The Years With Laura Diaz

6. Mexico City: 1922

THERE ARE NO SEASONS in Mexico City. The dry period runs from November to March, and then comes the period of rains from April to October. There’s no way to get a grip on the weather except for the water and the sun, the real heads and tails of Mexico City. And that’s quite a lot. For Laura Díaz, the image of her husband, Juan Francisco López Greene, became permanently fixed one rainy night. Hatless, right in the center of the city, the Zócalo, addressing a multitude, Juan Francisco did not have to shout. His speaking voice was deep and strong, the opposite of his low, private voice. His image was the quintessence of combat, with his heavy soaked hair dripping over the nape of his neck, on his forehead and ears, water pouring off his eyebrows, out of his eyes, and into his mouth, with an oilcloth cape covering his huge body, which she, on their newlywed nights, had approached with fear, respect, suspicion, and gratitude. At the age of twenty-four, Laura Daz had chosen.

She remembered the boys at provincial dances whom she couldn’t tell one from the other. They were interchangeable, pleasant, elegant …

“Laura, the thing is, he’s very ugly.”

“But Elizabeth, he doesn’t look like anyone else.”

“He’s dark-skinned.”

“No more so than my Aunt María de la O.”

“But you’re not going to marry her, are you? There are so many white boys in Veracruz.”

“This one’s stranger or more dangerous, I don’t know.”

“And that’s why you chose him? You’re crazy! And how dangerous, Laura! I envy you, but I’m also sorry for you.”

The newlyweds left Xalapa, and no sooner had Laura reached Mexico’s central plateau than she missed the beauty and balance of the provincial capital, its nights so perfect that with each evening they bestowed new life on all things. She would remember her home, and her family misfortunes would seem to dissolve in the all-encompassing harmony of the life she’d lived and recalled with her parents, with Santiago, with her maiden aunts, and with her dead grandparents.

She said the word “harmony” and was upset by the memory of the heroic Catalan anarchist whom Juan Francisco referred to that rainy evening when defending the eight-hour workday, minimum wage, paid maternity leave, paid vacations, everything the Revolution had promised, he was saying in his deep, resonant voice, speaking to the crowd gathered in the plaza to defend and demand enactment of Article 123 of the Constitution that May 1, 1922, in the nocturnal rain. This was the first time in the history of humanity that the right to work and the protection of the worker had constitutional status, which was why the Mexican Revolution was a real revolution, not a military coup, not a revolt, not the kind of riot that took place elsewhere in Spanish America. What happened in Mexico was different, unique, everything created from the ground up in the name of the people, by the people, Juan Francisco was saying to the two thousand people gathered in the rain. He was saying it to the rain itself, to the night as it fell, to the new government, successors to the assassinated Venustiano Carranza, who had been eliminated, everyone thought, by the triumvirate of the Agua Prieta rebellion — Calles, Obregón, and de la Huerta — who now held power. López Greene addressed all of them in the name of the Revolution, but he was also speaking to Laura Díaz, his young wife just arrived from the provinces. A beautiful girl, tall, strange with her conspicuous, aquiline features, beautiful because of her very strangeness; he’s talking to me as well, to me, I’m part of his words, I have to be part of his speech.

Now it was raining all over the central valley, and she was remembering the ascent in the train from Xalapa to the Buenavista station in Mexico City. I’m exchanging sand for stone, forest for desert, araucarias for cactus. The ascent to the central plateau passed through a landscape of mists and burned lands, then over a hard plain of quarries and workers quarrying stone who looked like stone; occasional poplars with silvery leaves. The landscape took Laura’s breath away and made her thirsty.

“You fell asleep, honey.”

“The landscape frightened me, Juan Francisco.”

“You missed the pines in the high forests.”

“Ah, that’s why it smells so good.”

“Don’t think everything here is just bald plains. Look, I’m from Tabasco, I miss the tropics as much as you, but now I couldn’t live without these highlands, without the capital.”

When she asked him why, Juan Francisco changed his tone of voice, falsified it, perhaps made it a bit high-flown in order to talk about Mexico City, the very center of the country, its heart, you might say, the Aztec city, the colonial city, the modern city one on top of the other.

“Like a layer cake,” laughed Laura.

Juan Francisco didn’t laugh. Laura went on making comparisons. “Like one of those food trays that would be brought up to Mrs. Aznar, your heroine, my love.”

Juan Francisco became even more serious.

“I’m sorry. I’m just joking.”

“Laura, weren’t you ever curious about seeing Armonía Aznar?”

“I was just a girl.”

“You were already in your teens.”

“It’s probably that my childhood impression lasted, Juan Francisco. Sometimes, no matter how old you are, you’re still frightened by the ghost stories you were told when you were little.”

“Forget all that stuff, Laura. You’re not the little girl of the family anymore. You’re at the side of a man fighting seriously.”

“I know, Juan Francisco. I respect that.”

“I need your support. Your logic, not your fantasy.”

“I’ll try not to let you down, my love. I respect you greatly. You know that.”

“Begin by asking yourself why you never rebelled against your family, why you never went up to the attic to see Armonía Aznar.”

“It’s that I was afraid, Juan Francisco. I tell you, I was just a little girl.”

“You missed the chance to meet a great woman.”

“Forgive me, my love.”

“You must forgive me.” Juan Francisco hugged her and kissed a nervously clenched fist. “I’ll take care of educating you about reality. You’ve lived for too long in infantile fantasies.”

Orlando was no fantasy, she wanted to tell him, knowing she’d never dare mention the disturbing blond young man. Orlando, who was a seducer, wanted to meet me in the attic, and that’s why I never went up there; besides, Mrs. Aznar wanted to be respected, she asked for that.

“She herself gave orders that she not be bothered. Who was I to disobey?”

“In other words, you didn’t have the nerve.”

“No, there are lots of things I don’t have the nerve to do.” Laura smiled, making a face of false repentance. “With you I would have the nerve. You’ll teach me, won’t you?”

He smiled and kissed her with the passion he’d been giving her since their wedding night, which they spent on the Interoceanic train. He was a big, vigorous, and loving man, with none of the mystery that had surrounded her other imminent love, Orlando Ximénez, but without his aura of evil, either. Next to the curly-haired blond of the San Cayetano ball, Juan Francisco was plainness itself, an open, almost primitive being in his direct sensual appetite. And because of that Laura was loving him more and more, as if her husband confirmed the first impression the young woman had felt in the Xalapa Casino when she met him. Juan Francisco the lover was as magnificent as Juan Francisco the orator, the politician, the labor leader.

(I don’t know anything else, I don’t know anything more, I can’t compare, but I can enjoy and I do enjoy, the truth is I enjoy myself in bed with this huge man, this male devoid of subtleties and perfumes like Orlando, Juan Francisco, mine.)

“You’re going to have to break the habit of calling me ‘sweetheart’ or ‘darling’ in public.”

“Yes, darling. Sorry. Why?”

“We’re in the company of comrades. We’re in the struggle. You just can’t do that.”

“Isn’t there any love among your comrades?”

“It isn’t serious, Laura. Enough.”

“I’m sorry. With you, next to you, for me everything is love. Even the union movement.” She laughed, as she always laughed, caressing her man’s long, hairy ear. She’d actually say that: “You’re my man and I’m your little wife, my love is macho but I mustn’t call him ‘darling.’”

“You always call me ‘girl,’ you’ve never called me ‘darling.’ and I respect you, I know it’s your natural way of speaking, just as it’s natural for me to call you …”

“Darling …”

He kissed her, but she was left with an uneasy, guilty feeling, as if, very secretly, the two of them had said something unrepeatable, fundamental, which they might one day either be happy about or deeply regret. That possibility was postponed indefinitely by the certainty that the two of them really didn’t know each other. Everything was a surprise. For both of them. Each expected that little by little they would reveal themselves to each other. Was that a consolation? The immediate reason for her misgivings, the one that registered in her head, was that her husband was reproaching her for not having had the courage to climb the stairs and knock at Armonía Aznar’s door. Juan Francisco’s presence and his own history abolished her motive and turned it into a pretext. Mrs. Aznar herself had requested isolation and respect. Laura had that excuse, but the excuse concealed a secret: Orlando, a subject not be mentioned. Laura was left with guilt, a vague, diffuse guilt which she could not defend, transforming it, she suddenly realized, into a motive for identifying with her husband, making it a motive for solidarity with the struggle instead of an obstacle between the two of them, a distancing — she didn’t know what to call it and attributed everything, in the end, to her inexperience.

“Don’t call me ‘darling’ in public.”

“Don’t worry … darling.” The young bride laughed and tossed a pillow at the tousled, hairy head of her sleepy husband, naked, dark, powerful, smiling now with his strong teeth, wide as an Indian frieze. Like kernels of white corn, said Laura in order not to deify her husband, “wow, you’ve got teeth like kernels of white corn,” Juan Francisco was the novelty of her life, the beginning of another history, far from her family, from Veracruz, from memory.

“I hope you’re not choosing him just because he’s different,” warned Aunt María de la O.

“Who’s more different than you, Auntie, and whom do I love more than I love you?”

Niece and aunt joyfully hugged and kissed each other, and now, near Juan Francisco’s face while they made love, Laura would feel his attractive darkness, his irresistible difference. Love was like satiating herself with brown sugar or getting drunk on that cinnamon perfume people from the tropics inherit, as if all of them had been conceived in a wild garden amid mangos, papayas, and vanilla. Which is what she thought about in bed with her husband, mangos, papayas, and vanilla, unable not to, thinking it again and again, understanding that in thinking these things she was paying less attention to what she was doing but also prolonging it, fearing at the same time that Juan Francisco might notice her distraction and take it for indifference and confuse the passion of their united bodies in bed with a comparison unfavorable for him, even though he’d proven that Laura was a virgin, that he was the first. Would he suspect that it wasn’t being first that was disturbing him but being another, one more, the second, the third, who knows? — the fourth — in the succession of his wife’s loves?

“You never tell me about your boyfriends.”

“You never tell me about your girlfriends.”

Juan Francisco’s eyes, his movements, the shrugging of his shoulders meant: We machos are different. Why didn’t he say so directly, openly?

“We machos are different.”

Why was it unnecessary to explain that? Why was society like that, and why was it not going to change? Listening to him speak in the gigantic plaza in the heart of the city, in the rain, with his deep voice, Laura was filled from him, with him, for him, with words and arguments to which she wanted to give a meaning in order to understand him, to penetrate his mind the way he penetrated her body, so she could be his comrade, his ally. Did this revolution not include a change in what Mexican men did to their women, did it not begin a new time for women, as important as the new time for workers that Juan Francisco was defending?

She’d belonged to no other man. She chose this one. She wanted to belong completely to this one. Would Juan Francisco let himself be tempted, was he going to take her as totally as she wanted to be taken by him? Did he fear, he who never spoke of his girlfriends, he who would never say “darling” in public or private, would he fear she might penetrate him, invade his person, dispel his mystery? Did a person exist behind the personage she followed from meeting to meeting, with his serene consent, he who never told her to stay home, this is a matter for men, you’ll be bored? On the contrary, he celebrated Laura’s presence, Laura’s giving herself over to the cause, Laura’s attention to the words of her husband the leader, Juan Francisco’s speech, The Speech, because there was only one, in defense of the workers, of the right to strike, of the eight-hour workday. It was one single speech because it was one single memory, that of the textile workers’ strike in Rio Blanco, the miners’ strike in Cananea, the memory of the liberal and anarcho-syndicalist struggle; an evocation with no blank spaces, a river of causes and effects perfectly linked and interrupted only by calls to rebellion that could set water itself, as well as the mines’ copper and silver, on fire.

Laura stopped asking herself questions. Everything was interrupted, nine months after their marriage, by the birth of their first son. Juan Francisco was so happy about the baby’s being a boy that Laura wondered, What if he’d been a girl? The simple fact that she’d borne a little boy and had noted her husband’s satisfaction with this gave Laura the power to name the child.

“We’ll call him Santiago, my brother’s name.”

“Your brother died for the Revolution. It’s a good sign for the boy.”

“I want him to live, Juan Francisco, not to die, not for the Revolution or for anything else.”

It was one of those moments when each one held back what might have been said. The destiny of the people surpasses that of the individual, Laura, we are more than ourselves, we are the people, we are the working class. You can’t be stingy with your brother and lock him up in your little heart the way you’d press a dead flower between the pages of a book. But, Juan Francisco, he’s a new being, can’t you accept him simply for being that, a unique creature on this earth, someone who never existed before and will never exist again? That’s how I celebrate our son, that’s how I kiss, rock, and feed him, singing welcome, my son, you’re unique, irreplaceable, I’m going to give you all my love because you’re you, I’m resisting the temptation to dream of you as a dead Santiago reborn, a second Santiago to fulfill the interrupted destiny of my adored brother.

“When I call my son Santiago, I think about your brother’s heroism.”

“I don’t, Juan Francisco. I hope our Santiago won’t become what you say. It’s very painful to be a hero.”

“All right. I understand you. I thought you’d like to see in the new Santiago something like the resurrection of the first one.”

“Forgive me if I annoy you, but I don’t agree.”

He said nothing. He got up and went to the window to look out at the July rain.

How could she deny Juan Francisco the right to name their second son? Danton was born eleven months after their first, when General Alvaro Obregón had been President for two years and the country was slowly returning to peace. Laura liked this brilliant (or at least clever) President. He had an answer for everything. He’d lost an arm in the battle of Celaya that annihilated Pancho Villa and his Golden Troops, los Dorados de Villa, and was even able to laugh at himself: “The battlefield was like a slaughterhouse. Among all those bodies, how was I going to find the arm they’d shot off me? Gentlemen, I had a brilliant idea. I tossed a gold coin up in the air, and my arm flew up to catch it. No revolutionary general can resist a barrage of fifty thousand pesos!”

Or: “He may have only one hand, but that one is good and heavy,” she heard a labor leader say when they gathered at their house to discuss politics.

She preferred to explore the city she didn’t know and discover tranquil spots, far from the noise of the buses that had their stops painted on them:

ROMAMERIDACHAPULTEPECANDADDITIONALSTOPS PENSILBUENOSAIRESPENITENCIARIASALTODELAGUA COYOACANCALZADADELAPIEDADNIÑOPERDIDO

And the yellow trams that went even farther — CHURUBUSCO, XOCHIMILCO, MILPA ALTA — and the cars, especially the “frees,” the libres, taxis with signs on their windshields that announced they were “free,” and the fotingos, the Fords that confused Paseo de la Reforma with a racetrack.

Laura was a lover of parks; that’s what she called herself, with a smile on her face. First one child, then two went in the pram that Laura pushed from her home on Avenida Sonora to the Bosque de Chapultepec, where it smelled of eucalyptus, pine, hay, and green lake.

When Danton was born, Aunt María de la O offered to come help Laura, and Juan Francisco raised no objections to the presence of the mulatta aunt, who was getting fatter and fatter, with ankles as thick as her arms, and thick, shaky legs. The two-story house was faced with fretted brick on the lower floor and yellowish stucco on the upper. The entrance was through a garage that Juan Francisco inaugurated the day after the birth of his second son with a Ford convertible given to him by the Regional Workers Confederation of Mexico, the CROM. The head of the central committee, Luis Napoleon Morones, gave him the car in recognition, he said, of his meritorious service on behalf of the union during the Revolution.

“Without the working class,” said Morones, not just a fat man, but a thick man with thick lips, thick nose, thick neck, and thick double chins, “without the House of the Workers of the World and the Red Battalions, we would not have triumphed. The workers made the Revolution. The peasants, Villa and Zapata, were a necessary ballast, the reactionary, clerical ballast of Mexico’s black colonial past.”

“He told you exactly what you wanted to hear,” said Laura to Juan Francisco, without a hint of a question in her voice. It was he who queried her words.

“He said nothing more than the truth. The working class is the advance guard of the Revolution.”

There sat the Model T Ford, less impressive than the luxurious Isotta-Fraschini that Xavier Icaza had brought to Xalapa but very comfortable for a family of five making an excursion to the Tenayuca pyramids or the floating gardens of Xochimilco. At the back of the garage, in the place of honor, were the hot-water boilers, fed by stacks of wood and newsprint. The garage led to a small foyer with tiled mosaic floors and thence to the living room, furnished simply and comfortably. Laura had opened an account at the Palacio de Hierro department store, and Juan Francisco gave her free rein to buy a sofa and armchairs in blue velvet and lamps that imitated the Art Deco fashion much admired in the illustrated magazines.

“Don’t worry, darling. There’s a new arrangement called the installment plan. You don’t have to pay the whole bill at once.” It was a pretty living room. It rose several meters above street level and had a little balcony from which one could admire the Bosque de Chapultepec.

Glass doors led to the dining room with its square table resting on a pedestal of hollow wood, eight heavy mahogany chairs with rigid backrests, a mirror that stored up the afternoon light, and the service entrance to the kitchen with its coal stove and icebox, which required the daily visit of the wood vendor and the coal man, the milk truck and the ice truck.

Above, up a rather pretentious stairway considering the size of the house, there were four bedrooms and a bathroom with a tub, a toilet, and — something Aunt María de la O had never seen — a French bidet. Juan Francisco wanted to have it taken out, but Laura begged him to leave it, for it was a novelty and so amusing.

“You’re imagining my union friends sitting there.”

“No, I imagine that potbellied Morones. Don’t say anything to them. Let them figure it out for themselves.”

Juan Francisco’s friends sometimes came back from the bathroom with an uncomfortable air and even with wet trousers. Juan Francisco turned a blind eye to it all, with his innate, dignified seriousness, which countenanced no jokes or extinguished them with a lightning glance, at once fiery and cold.

They would gather in the dining room, and Laura would stay in the living room, reading. Reading at her invalid father’s bedside in the hopes that he would understand her, as chancy as a shipwrecked sailor’s tossing a bottle into the sea, became for the married woman a silent, pleasurable habit. A living literature was coming into being concerned with the recent past, and Laura read The Underdogs by a physician named Mariano Azuela, agreeing with the people in the novel who spoke of peasant troops as a horde of savages, albeit alive, while the urban politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals were perfidious savages, opportunists and traitors. She realized that the Revolution had passed through Veracruz almost like an omen while it roared in the north and center of Mexico.

For Laura, the gift in these readings was the discovery of a young poet from Tabasco barely twenty-three years old. His name was Carlos Pellicer, and when Laura read his first book, Colors in the Sea, she didn’t know whether to kneel and give thanks or pray or weep, because now the tropics of her childhood came alive and were at hand between the covers of a book. And since Pellicer, like Juan Francisco, was from Tabasco, reading him drew her even closer to her husband:

Tropics, why did you give me hands

Full of color?

Besides, Laura knew that Juan Francisco liked to have her nearby to serve his friends if the meeting went on for long, but the real reason was to be a witness of what he was saying to his comrades while the aunt took care of the children. It was hard for her to put faces on the voices that reached her from the dining room because when the men came out, they were silent, distant, as if very recently emerged from dark, even invisible places. Some wore jackets and ties, but others wore collarless shirts and wool caps, and some even wore blue overalls and striped shirts with sleeves rolled up to the elbow.

One rainy afternoon the men arrived wet, some wearing raincoats, most unprotected. In Mexico City, almost no one used umbrellas, though the rain came punctually and powerfully, falling in cataracts at about two o’clock in the afternoon and continuing on and off until dawn. Then the morning sun would return. The men smelled strongly of wet clothes, muddy shoes, moist socks.

Laura watched them silently file in and silently file out. Those with caps would take them off when they saw her and then put them right back on. Those with hats would leave them at the entrance. Others didn’t know what to do with their hands when they saw her. Yet they were eloquent in the dining room, and Laura, invisible to them but attentive to everything they were saying, believed she was hearing voices buried for a long time, possessors of an eloquence that had been muted for centuries. They had fought against the dictatorship of Don Porfirio Díaz — this Laura heard, that they’d fought, the oldest among them — in Light, an anarcho-syndicalist group, then in the House of the Workers of the World founded by the anarchist Professor Moncaleano, and finally in the Labor Party after Carranza dissolved the House once the Revolution triumphed, when the old ingrate forgot everything he owed his Red Battalions and the House of the Workers. But Obregón (had he ordered the death of Carranza?) offered the workers a new party, the Labor Party, and a new central workers’ association, the Regional Workers Confederation of Mexico, the CROM, so they could continue their struggles for justice.

“Just tricks. You’ve got to realize, comrades, that governments, every single one of them, have done nothing but trick us. Madero, who was supposed to be the apostle of the Revolution, unleashed his Cossacks on us.”

“What did you expect, Dionisio? That twerp wasn’t a revolutionary. He was only a democrat. But we owe him a big favor, because, look, Madero thought he was going to create democracy in Mexico without revolution, without real changes. He was naive, and it cost him his life. He was bumped off by the army, the landowners, all the people he didn’t dare touch because he thought that it was enough simply to enact democratic laws. Right away.”

“But look at Huerta. He murdered Madero, and he did take us into account. Did you ever see a demonstration bigger than the one on May Day in 1913? The eight-hour workday, the six-day workweek, General Huerta accepted it all.”

“Just tricks. No sooner did we start talking about democracy than he ordered our offices burned, arrested us, and deported us. Don’t forget that. It’s a lesson. A dictatorship can give labor guarantees but not political liberty. Of course we were going to welcome General Obregón like a savior when he took Mexico City in 1915 and right away started talking about proletarian revolution, about teaching the capitalists a lesson, about—”

“You were there, Palomo, you remember how Obregón came to our meeting and embraced us one by one — he still had two arms then — and he said to each of us, You’re right, pal. He told us what we wanted to hear.”

“Just tricks, José Miguel. What Obregón wanted to do was to use us as allies against the peasants, against Villa and Zapata. And he got what he wanted. He convinced us the peasants were reactionaries, clerical, wore pictures of the Virgin on their hats, who knows what else, they were the past.”

“Just tricks, Pánfilo. Carranza was a hacienda owner and hated the peasants. Zapata and Villa were right to distribute land without asking the old goat’s permission.”

“But now Obregón has won. He always defended us, even if it was to win support against Zapata and Villa. Figure it out, comrades. Obregón won out over everyone.”

“You mean he killed everyone.”

“If you like. That’s how politics works.”

“Does it have to be that way? Let’s change it, Dionisio.”

“Obregón won, that’s reality. He won, and he’s going to stick. Mexico is at peace.”

“Tell it to all those restless generals. They all want a piece of the government, power has yet to be distributed, Palomo, there are miracles yet to come. Let’s see how it plays out for us.”

“Just tricks, that’s how it’ll play out for us. Tricks. Hoaxes.”

“Comrades,” Juan Francisco ended the discussion. “What matters to us are very concrete things — the right to strike, wages, the workday, and then further victories like paid vacations, paid maternity leave, social security. That’s what’s important for us to win. Don’t lose sight of those goals, comrades. Don’t get lost in the maze of politics.”

Laura stopped knitting, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine her husband in the dining room next door, standing up, ending the argument, telling the truth, but the intelligent truth, the possible truth: they simply had to collaborate with Obregón, with the CROM, and its leader Luis Napoleon Morones. The rain fell harder, and Laura listened harder. Juan Francisco’s comrades used the copper spittoons which were an indispensable part of every well-appointed home, of all public places, and, especially, of any room where men gathered.

“Why don’t we women spit?”

Then they filed out of the dining room and wordlessly said goodbye to Laura, and she would vainly try to attribute the ideas she’d heard to the faces she watched pass — this one with sunken eyes (Pánfilo?), that one with a nose as narrow as the gates of heaven (José Miguel?), the sunny look of one (Dionisio?), the blind stumbling of another (Palomo?), the whole group and all the details about these men, the dissimulated limping, the desire to weep for some loved one, the salty saliva, the last cold, the ancient passage of hours remembered because they never took place, youth wanting to be more than youth all at once, eyes mortgaged with blood, loves postponed, the handful of dead men, the longed-for generations, hopelessness without power, life exalted without the need for happiness, a parade of promises, crumbs on shirts, a strand of white hair on a lapel, a remnant of breakfast’s scrambled eggs on a lip, the haste to return to what had been abandoned, delay in order to avoid return — Laura saw all that as her husband’s comrades passed by.

No one was smiling, and that alarmed her. Wasn’t Juan Francisco right? Was it she who didn’t understand anything? She wanted to give words to the faces leaving her house, saying farewell wordlessly. She was upset, actually came to feel guilty for wanting reasons where perhaps there were only dreams and desires.

She liked President Obregón. He was astute, intelligent, even though he didn’t seem as handsome as he had in the battle photos, or as blond, young, and svelte as when he had fought with two arms; now, maimed and graying, he’d put on weight, as if he weren’t getting enough exercise or the presidential sash didn’t quite compensate for the lost hand. But as she strolled through the parks in the morning, before the cloudbursts, with the boys in the pram, Laura felt something new was happening. José Vasconcelos, an overexcited but brilliant philosopher, was the revolutionary government’s first Minister of Education, and he had turned over the walls of public buildings to artists to paint what they pleased — attacks on the clergy, the bourgeoisie, the Holy Trinity, or, rather worse, the very government that was paying for their labor. There was freedom! Laura exclaimed to herself — taking advantage of her aunt’s minding the boys to make an excursion to the National Preparatory School, where Orozco was painting, or to the National Palace, where Rivera was painting.

Like Obregón, Orozco too was one-armed, as well as nearsighted and sad. Laura admired him because he painted the walls in the Prepa as if he were someone else, with a vigorous hand and his eyes unblinkingly fixed on the sun: he painted with what he lacked. An unclouded vision, another Orozco inhabiting the body of this Orozco, guided him, illuminated him, challenged Laura Díaz to imagine what the fiery, fugitive genius must be that governed the painter’s body, communicating an invisible fire to the disabled, shortsighted artist with his severe lips and bitter brow.

By contrast, Laura in her new outfit, with its bodice embroidered with precious stones and its short skirt, had barely sat down on the stairway in the National Palace to watch Diego Rivera paint when the artist became distracted, staring at her with an intensity that made her blush.

“You’ve got the face of a boy or a madonna. I don’t know which. You choose. Who are you?” asked Rivera during a break.

“I’m a girl.” Laura smiled. “And I have two sons.”

“I’ve got two girls. Let’s marry off the four of them, and when we’re both free of brats I’ll paint you as neither a woman nor a man but a hermaphrodite. Do you realize what the advantage is? You can love yourself both ways.”

He was the opposite of Orozco. He was an immense, fat, tall frog with bulging, sleepy eyes. And when she turned up another day dressed in black with a black ribbon tied over her hair because of the death of her father, Fernando Daz, in Xalapa, one of Rivera’s assistants asked her to leave: the maestro feared the evil eye and couldn’t paint while making the sign of the horns to exorcise bad luck.

“Oh, I see … because I’m in mourning. You must be very superstitious, red maestro, if a woman in black can frighten you.”

She hadn’t had time to get to Xalapa for the funeral. Her mother, Leticia, sent her a telegram. You have your own obligations, Laura, a husband and two sons. Don’t make the trip. Why didn’t she add anything else, your father thought of you before dying, said your name, regained his speech for the last time just to say Laura, God gave him that gift at the end, he spoke again?

“He was a decent man, Laura,” said Juan Francisco. “You know how he helped us.”

“He did it for Santiago’s sake,” Laura retorted, the telegram in one hand and the other pushing aside the curtain so she could peer out through the almost black rain of late afternoon, as if to see all the way to a cemetery in Xalapa. The snowy peaks of Mexico City’s two volcanoes were bobbing above the storm.

When Aunt María de la O came home, she said that God knew what He was doing, Fernando Daz wanted to die in order not to be in the way, she knew this because the two of them understood each other clearly, with just a look, direct and intelligent, how could it be otherwise with the man who had saved her mother, supported her, and given her a dignified old age.

“Is your mother still alive?”

María de la O became upset, shook her head, said I don’t know, I don’t know, but one morning when Laura stayed home to make the beds and the aunt took the boy and the baby in the carriage out for a stroll, she found under María de la O’s mattress an old daguerreotype of a slim, good-looking black woman in a low-cut dress, with a spark on her lips, a challenge in her eyes, a wasp waist, and breasts like hard melons. She quickly put it back when she heard María de la O return, tired after only three blocks, hobbling on her swollen ankles.

“Oooh, the altitude here, Laurita.”

The altitude and its airless air. The rain and its refreshing air. It was like the beat of Mexico’s heart, sun and rain, rain and sun, systole and diastole, every day. Thank heaven the nights were rainy and the days clear. On weekends, Xavier Icaza would visit and teach them how to drive the Ford that the CROM had given Juan Francisco.

Laura turned out to be a better driver than her oversized, awkward husband, who almost didn’t fit in the seat and had no place to put his knees. She seemed to have an instinctive talent for driving and could now take the boys on excursions to Xochimilco to see the canals, to Tenayuca to see the pyramid, and to wander around the barns at Milpa Alta and smell that unique aroma of udders and straw and moist backs and drink warm milk fresh from the cow.

One day, ducking out of the rain after she’d left the National Palace (where Rivera had readmitted her as soon as she stopped wearing mourning), Laura took the car parked on Calle de La Moneda and drove down the recently rebaptized Avenida Madero, the former Calle de Plateros, admiring as she went the colonial mansions along it, with their fiery tezontle tiles and matte marble, and then to Alameda and Paseo de la Reforma, where the architecture became frenchified, where beautiful villas had high mansard roofs and formal gardens.

A feeling of comfort settled over her. Her life as a married woman was comfortable, satisfactory, she had two handsome sons and an extraordinary husband — difficult at times because he was an honest man with character, a man who wouldn’t give in, but an always loving man, preoccupied, burdened by his work, but who created no problems for her. As she maneuvered to the left at the Niza traffic circle to make her way to Avenida de los Insurgentes and her house on Avenida Sonora, her comfort began to discomfit her. Everything was too calm, too good, something had to happen …

“You believe in presentiments, omens, don’t you, Auntie?”

“Well, I do believe in sentiments, and your aunts tell me theirs in letter after letter, Hilda and Virginia and your mother down there together, busy with their guests, they sit down to write letters and they feel different. I think they don’t even realize what they tell me, and sometimes that offends me, they write to me as if I weren’t myself, as if by writing to me they could talk to each other, dearie, I’m just the pretext, Hilda can’t play the piano anymore because of her arthritis, so she tells me how the music goes through her head, look here, read, how good God is, or how bad, I don’t know, because He allows me to remember Chopin’s nocturnes, note by note, in my head, absolutely exact, but He won’t let me listen to the music outside my head, have you heard of that new thing, the Victrola? Chopin screeches on those records or whatever you call them, but in my head his music is crystalline and sad, as if the purity of the sound depended on the melancholy of one’s soul, don’t you hear it, sister, don’t you hear me? If I knew that someone was hearing Chopin in their head with the same clarity I hear him in mine, I’d be happy, María de la O, I’d be sharing what I love most, I don’t enjoy it all by myself, I wish I could share my musical happiness with someone, with more than one person, and I can’t any longer, my fate was not the one I wanted, perhaps it’s the one I imagined without wanting it, do you hear me, sister? Only a humble prayer, an impotent plea like Chopin’s, who people say imagined his last nocturne when a storm forced him inside a church, do you understand my plea, sister? and Virginia doesn’t talk to me but won’t accept dying without having had anything published, Laura, couldn’t your husband ask Minister Vasconcelos to publish your Aunt Virginia’s poems? Have you seen how pretty those books are with green covers that he brought out at the university? Don’t you think you could ask? Because even though out of pride Virginia never mentions these things to me, what Hilda writes to me is exactly what Virginia feels, except that the poetess has no words and the pianist does, because, as Hilda says, my music is my words and, as Virginia answers her, my words are my silence … Only your mother, Leticia, complains of nothing, but she isn’t happy, either.”

Laura felt insufficient. She decided to ask Juan Francisco to let her work with him at what he was doing, at his side, helping him at least half the day, the two of them working together, organizing the workers, and he said fine but first come with me for a few days to see if you like it.

They were together only forty-eight hours. The old city was a jumble of small shops, shoemakers, blacksmiths, carpenters, potters, disabled veterans of the revolutionary wars, old camp followers now without men who sold tamales and drinks on the corners, murmuring corridos and the names of lost battles, a viceregal city with a proletarian pulse, its palaces now tenements, its wide portals now cluttered with sweet shops and lottery stands, shops that sold anything and everything, saddle makers, ancient inns turned into shelters where vagrants and criminals, homeless beggars and disoriented old people slept in a repugnant collective fog older than the perfume in the streets, where prostitutes plied their trade, leaning against entryways, open to suggestions and propositions, a whorish perfume identical to the scent of funeral parlors, gardenias and penises, both erect, pulque shops reeking of vomit and stray-dog urine, battalions of loose, mangy beasts poking around in garbage dumps that grew and grew, ever grayer and more purulent, like huge, cancerous lungs that would someday suffocate the entire city. Garbage had overflowed from the few canals left from the Aztec city, the assassinated city. People said they’d be drained and filled in with asphalt.

“Where would you like to begin, Laura?”

“You tell me, Juan Francisco.”

“You want me to tell you? Begin at home. Run your own house properly, girl, and you’ll make more of a contribution than if you come to these neighborhoods to organize and save people — who by the way won’t thank you for your trouble. Leave the work to me. This is not for you.”

He was right. But that evening, back in her house, Laura Daz was in a high state of excitement, not understanding very well why, as if the trip to a city that was both hers and not hers had aroused the passion of her childhood years with which she’d loved and explored the forest and its giant stone women covered with lianas and jewels, the trees and their gods hidden among laurels, and in Veracruz, the passion she’d shared with Santiago that had only grown in the years since his death, and in Xalapa the passion from Orlando’s languid body that she’d rejected, the passion in her father’s broken body that she’d tenaciously embraced. And now Juan Francisco, Mexico City, her house, the boys, and a request dashed by her husband the way you swat a fly: let me become impassioned with you and with what you’re doing, Juan Francisco.

He may be right. He didn’t understand me. But even so he has to give something more to what is stirring in my soul. I love everything I have and wouldn’t exchange it for anything in the world. But I want something else. What is it?

He was asking for the mute obedience of an impassioned soul.

“Where’s the car, Juan Francisco?”

“I gave it back. Don’t give me that look. The comrades asked me for it. They don’t want me to accept anything from the official union. They call it corruption.”