He devoutly pushed the wheelchair of the woman with drowsy eyes, invisible eyebrows, hut-Oh! exclaimed Orlando-no longer a face of perfect symmetry with that eternal maturity which presumes eternal youth, as she had been thirty years earlier, at the very edge of an opulence that Laura’s companion had once compared to a piece of fruit at the peak of ripeness, freshly cut from the branch.
“It’s Andrea Negrete. Don’t you remember the vernissage of her portrait by Tizoc in Carmen’s little flat? She was nude-in the painting of course-with two white streaks at her temples and her pubis also painted white, bragging about having gone gray in the groin-
“Eat me,” Andrea whispered to Orlando as they entered the room where a priest was leading the prayer for the dead in front of a dozen of Carmen Cortina’s friends.
“Eat me.”
“Peel me.”
“You vulgarian,” laughed the actress, while the whisper of
The painter Tizoc Ambriz, on the other hand, had lost all facial expression. He was an idol, a diminutive Tezcatlipoca, Puck of the Aztecs, condemned to wander like a ghost through the bewitched nights of Mexico- Tenochtitlan.
Tizoc looked toward the entrance, where a tall, dark young man with curly hair was coming in with a woman on his arm, a woman swollen in every roll of her obesity and reworked in every centimeter of her epidermis. She made her way forward proudly, even impertinently, on the arm of her ephebe, showing off how light her step was despite the immensity of her weight. She sailed like a galleon in Spain’s Invincible Armada over the tempestuous seas of life. Her tiny feet supported a solid fleshly sphere crowned by a minuscule head with blond curls framing a sculpted, surgically enhanced, restored, composed, replaced, and displaced face-stretched like a balloon about to burst yet lacking expression, a pure mask fixed by invisible pins around her ears and stitched under a chin that had eliminated the double chin visibly struggling to be reborn.
“Laura, Laura dearest!” exclaimed this nightmare apparition wrapped in black veils and dripping with jewelry. My God, who can it be? Laura asked herself. I don’t remember her! Then she realized that the scarred blimp wasn’t greeting her but was lightly making her way to someone behind her, and Laura turned to follow this living advertisement for face-lifts and saw her kiss on both cheeks a woman who was her opposite, a thin, small lady in a black suit, with pearls and a tiny pillbox hat from which hung a black veil so close to her skin that it seemed an integral part of her face.
“Laura Riviere, how happy I am to see you,” exclaimed the scarfaced fatty.
“What a pleasure, Elizabeth,” answered Laura Riviere, discreetly drawing away from the exuberant Elizabeth Garcia-Dupont, formerly Caraza. Laura Diaz was astonished: it was her adolescent pal in Xalapa, whose mother, Dona Lucia Dupont, had said, Girls, never show your boobs, as she stuffed Elizabeth into her old-fashioned ball gown, rose-colored with layer upon layer of infinitely floating tulle…
(Laura has no problems because she’s flat, Mama, but I…
(Elizabeth, child, don’t shame me.
(There’s nothing to be done about it. God, with your help, made me this way.)
She hadn’t recognized Laura just as Laura hadn’t recognized her, either because Laura-glancing at herself in the mortuary mirror-had changed just as much, or perhaps Elizabeth actually had recognized her but didn’t want to say hello because resentment, however old, was still alive. Or perhaps to avoid comparisons, lies, you haven’t changed a bit! How do you do it? Made a pact with the devil? The last time, in Ciro’s in the Hotel Reforma, Elizabeth had looked like an anorexic mummy.
Laura Diaz waited for Elizabeth Garcia to separate from Laura Riviere before approaching her namesake, offering her hand, receiving one that was dry, fine, and then she tried to recognize her in the depth of the black veil, in the very well-cared-for white skin below the cylindrical, low hat crowning her head instead of the languid ash- blond hair-cut of her youth.
“I’m Laura Diaz.”
“I’ve been waiting for you. You promised to call me.”
“I’m sorry. You told me to save myself.”
“Did you think I couldn’t help you?”
“You told me yourself, remember?
“But if I could escape from my own body…” Laura Riviere smiled. “I detest it. That’s what I told you, you probably remember…”
“I’m sorry I didn’t call you.”
“So am I.”
“You know? We might have been friends.”
“She really loved Artemio Cruz,” Orlando Ximenez confided to Laura as he took her back to Avenida Sonora, threading their way through the rubble of the city. “She was a woman obsessed by light, lamps, light in interiors, yes, the proper arrangement of lamps, the exact wattage, how to illuminate faces. She’s her own self- portrait.”
(I can’t go on, my love. You have to choose.
(Be patient, Laura. Just realize… Don’t force me…
(To do what? Are you afraid of me?
(Aren’t we fine just as we are? Is something missing?
(Who knows? Artemio. It may well be that nothing’s missing.
(I didn’t deceive you. I didn’t force you.
(I didn’t transform you, which is different. You’re not ready. I’m getting tired.
(I love you. As I did the first day.
(It’s no longer the first day. No longer. Make the music louder.)
As she was getting out of the taxi, Orlando tried to kiss her. Laura felt the touch of those wrinkled lips, the nearness of that skin which looked like graph paper, like a weak, pink piece of meat on the grill. And she felt it repellent. She pushed him away, disgusted and shocked.
“I love you, Laura. As I did the first day.”
“It’s not the first day anymore. Now we know each other. Far too well. Goodbye, Orlando.”
And the mystery? Will they both die without Orlando’s ever revealing his secrets? Orlando, intimate friend of the first Santiago in Veracruz; Orlando, seducer of Laura because of that; mysterious mailman between the invisible anarchist Armonia Aznar and the world; Orlando, her lover and her Virgil in the infernal circles of Mexico City. It was impossible to attribute any mystery whatsoever to this out-of-fashion lounge lizard, mummified and banal, who had gone with her to Carmen Cortina’s wake, to the burial of an entire era in the history of Mexico City. She preferred to hold on to the mystery. The homage to “old times” nevertheless left Laura with a bitter taste in her mouth.
The electricity had been restored. She began to pick up fallen objects, pots and pans in the kitchen; she straightened up the dining room, then especially the living room, and the balcony where, when the family reconciled after Laura Diaz’s passion for Jorge Maura, she and her husband Juan Francisco, her sons Santiago and Danton, and the ancient auntie from Veracruz, Maria de la O, had watched the afternoons fade in the Bosque de Cohapultepec. She replaced the books knocked off their shelves. Out from between the pages of Bertram D. Wolfe’s biography of Diego Rivera had fallen the photograph Laura Diaz took of Frida Kahlo the day she died, July 13, 1954. The day Laura left Harry Jaffe alone in Tepoztlan and raced to the Riveras’ house in Coyoacan.
“Here,” Harry said, handing her a Leica. “I used it to take stills in Hollywood. Don’t come back without bringing me Frida Kahlo dead.”
She had restrained the rage Harry sometimes aroused in her. Frida was dying, amputated and ill, but even on her deathbed she’d gone on painting-right to the last moment. Harry was dying in a tropical valley, but he was too cowardly to pick up pen and paper. The main reason why Laura took the photo of Frida’s body was to show it to Harry and tell him, “She never stopped creating, not even on the day she died.”
But now Harry, too, was dead. So was Carmen Cortina, and the rage Laura felt toward Harry, like the sense of
