taken care of by your goodness and your efforts, we were fading like two burned-down candles. Both of us wanted to do something that would be the equivalent of what we could not accomplish in life. Our sister stared at her arthritic fingers and hummed a Chopin Nocturne. I looked at the shadows under my eyes, in each wrinkle I counted a poem that was never published. We looked at each other and realized what we were both thinking-so many years living together, just imagine, we haven’t separated since we were born, so we can guess each other’s thoughts! Last night, you may remember, the four of us sat down to play cards in the living room. It was my turn to shuffle (Hilda can’t because of the condition of her fingers), and I began to feel ill, the way someone should feel who enters their final moments without knowing it, but no matter how ill I felt, I couldn’t stop shuffling, I went on aimlessly, until you and Maria de la O began to stare in astonishment, and then I shuffled frantically, as if my life depended on mixing the cards, and you, Leticia, said the fatal phrase, repeated that sweet, old, terrible saying:
Then I looked at Hilda and she at me, and we understood each other. You and our other sister were elsewhere, out of our world.
Looking at the cards. You led with the king of clubs.
Hilda and I looked at each other from the depths of our souls… don’t try to find us. Last night, the two of us put on our white nightgowns, left our feet bare, woke up Zampaya and told him to drive us, in the Isotta, to the sea, to the lake where we were born. He put up no resistance. He looked at us as if we were insane for going out in our nightgowns. But he would always do what any one of us would tell him. So when you wake up and read this letter, you will not find either Hilda or me or Zampaya or the car. Zampaya will let us out where we tell him to do so, and the two of us will lose ourselves, barefoot in the forest, with no plan, no money, no bread basket, barefoot and wearing our nightgowns only out of modesty. If you love us, you will not look for us. Respect our wishes. We want to make death into art. The last. The only. Don’t deprive us of that pleasure. With love from your sisters
“Your aunts were never seen again,” said Leticia to Laura. “The car was found on a curve in the Acayucan road. Zampaya was found stabbed to death in, forgive me, daughter, the same bordello where Maria de la O grew up. Don’t look at me like that. These are absolute mysteries, and I’m not going to be the one to clear them up. Enough headaches with what I already know, no need to add to them with what I don’t know.”
Laura had come to Xalapa the moment she found out about the disappearance of her maiden aunts, although she didn’t yet know the terrible fate of the man who’d been the family’s faithful servant for so many years. It was as if the evil spirit of Maria de la O’s mother had returned, black as her skin, to take revenge on everyone who kept her from a life that, as her own daughter acknowledged, she exalted madly: “I was so happy when I was a whore. Fuck everyone who made me into a proper lady!”
Leticia went ahead and told Laura everything Laura had known for years. Mutti never bothered with gossip or with ferreting out information. She faced things as they turned up. She didn’t have to ask because she understood everything and, as she’d just said, what she didn’t understand she could imagine.
Back in her Veracruz home, Laura understood retrospectively, as if she were looking at a broken sun dial, that because of her aunts’ fate and her mother’s attitude Leticia knew everything about the failure of her marriage to Juan Francisco, about how her rebellion against her husband had dissolved in Elizabeth’s protective treatment and how she’d drifted from there into her empty, prolonged, and ultimately useless relationship with Orlando; yet weren’t those indispensable stages, if in themselves dispensable, in accumulating isolated instants of perception that, added together, would lead her to a new awareness, still vague, still misty, of things? The sun dial was inseparable from the shade dial.
Leticia took advantage of the flight of the old maids to look deep into Laura’s eyes and silently ask her to do the thing that Laura quickly expressed: It’s very hard for you and Auntie to take care of two boys who will soon be thirteen and fourteen. I’m going to take them back to Mexico City. You and Auntie too.
“No, Laura, we’ll stay here. We look after each other. You’ll have to remake your home on your own.”
“Yes, Mutti. Juan Francisco is waiting for all of us in the house on Avenida Sonora. But I already told you, if you and your sister want to come with us, we’ll get a larger house, so don’t give it a second thought.”
“Get used to living without us.” Leticia smiled. “I don’t want to leave the state of Veracruz ever again. Mexico City horrifies me.”
Did one have to explain to Leticia that since Orlando had abandoned her she’d decided to rebuild her home with Juan Francisco, not out of weakness but through a strong, essential act of will that summed up for her the lessons she’d learned from her life with Orlando? She’d reproached her husband for a lack of basic sincerity, for not admitting his cowardice in not confessing a betrayal that would forever make him odious in her eyes and make her odious to herself, since the excuses she could invent when she married the labor leader now seemed insufficient to her, no matter whether youth and inexperience might justify them.
That afternoon, close to her mother in the old city of her adolescence, Laura would have wanted to say this to Mutti, but Leticia herself stopped her with a definitive conclusion: “If you want, you can leave the boys here until you settle things with your husband and you resume your married life together. But you already know that.”
The two women were both about to say “Well?” but realized that without having to say a word they each knew everything, Leticia about Laura’s failed marriage, and Laura about having to go back to living with Juan Francisco despite everything, to give their home and their sons a second chance. Then Laura remembered that yes, she’d been on the verge of saying that she’d wasted these last years of her life recklessly deceiving herself, that flagrant disillusion had led her to lies: she’d felt justified in abandoning her home and handing herself over to what those two worlds-the internal one of her own rage and the external one of Mexico City society-exalted as an acceptable vendetta for a humiliated woman: pleasure and independence.
Now Laura didn’t know whether either enjoyment or freedom had ever really been hers. Staying with Elizabeth so long that generosity had turned into patronage, then irritation, and finally disdain. Bound over to the love of Orlando until passion revealed itself as games and trickery. Exploring a new society of artists, of old-family people or new money arrivistes who, it’s true, never fooled her, for at Carmen Cortina’s parties appearance was essence and reality its mask.
Being useful, feeling herself to be useful, imagining she was good for something-that brought her under the wing of the Kahlo-Rivera clan, but all her gratitude toward the extraordinary couple who took her in at a bad moment and treated her as a friend and comrade could not disguise the truth that Laura was ancillary to the two artists’ world, she was a replaceable part in a perfectly lubricated geometry like those machines of glittering steel that Diego celebrated in Detroit, but a machine on a fragile base, fragile like Frida Kahlo’s wounded legs. They could take care of themselves. Laura would always love them, but she had no illusions: they loved but did not need her.
“What do I need, Mama? Who needs me?” asked Laura, after telling Leticia all these things-everything she’d sworn not to tell her and now, having blurted them out so quickly, vertiginously, clasping her mother’s strong and diligent hands, not knowing if she’d actually said it all or if Leticia once again had divined her feelings and ideas without Laura’s saying a word.
“Well?” asked Leticia, and Laura knew she knew.
“So the boys should stay here?”
“Only while you find your husband again.”
“And what if we can’t understand each other, which is very possible?”
“The fact is, the two of you will never understand each other. That’s the problem. The important thing is for you to take on the burden of something real and decide to save it instead of waiting for someone to save you. Which is what you’ve done until now. Excuse me for saying so.”
“Even if I know it will turn out badly again.”
Leticia nodded. “Sometimes we have to do things knowing beforehand we’re going to fail.”
“What do I get from that, Mutti?”
“I’d say the opportunity to become yourself, to leave your failed efforts behind. You won’t go through them again.”
“I should walk into a disaster with my eyes wide open, is that what you’re asking of me?”
“We have to finish things. You’re leaving too much unfinished, too many loose ends. Be yourself, not someone else’s toy, even if it costs you dearly to be a little more authentic.”
“It wasn’t authentic, everything that’s happened to me since I left Orlando?”
