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 center 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.
She looked at Laura but didn’t smile, and Laura was grateful for the woman’s imperturbable seriousness because she feared what she might see if the enigmatic visitor opened her mouth. Such was the cold and nervous style of this visitor: she tried to hide the emotion of her gaze but did not quite succeed. She knew it and transferred the enigma to her mouth, closed in sorrow, sealed with manifest difficulty in order not to show… Her teeth? Laura wondered. Does this woman want to hide her teeth from me? If she could only be identified by her eyes, Laura Díaz, accustomed to discovering eyes and making them into metaphors, saw in them instantaneous moons, torches of straw and wood, lights on the mountain-and she stopped, biting her lower lip, as if to restrain her own memory, so as not to remember those words as spoken by Maura, Jorge Maura, in the Café de Paris almost twenty years before, with Domingo Vidal and Basilio Baltazar, the three of them safe in that bohemian setting on Avenida Cinco de Mayo yet at the same time exposed to the most brutal storms, like the hyenas and oxen and wind and lights on the mountain, whenever they opened their mouths.