The Years with Laura Diaz

You look picturesque to me.”

“Thanks, but I already have a date. Next Sunday perhaps.”

“Perhaps? You mean the way it is in the bolero, ‘perhaps-perhaps-perhaps.’ You talk like a bolero, I mean like a song, not like a shoeshine boy.”

“And what’s your name, blondie?”

“Blondie! He calls me blondie! People call me the Curate.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because Papa cures people. He’s a doctor. My second last name is Landa. I’m a descendant of the last city governor in the ancien regime. It’s my mother’s name.”

“And what’s your father’s name?”

“No jokes, now.”

“But you’re the one making jokes, sonny.”

“Sonny! He called me sonny! Ha-ha! No, I’m called the Curate, my father’s named Lopez too, just like yours. Now that’s amusing, really amusing! We’re namesakes in reverse! It’s fate! Anastasio Lopez-Landa. Don’t forget next Sunday. You seem like a good guy. But buy yourself a better tie. The ones you’ve been wearing look like a flag.”

What would a “better” tie look like? Whom to ask? The next Sunday, Danton turned up in church in riding clothes, jodhpurs and boots, a coffee-colored jacket, an open shirt. And with a riding crop in his hand.

“Where do you ride? Hmm… What did you say your name was?”

“Lopez, like you. Danton.”

“The guillotine, ha-hal Your parents must really be something!”

“A joke a minute. The Atayde circus hires them when things get rough.”

“Ha-ha-ha, Danton! You’re a real scream, you know,” said the other Lopez, shifting into English.

“Yeah, I’m the cat’s pajamas,” said Danton,. A line from an American movie comedy.

“Listen, everybody, this guy knows everything. He’s the bee’s knees! He’s Tarzan’s mama!”

“Of course. Me Columbus. Cristobal Col??n!”

“And my sons are Crystal Balls, ha-ha! Look, I live right around the corner here on Amberes. Come with me, and I’ll lend you a tie, old sport.”

Danton turned La Votiva and the Jockey into his Sunday obligations, more sacred than taking communion-just to stay on the right side of his new acquaintances-without the benefit of confession.

At first his presence was disconcerting. He made a detailed study of the way the boys dressed. He did not let himself be put off by the girls’ cool manners, though he’d never seen he who knew only eternal mournings and the flowered silk outfits provincial women wore-so many young ladies in suits or kilts with sweaters, a cardigan over a matching sweater, and a pearl necklace on top of everything else. A Spanish girl, Maria Luisa Elio, attracted attention with her beauty and elegance; she was ash blond, slim as a little bullfighter, in a black beret like Michele Morgan in the French movies they all went to see at the Trans-Lux Prado, a checked jacket, pleated skirt, and she leaned on an umbrella.

Danton was confident in his potency, his virility, in the very fact that he stood out. He was as dark as a gypsy and hadn’t lost his childhood long eyelashes, which now more than ever shaded his green eyes and olive cheeks, his short nose, and his full, feminine lips. He was about five feet ten and tended to be square, like a sportsman, but with the hands of a pianist-so he’d been told-like those of Aunt Hilda, who played Chopin in Catemaco. Danton would say, rather vulgarly, “These thoroughbred mares need a good branding,” and he’d ask Juan Francisco for money, he couldn’t walk in like a beggar every Sunday, he too had to shoot from time to time, I’ve got new friends, Dad, high-class, you don’t want me to make the whole family look bad, do you? And look, I do my work all week, I never miss an eight o’clock class, I take my exams right on schedule and get A or A minus, I have a good head for economics, I swear, Papa, whatever you lend me now I’ll give back with compound interest, I swear… When have I ever let you down?

The first rows at the Hippodrome were occupied by generals nostalgic for their own, now ancient, cavalry charges; then came big businessmen who’d arrived even more recently than the soldiers, men who’d made their fortunes, paradoxically, with the radical reforms of President Lazaro Cardenas, thanks to which the peons, who had been locked into their social position, had left the haciendas and worked for almost nothing in new factories in Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Mexico City. Less paradoxically, the new fortunes had been made because of war, monopolies, Mexico’s export of strategic materials, the rising cost of food…

Linking these groups was a small Italian named Bruno Pagliai, smiling and elegant, manager of the racetrack and possessor of an irresistible furberia that dominated, restrained, and shamed the rustic malice of even the most hard-boiled Mexican general or millionaire. Yet there persisted a clear discrimination. The world of La Votiva, of the Curate (Lopez-Landa) and his friends, dominated the bar, the armchairs, the dance floor, and it left to the merely rich the healthy out door life of the racetrack. The sons and daughters of generals and tycoons were also left on the outs: they weren’t taken seriously; they were-as Miss Chatis Larrazabal put it-“not our kind, dear.” But among those who weren’t “our kind,” Danton one day discovered the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen in his life, a dream.

The “dream” was a beauty of a kind not found in Mexico, Levantine or Oriental, from that part of the world that the Malet and Isaac general-history textbooks called “Asia Minor.” Magdalena Ayub Longoria’s “Asia Minor” transformed her apparent defects-continuous eyebrows, prominent nose, square jaw-into a counterpoint or frame for eyes worthy of an Arabian princess, dreamy and velvety, eloquent beneath oiled and erotic eyelids, like a hidden sex. Her smile was so warm, sweet, and ingenuous that it would justify the veil and seraglio concealing her from everyone but her master. She was tall, slim, but she hinted here and there at roundnesses now scarcely imaginable: thus did Danton describe her to himself.

His imagination was on the mark.

The first time he saw her, she was sipping a “Shirley Temple,” and from that moment on he called her “my dream.” Magdalena Ayub was the daughter of a merchant from Syria or Lebanon-Mexicans always referred to them as “Turks”-named Simon Ayub, who’d come to Mexico barely twenty years before and now had a colossal fortune and the most vulgar neo-baroque mansion in Colonia Polanco. How had he accumulated his cash? By taking over markets that had been monopolies in the days of Obregon and Calles and were enhanced during the war by artificially elevated prices: for henequen, an essential rope-making fiber, for the Allies, bought cheap from Yucatan communal farms and sold dear to the gringos; vegetables exported during the winter for Yankee soldiers; pharmaceutical factories set up when gringo medicines stopped coming and anyway could be manufactured more cheaply in Mexico, even introducing sulfa drugs and penicillin. He was the inventor of black thread and perhaps even of aspirin itself! Which is why he was dubbed Aspirin Ayub, recalling, it may be, the Revolutionary general who cured his soldiers’ headaches with a bullet to the forehead.

And even if he was uglier than the wrong end of a mule, he’d married a pretty woman from the north, from some border town, one of those women who could tempt the Pope and make St. Joseph a bigamist. Dona Magdalena Longoria de Ayub. Danton looked her over, because everyone said that after a while your girlfriend starts looking like your mother-in-law-all girlfriends, all mothers-in-law. And big Magdalena, who really was big, passed the test. Danton told the Curate, Lopez-Landa, that she was “ripe” or, more biblically, that her cups overfloweth.

“I swear, Dan, look over there at the mother and the daughter in their box. You tell me which you’d rather have.”

“If I’m lucky, both of them,” said Danton, with a manhattan in one hand and a Pall Mall in the other.

He approached the daughter and succeeded. He asked her to dance. He removed her from the isolation of the new and brought her into the community of the old. He himself was shocked it should be he, Danton Lopez-Diaz (and Greene and Kelsen), who led the fortunate princess by the hand into the exclusive circle of the kings of ruin.

“May I introduce Magdalena Ayub? We’re to be married.”

Her mouth fell open with all the astonishment a nineteen-year-old can muster. The boy was joking. They’d just met.