up betraying them all.”
Basilio wanted to tell the young people what he’d already told Laura, about how he’d asked for emergency leave and had rushed back to Mexico to see his wife, his Pilar. Don Alvaro Mendez, Pilar’s father, had faked his daughter’s execution that morning and had hidden her in a ruined house out in the Sierra de Gredos, where she’d lack for nothing for the duration of the war; the owners of the neighboring farm were impartial, friends of both Don Alvaro and his wife, Dona Clemencia. They wouldn’t betray anyone. Even so, Pilar’s father said nothing to his wife, who remained convinced that her daughter was a Martyr to the Movement. That’s how she described it when Franco triumphed. Don Alvaro was executed on the very spot where his daughter was supposed to have died. The mother cultivated a devotion to her martyred daughter, dedicating the place where Pilar had supposedly fallen, though the body was never found because the reds must have taken it away, most likely tossing it into a common grave…
The heroine Pilar Mendez, the martyr executed by the reds, was put on the Falange’s list of saints, and the real Pilar, hidden in the mountains, could not reveal herself, lived invisibly, torn at first between revealing herself and telling the truth or hiding out and maintaining the myth, but in the end convinced, when she learned of her father’s death, that in Spain history is tragic and always ends badly, therefore it was better to go on being invisible, because that protected both the faithful memory of her father and the holy hypocrisy of her mother. She became accustomed to it, first in the refuge given her by her father’s friends’ kindness and then, much later, when they feared they were in danger because of Franco’s avenging siege, protected by the charity of a convent of Discalced Carmelites, the order founded by St. Teresa of Avila and under her regulations, in which Pilar Mendez-protected by Christian charity though longing to join the rules of the sisters-found a discipline that, as she accustomed herself to it, was a salvation: poverty, the woolen Carmelite habit, rough sandals, abstinence from meat; sweeping, sewing, praying, and reading, because St. Teresa said that nothing seemed more detestable than “a stupid nun.”
The nuns soon discovered Pilar’s gifts. She was a girl who could read and write, so they gave her the Saint’s books and with the passing years so ingrained the customs of the convent in her (her personal austerity reminded the sisters of their Holy Founder, that “errant woman,” as King Philip II had called her) that the authorities raised no objections when the Mother Superior asked for a pass for this humble, intelligent convent worker, Ursula Sanchez, who wanted to visit some relatives in France and had no documents because the Communists had burned all the papers in her hometown.
“I left blinded, but with such an intense memory of my past that it wasn’t hard for me to remember it when I got to Paris, to recover what might have been my fate if I hadn’t spent my life in towns with bad water where the rivers flow down the mountains white with lime. The sisters had recommended me to the Carmelites in Paris, where I began to stroll the boulevards, regain my feminine tastes, covet elegant clothes-I was thirty four and wanted to look pretty and well dressed-and I made friends in the diplomatic corps, managed to get a job in the Mexican House at the Cite Universitaire and I met a rich Mexican whose son was studying there, we had an affair, he brought me to Mexico, he was jealous, so now I was living in a tropical cage in Acapulco filled with parrots, and he gave me jewels, but I felt I’d been living in cages all my life, village cages, convent cages, and now a gilded cage, but always a prisoner, incarcerated mostly by myself, first so I wouldn’t betray my father, then so I wouldn’t rob my mother of her satisfied rancor, or of the holiness she ascribed to me thinking I was dead, which let her feel saintly, and I was used to living in secret, to being someone else, to never breaking the silence imposed on me by my parents, the war, Spain, the peasants who protected me, the nuns who gave me refuge, the Mexican who brought me to America.”
She paused a moment, surrounded by the others’ attentive silence. The world had thought her sacrificed. She had to sacrifice herself for the world. What part of pain comes to us from others, and what part comes from ourselves?
She looked at Basilio. She took his hand.
“I always loved you. I thought my death would preserve our love. My pride was to believe there was no better fate than to die unknown. How was I going to scorn what I was most thankful for in my life-your love, the friendship of Jorge Maura and Domingo Vidal, ready to die with me if necessary?”
“Remember,” interrupted Basilio, “we Spaniards are hounds of death. We sniff it out and follow it until we ourselves get killed.”
“I’d give anything to undo the past,” said Pilar sadly. “I chose my stupid political militancy over the affection of three marvelous men. I hope they forgive me.”
“Violence breeds violence.” Laura smiled. “Luckily, love breeds love. We come out even, in general.” She took Lourdes’ hand on her right and Pilar’s on her left.
“That’s why, when I saw the announcement for an exhibit of portraits of exiled Spaniards, I flew from Acapulco and found Basilio’s empty frame.”
She looked at Laura. “But if you hadn’t been there, we’d never have gotten together again.”
“When did you tell your Mexican lover you weren’t going back to him?” asked Santiago.
“As soon as I saw the empty frame.”
“That was brave of you. Basilio might have been dead.”
Pilar blushed. “No, all the photos had birth and death dates when called for. Basilio’s had no death date, so I knew. Excuse me.”
The young people hadn’t spoken much. They were giving all their attention to the story of Pilar and Basilio. Santiago once exchanged a loving look with his grandmother and found something marvelous in Laura Diaz’s eyes, something he wanted to tell Lourdes about later, something that shouldn’t be forgotten, he didn’t say so, the eyes, the entire attitude of Laura Diaz said so that Christmas of 1965, and those eyes took in the people at the table but also opened to them, gave them a voice, invited them to see and read each other, lovingly to disclose themselves.
But she was the world’s fulcrum.
Laura Diaz had learned to love without asking for explanations because she had learned to see others, with her camera and with her eyes, as they themselves might never see themselves.
She read after dinner a brief note of congratulations from Jorge Maura, written in Lanzarote. Laura could not resist: she’d told him about the marvelous and unexpected reunion of Pilar Mendez and Basilio Baltazar.
Jorge’s note simply asked, “What part of happiness doesn’t come from God?”
On New Year’s Eve, Lourdes Alfaro and Santiago Lopez-Ayub were married. The witnesses were Laura Diaz, Pilar Mendez, and Basilio Baltazar.
Laura thought of a fourth witness. Jorge Maura. They would not see each other again.
23.
Tlatelolco: 1968
“NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT to identify a body. No one has the right to remove a body. We will not tolerate five hundred funeral processions in this city tomorrow. Throw them all in a common grave. Allow no one to identify them.”
Make them disappear.
Laura Diaz photographed her grandson Santiago the night of October 2, 1968. She made her way on foot from the Calzada de la Estrella to watch the marchers enter the Plaza of the Three Cultures. She’d been photographing all the events in the student movement beginning with the first demonstrations-the growing presence of police squads, the bazooka fired against the door of the National Preparatory School, the occupation of University City by the army, the arbitrary destruction of laboratories and libraries by paid thugs, the university protest march headed by the rector, Javier Barros Sierra, and followed by the entire university community, the gathering in the Zocalo, where the crowd shouted to President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz: SHOW YOUR FACE-SHOW YOUR FACE-YOU’RE A DISGRACE-TO THE HUMAN RACE!, the silent march of a hundred thousand gagged citizens.
Laura recorded the nights of discussion with Santiago, Lourdes, and a dozen or more young men and women whose passions had been aroused by the events. They met in a room Laura had cleared for them in the Plaza Rio de Janeiro apartment, moving old files and throwing out useless trash that actually represented precious memories, but Laura told Lourdes that if at the age of seventy she hadn’t stored up in her memory what was worth
