There we found Siqueiros’ mural, painted on the high exterior wall of a three-story building. The work had been restored after seventy years of blindness and silence. In 1930, a rich California lady who had heard of the “Mexican Renaissance” had commissioned it. And since Rivera was committed to Detroit and Orozco was at Dartmouth, she hired Siqueiros and asked him what the theme of his work would be.
“Tropical America,” answered the muralist with frizzy, tangled hair, flashing green eyes, immense nostrils, and, curiously, a way of speaking in which he constantly interrupted his words with hesitations and little crutches, with “well”s and “hmm”s and “don’t you agree”s.
The patron had a marvelous vision of palm trees and sunsets, according to Siqueiros, quivering rumba dancers and gallant charros, red tiled roofs and decorative nopals. She signed the check and told him to get started.
On the day of the opening, with the old square crowded with officials and society people, the curtain fell revealing “Tropical America,” and there appeared the mural of a Latin America represented by a dark skinned Christ, enslaved and crucified. A Latin America crucified, naked, in agony, hanging from a cross above which flew, with fierce intent, the emblematic U.S. eagle.
The patron fainted, the officials hit the roof, Siqueiros had placed Los Angeles in hell, and the next morning the mural was completely whitewashed over, made invisible to the world, as if it had never existed. Nothing. Nada.
Seeing it restored, in place, that afternoon during the first year of the new millennium moved Enedina more than me. The girl with green eyes and olive skin raised her arms and tossed her long hair away from her neck, rolling it into a tight knot that grounded her emotion like a lightning rod. The restored work restored herself, Enedina told me later; it was the diploma proving that the Chicana personality belonged as much to Mexico as to the United States. There was nothing to hide, nothing to cover up, this land belonged to all, all races, all languages, all histories. That was its destiny because that was its origin.
On the other hand, I was too busy photographing the mural, happy that for once a job coincided with one of my own projects, which had been interrupted in Detroit when I was mugged after leaving the Institute of Arts, after I’d discovered the face of a woman that was mine, of my blood, of my memory, Laura Díaz, grandmother of my father, murdered in Tlatelolco, mother of another Santiago who couldn’t fulfill his artistic promise but who perhaps transmitted to his grandnephew the continuity of the artistic image, sister of a first Santiago shot in Veracruz and delivered to the waves in the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, here, in Los Angeles, the American Babel, Byzantium of the Pacific, the utopia of the new century, I was finishing a chapter in my artistic and family inheritance, the chronicle that Enedina and I had decided to call The Years with Laura Díaz.
“Is there anything more to say?” Enedina asked me that night, as we embraced, naked, in our Santa Monica apartment near the murmuring of the sea.
Yes, no doubt there was always something more, but between the two of us, almost brother and sister from childhood, but absolute lovers, each one belonging to the other, no explanations asked, from the time we arrived in California as infants and then grew up together, went to school together, studied together at UCLA and became impassioned by our courses in philosophy and history, on the Mexican Revolution, the history of socialism and anarcho-syndicalism, the workers’ movement in Latin America, the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, McCarthyism in the United States, studying the writings of Ortega y Gasset, Husserl, Marx, and Ferdinand Lassalle, seeing Eisenstein’s Mexican films and Leni Riefenstahl’s on Hitler’s glory and Alain Resnais on Auschwitz, Night and Fog, reviewing the photographs of Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, André Kertèsz, Rodchenko, and Alvarez Bravo: the totality of these apprenticeships, curiosities, and shared disciplines cemented our love. She flew to Detroit as soon as she found out that I’d been attacked and spent hours by my side in the hospital.
Speaking.
I’d had a concussion, dreamed wild dreams, had to stay in bed before getting back the use of my broken leg, but I didn’t forget my dreams, even when it took forever to regain the use of my leg.
Speaking.
Speaking with Enedina, recalling everything possible, inventing the impossible, freely mixing memory and imagination, what we knew, what we’d been told, what the generations of Laura Díaz knew and dreamed, the factual but also the possible, about their lives, the genealogy of Felipe Kelsen and Cosima Reiter, the sisters Hilda,, Virginia, and María de la O, Léticia (Mutti), and her husband, Fernando Díaz, the first Santiago, son of Fernando, Laura’s first ball at the San Cayetano hacienda, her marriage to Juan Francisco, the birth of the second Santiago and Danton, her love for Orlando Ximénez and for Jorge Maura, her devotion to Harry Jaffe, the death of the third Santiago at Tlatelolco, the liberation, the pain, the glory of Laura Díaz, daughter, wife, lover, mother, artist, old woman, young woman: Enedina and I remembered it all, and what we didn’t remember we imagined and what we didn’t imagine we discarded as unworthy of a life lived for the inseparable possibility of being and not being, of carrying through one part of existence by sacrificing another part and always knowing that nothing is totally possessed, neither truth nor error, neither wisdom nor memory, for we descend from incomplete but intense loves, from intense but incomplete memories, and we can only inherit what our ancestors bequeathed us, the community of the past and the will of the future, united in the present by memory, by desire, and by the knowledge that every act of love today carries out, in the end, the act of love begun yesterday. Today’s memory consecrated, as it deformed, the memory of yesterday. Today’s imagination was the truth of yesterday and tomorrow.
From our bed, Enedina and I stared for a long time at the painting of Adam and Eve ascending from Paradise instead of falling from Paradise, the painting of the first naked lovers, possessors of their own sensuality, created by the second Santiago, Santiago the Younger, before he died. Laura Díaz, in her will, had bequeathed the painting to us.
“I love you, Santiago.”
“And I love you, Enedina.”
“I love Laura Díaz a lot.”
“How wonderful that between the two of us we could recreate her life.”
“Her years. The years with Laura Díaz.”
Acknowledgments
THE BEST NOVELISTS in the world are our grandmothers, and it is to them I owe the first memory on which this novel is based. My maternal grandmother was Emilia Rivas Gil de Macías, widow of Manuel Macias Gutiérrez; she born in Alamos, Sonora, he in Guadalajara, Jalisco; she the descendant of Spanish immigrants from Santander and, according to rumors I’ve heard, Yaqui Indians from Sonora. My grandfather Macías died tragically in 1919, leaving my grandmother with four young daughters-María Emilia, Sélika, Carmen, and my mother, Berta Macías de Fuentes.
My paternal grandmother, Emilia Boettiger de Fuentes, was born in Catemaco, Veracruz, daughter of Philip Boettiger Keller, a German immigrant from Darmstadt, married to a young lady of Spanish origin, Ana María Murcia de Boettiger, with whom he had three daughters: Luisa (Boettiger de Salgado), María (Boettiger de Alvarez), and Emilia (Boettiger de Fuentes). Emilia married Rafael Fuentes Vélez, president of the National Bank of Mexico in Veracruz and son of Carlos Fuentes Benítez and Clotilde Vélez, who was attacked and mutilated on the stagecoach between Mexico City and Veracruz. A fourth Boettiger sister, Anita, was a mulatta, the issue of a never acknowledged love affair of my great-grandfather. She was always a confident and loving member of the Boettiger family.