The vernissage for Andrea Negrete’s portrait by Tizoc Ambriz was the pretext for Laura to depart from what Elizabeth, with a certain macabre resonance, called her “stiff widowhood without a stiff,” and attend an artistic “function.” Enough of ruminating about the past, enough of imagining impossible loves, enough of telling stories about Veracruz or missing her sons or feeling ashamed to go to Xalapa because she felt guilty, because it was she who had abandoned her home just as she abandoned her sons, for she knew no way to justify what she’d done, didn’t want to destroy Juan Francisco’s image for the boys, didn’t want to admit to Mutti and to her aunts that she’d made a mistake, that she would have been better off looking for a young man of her own class at the San Cayetano and Xalapa Casino dances, but above all she did not want to speak ill of Juan Francisco, wanted everyone to go on believing she’d put her faith in a fighting, valiant man, above all a leader who personified everything that had happened in Mexico in this century, didn’t want to say to her family I was mistaken, my husband is corrupt or mediocre, my husband is an ambitious man unworthy of his ambition, your father, Santiago, can’t live without having someone recognize his merits, your father, Danton, is defeated by his belief that other people don’t give him what he deserves-my husband, Elizabeth, is incapable of recognizing that he’s already lost his merit. The gold has rubbed off his medals and only the copper is left.
“Your father hasn’t done anything except inform on a persecuted woman.”
How could she say that to Santiago and Danton, who were going to turn, respectively, nine and eight? How could she explain herself to Mutti and her aunts? How could she tell them that all the prestige won over years of struggle had evaporated in a second because one thing had been done badly? It was better, Laura told herself in her self-imposed solitude, for Juan Francisco to go on thinking she had judged and condemned him. It didn’t matter to her, so long as he believed it was only she and no one else-not the world, not his sons, not some middle aged women hidden in a Xalapa boardinghouse and unimportant to him-who judged him. Her husband’s pride would remain intact. The wife’s sorrow would only be the wife’s.
She did not know how to say all that to the insistent Elizabeth, just as she couldn’t explain it to the family in Veracruz, to whom she wrote as if nothing had happened. The letters would arrive at Avenida Sonora, and Juan Francisco’s new maid would turn them over to Laura every week. Laura would go to her old home at midday when he wasn’t in. Laura was sure: if María de la O suspected something, she would keep quiet about it. Discretion was born with María de la O.
The invitation to the unveiling of Andrea Negrete’s portrait was irresistible because, one day before, Elizabeth had spoken about expenses with her guest.
“Don’t worry about anything, Laura. The hat, the dresses, you’ll pay me back when you can.”
“Juan Francisco’s monthly allotment to me hasn’t come yet.”
“It wouldn’t be enough!” laughed the rose-colored blonde tenderly. “You’ve got a wardrobe like Marlene’s.”
“I like pretty things. Perhaps because I don’t have, for the moment, any compensation for such an… absence, I guess I’d call it.”
“Something will come your way. Don’t upset yourself.”
The truth is that she wasn’t spending very much money. She read. She went to concerts and museums alone, to the movies and to dinner with Elizabeth. The situation that separated her from her husband was for her a period of mourning. Between them was a betrayal, a death-a dead woman. But the Chanel perfume, the little Schiaparelli hat, the suit tailored by Balenciaga… So much had changed so quickly. Fashion: How was Laura going to appear in public wearing a flapper’s short skirt like a Charleston dancer and Clara Bow hair when everyone had to dress like the new Hollywood stars? Skirts were longer, hair was wavier, busts were decked out with huge pique lapels, those who dared wore silk evening dresses sculpted to the shape of the body, like the platinum blonde Jean Harlow, and a fashionable hat was indispensable. A woman took off her hat only to sleep or play tennis. A rubber bathing cap was called for even in the swimming pool-marcelled hair had to be protected.
“Come on now, pluck up your courage.”
Before she could say hello to the hostess or admire the severe Bauhaus lines of the penthouse, decorated by Pani, or pay respects to the guest of honor, two hands covered Laura Díaz’s eyes. Then came a coquettish “Guess who!” (in English), and before Laura’s half-opened eye, the heavy gold ring with the initials OX.
For an instant, she did not want to see it. Behind Orlando Ximénez’s hands was the young man she hadn’t wanted to look at the first time she’d met him, in the dining room of the San Cayetano hacienda. Once again she smelled the English cologne, once again she heard the baritone voice raised intentionally as, it seemed, was the custom among the English. She imagined the tenuous light of the tropical terrace, and saw in her mind’s eye the chiseled profile, the straight nose, the blond curls…
She opened her eyes and recognized the upper lip, slightly recessive, and the prominent chin, a bit like the Habsburg kings’. But this time there were no curls, only a receding hairline, a mature face, and quite yellowish skin, like that of the Chinese workers on the Veracruz docks.
Orlando saw the sad shock in Laura’s eyes and said, “Orlando Ximénez. You don’t recognize me, but I recognize you. Santiago spoke of you so tenderly. I think you were-what did I tell you…?
“His favorite virgin.”
“No longer?”
“Two sons.”
“Husband?”
“He no longer exists.”
“Did he die?”
“You figure it out.”
“And here we are, you and I, still alive. Hmm. Funny how things work out.”
Orlando looked around as if he were once again trying to find the San Cayetano balcony, the corner where they could be alone again and speak. A bittersweet wave of lost opportunity rolled across Laura’s breast, but Carmen Cortina would not allow frivolous intimacy or shameful solitude at her parties. As if she sensed a private-that is, exclusive-situation in the making, she interrupted the couple and introduced them around: to Butt del Rosal, an old aristocrat who used a monocle and whose joke was to take the lens out of his eye and, look at this, ingest it as if it were a communion wafer-it was phony, made of gelatin; then Onomástico Galán, a fat, red-faced Spaniard who went to parties in a nightshirt and matching cap with stripes and a red tassel, carrying a candle in one hand-in case there was a power failure in this disorganized and revolutionary country, which needed a good, soft dictatorship like Primo de Rivera’s in Spain; after him came a couple in sailor costumes, he with short pants and a blue cap with the words KISS ME on it and she as Mary Pickford, with a wig of big blond curls, white knee socks, patent-leather shoes, frilly panties, and a daringly short pink skirt, in addition to the requisite bow on her curly head; behind them came an art critic in an impeccable white suit and its contemptuous corollary on his lips, which he repeated constantly: “These people are all ridiculous!”
He was hand in hand with his sister, a tall, beautiful statue made of confectioner’s sugar who would repeat, like some sisterly echo, “Ridiculous, we’re all ridiculous,” while an old painter with invisible, sharp, and powerful halitosis announced he was the teacher of this new artist, Tizoc, a position disputed by another painter of melancholic and disillusioned mien, famous for his funerary black-and-white paintings and for his pure-black lover and disciple, nicknamed “Xangó” by the painter, by Mexico City, and by the world, although to gild, I mean geld, I mean gild the lily, as Carmen Cortina would say, the powerful black had an Italian wife whom he introduced as the model for La Gioconda.