She resigned herself to it all, until the day when a shadow began to manifest itself, first immaterial in the traffic on the avenue, then more visible on the sidewalk across the street, finally showing itself completely a few steps behind her, as Laura made her daily journey to the Parián market. She did not want to hire a maid. The memory of the nun Gloria Soriano pained her too much. Domestic chores filled her solitary hours. The surprising thing in this discovery is that Laura, once she realized she was being followed by one of her husband’s lackeys, did not take it seriously. And that affected her more than if it had really mattered to her. Instead, for her it opened a street as narrow as the avenue where they lived was wide. She decided not to shadow him physically-as he, stupidly, was doing to her-but to use a more powerful weapon, moral shadowing.
Lázaro Cárdenas, a general from Michoacán, ex-governor of his state and head of the official party, had been elected President of Mexico. Everyone thought he would be just one more of the puppets shamelessly manipulated by the Maximum Chief of the Revolution, General Plutarco Elías Calles. The joke was so public that during a preceding presidency, some joker had hung a sign on the door of the presidential residence at Chapultepec: THE PRESIDENT LIVES HERE. THE MAN WHO GIVES THE ORDERS LIVES ACROSS THE STREET. Then President Abelardo Rodríguez, considered yet another of the Maximum Chief’s servants, repressed strike after strike, first the telegraph workers, then the day laborers from New Lombardy and New Italy in Michoacán, farm workers of Italian background who were accustomed to the struggles being waged by Antonio Gramsci’s Communist Party, and finally the national movement of agricultural workers in Chiapas, Veracruz, Puebla, and Nuevo León: President Rodriguez ordered that the strikers be fired and sent soldiers to take their place; the courts, dominated by the executive branch, declared all these strikes “unjustified.” The army and the paramilitary thugs working for the government murdered several workers from the Italo-Mexican communities, and Abelardo Rodriguez sent the national strike leaders, who were fighting for a minimum wage, to the desolate penal colony on the Islas Mar as, among them the young writer José Revueltas.
Luis Napoleón Morones’ old CROM grew weaker and weaker, incapable of defending the workers. At the same time the star of their new leader, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, rose. Lombardo-once a Thomist philosopher and now a Marxist, a thin man with an ascetic air and sad eyes, forelock dangling over them, and a pipe in his mouth-as head of the General Confederation of Mexican Workers and Peasants created an alternative for the real workers’ struggle: workers struggling for land, good wages, collectively negotiated contracts, began to group themselves with the GCMW, and since Cárdenas had supported union struggles in Michoacán, everything was now expected to change: no longer Calles and Morones but Cárdenas and Lombardo.
“And union independence, Juan Francisco, where is it?” Laura heard the only old comrade who still visited her husband say one night, the now beaten-down Pánfilo, who couldn’t even find a place to spit since Laura had had the hideous copper spittoons removed.
Juan Francisco repeated something that by now was his credo: “In Mexico, things change from within, not from without.”
“When are you going to learn?” Pánfilo answered with a sigh.
Cárdenas was beginning to show signs of independence and Calles signs of irritation. Caught between them, Juan Francisco seemed uncertain as to which direction the workers’ movement would take and what his position in it would be. Laura noted his disquiet and asked him over and over, with an air of legitimate concern: If there’s a break between Calles and Cárdenas, which side will you be on? And he had no choice but to fall back on his old bad habit, political rhetoric: the Revolution is united, there will never be a break among its leaders. But the Revolution has already broken with many of your old ideals, Juan Francisco, when you were an anarcho-syndicalist (and the images of the Xalapa attic and the walled-up life of Armonía Aznar and her mysterious relationship with Orlando and Juan Francisco’s funeral oration all returned to her in a wave), and he would say, like a true believer repeating the credo, you have to influence things from within, try it from outside and you’ll be squashed like a bug, the battles are waged within the system.
“You have to know how to adapt, isn’t that so?”
“All the time. Of course. Politics is the art of compromise.”
“Of compromise,” she repeated in a most serious tone.
“Yes.”
So as not to acknowledge what was happening, one had to keep one’s heart in the dark. Juan Francisco could explain that political necessity forced him into compromises with the government.
“With all governments? With any government?”
… She could not ask him if his conscience was condemning him. He would have wanted to admit that he wasn’t afraid of the opinions others might have but he was afraid of Laura Díaz, of being judged again by her. Then, one night, the two of them exploded again.
“I’m sick and tired of your judging me.”
“And I’m sick and tired of your spying on me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve locked my soul in a basement.”
“Don’t feel so sorry for yourself, you make me pity you.”
“Don’t talk to me as if you were a saint talking to a sinner. Talk to the real me instead!”
“It’s outrageous that you ask me for results that have nothing to do with reality.”
“Stop imagining that I judge you.”
“As long as it’s only you who judges me, poor little you, it really doesn’t bother me, do you think I came back so you could forgive my sins?” She bit her tongue, night tracks me, sunrise frees me, she went to the boys’ bedroom to watch them sleep, to calm down.
Seeing them sleep.
It was enough to watch the two little heads sunk deep in the pillows, Santiago covered up to his chin, Danton uncovered and spread-eagled, as if even in sleep their two contrary personalities revealed themselves, and Laura D az asked herself, at that exact moment of her existence, did she have anything to teach her sons or at least the courage to ask them, what do you want to know, what can I tell you?
Sitting there opposite the twin beds, she could only tell them that they came into this world without being consulted and thus their parents’ freedom in creating them did not save them, creatures of a heritage of rancor, needs, and ignorance that their parents, no matter how they tried, could not erase without damaging their children’s freedom. It would be up to them to fight the earthly evils they’d inherited, and yet, she, the mother, could not step back, disappear, turn into the ghost of her own descendants. She had to resist in their name without ever showing it, remain invisible at the side of her sons, not to diminish the child’s honor, the responsibility of the son who must believe in his own freedom, know that he is forging his own destiny. What was left to her if not to keep watch discreetly, to be tolerant, and to ask as well for a long time to live and a short time to suffer, like Aunts Hilda and Virginia?
Sometimes she would spend the entire night watching them sleep, intent on accompanying her sons wherever they might go, like a very long shoreline where sea and beach are distinct but inseparable; the voyage might last only one night, but she hoped it would never end, and over the heads of her sons floated the question: How much time, how much time will God and men allow my sons on earth?