neologisms-all in a kind of linguistic sublimation of the armed struggle: “shooting” meant giving presents, “Carranzifying” meant stealing, “besieging” meant courting, and any serious effort was called “engaging in battle.” To say “I’m doing a Wilson” meant to pass through the triumphal arch of a woman’s legs like the American President who ordered General Pershing’s punitive expedition against Pancho Villa and, before that, the landing at Veracruz with the Marines. Fatality was always compared to the Valentina song-if I’ve got to die tomorrow, why not die right now? Amorous persistence was always compared to the Adelita song-if she went off with another man, I’d follow her o’er land and sea. To compare the country to the city was like singing that only four cornfields are left or that bobbed-hair girls are finished and so is presumption, or like comparing the horribly vulgar charro Buddy-boy Beristain-who said he was a general without having fought any battles, except against his mother-in-law-with nostalgia for the vanished refinement and grace of the Little White Cat, Maria Conesa, who sang “Oh, oh, oh, oh, my darling Captain” about her lover, a fearsome military man and leader of a band of thieves called the “gray car gang.” To shoot someone meant to copy that person. And “to Madero” was to do what the two women were doing at that moment-to stroll down Avenida Madero, downtown Mexico City’s main commercial street, once the Silversmiths Street and now rebaptized to honor the Apostle of the Revolution and Democracy.
“I read a very funny book by Julio Torri. It’s called
“Don’t worry. My husband, poor Caraza, used to say that a million people died in the Revolution but not on the battlefields. Only in cantina brawls. Laura”-Elizabeth stopped outside the Chamber of Deputies on Donceles Street-“you like coming to the Iris because your husband is a deputy, right?”
They bought tickets to see
“Fresh apples and sticky honey,” sighed the young matron, who was getting blonder and blonder and plumper and plumper, when they left the theater. “Just think, Norma Shearer abandons everything-social position, an aristocratic boyfriend-how distinguished that Englishman Leslie Howard is!-for a gangster sexier than… Clark Gable! Divine, big ears and all! I adore him!”
“Well, I’ll take the blond, Leslie Howard. Anyway, he’s Hungarian, not English.”
“Impossible. Hungarians are gypsies and wear earrings. Where did you read that?”
“In
“Well maybe you want a blond now-English or kidnapper or whatever he is-but you married that dark, dark Juan Francisco. Honey, you don’t fool me. You like the Cine Iris because it’s next door to the Chamber of Deputies. If you’re lucky, you’ll see him. I mean, you’ll see each other. I mean. I just mean.”
Laura shook her head emphatically but explained nothing to Elizabeth. Sometimes she felt her life was like the seasons of the year, except that her marriage had gone from spring to winter without any summer or fall. She loved Juan Francisco, but a man is only admirable when he admires the woman who loves him. That, in the last instance, is what Laura felt was missing. Perhaps Elizabeth was right: she had to try other waters, swim in other rivers. Even if she didn’t find perfect love, she could build herself a romantic passion. Maybe it could be “platonic,” a word Elizabeth didn’t understand but put into practice at the parties she was always going to.
“Look but don’t touch. If you touch me, you’ll catch something.”
She never gave herself to anyone: her friend Laura imagined that a passion could be created by force of will. This is why the two women could live together without problems and without men, avoiding the multitude of Don Juans in Mexico City liberated from hearth and home by the chaos of the Revolution and looking for lovers when what they really wanted was mothers.
The vernissage for Andrea Negrete’s portrait by Tizoc Ambriz was the pretext for Laura to depart from what Elizabeth, with a certain macabre resonance, called her “stiff widowhood without a stiff,” and attend an artistic “function.” Enough of ruminating about the past, enough of imagining impossible loves, enough of telling stories about Veracruz or missing her sons or feeling ashamed to go to Xalapa because she felt guilty, because it was she who had abandoned her home just as she abandoned her sons, for she knew no way to justify what she’d done, didn’t want to destroy Juan Francisco’s image for the boys, didn’t want to admit to Mutti and to her aunts that she’d made a mistake, that she would have been better off looking for a young man of her own class at the San Cayetano and Xalapa Casino dances, but above all she did not want to speak ill of Juan Francisco, wanted everyone to go on believing she’d put her faith in a fighting, valiant man, above all a leader who personified everything that had happened in Mexico in this century, didn’t want to say to her family I was mistaken, my husband is corrupt or mediocre, my husband is an ambitious man unworthy of his ambition, your father, Santiago, can’t live without having someone recognize his merits, your father, Danton, is defeated by his belief that other people don’t give him what he deserves-my husband, Elizabeth, is incapable of recognizing that he’s already lost his merit. The gold has rubbed off his medals and only the copper is left.
“Your father hasn’t done anything except inform on a persecuted woman.”
How could she say that to Santiago and Danton, who were going to turn, respectively, nine and eight? How could she explain herself to Mutti and her aunts? How could she tell them that all the prestige won over years of struggle had evaporated in a second because one thing had been done badly? It was better, Laura told herself in her self-imposed solitude, for Juan Francisco to go on thinking she had judged and condemned him. It didn’t matter to her, so long as he believed it was only she and no one else-not the world, not his sons, not some middle aged women hidden in a Xalapa boardinghouse and unimportant to him-who judged him. Her husband’s pride would remain intact. The wife’s sorrow would only be the wife’s.
She did not know how to say all that to the insistent Elizabeth, just as she couldn’t explain it to the family in Veracruz, to whom she wrote as if nothing had happened. The letters would arrive at Avenida Sonora, and Juan Francisco’s new maid would turn them over to Laura every week. Laura would go to her old home at midday when he wasn’t in. Laura was sure: if Maria de la O suspected something, she would keep quiet about it. Discretion was born with Maria de la O.
The invitation to the unveiling of Andrea Negrete’s portrait was irresistible because, one day before, Elizabeth had spoken about expenses with her guest.
“Don’t worry about anything, Laura. The hat, the dresses, you’ll pay me back when you can.”
“Juan Francisco’s monthly allotment to me hasn’t come yet.”
“It wouldn’t be enough!” laughed the rose-colored blonde tenderly. “You’ve got a wardrobe like Marlene’s.”
“I like pretty things. Perhaps because I don’t have, for the moment, any compensation for such an… absence, I guess I’d call it.”
“Something will come your way. Don’t upset yourself.”
The truth is that she wasn’t spending very much money. She read. She went to concerts and museums alone, to the movies and to dinner with Elizabeth. The situation that separated her from her husband was for her a period of mourning. Between them was a betrayal, a death-a dead woman. But the Chanel perfume, the little Schiaparelli hat, the suit tailored by Balenciaga… So much had changed so quickly. Fashion: How was Laura going to appear in public wearing a flapper’s short skirt like a Charleston dancer and Clara Bow hair when everyone had to dress like the new Hollywood stars? Skirts were longer, hair was wavier, busts were decked out with huge pique lapels, those who dared wore silk evening dresses sculpted to the shape of the body, like the platinum blonde Jean Harlow, and a fashionable hat was indispensable. A woman took off her hat only to sleep or play tennis. A rubber bathing cap was called for even in the swimming pool-marcelled hair had to be protected.
“Come on now, pluck up your courage.”
Before she could say hello to the hostess or admire the severe Bauhaus lines of the penthouse, decorated by Pani, or pay respects to the guest of honor, two hands covered Laura Diaz’s eyes. Then came a coquettish
For an instant, she did not want to see it. Behind Orlando Ximenez’s hands was the young man she hadn’t wanted to look at the first time she’d met him, in the dining room of the San Cayetano hacienda. Once again she smelled the English cologne, once again she heard the baritone voice raised intentionally as, it seemed, was the custom among the English. She imagined the tenuous light of the tropical terrace, and saw in her mind’s eye the chiseled profile, the straight nose, the blond curls…
She opened her eyes and recognized the upper lip, slightly recessive, and the prominent chin, a bit like the
