“We have the same name.” A very beautiful woman smiled at Laura as she sat down on a sofa and tried to adjust the lamp next to it. She laughed. “After a certain age, a woman depends on light.”
“You are very young,” said Laura with provincial courtesy.
“We must be the same age, a trifle over thirty, right?”
Laura D az nodded and wordlessly accepted the invitation to join the ash-blond woman on the sofa, who arranged a pillow next to her with one hand as she picked up her glass of whiskey with the other.
“Laura Riviere.”
“Laura Diaz.”
“Yes, Orlando told me.”
“Then you know each other?”
“He’s an interesting man. But with no hair. I keep telling him to shave his head completely. Then he wouldn’t be merely interesting but dangerous.”
“Shall I confess something? He’s always made me afraid.”
“Let’s speak as friends, please. Me too. Know why? Let me tell you. There never was a first time.”
“No.”
“I wasn’t asking you, my dear. I was affirming it. I wouldn’t have the nerve with him.”
“Me either.”
“But you should. I’ve never seen a look like the one he aims at you. Besides, I swear it’s more dangerous to close doors than to open them.” Laura Riviere caressed her neck, adorned with brilliant stones. “Did you know? Ever since I separated from my husband, I’ve kept an antique shop. Come see me some time.”
“I live with Elizabeth.”
“Not forever, correct?”
“Correct.”
“What are you going to do with yourself?”
“I don’t know. That’s my dilemma.”
“I’d advise you not to postpone the impossible, dear namesake. It’s better to make things over as you please, in your own time. Take a chance. Look, here comes your friend Elizabeth.”
Laura looked around her: No one was left, even Carmen Cortina had gone to greener pastures with her court. Where? To listen to mariachis at the Tenampa? To hire a show with a cast of whores at the Bandit Woman? To drink rum in votive lamps under a sagging roof? To dance to the music of Luis Arcaraz’s orchestra in the new Hotel Reforma? To listen to Juan Arvizu, the Tenor with the Voice of Silk, in the old Hotel Regis?
Laura Riviere fixed her hair so it covered half her face, and Elizabeth Garc a-Dupont, ex-wife of Caraza, told Laura Diaz, ex-wife of Lopez Greene, “I’m really, really sorry, honey, but I’ve got something set up for tonight at home, you know what I mean, even good girls need to let their hair down sometimes, ha-ha, just this once, but I’ve taken care of you, I booked you a room at the Hotel Regis, here’s the key, go on over and call me in the morning.”
She wasn’t surprised, when she opened the hotel-room door, to find Orlando Ximenez naked, a towel wrapped around his waist. She was immediately surprised that
She looked down at Orlando naked on the bed and would have wanted to ask him, How many destinies do we have?
He was waiting for her, and she imagined an infinite masculine variety, the same variety men imagine in women but women are forbidden to express publicly, only in the most secret intimacy: I like more than one man, I like several men, because I’m a woman, not because I’m a slut.
She began by taking off her rings. She wanted to arrive with clean, agile hands, eager for the body of Orlando, and he from the bed was trying to decipher Laura, his fist clenched and the gold ring with the initials OX daring her, that’s it, reproaching her for the years lost for love, the postponed meeting, this time, yes, now, yes, and she saying yes to him as she took off her own rings, especially those from her marriage to Juan Francisco and the diamond from her grandmother Cosima Kelsen, who was left without fingers because of the amorous machete of the Hunk from Papantla, Laura dropping her rings on the rug, on the way to Orlando’s bed, like Little Red Riding Hood lost in the forest dropping bread crumbs, and the birds, all without exception birds of prey, all of them beautiful predators, will eat the bread crumbs, erasing the trail, telling the lost little girl, “There’s no way back, you’re in the cave of the wolf.”
9.
The Interoceanic Train: 1932
ON THE SAME TRAIN that had brought her, a newlywed, from Xalapa to Mexico City, Laura was now returning. This time it was by day, not night, and she was alone. Her last companions in the capital, before she got to the Colonia station, had been a pack of dogs that both followed and preceded her, threatening mostly because meeting a pack of dogs was such a novelty. She hadn’t realized two things. First, the city had dried out: one after another, the lakes and canals-Texcoco, La Viga, La Veronica, the moribund tributaries of the Aztec lake-had filled with garbage, then dirt from construction sites, and finally asphalt. The city in a lake had died forever, inexplicably in Laura’s imagination, because she sometimes dreamed of a pyramid surrounded by water.
Second, Mexico City had been invaded by dogs, mixed breeds of no breeding at all, lost, disoriented, objects of simultaneous fear and compassion. Once fine collies, galloping Great Danes, or degenerated German shepherds had mixed together in a vast pack of hounds with no collars, direction, owners, identity. Families with pedigreed dogs had left the capital with the Revolution and let their pets loose to run away-or to die, of loyalty or of hunger. Behind several fancy houses in Colonia Roma and on Paseo de la Reforma one found the bodies of dogs still chained, locked in their doghouses, unable either to eat or to flee. Everyone-dogs and masters-had bet on disloyalty as long as it meant survival.
“They’ve grown up on their own, with no training at all. No dog knows if it has a pedigree, Laura, and if their masters return-and they’re beginning to, mostly from Paris, a few from New York, by the drove from Havana-they’ll never get them back.”
Thus according to Orlando. On the train, she tried to erase the image of the abandoned dogs, but it was a vision that prevailed over all the images of her life with Orlando in the eighteen months that had passed since they slept together for the first time in the Hotel Regis and then stayed on, with Orlando paying for the room and the services. Together they began the social life that he called “observations for my novel,” although Laura sometimes wondered whether her lover really enjoyed the facile frivolity that reigned in Mexico City at peace after twenty years of revolutionary fear, or if Orlando’s tour through all the urban strata was part of a secret plan, like his intermediary relationship with the Catalan anarchist Armonia Aznar.
She never asked him. She wouldn’t dare. That was the difference between him and Juan Francisco, who gave reports on everything that happened to him, turning them into speeches. Orlando never said what he was doing. Laura was likely to know what was going to happen, never what already had. Neither his relationship with the old anarchist in the attic nor that with the brother executed in Veracruz. How easy it would have been for Orlando to brag about the first and take advantage of the second. A heroic aura surrounded anyone linked to Armon a Aznar and Santiago Diaz. Why didn’t Orlando profit from that splendor?
Watching him sleep, exhausted, defenseless under her wide-awake eyes, Laura imagined many things. Public
