happy, Maria de la O, I’d be sharing what I love most, I don’t enjoy it all by myself, I wish I could share my musical happiness with someone, with more than one person, and I can’t any longer, my fate was not the one I wanted, perhaps it’s the one I imagined without wanting it, do you hear me, sister? Only a humble prayer, an impotent plea like Chopin’s, who people say imagined his last nocturne when a storm forced him inside a church, do you understand my plea, sister? and Virginia doesn’t talk to me but won’t accept dying without having had anything published, Laura, couldn’t your husband ask Minister Vasconcelos to publish your Aunt Virginia’s poems? Have you seen how pretty those books are with green covers that he brought out at the university? Don’t you think you could ask? Because even though out of pride Virginia never mentions these things to me, what Hilda writes to me is exactly what Virginia feels, except that the poetess has no words and the pianist does, because, as Hilda says, my music is my words and, as Virginia answers her, my words are my silence… Only your mother, Leticia, complains of nothing, but she isn’t happy, either.”
Laura felt insufficient. She decided to ask Juan Francisco to let her work with him at what he was doing, at his side, helping him at least half the day, the two of them working together, organizing the workers, and he said fine but first come with me for a few days to see if you like it.
They were together only forty-eight hours. The old city was a jumble of small shops, shoemakers, blacksmiths, carpenters, potters, disabled veterans of the revolutionary wars, old camp followers now without men who sold tamales and drinks on the corners, murmuring
“Where would you like to begin, Laura?”
“You tell me, Juan Francisco.”
“You want me to tell you? Begin at home. Run your own house properly, girl, and you’ll make more of a contribution than if you come to these neighborhoods to organize and save people-who by the way won’t thank you for your trouble. Leave the work to me. This is not for you.”
He was right. But that evening, back in her house, Laura D az was in a high state of excitement, not understanding very well why, as if the trip to a city that was both hers and not hers had aroused the passion of her childhood years with which she’d loved and explored the forest and its giant stone women covered with lianas and jewels, the trees and their gods hidden among laurels, and in Veracruz, the passion she’d shared with Santiago that had only grown in the years since his death, and in Xalapa the passion from Orlando’s languid body that she’d rejected, the passion in her father’s broken body that she’d tenaciously embraced. And now Juan Francisco, Mexico City, her house, the boys, and a request dashed by her husband the way you swat a fly: let me become impassioned with you and with what you’re doing, Juan Francisco.
He may be right. He didn’t understand me. But even so he has to give something more to what is stirring in my soul. I love everything I have and wouldn’t exchange it for anything in the world. But I want something else. What is it?
He was asking for the mute obedience of an impassioned soul.
“Where’s the car, Juan Francisco?”
“I gave it back. Don’t give me that look. The comrades asked me for it. They don’t want me to accept anything from the official union. They call it corruption.”
7.
Avenida Sonora: 1928
WHAT WAS HE THINKING about? What was she thinking about?
He was impenetrable, like a sphere of knives. She could only know what he was thinking about by knowing what she was thinking about. What did she think about when he-repeating something that irritated her more and more and discredited him-accused her of not having gone up to the attic in Xalapa to see the Catalan anarchist. Finally, she tired of it, gave up, set aside her own reasons, and began to note, in a small graph-paper notebook she used to keep household accounts, each time he, with no provocation on her part, would remind her of this omission. It was no longer a scolding but a nervous habit, like the involuntary squinting of eyes that were fixed, without their own light. What did she think when she heard yet again the same speech she’d been hearing now for nine years, so fresh, so powerful the first times, then more difficult to understand because more difficult to hear, excessively rationalist, as she waited in vain for the dream of the speech, not the speech itself but the dream of the speech, especially when she realized that, as a mother, she could speak to her sons Santiago and Danton only in dreams, in fables. Their father’s speech had lost the dream. It was an insomniac speech. Juan Francisco’s words did not sleep. They kept watch.
“Mama, I’m afraid, look through the window. The sun isn’t there anymore. Where did the sun go? Did the sun die?”
“Juan Francisco, don’t talk to me as if I were an audience of a thousand people. I’m just one person. Laura. Your wife.”
“You don’t admire me the way you did before. Before, you used to admire me.”
She wanted to love him. What was happening to her? What was it that was happening, which she neither knew nor understood?
“Who understands women? Short ideas and long hair.”
She wasn’t going to waste time telling him what the boys understood each time they told a story or asked a question, that words are born from imagination and pleasure, they aren’t for an audience of thousands of people or a plaza filled with flags, they are for you and for me. To whom are you speaking, Juan Francisco? She always saw him at a podium and the podium was a pedestal and that was where she’d placed him herself from the day they married. No one but she had put him there, not the Revolution, not the working class, not the unions, not the government; she was the vestal of the temple named Juan Francisco Lopez Greene, and she’d asked her husband to be worthy of the devotion of the wife. But a temple is a place for repeated ceremonies. And what is repeated becomes boring unless faith sustains it.
It wasn’t that Laura lost faith in Juan Francisco. She was simply being honest with herself, registering the irritations of connubial life, what couple doesn’t get irritated over the course of time? It was normal after eight years of marriage. At first they hadn’t known each other, and everything was a surprise. Now she wished she could recover the astonishment and novelty, but she realized that the second time around astonishment is habit and novelty is nostalgia. Was it her fault? She’d begun by admiring the public figure. Then she’d tried to penetrate it, only to find that behind the public figure was another public figure and another behind that one, until she realized that the dazzling orator, leader of the masses, was the real figure, there was no trick, no other personality to find, she’d have to resign herself to living with a man who treated his wife and children as a grateful audience. The problem was that the figure on the podium also slept in the conjugal bed, and one evening contact between their feet under the sheets made her, involuntarily, pull hers back, her husband’s elbows began to disgust her, she would stare at that articulation of wrinkles between the upper arm and forearm and imagine all of him as an enormous elbow, a loose hide from head to foot.
“I’m sorry. I’m tired. Not tonight.”
“Why didn’t you say something? Should we hire a maid? I thought that between you and your aunt you managed the house very well.”
“That’s true, Juan Francisco. There’s no need for maids. You have Mar??a de la O and me. You shouldn’t have maids. You serve the working class.”
