or if they were affluent, they studied architecture. All these schools were in the old center of the city, in a quarter surrounded by bars, cabarets, and bordellos. The Mexico City of the poor was like an invisible anthill that ran day and night, a Mexico City crowded with men still wearing huge straw hats and huaraches or overalls and shawls: that’s what my husband, Juan Francisco, showed me when he took me to see the barrios and convinced me the problems were so gigantic that it was better I stay home and look after my sons.
“Your husband didn’t show you anything,” said Orlando Ximenez with unexpected ferocity, grabbing Laura’s wrist and making her get out in the middle of a partly built-up lot-that was the brutal shock, the paradox: here were streets, here were houses, yet this was a wasteland within the city, a ruin built of dust, conceived as a ruin, a pyramid of sand on whose flanks, invisible at first sight, began to appear incomplete silhouettes, forms difficult to name, a half-made world, and Laura and Orlando made their way through this gray urban mystery, Orlando leading Laura by the hand like Virgil with Beatrice-not Dante; another Laura, not Petrarch’s; making her look, look, now you can see them, they’re coming out of holes, emerging from the garbage, tell me, Laura, what could you do for that woman over there called the Frog, who hops because her torso is crushed against her thighs, look at her, forced to hop like a frog in search of edible garbage, what could you do for that man over there who drags himself along the street with no nose, no arms, no legs, like a human snake? and look at them now because it’s night, because they only come out when there’s no light, because they fear the sun, because during the day they live locked in fear, so as not to be seen, what are they, Laura? take a good look: are they dwarfs, children? they’re children, but they won’t grow any more, they’re dead children with rigor mortis, on their feet but half buried in the dust, tell me, Laura, did your husband show you this, or did he only show you the pretty side of poverty, the workers with their cheap shirts, the whores with their powder, the organ grinders and locksmiths, the tamale sellers and the saddlers? is that his working class? Do you want to rebel against your husband? hate him because he didn’t give you a chance to do something for others, treated you with contempt? well then, I’ll give you the chance, take you by the shoulders, Laura, and make you open your eyes, what, what can you do against all this? why don’t you and I spend our evenings here, with the Frog and the Snake and the children who won’t grow and who fear the sun, instead of with Carmen Cortina and Querubina de Landa and Fatso del Valle and the actress who dyes her pubic hair white, why not?
Laura held on tight to Orlando and released a flood of tears she’d been holding in, she said, since the day she was born, since she’d lost the first person she’d loved and asked herself, why do the people I love die, why were they born…?
“What can one do? There are thousands, millions of them, perhaps Juan Francisco is right. Where would you begin? What can you do for all these people?”
“Tell me.”
“Choose the very poorest. Just one, Laura. Choose one and you’ll save them all.”
Laura D az watching the calcified plateau pass by from the window of the Pullman car as she goes home, goes to the state of Veracruz, far from the pyramid of sand out of which-like caterpillars, cockroaches, crabs, along invisible rough paths sprouting in the night from holes like chancres-the frog women, snake men, and rachitic children made their way.
Until that night, she hadn’t really believed in misery. We live protected lives, we’re conditioned to see only what we want to see. That’s what Laura said to Orlando. Now, on her way to Xalapa, she herself felt the anguished need for someone who would take pity on her: she was experiencing an urgent longing for pity, knowing that what she was asking for herself, her portion of compassion, was what was expected of her in the house on Bocanegra Street, a touch of compassion, a bit of attention for everyone forgotten-mother, aunts, two sons-all in order not to tell them the truth, to keep up the original fiction, it was better that Danton and Santiago grow up well looked after, in a provincial city, while Laura and Juan Francisco sorted out their lives, their careers, in a difficult Mexico City, in a most difficult country emerging from the furrows, the ashes, the blood of the Revolution… Only Auntie Maria de la O knew the truth, but above all she knew that discretion is the truth that hurts no one.
The four women were sitting in the old armchairs with wicker backs that the family had dragged with them all the way from the port of Veracruz. Zampaya opened the coach gate for her, and he was Laura’s first shock: the jolly dancing man had white hair, and his broom was no longer for him to dance with, “putting your arm around your partner’s waist if she lets you,” but now a cane on which the old family retainer rested his mutilated greeting, his “Miss Laura!” instantly hushed when Laura put her finger over her lips while the black man carried Miss’s valise and she let him do it to keep his self-respect, even though he could barely move it.
Laura wanted to see them first from the living-room door without their seeing her, the four sisters sitting in silence behind the worn-out curtains: Aunt Hilda nervously moving her arthritic fingers as if playing a muted piano; Aunt Virginia silently muttering a poem she was too weak to consign to paper; Auntie Maria de la O self-absorbed, staring at her fat ankles; and only Mutti working, Leticia. knitting a thick house coat that extended over her knees, protecting her, as she knitted, from Xalapa’s December chill, when the fogs of Perote Peak combine with those of the dams, the fountains, the brooks that join together in the fertile subtropical zone between the mountains and the coast.
When she looked up to examine her work, Leticia saw Laura’s eyes and exclaimed, Daughter, my daughter, as she painfully rose while Laura ran to hug her: Don’t move, Mutti, don’t wear yourself out, no one get up, please, and, if she had stood up, would Aunt Hilda have suffocated herself with the ribbon embedded in her double chin that narrowed her myopic eyes even more behind the glasses thick as fishbowls? Would Aunt Virginia have split open? Her face plastered with rice powder was no longer a powdered wrinkle but a wrinkled powder. Would Auntie Maria de la O have collapsed on the tile floor, recently mopped, her swollen ankles no longer supporting her?
But Leticia did stand up, straight as an arrow, parallel to the walls of the house, her house, hers, her posture telling Laura of her attitude, the house is mine, I keep it clean, tidy, active, modest but sufficient. Nothing is needed here.
“We need you, daughter. Your sons need you.”
Laura embraced her, kissed her, remained silent. She wasn’t going to remind her that they, mother and daughter, had lived for twelve years in Catemaco, separated from her father, Fernando, and her brother, Santiago, and that reasons given in the past could be invoked in the present. Even so, yesterday’s present was not today’s past. Carmen Cortina’s parties swiftly passed through Laura’s mind, at full speed, like the stray dogs near the railroad station; perhaps the dogs secretly admired the speed of the locomotives; perhaps Carmen Cortina’s guests were just another pack of homeless animals.
“The boys are at school. They’ll be home soon.”
“How are their studies going?”
“They’re with the Misses Ramos, of course.”
Laura was going to exclaim, My God, the ladies haven’t died yet!, but that would have been another blunder, a faux pas as Carmen Cortina would say, Carmen whose world seemed to be disappearing into the most distant and invisible unreality. Laura smiled within. That had been her world, during the year and a half of her love affair with Orlando Ximenez, the daily or rather nightly world of Laura and Orlando together.
Laura and Orlando. How different that couple sounded here in the Xalapa house, in Veracruz, in the resuscitated memory of Santiago the first. She was surprised to find herself thinking in such terms, for her brother had been shot when he was only twenty, but the new Santiago coming into the living room with his backpack was a little gentleman of eleven, as serious as a portrait and direct in his first announcement:
“Danton was kept after school. He has to copy twenty pages without a single ink blot.”
The Misses Ramos would always be the same, but Santiago hadn’t seen his mother in four years, though he immediately understood who she was. He did not run over to embrace her. He let her come to him, kneel down and kiss him. The child’s face never changed. With a look, Laura asked for help from the four women.
“That’s the way Santiago is,” said Mutti Leticia. “I’ve never met so serious a child.”
He kissed Laura’s hand: who taught him that, the Misses Ramos, or was it innate courtesy, his distance? Then he scampered out. Laura rejoiced at that childish act; her son skipped in and skipped out, even though he spoke like a judge.
Dinner was slow and painful. Danton sent word with a maid that he was going to sleep at a friend’s house, and Laura did not want to play the part of the active and emancipated woman from the capital or upset the ambulatory siesta that was her aunts’ waking hours; nor did she want to offend her mother’s admirable and nervous activity,
