The Years With Laura Diaz

1

LAURA, WHO HAD SEEN EVERYTHING with her camera, stopped one August day opposite the mirror in her bathroom and asked herself, How do people see me?

She kept, perhaps, that memory of a memory which is our past face, not the simple accumulation of years on our skin, not even the layers of years, but a kind of transparency: this is how I am, as I see myself right now, how I always was. The moment can change but it’s always just one moment, even if in my head I keep everything that belongs in my head; I always sensed, but now I know, that what belongs to the mind never leaves it, never says goodbye; everything dies except what lives forever in my mind.

I’m the girl from Catemaco, the San Cayetano debutante, the young wife in Mexico City, the loving mother and unfaithful wife, Harry Jaffe’s tenacious companion, refuge for my grandson Santiago, but most of all I am Jorge Maura’s lover; among all the faces in my existence, his is the one I keep in my imagination as the face of my faces, the face that contains all faces, the image of my happy passion, the face that supports the masks of my life, the final bones of my features, the one that will remain when the flesh has been devoured by death …

But the mirror did not reflect the face of Laura Díaz during the 1930s, which she, knowing it had been transitory, imagined was eternal. She read a lot about the ancient history and anthropology of Mexico the better to understand the present she was photographing. Ancient Mexicans had the right to choose a death mask, to put on an ideal face for the journey to Mictlan, that other world of the Indians, both inferno and paradise. If she were an Indian, Laura would choose the mask of her days of love with Jorge and superimpose it on all the others, those of her childhood, her adolescence, her maturity, and her old age. Only the mask of her son Santiago’s death agony could compete with that of Jorge Maura’s amorous passion, which yielded the desire of happiness. This was her mental photograph of herself. That’s what she wanted to see in the mirror on that August morning in 1970. But that morning the mirror was more faithful to the woman than the woman herself.

She’d taken great care with her appearance. Very early in life, observing Elizabeth García-Dupont’s ridiculous changes in hairstyle, she decided she’d choose a hairstyle for good and never give it up. Orlando’s circle confirmed this: you change your hair, and right away you feel pleased and renovated, but then people notice that your face has changed, look at those crow’s-feet, look at those creases in her forehead, my my my, she’s made the leap into old age, she’s worn out. So Laura Díaz — after toying with the idea of keeping the bangs she’d worn as a girl to cover her forehead that was too high and too wide and to shorten a face that was too long — decided, after meeting Jorge Maura, to reject the hairstyles à la garçon of Mexico’s Clara Bows, or the platinum-blond ones of the silky Jean Harlow, or the undulating marcelled tresses of the local Irene Dunnes; she pulled her hair back, revealing her clear forehead and her “Italian” nose, as Orlando called it, prominent and aristocratic, fine and nervous, as if it never stopped inquiring about things. And she rejected the bee-stung lips of Mae Murray, Erich von Stroheim’s merry widow, and Joan Crawford’s immensely wide mouth, painted like a fearsome entryway into the hell of sex, and kept to her thin lips, with no lipstick, which accentuated the sculptured Gothic look of Laura Díaz’s head, she was descended after all from people of the Rhine and the Canary Islands, from Murcia and Santander. She bet everything on the beauty of her eyes, which were of a chestnut, almost golden color, greenish in the evening, silvery during the open-eyed orgasm Jorge Maura asked of her, I come when I see your eyes, my love, let me see your open eyes when I come, your eyes excite me, and it was true, sexes aren’t beautiful, they’re even grotesque, Laura Díaz says to her mirror this morning in August 1970, what excites us are eyes, skin, the reflection of the sex in the hot eyes and sweet skin that draws us closer to the inevitable thicket of sex, the lair of the great spider that is pleasure and death.

She no longer looked at her body while bathing. It no longer concerned her. And Frida Kahlo, of course. Frida helped her friend Laura give thanks for her old but intact body. Before Jorge Maura, there was Frida Kahlo, the best example of an invariable style, imposed once and for all, impossible to imitate, imperial and unique. That was not the style of her friend and occasional secretary Laura Díaz, who once had followed the changes in fashion — even now she went through yesterday’s outfits in the closet — the short flapper dresses of the 1920s, the long satin whiteness of the 1930s, the tailored suits of the 1940s, Christian Dior’s “New Look,” when full skirts made a comeback after the scarcity of textiles during the war years. But after her trip to Lanzarote, Laura too adopted a comfortable uniform, as it were, a kind of tunic, with no buttons, zippers, or belt, nothing to hamper her, a long monastic shift she could put on or take off without fuss and which turned out to be ideal, first in the tropical valley of Morelos and then — so she could fly, as if the simple cotton cloth gave her wings — on all the stairways in that Rome of the Americas, Mexico City, city of four, five, seven levels superimposed on each other, as high as the sleeping volcanoes, as deep as the reflection in a smoking mirror.

But that August day in 1970, while it rained outside and the fat drops beat against the opaque glass of the bathroom, the mirror refleeted back to me, merciless, true, cruel, without dissimulation, no longer the preferred face of my thirties but my face of today, that of my seventy-two years, my high forehead furrowed, my dark-honey eyes lost between the bags beneath them and the lids like used curtains, my nose grown beyond anything she remembered, lips with no lipstick, cracked, all the corners of her mouth and planes of her cheeks worn like tissue paper used too many times to wrap too many useless gifts, and the revelation that nothing can disguise, the neck that proclaims her age.

“Damned turkey wattle!” Laura decided to laugh into the mirror and go on loving herself, loving her body and combing her graying hair.

Then she joined her hands over her breasts and felt them frozen. She saw the reflection of her hands, pecked by time, and remembered her young woman’s body, so desired, so well exhibited or hidden according to the decision of that great prompter of vanity which is pleasure, beauty, and seduction.

She went on loving herself.

“Rembrandt painted himself at every stage, from adolescence to old age,” said Orlando Ximénez when he invited her, for the umpteenth time, to the Scotch Bar at the Hotel Presidente in the Zona Rosa, and she, “for old times’ sake,” as Orlando himself insisted, agreed just once to see him for a bit at six o’clock, when the bar was empty. “There is no pictorial document more moving than that of a great artist who can see himself without any idealism as he was all through his life, culminating in a self-portrait in old age that has in the eyes all the earlier stages, all of them without exception, as if only old age can reveal not just the totality of a life but each one of the multiple lives we have lived.”

“You’re still nothing but an aesthete.” Laura laughed.

“No, listen to me. Rembrandt’s eyes are almost closed under his old eyelids. His eyes are tearing, not out of emotion but because age liquefies them. Look at my eyes, Laura, I have to wipe them all the time! I look as if I have a perpetual cold!” Orlando laughed in turn, as he picked up his scotch and soda with a tremulous hand.

“You look very well, very snappy,” offered Laura in genuine admiration of the dry trimness of her old beau, stiff and dressed with outmoded elegance, as if one could still buy clothes in the Duke of Windsor style — glen plaid jackets, ties with wide knots, wide cuffed trousers, Church shoes with thick soles.

Orlando had turned into a well-dressed broom crowned with a bare skull; a fringe of thin gray hair, well oiled at the temples, was scrupulously combed to the nape of his neck.

“No, let me tell you, the prodigious thing about that last portrait of the old Rembrandt is that the artist doesn’t blink at the sight of the ravages of time, but lets us remember not only all his earlier years but our own, so we keep the most profound image those little eyes possess. He was resigned — but astute.”

“What image?”

“The image of eternal youth, Laura, because it’s the image of the artistic power that created all his work, that of his youth, his maturity, and his old age. That’s the true image Rembrandt’s last self-portrait gives us: I’m eternally young because I’m eternally creative.”

“How little everything costs you.” Laura laughed again, this time defensively. “Being frivolous, cruel, charming, innocent, perverse. And sometimes even intelligent.”

“Laura, I’m a firefly, I light up and go dark without wanting to.” Orlando returned her laugh. “It’s my nature. You don’t approve?”

“I know you’re like that,” Laura answered quickly.

“Do you remember the first time I asked you, Does your body approve of me, do I get an A?”

“I’m astonished by your question.”

“Why?”

“You talk about the past as if it could be repeated. You talk about the past so that you can proposition me now, in the present.” Laura stretched out her hand and patted Orlando’s; she noted that his old gold ring with the engraved OX was now too big on his thin finger.

“For me,” said the eternal suitor, “you and I are always on the terrace of the San Cayetano hacienda in 1915 …”

Laura drank her favorite dry martini more quickly than she should have. “No, we’re in a bar in the Zona Rosa in 1970, and it seems ridiculous for you to evoke — what shall I call it? — the romantic lyricism of our first meeting, my poor Orlando.”

“Don’t you understand?” The old man furrowed his brow. “I didn’t want our relationship to cool off out of habit.”

“My poor Orlando, age cools everything off.”

Orlando peered into the bottom of his glass of whiskey. “I didn’t want poetry to turn into prose.”

Laura fell silent for a few moments. She wanted to tell the truth without hurting her old friend. She didn’t want to take advantage of her age to judge others from an unjust height. That was a temptation of age, to make judgments with impunity. But Orlando spoke first.

“Laura, would you like to be my wife?”

Rather than answer, Laura told herself three truths in a row, repeated them several times: absence simplifies things, prolongation corrupts them, profundity kills them. With Orlando, the temptation was to simplify: just to leave. But Laura felt that to walk out on a man and a situation that were already close to absurd was a kind of betrayal, which she wanted to avoid at all costs, I’m not betraying myself or my past if I don’t run off, I’m not simplifying, not laughing, if I prolong this instant even if it ends in disaster, and deepen it even if it ends in death.

“Orlando.” Laura leaned closer. “We met in San Cayetano. We became lovers in Mexico City. You abandoned me, leaving a note in which you said that you weren’t what you said you were or what you seemed to be. You’re getting too close to my mystery. You reproached me.”

“Not reproached, warned.”

“You threw it in my face, Orlando. I’d rather keep my secret, you wrote me then. And without mystery, you added, our love would be uninteresting.”

“I also said, I’ll always love you.”

“Orlando, Orlando, my poor Orlando. Now you’re telling me the time has come for us to unite. Does this mean there’s no more mystery?”

She caressed his cold, emaciated hand with genuine tenderness.

“Orlando, be faithful to yourself to the end. Be Orlando Ximénez, leave everything in the air, everything open, everything unfinished. That’s your nature, don’t you realize? Actually, that’s what I most admire in you, my poor Orlando.”

Orlando’s glass of whiskey turned into a crystal ball for a while. The old man wanted to see into the future.

“I should have asked you to marry me, Laura.”

“When?” She felt she was wearing out.

“Do you mean I’m the victim of my own perversity? Have I lost you forever?”

He had no idea that “forever” had happened half a century before, at the ball in the tropical hacienda, he didn’t realize that then and there, when they met, Orlando had said “never” to Laura Díaz when he meant “forever,” confusing postponement with what he’d just said: I didn’t want our relationship to cool off out of habit, I didn’t want you to get too close to my mystery.

Laura shivered with cold. Orlando was proposing a marriage for death. An acceptance that now there were no more games to be played, no more ironies to show off, no more paradoxes to explore. Did Orlando realize that when he talked like that he was negating his own life, the mysterious and unfinished vocation of his entire existence?

“Do you know”—Laura Díaz smiled—“I remember our entire relationship as a fiction? Do you want to write a happy ending for it now?”

“No,” muttered Orlando. “I don’t want it to end. I want to start over.” He raised the glass to his mouth until she couldn’t see his eyes. “I don’t want to die alone.”

“Careful. You don’t want to die without knowing what might have been.”

“That’s right. What might have been.”

Laura found it very hard to get the register of her voice right. Did she hammer at him, pronounce, summarize, or start over? Whatever she chose she did it with all the tenderness she could muster. “What might have been already was, Orlando. Everything happened exactly as it should have happened.”

“Should we resign ourselves, then?”

“No, maybe not. We should carry some mysteries to the grave.”

“Of course. But where do you bury your demons?” Orlando automatically bit his emaciated finger where the heavy gold ring was slip ping around. “We all carry a little devil around inside us who won’t abandon us even in the hour of our death. We will never be satisfied.”

After she left the bar, Laura took a long walk through the Zona Rosa, the fashionable new neighborhood where the young generation gathered en masse, the young people who’d survived the Tlatelolco massacre and ended up in jail or at a café, both prisons, both enclosed. They’d invented, in the space bounded by Chapultepec, Paseo de la Reforma, and Insurgentes, an oasis of cafeterias, restaurants, malls, mirrors, where they could stop, look at themselves, be admired, show off the new styles — miniskirts, wide belts, black patent-leather boots, bell-bottom trousers, and Beatles haircuts. Half of Mexico City’s ten million inhabitants were under twenty years of age, and in the Zona Rosa they could have a drink, show off, pick someone up, see and be seen, believe again that the world was livable, conquerable, without spilled blood, without an insomniac past.

Here in these same streets — Génova, Londres, Hamburgo, and Amberes — the impoverished aristocrats of the Porfirio Díaz era had lived; here the first elegant nightclubs — the Casanova, the Minuit, the Sans Souci — had opened during the Second World War, which transformed the city; here, in the La Votiva church, Danton had daringly begun his climb to success; here too, along Paseo de la Reforma, the young people of Tlatelolco had marched to their death, and here appeared the cafés which were like guild halls for the young literary set, the Kineret, the Tirol, and the Perro Andaluz; here were restaurants frequented by the rich, the Focolare, the Rivoli, and the Estoril, along with the restaurant that was everyone’s favorite, the Bellinghausen, with its maguey worms, its noodle soups, its escamoles and chemita steaks, its delicious flans flavored with rompope eggnog and its steins of beer, colder than anywhere else. And right here, when the subway system was built, there began to appear, vomited out by the trains, the gandallas, onderos, chaviza—the fuckers, the new wavers, the bucks — all the names invented for the hordes of the new poor from the lost neighborhoods, dispatched from the urban deserts to the oasis where camels drink and caravans repose: the Zona Rosa, as the artist José Luis Cuevas called it.

Laura, who’d photographed it all, felt powerless to depict this new phenomenon: the city was escaping her eyes. The capital’s epicenter had shifted too many times during her life — from the Zócalo, Madero, and Avenida Juárez to Las Lomas and Polanco, to Reforma (now converted from a residential street like one in Paris to a commercial avenue like one in Dallas), and now the Zona Rosa. But its days, too, were numbered. Laura Díaz could smell it in the air, see it in the faces, feel it on her skin — it was a time of crime, of insecurity and hunger, asphyxiating air, invisible mountains, only the fleeting presence of stars, an opaque sun, a mortal fog over a city transformed into a bottomless, treasureless mine, lifeless canyons replete with death …

How can one separate passion from violence?

Mexico’s question, Mexico City’s question, was Laura’s answer: yes, after all is said and done, as she walked away from her final meeting with Orlando Ximénez, Laura Díaz could declare, “Yes, I think I’ve managed to separate passion from violence.”

What I haven’t achieved, she said to herself as she strolled quietly from Niza Street to Plaza Rio de Janeiro along Orizaba Street, the familiar, almost totemic, places of her daily life — the church of the Holy Family, the Chiandoni ice-cream parlor, the department store, the stationery store, the pharmacy, the newspaper stand at the corner of Puebla Street — what I didn’t do was solve those many mysteries, except Orlando’s, which I finally figured out this afternoon. He was waiting for something that never came; to wait for something that would never come was his fate, which he tried to change this afternoon by proposing to me, but fate — experience transformed into fatality — took control again. That was fatal, murmured Laura, sheltered by the sudden splendor of a long, agonic afternoon enamored of its own beauty, a narcissistic afternoon in the Valley of Mexico. She recited one of Jorge Maura’s favorite poems:

Fortunate the tree, which is barely sensitive,

more fortunate still the hard stone, because it feels nothing.

There is no greater pain than the pain of being alive,

nor any greater sorrow than conscious life …

This “song of life and hope” by the marvelous Nicaraguan poet Rubén Dario shrouded Laura in its words that August afternoon, clean and clear because of recent rain, when Mexico City recovered for a few seconds the lost promise of its diaphanous beauty.

The thunderstorm had carried out its punctual chore, and, as Mexico City denizens say, “it cleared up.” On her way home, Laura amused herself reviewing the unsolved mysteries, one by one. Did Armonía Aznar really exist? Had that invisible woman really lived in the attic of the Xalapa house, or was she merely a cover story for the conspiracies of the anarcho-syndicalists from Catalonia and Veracruz? Was she a figment of the young, mischievous, irrepressible imagination of Orlando, Ximénez? I never saw Armonía Aznar’s body, Laura Díaz was surprised to hear herself saying, now that I think about it. I was only told that “it didn’t stink.” Was her grandmother Cosima Reiter really in love with the handsome, brutal outlaw, the Hunk of Papantla, who cut off her fingers and left her self-absorbed for the rest of her days? Did her grandfather Felipe Kelsen ever miss his lost rebel youth in Germany? Did he ever resign himself completely to the fate of being a prosperous coffee grower in Catemaco? Would Aunts Hilda, and Virginia have been more than they were? If they’d been educated in Germany and if they hadn’t had the pretext of isolation in a dark corner of the Mexican forest, would they have been in Düsseldorf a recognized concert pianist and a famous writer? It was no mystery what would have been Auntie María de la O’s life if Grandmother Cosima had not energetically separated her from her mother, the black prostitute, and integrated her into the Kelsen household. The goodness and rectitude of her own father, Don Fernando Díaz, was also no mystery; nor was the pain he bore for the death of the promising young man, the first Santiago, shot by Porfirio Díaz’s soldiers at the Gulf. But Santiago himself was a mystery, the politics he chose by necessity and the private life he chose by act of will. Perhaps the latter was just another myth invented by Orlando. Ximénez to seduce Laura Díaz by exciting her. And what happened at the outset of her husband Juan Francisco’s life, a man who shone with such glory in the public eye for twenty years only to fade away and die defecating? Nothing, nothing before and nothing after the interlude of glory? Born from shit and dying in shit? Was the interlude the entire performance of his life, or something that had happened between the acts? Nothing? Infinitely painful mysteries: if her son Santiago had lived, if the promises of his talent were there, present and fulfilled, if Danton hadn’t had the ambitious genius that led him to wealth and corruption. And if the third Santiago, dead at Tlatelolco, had submitted to the destiny planned by his father, would he be alive today? And his mother, Magdalena Ayub Longoria, what did she think of all this, of these lives which were hers and which she shared with Lauras Díaz?

Had Harry informed on his left-wing comrades to McCarthy?

And finally, above all, what had become of Jorge Maura? Was he alive, was he dying, had he already died? Did he find God? Had God found him? Had Jorge Maura sought for spiritual well-being so strenuously only because he’d already found it?

Arriving at that final mystery, the fate of Jorge Maura, Laura Díaz stopped, granting her lover a privilege she would soon grant to all the other protagonists of the years with Laura Díaz: the right to carry a secret to the grave.

2

When the third Santiago was murdered in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, Laura presumed that the young, pregnant widow, Lourdes Alfaro, would continue to live with her. Lourdes transformed her grief into a decision to honor — twice over — the memory of Santiago. In April 1969 she gave birth to a boy, who was of course named Santiago, the fourth to be named after the Greater Apostle, witness of the agony and transfiguration of the victims: the Santiagos, “sons of the lightning,” descendants of Christ’s first disciple, executed by the power of Herod and saved for love, home, and the memory of Laura Díaz.

Lourdes did her duty as a mother and — with the infant Santiago in a rebozo on her back — she organized demonstrations to seek the release of political prisoners from 1968, helped other young Tlatelolco widows like herself who had small children who needed nursemaids, medicine, care, and also, Lourdes said to Laura, the living memory of their fathers’ sacrifice. Of course, there were times when the situation was reversed and the fathers were widowers whose young student wives had fallen in Tlatelolco.

Thus a union of survivors of October 2 came into being. Lourdes met, came to know, and fell in love with a young man who was twenty-six years old. Jesus Anibal Pliego, who was starting out as a filmmaker and had managed to shoot bits and pieces — shadowy fields, blood-red filters, echoes of machine-gun fire — of the night at Tlatelolco. That same night, Jesus Anibal’s young wife had also died, and the widower, a tall, dark, curly-headed young man with a radiant smile and eyes, was left with a little girl just a few months old, Enedina, who was in the same day-care center Lourdes used for her son, the fourth Santiago in the line of Laura Díaz.

“I have something to tell you, Laura,” Lourdes blurted out after pussyfooting around for several weeks. Lauras, of course, had already guessed everything.

“You don’t have to tell me anything, dear girl. You’re like my daughter, and I understand everything. I couldn’t think of a better match for you than Jesús Aníbal. You’ve got so much in common. If I were old-fashioned, I’d give you my blessing.”

They had something more than love in common: work. Lourdes, who had learned a great deal at Laura’s side, could now work more and more with Jesus Aníbal as his photographic assistant. But what Lourdes had to tell Laura was that she, her husband, and the two children — Enedina and Santiago the Fourth — were going to live in Los Angeles. Jesus Aníbal had gotten an excellent offer from an American movie company: in Mexico he had few chances to work because the Díaz Ordaz government had confiscated his Tlatelolco films.

“You don’t have to explain anything, mi amor. I know how things are.”

The apartment on Plaza Rio de Janeiro was empty.

The fourth Santiago barely left a trace in the memory of his great-grandmother. Just saying that word fills me with pride, satisfaction, consolation, and disconsolation, makes me afraid and makes me sad, convinces me in a happy way that I’ve finally managed to kill vanity — I’m a great-grandmother! — but also that I’ve managed to revive death, my own death forever accompanying that of each Santiago — the one shot in Veracruz, the one who died in Mexico City, the one murdered in Tlatelolco, and now the one who’s going to Los Angeles, my little bracero—now I’m going to laugh — my little wetback whom I’ll never get to dry with the towels my mother Leticia gave me when I married. How certain things last! …

Living alone was no problem for Laura Díaz, She kept herself agile, busy, deriving pleasure from little things, like making the bed, washing and hanging out clothes, keeping herself “snappy,” as she said to Orlando, shopping at the new Aurrerá supermarket, just as she’d once gone, a young bride, to the old Parián market on Avenida Alvaro Obregón. Late in the day, she’d inherited from her mother Leticia a taste for cooking. She rescued old Veracruz recipes — rice and beans, the wonderful shredded beef of ropa vieja, tamales in the coastal style, stuffed crabs, squid in its own ink, snapper swimming in a sea of onions, olives, and tomatoes, strong, hot coffee the way they used to serve it in the Café de la Parroquia, hot coffee to keep out the heat, as Doña Leticia. Kelsen de Díaz recommended. And as if it had just arrived from another celebrated café, the one in Almendares Park in Havana, the cloyingly sweet tocinillo del cielo along with the full gamut of Mexican sweets which Laura would buy at the Celaya candy store on Avenida Cinco de Mayo — the bicolored jamoncillos, the marzipans and glazed sweet potatoes; the peaches, pineapples, figs, cherries, and crystallized quince — and for her breakfasts, chilaquiles in green sauce, huevos rancheros, fried tortillas with chicken, lettuce, and fresh cheese, “divorced” eggs (red and green), and, again, all the different kinds of Mexican breads: rolls, biscuits, white bread, the sugar cookies, the conch shells, and chilindrinas.

She classified her negatives, attended to requests to buy prints of her classic photographs, prepared books, and dared to request prefaces from new writers — Salvador Elizondo, Elena Poniatowska, Margo Glantz, and the youngsters of the Onda movement, José Agustín and Gustavo Saínz. Diego Rivera had died in 1957; Rodriguez Lozano, María Izquierdo, and Alfonso Michel had died, artists she’d known and who had inspired her (the pure, brutal blacks, whites, and grays of the first, the false naivete of the second, the wise shock of each color in the third), and the only two who’d survived, antagonistic but huge, Siqueiros the Big Colonel with fists raised against the celebratory velocity of the world in motion, and Tamayo, handsome, shrewd, and silent, his head just like the volcano Popocatépetl. There wasn’t much to cling to. Unless it was disappearing memory and will. One after another, the guardians of shared memories were disappearing.

One dry, no longer rainy afternoon during the beautiful Mexican autumn, someone knocked at Laura’s door. When she opened it, she had a hard time identifying the woman in black, the first thing Laura noticed being the dark suit in expensive good taste, as if to call attention to a figure that was attractive without needing attention, such was the faded aspect of the face with no memorable features, not even a trace of lost beauty. The beauty innate in all young women. Even in ugly ones. Here, instead, was an evident pride, concentrated, painful, submitted—that word emanated from the lady’s eyes, uncomfortable eyes, uncertain and troubled beneath thick brows as the unknown visitor emitted an “Oh!” as submissive as the rest of her person and shifted her eyes to the floor in alarm.

“My contact lens fell out,” said the stranger.

“Well, let’s find it.” Laura Díaz laughed.

The two of them, on all fours, felt around on the entry way floor until Laura touched the tiny piece of moist lost plastic with the tip of her index finger. But with her other hand she touched a distant but familiar flesh as she presented the saved lens to Magdalena. Ayub Longoria. I’m Danton’s wife, your daughter-in-law, the woman explained, standing up but not daring to put the lens back in its place while Laura invited her in.

“Oh, with all this pollution these lenses go coffee-colored right away,” said Magdalena as she put the lens in her Chanel bag.

“Is something wrong with Danton?” asked Laura, trying to anticipate her.

A smile fleetingly sketched itself on Magdalena’s face, followed by a strange giggle, almost an involuntary flourish. “There’s nothing wrong … with your son … I mean my husband … there’s never anything wrong with him, Señora, in the sense of anything serious. But you know that. He was born to win.”

Laura said nothing, but inquired with her eyes, What do you want? Come on, tell me.

“I’m afraid, Señora.”

“Just call me Laura, don’t be formal.”

Everything in her guest was approximation, doubt, unnecessary expense but perfectly planned to cover appearances, from her hairdo to her shoes. One would have to anticipate her, ask her fear about what, about her husband, about Laura herself, about memory, the memory of her rebellious son, her dead son, her grandson now emigrated, far away from the country where violence held sway over reason and, worse, over passion itself.

“Afraid of what?” asked Laura.

They sat down on the blue velvet sofa Laura had been dragging with her since Avenida Sonora, but Magdalena looked around the disordered room, with the piles of magazines, books, papers, newspaper articles, and the photos tacked to cork panels. Laura understood the woman was seeing for the first time the place her son had gone to die. She stared for a long time at the picture of Adam and Eve painted by Santiago the Younger.

“You must know, Señora.”

“Just call me Laura, for heaven’s sake.” Laura feigned exasperation.

“All right. You must understand that I’m not what I seem. I’m not what you think I am. I admire you.”

“It might have been better if you’d loved and admired your son a bit more,” said Laura with great tranquillity.

“That’s what you have to understand.”

“Understand?”

“You’re right to doubt me. It doesn’t matter. If I can’t share my truth with you, then there’s no one left I can share it with.”

Laura said nothing but looked at her daughter-in-law attentively and respectfully.

“Can you imagine how I felt when Santiago was killed?” asked Magda.

Laura felt a bolt of lightning crossing her face. “I saw you and Dan ton sitting in the presidential box at the Olympics, when your son’s body was not yet cold.”

Magdalena’s expression was one of supplication. “Imagine my pain, please, Laura, my shame, my fury, how I had to hold everything in, how the habit of serving my husband won out over my pain, my rage, how I ended up as I always do, submitting to my husband …” She looked into Laura’s eyes. “You must understand.”

“I’ve always tried to imagine what happened between you and Danton when Santiago died,” Laura said, trying to read her mind.

“That’s the bad part. Nothing happened. He went on with his life as if nothing had happened.”

“Your son was dead. You were alive.”

“I was dead long before my son died. For Danton, nothing changed. At least when Santiago rebelled, he lost his illusions. When our son died, well, it was as if he were saying he brought it on himself.”

Danton’s wife fluttered her hands as if she were tearing away a veil. “Laura, I’ve come to you because I have to unburden myself. I don’t have anyone else. I can’t bear it anymore. I need to open myself up to you. You’re all I have left. Only you can understand everything, the hurt I feel, all the disappointment and pain rotting inside me for so many years.”

“You’ve stood up pretty well.”

“Don’t think I don’t have my pride, no matter how submissive you think I am, believe me I never lost the pride I had in myself, I’m a woman, I’m a wife, I’m a mother, I feel pride in being those things, even though Danton hasn’t shared my bed in years, Laura, accept that for just this reason I am furious and I have some pride, despite my submission to the intimidations I’ve endured.”

She stopped for an instant.

“I’m not what I seem,” she went on. “I thought only you could understand me.”

“Why, daughter?” Laura caressed Magda’s hand.

“Because you’ve lived your life freely. That’s why you can understand me. It’s very simple.”

Laura was on the verge of saying to her, saying to you, what can I do for you now that the final curtain’s about to fall, just as it did with Orlando, why does everyone expect me to write the last scene in the play?

Instead, she lifted Magdalena’s chin and asked, “Do you think there ever was a single minute in your life when you took charge of yourself, alone and completely?”

“Not me,” Magdalena blurted out. “You did, Laura. We all know that.”

Laura Díaz smiled. “I’m not saying it about you, Magda. I’m saying it about myself. I’m begging you now to ask me a question. Ask me, Magdalena: were you always equal to your own demands?”

“No, not me,” stuttered Magdalena. “Obviously not.”

“No, you don’t understand me,” Laura replied. “Ask me that question. Please.”

Magdalena pronounced some confused words, you yourself, Laura Díaz, were always equal to your own demands …

“And those of others,” Laura went on.

“And those of others.” Magda’s eyes shone, as she began to take flight on her own.

“Did you ever feel temptation? Did you want to be seen only as a proper lady? Did it ever strike you that the two things could coexist — being a proper lady and, for that very reason, being a corrupt woman?” Laura went on.

She paused. “Your husband, my son, represents the triumph of fraud.” Laura wanted to be implacable. Magda’s face registered disgust. “He’s always believed that other people’s lives depend on him. I swear to you, I detest him and despise him. Excuse me.” Laura hugged Magda’s head against her bosom. “Did it ever occur to you that the sacrifice of your son redeems Danton from all his sins?”

Now Magdalena freed herself from Laura’s arm, disconcerted.

“You have to understand that, child. If you don’t, your son has died in vain.”

Santiago the son redeemed Danton the father. Magda raised her eyes and joined them to Laura’s in a look that mixed horror, weakness, and rejection, but the seventy-two-year-old woman — not the widow, not the mother, not the grandmother, just the woman named Laura Díaz — looked out her window and watched her daughter-in-law Magdalena Ayub walk down the street, hail a taxi, and look back to the window where Laura waved goodbye with infinite tenderness, begging her to understand what I’ve said, I’m not asking you to accept things but to be outraged, brave, to have the unexpected triumph over a man who expects everything from his submissive wife except the generosity of forgiveness.

Laura saw Magda’s smiling eyes as she entered the taxi. Perhaps the next time she would come in her own car, with her own chauffeur, without hiding herself from her husband.