Seeing them sleep until the sun comes up and the light touches their heads because she herself can touch the sun with her hands, asking herself how many sunrises she and her sons will be able to endure. For each allotment of light had a silhouette of shadow.
Then Laura Díaz rose, disquieted by a mild vertigo, and stepped away from the beds where her sons slept, and she told herself (and almost told them)-so they would understand their own mother and not condemn her to pity first and oblivion later-that to be a mother, hated and liberated by the hatred of her sons, hated, perhaps, but fatally unforgettable, I must be active, ardent and active, but I still don’t know how, I can’t return to what I’ve already done, I want an authentic revelation, a revelation that will be an elevation, not a renunciation. How easy life would be without children or a husband! Again? This time for sure? Why not? Does the first effort at liberty use it up, a prior failure close the doors to possible happiness beyond the walls of home? Have I used up my destiny? Santiago, Danton: don’t leave me. Let me follow you wherever you go, whatever happens. I don’t want to be adored. I want to be awaited. Help me.
12.
Parque de la Lama: 1938
IN 1938, the European democracies caved in to Hitler at the Munich Conference and the Nazis occupied Austria, then Bohemia; the Spanish Republic was in full retreat, falling back on all fronts; Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened, as did Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad. On Kristallnacht, Jewish synagogues, businesses, homes, and schools all over Germany were burned by SS troops; in the United States, Congress established the House Un-American Activities Committee, in France Antonin Artaud proposed a “theater of cruelty,” Orson Welles convinced everyone that Martians had invaded New Jersey, Lázaro Cárdenas was nationalizing the oil industry in Mexico, and two rival telephone companies-the Swedish Ericsson and Mexicana, the Mexican national company-simultaneously offered separate telephone services; as luck (bad) would have it, a person signed up with Ericsson could not call someone with Mexicana service and vice versa. This meant that a subscriber to one service had to turn to neighbors, friends, nearby offices, or phone booths to speak to someone with the other service, and vice versa.
“In Mexico, even the telephones are baroque,” Orlando Ximénez declared.
The sheer size of the modern metropolis makes amorous relationships difficult; no one wants to spend an hour in a bus or car in order to enjoy ninety seconds of sex. The telephone enabled lovers to agree on intermediate rendezvous sites. In Paris, pneumatiques, the quick “petits bleus,” brought couples together; lovers opened those little blue envelopes that might contain all the promises of love with more apprehension than if they were telegrams. But in Mexico, during the year of oil expropriation, the year of the Spanish Republic’s last-ditch defense of Madrid, if lovers didn’t also happen to be neighbors and if one had Ericsson and the other Mexicana, they were doomed to invent bizarre, complex, or, as Orlando said, baroque communication networks.
Nonetheless, the first communication between them, the first personal message, could not have been more direct. It was, simply, a meeting of eyes. Later, she would say she was predisposed to what happened, but when she saw him, it was as if she’d never thought about him. They did not exchange glances; each anchored their eyes in those of the other. She asked herself, Why is this man different from all the rest? And he answered in silence, the two of them separated by the hundred other guests at the party, because I’m looking only at you.
“Because he’s looking only at me.”
She wanted to leave; she was frightened by this attraction, so sudden but also so complete, the novelty of the encounter alarmed her, it disturbed her to imagine the consequences of an approach, she thought about everything that might happen-passion, giving herself, guilt, remorse, her husband, her sons; it wasn’t that all these issues would come afterward; involuntarily, instantaneously, they were coming first; everything entered the present moment, as in one of those living rooms where only family ghosts sat down to talk and, serenely, to judge her.
She thought of leaving. She was going to flee. He came over to her as if guessing her thoughts and said, “Stay a little longer.”
They looked directly into each other’s eyes; he was as tall as she, not as tall as her husband, but even before he spoke a word to her, she felt he treated her with respect, and his familiar tone was merely the way Spaniards dealt with one another. His accent was Castilian and his physical appearance, too. He couldn’t have been more than forty, but his hair was quite white, contrasting with the freshness of his skin, which had no notable wrinkles except in his brow. His eyes, his white smile, his straight profile, his courteous but impassioned eyes. His very white complexion, his very black eyes. She wanted to see herself as he saw her.
“Stay a little longer.”
“You’re the boss,” she said impulsively.
“No.” He laughed. “I’m making a suggestion.”
From the first instant, she conceded three virtues to the man: reserve, discretion, and independence, together with impeccable social graces. He wasn’t an upper-class Mexican like so many of those she’d met at the hacienda in San Cayetano or at Carmen Cortina’s cocktail parties. He was a wellborn Spaniard, but in his eyes there was melancholy and in his body a disquiet that fascinated and disturbed her, invited her to penetrate a mystery, and she wondered if this might not be the subtlest trick of a Spanish hidalgo (as she quickly nicknamed him): to present oneself to the world as an enigma.
She tried to penetrate the man’s gaze, his eyes sunk deep in his skull, near the bone, near the brain. The white hair lightened his dark eyes, the same way that here in Mexico it lightens mestizo faces. A dark young man could, with white hair, become a paper-colored old man, as if time had faded his skin.
The hidalgo made her a present of a look that combined adoration with fate. That night, together in bed in the L’Escargot Hotel facing the Parque de la Lama, the two of them caressing each other slowly, over and over, cheeks, hair, temples, he asked her to envy him because he could see her face from various perspectives and, above all, illuminated by the minutes they spent together. What does the light do to a woman’s face, how does a woman’s face depend on the time of day, the light of dawn, morning, midday, sunset, nighttime, what does the light that faces her, outlines her, surprises her from below or crowns her from above, attacks her brutally and without warning in broad daylight or caresses her softly in the half light, what does it say to her face? he asked her, but she had no answers, no wish to have answers, she felt admired and envied because in bed he asked all the questions that she always wanted a man to ask, knowing they were the questions that all women want to be asked at least once in their lives by just one man.
She no longer thought about minutes or hours, she lived with him, beginning that night, in a time without time of amorous passion, a whirlwind of time that dispensed with all the other concerns of life. All the forgotten scenes. Although at dawn on that night, she feared that the time with him, this night with him, had devoured all the previous moments of her life and had also swallowed up this one. She clung to the man’s body, clasped it with the tenacity of ivy, imagining herself without him, absent but unforgettable, saw herself in that possible but totally undesired moment when he would no longer be there even if the memory of him was; the man would no longer be with her but his memory would be with her forever. That was the price she paid from that moment on, and she was pleased, thought it cheap in comparison with the plenitude of the instant. She could not keep from asking herself, in anguish, What does this face, these eyes, this voice without beginning or end mean? From the first moment, she never wanted to lose him.