The Years with Laura Diaz

it would be. Laura noted his disquiet and asked him over and over, with an air of legitimate concern: If there’s a break between Calles and Cardenas, which side will you be on? And he had no choice but to fall back on his old bad habit, political rhetoric: the Revolution is united, there will never be a break among its leaders. But the Revolution has already broken with many of your old ideals, Juan Francisco, when you were an anarcho-syndicalist (and the images of the Xalapa attic and the walled-up life of Armonia Aznar and her mysterious relationship with Orlando and Juan Francisco’s funeral oration all returned to her in a wave), and he would say, like a true believer repeating the credo, you have to influence things from within, try it from outside and you’ll be squashed like a bug, the battles are waged within the system.

“You have to know how to adapt, isn’t that so?”

“All the time. Of course. Politics is the art of compromise.”

“Of compromise,” she repeated in a most serious tone.

“Yes.”

So as not to acknowledge what was happening, one had to keep one’s heart in the dark. Juan Francisco could explain that political necessity forced him into compromises with the government.

“With all governments? With any government?”

… She could not ask him if his conscience was condemning him. He would have wanted to admit that he wasn’t afraid of the opinions others might have but he was afraid of Laura Diaz, of being judged again by her. Then, one night, the two of them exploded again.

“I’m sick and tired of your judging me.”

“And I’m sick and tired of your spying on me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’ve locked my soul in a basement.”

“Don’t feel so sorry for yourself, you make me pity you.”

“Don’t talk to me as if you were a saint talking to a sinner. Talk to the real me instead!”

“It’s outrageous that you ask me for results that have nothing to do with reality.”

“Stop imagining that I judge you.”

“As long as it’s only you who judges me, poor little you, it really doesn’t bother me, do you think I came back so you could forgive my sins?” She bit her tongue, night tracks me, sunrise frees me, she went to the boys’ bedroom to watch them sleep, to calm down.

Seeing them sleep.

It was enough to watch the two little heads sunk deep in the pillows, Santiago covered up to his chin, Danton uncovered and spread-eagled, as if even in sleep their two contrary personalities revealed themselves, and Laura D az asked herself, at that exact moment of her existence, did she have anything to teach her sons or at least the courage to ask them, what do you want to know, what can I tell you?

Sitting there opposite the twin beds, she could only tell them that they came into this world without being consulted and thus their parents’ freedom in creating them did not save them, creatures of a heritage of rancor, needs, and ignorance that their parents, no matter how they tried, could not erase without damaging their children’s freedom. It would be up to them to fight the earthly evils they’d inherited, and yet, she, the mother, could not step back, disappear, turn into the ghost of her own descendants. She had to resist in their name without ever showing it, remain invisible at the side of her sons, not to diminish the child’s honor, the responsibility of the son who must believe in his own freedom, know that he is forging his own destiny. What was left to her if not to keep watch discreetly, to be tolerant, and to ask as well for a long time to live and a short time to suffer, like Aunts Hilda and Virginia?

Sometimes she would spend the entire night watching them sleep, intent on accompanying her sons wherever they might go, like a very long shoreline where sea and beach are distinct but inseparable; the voyage might last only one night, but she hoped it would never end, and over the heads of her sons floated the question: How much time, how much time will God and men allow my sons on earth?

Seeing them sleep until the sun comes up and the light touches their heads because she herself can touch the sun with her hands, asking herself how many sunrises she and her sons will be able to endure. For each allotment of light had a silhouette of shadow.

Then Laura Diaz rose, disquieted by a mild vertigo, and stepped away from the beds where her sons slept, and she told herself (and almost told them)-so they would understand their own mother and not condemn her to pity first and oblivion later-that to be a mother, hated and liberated by the hatred of her sons, hated, perhaps, but fatally unforgettable, I must be active, ardent and active, but I still don’t know how, I can’t return to what I’ve already done, I want an authentic revelation, a revelation that will be an elevation, not a renunciation. How easy life would be without children or a husband! Again? This time for sure? Why not? Does the first effort at liberty use it up, a prior failure close the doors to possible happiness beyond the walls of home? Have I used up my destiny? Santiago, Danton: don’t leave me. Let me follow you wherever you go, whatever happens. I don’t want to be adored. I want to be awaited. Help me.

12.

Parque de la Lama: 1938

IN 1938, the European democracies caved in to Hitler at the Munich Conference and the Nazis occupied Austria, then Bohemia; the Spanish Republic was in full retreat, falling back on all fronts; Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened, as did Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad. On Kristallnacht, Jewish synagogues, businesses, homes, and schools all over Germany were burned by SS troops; in the United States, Congress established the House Un-American Activities Committee, in France Antonin Artaud proposed a “theater of cruelty,” Orson Welles convinced everyone that Martians had invaded New Jersey, Lazaro Cardenas was nationalizing the oil industry in Mexico, and two rival telephone companies-the Swedish Ericsson and Mexicana, the Mexican national company-simultaneously offered separate telephone services; as luck (bad) would have it, a person signed up with Ericsson could not call someone with Mexicana service and vice versa. This meant that a subscriber to one service had to turn to neighbors, friends, nearby offices, or phone booths to speak to someone with the other service, and vice versa.

“In Mexico, even the telephones are baroque,” Orlando Ximenez declared.

The sheer size of the modern metropolis makes amorous relationships difficult; no one wants to spend an hour in a bus or car in order to enjoy ninety seconds of sex. The telephone enabled lovers to agree on intermediate rendezvous sites. In Paris, pneumatiques, the quick “petits bleus,” brought couples together; lovers opened those little blue envelopes that might contain all the promises of love with more apprehension than if they were telegrams. But in Mexico, during the year of oil expropriation, the year of the Spanish Republic’s last-ditch defense of Madrid, if lovers didn’t also happen to be neighbors and if one had Ericsson and the other Mexicana, they were doomed to invent bizarre, complex, or, as Orlando said, baroque communication networks.

Nonetheless, the first communication between them, the first personal message, could not have been more direct. It was, simply, a meeting of eyes. Later, she would say she was predisposed to what happened, but when she saw him, it was as if she’d never thought about him. They did not exchange glances; each anchored their eyes in those of the other. She asked herself, Why is this man different from all the rest? And he answered in silence, the two of them separated by the hundred other guests at the party, because I’m looking only at you.

“Because he’s looking only at me.”

She wanted to leave; she was frightened by this attraction, so sudden but also so complete, the novelty of the encounter alarmed her, it disturbed her to imagine the consequences of an approach, she thought about everything that might happen-passion, giving herself, guilt, remorse, her husband, her sons; it wasn’t that all these issues would come afterward; involuntarily, instantaneously, they were coming first; everything entered the present moment, as in one of those living rooms where only family ghosts sat down to talk and, serenely, to judge her.