“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.
“Not reproached, warned.”
“You threw it in my face, Orlando.
“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 Ximenez, 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 Diaz 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 Diaz 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 cafe, 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-Genova, Londres, Hamburgo, and Amberes-the impoverished aristocrats of the Porfirio Diaz 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 cafes 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
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 Zocalo, Madero, and Avenida Juarez 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 Diaz 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 Ximenez, Laura Diaz 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:
This “song of life and hope” by the marvelous Nicaraguan poet Ruben 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 Armonia 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, Ximenez? I never saw Armonia Aznar’s body, Laura Diaz 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,
