Through his grandmother, this new Santiago was heir to them all, whether he knew it or not. The years with Laura Díaz had formed the days of Santiago the New, which is how she thought of him, like the new apostle in the long line of namesakes of the son of Zebedee who had been a witness at Gethsemane of Christ’s transfiguration. The Santiagos, “sons of lightning,” all violently killed. St. James pierced by the swords of Herod. St. James the Less garroted by the Sanhedrin. Santiago saints: history recorded two; she, Laura, had four of them, and a name, said the grandmother, is a manifestation of our most intimate nature. Laura, Lourdes, Santiago.
Now the faith of the friends and lovers of all the years with Laura Díaz was the faith of Laura Díaz’s grandson, who, along with hundreds of young Mexicans, men and women, went to the Plaza of the Three Cultures, the ancient Aztec ceremonial center Tlatelolco, with no more illumination than that which came from the dying afternoon in the old valley of Ana huac. Everything was old here, thought Laura Díaz, the Indian pyramid, the church of Santiago, the Franciscan convent and college, but also the modern buildings, the Foreign Ministry, the apartment buildings. Perhaps the most recent things were the oldest because they’d stood the test of time least, being already cracked, with peeling paint, smashed windows, sagging clotheslines, the lamentation of too many sobbing, penitential rains coming from the walls: the streetlights in the square were beginning to come on, the spotlights on prestigious buildings, lamps in kitchens, terraces, living rooms, and bedrooms; hundreds of young people were coming in on one side, dozens of sol diers surrounding them were coming from other sides; nervous shad ows appeared on the roof terraces, fists covered with white gloves were raised, and Laura photographed the figure of her grandson Santiago, with his white shirt, his stupid white shirt, as if he were asking to be a target, and his voice saying to her, (Grandmother, we don’t fit into the future, we want a future that will give room to young people, I don’t fit into the future my father invented, and Laura said to him, yes, that with her grandson she too had come to understand that all her life Mexicans had dreamed of a different country, a better country, her grandfather Felipe who emigrated from Germany to Catemaco and her grandfather Díaz who left Tenerife for Veracruz, both dreamed of a country of work and honor, as the first Santiago had dreamed of a country of justice and the second Santiago of a country of creative serenity and the third Santiago, this one entering Tlatelolco Plaza with all those students on the night of October 2, 1968, continued the dream of those whose name he bore, his namesakes, and seeing him enter the plaza, photographing him, Laura said, Today the man I love is my grandson.
She fired her camera, the camera was her weapon, and she fired only at her grandson, realizing the injustice of her attitude, since hundreds of young men and women were coming to Tlatelolco Plaza to demand a new country, a better country, a country faithful to itself, and she, Laura Díaz had eyes only for the flesh of her flesh, for the protagonist of her descendance, a boy with his hair tousled, his white shirt and dark skin and honey-green eyes and bright teeth and sturdy muscles.
I am your comrade, Laura said to Santiago from afar, I’m no longer the woman I was, now I’m yours, tonight I understand you, I understand my love Jorge Maura and the God he adores and for whom he licks the floor of a monastery in Lanzarote, I say to you, my God, take away everything I’ve been, give me sickness, give me death, give me fever, chancres, cancer, tuberculosis, give me blindness and deafness, cut out my tongue and my ears, my God, if that’s what’s necessary to save my grandson and my country, kill me with evils so my nation and my children may have health, thank you, Santiago, for teaching all of us that there are still things to fight for in this sleeping and self-satisfied and tricky and tricked Mexico of 1968, Year of the Olympic Games, thanks, my son, for teaching me the difference between the living and the dead-then the commotion in the plaza was like the earthquake that toppled the Angel of Independence, Laura’s camera looked up to the stars and saw nothing, then, trembling, it looked down and found the eye of a soldier staring at her like a scar, the camera firing and the rifles firing, extinguishing the songs, slogans, voices of the young people, and then came a horrifying silence, and one heard only the moans of the wounded and dying young people, Laura looking for the figure of Santiago and finding only white gloves against the sky, closing into insolent fists, “mission accomplished,” and the impotence of the stars to tell the story of what had happened.
Rifle butts beat Laura out of the plaza, chased out not for being Laura the photographer, grandmother of Santiago, but because all witnesses are being chased away, they want no witnesses, yet under her full skirt Laura hides her roll of film, in her panties, next to her sex, but she cannot photograph the smell of death that rises from the plaza soaked in young blood, she can no longer capture the blinded sky of the night of Tlatelolco, she cannot print the widespread fear of the great urban cemetery, the groans, the screams, the echoes of death… The city grows dark.
Not even Danton López-Díaz, the powerful Don Danton, has the right to remove his son’s body? No, not even he.
To what do the young widow and the grandmother of Santiago, young rebel leader, have a right? If they wish, they may go to the morgue and identify the body. As a concession to Don Danton, personal friend of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. They may see him, but they may not remove or bury him. No exceptions. There will not be five hundred funeral processions on October 3, 1968, in Mexico City. It would make traffic impossible. It would break the rules and regulations.
Laura and Lourdes entered the ice shed, where a strange pearly light illuminated naked bodies laid on wooden pallets mounted on sawhorses.
Laura feared that death would strip away the personalities of these stripped victims, victims of the sedition of a President gone mad with vanity, overweening power, fear, and cruelty. That would be his final victory.
“I haven’t killed anyone. Where are the dead? Come on, let them speak out. Let them talk. Me kill anyone?”
They weren’t the dead for the President. They were agitators, subversives, Communists, ideologues of destruction, enemies of the nation, the nation incarnated in the presidential Sash. Except the eagle, that night at Tlatelolco, flew off the Sash and away, flew far away, and the serpent, ashamed, thought it better to shed its skin, and the cactus grew wormy, and the water of the lake once again caught fire. Lake of Tlatelolco, throne of sacrifices, where the Tlatilca king was thrown from the top of the pyramid in 1473 to consolidate Aztec power, from the top of the pyramid the idols were cast down to consolidate Spanish power, from all four sides Tlatelolco was besieged by death, the tzompantli, the wall of skulls cemented together in an immense funeral necklace, thousands of skulls forming a defense and warning about power in Mexico, raised up, time and again, over death.
But the dead here in the morgue were singular, there wasn’t one face like another, not one body identical to another, not even uniform postures. Each bullet had left a different rosette on a murdered man’s chest, head, thigh; each man’s sex was in different repose, each woman’s sex a singular wound, that difference was the triumph of the young people sacrificed in their defeat of a violence that went unpunished, a violence that knew itself to be absolved beforehand. The proof was that two weeks later, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz inaugurated the Olympic Games with the release of a flock of peace doves and with a smile of satisfaction as wide as his bloody snout. In the presidential box, covered with smiles of national pride, were Santiago’s parents, Don Danton and Doña Magdalena. The nation had returned to order, thanks to the President’s disciplined energy.