At first she was critical of the piece. The angular, prominent, twisted, and cruel outline of the figures derived from Santiago’s admiration for Egon Schiele and from his long study of the Viennese albums that had miraculously turned up at the German Bookstore in Colonia Hipódromo. The difference, Laura quickly noticed when she compared the books with the painting, was that Schiele’s figures were almost always unique, solitary, or, rarely, intertwined diabolically and innocently in a frozen physical union that was merely physiological and always-whether together or apart-airless, having no reference to any landscape, or room, or other space, as if in an ironic return by the most modern artist to the most ancient art, Schiele the blase Expressionist returned to Byzantine painting, where the figure of God the Pancreator is fixed before the creation of anything in the absolute void of solitary majesty.
This painting by the young Santiago took from Schiele’s tortured figures, no doubt of it, but also gave back to them, as in a renaissance of the Renaissance, the way that Giotto and Masaccio gave air, landscape, and location to the ancient iconography of Byzantium. The naked man in Santiago’s canvas-emaciated, pierced by invisible thorns, young, beardless, but with the face of an unconquerable malady, a corrosive sickness running through his unwounded body that was conquered from within for having been created without being consulted first-fixed his gaze on the belly of the naked woman, pregnant, blond (Laura quickly checked for resemblances in the books Santiago had collected), just like the Eves by Holbein and Cranach, resigned to passive conquest of the man with one less rib, even though this time they were deformed by desire. The earlier Eves were impassive, fatal, but this, the new Eve of Santiago the Younger, participated in the anguish of the convulsed, young, condemned Adam who stared intensely at her belly while she, Eve, stared intensely into his eyes, and neither-only now did Laura notice this obvious detail-had their feet on the ground.
They didn’t levitate. They ascended. Laura felt a deep emotion when she understood her son Santiago’s painting. This Adam and Eve did not fall. They ascended. At their feet, the skin of the apple and the skin of the serpent fused in a single mass. Adam and Eve left the garden of delights, but they did not fall into the inferno of pain and toil. Their sin was of another kind. They ascended. They rebelled against the divine decree-thou shall not eat this fruit-and instead of falling, they rose. Thanks to sex, rebellion, and love, Adam and Eve were the protagonists of the Ascent of Humanity, not its Fall. The evil of the world was believing that the first man and the first woman fell and condemned us to a heritage of vice. For Santiago the Younger, on the other hand, Adam and Eve’s guilt was not hereditary, wasn’t even guilt, and the drama of the Earthly Paradise was a triumph of human freedom over God’s tyranny. It wasn’t drama. It was history.
In the deepest part of the landscape in her son’s painting, Laura saw painted, very small, like Brueghel’s Icarus, a barque with black sails leaving the coasts of Eden behind with a single passenger, a tiny figure divided in a singular way: half of his face was angelic, the other half diabolical; one half blond, the other half red; but the body itself, wrapped in a cape as long as the sails, was shared by angel and demon, and both, Laura guessed, were God, with a cross in one hand and a pitchfork in the other: two instruments of torture and death. The lovers ascended. The one who fell was God, and the fall of God was what Santiago had painted: a departure, a distance, shock on the face of the Creator, who abandons Eden perplexed because His creatures have rebelled, because they have decided to ascend instead of fall, because they have mocked the perverse divine plan to create the world only in order to condemn it to sin, transmitted from generation to generation, so that men and women for all time will feel inferior to God, dependent on God, condemned by Him, and absolved-before falling again-only by God’s capricious grace.
On the back of the canvas, Santiago had written: “Art isn’t modern. Art is eternal. Egon Schiele.”
Line dominated color. Which is why the colors were so strong. The black ship. The red half of the Creator. The greenish red of the apple peel that was the mutable skin of the serpent. But Eve’s skin was as translucent as that of a Memling Virgin, while Adam’s was spotty, green, yellow, and sick, like an adolescent painted by Schiele.
The man stared at the woman. The woman stared at the sky. But neither of them was falling. Because both desired each other. There was that equivalence in the difference which Laura made her own, comparing her own emotions to those of her son, the young, dead artist.
She hung Santiago the Younger’s painting in her living room and understood for all time that the son was father of the mother, that, unwittingly, Laura Díaz the photographer owed more to her own son than to any other artist. At first she did not understand this, and the secret, unknown identification was for that reason all the stronger.
Now nothing mattered but the equivalence of the emotion.
3.
Show after show of photographs followed, sales first to newspapers and magazines and then in books.
Blessings of animals and birds.
Old men with huge mustaches gathered around singing corridos from the Revolution.
Flower vendors.
The crowded pools on St. John’s Day.
The life of a metalworker.
The life of a hospital nurse.
Her celebrated photograph of a dead gypsy woman with no lines on her hand, open under her breasts, a gypsy with an erased destiny.
And now something she owed Jorge Maura: a report on the exiled Spanish Republicans in Mexico.
Laura now realized that for years the Spanish Civil War had been the epicenter of her historical life, not the Mexican Revolution, which had passed through the state of Veracruz so mildly and tangentially, as if dying in the Gulf were a unique, moving, and untouchable privilege reserved for Laura’s older brother, Santiago Díaz, sole protagonist, as far as she was concerned, of the 1910 insurrection.
In Spain, on the other hand, Jorge Maura, Basilio Baltazar, and Domingo Vidal had fought, the young gringo, Jim, had died, and the sad gringo, Harry, had survived. In Spain, the beautiful and young Pilar Méndez was shot at the Roman gate of Santa Fe de Palencia by order of her own father, the Communist mayor Alvaro Méndez.
Bearing that heavy emotional weight, Laura began to photograph the faces of Spanish exile in Mexico. President Cárdenas had given sanctuary to a quarter million Republicans. Each time she photographed one of them, Laura remembered with emotion Jorge’s trip to Havana to rescue Raquel from the Prinz Eugen, anchored opposite Morro Castle.
Each one of her models could have suffered that fate: jail, torture, execution. She understood that.
She photographed the miracles of survival. She knew that’s who they were.
The philosopher José Gaos, disciple of Husserl like Jorge Maura and Raquel Mendes-Alemán, leaning on the iron railing above the patio of the Escuela de Mascarones, the philosopher with a patrician Roman head, bald and strong, as strong as his jaw, as strong as his pencil-thin lips, as skeptical as his myopic eyes behind their small, round glasses, suitable for a Franz Schubert of philosophy. Gaos leaning on the railing, and from the beautiful colonial patio the young men and women of the School of Philosophy raise their faces to look at the master with smiles of admiration and gratitude.
Luis Buñuel arranged to meet her in the bar of the Parador, where the director ordered perfect martinis from his favorite bartender, Córdoba, while he replayed the film of a cultural cycle through his memory, which went from the Student Residence in Madrid to the filming of Un Chien Andalou, in which Buñuel and Dali used the eye of a dead fish surrounded by eyelashes to simulate the heroine’s eye sliced open with a straight razor, to L’Age d’Or and its image of the ecclesiastical hierarchy transformed into petrified bone on the coast of Mallorca, to his participation in Parisian Surrealism in its New York exile, to Dalí’s denunciation (“Buñuel is a Communist, an atheist, a blasphemer, and an anarchist. How can you let him work in the Museum of Modern Art?”), to his arrival in Mexico with forty dollars in his pocket.