Los años con Laura Díaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  When she achieved independence and fame, Laura Díaz kept the photo of the dead Frida for herself, that one she would never give out for publication, that photo was part of her rich, rich memory, the emotional archive of a life that had suddenly, in maturity, flourished like a plant that flowers late but perennially. The photograph of Frida was testimony to all the photographs Laura hadn’t taken in the years she’d lived with others; it was a talisman. Alongside Diego and Frida, without noticing it, as if in a dream, she had gained the artistic sensibility that flourished much later on, when many of the years with Laura Díaz had gone by.

  She didn’t complain about that time or condemn it as a calendar of subjection to the world of men, how could she if in her pages lived the two Santiagos, her lovers Jorge Maura, Orlando Ximénez, and Harry Jaffe, her parents, her aunts, the jolly black sweeper Zampayita, and her poor but sympathetic, and (to her) compassionate, husband Juan Francisco? How could she forget them, but how could she not feel sorry that she had not photographed them. She imagined her own eye as a camera able to capture everything it saw and felt over the six decades of her life, and felt a chill of horror. Art was selection. Art meant losing almost everything in exchange for the salvation of very little.

  It was impossible to have art and life at the same time, and in the end Laura Díaz was thankful that life had preceded art—for art, premature or even prodigal, might have killed life.

  It was when she discovered something that should have been obvious, when she recovered her son Santiago’s paintings and drawings from the rubble of the family house on Avenida Sonora and brought them to her new apartment on Plaza Rio de Janeiro, when in among the mass of pencil and pastel drawings, sketches, and two dozen oil paintings, she discovered the canvas with the naked man and woman staring at each other without touching, desiring only each other but satisfied with the desire.

  In her haste to abandon the fallen family home, to set herself up in her new apartment on Plaza Rio de Janeiro, to start her new, independent life, and go out to photograph Mexico City and the lives in it, following, she said to herself, the inspiration of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Laura had not stopped to take a close look at her own son’s paintings. Perhaps she felt so much love for Santiago the Younger that she preferred to distance herself from the physical proof of her son’s existence in order to keep him alive, if only in his mother’s soul. Perhaps she had to discover her own vocation to rediscover her son’s. Busy arranging her own photos, she went on to arrange Santiago’s paintings and drawings, and among the two dozen oils, this one, the naked couple staring at each other without touching, held her attention.

  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.

  Humor, anger, and daydreams passed ceaselessly and simultaneously across Buñuel’s green eyes: his gaze stopped on a fixed point in his past, and Laura photographed a boy in the Aragonese village of Calanda playing drums on Good Friday until his hands bled, this to free himself from the sensual charm of the image of the Virgin of Pilar, inhabitant of his onanistic childhood bed.

  Thanks to the intervention of the Basque writer Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, Laura photographed the marvelous poet from Málaga, Emilo Prados, in his modest apartment on Lerma Street. She’d met him before with Jorge Maura. Prados was hidden in a couple of rooms behind mountains of books and papers, sickness and exile etched in every line on his face, but able to transform suffering into two expressions Laura was able to photograph. The infinite sweetness of his face was that of an unredeemed Andalusian saint now veiled by a cascade of white locks and thick, aquarium-style glasses, as if the poet, embarrassed by his own innocence, wanted to conceal it. And you could see the lyric strength behind his suffering, poverty, disillusion, old age, and exile:

  If I could give you

  all the light of dawn …

  Like the sun, I would

  slowly pierce your breast,

  until I emerged without blood

  or pain into the night …

  Manuel Pedroso, the wise old Andalusian who had been rector of the University of Seville, was adored by the small group of his young disciples who every day went with him as he walked from the Law School near the Zócalo to his small apartment on Amazonas Street. Laura left graphic testimony of that daily journey, as well as of gatherings in the master’s library, packed with ancient books that smelled of tropical tobacco. Francisco Franco’s troops had burned his library in Seville, but Pedroso recovered jewel after jewel in the secondhand bookstalls in La Lagunilla, Mexico City’s thieves’ market.

  The books were stolen from him, other thieves stole from other people, but the books always returned, like nostalgic and unremitting lovers, to Pedroso’s long, thin hands, a gentleman painted by El Greco, hands always on the verge of tensing, warning, as if convoking a ceremony of thought. Laura captured Pedroso in the instant when he held out his hands with their long, beautiful fingers to beg for some light from the world, to bank the fires of intolerance, and to affirm his faith in his Mexican students.

  Laura photographed a noisy, cheery, argumentative, and affectionate group of young exiles who adapted to Mexico but who never abandoned Spain, who always spoke with the Castilian lisp and let their eyes express the tenderness they felt for everything they had explicitly renounced: chocolate with the parish priest, the novels of Pérez Galdós, café discussion groups, old women in black, tasty treats like hot churros, cante hondo, and bullfights, the punctuality of church bells and funerals, the madness of families who took to their beds to avoid forever the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Laura photographed them in their perpetual, eternal arguments, as if they were Irishmen and didn’t know each other because they came from Madrid, Navarra, Galicia, and Barcelona and because their names were Oteyza, Serra Puig, Munoz de Baena, García Ascot, Xirau, Durán, Segovia, and Blanco Aguinaga.

  But Laura Díaz’s favorite exile was a young woman whom Danton mentioned as having been the most interesting feminine presence in the Jockey Club in the 1940s. She lived with her husband, the poet and filmmaker Garcia Ascot, in a strange building at right angles to Villalongin Street, and her beauty was so perfect that Laura despaired either of finding her bad side or of being able to capture in one or a thousand photographs the charms of this fragile, svelte, and elegant woman, who walked around her house barefoot like a cat, followed by another cat that posed as her mistress’s double, both desired and envied by the entire feline race because of her aggressive profile and weak chin, her melancholy eyes and irrepressible, all-inclusive laugh.

  María Luisa Elío had a secret. Her father had been in hiding since 1939, living in an attic in a village in Navarre, under sentence of death from Franco’s Falange. She could not speak of it, but her father dwelled in his daughter’s gaze, in her fabulously clear eyes, thanks to the pain, the secret, the wait for the phantom who might finally, one day, escape from Spain and show up in Mexico and for his daughter as what he was: a ghost incarnate and an oblivion remembered from an empty balcony.

  Another ghost—carnal, this one, all too carnal, but in the end steadfast in the sensuous specter of his words—was Luis Cernuda, an elegant homosexual gentleman who would appear in Mexico City from time to time, who was always received by his colleague Octavio Paz, with whom he fought, his arrogance being outrageous while Paz’s was deceptive, but with whom he always in the end reconciled because of their shared poetic fervor. A consensus gradually formed: Luis Cernuda was the greatest Spanish poet of his generation. Laura Díaz tried to keep her distance from him, the better to see him stripped of the appearance (or disguise) he affected of a Madrid dandy. She asked him to read:

  I want to live when love dies …

  Just as your death awakens my desire for death

  Just as your life awakened my desire for life

  She missed Basilio Baltazar, but they kept missing each other—the dates of Laura’s shows didn’t coincide with Basilio’s university vacations, so Laura would hang an empty frame in the ce
nter of the exhibit with the name of her old friend next to it.

  His absence was also homage to the absence of Jorge Maura, whose distance and anonymity Laura decided to respect, it being the wish of the man she’d loved most. Perhaps Basilio couldn’t appear among the portraits of Spanish exile without his comrade Jorge.

  And Vidal? He wasn’t the only one who’d disappeared.

  Malú Block, the gallery director, told Laura that something strange was going on. Every afternoon at around six o’clock, a woman in black would come to the gallery and stay for an entire hour—not a minute more, not a minute less, even though she never looked at her watch—opposite the empty frame for Basilio Baltazar’s missing portrait. Almost immobile, she would sometimes shift her weight from one foot to the other or she would step back a centimeter or turn her head, as if to formulate a better appreciation of what wasn’t there: Basilio’s effigy.

  Laura hesitated between giving in to natural curiosity and being discreet. One afternoon, she went to the gallery and saw the woman in black standing opposite the empty frame. She didn’t dare approach her, but the woman herself, the mysterious visitor, half turned, as if attracted by the magnet in Laura’s eyes, and allowed herself to be seen: a woman about forty years old with blue eyes and long sandy-yellow hair.