The Years with Laura Diaz

the devil created me for ball-dancing… but if she was interested in what “we” were doing, he would tell her, out on the balcony, how the workers’ struggle organized itself during the Revolution. People thought the Revolution involved only a Creole elite followed by peasant guerrillas. They forgot that everything began in the factories and mines, in Rio Blanco and Cananea. The workers organized the Red Battalions that went out to fight Huerta’s dictatorship and founded the House of the Workers of the World in the Azulejos palace in Mexico City, in the aristocracy’s former Jockey Club. But because “we” were invaded by Huerta’s police, who arrested us and tried to burn the palace down, “we” were forced to flee. We found ourselves in the open arms of General Obregon.

“Be careful,” said Icaza, rejoining Laura and Juan Francisco. “Obregon is a fox. He wants worker support so he can undercut the followers of the peasant rebels, Zapata and Villa. He talks about a proletarian Mexico to provoke peasant and Indian Mexico. According to the Creole revolutionary leaders, who are cautious on this subject, that’s still the reactionary, backward, religious Mexico, suffocated by its scapularies and fumigated by the incense of too many churches. Be careful with the fraud, Juan Francisco, very careful.”

“But it’s the truth,” said Juan Francisco heatedly. “The peasants wear the image of the Virgin on their hats, they go to Mass on their knees, they aren’t modern, but Catholic and rural, Dr. Icaza.”

“Listen, Juan Francisco, stop calling me doctor or we’ll end up in a fistfight. And stop acting like such a hick. When you meet a young lady from high society whom you like, you do not address her as ‘miss,’ you dummy. Stop behaving like a reactionary, retarded, premodern peasant.” Xavier Icaza’s voice pealed with laughter.

But Juan Francisco insisted, with no trace of humor, that peasants were reactionaries, that urban workers were true revolutionaries, the fifteen thousand workers who fought in the Red Battalions, the hundred and fifty thousand members of the House of the Workers of the World-when had anything like that ever been seen in Mexico?

“Want some contradictions, Juan Francisco?” Icaza interrupted him. “Think about the battalions of Yaqui Indians who joined General Obregon to defeat the oh-so-agrarian Pancho Villa at the battle of Celaya. And start getting used to it, my friend. Revolutions are contradictory, and if they take place in a country as contradictory as Mexico, well, it can drive you crazy,” Icaza wailed, “as crazy as when you stare into Laura D az’s eyes. In short, Lopez Greene: when the Revolution came to power with Carranza and Obregon, did those leaders accept self- governance in the factories and the expulsion of foreign capitalists as the Red Battalions had been promised?”

No, said Juan Francisco, he knew “we” were going to live through a constant give-and-take with the government, but “we” are not going to give in on our fundamental principles; “we” have organized the biggest strikes in all Mexican history, we’ve resisted all the pressures of the revolutionary government that wanted to turn us into official labor puppets, we got salary increases, we always negotiate, we made Carranza nuts because he couldn’t figure out where we were vulnerable, he jailed us, called us traitors, we cut the light in Mexico City, they captured the head of the electricians, Ernesto Velasco, and put a gun to his temple as they asked how to turn the power back on, they broke us again and again, but “we” never give up, we always return to the fight, and we always go back to the negotiating table, we win, we lose, we’ll win a little and lose a lot, but it’s fine, it’s fine, no need to strike the colors, we know how to turn the lights on and off and they don’t, they need us.

“Armonia Aznar was an exemplary fighter,” said Juan Francisco Lopez Greene when he unveiled the plaque in honor of the Catalan woman in the house where Laura and her family lived. “Like all the anarcho-syndicalists, she came to Veracruz. She arrived with the Spanish anarchist Amedeo Ferres and secretly organized the printers and typographers during the Porfirio Diaz presidency. Then, during the Revolution, she fought in the House of the Workers of the World-with heroism and, which is more difficult, without glory, secretly delivering mail right here in Xalapa, carrying documents to and from Veracruz to Mexico City.”

Juan Francisco paused and sought out, among the hundred or so at the ceremony, the eyes of Laura Diaz.

“All she did was made possible thanks to the revolutionary generosity of Don Fernando Diaz, president of the bank, who allowed Armonia Aznar to take refuge here and carry out her work in secret. Don Fernando is ill, and I will be so bold as to salute him and thank him, his wife, and his daughter in the name of the working class. This discreet and valiant man acted in this way, he told us, in memory of his son Santiago Diaz, shot by thugs in the pay of the dictatorship. Honor to all of them.”

That night, Laura stared intensely into the mute eyes of her invalid father. Then she slowly repeated what Juan Francisco Lopez Greene had said at the ceremony, and Fernando Diaz blinked. When Laura wrote on the little blackboard the family used to communicate with him, she wrote simply, THANK YOU FOR HONORING SANTIAGO. Then Fernando Diaz, as was his custom, opened his eyes very wide and made an immense effort not to blink. All of them, the women in the house, knew those two gestures well-blinking over and over again or not blinking until his eyeballs seemed ready to pop out of their sockets-though they had no idea what either meant. On this occasion, Fernando tried to raise his hands and clench his fists, but they fell on his lap, defeated. He simply arched his eyebrows like two circumflexes.

“Soon we’ll find a house where we can live and have hoarders right here on Bocanegra Street,” Mutti Leticia announced a few days later.

“I’ll read to Fernando every night,” said the writing aunt, Virginia, her lips tight and her eyes feverish. “Don’t worry, Laura.”

Laura went in to say good night to her mute father, to read passages from Jude the Obscure to him for half an hour, and she could imagine her father dead, his face made beautiful by death, death that would rejuvenate him. They would all have to wait for his death with confidence, even joy, because death would erase the traces of time from Don Fernando, and Laura would always have with her the image of a tender, strong man whenever she needed it.

“Don’t let this chance slip by,” said her aunt the pianist, Hilda Kelsen, that same night. “Look at my hands. You know what I could have been, isn’t that true, Laura? I never want you to have to say the same thing.”

Laura Diaz and Juan Francisco Lopez Greene were married in a court in Xalapa on May 12, 1920, Laura’s birthday, and she who sang on the twelfth of May the Virgin dressed in white came walking into sight with her coat so gay, and the black Zampaya swept and sang ora la cachimba-bimba-bimba now my black girl dance to me now my black girl dance away, and Laura Diaz went out with her husband on the Interoceanic to Mexico City and halfway there she burst into tears because she’d forgotten the Chinese doll Li Po in her pillows back in Xalapa and at the Tehuacan station Juan Francisco was told that President Venustiano Carranza had been assassinated at Tlaxcalantongo.

6.

Mexico City: 1922

THERE ARE NO SEASONS in Mexico City. The dry period runs from November to March, and then comes the period of rains from April to October. There’s no way to get a grip on the weather except for the water and the sun, the real heads and tails of Mexico City. And that’s quite a lot. For Laura Diaz, the image of her husband, Juan Francisco Lopez Greene, became permanently fixed one rainy night. Hatless, right in the center of the city, the Zocalo, addressing a multitude, Juan Francisco did not have to shout. His speaking voice was deep and strong, the opposite of his low, private voice. His image was the quintessence of combat, with his heavy soaked hair dripping over the nape of his neck, on his forehead and ears, water pouring off his eyebrows, out of his eyes, and into his mouth, with an oilcloth cape covering his huge body, which she, on their newlywed nights, had approached with fear, respect, suspicion, and gratitude. At the age of twenty-four, Laura D az had chosen.

She remembered the boys at provincial dances whom she couldn’t tell one from the other. They were interchangeable, pleasant, elegant…

“Laura, the thing is, he’s very ugly.”

“But Elizabeth, he doesn’t look like anyone else.”

“He’s dark-skinned.”

“No more so than my Aunt Maria de la O.”

“But you’re not going to marry her, are you? There are so many white boys in Veracruz.”