Jorge’s note simply asked, “What part of happiness doesn’t come from God?”
On New Year’s Eve, Lourdes Alfaro and Santiago López-Ayub were married. The witnesses were Laura Díaz, Pilar Méndez, and Basilio Baltazar.
Laura thought of a fourth witness. Jorge Maura. They would not see each other again.
23.
Tlatelolco: 1968
“NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT to identify a body. No one has the right to remove a body. We will not tolerate five hundred funeral processions in this city tomorrow. Throw them all in a common grave. Allow no one to identify them.”
Make them disappear.
Laura Díaz photographed her grandson Santiago the night of October 2, 1968. She made her way on foot from the Calzada de la Estrella to watch the marchers enter the Plaza of the Three Cultures. She’d been photographing all the events in the student movement beginning with the first demonstrations-the growing presence of police squads, the bazooka fired against the door of the National Preparatory School, the occupation of University City by the army, the arbitrary destruction of laboratories and libraries by paid thugs, the university protest march headed by the rector, Javier Barros Sierra, and followed by the entire university community, the gathering in the Zócalo, where the crowd shouted to President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz: SHOW YOUR FACE-SHOW YOUR FACE-YOU’RE A DISGRACE-TO THE HUMAN RACE!, the silent march of a hundred thousand gagged citizens.
Laura recorded the nights of discussion with Santiago, Lourdes, and a dozen or more young men and women whose passions had been aroused by the events. They met in a room Laura had cleared for them in the Plaza Rio de Janeiro apartment, moving old files and throwing out useless trash that actually represented precious memories, but Laura told Lourdes that if at the age of seventy she hadn’t stored up in her memory what was worth remembering, she’d be crushed by the weight of the miscellaneous past. The past had many forms. For Laura, it was an ocean of paper.
What was a photograph, after all, but an instant transformed into eternity? The flow of time was unstoppable, so trying to save it in its totality would be a kind of madness-time that went on, under the sun and stars, with or without us, in an uninhabited, lunar world. Human time meant sacrificing the totality to give privilege to the instant and the prestige of eternity to the instant. The painting by Santiago the Younger in the apartment dining room said it alclass="underline" we aren’t falling, we’re rising.
Laura had shuffled the contact sheets nostalgically, thrown the ones that seemed pointless to her into the trash, and cleared out the room for her great-grandchild to come. Shall we paint it blue or pink? Lourdes asked, laughing, and Laura laughed with her. Male or female, the baby would sleep in a cradle surrounded by photography smells, the walls were impregnated with the unmistakable perfume of wet photographs, of developer, of prints hung up with clothespins to dry like freshly washed clothes.
She observed her grandson’s growing enthusiasm and would have wanted to warn him, Don’t let yourself be swept along by enthusiasm, for in Mexico disillusion quickly punishes anyone with faith and tosses that faith out the door. We were taught this in school, Santiago would say to his comrades, kids between seventeen and twenty-five, dark-haired and blond, the way Mexico is, a rainbow country, said a pretty girl with hair down to her waist, very dark skin and very green eyes, a country on its knees that has to be stood on its feet, said a dark boy, tall with very small eyes, a democratic country, said a boy who was pale and short, muscular and calm, with glasses that were always sliding down his nose, a country united with the great revolts in Berkeley, Tokyo, and Paris, a country that won’t ever say “Interdit d’interdire” and where imagination can seize power, said a blond boy, very Spanish, with a full beard and intense eyes, a country where we don’t forget the others, said another boy who looked Indian, very serious and hidden behind thick glasses, a country where we can all love one another, said Lourdes, a country without exploiters, said Santiago, we’re doing nothing more than bringing to the street what we were taught in school, we were educated with ideas called democracy, justice, freedom, revolution; they asked us to believe in all that, Doña Laura, can you imagine, Grandmama, a student or teacher defending dictatorship, oppression, injustice, reactionary thinking, but they showed themselves and we saw their faces, said the tall dark boy, and we cited demands, said the Indian boy with thick glasses, listen here, where are the things you taught us in school?, listen here, the dark girl with green eyes added her voice to the chorus, who do you think you’re fooling?, look here, said the boy with the full beard and intense eyes, just dare to look at us, there are millions of us, thirty million Mexicans under the age of twenty-five, do you think you can fool us forever?, the tall boy with small eyes leaped to his feet, where is democracy in the farcical elections that the PRI organizes with stuffed ballot boxes?, where is the justice-Santiago went on-in a country where seventy people have more money than seventy million citizens?, where is the freedom in unions handcuffed by corrupt leaders? asked the girl with hair to her waist, in newspapers paid off by the government, added Lourdes, in television that hides the truth?, where is the revolution? concluded the boy who was pale and short, muscular and calm, in the names of Villa and Zapata inscribed in gold on the Chamber of Deputies, concluded Santiago, on the statues the night birds shit on and the morning goldfinches shit on again when they write the PRI’s speeches?
It would have been useless to warn him. He’d broken with his parents, he identified himself with his grandmother, she and he, Laura and Santiago, had knelt down together one night right in the Zócalo and together had put their ears to the ground and together heard the same thing, the blind tumult of the city and the nation about to explode.
“The hell that is Mexico,” said Santiago. “Are we predestined for crime, violence, corruption, poverty?”
“Don’t talk, son. Listen. Before I photograph, I always listen…”
She wanted to bequeath to her descendants a luminous liberty. The two of them raised their faces from the icy stone and looked at each other with a questioning look filled with tenderness. Laura understood then that Santiago was going to act as he acted, she was not going to say to him, You’ve got a wife, you’re going to have a baby, don’t get involved. She wasn’t Danton, she wasn’t Juan Francisco, she was Jorge Maura, she was the gringo Jim at the Jarama front, she was the young Santiago the Elder shot in Veracruz. She was those who doubted everything but never hesitated to act.
Her grandson Santiago, in every march, in every speech, at every university gathering, incarnated change, and his grandmother followed him, photographed him, he paying no attention to being photographed, and Laura watched him with the tenderness of a comrade: with her camera, she recorded all the moments of change, sometimes change brought on by uncertainty, sometimes change brought on by certainty, but the final certitude-of acts, of words-was less certain than doubt. The most uncertain thing was certainty.
Laura felt during those days of the student revolt, in sunlight or torchlight, that change was certain because it was uncertain. Through her memory passed the dogmas she’d listened to all her life-the almost prehistoric antagonisms between the Franco-British allies and the Central Powers in the 1914 war, Vidal’s Communist faith and Basilio’s anarchist faith, Maura’s Republican faith and Pilar’s Falangist faith, Raquel’s Judeo-Christian faith and also Harry’s confusion, Juan Francisco’s opportunism, Danton’s greedy cynicism, and his brother Santiago’s generosity.