The Years with Laura Diaz

“I’d like to have a birdcage like that at home. I’d be the owner of the castle and defend you against the bad guys, Mama.”

“Santiago, do you remember the maid I hired back in Mexico City before leaving for Xalapa? Now, when you go back, I want you to treat Carmela with respect.”

“Carmela. Sure, Mama.”

Laura had a premonition. She asked Maria de la O to stay a few more days in Xalapa with the boys while she went back to Mexico City to straighten up the house. “It must be a mess, with Juan Francisco all alone there and he so busy with politics. As soon as I have things in hand, I’ll send for you.”

“Laura.”

“Yes, Mutti.”

“Look what you forgot when you got married.”

It was the Chinese doll Li Po. True. She hadn’t thought of the doll since she’d gone.

“Oh, Mama, how sad it makes me that I forgot her.” She hid her real sadness with a false laugh. “I think it’s because I turned into my husband’s Li Po.”

“Do you want to take her with you?”

“No, Mutti. It’s better for her to stay here in her place until I come hack.”

“Do you really think you’ll be coming back, dear?”

Neither Carmela nor Juan Francisco was in the little house on Avenida Sonora when Laura arrived around midday from the Buenavista station after the usual delay on the trains.

She felt a difference in the house. A silence. An absence. Naturally: the boys and her cherished aunt were the noise, the joy of the place. She picked up the newspaper jammed under the garage door. She planned a solitary day. Would she go to the Cine Royal? Let’s just see what’s going on.

She opened El Universal and found the photograph of “Carmela.” Gloria Soriano, a Carmelite nun, had been arrested as a conspirator in the assassination of President- elect Alvaro Obregon. She had been discovered in a home near the Bosque de Chapultepec. When she tried to escape, the police shot her in the back. The nun had died instantly.

Laura spent the remaining hours of the day in the dining room staring fixedly at this photo of the very white woman with the deep shadows under her very black eyes. Sunset came, and even though she could no longer see the photo, she did not turn on the light. She knew the face by heart. It was the face of a moral ransom. If Juan Francisco had reproached her all those years for not having visited the Catalan anarchist in the attic, how could he reproach her now for having given sanctuary to a nun being hunted down? Of course he wouldn’t, they would both finally share a combative humanity, Laura told herself, repeating the word “combative.”

Juan Francisco returned at 11 p.m. The house was in darkness. The big dark man tossed his hat on the sofa, sighed, and turned on the light. He was visibly startled when he saw Laura sitting there with the newspaper open in front of her.

“Oh, you’re hack.”

Laura nodded.

“Did you see that item about the nun Soriano?” asked Lopez Greene.

“No. I saw the item about the anarchist Aznar.”

“I don’t follow.”

“When you came to Xalapa to unveil the plaque in the attic, you praised my father for having protected Armon a Aznar. That’s when I really met you and fell in love.”

“Of course. She was a heroine of the working class.”

“You aren’t going to praise me for giving sanctuary to a heroine of the religious persecution?”

“A nun who assassinates presidents.”

“An anarchist who assassinates tsars and princes?”

“No, Armon a fought for the workers. Your Carmela fought for the priests.”

“Oh, so she’s my Carmela, not yours.”

“No, she’s not mine.”

“She’s not human, Juan Francisco, but someone from another planet?”

“Just from an outdated era, that’s all.”

“Unworthy of your protection.”

“A criminal. Besides, if she’d just stayed put here as I asked her, the shoot-to-kill law wouldn’t have been applied to her.”

“I didn’t know that the police of the Revolution kill people the same way the dictatorship did, shooting them in the hack.”

“There would have been a trial, I told her that, just as there was for the assassin Toral and his accomplice Mother Conchita-another woman, as you see.”

“You must have wanted to get on someone’s good side, Juan Francisco. Whose? Because you’ll be on my bad side forever.”

She didn’t want to hear his explanations, and Juan Francisco didn’t dare give any. Laura packed a suitcase, walked out to the street, hailed a cab, and gave the driver the address of her girlhood friend Elizabeth Garcia- Dupont.

Juan Francisco rushed after her, opened the taxi door with a bang, grabbed her by the arm, tried to pull her from the car, and slapped her in the face. The cabby got out, shoved Juan Francisco to the ground, and pulled away as quickly as he could.

The friend of her adolescence received Laura with joy, hugs, courtesy, tenderness, and kisses-everything Laura hoped for. Laura moved in with Elizabeth, in her modern apartment in Colonia Hipodromo. Later, in their nightclothes, they told each other their stories. Elizabeth had just divorced the famous Eduardo Caraza, who had blithely danced with her at the balls in the San Cayetano hacienda and just as blithely brought her along when they married and moved to Mexico City because Caraza was a friend of the Treasury Minister, Alberto Pani, who was miraculously putting the nation’s finances in order after the inflation during the Revolution, when every group had printed its own paper money, the famous “funny money.” Eduardo Caraza thought he was irresistible, even calling himself “God’s gift to women,” and told Elizabeth he’d done her a great favor by marrying her.

“That’s what I get for begging.”

“Consider yourself fortunate, my sweet. You’ve got me, but I need lots of women. It’s better we understand each other.”

“Well, I’ve got you, but I also need other men.”

“Elizabeth, you’re talking like a whore.”

“In that case, my dear Lalo, you’re talking like a primp.”

“Forgive me, I didn’t mean to offend you. I was just joking.”

“I’ve never heard you speak more seriously. You did offend me, and I’d be a fool to stay around and suffer more humiliations after listening to your philosophy of life. It seems you have the right to everything and I to nothing. I’m a whore, but you’re a ladies’ man. I’m a disgrace, but you’re what they call a gentleman, no matter what happens, correct? Bye-bye.”

Fortunately, they had no children. How could they, when Lalo wore himself out in orgies and wandered in at six in the morning limp as a wet noodle?

“Juan Francisco never played that trick, he always respected me. Until tonight, when he tried to slap me.”

“Tried? Take a look at your cheek.”

“Well, he did slap me. But he’s not that way.”

“Dearest Laura, I can see that if we go on like this you’ll forgive him everything and in less than a week you’ll be back in the cage. Instead, let’s have some fun. I’m inviting you to the Lyric Theater to see potbellied Roberto Soto in The Fall of Napoleon. It’s a satire on that union man Morones, and they say you’ll laugh your head off. It makes fun of everybody. Let’s go before it’s closed down.”

They got a box so they’d be more protected. Roberto Soto was the very image of Luis Napoleon Morones, with double everything-chin, belly, lips, cheek, eyelids. The setting was the union leader’s mansion in Tlalpam. He walked