generosity, everything but health, everything but life and time to live it. Only now did father and mother discover that both had refused to pity Santiago because in this house no one was permitted to pity anyone. We can betray with pity those whom we love.
“Is that why you favored Danton so openly, Juan Francisco?”
Laura had boasted of the eloquent silence between mother and son. Solitude and quietude had united them. Was that also true about the relation of Santiago to Juan Francisco? Was being explicit about what was taking place more than an offense? Was it a betrayal? Mother and son lived a skein of complicities, shared thoughts, ways of saying thank you, everything but compassion-damned, forbidden compassion… did the father also live and feel this, at a distance, celebrating the other son, father of both?
Every mother knows there are children who take care of themselves. Trying to protect them is an effrontery. That was how it was with Danton. To her, his father’s nearness to him seemed an abuse; Juan Francisco understood nothing, gave everything to the son who needed nothing, Danton who almost from infancy played all day unaware of what might be happening in the shadows and silence of their home where his brother lived. But Laura knew instinctively that even if Danton needed no attention and Santiago did, an excessive display of it would have been more offensive and damaging to the weak boy than to the strong one. That wasn’t the problem. Danton moved through the world adjusting everything to his own advantage. Santiago disregarded everything except what he considered essential to his painting, his music, his poetry, his Van Gogh and his Egon Schiele, his Baudelaire and his Rimbaud, his Schubert…
Now, seeing both father and son, Juan Francisco and Danton, weeping over the handsome, ascetic body of the young Santiago, Laura realized that the brothers had loved each other but were too modest to show it-brotherly love is virile; sometimes it must wait until the moment of death to show itself as love, affection, tenderness… Now she blamed herself. Had Laura Diaz stolen all her glories from the world just to give them solely to Santiago? All the virtue for the weak brother? Didn’t the strong brother also deserve something? Had she in reality lost two sons?
“Did I ever tell you,” said Juan Francisco after the funeral, “that one night I surprised them talking to each other like men? Both were saying, ‘We’re all we need.’ They were declaring themselves independent of you and of me, Laura. How incredible to surprise your sons in the very moment when they are declaring independence. Except that Santiago really meant what he said. All he needed was himself. Danton’s different. He needs success, money, society. He needs more than himself; he’s fooling himself. That’s why he needs us more than ever.”
Would there be time to correct thirty years of errors in a shared life with two adult sons, one already dead? Santiago wrote a poem just before he died that Laura showed to Juan Francisco, especially one line:
“My sons are my biography, Laura. I don’t have any other.”
“What about me?”
“You’re part of it too, darling.”
Was that Juan Francisco’s secret, that his life had no secret because he had no past, that his life was only external, the fame of Juan Francisco the orator, the leader, the revolutionary? And behind it, what was there that opened up behind it? Nothing?
“There was a girl in Villahermosa who suffered from mongolism. She would threaten people, hit them, and spit, all violently. Her mother had to put blinders on her, as if she were a horse, so she couldn’t see the world and could calm down.”
“Was she your neighbor in Tabasco?”
No, he didn’t have neighbors, he said, shaking his head.
“Who are you? Where are you from? Are you ever going to tell me?”
Again, he shook his head.
“Don’t you realize that separates us, Juan Francisco? Just when we’re on the verge of understanding each other you deny me the story of your life once again?”
This time he nodded his head.
“What did you do, Juan Francisco? Were you a hero who simply got tired? Was your heroism a lie? Do you know that’s what I’ve come to believe? What myth are you going to transmit to your sons, the living and the dead one, too-have you thought about that? What are you going to leave us? The whole truth? A half-truth? The good part? The bad? Which part goes to Danton, who’s alive? Which to Santiago, who’s dead?”
She knew that only time, which fades like smoke, would reveal her husband’s jealously guarded secret. How many times had they each invited the other to give up? Could they ever say,
“Later you’ll understand,” said the man. He was more and more beaten down.
“Do you realize what you’re making me do? You’re making me ask you questions. What must I give you, Juan Francisco, what do you want from me? Would you like me to call you ‘sweetheart’ and ‘my love’ again, even though you know I reserve those words for another man and for my sons, they’re not your words, you’re my husband, Juan Francisco, not my tenderness, my dear one, my love (my hidalgo, my adored little Spanish boy…)?”
She feared-or only wanted to believe-that at a certain moment Juan Francisco would shake off his lethargy and touch her with another voice, the voice, new and old at the same time, of the end. She schooled herself in patience for the end to come, visibly approaching in the physical collapse of this oversized man with wide shoulders and immense hands, short torso and long legs, like others in his caste. His caste: Laura wanted to attribute something to Juan Francisco, at least race, caste, descent, family, father, mother, lovers, first wife, illegitimate or legitimate children, what difference did it make? One day, she was on the verge of taking the Interoceanic train back to Veracruz and from there going by boat and highway to Tabasco to consult registries, but that made her feel like a contemptible busybody. So she followed her daily routine, helping Frida Kahlo, in more pain than ever, with one leg amputated, a prisoner of her bed and wheelchair, and she went to gatherings hosted by the Riveras in honor of the new wave of exiles-Americans persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
A new war had begun, the Cold War. Churchill had recognized it in a famous speech: “An iron curtain has descended over Europe…” Stalin proved that the democracies’ suspicions of the Soviet Union were well founded. The old dictator’s paranoia led him to commit delirious crimes: he jailed and ordered the execution not of his nonexistent enemies but of his friends, out of fear that one day they might become enemies. He carried out preventive assassination and imprisonment, cruel and horribly unnecessary. Yet Picasso painted the “realistic” portrait of Stalin with a dove, because devotees of that strange monster-so argued about during the evenings with Domingo Vidal, Basilio Baltazar, and Jorge Maura in the Cafe de Paris during the Spanish Civil War-believed he was now champion of peace, enemy of U.S. imperialism. For their part, Americans invented their own anti-Communist paranoia and saw Stalinist agents under every rug, on every New York stage, and in every Hollywood film.
The new exiles began gathering at the Riveras’ house, but many stopped coming because Diego’s Marxist logorrhea bored them and they were indignant about Frida’s devotion to Uncle Joe, to whom she dedicated a portrait and unlimited praise despite the fact that (or perhaps because) Stalin had had her lover Leon Trotsky murdered.
Laura Diaz remembered Jorge Maura’s words-there’s no need to change life, no need to transform the world. We have to diversify life. We have to give up the illusion that a recovered unity is the key to a new paradise. We have to see difference as a value. Difference strengthens identity. Jorge Maura had said he found himself between two truths: that the world was going to save itself, and that the world was doomed. Both are true: capitalism’s corrupt society is doomed, but the revolution’s ideal society is also doomed.
“Believe in the opportunities of freedom,” said a warm voice behind Laura, a voice that dominated the debates (profound) and conversations (flat) at the Riveras’ house. “Remember that politics is secondary to personal integrity. Without personal integrity the social life is not worth living.”
“Jorge!” exclaimed Laura in a shock of disbelief, spinning around to see the face of a still young-looking man with thick hair and brows that were no longer black as they once had been but spattered with white.
“No. I’m sorry to disappoint you. Basilio. Basilio Baltazar. Remember me?”
