They hugged each other with an emotion like that attending a new birth, as if they’d both in some way been reborn in that instant and, in the emotion of their meeting, could fall in love and again be the young people they had been fifteen years earlier. But now they were both accompanied, Laura Diaz by Jorge Maura, Basilio Baltazar by Pilar Mendez. And Jorge, on his island, forever accompanied by the other Mends-Raquel.
They looked at each other with immense tenderness, unable to speak for a few moments.
“See?” Basilio smiled behind his moist eyes. “We never escape our problems. We never stop persecuting or being persecuted.”
“Yes, I do see,” she said in a broken voice.
“There are some terrific people among these gringos. They’re almost all film or theater directors, writers, not to mention a few veterans of our war and the Lincoln Brigade. Remember?”
“How could I forget, Basilio?”
“Most of them live in Cuernavaca. Why don’t we go down one weekend and talk to them.”
All Laura could do was kiss the cheek of her old friend the Spanish anarchist, as if she were once again kissing Jorge Maura, as if she were seeing for the first time the always hidden face of Armonia Aznar, as if from the bottom of the gulf arose the face of her adored brother, the first Santiago. Basilio was the catalyst of a past Laura missed terribly but considered lost forever.
“I don’t think so. You make our past into a present, Basilio. Thanks.”
Going to Cuernavaca to argue about politics, but this time with Americans instead of Spaniards or Mexican labor leaders betrayed by the Revolution, by Calles and Morones… the idea tired and depressed her as she returned that night to the family house on Avenida Sonora, now so solitary without Maria de la O and Santiago, both dead, Danton married and living, as he always wanted to, in Las Lomas de Chapultepec. Laura, in an aesthetic fit, had sworn she’d never set foot in his house.
“You said you were going to change your in-laws’ taste, Danton.”
“Just wait a while, Mama. It’s a period of adjustment, an accommodation. I have to make my father-in-law happy so I can dominate him. Don Aspirin’s half senile. Don’t worry, at least we got rid of the fountains on the terrace.”
“What about your wife?”
“Mama, I swear poor Magda was so completely ignorant I had to finish her toilet training.”
“You’re as vulgar as they come.” But Laura couldn’t keep from laughing.
“I’ve actually got her convinced that the stork will be bringing the baby.”
“What baby?” said Laura, hugging her son.
I’m fifty-two and I’m going to be a grandmother, she kept saying to herself on the way home from the Coyoacan party and Basilio Baltazar. She’d been forty when she met Jorge Maura. Now I live alone with Juan Francisco, but I am going to be a grandmother.
The mere sight of Juan Francisco in bathrobe and slippers opening the door reminded her that she was, like it or not, a wife. She instantly rejected a repugnant but all too noble idea that had flashed through her mind. We only survive at home. Only those who stay at home survive. Out in the world, chasing the light, the fireflies burn up and die. That had to be what her grandfather must have thought, the old German Don Felipe Kelsen, who crossed the ocean to lock himself away in the Catemaco coffee plantation never to leave again. Was he happier than his descendants? Children shouldn’t be judged by their parents, much less the grandchildren. The idea that the generation gap has never been greater is false. The world has always been made up of generations standing on opposite sides of an abyss. It’s also made up of couples divided at times by clamorous silences, like the one that separated Grandfather Felipe from his beautiful and mutilated Dona Cosima, whose self absorbed gaze was never distracted-Laura knew from the time she was a child-from the dangerous and dashing bandit of Papantla. Seeing Juan Francisco in his robe and slippers open the door-old slippers with a hole for the big toe on his right foot to air, the chenille robe with gaudy stripes like a serape turned into a towel-she was seized with laughter thinking that her husband might be the secret child of that highwayman from the era of Benito Juarez.
“What the devil are you laughing at?”
“At the idea that we’re going to be grandparents, old boy,” she said, giggling hysterically.
In some unconscious way, the news of his daughter-in-law’s pregnancy buried Juan Francisco for good. It was as if the announcement of an imminent birth demanded the sacrifice of a hasty death, so that the child could take the space now uselessly occupied by the old man; he was now sixty-nine. Well, that was an educated guess, said Laura, smiling, because no one had ever seen his birth certificate. She saw him as dead beginning the night when he opened the door of their solitary home. Which is to say, she took away the time left to him.
Now there would be no time for a few sad caresses.
She saw him close the door, double-lock it and slide the bolt, as if there were something worthy of being stolen in that sad, poor place.
Now there would be no time to say that after all he’d had a happy life.
He shuffled off to the kitchen to make the coffee that both put him to sleep and gave him the sensation of doing something useful, something he could do on his own without Laura’s help.
Now there would be no time to change that winter smile.
He sipped his coffee slowly, moistening the remnants of a roll in it.
Now there would be no time to rejuvenate a soul that had become old. Not even believing in the immortality of the soul would make it conceivable that Juan Francisco’s might survive.
He cleaned his teeth with a toothpick.
Now there would be no time for a new and first look of love, neither sought nor foreseen yet astonishing.
He left the kitchen and glanced at the old newspapers saved for the hot-water heater.
Now there would be no time for the pity the old deserve even when they’ve lost love and respect.
He crossed the room filled with the velvet-covered furniture where years ago Laura had whiled away long hours while her husband argued labor politics in the dining room.
Now there would be no time to become indignant when results and not words were demanded of him.
He made a half turn back to the dining room, as if he’d left something behind, a memory, a promise.
Now there would be no time to justify himself, saying he’d joined the official party to convince those in power of the error of their ways.
Stumbling, he grabbed the banister on the stairway.
Now there would be no time to try to change things from within the government and the party.
Each stair took a century.
Now there would be no time to feel himself judged by her.
Each stair had turned to stone.
Now there would be no time to feel himself condemned or satisfied that it was only she who judged him, no one else.
He managed to reach the second floor.
Now there would be no time for his own conscience to condemn him.
He felt disoriented. Where was the bedroom? Which door led to the bathroom?
Now there would be no time to recover the prestige he’d accumulated over years and lost in an instant, as if nothing counted but that instant when the world turns its back on you.
Ah yes, this was the bathroom.
Now there would be no time to hear her say, What did you do today? and to answer the usual thing, You know.
He knocked modestly at the door.
Now there would be no time to keep an eye on her every moment during the day, to have her followed by detectives, to humiliate her a bit because he loved her too much.
He went into the bathroom.
Now there would be no time for her to pass from tedium and disdain to love and tenderness. No more time.
He looked at himself in the mirror.
Now there would be no time for the workers to love him, for him to feel loved by the workers.
He took down his razor, the shaving soap, and brush.
Now there would be no time to relive the historic days of the Rio Blanco strikes.
