was alluring, with its promises of well-being, even beauty. Didn’t the beer ads promise top-caliber blondes, and weren’t all the characters in the ever more popular television soap operas also blond, rich, well-dressed upper-class types?
For Laura, none of this answered her questions about the unstoppable migratory flow: Where did these people come from? What was their final destination? How did they live? Who were they?
That was Laura Diaz’s first great photo-essay. It summed up the experience of a lifetime-her provincial origins, her life as a young married woman, her two experiences of motherhood, her loves and what her loves brought her: the Spanish world of Maura, the terrible memory of Raquel’s martyrdom in Buchenwald, the merciless execution of Pilar at the walls of Santa Fe de Palencia, McCarthy’s persecution of Harry, the double death of Frida Kahlo, first immobile death and then resuscitation by fire-she poured it all into a single image taken in one of the nameless cities springing up like loose threads and patches on the great embroidered sackcloth that was Mexico City.
Lost cities, anonymous cities built on the outskirts of the dry valley, amid rocky fields and mesquite trees, with houses nailed together any which way, caves made of cardboard and flattened tin cans, dirt floors, poisoned water, and dying candles (until the people’s ingenuity discovered a technique for stealing electricity from streetlights and the pylons supporting high-tension power cables).
Which is why the first photograph Laura Diaz took, after Frida Kahlo’s body, was of the fallen Angel, the statue smashed to pieces at the foot of its slender column, the bodiless wings, the split, blinded face of the model who, according to legend, posed for it, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, who years after went to Notre Dame in Paris to commit suicide in front of an altar because of her love for the philosopher Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico’s first Minister of Education. Vasconcelos’ memoir,
When she photographed the broken figure of the Angel who was the philosopher’s lover, Laura Diaz had to measure the seasons-in a city of “perpetual spring” that seemed never to have one. She realized she hadn’t really taken notice of how the years had passed. The city has no seasons. January is cold. Dust storms in February. March blazes. It rains in summer. In October, the storms remind us that appearances are deceiving. December is transparent. January is cold.
She thought about the years she’d lived in Mexico City and began to superimpose Vasconcelos’ various faces on them-from the young, romantic student to the dashing intellectual
Vasconcelos was the mutable and dramatic image of revolutionary Mexico, and his fallen lover, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Angel of Independence, was the fixed, symbolic supernatural image of the nation in whose name the heroes who venerated her had fought, the same ones who’d fucked her. Today, both the philosopher and his angel were in ruins, in a city that neither would recognize and that Laura went out to photograph.
Laura was sleeping differently. Before, she had dreamed without reflecting but with concern. Now there was neither reflection nor concern. She slept as if everything had already happened. She slept like an old lady.
She reacted. She wanted to sleep again as if nothing had happened, as if her life would only begin when she woke up, as if love were still a pain unknown to her. She wanted to wake up with a desire to see anew each morning and to file what she was seeing in the most precise place in her feelings, where heart and head joined forces. Before, she’d seen without seeing. She didn’t know what to do with her everyday images, the daily coins that each day put in her empty hands.
Laura Diaz began to ask herself, What will I do next year? Before, when she was young, everything was unforeseen, natural, necessary, and, despite everything, pleasant. But Frida’s death especially made her remember her own past as if it were a blurry photo. The earthquake, seeing Orlando again, and the death of Carmen made her think, Can I give the past its lost focus, its absent clarity?
The city and death woke her up. Mexico surrounded her like a great, sleeping serpent. Laura woke next to the heavy breathing of the serpent that wrapped around her but did not suffocate her. She woke up and photographed the serpent.
She had photographed Frida dead. Now she photographed the family house on Avenida Sonora before it was demolished as her son had ordered. She photographed the splintered facade and the condemned interiors, too, the garage where Juan Francisco parked the car the CROM labor union had given him, the dining room where her husband had met with labor leaders, the living room where she would wait, patient as a Creole Penelope, for the moment of grace and solitude when her husband returned home, the threshold where the persecuted nun Gloria Soriano sought refuge, and the kitchen where Auntie Maria de la O maintained the traditions of Veracruz cuisine-the aromas of chile chipotle, purslane, and cumin still permeated the walls. Then there was the hot-water tank fueled by yellowed newspapers where all the figures of power, crime, and entertainment were gradually consumed, where the flames devoured Calles and Morones, Lombardo and Avila Camacho, Trotsky and Ramon Mercader, the murderer Chinta Aznar and the insane rapist and murderer Sobera de la Flor, the pudgy Roberto Soto and Cantinflas, Meche Barba the rumba dancer and Jorge Negrete the singing
She went out to photograph the lost villages in the great city’s misery, and there she found herself, in the very act of photographing something totally alien to her own life. She found herself because she did not deny her fear, all alone with her Leica, of penetrating a world that lived in poverty but revealed itself in crime, first a man stabbed to death on a street of unquiet dust; fear of the ambulances with the howling, deafening noise of their sirens at the very edge of the territory of crime; women stomped to death by drunken husbands; newborn babies tossed on garbage dumps; old people abandoned and found dead on mats that later were used as their shrouds, stuck in a hole in the ground a week later, their bodies so dry that they didn’t even smell. Laura Diaz photographed all that and thanked Juan Francisco, despite everything, for having saved her from such a fate, the fate of the violence and misery around her.
She would go into a tavern in a lost city and find all the men shot to death, all having inexplicably killed each other as if in a caroming series of crimes, all anonymous-but now saved from oblivion by Laura’s photographs. She thanked Jorge Maura for having saved her from the violence of ideologies, from the fear a woman might have of the world of thought he had introduced her to. In her memory she had an impossible photo-of Jorge licking the monastery floor in Lanzarote, cleansing his own spirit of ideologies and of the bloody twentieth century.
Jorge Maura was the antidote to the violence the abandoned children lived in; she photographed them in sewers and tunnels, surprising their inexpungible beauty of childhood, as if her camera cleansed them the way Jorge had cleansed the monastery floor, children cleansed of snot, rheum, greasy hair, rachitic arms, heads hairless from mange, hands discolored by pinta, the tropical skin disease, bare feet with crusts of mud as their only shoes. And when she photographed them she also thanked Harry for the weakness of loyalties and for nostalgia for the unique, unrepeatable moment of heroism. She thought about the great photograph of the fallen Republican soldier taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War.
She’d turn up at local police stations and at hospitals. No one took any notice of an old, gray-haired lady with full skirts and worn-out sandals (it was she). They let her photograph a woman, not breathing, with an empty Coca-Cola bottle jammed between her thighs, a drug addict in his cell twisted with pain, scratching the walls and stuffing saltpeter into his nose, men and women beaten in their houses or in some alley, it was all the same, bloody, blinded by disorientation more than because their eyes were swollen from punches, clubbings, the arrival of the Black Marias, the entrance into the police station of whores and fags, transvestites and drug dealers, the nightly
