mental photograph of herself. That’s what she wanted to see in the mirror on that August morning in 1970. But that morning the mirror was more faithful to the woman than the woman herself.
She’d taken great care with her appearance. Very early in life, observing Elizabeth Garcia-Dupont’s ridiculous changes in hairstyle, she decided she’d choose a hairstyle for good and never give it up. Orlando’s circle confirmed this: you change your hair, and right away you feel pleased and renovated, but then people notice that your face has changed, look at those crow’s-feet, look at those creases in her forehead, my my my, she’s made the leap into old age, she’s worn out. So Laura Diaz-after toying with the idea of keeping the bangs she’d worn as a girl to cover her forehead that was too high and too wide and to shorten a face that was too long-decided, after meeting Jorge Maura, to reject the hairstyles
She no longer looked at her body while bathing. It no longer concerned her. And Frida Kahlo, of course. Frida helped her friend Laura give thanks for her old but intact body. Before Jorge Maura, there was Frida Kahlo, the best example of an invariable style, imposed once and for all, impossible to imitate, imperial and unique. That was not the style of her friend and occasional secretary Laura Diaz, who once had followed the changes in fashion-even now she went through yesterday’s outfits in the closet-the short flapper dresses of the 1920s, the long satin whiteness of the 1930s, the tailored suits of the 1940s, Christian Dior’s “New Look,” when full skirts made a comeback after the scarcity of textiles during the war years. But after her trip to Lanzarote, Laura too adopted a comfortable uniform, as it were, a kind of tunic, with no buttons, zippers, or belt, nothing to hamper her, a long monastic shift she could put on or take off without fuss and which turned out to be ideal, first in the tropical valley of Morelos and then-so she could fly, as if the simple cotton cloth gave her wings-on all the stairways in that Rome of the Americas, Mexico City, city of four, five, seven levels superimposed on each other, as high as the sleeping volcanoes, as deep as the reflection in a smoking mirror.
But that August day in 1970, while it rained outside and the fat drops beat against the opaque glass of the bathroom, the mirror refleeted back to me, merciless, true, cruel, without dissimulation, no longer the preferred face of my thirties but my face of today, that of my seventy-two years, my high forehead furrowed, my dark-honey eyes lost between the bags beneath them and the lids like used curtains, my nose grown beyond anything she remembered, lips with no lipstick, cracked, all the corners of her mouth and planes of her cheeks worn like tissue paper used too many times to wrap too many useless gifts, and the revelation that nothing can disguise, the neck that proclaims her age.
“Damned turkey wattle!” Laura decided to laugh into the mirror and go on loving herself, loving her body and combing her graying hair.
Then she joined her hands over her breasts and felt them frozen. She saw the reflection of her hands, pecked by time, and remembered her young woman’s body, so desired, so well exhibited or hidden according to the decision of that great prompter of vanity which is pleasure, beauty, and seduction.
She went on loving herself.
“Rembrandt painted himself at every stage, from adolescence to old age,” said Orlando Ximenez when he invited her, for the umpteenth time, to the Scotch Bar at the Hotel Presidente in the Zona Rosa, and she, “for old times’ sake,” as Orlando himself insisted, agreed just once to see him for a bit at six o’clock, when the bar was empty. “There is no pictorial document more moving than that of a great artist who can see himself without any idealism as he was all through his life, culminating in a self-portrait in old age that has in the eyes all the earlier stages, all of them without exception, as if only old age can reveal not just the totality of a life but each one of the multiple lives we have lived.”
“You’re still nothing but an aesthete.” Laura laughed.
“No, listen to me. Rembrandt’s eyes are almost closed under his old eyelids. His eyes are tearing, not out of emotion but because age liquefies them. Look at my eyes, Laura, I have to wipe them all the time! I look as if I have a perpetual cold!” Orlando laughed in turn, as he picked up his scotch and soda with a tremulous hand.
“You look very well, very snappy,” offered Laura in genuine admiration of the dry trimness of her old beau, stiff and dressed with outmoded elegance, as if one could still buy clothes in the Duke of Windsor style-glen plaid jackets, ties with wide knots, wide cuffed trousers, Church shoes with thick soles.
Orlando had turned into a well-dressed broom crowned with a bare skull; a fringe of thin gray hair, well oiled at the temples, was scrupulously combed to the nape of his neck.
“No, let me tell you, the prodigious thing about that last portrait of the old Rembrandt is that the artist doesn’t blink at the sight of the ravages of time, but lets us remember not only all his earlier years but our own, so we keep the most profound image those little eyes possess. He was resigned-but astute.”
“What image?”
“The image of eternal youth, Laura, because it’s the image of the artistic power that created all his work, that of his youth, his maturity, and his old age. That’s the true image Rembrandt’s last self-portrait gives us: I’m eternally young because I’m eternally creative.”
“How little everything costs you.” Laura laughed again, this time defensively. “Being frivolous, cruel, charming, innocent, perverse. And sometimes even intelligent.”
“Laura, I’m a firefly, I light up and go dark without wanting to.” Orlando returned her laugh. “It’s my nature. You don’t approve?”
“I know you’re like that,” Laura answered quickly.
“Do you remember the first time I asked you, Does your body approve of me, do I get an A?”
“I’m astonished by your question.”
“Why?”
“You talk about the past as if it could be repeated. You talk about the past so that you can proposition me now, in the present.” Laura stretched out her hand and patted Orlando’s; she noted that his old gold ring with the engraved OX was now too big on his thin finger.
“For me,” said the eternal suitor, “you and I are always on the terrace of the San Cayetano hacienda in 1915…”
Laura drank her favorite dry martini more quickly than she should have. “No, we’re in a bar in the Zona Rosa in 1970, and it seems ridiculous for you to evoke-what shall I call it?-the romantic lyricism of our first meeting, my poor Orlando.”
“Don’t you understand?” The old man furrowed his brow. “I didn’t want our relationship to cool off out of habit.”
“My poor Orlando, age cools everything off.”
Orlando peered into the bottom of his glass of whiskey. “I didn’t want poetry to turn into prose.”
Laura fell silent for a few moments. She wanted to tell the truth without hurting her old friend. She didn’t want to take advantage of her age to judge others from an unjust height. That was a temptation of age, to make judgments with impunity. But Orlando spoke first.
“Laura, would you like to be my wife?”
Rather than answer, Laura told herself three truths in a row, repeated them several times: absence simplifies things, prolongation corrupts them, profundity kills them. With Orlando, the temptation was to simplify: just to leave. But Laura felt that to walk out on a man and a situation that were already close to absurd was a kind of betrayal, which she wanted to avoid at all costs, I’m not betraying myself or my past if I don’t run off, I’m not simplifying, not laughing, if I prolong this instant even if it ends in disaster, and deepen it even if it ends in death.
