just to tell you to go on sending me the bills for everything, the hairdresser, clothes, don’t be stingy, honey, that fat-lipped Caraza left me well set up, spending is one of my pleasures, and I don’t want anyone to say a friend of mine is Orlando Ximenez’s kept woman.”
Laura, with the hint of a bitter smile, asked Elizabeth, “Why are you offending me?”
“Offending you? Offending someone who’s been my friend forever? Jesus!” Elizabeth patted dry the drops of perspiration in the cleavage between her powerful breasts.
“So, you’re cutting me out of your life.”
“Don’t take it that way.”
“I promised I’d pay you. You know my situation.”
“Let’s wait for the next revolution, dearie. Maybe things will go better for your husband then. Deputy from the state of Tabasco, isn’t that right? Don’t make me laugh. All you get out of Tabasco are priest baiters who drink tequila, not gentlemen who pay the rent.”
Laura turned her back on Elizabeth and took Orlando’s hand with the urgency of someone in flight. Smiling, Orlando caressed Laura’s hand.
“You don’t want to run into the terrible Artemio Cruz in the elevator, do you? They say he’s a shark, and around here, darling, I’m the only one who chews on you.”
“Look at him. What an arrogant man. He just walked out on Laura!”
“I tell you he’s a shark. And sharks never stop moving, because if they do they sink and die at the bottom of the sea.”
The two Lauras spontaneously sought each other out. “The two Lauras have a look of sadness.
“Why do we put up with this social whirl?” asked the blond woman point-blank.
“Out of fear, I think,” answered Laura Diaz.
“Fear of speaking, fear of telling the truth, fear we’ll be laughed at? You know what I mean? No one here came without being armed with jokes or funny stories or wit. Those are the swords they use to defend themselves. It’s a tournament where the prize is fame, money, sex, and, most of all, feeling you’re cleverer than the next person. Is that what you want, Laura Diaz?”
Laura vigorously shook her head. No.
“…?”
“Then save yourself, and quickly.”
“It’s too late for me. I’m a prisoner. My body’s been captured by routine. But I swear that if I could escape from my own body… I detest it.” Laura Riviere exhaled with a muffled sigh. “You know where all this leads? To a permanent moral hangover. You end up hating yourself.”
“Look.” Orlando returned balancing three manhattans in the bowl of his joined hands. “The Maximum Actress and the Maximum Narcissus have made contact. I was right. Famous women were invented by innocent men.”
“No”-Laura Riviere took her glass-“by malicious men who condemned us to theatrics.”
“Darlings,” interrupted Carmen Cortina, “have I introduced you to Querubina de Landa yet?”
“No one is named Querubina de Landa,” said Orlando to Carmen, to the air, to the night, to the overextended Senorita Querubina de Landa, who was hanging on the arm of the philosophic playboy. Orlando casually skewered him: “They’re right to call you the Great Chicken Thief.”
“In the matter of names, my dear but ignorant Orlando, no one has said it better than Plato: There are conventional names, there are intrinsic names, and there are names that harmonize nature with necessity, as, for example, Laura Riviere and Laura Diaz. Good night.” O’Higgins bowed to one and all, patted the backside of the conventional, natural, harmoniously named Querubina de Landa, and said (in English),
“I’ll bet her real name is Petra Perez,” said the cordial hostess, as she ran off to greet an unusual couple entering the living room of the penthouse overlooking Paseo de la Reforma: a very old man on the arm of a perpetually tremulous lady.
Laura Diaz’s high heels sounded like hammers pounding on the sidewalk. She smiled, arm in arm with Orlando, and told him that they’d met in a Veracruz hacienda and ended up in a penthouse on Paseo de la Reforma, but with the same rules and aspirations in both places: to be admitted or disapproved by society and its empresses-Dona Genoveva Deschamps in San Cayetano, Carmen Cortina in Mexico City.
“Can’t we escape? We’ve been together now for eighteen months, my love.”
“For me, time doesn’t matter if I’m with you,” said the no longer very young and now balding Orlando Ximenez.
“Why is it you never wear a hat? You’re the only one.”
“For that very reason. To be the only one who doesn’t.”
They walked along the tree-lined part of the avenue that cold December night, on the earthen bridle path for early-morning riders.
“I still don’t know anything about you,” Laura dared to say, squeezing his hand harder.
“I’m not hiding anything from you. The only things you don’t know are the things you don’t want to know.”
“Orlando, night after night, like this evening, we hear only cliches, predictable, expected…”
“Keep going. Desperate.”
“You know something? I’ve just realized that in this world you’ve introduced me to it doesn’t matter how we end up. Tonight was interesting for me. The people who mattered most to each other were Laura Riviere and Artemio Cruz. Do you see? He walked out, the night ended badly. That was the most important thing that happened tonight.”
“Let me console you. You’re right. It doesn’t matter how we end up. The good thing will be that we don’t notice everything is over.”
“Oh, my love, I feel as if I’m falling down a collapsing staircase.”
Orlando hailed a taxi and gave the driver an address unknown to Laura. The cabby stared at the couple in astonishment: “You really want to go there, boss? Sure of that?”
In 1932, Mexico City streets emptied early. Punctual evening meals brought the entire family together. And families were tight-knit, as if the prolonged civil war-twenty unbroken years-had taught the clans to live in a state of fear, clinging to one another, waiting for the worst, for unemployment, expropriation, execution, kidnapping, rape, life savings erased in an instant, useless paper money, the arrogant confusion of the rebel factions. One society had disappeared. The new one was not yet clearly defined. City dwellers had one foot in the furrow of the plow and the other in ashes, as Musset said about post-Napoleonic France. The bad thing was that sometimes blood covered both furrow and ashes, erasing the lines between soil that would be sterile forever and seed that, to produce its fruits, had first to die.
Parties like those of the celebrated, shortsighted Carmen Cortina were a relief for a worldly elite that counted among its protagonists both Seeds and Ashes, those who survived the revolutionary catastrophe, those who lived thanks to it, and those who had died in it but had yet to realize it. Carmen’s parties were an exception, a rarity. Proper families would visit one another early, marry one another even earlier, and use both magnifying glass and strainer when letting in elements of the new revolutionary society… If a savage general from Sonora married a charming young lady from Sinaloa, relatives and family friends from Culiacan, the capital, were there immediately to approve or disapprove. General Obregon’s family had no social pretensions, and the One-armed Hero of Celaya would have been better off staying on his hacienda in Huatabampo and tending turkeys instead of getting entangled in reelection and death. The Calles family, on the other hand, did want to get into high society, cut a figure in it, present its daughters at the Churubusco Country Club and then marry them all-but of course!-in religious weddings (private ceremonies, naturally). The most notable and respected case was General Joaquin Amaro, the very model of the revolutionary warlord, an unequaled horseman (he looked like a centaur), an Indian with his neckerchief and pendant earring, ebony complexion, thick, sensual, and challenging lips and eyes lost in the origin of the tribes, who married a young lady of the best northern society and as a wedding gift promised he would learn French and good manners.
There was always a goodly supply of playboys, and if there was no money anymore to send them abroad to study, they now went to the San Ildefonso Law School or the Santo Domingo School of Medicine, if they were poor;
