“Just tricks, Pánfilo. Carranza was a hacienda owner and hated the peasants. Zapata and Villa were right to distribute land without asking the old goat’s permission.”
“But now Obregón has won. He always defended us, even if it was to win support against Zapata and Villa. Figure it out, comrades. Obregón won out over everyone.”
“You mean he killed everyone.”
“If you like. That’s how politics works.”
“Does it have to be that way? Let’s change it, Dionisio.”
“Obregón won, that’s reality. He won, and he’s going to stick. Mexico is at peace.”
“Tell it to all those restless generals. They all want a piece of the government, power has yet to be distributed, Palomo, there are miracles yet to come. Let’s see how it plays out for us.”
“Just tricks, that’s how it’ll play out for us. Tricks. Hoaxes.”
“Comrades,” Juan Francisco ended the discussion. “What matters to us are very concrete things-the right to strike, wages, the workday, and then further victories like paid vacations, paid maternity leave, social security. That’s what’s important for us to win. Don’t lose sight of those goals, comrades. Don’t get lost in the maze of politics.”
Laura stopped knitting, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine her husband in the dining room next door, standing up, ending the argument, telling the truth, but the intelligent truth, the possible truth: they simply had to collaborate with Obregón, with the CROM, and its leader Luis Napoleon Morones. The rain fell harder, and Laura listened harder. Juan Francisco’s comrades used the copper spittoons which were an indispensable part of every well-appointed home, of all public places, and, especially, of any room where men gathered.
“Why don’t we women spit?”
Then they filed out of the dining room and wordlessly said goodbye to Laura, and she would vainly try to attribute the ideas she’d heard to the faces she watched pass-this one with sunken eyes (Pánfilo?), that one with a nose as narrow as the gates of heaven (José Miguel?), the sunny look of one (Dionisio?), the blind stumbling of another (Palomo?), the whole group and all the details about these men, the dissimulated limping, the desire to weep for some loved one, the salty saliva, the last cold, the ancient passage of hours remembered because they never took place, youth wanting to be more than youth all at once, eyes mortgaged with blood, loves postponed, the handful of dead men, the longed-for generations, hopelessness without power, life exalted without the need for happiness, a parade of promises, crumbs on shirts, a strand of white hair on a lapel, a remnant of breakfast’s scrambled eggs on a lip, the haste to return to what had been abandoned, delay in order to avoid return-Laura saw all that as her husband’s comrades passed by.
No one was smiling, and that alarmed her. Wasn’t Juan Francisco right? Was it she who didn’t understand anything? She wanted to give words to the faces leaving her house, saying farewell wordlessly. She was upset, actually came to feel guilty for wanting reasons where perhaps there were only dreams and desires.
She liked President Obregón. He was astute, intelligent, even though he didn’t seem as handsome as he had in the battle photos, or as blond, young, and svelte as when he had fought with two arms; now, maimed and graying, he’d put on weight, as if he weren’t getting enough exercise or the presidential sash didn’t quite compensate for the lost hand. But as she strolled through the parks in the morning, before the cloudbursts, with the boys in the pram, Laura felt something new was happening. José Vasconcelos, an overexcited but brilliant philosopher, was the revolutionary government’s first Minister of Education, and he had turned over the walls of public buildings to artists to paint what they pleased-attacks on the clergy, the bourgeoisie, the Holy Trinity, or, rather worse, the very government that was paying for their labor. There was freedom! Laura exclaimed to herself-taking advantage of her aunt’s minding the boys to make an excursion to the National Preparatory School, where Orozco was painting, or to the National Palace, where Rivera was painting.
Like Obregón, Orozco too was one-armed, as well as nearsighted and sad. Laura admired him because he painted the walls in the Prepa as if he were someone else, with a vigorous hand and his eyes unblinkingly fixed on the sun: he painted with what he lacked. An unclouded vision, another Orozco inhabiting the body of this Orozco, guided him, illuminated him, challenged Laura Díaz to imagine what the fiery, fugitive genius must be that governed the painter’s body, communicating an invisible fire to the disabled, shortsighted artist with his severe lips and bitter brow.
By contrast, Laura in her new outfit, with its bodice embroidered with precious stones and its short skirt, had barely sat down on the stairway in the National Palace to watch Diego Rivera paint when the artist became distracted, staring at her with an intensity that made her blush.
“You’ve got the face of a boy or a madonna. I don’t know which. You choose. Who are you?” asked Rivera during a break.
“I’m a girl.” Laura smiled. “And I have two sons.”
“I’ve got two girls. Let’s marry off the four of them, and when we’re both free of brats I’ll paint you as neither a woman nor a man but a hermaphrodite. Do you realize what the advantage is? You can love yourself both ways.”
He was the opposite of Orozco. He was an immense, fat, tall frog with bulging, sleepy eyes. And when she turned up another day dressed in black with a black ribbon tied over her hair because of the death of her father, Fernando D az, in Xalapa, one of Rivera’s assistants asked her to leave: the maestro feared the evil eye and couldn’t paint while making the sign of the horns to exorcise bad luck.
“Oh, I see… because I’m in mourning. You must be very superstitious, red maestro, if a woman in black can frighten you.”
She hadn’t had time to get to Xalapa for the funeral. Her mother, Leticia, sent her a telegram. You have your own obligations, Laura, a husband and two sons. Don’t make the trip. Why didn’t she add anything else, your father thought of you before dying, said your name, regained his speech for the last time just to say Laura, God gave him that gift at the end, he spoke again?
“He was a decent man, Laura,” said Juan Francisco. “You know how he helped us.”
“He did it for Santiago’s sake,” Laura retorted, the telegram in one hand and the other pushing aside the curtain so she could peer out through the almost black rain of late afternoon, as if to see all the way to a cemetery in Xalapa. The snowy peaks of Mexico City’s two volcanoes were bobbing above the storm.
When Aunt María de la O came home, she said that God knew what He was doing, Fernando D az wanted to die in order not to be in the way, she knew this because the two of them understood each other clearly, with just a look, direct and intelligent, how could it be otherwise with the man who had saved her mother, supported her, and given her a dignified old age.
“Is your mother still alive?”
María de la O became upset, shook her head, said I don’t know, I don’t know, but one morning when Laura stayed home to make the beds and the aunt took the boy and the baby in the carriage out for a stroll, she found under María de la O’s mattress an old daguerreotype of a slim, good-looking black woman in a low-cut dress, with a spark on her lips, a challenge in her eyes, a wasp waist, and breasts like hard melons. She quickly put it back when she heard María de la O return, tired after only three blocks, hobbling on her swollen ankles.
“Oooh, the altitude here, Laurita.”
The altitude and its airless air. The rain and its refreshing air. It was like the beat of Mexico’s heart, sun and rain, rain and sun, systole and diastole, every day. Thank heaven the nights were rainy and the days clear. On weekends, Xavier Icaza would visit and teach them how to drive the Ford that the CROM had given Juan Francisco.