“Mama, I’m afraid, look through the window. The sun isn’t there anymore. Where did the sun go? Did the sun die?”
“Juan Francisco, don’t talk to me as if I were an audience of a thousand people. I’m just one person. Laura. Your wife.”
“You don’t admire me the way you did before. Before, you used to admire me.”
She wanted to love him. What was happening to her? What was it that was happening, which she neither knew nor understood?
“Who understands women? Short ideas and long hair.”
She wasn’t going to waste time telling him what the boys understood each time they told a story or asked a question, that words are born from imagination and pleasure, they aren’t for an audience of thousands of people or a plaza filled with flags, they are for you and for me. To whom are you speaking, Juan Francisco? She always saw him at a podium and the podium was a pedestal and that was where she’d placed him herself from the day they married. No one but she had put him there, not the Revolution, not the working class, not the unions, not the government; she was the vestal of the temple named Juan Francisco López Greene, and she’d asked her husband to be worthy of the devotion of the wife. But a temple is a place for repeated ceremonies. And what is repeated becomes boring unless faith sustains it.
It wasn’t that Laura lost faith in Juan Francisco. She was simply being honest with herself, registering the irritations of connubial life, what couple doesn’t get irritated over the course of time? It was normal after eight years of marriage. At first they hadn’t known each other, and everything was a surprise. Now she wished she could recover the astonishment and novelty, but she realized that the second time around astonishment is habit and novelty is nostalgia. Was it her fault? She’d begun by admiring the public figure. Then she’d tried to penetrate it, only to find that behind the public figure was another public figure and another behind that one, until she realized that the dazzling orator, leader of the masses, was the real figure, there was no trick, no other personality to find, she’d have to resign herself to living with a man who treated his wife and children as a grateful audience. The problem was that the figure on the podium also slept in the conjugal bed, and one evening contact between their feet under the sheets made her, involuntarily, pull hers back, her husband’s elbows began to disgust her, she would stare at that articulation of wrinkles between the upper arm and forearm and imagine all of him as an enormous elbow, a loose hide from head to foot.
“I’m sorry. I’m tired. Not tonight.”
“Why didn’t you say something? Should we hire a maid? I thought that between you and your aunt you managed the house very well.”
“That’s true, Juan Francisco. There’s no need for maids. You have Mar��a de la O and me. You shouldn’t have maids. You serve the working class.”
“How well you understand things, Laura.”
“Know something, Auntie?” she dared to say to María de la O. “Sometimes I miss life in Veracruz. It was more fun.”
The aunt did not agree, simply looked attentively at Laura, and then Laura laughed as if to say the matter was of no importance.
“You stay here with the boys. I’ll go to the market.”
It was not a bother; she found it amusing to go to the Parián in Colonia Roma, because it broke the household routine, which in truth was no routine. Laura loved her aunt, adored her sons, and was delighted to watch them grow. The market was a miniature forest where she could find all the things that delighted her, flowers and fruits, so various and abundant in Mexico, the azucenas and gladiolas, the Madonna lilies, the “clouds” and pansies, the mangos, papaya, vanilla that she thought about when she made love: the mamey, the quince, the tejocote, the pineapple, limes and lemons, guanábana, oranges, the black zapotes and the little zapotes: the tastes, shapes, flavors of markets filled her with joy and with nostalgia for her childhood and youth.
“But I’m only thirty years old.”
She was pensive as she returned from the Parián to Avenida Sonora and asked herself, Is there something more? Is this all there is? She answered herself with a slight shrug of her shoulders and walked faster, not even thinking about the weight of the baskets. If there was no more automobile, it was because Juan Francisco was honorable and had returned the gift to the CROM. She remembered that it had not been his idea to return it. The comrades had asked him to do it. Don’t accept gifts from the official union. Don’t become corrupt. It hadn’t been a voluntary act on his part. They’d asked him to do it.
“Juan Francisco, would you have returned the car if your comrades hadn’t asked you to?”
“I serve the working class. That’s that.”
“Sweetheart, why do you depend on injustice so much?”
“You already know I don’t like-”
“My poor Juan Francisco, what would become of you in a just world?”
“Spare me the condescension. Sometimes I just can’t figure you out. Hurry up and make breakfast, I’ve got an important meeting today.”
“Not a day passes without an important meeting. Not a month. Not a year. Every minute there’s an important meeting.”
What did he think of her? Was Laura only a habit of his, a sexual rite, mute obedience, expected gratitude?
“I mean, how good it is that you have people to defend. That’s your strength. It pours out of you. I love to see you come home tired.”
“You’re incomprehensible.”
“What are you talking about? I love it when you fall asleep on my breasts, and I love the idea that I restore your strength. Your work drains you even if you don’t realize it.”
“You’re so flighty, you make me laugh sometimes, but other times-”
“I annoy you… I just love the idea!”
He left without another word. What did he think of her? Did he remember the young woman he met at the Casino ball at Xalapa? The promise he made her that he would educate her, teach her to be a woman in the city and in the world? Would he remember the young mother who wanted to accompany him in his work, identify herself with him, prove that in their married life the two of them shared the life of the world, the life of work?
This idea weighed more and more on Laura Díaz. Her husband had rejected her, had not carried out the promise that they would be together in everything, united in bed, in being parents, but also in work, in that part of the whole that eats up the life of each day the way children eat the sections of an orange, transforming all the rest-bed and being parents, matrimony and dreams-into minutes to be counted and finally into empty skins to be discarded.
“The mute obedience of impassioned souls.”
Laura blamed herself. She remembered the child from Catemaco, the girl from Veracruz, the young woman from Xalapa, and in each she saw the growing promise that culminated in her wedding eight years before. Ever since then I’ve shrunk instead of growing, I’ve been turning into a little dwarf, as if he didn’t deserve me, as if he’d done me a favor, he didn’t ask me to do it, he didn’t impose it on me, I asked for it, and I imposed it on myself in order to be worthy of him. Now I know I wanted to be worthy of a mystery, I didn’t know him, I was impressed by him physically, his way of speaking, of taking control of the monster of the crowd, I was impressed by that speech he gave in our Xalapa house in honor of the Catalan woman. That’s what I fell in love with-to jump from my love to knowledge of the person I loved, love as a trampoline of knowing, its labyrinth, my God, I’ve spent eight years trying to penetrate a mystery that isn’t mysterious, for my husband is what he seems to be, not more, what appears is what he is, there’s nothing more to discover, I’ll ask the audience whom the leader López Greene speaks to, the man is for real, what he tells them is true, there’s nothing hidden behind his words, his words are his entire truth, every last bit, believe in him, there is no one more authentic, what you see is what he is, what he says is nothing more.