The Years with Laura Diaz

your husband’s life. Those twenty years of glory, eloquence, fearlessness, they were his life. He had no life before or after his moment of glory, if you’ll permit me to call it that. With you, he sought the safe harbor for a tired hero. Did you give him the peace he silently begged of you? Or did you demand of him what he could no longer give? A tired hero who’d lived something no one lives twice, his moment of glory. He came from far away and from the depths of society, Laura. When I met him, he was a little boy in Macuspana, wandering around like an animal with no master, no family, stealing food here and there when bananas, which Tabasco gives freely to the hungriest of the poor, weren’t enough for him. I took him in. I dressed him. I taught him to read and write. You know well that this is common practice in Mexico. The young priest teaches a poor boy to read and write the language the boy will use against our Holy Mother Church as a man. That was the case with Benito Juarez, and that was the case with Lopez Greene. That last name. Where did he get it, when he had neither father nor mother nor sister nor brother? “I heard it, Father…” Lopez is a very common name in Hispanic genealogy, and Greene is a name found frequently among families in Tabasco that descend from English pirates of colonial times, when Sir Henry Morgan himself attacked the coast of the Gulf of Campeche and sacked the ports whence Mexico’s gold and silver were shipped to Spain. And Juan? Again, the commonest name in the Spanish language. But Francisco because I taught him the virtues of the most admirable saint in Christendom, the man from Assisi… Ah, my dear girl Laura, St. Francis abandoned a life of luxury and pleasure to become God’s jester. I took the opposite route, as you know. Sometimes faith falters. There would be no faith without doubt. I was young when I came to Catemaco to take the place of a beloved parish priest, you remember him, Father Jesus Morales. I’ll confess several things. I was annoyed by the aura of sanctity surrounding Father Morales. I was very young, imaginative, even perverse. If St. Francis went from sin to sanctity, I would do the same, perhaps in reverse, I’d be a perverse, sinful priest, what horrors did I not pour into your ear, Laura, defying the greatest commandment of Our Lord Jesus Christ, not to scandalize children? What greater crime than running off with the treasure of the poorest, offerings to the Holy Child of Zongolica? Believe me, Laura, I sinned to be holy. That was my project, my perverted Franciscanism, if you prefer. I was defrocked, and that’s how you found me, surviving on my stolen money as your mother’s guest, may God have her in His glory, in Xalapa. You must have said something to your husband. He remembered me. He came looking for me. He thanked me for my teaching. He knew about my sin. He confessed his own. He betrayed the nun who called herself Carmela, Sister Gloria Soriano, implicated in the assassination of President-elect Alvaro Obregon. He did it out of revolutionary conviction, he said. The policy then was to extinguish the clericalism that in Mexico had exploited the poor and supported the exploiters. He didn’t hesitate to turn her in: it was his obligation. He never thought that you, Laura-you weren’t even a believer-would take it so seriously. How strange, but how wrong. We never measure the moral consequences of our acts. We think we’re obeying the mandates of ideology, whether we’re revolutionaries, clericalists, liberals, conservatives, Cristeros, and what slips through our fingers is the precious liquid we call, for lack of a better word, “the soul.” Your brutal reaction to his betrayal of Gloria Soriano at first disconcerted Juan Francisco and then depressed him. It was like the tombstone over his career. He was finished. He did ridiculous things, like hiring a detective to spy on you. He repented of his silliness, I assure you. But once a priest always a priest, you know that not even if they cut off my fingertips I could never give up hearing confessions and absolving people of their sins. Laura: Juan Francisco asked me to forgive his betrayal of Gloria Soriano. It was his way of thanking me for having taken in a barefoot, ignorant boy and educated him sixty-five years ago, just imagine. But he did something else. He returned the treasure of the Holy Child of Zongolica. One afternoon, as they came into the church for vespers, the townspeople found the jewelry, the offerings, everything they’d given and saved, back in its proper place. You never knew, because Catemaco news never leaves Catemaco. But the bedazzled town attributed it to a miracle wrought by the Holy Child, capable of re- creating His own treasure and returning it to where it belonged. It was as if He’d said, If I made you wait it was so you would feel the absence of my offerings and rejoice even more when you recovered them. How did you pay for all that? I asked Juan Francisco. With contributions from the workers, he confessed. Did they know? No, I told them it was for victims of an epidemic after the Usumacinta River flooded. No one ever kept any accounts. Laura, I hope you’ll return to your hometown to see how beautiful the altar is thanks to Juan Francisco. Laura, forgive men who have nothing more to give than what they carry within them. Sometimes the well runs dry. As with me, I’m. running out of communions. I don’t think we’ll ever see each other again. I don’t want us to see each other again. It was very hard for me to appear today before you at the funeral parlor. How good it was you didn’t recognize me. Damn, I don’t even recognize myself!

Remember, with a drop of tenderness,

ELZEVIR ALMONTE

That weekend, Basilio Baltazar rented a car, and the two of them drove to Cuernavaca, Laura and her old friend the Spanish anarchist.

19.

Cuernavaca: 1952

LAURA DOVE into the pool, framed in bougainvillea, and didn’t surface until she reached the far end. On the side, a large group of foreign men and women were chatting, the majority Americans, a few in bathing suits but most of them dressed, the women in full skirts and “Mexican-style” short-sleeved blouses with flower-embroidered bodices, the men in short-sleeved shirts and summer slacks, most of them getting their feet used to huaraches, all of them, every single one of them, holding a drink, all of them guests of the splendid English Communist Fredric Bell, whose house in Cuernavaca had become a sanctuary for the victims of McCarthyite persecution in the United States.

Bell’s wife, Ruth, was an American who balanced the high, dry irony of her British husband with an earthy coarseness, close to the soil, as if she were dragging along her roots in the Chicago slums where she was born. She was a woman from the Great Lakes and immense prairies who by chance had been born on the asphalt of the “big- shouldered city,” in Carl Sandburg’s words. Ruth’s shoulders easily carried her husband, Fredric, and her husband’s friends, she was Sancho Panza to Fredric, the tall, slim Englishman with blue eyes, clear brow, and thin, completely white hair surrounding his freckled skull.

“A Quixote of lost causes,” Basilio Baltazar told Laura.

Ruth had the strength of a steel die, from the tips of her bare toes on the grass to her curly, short gray hair.

“Almost all of them are directors and screenwriters,” Basilio went on as he drove along the recently opened highway between Mexico City and Cuernavaca, which reduced the trip to only forty-five minutes, “a few professors, but mostly movie people.”

“You’re safe, then, you’re in the minority.” Laura smiled. She had a kerchief tied over her head against the wind blowing over the MG convertible that Garcia Ascot, a Republican poet exiled in Mexico, had lent to his friend Basilio.

“Can you see me as a professor, teaching Spanish literature to proper young ladies at Vassar?” asked Basilio maliciously, as he steered smoothly around the highway curves.

“Is that where you met this gang of reds?”

“No. On the side, I moonlight on weekends-extra, unpaid work at the New School for Social Research in New York. The students there are workers, older people who had no time to get an education. That’s where I met a lot of the people you’re going to meet today.”

She wanted to ask a favor of Basilio, that he not treat her with pity, that he simply relegate the past that both knew to a tranquil, silent memory, the past whose pains and joys leave their marks on our bodies.

“You’re still a beautiful woman.”

“I’m over fifty. A bit.”

“Well, there are women twenty years younger than you who wouldn’t be seen in a one piece bathing suit.”

“I love swimming. I was born next to a lake and grew up on the seacoast.”

Good manners did not let the group take overt notice of her when she dove into the pool, but when she came out, Laura noticed the curious, approving, smiling glances of the gringos gathered for dinner that Saturday in Cuernavaca at the house of the Communist Fredric Bell, and she also saw, as if in a Diego Rivera mural or a King