Laura turned out to be a better driver than her oversized, awkward husband, who almost didn’t fit in the seat and had no place to put his knees. She seemed to have an instinctive talent for driving and could now take the boys on excursions to Xochimilco to see the canals, to Tenayuca to see the pyramid, and to wander around the barns at Milpa Alta and smell that unique aroma of udders and straw and moist backs and drink warm milk fresh from the cow.
One day, ducking out of the rain after she’d left the National Palace (where Rivera had readmitted her as soon as she stopped wearing mourning), Laura took the car parked on Calle de La Moneda and drove down the recently rebaptized Avenida Madero, the former Calle de Plateros, admiring as she went the colonial mansions along it, with their fiery tezontle tiles and matte marble, and then to Alameda and Paseo de la Reforma, where the architecture became frenchified, where beautiful villas had high mansard roofs and formal gardens.
A feeling of comfort settled over her. Her life as a married woman was comfortable, satisfactory, she had two handsome sons and an extraordinary husband-difficult at times because he was an honest man with character, a man who wouldn’t give in, but an always loving man, preoccupied, burdened by his work, but who created no problems for her. As she maneuvered to the left at the Niza traffic circle to make her way to Avenida de los Insurgentes and her house on Avenida Sonora, her comfort began to discomfit her. Everything was too calm, too good, something had to happen…
“You believe in presentiments, omens, don’t you, Auntie?”
“Well, I do believe in sentiments, and your aunts tell me theirs in letter after letter, Hilda and Virginia and your mother down there together, busy with their guests, they sit down to write letters and they feel different. I think they don’t even realize what they tell me, and sometimes that offends me, they write to me as if I weren’t myself, as if by writing to me they could talk to each other, dearie, I’m just the pretext, Hilda can’t play the piano anymore because of her arthritis, so she tells me how the music goes through her head, look here, read, how good God is, or how bad, I don’t know, because He allows me to remember Chopin’s nocturnes, note by note, in my head, absolutely exact, but He won’t let me listen to the music outside my head, have you heard of that new thing, the Victrola? Chopin screeches on those records or whatever you call them, but in my head his music is crystalline and sad, as if the purity of the sound depended on the melancholy of one’s soul, don’t you hear it, sister, don’t you hear me? If I knew that someone was hearing Chopin in their head with the same clarity I hear him in mine, I’d be happy, María de la O, I’d be sharing what I love most, I don’t enjoy it all by myself, I wish I could share my musical happiness with someone, with more than one person, and I can’t any longer, my fate was not the one I wanted, perhaps it’s the one I imagined without wanting it, do you hear me, sister? Only a humble prayer, an impotent plea like Chopin’s, who people say imagined his last nocturne when a storm forced him inside a church, do you understand my plea, sister? and Virginia doesn’t talk to me but won’t accept dying without having had anything published, Laura, couldn’t your husband ask Minister Vasconcelos to publish your Aunt Virginia’s poems? Have you seen how pretty those books are with green covers that he brought out at the university? Don’t you think you could ask? Because even though out of pride Virginia never mentions these things to me, what Hilda writes to me is exactly what Virginia feels, except that the poetess has no words and the pianist does, because, as Hilda says, my music is my words and, as Virginia answers her, my words are my silence… Only your mother, Leticia, complains of nothing, but she isn’t happy, either.”
Laura felt insufficient. She decided to ask Juan Francisco to let her work with him at what he was doing, at his side, helping him at least half the day, the two of them working together, organizing the workers, and he said fine but first come with me for a few days to see if you like it.
They were together only forty-eight hours. The old city was a jumble of small shops, shoemakers, blacksmiths, carpenters, potters, disabled veterans of the revolutionary wars, old camp followers now without men who sold tamales and drinks on the corners, murmuring corridos and the names of lost battles, a viceregal city with a proletarian pulse, its palaces now tenements, its wide portals now cluttered with sweet shops and lottery stands, shops that sold anything and everything, saddle makers, ancient inns turned into shelters where vagrants and criminals, homeless beggars and disoriented old people slept in a repugnant collective fog older than the perfume in the streets, where prostitutes plied their trade, leaning against entryways, open to suggestions and propositions, a whorish perfume identical to the scent of funeral parlors, gardenias and penises, both erect, pulque shops reeking of vomit and stray-dog urine, battalions of loose, mangy beasts poking around in garbage dumps that grew and grew, ever grayer and more purulent, like huge, cancerous lungs that would someday suffocate the entire city. Garbage had overflowed from the few canals left from the Aztec city, the assassinated city. People said they’d be drained and filled in with asphalt.
“Where would you like to begin, Laura?”
“You tell me, Juan Francisco.”
“You want me to tell you? Begin at home. Run your own house properly, girl, and you’ll make more of a contribution than if you come to these neighborhoods to organize and save people-who by the way won’t thank you for your trouble. Leave the work to me. This is not for you.”
He was right. But that evening, back in her house, Laura D az was in a high state of excitement, not understanding very well why, as if the trip to a city that was both hers and not hers had aroused the passion of her childhood years with which she’d loved and explored the forest and its giant stone women covered with lianas and jewels, the trees and their gods hidden among laurels, and in Veracruz, the passion she’d shared with Santiago that had only grown in the years since his death, and in Xalapa the passion from Orlando’s languid body that she’d rejected, the passion in her father’s broken body that she’d tenaciously embraced. And now Juan Francisco, Mexico City, her house, the boys, and a request dashed by her husband the way you swat a fly: let me become impassioned with you and with what you’re doing, Juan Francisco.
He may be right. He didn’t understand me. But even so he has to give something more to what is stirring in my soul. I love everything I have and wouldn’t exchange it for anything in the world. But I want something else. What is it?
He was asking for the mute obedience of an impassioned soul.
“Where’s the car, Juan Francisco?”
“I gave it back. Don’t give me that look. The comrades asked me for it. They don’t want me to accept anything from the official union. They call it corruption.”
7.
Avenida Sonora: 1928
WHAT WAS HE THINKING about? What was she thinking about?
He was impenetrable, like a sphere of knives. She could only know what he was thinking about by knowing what she was thinking about. What did she think about when he-repeating something that irritated her more and more and discredited him-accused her of not having gone up to the attic in Xalapa to see the Catalan anarchist. Finally, she tired of it, gave up, set aside her own reasons, and began to note, in a small graph-paper notebook she used to keep household accounts, each time he, with no provocation on her part, would remind her of this omission. It was no longer a scolding but a nervous habit, like the involuntary squinting of eyes that were fixed, without their own light. What did she think when she heard yet again the same speech she’d been hearing now for nine years, so fresh, so powerful the first times, then more difficult to understand because more difficult to hear, excessively rationalist, as she waited in vain for the dream of the speech, not the speech itself but the dream of the speech, especially when she realized that, as a mother, she could speak to her sons Santiago and Danton only in dreams, in fables. Their father’s speech had lost the dream. It was an insomniac speech. Juan Francisco’s words did not sleep. They kept watch.