“Dying of hunger?”
“Independent.”
“Okay, but call if you need me.”
“Likewise.”
With the Leica in her hands, Laura Díaz reacted in the same way to the dissimilar deaths of first Frida Kahlo and then Carmen Cortina in the year of the earthquake. Orlando made her remember the invisible, lost city of an asphyxiating misery and degradation that he had taken her to see that night after the penthouse party on Paseo de la Reforma. Now, camera in hand, Laura walked the streets in the heart of Mexico City and found them simultaneously crowded and abandoned. Not only did she fail to find that lost city, the true beggars’ paradise, where Orlando had taken her to convince her that there was no hope, but she discovered that the visible city of the 1930s was now the real invisible or, at the least, abandoned, city, left behind by the incessant outward expansion of the capital. The first block around the Zócalo, great center of the city’s celebrations since the time of the Aztecs, wasn’t empty-there were no open spaces in Mexico City-but it had ceased to be the center and was just another neighborhood, the oldest and in a certain way the most prestigious because of its history and architecture. Now a new center was springing up around the fallen Angel of Independence, on both sides of Paseo de la Reforma, neighborhoods named either for rivers or for foreign cities: urban Colonia Juárez and fluvial Colonia Cuauhtémoc.
Two thousand new people a day were moving into Mexico City, sixty thousand new inhabitants a month fleeing hunger, arid farmland, injustice, unpunished crime, brutal political bosses, and indifference; the capital, meanwhile, was alluring, with its promises of well-being, even beauty. Didn’t the beer ads promise top-caliber blondes, and weren’t all the characters in the ever more popular television soap operas also blond, rich, well-dressed upper-class types?
For Laura, none of this answered her questions about the unstoppable migratory flow: Where did these people come from? What was their final destination? How did they live? Who were they?
That was Laura Díaz’s first great photo-essay. It summed up the experience of a lifetime-her provincial origins, her life as a young married woman, her two experiences of motherhood, her loves and what her loves brought her: the Spanish world of Maura, the terrible memory of Raquel’s martyrdom in Buchenwald, the merciless execution of Pilar at the walls of Santa Fe de Palencia, McCarthy’s persecution of Harry, the double death of Frida Kahlo, first immobile death and then resuscitation by fire-she poured it all into a single image taken in one of the nameless cities springing up like loose threads and patches on the great embroidered sackcloth that was Mexico City.
Lost cities, anonymous cities built on the outskirts of the dry valley, amid rocky fields and mesquite trees, with houses nailed together any which way, caves made of cardboard and flattened tin cans, dirt floors, poisoned water, and dying candles (until the people’s ingenuity discovered a technique for stealing electricity from streetlights and the pylons supporting high-tension power cables).
Which is why the first photograph Laura Díaz took, after Frida Kahlo’s body, was of the fallen Angel, the statue smashed to pieces at the foot of its slender column, the bodiless wings, the split, blinded face of the model who, according to legend, posed for it, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, who years after went to Notre Dame in Paris to commit suicide in front of an altar because of her love for the philosopher José Vasconcelos, Mexico’s first Minister of Education. Vasconcelos’ memoir, Ulises Criollo, had caused a sensation in 1935 because of its frankness, and Orlando, in one of his most felicitous remarks, said, “It’s a book you have to read standing up.”
When she photographed the broken figure of the Angel who was the philosopher’s lover, Laura Díaz had to measure the seasons-in a city of “perpetual spring” that seemed never to have one. She realized she hadn’t really taken notice of how the years had passed. The city has no seasons. January is cold. Dust storms in February. March blazes. It rains in summer. In October, the storms remind us that appearances are deceiving. December is transparent. January is cold.
She thought about the years she’d lived in Mexico City and began to superimpose Vasconcelos’ various faces on them-from the young, romantic student to the dashing intellectual guerrillero of the Revolution, to the noble educator with the interminable forehead who commissioned Diego Rivera to paint murals, to the Bergsonian philosopher of élan vital, to the Americanist of the “cosmic race,” to the presidential candidate who opposed the Maximum Chief Calles and his court jester Luis Napoleon Morones, the man who’d corrupted Juan Francisco, to the resentful exile who ended up, old and choleric, praising Franco and fascism and ordering his own books expurgated.
Vasconcelos was the mutable and dramatic image of revolutionary Mexico, and his fallen lover, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Angel of Independence, was the fixed, symbolic supernatural image of the nation in whose name the heroes who venerated her had fought, the same ones who’d fucked her. Today, both the philosopher and his angel were in ruins, in a city that neither would recognize and that Laura went out to photograph.
Laura was sleeping differently. Before, she had dreamed without reflecting but with concern. Now there was neither reflection nor concern. She slept as if everything had already happened. She slept like an old lady.
She reacted. She wanted to sleep again as if nothing had happened, as if her life would only begin when she woke up, as if love were still a pain unknown to her. She wanted to wake up with a desire to see anew each morning and to file what she was seeing in the most precise place in her feelings, where heart and head joined forces. Before, she’d seen without seeing. She didn’t know what to do with her everyday images, the daily coins that each day put in her empty hands.
Laura Díaz began to ask herself, What will I do next year? Before, when she was young, everything was unforeseen, natural, necessary, and, despite everything, pleasant. But Frida’s death especially made her remember her own past as if it were a blurry photo. The earthquake, seeing Orlando again, and the death of Carmen made her think, Can I give the past its lost focus, its absent clarity?
The city and death woke her up. Mexico surrounded her like a great, sleeping serpent. Laura woke next to the heavy breathing of the serpent that wrapped around her but did not suffocate her. She woke up and photographed the serpent.
She had photographed Frida dead. Now she photographed the family house on Avenida Sonora before it was demolished as her son had ordered. She photographed the splintered facade and the condemned interiors, too, the garage where Juan Francisco parked the car the CROM labor union had given him, the dining room where her husband had met with labor leaders, the living room where she would wait, patient as a Creole Penelope, for the moment of grace and solitude when her husband returned home, the threshold where the persecuted nun Gloria Soriano sought refuge, and the kitchen where Auntie María de la O maintained the traditions of Veracruz cuisine-the aromas of chile chipotle, purslane, and cumin still permeated the walls. Then there was the hot-water tank fueled by yellowed newspapers where all the figures of power, crime, and entertainment were gradually consumed, where the flames devoured Calles and Morones, Lombardo and Avila Camacho, Trotsky and Ramón Mercader, the murderer Chinta Aznar and the insane rapist and murderer Sobera de la Flor, the pudgy Roberto Soto and Cantinflas, Meche Barba the rumba dancer and Jorge Negrete the singing charro, the bargains at Puerto de Liverpool and the ads that told you Betterall’s Better at Making You Better (Mejor Mejora Mejoral) and Twenty Million Mexicans Can’t Be Wrong, the great bullfighters Manolete and Arruza, the city-planning accomplishments of the regent Ernesto Uruchurtu, and the swimmer Joaquin Capilla’s Olympic medaclass="underline" fire consumed them all, just as death devoured the bedroom her son Santiago transformed into sacred space, a fountain of images, a cavern where shadows were reality, and paintings and drawings piled up; and Danton’s secret room, which no one could enter, an imagined room which could just as easily be decked out with pictures of naked women torn out of the magazine Vea as be kept with bare walls as a penitence, until he found his own fortune, as he did; and the matrimonial bedroom where Laura was overwhelmed by the images of the men she’d loved, why she’d loved them, how she’d loved them.