remembering, she’d be crushed by the weight of the miscellaneous past. The past had many forms. For Laura, it was an ocean of paper.
What was a photograph, after all, but an instant transformed into eternity? The flow of time was unstoppable, so trying to save it in its totality would be a kind of madness-time that went on, under the sun and stars, with or without us, in an uninhabited, lunar world. Human time meant sacrificing the totality to give privilege to the instant and the prestige of eternity to the instant. The painting by Santiago the Younger in the apartment dining room said it all: we aren’t falling, we’re rising.
Laura had shuffled the contact sheets nostalgically, thrown the ones that seemed pointless to her into the trash, and cleared out the room for her great-grandchild to come. Shall we paint it blue or pink? Lourdes asked, laughing, and Laura laughed with her. Male or female, the baby would sleep in a cradle surrounded by photography smells, the walls were impregnated with the unmistakable perfume of wet photographs, of developer, of prints hung up with clothespins to dry like freshly washed clothes.
She observed her grandson’s growing enthusiasm and would have wanted to warn him, Don’t let yourself be swept along by enthusiasm, for in Mexico disillusion quickly punishes anyone with faith and tosses that faith out the door. We were taught this in school, Santiago would say to his comrades, kids between seventeen and twenty-five, dark-haired and blond, the way Mexico is, a rainbow country, said a pretty girl with hair down to her waist, very dark skin and very green eyes, a country on its knees that has to be stood on its feet, said a dark boy, tall with very small eyes, a democratic country, said a boy who was pale and short, muscular and calm, with glasses that were always sliding down his nose, a country united with the great revolts in Berkeley, Tokyo, and Paris, a country that won’t ever say “
It would have been useless to warn him. He’d broken with his parents, he identified himself with his grandmother, she and he, Laura and Santiago, had knelt down together one night right in the Zocalo and together had put their ears to the ground and together heard the same thing, the blind tumult of the city and the nation about to explode.
“The hell that is Mexico,” said Santiago. “Are we predestined for crime, violence, corruption, poverty?”
“Don’t talk, son. Listen. Before I photograph, I always listen…”
She wanted to bequeath to her descendants a luminous liberty. The two of them raised their faces from the icy stone and looked at each other with a questioning look filled with tenderness. Laura understood then that Santiago was going to act as he acted, she was not going to say to him, You’ve got a wife, you’re going to have a baby, don’t get involved. She wasn’t Danton, she wasn’t Juan Francisco, she was Jorge Maura, she was the gringo Jim at the Jarama front, she was the young Santiago the Elder shot in Veracruz. She was those who doubted everything but never hesitated to act.
Her grandson Santiago, in every march, in every speech, at every university gathering, incarnated change, and his grandmother followed him, photographed him, he paying no attention to being photographed, and Laura watched him with the tenderness of a comrade: with her camera, she recorded all the moments of change, sometimes change brought on by uncertainty, sometimes change brought on by certainty, but the final certitude-of acts, of words-was less certain than doubt. The most uncertain thing was certainty.
Laura felt during those days of the student revolt, in sunlight or torchlight, that change was certain because it was uncertain. Through her memory passed the dogmas she’d listened to all her life-the almost prehistoric antagonisms between the Franco-British allies and the Central Powers in the 1914 war, Vidal’s Communist faith and Basilio’s anarchist faith, Maura’s Republican faith and Pilar’s Falangist faith, Raquel’s Judeo-Christian faith and also Harry’s confusion, Juan Francisco’s opportunism, Danton’s greedy cynicism, and his brother Santiago’s generosity.
Through his grandmother, this new Santiago was heir to them all, whether he knew it or not. The years with Laura Diaz had formed the days of Santiago the New, which is how she thought of him, like the new apostle in the long line of namesakes of the son of Zebedee who had been a witness at Gethsemane of Christ’s transfiguration. The Santiagos, “sons of lightning,” all violently killed. St. James pierced by the swords of Herod. St. James the Less garroted by the Sanhedrin. Santiago saints: history recorded two; she, Laura, had four of them, and a name, said the grandmother, is a manifestation of our most intimate nature. Laura, Lourdes, Santiago.
Now the faith of the friends and lovers of all the years with Laura Diaz was the faith of Laura Diaz’s grandson, who, along with hundreds of young Mexicans, men and women, went to the Plaza of the Three Cultures, the ancient Aztec ceremonial center Tlatelolco, with no more illumination than that which came from the dying afternoon in the old valley of Ana huac. Everything was old here, thought Laura Diaz, the Indian pyramid, the church of Santiago, the Franciscan convent and college, but also the modern buildings, the Foreign Ministry, the apartment buildings. Perhaps the most recent things were the oldest because they’d stood the test of time least, being already cracked, with peeling paint, smashed windows, sagging clotheslines, the lamentation of too many sobbing, penitential rains coming from the walls: the streetlights in the square were beginning to come on, the spotlights on prestigious buildings, lamps in kitchens, terraces, living rooms, and bedrooms; hundreds of young people were coming in on one side, dozens of sol diers surrounding them were coming from other sides; nervous shad ows appeared on the roof terraces, fists covered with white gloves were raised, and Laura photographed the figure of her grandson Santiago, with his white shirt, his stupid white shirt, as if he were asking to be a target, and his voice saying to her, (Grandmother, we don’t fit into the future, we want a future that will give room to young people, I don’t fit into the future my father invented, and Laura said to him, yes, that with her grandson she too had come to understand that all her life Mexicans had dreamed of a different country, a better country, her grandfather Felipe who emigrated from Germany to Catemaco and her grandfather Diaz who left Tenerife for Veracruz, both dreamed of a country of work and honor, as the first Santiago had dreamed of a country of justice and the second Santiago of a country of creative serenity and the third Santiago, this one entering Tlatelolco Plaza with all those students on the night of October 2, 1968, continued the dream of those whose name he bore, his namesakes, and seeing him enter the plaza, photographing him, Laura said, Today the man I love is my grandson.
She fired her camera, the camera was her weapon, and she fired only at her grandson, realizing the injustice of her attitude, since hundreds of young men and women were coming to Tlatelolco Plaza to demand a new country, a better country, a country faithful to itself, and she, Laura Diaz had eyes only for the flesh of her flesh, for the protagonist of her descendance, a boy with his hair tousled, his white shirt and dark skin and honey-green eyes and bright teeth and sturdy muscles.
I am your comrade, Laura said to Santiago from afar, I’m no longer the woman I was, now I’m yours, tonight I understand you, I understand my love Jorge Maura and the God he adores and for whom he licks the floor of a monastery in Lanzarote, I say to you, my God, take away everything I’ve been, give me sickness, give me death, give me fever, chancres, cancer, tuberculosis, give me blindness and deafness, cut out my tongue and my ears, my God, if that’s what’s necessary to save my grandson and my country, kill me with evils so my nation and my children may have health, thank you, Santiago, for teaching all of us that there are still things to fight for in this sleeping and self-satisfied and tricky and tricked Mexico of 1968, Year of the Olympic Games, thanks, my son, for teaching me
