The Years with Laura Diaz

astonishing event in the Avenida Sonora household. Aunt Maria de la O started speaking again. “He’s from Veracruz, a jarocho,” she said-of the new, young, elegant head of state, the first civilian President, after a series of military men.

Everyone-Laura D az, Juan Francisco, Santiago, Danton-was taken aback, but Aunt Maria’s surprises didn’t stop there: for no reason at all, she started dancing la bamba at all hours of the day or night, her swollen ankles notwithstanding.

“No fool like an old fool,” said a scornful Danton.

Then, at the beginning of the new year, Maria de la O made her sensational announcement: “The time of sadness is over. I’m going back to live in Veracruz. An old beau of mine from the port has asked me to marry him. He’s my age, though I don’t know exactly what my age is, because Mama never registered me. She wanted me to grow up quickly and follow her in the crazy life. Silly cunt, I hope she’s sizzling in hell. All I know is that Matias Matadamas-that’s my boyfriend-can dance the danzon like an angel, and he’s promised to take me dancing twice a week in the city square, right along with everyone else.”

“Nobody’s named Matias Matadamas,” said Danton the wet blanket.

“You little snot,” replied Auntie. “For your information, St. Matias was the last apostle, the one who took the place of Judas the Traitor after the crucifixion so there would be an even dozen.”

“Apostle and boyfriend all at the last minute!” Danton laughed. “As if Jesus Christ were a peddler who sold saints cheaper by the dozen.”

“Just you wait and see if the last minute isn’t sometimes the first, you disbeliever.” Maria de la O was berating him, but truth to tell, she was not in the mood for reproofs. What she wanted was to be dancing bulerias. “I can just see myself, holding on to him tight,” she went on with her best daydream air, “cheek to cheek, dancing on a brick, which is how you should dance the danzon, barely moving your body, just your feet, your feet tapping out the beat, slow, delicious, sexy. Oh boy, family, I am going to live!”

Nobody could explain Aunt Maria de la O’s miracle; nobody could thwart her will or even take her to the train, much less to Veracruz.

“He’s my boyfriend. He’s my life. My time has come. I’m tired of being a parasite. From now to the grave, pure Caribbean fun and nights on the town. A little old lady died shuffling cards. To hell with that! Not me!”

With those words, a not unusual proof that the tongues of the old loosen up when there’s nothing to lose, she boarded the Interoceanic train almost with relief, a renewed woman, a miracle.

Even though Auntie’s chair was empty, Laura Diaz insisted on continuing the afternoon ceremony of sitting at the balcony and observing the to-and-fro of the city. It had changed little between the inauguration of General Avila Camacho and that of Mr. Aleman. During the war, Mexico had become a Latin American Lisbon (Casablanca with nopales, quipped Orlando), a refuge for the many men and women fleeing from the European conflict. Two hundred thousand Spanish Republicans came, and Laura told herself that Jorge Maura’s labors had not been in vain. The cream of the Spanish intelligentsia arrived, a terrible bloodletting for the contemptible Franco dictatorship but a magnificent transfusion for Mexico’s university life, literature, art, and science. In exchange for shelter, the Spanish Republicans renovated Mexico’s culture-a wonderful example of the universalism that saves cultures from nationalist viruses.

In a small apartment on Lerma Street, the great poet Emilio Prados, with his blind man’s glasses and his tangled, graying mane, lived modestly. Prados had already foreseen the “flight” and “arrival” in his beautiful poems about the “persecuted body,” which Laura memorized and recited to Santiago. The poet wanted to flee, he said, “tired of hiding in the branches… tired of this wound. There are limits.” As Laura recited, she heard the voice of Jorge Maura reaching her from far off, as if poetry were the only form of true actuality allowed by the eternal God to His poor mortal creatures. Prados, Jorge Maura, Laura D az, and perhaps Santiago Lopez-Diaz as he listened to her read the poems-they all wanted to arrive “with my rigid body… that flows like a river without water, walking on foot through a dream with five sharp flames nailed to my chest.”

Coming and going, tricked out like an Englishman taking a stroll, was Luis Cernuda with his houndstooth jackets and Duke of Windsor ties, his slicked-down hair and French movie-star mustache, scattering the most beautiful erotic poems in the Spanish language along the streets of Mexico City. Now it was Santiago who read to his mother, running feverishly from one poem to the next, never finishing one, finding the perfect line, the unforgettable words:

What a sad noise two bodies make when they love.

I could knock down their body, leaving only the truth of your love…

I know no freedom but the freedom of being imprisoned in someone…

I kissed his tracks…

Luis Bun uel was in Mexico City, too, expelled from New York because of the gossip and calumny there of his former friend Salvador Dal, now anagrammed into Avida Dollars. Laura D az learned about him from Jorge Maura, who had shown her Bun uel’s film about the Las Hurdes region in Spain, a film of unbearable pain and abandonment that the Republic itself censored.

And on Amazonas Street lived Don Manuel Pedroso, former rector of the University of Seville, surrounded by first editions of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, with his students at his feet. Danton, brought to one of Pedroso’s tertulias by a fellow student in the law school, remarked to his friend as they walked along Paseo de la Reforma to dine at the Bellinghausen restaurant on Londres Street, “He’s a charming old man. But his ideas are utopian. That stuff’s not for me.”

At the next table, Max Aub was eating with other exiled writers. He looked focused: short, curly hair, immense forehead, eyes lost in the depth of a glass swimming pool, and expressions impossible to separate, like the faces on a coin, where heads was his frown and tails his smile. Aub had shared adventures with Andre Malraux during the war and predicted for Franco a “true death” that would be totally unrelated to any calendar date, because for the dictator it would be, more than a surprise, an ignorance of his own death.

“My mother knows him,” said Danton to his classmate. “She’s in with the intellectuals because she works with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.”

“And because she was the girlfriend of a Spanish Communist spy,” said the friend, though that was the last thing he said, because Danton broke his nose with a punch. Chairs were turned over, tablecloths were stained, and Laura Diaz’s son angrily shook off the waiters and departed the restaurant.

The torero Manolete, now living in Mexico, was bringing crowds to the bullfights. A Francoist, he was actually El Greco’s last creation: thin, sad, stylized, Manuel Rodriguez “Manolete” was skillful in a priestly way. He fought standing tall, immutable, vertical as a candle. His rival was Pepe Luis Vazquez, Juan Francisco explained to Danton when father and son went to the new Plaza Monumental Mexico along with sixty thousand fans to see Manolete, Pepe Luis being the orthodox Sevillan and Manolete the unorthodox Cordoban, who broke the classic rules by not extending the muleta-the short staff on which the red cape is hung-to calm and control the bull, who didn’t take risks to make the bull enter the space of the fight, who stood still, calmed and ordered, never moving from his place, exposed to the bull, who was bringing the fight to him. And when the bull charged this unmoving bullfighter, the entire stadium gasped in anguish, held its breath, and exploded into an ole of victory when the marvelous Manolete broke the tension with an extremely slow- moving attack and sank his sword into the bull’s body. Did you see that? Juan Francisco asked his son as they walked, in the crush of the crowd, out of the Plaza through the honeycomb of crisscrossing long passageways. Did you see that? He fought the whole time face to face, never bending, dominating the bull from below, our hearts all skipped a beat watching him fight! But Danton remembered only one lesson: The bull and the bullfighter saw each other’s face. They were two faces of death. Only apparently did the bull die and the bullfighter survive. The truth is, the man was mortal and the animal immortal, the hull went on and on and on, charged and charged and charged,