivated a devotion to her martyred daughter, dedicating the place where Pilar had supposedly fallen, though the body was never found because the reds must have taken it away, most likely tossing it into a common grave …

The heroine Pilar Méndez, the martyr executed by the reds, was put on the Falange’s list of saints, and the real Pilar, hidden in the mountains, could not reveal herself, lived invisibly, torn at first between revealing herself and telling the truth or hiding out and maintaining the myth, but in the end convinced, when she learned of her father’s death, that in Spain history is tragic and always ends badly, therefore it was better to go on being invisible, because that protected both the faithful memory of her father and the holy hypocrisy of her mother. She became accustomed to it, first in the refuge given her by her father’s friends’ kindness and then, much later, when they feared they were in danger because of Franco’s avenging siege, protected by the charity of a convent of Discalced Carmelites, the order founded by St. Teresa of Avila and under her regulations, in which Pilar Méndez — protected by Christian charity though longing to join the rules of the sisters — found a discipline that, as she accustomed herself to it, was a salvation: poverty, the woolen Carmelite habit, rough sandals, abstinence from meat; sweeping, sewing, praying, and reading, because St. Teresa said that nothing seemed more detestable than “a stupid nun.”

The nuns soon discovered Pilar’s gifts. She was a girl who could read and write, so they gave her the Saint’s books and with the passing years so ingrained the customs of the convent in her (her personal austerity reminded the sisters of their Holy Founder, that “errant woman,” as King Philip II had called her) that the authorities raised no objections when the Mother Superior asked for a pass for this humble, intelligent convent worker, Ursula Sánchez, who wanted to visit some relatives in France and had no documents because the Communists had burned all the papers in her hometown.

“I left blinded, but with such an intense memory of my past that it wasn’t hard for me to remember it when I got to Paris, to recover what might have been my fate if I hadn’t spent my life in towns with bad water where the rivers flow down the mountains white with lime. The sisters had recommended me to the Carmelites in Paris, where I began to stroll the boulevards, regain my feminine tastes, covet elegant clothes — I was thirty four and wanted to look pretty and well dressed — and I made friends in the diplomatic corps, managed to get a job in the Mexican House at the Cite Universitaire and I met a rich Mexican whose son was studying there, we had an affair, he brought me to Mexico, he was jealous, so now I was living in a tropical cage in Acapulco filled with parrots, and he gave me jewels, but I felt I’d been living in cages all my life, village cages, convent cages, and now a gilded cage, but always a prisoner, incarcerated mostly by myself, first so I wouldn’t betray my father, then so I wouldn’t rob my mother of her satisfied rancor, or of the holiness she ascribed to me thinking I was dead, which let her feel saintly, and I was used to living in secret, to being someone else, to never breaking the silence imposed on me by my parents, the war, Spain, the peasants who protected me, the nuns who gave me refuge, the Mexican who brought me to America.”

She paused a moment, surrounded by the others’ attentive silence. The world had thought her sacrificed. She had to sacrifice herself for the world. What part of pain comes to us from others, and what part comes from ourselves?

She looked at Basilio. She took his hand.

“I always loved you. I thought my death would preserve our love. My pride was to believe there was no better fate than to die unknown. How was I going to scorn what I was most thankful for in my life — your love, the friendship of Jorge Maura and Domingo Vidal, ready to die with me if necessary?”

“Remember,” interrupted Basilio, “we Spaniards are hounds of death. We sniff it out and follow it until we ourselves get killed.”

“I’d give anything to undo the past,” said Pilar sadly. “I chose my stupid political militancy over the affection of three marvelous men. I hope they forgive me.”

“Violence breeds violence.” Laura smiled. “Luckily, love breeds love. We come out even, in general.” She took Lourdes’ hand on her right and Pilar’s on her left.

“That’s why, when I saw the announcement for an exhibit of portraits of exiled Spaniards, I flew from Acapulco and found Basilio’s empty frame.”

She looked at Laura. “But if you hadn’t been there, we’d never have gotten together again.”

“When did you tell your Mexican lover you weren’t going back to him?” asked Santiago.

“As soon as I saw the empty frame.”

“That was brave of you. Basilio might have been dead.”

Pilar blushed. “No, all the photos had birth and death dates when called for. Basilio’s had no death date, so I knew. Excuse me.”

The young people hadn’t spoken much. They were giving all their attention to the story of Pilar and Basilio. Santiago once exchanged a loving look with his grandmother and found something marvelous in Laura Díaz’s eyes, something he wanted to tell Lourdes about later, something that shouldn’t be forgotten, he didn’t say so, the eyes, the entire attitude of Laura Díaz said so that Christmas of 1965, and those eyes took in the people at the table but also opened to them, gave them a voice, invited them to see and read each other, lovingly to disclose themselves.

But she was the world’s fulcrum.

Laura Díaz had learned to love without asking for explanations because she had learned to see others, with her camera and with her eyes, as they themselves might never see themselves.

She read after dinner a brief note of congratulations from Jorge Maura, written in Lanzarote. Laura could not resist: she’d told him about the marvelous and unexpected reunion of Pilar Méndez and Basilio Baltazar.

Jorge’s note simply asked, “What part of happiness doesn’t come from God?”

On New Year’s Eve, Lourdes Alfaro and Santiago López-Ayub were married. The witnesses were Laura Díaz, Pilar Méndez, and Basilio Baltazar.

Laura thought of a fourth witness. Jorge Maura. They would not see each other again.