“No.” He sighed with fatigue. “I’m a man who’s angry with himself because he doesn’t know how to explain the truth and avoid lies.”
“Perhaps you’re strong because you doubt things, my Spanish boy. I think I figured that out tonight.”
They crossed Aquiles Serdan and passed under the marble portico of the Palace of Fine Arts.
“I just said it now in the cafe, my love, we’re all condemned. I confess I hate all systems, mine and the others’.”
VIDAL: Now do you see? Victory will not be achieved without order. Let’s win or lose now, victorious today or defeated tomorrow, we’re going to need order and unity, hierarchies of command and discipline. Without them, we’ll always be beaten, because they do have order, unity, command, and discipline.
BALTAZAR: Well, in that case, what’s the difference between Hitler’s implacable discipline and Stalin’s?
VIDAL: The ends, Basilio. Hitler wants a world of slaves. Stalin wants a world of free men. Even though their means may be equally violent, their ends are totally different.
“Vidal’s right,” laughed Laura. “You’re closer to the anarchist than to the Communist.”
Jorge stopped short opposite a poster at the Palace of Fine Arts. “No one was playing a part this afternoon, Laura. Vidal really is a Communist. Basilio really is an anarchist. I didn’t tell you the truth. I thought that way the two of us, you and I, could stand at a certain distance from the debate.”
They stood in silence for a while, staring at the poster’s black letters on yellow paper, improperly fastened to a wooden frame unworthy of the marbles and bronzes in the Palace of Fine Arts. Jorge looked at Laura.
“Forgive me. How beautiful you are.”
Carlos Chavez was going to conduct his own
“How I wish no one on our side had ever committed a single crime.”
“That’s how Armonia Aznar must have been-a woman I met, or rather never met. I had to guess how she was. Thank you for opening yourself to me without mysteries, without locked doors. Thanks, my hidalgo. You make me feel better, cleaner, clearer in my head.”
“I’m sorry. It’s like vaudeville. We meet and repeat the same trite lines, like one of those Madrid comedies by Munoz Seca. You saw it today: each one knew exactly what he should say. Perhaps that’s how we’ll exorcise our disgust. I don’t know.”
He hugged her in the Fine Arts portico, the two of them surrounded by the brownish-black Mexican night, sudden and vicious. “I’m getting tired of this interminable fight. I’d like to live with no more country than my soul, with no more country…”
They made a half turn and went back to Cinco de Mayo, their arms around each other’s waists. Their words were slowly extinguished, like the lights in the candy shops, bookstores, luggage emporia, as the streetlamps came on, opening a path of light all the way to Herrera’s cathedral, where on the previous March 18 they’d celebrated the nationalization of Mexico’s oil-she and Juan Francisco, Santiago and Danton, and Jorge at a distance, greeting her with his hat in his hand and, on high, a personal greeting that was also a political celebration, above the heads of the crowd, greeting and saying goodbye at the same time, saying I love you and goodbye, I’ve come back and I still love you.
At the Cafe de Paris, Barreda, who had been watching them, asked Gorostiza, and Villaurrutia to guess what the Spaniards had been talking about. Politics? Art? No, wine jugs. He recited another pair of verses from the Bible turned into rhyme by a mad Spaniard, the description of Balthazar’s Feast:
Villaurrutia said he didn’t find Mexican jokes about Spaniards funny, and Gorostiza asked why there was this ill will against a country that gave us its culture, its language, even its mixed blood…
“Go ask Cuauhtemoc how it went with the Spaniards at dinnertime,” laughed Barreda. “Toasted tootsies!”
“No.” Gorostiza smiled. “The thing is, we don’t like to admit that the winners are right. We Mexicans have been defeated too often. We like loving the defeated. They’re ours. They’re us.”
“Are there winners in history?” asked Villaurrutia, he himself defeated by sleep or languor or death, God knows, thought the beautiful, intelligent, and taciturn Carmen Barreda.
14.
Every Place, the Place: 1940
1.
HE WENT TO HAVANA, Washington, New York, Santo Domingo, sent telegrams to her at L’Escargot, sometimes called her house and only spoke if he heard her voice saying, “No, it isn’t Ericsson, it’s Mexicana,” which was their personal code for-no problems, neither husband nor children. Sometimes Maura threw caution to the wind and said something anyway, and she would have to stand there in silence or babble nonsense because her husband or her sons were nearby, no I need the plumber today, or when will that dress be ready?, or how expensive everything is, now that there’s going to be a war, while Jorge would be saying these are the best days of our lives, don’t you think?, why don’t you answer me?, and she would laugh nervously, and he’d begin, what a good thing it was we were impatient, my love, can you imagine if we’d restrained ourselves that first night?, in the name of what were we supposed to be patient?, our lives are slipping away in any case, my adored wife, my “freisch and gay wyf,” as he called her, in playful medieval Spanish, and she silently staring at her husband reading
2.
The death of Leticia, the magnificent and adored Mutti: the central feminine image in Laura D az’s life, the column to which clung all the masculine strands of ivy-the grandfather Don Felipe, the father Don Fernando, the equally adored brother Santiago, the dolorous and doleful Orlando Ximenez, the husband Juan Francisco, the sons
