Go on, she said, be a saint, be a hermit, climb up and sit alone on top of your column in the desert, be a comfortable martyr without martyrdom.
He said she was very hard on him.
She answered, because I love you. “Why are you hiding on an island? It would have been better if you’d stayed in Mexico. There’s no hiding place better than Mexico City.”
“I don’t have the strength anymore. Forgive me.”
“Well, you’re a Spaniard. You can be sure that death will be late in reaching you.”
Was the meeting so painful for her?
“No, it’s that I’ve learned to fear those who deform me with their love, not those who hate me. When you went to Cuba, I asked myself a thousand times, can I live without him, can I live without his support? I badly needed your support to create a world of my own that I wouldn’t have to sacrifice to anyone I loved. You gave it to me, you know, you supported me so that I could return to my home and tell the truth to my family, whatever happened. Without your love supporting me, I never would have dared. Without your memory, I would have been just one more adulteress. With you, no one dared cast the first stone against me. I feel free because you are with me.”
“Laura, the worst is over. Calm down. Understand that I stay here alone of my own free will.”
“Alone? That word I don’t understand. How are you going to be religious without the world, how are you going to reach God without leaving yourself? You see how you live halfway between the monastery and the world. Do you think the cloistered monks who forbid the presence of women have already found God, you think they can find Him without the world? How pretentious you are, pretentious bastard! Are you going to purge the sins of the twentieth century hiding away on this stone island? You are the very pride you detest. You are your own Lucifer. How are you going to have your pride pardoned, Jorge, you bastard?”
“By imagining that God says to me: I hate in you the same thing you’ve hated in others.”
“Imagining? Only that?”
“Listening, Laura.”
“Do you know something? I leave here admiring your indifference and your serene wisdom. Which I don’t have.”
“Raquel is buried in an unmarked grave, mixed with hundreds of other naked bodies. Can we be more than she? I’m not better. I’m different. Just like you.”
“Why do you think you’re liberated?” she asked incredulously.
“Because you came to see me filled with incredulity. You’re the truly incredulous person here. As I was before. I’m finding health seeing a human being with less faith than I. What insignificant things we are, Laura.”
She asked him to answer the question she’d been asking since she reached Lanzarote. (You shouldn’t have come here. This island doesn’t exist. You’re going to believe what you see, and when you leave you’ll realize there’s nothing there.) Do you believe or don’t you?
“Which is like asking, is Christianity true or false? And I answer that your question has no importance. What I want to find out here on Lanzarote, halfway between monastic life and life as you understand it, between security and danger, is whether faith can give meaning to the madness of being here on earth.”
What had he discovered?
“That the life of Christ is always possible for a Christian, but no one dares imitate it.”
“No one dares, or no one can?”
“It’s that they think that being like Christ is acting as Christ acted—raising the dead, multiplying loaves … they transform Christ into an active ideology. Laura, Christ only seeks us if we don’t believe in Him. Christ finds us if we don’t look for Him. It’s Pascal’s truth: you found me because you didn’t seek me. That is my truth today. Go away, Laura. Realize I have no joy. Every afternoon on this island is very sad.”
I came because your place was empty, Laura said to herself as she left the nocturnal coast of Lanzarote, sailing for Tenerife, as the night became black and the island red. I couldn’t bear it anymore. It’s dangerous, living in a vacant space, nostalgic for the life my son didn’t have and the love you took away from me. But I lost my son, and you lost Raquel. We both gave up something precious. Perhaps God, if He exists, recognizes that loss and takes note of our sorrows, each of them. Now I no longer want to think about you. To think about you consoles me too much and keeps my imagination going. I want to renounce you completely. I never met you.
When they had separated at the monastery entrance, Laura had waited for a moment, confused. Why wouldn’t they let a woman in? She saw that nothing was keeping her from entering, from looking for Jorge just once more, from feeling his hot lips for the last time, from repeating the words that would now be unspoken for all time.
I love you.
He was on all fours in the solitary refectory, licking the floor with his tongue, tenacious, disciplined, tile after tile.
18.
Avenida Sonora: 1950
THERE COMES A MOMENT in life when nothing but loving the dead has any importance. We have to do everything we can for the dead. You and I together, we can suffer because the dead person is absent. Their presence is not absolute. Their absence is the only absolute. But the desire we have for the dead person is neither presence nor absence. There is no one left in my house, Jorge. If you want to believe my solitude is what returned me to you, I give you permission to do so.
My husband, Juan Francisco, died.
My auntie, María de la O, died.
But the death of my adored son Santiago is the only real death for me, it comprises all the others, gives them meaning.
My auntie’s death actually gives me joy. She died as she wished, in her beloved Veracruz, dancing danzones with a tiny man named Matias Matadamas, who dressed all in powder blue to take her out in the public square twice a week dancing the danzón on the space of a single brick.
The real death of Juan Francisco had occurred long before. His inanimate body merely confirmed it. He approached death dragging his feet, saying to me, “I can’t think of anything,” asking me, “Should we have married, you and I?” Because the day he died I asked him if we could finally stop hurting each other.
“I’ve lost too much time hating you.”
“And I, forgetting you.”
Who said what, Jorge? He or I? I don’t know anymore. I don’t know which of us said, “If you don’t tell me I deserved your hatred, I won’t tell you you deserved to be forgotten.”
I want to believe I didn’t love him when he died. Ever since I went back to him after you left for Cuba, I always asked myself, Why does he accept me again? Is he weak or perverse? Is he making a profession of his failure so he can get the only form of love left to him—the compassion of others? How could I abandon such a weak man?
Every day, my son Santiago makes me think that everything I love is dead.
I console myself the way we all do. Time will pass. Gradually, able to bear the absence.
Then I react violently. I don’t want my pain to fade, ever. I want the absence of my son always, always, to be intolerable.
Then my pride takes control of me. I wonder if a love with no other foundation but memory won’t ultimately become tolerable, I wonder if a love that always wants pain should subdue that caress of memory and demand a void, a great void in which there is no room for memory or tenderness and where absence, knowing him to be absent, will admit no consolation.
It came from where she least expected it. Pity.
It was Juan Francisco’s tears over the body of Santiago. The father mourned the death of the son as if no one in the world had loved him more, more secretly, less openly. Why had he kept his distance from Santiago and drawn so close to Danton? To suffer less when Santiago died? Did he weep because he was never close to him, or did he weep because he loved him more than he loved anyone and only death allowed him to show it?
Seeing the father weep over the body of the son returned to Laura’s memory one verbal slap after another, as if everything her husband and she had
said to hurt each other over the years was being repeated, more venomously, at that very moment, marrying you was like turning the other cheek to destiny, don’t talk to me as if you were a saint talking to a temptress, speak to me, look me in the eye, why didn’t you judge me for my will to love you, Juan Francisco, instead of condemning me for the adultery? I have no idea why I thought you an exciting, brave man, that’s what they said about you, you were always “they say about him,” a whisper, never a reality, between the two of us there was never love, only illusion, mirages, which never last, not love based on respect and admiration, life with you has overpowered me, you’ve left me perplexed and sick, I don’t hate you, you just tire me out, you love me too much, a real lover should never love one too much, should never cloy, Juan Francisco, our marriage is dead, either everything or nothing killed it, who knows? But let’s start burying it, dearest, because it stinks to high heaven.
And now she could say thank you, thanks to your all too facile adoration I was able to achieve something better, that constant expectation which requires passion, thanks to you I reached Jorge Maura, the difference between you let me understand and love Jorge as I could never love you.
“I thought I had more strength than I do, Laura. Forgive me.”
“I can’t condemn the best of myself to the grave of memory. You forgive me.”
And now she saw him weeping over the body of the exhausted son. She would have wanted to ask his forgiveness for having been unable, for thirty years, to penetrate beyond appearances, legends, the mystery of his origins, the myth of his past, the betrayal of his present.
It was terrible that they were finally able to speak thanks to the death of their son.
It was terrible for them to identify themselves, Laura and Juan Francisco, revealing that both, in secret, were staring with equal love at Santiago the Younger, thinking the same thoughts, he has everything, good looks, talent, generosity, everything but health, everything but life and time to live it. Only now did father and mother discover that both had refused to pity Santiago because in this house no one was permitted to pity anyone. We can betray with pity those whom we love.
“Is that why you favored Danton so openly, Juan Francisco?”
Laura had boasted of the eloquent silence between mother and son. Solitude and quietude had united them. Was that also true about the relation of Santiago to Juan Francisco? Was being explicit about what was taking place more than an offense? Was it a betrayal? Mother and son lived a skein of complicities, shared thoughts, ways of saying thank you, everything but compassion—damned, forbidden compassion … did the father also live and feel this, at a distance, celebrating the other son, father of both?
Every mother knows there are children who take care of themselves. Trying to protect them is an effrontery. That was how it was with Danton. To her, his father’s nearness to him seemed an abuse; Juan Francisco understood nothing, gave everything to the son who needed nothing, Danton who almost from infancy played all day unaware of what might be happening in the shadows and silence of their home where his brother lived. But Laura knew instinctively that even if Danton needed no attention and Santiago did, an excessive display of it would have been more offensive and damaging to the weak boy than to the strong one. That wasn’t the problem. Danton moved through the world adjusting everything to his own advantage. Santiago disregarded everything except what he considered essential to his painting, his music, his poetry, his Van Gogh and his Egon Schiele, his Baudelaire and his Rimbaud, his Schubert …
Now, seeing both father and son, Juan Francisco and Danton, weeping over the handsome, ascetic body of the young Santiago, Laura realized that the brothers had loved each other but were too modest to show it—brotherly love is virile; sometimes it must wait until the moment of death to show itself as love, affection, tenderness … Now she blamed herself. Had Laura Díaz stolen all her glories from the world just to give them solely to Santiago? All the virtue for the weak brother? Didn’t the strong brother also deserve something? Had she in reality lost two sons?
“Did I ever tell you,” said Juan Francisco after the funeral, “that one night I surprised them talking to each other like men? Both were saying, ‘We’re all we need.’ They were declaring themselves independent of you and of me, Laura. How incredible to surprise your sons in the very moment when they are declaring independence. Except that Santiago really meant what he said. All he needed was himself. Danton’s different. He needs success, money, society. He needs more than himself; he’s fooling himself. That’s why he needs us more than ever.”
Would there be time to correct thirty years of errors in a shared life with two adult sons, one already dead? Santiago wrote a poem just before he died that Laura showed to Juan Francisco, especially one line: “We are translated lives.” What did it mean? What did those everyday phrases the boy used mean? Don’t leave the cage door open, those are homing pigeons in there and they won’t leave, but cats are different, they go and come back to hurt … “The sun doesn’t always hit me on the head.” Perhaps they meant that Santiago knew how to detach himself from himself, transform himself, discover the other within. She discovered it, too, but didn’t tell him. What about you, Juan Francisco?
“My sons are my biography, Laura. I don’t have any other.”
“What about me?”
“You’re part of it too, darling.”
Was that Juan Francisco’s secret, that his life had no secret because he had no past, that his life was only external, the fame of Juan Francisco the orator, the leader, the revolutionary? And behind it, what was there that opened up behind it? Nothing?
“There was a girl in Villahermosa who suffered from mongolism. She would threaten people, hit them, and spit, all violently. Her mother had to put blinders on her, as if she were a horse, so she couldn’t see the world and could calm down.”
“Was she your neighbor in Tabasco?”
No, he didn’t have neighbors, he said, shaking his head.
“Who are you? Where are you from? Are you ever going to tell me?”
Again, he shook his head.
“Don’t you realize that separates us, Juan Francisco? Just when we’re on the verge of understanding each other you deny me the story of your life once again?”
This time he nodded his head.
“What did you do, Juan Francisco? Were you a hero who simply got tired? Was your heroism a lie? Do you know that’s what I’ve come to believe? What myth are you going to transmit to your sons, the living and the dead one, too—have you thought about that? What are you going to leave us? The whole truth? A half-truth? The good part? The bad? Which part goes to Danton, who’s alive? Which to Santiago, who’s dead?”
She knew that only time, which fades like smoke, would reveal her husband’s jealously guarded secret. How many times had they each invited the other to give up? Could they ever say, I’m giving everything to you, right now?
“Later you’ll understand,” said the man. He was more and more beaten down.
“Do you realize what you’re making me do? You’re making me ask you questions. What must I give you, Juan Francisco, what do you want from me? Would you like me to call you ‘sweetheart’ and ‘my love’ again, even though you know I reserve those words for another man and for my sons, they’re not your words, you’re my husband, Juan Francisco, not my tenderness, my dear one, my love (my hidalgo, my adored little Spanish boy … )?”
She feared—or only wanted to believe—that at a certain moment Juan Francisco would shake off his lethargy and touch her with another voice, the voice, new and old at the same time, of the end. She schooled herself in patience for the end to come, visibly approaching in the physical collapse of this oversized man with wide shoulders and immense hands, short torso and long legs, like others in his caste. His caste: Laura wanted to attribute something to Juan Francisco, at least race, caste, descent, family, father, mother, lovers, first wife, illegitimate or legitimate children, what difference did it make? One da
y, she was on the verge of taking the Interoceanic train back to Veracruz and from there going by boat and highway to Tabasco to consult registries, but that made her feel like a contemptible busybody. So she followed her daily routine, helping Frida Kahlo, in more pain than ever, with one leg amputated, a prisoner of her bed and wheelchair, and she went to gatherings hosted by the Riveras in honor of the new wave of exiles—Americans persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
A new war had begun, the Cold War. Churchill had recognized it in a famous speech: “An iron curtain has descended over Europe …” Stalin proved that the democracies’ suspicions of the Soviet Union were well founded. The old dictator’s paranoia led him to commit delirious crimes: he jailed and ordered the execution not of his nonexistent enemies but of his friends, out of fear that one day they might become enemies. He carried out preventive assassination and imprisonment, cruel and horribly unnecessary. Yet Picasso painted the “realistic” portrait of Stalin with a dove, because devotees of that strange monster—so argued about during the evenings with Domingo Vidal, Basilio Baltazar, and Jorge Maura in the Café de Paris during the Spanish Civil War—believed he was now champion of peace, enemy of U.S. imperialism. For their part, Americans invented their own anti-Communist paranoia and saw Stalinist agents under every rug, on every New York stage, and in every Hollywood film.
The new exiles began gathering at the Riveras’ house, but many stopped coming because Diego’s Marxist logorrhea bored them and they were indignant about Frida’s devotion to Uncle Joe, to whom she dedicated a portrait and unlimited praise despite the fact that (or perhaps because) Stalin had had her lover Leon Trotsky murdered.
Laura Díaz remembered Jorge Maura’s words—there’s no need to change life, no need to transform the world. We have to diversify life. We have to give up the illusion that a recovered unity is the key to a new paradise. We have to see difference as a value. Difference strengthens identity. Jorge Maura had said he found himself between two truths: that the world was going to save itself, and that the world was doomed. Both are true: capitalism’s corrupt society is doomed, but the revolution’s ideal society is also doomed.
Years With Laura Diaz, The Page 39
