and Virginia have been more than they were? If they’d been educated in Germany and if they hadn’t had the pretext of isolation in a dark corner of the Mexican forest, would they have been in Dusseldorf a recognized concert pianist and a famous writer? It was no mystery what would have been Auntie Maria de la O’s life if Grandmother Cosima had not energetically separated her from her mother, the black prostitute, and integrated her into the Kelsen household. The goodness and rectitude of her own father, Don Fernando Diaz, was also no mystery; nor was the pain he bore for the death of the promising young man, the first Santiago, shot by Porfirio Diaz’s soldiers at the Gulf. But Santiago himself was a mystery, the politics he chose by necessity and the private life he chose by act of will. Perhaps the latter was just another myth invented by Orlando. Ximenez to seduce Laura Diaz by exciting her. And what happened at the outset of her husband Juan Francisco’s life, a man who shone with such glory in the public eye for twenty years only to fade away and die defecating? Nothing, nothing before and nothing after the interlude of glory? Born from shit and dying in shit? Was the interlude the entire performance of his life, or something that had happened between the acts? Nothing? Infinitely painful mysteries: if her son Santiago had lived, if the promises of his talent were there, present and fulfilled, if Danton hadn’t had the ambitious genius that led him to wealth and corruption. And if the third Santiago, dead at Tlatelolco, had submitted to the destiny planned by his father, would he be alive today? And his mother, Magdalena Ayub Longoria, what did she think of all this, of these lives which were hers and which she shared with Lauras Diaz?
Had Harry informed on his left-wing comrades to McCarthy?
And finally, above all, what had become of Jorge Maura? Was he alive, was he dying, had he already died? Did he find God? Had God found him? Had Jorge Maura sought for spiritual well-being so strenuously only because he’d already found it?
Arriving at that final mystery, the fate of Jorge Maura, Laura Diaz stopped, granting her lover a privilege she would soon grant to all the other protagonists of the years with Laura Diaz: the right to carry a secret to the grave.
2.
When the third Santiago was murdered in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, Laura presumed that the young, pregnant widow, Lourdes Alfaro, would continue to live with her. Lourdes transformed her grief into a decision to honor-twice over-the memory of Santiago. In April 1969 she gave birth to a boy, who was of course named Santiago, the fourth to be named after the Greater Apostle, witness of the agony and transfiguration of the victims: the Santiagos, “sons of the lightning,” descendants of Christ’s first disciple, executed by the power of Herod and saved for love, home, and the memory of Laura Diaz.
Lourdes did her duty as a mother and-with the infant Santiago in a rebozo on her back-she organized demonstrations to seek the release of political prisoners from 1968, helped other young Tlatelolco widows like herself who had small children who needed nursemaids, medicine, care, and also, Lourdes said to Laura, the living memory of their fathers’ sacrifice. Of course, there were times when the situation was reversed and the fathers were widowers whose young student wives had fallen in Tlatelolco.
Thus a union of survivors of October 2 came into being. Lourdes met, came to know, and fell in love with a young man who was twenty-six years old. Jesus Anibal Pliego, who was starting out as a filmmaker and had managed to shoot bits and pieces-shadowy fields, blood-red filters, echoes of machine-gun fire-of the night at Tlatelolco. That same night, Jesus Anibal’s young wife had also died, and the widower, a tall, dark, curly-headed young man with a radiant smile and eyes, was left with a little girl just a few months old, Enedina, who was in the same day-care center Lourdes used for her son, the fourth Santiago in the line of Laura Diaz.
“I have something to tell you, Laura,” Lourdes blurted out after pussyfooting around for several weeks. Lauras, of course, had already guessed everything.
“You don’t have to tell me anything, dear girl. You’re like my daughter, and I understand everything. I couldn’t think of a better match for you than Jesus Anibal. You’ve got so much in common. If I were old-fashioned, I’d give you my blessing.”
They had something more than love in common: work. Lourdes, who had learned a great deal at Laura’s side, could now work more and more with Jesus Anibal as his photographic assistant. But what Lourdes had to tell Laura was that she, her husband, and the two children-Enedina and Santiago the Fourth-were going to live in Los Angeles. Jesus Anibal had gotten an excellent offer from an American movie company: in Mexico he had few chances to work because the Diaz Ordaz government had confiscated his Tlatelolco films.
“You don’t have to explain anything, mi amor. I know how things are.”
The apartment on Plaza Rio de Janeiro was empty.
The fourth Santiago barely left a trace in the memory of his great-grandmother. Just saying that word fills me with pride, satisfaction, consolation, and disconsolation, makes me afraid and makes me sad, convinces me in a happy way that I’ve finally managed to kill vanity-I’m a great-grandmother!-but also that I’ve managed to revive death, my own death forever accompanying that of each Santiago-the one shot in Veracruz, the one who died in Mexico City, the one murdered in Tlatelolco, and now the one who’s going to Los Angeles, my little
Living alone was no problem for Laura Diaz,. She kept herself agile, busy, deriving pleasure from little things, like making the bed, washing and hanging out clothes, keeping herself “snappy,” as she said to Orlando, shopping at the new Aurrera supermarket, just as she’d once gone, a young bride, to the old Parian market on Avenida Alvaro Obregon. Late in the day, she’d inherited from her mother Leticia a taste for cooking. She rescued old Veracruz recipes-rice and beans, the wonderful shredded beef of
She classified her negatives, attended to requests to buy prints of her classic photographs, prepared books, and dared to request prefaces from new writers-Salvador Elizondo, Elena Poniatowska, Margo Glantz, and the youngsters of the Onda movement, Jose Agustin and Gustavo Sainz. Diego Rivera had died in 1957; Rodriguez Lozano, Maria Izquierdo, and Alfonso Michel had died, artists she’d known and who had inspired her (the pure, brutal blacks, whites, and grays of the first, the false naivete of the second, the wise shock of each color in the third), and the only two who’d survived, antagonistic but huge, Siqueiros the Big Colonel with fists raised against the celebratory velocity of the world in motion, and Tamayo, handsome, shrewd, and silent, his head just like the volcano Popocatepetl. There wasn’t much to cling to. Unless it was disappearing memory and will. One after another, the guardians of shared memories were disappearing.
One dry, no longer rainy afternoon during the beautiful Mexican autumn, someone knocked at Laura’s door. When she opened it, she had a hard time identifying the woman in black, the first thing Laura noticed being the dark suit in expensive good taste, as if to call attention to a figure that was attractive without needing attention, such was the faded aspect of the face with no memorable features, not even a trace of lost beauty. The beauty innate in all young women. Even in ugly ones. Here, instead, was an evident pride, concentrated, painful,
“My contact lens fell out,” said the stranger.
“Well, let’s find it.” Laura Diaz laughed.
