There sat the Model T Ford, less impressive than the luxurious Isotta-Fraschini that Xavier Icaza had brought to Xalapa but very comfortable for a family of five making an excursion to the Tenayuca pyramids or the floating gardens of Xochimilco. At the back of the garage, in the place of honor, were the hot-water boilers, fed by stacks of wood and newsprint. The garage led to a small foyer with tiled mosaic floors and thence to the living room, furnished simply and comfortably. Laura had opened an account at the Palacio de Hierro department store, and Juan Francisco gave her free rein to buy a sofa and armchairs in blue velvet and lamps that imitated the Art Deco fashion much admired in the illustrated magazines.
“Don’t worry, darling. There’s a new arrangement called the installment plan. You don’t have to pay the whole bill at once.” It was a pretty living room. It rose several meters above street level and had a little balcony from which one could admire the Bosque de Chapultepec.
Glass doors led to the dining room with its square table resting on a pedestal of hollow wood, eight heavy mahogany chairs with rigid backrests, a mirror that stored up the afternoon light, and the service entrance to the kitchen with its coal stove and icebox, which required the daily visit of the wood vendor and the coal man, the milk truck and the ice truck.
Above, up a rather pretentious stairway considering the size of the house, there were four bedrooms and a bathroom with a tub, a toilet, and-something Aunt Maria de la O had never seen-a French bidet. Juan Francisco wanted to have it taken out, but Laura begged him to leave it, for it was a novelty and so amusing.
“You’re imagining my union friends sitting there.”
“No, I imagine that potbellied Morones. Don’t say anything to them. Let them figure it out for themselves.”
Juan Francisco’s friends sometimes came back from the bathroom with an uncomfortable air and even with wet trousers. Juan Francisco turned a blind eye to it all, with his innate, dignified seriousness, which countenanced no jokes or extinguished them with a lightning glance, at once fiery and cold.
They would gather in the dining room, and Laura would stay in the living room, reading. Reading at her invalid father’s bedside in the hopes that he would understand her, as chancy as a shipwrecked sailor’s tossing a bottle into the sea, became for the married woman a silent, pleasurable habit. A living literature was coming into being concerned with the recent past, and Laura read
For Laura, the gift in these readings was the discovery of a young poet from Tabasco barely twenty-three years old. His name was Carlos Pellicer, and when Laura read his first book,
Besides, Laura knew that Juan Francisco liked to have her nearby to serve his friends if the meeting went on for long, but the real reason was to be a witness of what he was saying to his comrades while the aunt took care of the children. It was hard for her to put faces on the voices that reached her from the dining room because when the men came out, they were silent, distant, as if very recently emerged from dark, even invisible places. Some wore jackets and ties, but others wore collarless shirts and wool caps, and some even wore blue overalls and striped shirts with sleeves rolled up to the elbow.
One rainy afternoon the men arrived wet, some wearing raincoats, most unprotected. In Mexico City, almost no one used umbrellas, though the rain came punctually and powerfully, falling in cataracts at about two o’clock in the afternoon and continuing on and off until dawn. Then the morning sun would return. The men smelled strongly of wet clothes, muddy shoes, moist socks.
Laura watched them silently file in and silently file out. Those with caps would take them off when they saw her and then put them right back on. Those with hats would leave them at the entrance. Others didn’t know what to do with their hands when they saw her. Yet they were eloquent in the dining room, and Laura, invisible to them but attentive to everything they were saying, believed she was hearing voices buried for a long time, possessors of an eloquence that had been muted for centuries. They had fought against the dictatorship of Don Porfirio Diaz-this Laura heard, that they’d fought, the oldest among them-in Light, an anarcho-syndicalist group, then in the House of the Workers of the World founded by the anarchist Professor Moncaleano, and finally in the Labor Party after Carranza dissolved the House once the Revolution triumphed, when the old ingrate forgot everything he owed his Red Battalions and the House of the Workers. But Obregon (had he ordered the death of Carranza?) offered the workers a new party, the Labor Party, and a new central workers’ association, the Regional Workers Confederation of Mexico, the CROM, so they could continue their struggles for justice.
“Just tricks. You’ve got to realize, comrades, that governments, every single one of them, have done nothing but trick us. Madero, who was supposed to be the apostle of the Revolution, unleashed his Cossacks on us.”
“What did you expect, Dionisio? That twerp wasn’t a revolutionary. He was only a democrat. But we owe him a big favor, because, look, Madero thought he was going to create democracy in Mexico without revolution, without real changes. He was naive, and it cost him his life. He was bumped off by the army, the landowners, all the people he didn’t dare touch because he thought that it was enough simply to enact democratic laws. Right away.”
“But look at Huerta. He murdered Madero, and he did take us into account. Did you ever see a demonstration bigger than the one on May Day in 1913? The eight-hour workday, the six-day workweek, General Huerta accepted it all.”
“Just tricks. No sooner did we start talking about democracy than he ordered our offices burned, arrested us, and deported us. Don’t forget that. It’s a lesson. A dictatorship can give labor guarantees but not political liberty. Of course we were going to welcome General Obregon like a savior when he took Mexico City in 1915 and right away started talking about proletarian revolution, about teaching the capitalists a lesson, about-”
“You were there, Palomo, you remember how Obregon came to our meeting and embraced us one by one-he still had two arms then-and he said to each of us, You’re right, pal. He told us what we wanted to hear.”
“Just tricks, Jose Miguel. What Obregon wanted to do was to use us as allies against the peasants, against Villa and Zapata. And he got what he wanted. He convinced us the peasants were reactionaries, clerical, wore pictures of the Virgin on their hats, who knows what else, they were the past.”
“Just tricks, Panfilo. Carranza was a hacienda owner and hated the peasants. Zapata and Villa were right to distribute land without asking the old goat’s permission.”
“But now Obregon has won. He always defended us, even if it was to win support against Zapata and Villa. Figure it out, comrades. Obregon won out over everyone.”
“You mean he killed everyone.”
“If you like. That’s how politics works.”
“Does it have to be that way? Let’s change it, Dionisio.”
“Obregon won, that’s reality. He won, and he’s going to stick. Mexico is at peace.”
“Tell it to all those restless generals. They all want a piece of the government, power has yet to be distributed, Palomo, there are miracles yet to come. Let’s see how it plays out for us.”
“Just tricks, that’s how it’ll play out for us. Tricks. Hoaxes.”
“Comrades,” Juan Francisco ended the discussion. “What matters to us are very concrete things-the right to strike, wages, the workday, and then further victories like paid vacations, paid maternity leave, social security. That’s what’s important for us to win. Don’t lose sight of those goals, comrades. Don’t get lost in the maze of politics.”
Laura stopped knitting, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine her husband in the dining room next door, standing up, ending the argument, telling the truth, but the intelligent truth, the
