for himself, as it should be, whatever the fate of the painting may be, my son is going to reveal his gifts, but will not have time for his conquests, he’s going to work, to imagine, but will not have time to produce: his painting is an inevitability, that’s the reward, my son doesn’t take the place of another, and no one can take his place in what he and he alone can do, it doesn’t matter for how long; there is no frustration in his work, even if his life is cut short, his progress is astonishing, dedicating oneself to art means one revelation after another, going from surprise to surprise.
“Everything good is work,” the young Santiago would say as he painted. “The artist doesn’t exist.”
“You’re an artist,” Laura said boldly to him. “Your brother is a mercenary. That’s the difference.”
Santiago laughed, almost accusing her of being vulgarly obvious.
“No, Mama, it’s good that we’re different instead of being divided from within.”
She repented her banality. She didn’t want to make comparisons, neither critical nor reductive. She wanted to tell him it’s been wonderful watching you grow, change, generate new life, I never want to ask myself, could my son have been great? Because you already are great, I watch you paint, and I see you as if you were going to live to be one hundred, my adored son, I listened to you from the first moment, ever since you asked me without saying a word, mother, father, brother, help me to get what’s inside me out, let me
She never fully understood that request, especially when she remembered another overheard conversation between the brothers, when Danton told Santiago that the good thing about the body is that it can satisfy us at any moment, and Santiago told him it can also betray us at any moment; and that’s why you’ve got to catch pleasure on the fly, replied Danton, and Santiago: “Other satisfactions cost dearly, you have to work for them,” and then both in one voice:
Danton was afraid of nothing but sickness and death. That’s true of many men. They can fight hand to hand in a trench but be unable to endure witnessing the pain of childbirth. He sought and found pretexts for not visiting his parents’ house on Avenida Sonora. He preferred to telephone, ask for Santiago even though Santiago hated telephones-the most horrifying distraction ever invented to torture artists, how great it was when he was a boy and there were the two systems, Ericsson and Mexicana, when it was hard to communicate.
He looked at Laura.
That was before the sicknesses followed one after the other ever more rapidly, and the doctors could find no explanation for the boy’s increasing weakness, his low resistance to infection, the incomprehensible wearing down of his immunological system, and what the doctors didn’t say, what only Laura D az said, my son has to live out his own life, I’ll see to that, nothing-not sicknesses, not useless medicines, not medical advice-matters to me, what I must give my son is everything my son should have if he were going to live for a hundred years, I’m going to give my son the love, the satisfaction, the conviction that he lacked nothing in the years of his life, nothing, nothing, nothing.
She watched over him at night as he slept, wondering, what can I save of my son the artist that will last beyond the echo of death? Surprised, she admitted that she wanted not only that her son might have what he deserved but that she, Laura Diaz, might have what her son could give her. He needed to receive. She did, too. She wanted to give. Did he?
Like all painters, Santiago the Younger, when he could still move freely, liked to step back from his paintings, to see them at a certain distance.
“I look for them as if they were lovers, but I re-create them as ghosts.” He tried to laugh.
She answered those words in silence later on, when Santiago could no longer get out of bed, and she had to lie down next to him to console him, to be literally at his side, supporting him. “I don’t want to be deprived of you.”
She didn’t want to be deprived, she meant, of that part of herself that was her son.
“Tell me your plans, your ideas.”
“You speak as if I were going to live a hundred years.”
“A century fits into a day of success,” whispered Laura, with no fear of banality.
Santiago simply laughed. “Is being successful worthwhile?”
“No,” she surmised. “Sometimes absence, silence are better.”
Laura was not going to compile a list of things a boy of great talent, dying at the age of twenty-six, was not going to do, to know, to enjoy. The young painter was like a frame without a painting which she would have liked to fill with her own experiences and with their shared promises, she would have liked to bring her son to Detroit to see Diego’s mural in the Arts Institute, she would have liked both of them to go to the legendary museums, the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Mauritshuis, the Prado.
She would have wanted…
Sleeping with you, entering your bed, extracting from nearness and dreams the forms, visions, challenges, the very strength I wish I could give you when I touch you, when I whisper in your ear, your final weakness threatens me more than it does you and I want to test your strength, tell you that your strength and mine depend on each other, that my caresses, Santiago, are your caresses, those you didn’t have, will never have, accept my nearness, accept the body of your mother, do nothing, son, I bore you, I carried you inside me, I am you and you are me, what I do is what you would do, your heat is my heat, my body is your body, do nothing, I’ll do it for you, say nothing, I’ll say it for you, forget this night, I’ll remember it always for you.
“My son, what do you need, what can I do for you?”
“Nothing, Mama, what can I do for you?”
“You know I wish I could steal all the glories and virtues from the world and give them to you.”
“Thank you. But you already did, didn’t you know?”
They wouldn’t say it, ever. Santiago loved as if he were dreaming. Laura dreamed as if she were loving. Their bodies became again as they were at the beginning, the seed of each one in the womb of the other. She was reborn in him. He killed her in one single night. She did not want to think about anything. She allowed fugitive, whirling, lost images to pass through her mind, the perfume of the rain in Xalapa, the tree of smoke in Catemaco, the jewel- encrusted goddess in El Zapotal, the bloody hands washing themselves in the river, the green stick in the desert, the araucaria tree in Veracruz, the river flowing with a shriek into the Gulf, the five chairs on the balcony opposite Chapultepec, the six place settings and the napkins rolled up in their silver rings, the doll Li Po, Santiago her brother sinking dead into the sea, the severed fingers of Grandmother Cosima, the arthritic fingers of Aunt Hilda trying to play the piano, the ink-stained fingers of the poet aunt, Virginia, the urgent busy fingers of Mutti Leticia preparing a
“Thank you. Didn’t you know?”
“What else? Something else.”
“Don’t leave the birdcages open.”
“They’d come back. They are good and loving birds.”
“But cats aren’t like that.”
She hugged him tight. She did not close her eyes, hugging her son. She looked around, the white frames, the already finished paintings leaning one against the other like sleeping infantrymen, an army of colors, a parade of possible looks that would be able or never would be able to give their momentary life to the canvas, each one the owner of a double existence, that of being looked at and not.
“I dreamed about what happens to the paintings when they lock up the museums and they’re left alone all night.”
That was Santiago the Younger’s theme. The naked couples that look at each other and never touch, as if they knew, modestly, they were being looked at. The bodies in his paintings were not beautiful, not classical, they had a certain emaciated, even demonic aspect. They were a temptation, not that of coupling but that of being seen, surprised, in the moment of constituting themselves as a couple. That was their beauty, expressed in pale gray or very tenuous rose tones, where the flesh stood out like an intrusion unforeseen by God, as if in the artistic world of Santiago, God had not conceived of this intruder, his rival, the human being.
“Don’t think I’m just resigning myself to not living. I’m not. resigning myself to not working. I don’t know, for days now, the sun hasn’t shone on my head in the morning as it used to before. Would you open the curtains,
