After she left the bar, Laura took a long walk through the Zona Rosa, the fashionable new neighborhood where the young generation gathered en masse, the young people who’d survived the Tlatelolco massacre and ended up in jail or at a café, both prisons, both enclosed. They’d invented, in the space bounded by Chapultepec, Paseo de la Reforma, and Insurgentes, an oasis of cafeterias, restaurants, malls, mirrors, where they could stop, look at themselves, be admired, show off the new styles-miniskirts, wide belts, black patent-leather boots, bell-bottom trousers, and Beatles haircuts. Half of Mexico City’s ten million inhabitants were under twenty years of age, and in the Zona Rosa they could have a drink, show off, pick someone up, see and be seen, believe again that the world was livable, conquerable, without spilled blood, without an insomniac past.
Here in these same streets-Génova, Londres, Hamburgo, and Amberes-the impoverished aristocrats of the Porfirio Díaz era had lived; here the first elegant nightclubs-the Casanova, the Minuit, the Sans Souci-had opened during the Second World War, which transformed the city; here, in the La Votiva church, Danton had daringly begun his climb to success; here too, along Paseo de la Reforma, the young people of Tlatelolco had marched to their death, and here appeared the cafés which were like guild halls for the young literary set, the Kineret, the Tirol, and the Perro Andaluz; here were restaurants frequented by the rich, the Focolare, the Rivoli, and the Estoril, along with the restaurant that was everyone’s favorite, the Bellinghausen, with its maguey worms, its noodle soups, its escamoles and chemita steaks, its delicious flans flavored with rompope eggnog and its steins of beer, colder than anywhere else. And right here, when the subway system was built, there began to appear, vomited out by the trains, the gandallas, onderos, chaviza-the fuckers, the new wavers, the bucks-all the names invented for the hordes of the new poor from the lost neighborhoods, dispatched from the urban deserts to the oasis where camels drink and caravans repose: the Zona Rosa, as the artist José Luis Cuevas called it.
Laura, who’d photographed it all, felt powerless to depict this new phenomenon: the city was escaping her eyes. The capital’s epicenter had shifted too many times during her life-from the Zócalo, Madero, and Avenida Juárez to Las Lomas and Polanco, to Reforma (now converted from a residential street like one in Paris to a commercial avenue like one in Dallas), and now the Zona Rosa. But its days, too, were numbered. Laura Díaz could smell it in the air, see it in the faces, feel it on her skin-it was a time of crime, of insecurity and hunger, asphyxiating air, invisible mountains, only the fleeting presence of stars, an opaque sun, a mortal fog over a city transformed into a bottomless, treasureless mine, lifeless canyons replete with death…
How can one separate passion from violence?
Mexico’s question, Mexico City’s question, was Laura’s answer: yes, after all is said and done, as she walked away from her final meeting with Orlando Ximénez, Laura Díaz could declare, “Yes, I think I’ve managed to separate passion from violence.”
What I haven’t achieved, she said to herself as she strolled quietly from Niza Street to Plaza Rio de Janeiro along Orizaba Street, the familiar, almost totemic, places of her daily life-the church of the Holy Family, the Chiandoni ice-cream parlor, the department store, the stationery store, the pharmacy, the newspaper stand at the corner of Puebla Street-what I didn’t do was solve those many mysteries, except Orlando’s, which I finally figured out this afternoon. He was waiting for something that never came; to wait for something that would never come was his fate, which he tried to change this afternoon by proposing to me, but fate-experience transformed into fatality-took control again. That was fatal, murmured Laura, sheltered by the sudden splendor of a long, agonic afternoon enamored of its own beauty, a narcissistic afternoon in the Valley of Mexico. She recited one of Jorge Maura’s favorite poems:
Fortunate the tree, which is barely sensitive,
more fortunate still the hard stone, because it feels nothing.
There is no greater pain than the pain of being alive,
nor any greater sorrow than conscious life…
This “song of life and hope” by the marvelous Nicaraguan poet Rubén Dario shrouded Laura in its words that August afternoon, clean and clear because of recent rain, when Mexico City recovered for a few seconds the lost promise of its diaphanous beauty.
The thunderstorm had carried out its punctual chore, and, as Mexico City denizens say, “it cleared up.” On her way home, Laura amused herself reviewing the unsolved mysteries, one by one. Did Armonía Aznar really exist? Had that invisible woman really lived in the attic of the Xalapa house, or was she merely a cover story for the conspiracies of the anarcho-syndicalists from Catalonia and Veracruz? Was she a figment of the young, mischievous, irrepressible imagination of Orlando, Ximénez? I never saw Armonía Aznar’s body, Laura Díaz was surprised to hear herself saying, now that I think about it. I was only told that “it didn’t stink.” Was her grandmother Cosima Reiter really in love with the handsome, brutal outlaw, the Hunk of Papantla, who cut off her fingers and left her self-absorbed for the rest of her days? Did her grandfather Felipe Kelsen ever miss his lost rebel youth in Germany? Did he ever resign himself completely to the fate of being a prosperous coffee grower in Catemaco? Would Aunts Hilda, and Virginia have been more than they were? If they’d been educated in Germany and if they hadn’t had the pretext of isolation in a dark corner of the Mexican forest, would they have been in Düsseldorf a recognized concert pianist and a famous writer? It was no mystery what would have been Auntie María de la O’s life if Grandmother Cosima had not energetically separated her from her mother, the black prostitute, and integrated her into the Kelsen household. The goodness and rectitude of her own father, Don Fernando Díaz, was also no mystery; nor was the pain he bore for the death of the promising young man, the first Santiago, shot by Porfirio Díaz’s soldiers at the Gulf. But Santiago himself was a mystery, the politics he chose by necessity and the private life he chose by act of will. Perhaps the latter was just another myth invented by Orlando. Ximénez to seduce Laura Díaz by exciting her. And what happened at the outset of her husband Juan Francisco’s life, a man who shone with such glory in the public eye for twenty years only to fade away and die defecating? Nothing, nothing before and nothing after the interlude of glory? Born from shit and dying in shit? Was the interlude the entire performance of his life, or something that had happened between the acts? Nothing? Infinitely painful mysteries: if her son Santiago had lived, if the promises of his talent were there, present and fulfilled, if Danton hadn’t had the ambitious genius that led him to wealth and corruption. And if the third Santiago, dead at Tlatelolco, had submitted to the destiny planned by his father, would he be alive today? And his mother, Magdalena Ayub Longoria, what did she think of all this, of these lives which were hers and which she shared with Lauras Díaz?
Had Harry informed on his left-wing comrades to McCarthy?
And finally, above all, what had become of Jorge Maura? Was he alive, was he dying, had he already died? Did he find God? Had God found him? Had Jorge Maura sought for spiritual well-being so strenuously only because he’d already found it?
Arriving at that final mystery, the fate of Jorge Maura, Laura Díaz stopped, granting her lover a privilege she would soon grant to all the other protagonists of the years with Laura Díaz: the right to carry a secret to the grave.