“I am Laura Díaz. I took these photographs. May I assist you?”
The woman dressed in black turned to look at the empty frame where Basilio’s portrait should have been and told Laura, If you know this man, tell him I’ve returned.
She smiled then and showed her savagely ruined teeth.
22.
Plaza Río de Janeiro: 1966
LAURA DÍAZ’S GRANDSON, SANTIAGO López-Ayub, and his girlfriend, Lourdes Alfaro, came to live with her at Christmas in 1966. The apartment was old but spacious, the building itself a relic from the previous century that had survived the implacable transformation of Mexico City, from the town of pastel colors and two-story buildings which Laura first saw when she arrived as a new bride in 1922, to what it was now, a blind giant, growing and destroying everything in its path, demolishing the nineteenth-century French architecture, the eighteenth-century neoclassical architecture, and the seventeenth-century baroque architecture. In some sort of grand regressive reckoning, the past was being burned away until there appeared, pulsing like a forgotten, awful, painful wound, the very sediment of the Aztec city.
Laura was not merely ignoring the impudence of her generous, though hardly disinterested, son Danton when she rejected his help and set herself up in the old building on Plaza Rio de Janeiro, adapting the flat to her work needs-with living space but also a darkroom, an archive, space for her illustrated reference works. She had, for the first time in her life, the famous “room of one’s own” that Virginia Woolf had said women deserved so they could have their sacred zone, their minimal redoubt of independence: a sovereign island of their own.
After she’d left the family house on Avenida Sonora and grown accustomed to living alone and free as she went from being fifty-nine to being sixty-seven with a profession and a livelihood, gratified by fame and success, Laura did not feel threatened by the renewed youth Santiago and Lourdes offered her, and she was pleased by how easy it was for the three of them to share household chores, by the understandable but unexpected richness which their after-dinner conversations developed, by the sharing of their experiences, desires, and similar tastes that living together afforded them right from the first moment the third Santiago appeared at Laura’s door and said, Grandmother, I can’t live with my father anymore and I don’t have enough money to live alone and take care of my girlfriend.
“Hello. Let me introduce myself. I’m your grandson Santiago, and this is my girlfriend, Lourdes, and we’ve come to ask you to put us up.” Santiago smiled with Danton’s strong, white teeth but with his uncle’s sweet, melancholy eyes. He had an elegant, even excessive way of moving, too, that reminded Laura of the dissimulating affectation of the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Revolution in Veracruz, Santiago the Elder.
Lourdes Alfaro by comparison was modestly beautiful and dressed the way all young people dressed nowadays, in pants and a T-shirt-one day with the face of Che Guevara, Mick Jagger the next-a long mane of black hair and no makeup whatsoever. She was small and shapely, a “tiny mistress full of virtues,” an epithet which, Laura recalled, Jorge Maura used to quote from the medieval Archpriest of Hita’s Book of Good Love when he teased her about her own Teutonic stature.
The presence of the young lovers in her house was enough to gladden Laura Díaz’s heart, and she opened her arms to the couple-they had a right to happiness now and not after twenty years of violence and unhappiness, as had been the case with Laura and Jorge, or with Basilio Baltazar and Pilar Méndez (now reunited as Jorge and Laura could never have dreamed of being, since destiny can’t succeed twice in turning a tragedy into a happy ending).
The third Santiago and Lourdes for all these reasons had all the rights in the world, in the eyes of Laura Díaz. The boy, whom she’d never met before, given Danton’s stubborn rancor and his wife’s arrogance, now told her about himself, told her he knew and admired her, because, he said, he was going into his first year of law school and didn’t have the artistic talent of either his grandmother or his uncle Santiago, who’d died so young…
“That painting of the couple looking at each other, is it his?”
“Yes.”
“What a great talent, Grandmother.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t sing his own virtues, but Lourdes told Laura one night while she was preparing dinner-saffron rice and drumsticks-Santiago is a tough guy, a real man, considering how young he is, Doña Laura, nothing fazes him… at one point I thought I’d just be a burden to him, given his career, and especially given his relations with his parents, but you should have seen, Doña Laura, how firmly Santiago faced up to them and made me feel that he needed me, that instead of a burden I was someone he could lean on, that he respected me.
They’d met at the school dances Santiago liked more than the parties organized by his parents and his parents’ friends, where everything was about exclusivity and only children of “well-known families” were invited. But at the school dances, social barriers fell and buddies studying the same subjects could meet regardless of their wealth or their family connections. Along with the boys came girlfriends, sisters, and the odd maiden aunt-the tradition of “chaperons” wouldn’t die…
Danton approved of those gatherings. Lasting friendships were made in school, and even though your mother’d prefer that you went to parties only with people of our class, if you notice, son, the people who govern us never come from the upper classes, they develop at the bottom or in the middle class, and it’s important for you to know them when you can help them, because one day, I assure you, they’ll help you. In Danton’s eyes, poor friends could be a good investment.
“Mexico is a country open to talent, Santiago. Don’t forget that.”
In his first year at law school, Santiago met Lourdes. She was in nursing school and came from Puerto Escondido, a beach town on the Oaxaca coast where her parents had a modest hotel with the best temazcal in the region, she said.
“What’s that?”
“A steam bath with fragrant herbs that cleanses you of all toxins.”
“I think that’s just what I need. When are you going to invite me?”
“Whenever you like.”
“Sounds good.”
Together they went to Puerto Escondido and they fell in love there, facing the Pacific, which meets the steep bluffs along a treacherously sandy, sweet beach, but in fact it’s an abyss where anyone can quickly lose his footing, with no support to withstand the swift currents, which caught Santiago and dragged him, more in anguish than in danger, until Lourdes dove into the water, hooked an arm around the boy’s neck, swam with her free arm, helping him to get to shore, and there, exhausted but excited, they exchanged their first kiss.
“You tell me that with your voice trembling,” said Laura.
“It’s that I’m afraid, Doña Laura.”
“Forget the don a. You make me older than I am.”
“Okay, Laura.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Santiago’s papa is a very hard man, Laura, he won’t put up with anything he himself hasn’t ordered, he becomes like a panther, and it’s something terrifying.”