Azucena. She wasn’t pretty. She had one of those Catalan faces that seem hacked out with an ax or born out of a mountain: hard, rocky, angular. Long, thin lips, long nose whose tip trembled, her stare veiled by her eyelids and thick bags, her eyes mere slits that nevertheless revealed an intelligent gleam. Everything depended on the eyebrows and the hairdo. The arc, the thickness of the eyebrow. The form, the color of the hair. Azucena had chosen a neutral hairstyle and a mahogany shade that proclaimed her message: I’ll grow old with this color and this hairdo. I’ll grow old and no one will notice, until everyone thinks I was always the age I was when I died.
I could never forget that on this location, only she and I knew who Quevedo was. “Yesterday’s gone. Tomorrow hasn’t arrived …” But I was curious about the real shape of her eyebrows. The artificial shape was interrogative, not a neutral declaration like her hair but a questioning challenge, arched brows from which surprise was excluded and in which, always, only the question remained.
She was Spanish, so it was easy for us to communicate. Not only because of language but because of a quality I first intuited in her and then verified. Seeing her move — agile and sinewy, always in a skirt, blouse, and cardigan, the professional city uniform of that period, but with two Spanish legs, muscular and strong, with thick ankles — I guessed there were many generations of peasants behind Azucena’s leathery figure. Above all, though, there was a tradition of work, not only honorable work but pride in work. In everything the woman did, the woman took pride. One day, she told me that her grandparents were peasants from the Lower Ebro, that they’d lived in Poblet for centuries. Her parents had gone to Barcelona and set up a small grocery store; they’d sent her to study shorthand, but times in Spain turned bad and young people had to work to support their parents and siblings. She became a waitress, was hired when the Americans began to shoot movies in Spain; she met the mistress’s husband — here she was…
She had, as I say, that dignity in her work which we associate, however much we hate the idea, with the closed European class system. It might also be the result of the ancient medieval dignity ascribed to function, to trades. When we know, centuries before and centuries after, that we were and shall be carters, bricklayers, silversmiths, innkeepers, we lend spontaneous dignity to our place, our work. This certainty — this fatality? this pride? — contrasted with the modern cult of social mobility, the upward mobility that makes us eternally unsatisfied with the place we occupy, eternally envious of those who’ve reached a place superior to our own, who probably did so, of course, by usurping the place that was rightfully ours…
Azucena didn’t talk about it, but there could be no doubt she’d passed through war and dictatorship, she’d seen prison and death, she knew about the hangman’s knot, and the Guardia Civil filled her with dread. But her work went on: sow, plow, sell lettuce, or wait tables. If she didn’t confer dignity on her work, no one else would. The perspective of that work was continuity, permanence. She was where she was to suit herself and no one else, and that’s where I saw the contrast, when I visited the set from time to time in the afternoon to meet with Diana, the hairdresser, and the stunt-man. They and the other actors, the technicians, the producers, the director were all immensely anguished, hiding their anguish behind a jolly mask.
The joke, perpetual joking, is another atrocious trait of North Americans. The wisecrack, the snappy retort, the ironic or witty answer — they’re all an extensive but thin mask covering the vast territory of the United States and disguising the anguish of its inhabitants, the anguish of moving around, of not being still in a single place, of arriving at another place, doing, getting things done, making it. North Americans detest what they’re doing because all of them, without exception, would like to do something else so as to be something more. The United States had no Middle Ages. That’s the big difference between it and Europe, of course, but it’s also the biggest difference between them and us. We Mexicans descend from the Aztecs but also from the Mediterranean — the Phoenicians, the Greeks and Romans, from the Jews and Arabs, and along with all of them, medieval Spain. To get to Mexico you must travel the route to Santiago — not the movie set in Mexico but Santiago de Compostela in Spain — as did pilgrims. Later, when my Harvard students would complain about the remote traditions I dragged out to explain contemporary Latin America, I ask them: “And for you, when does history begin?”
They always answered: “In 1776, when our nation was born.”
The U.S.A., sprung like Minerva from the brow of Jupiter, armed, whole, enlightened, free, envied … and blessed with social mobility, always higher, to be always something more, someone more, more than the person next door. The country without limits. That was its grandeur. Also its servitude.
Azucena was the lady’s maid, the invisible, worthy, serenely satisfied servant. At times it was impossible to know if she was there or not. She walked through the Santiago house like a cat. One morning, she came in with the breakfast tray to wake Diana and found us screwing — well, ostensibly we were screwing: a sumptuous sixty-nine that we could not disguise. She dropped the tray. In the huge clatter, Diana and I awkwardly disconnected ourselves. By chance, because of my position or the light, my eyes caught Azucena’s. In her eyes, I saw the vertigo of her imagining herself loved.
XIII
In very tender, very vulnerable moments that I thought I was sharing with Diana, investing her with qualities, if that’s what they were, or lacks of defense, which is what they turned out to be, I invited her to give it all up, to come with me to one of those North American university positions I was offered from time to time. I’d never taught in a gringo university. What I imagined was a bucolic haven surrounded by lakes, with ivy-covered libraries — and good stationers, the supreme attraction the Anglo-Saxon world holds for me.
I feel a professional distress in Latin countries: the low quality of the paper, my work material, is a negative comparable to a painter’s being deprived of paint or given brushes but no canvases. The ink bleeds through notebooks made in Mexico; Spanish paper comes right out of the ancient mercantile or accounting world Pérez Galdós describes in his novels — it’s first cousin to the abacus and brother to parchment — and in France a sourpuss salesgirl blocks the way to any writer curious to smell, touch, or feel the nearness of paper.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, by contrast, the paper is as smooth as silk, the selection brilliant, extensive, well-ordered. To enter a stationery store in London or New York is to penetrate a paradise of writerly fruits, pens that fly like hawks, pads that are as pliant and responsive as a loving hand, paper clips that are silver brooches, portfolios as grand as protocols, labels that are credentials, notebooks that are deuteronomies… For years, I would go back to Mexico loaded with satin-paper notebooks for my friend Fernando Benítez so that he could write his great books about the survival of indigenous cultures in Mexico comfortably and sensually. The ideological exclusion laws of McCarthyism kept him from entering the States — he couldn’t even buy good workbooks. But that’s another story. The Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco says that the first thing he does before buying a book is to open it at random and stick his nose between its pages. That magnificent scent, comparable to aromas that might be found between a woman’s breasts or legs, is multiplied a thousandfold in the stacks of the great university libraries in the United States. Now I was inviting Diana, not too seriously, I admit, and with a kind of defenseless enthusiasm, I repeat. If you want, I said, we can live together in a university, you could go out and make your films …