“No.” Gorostiza smiled. “The thing is, we don’t like to admit that the winners are right. We Mexicans have been defeated too often. We like loving the defeated. They’re ours. They’re us.”
“Are there winners in history?” asked Villaurrutia, he himself defeated by sleep or languor or death, God knows, thought the beautiful, intelligent, and taciturn Carmen Barreda.
14.
Every Place, the Place: 1940
1.
HE WENT TO HAVANA, Washington, New York, Santo Domingo, sent telegrams to her at L’Escargot, sometimes called her house and only spoke if he heard her voice saying, “No, it isn’t Ericsson, it’s Mexicana,” which was their personal code for-no problems, neither husband nor children. Sometimes Maura threw caution to the wind and said something anyway, and she would have to stand there in silence or babble nonsense because her husband or her sons were nearby, no I need the plumber today, or when will that dress be ready?, or how expensive everything is, now that there’s going to be a war, while Jorge would be saying these are the best days of our lives, don’t you think?, why don’t you answer me?, and she would laugh nervously, and he’d begin, what a good thing it was we were impatient, my love, can you imagine if we’d restrained ourselves that first night?, in the name of what were we supposed to be patient?, our lives are slipping away in any case, my adored wife, my “freisch and gay wyf,” as he called her, in playful medieval Spanish, and she silently staring at her husband reading El Nacional or her sons doing their homework, wanting to say to Maura, silently telling him, nothing calmed my desire for life until I met you and now I consider myself satisfied. I don’t ask for anything more, my hidalgo, except for you to come back safe and sound so we can be together in our little room and if you ask me to leave everything behind I would without a moment’s hesitation, my sons, my husband, or my mother couldn’t stop me, only you, because with you I feel I haven’t used up my youth, will you allow me to speak frankly? Yesterday I turned forty-two, and I was sorry you weren’t here so we could celebrate it together, Juan Francisco and Danton forgot completely, only Santiago remembered, and I told him, “It’s our secret, don’t tell them,” and my son told me in a hug that we were accomplices, that would be my happiness, you and I my favorite son, why deny it?, why pretend we love all our children equally, it isn’t so, it isn’t so, there are children who have in themselves what you strongly suspect is lacking in you, children who are more than themselves, children like mirrors of the past and the future, that’s how my Santiago is, the one who did not forget my birthday and who made me think you’ve given me a papal indulgence which a woman my age needs, and if I don’t take it, my hidalgo, the life you’re giving me, I will have no life to give in the times to come to my sons, to my poor husband, my mother.
2.
The death of Leticia, the magnificent and adored Mutti: the central feminine image in Laura D az’s life, the column to which clung all the masculine strands of ivy-the grandfather Don Felipe, the father Don Fernando, the equally adored brother Santiago, the dolorous and doleful Orlando Ximénez, the husband Juan Francisco, the sons brought up by the grandmother while the life of Mexico became calmer after the now distant, cruel turbulence of the Revolution, while Laura and Juan Francisco uselessly sought each other out, while Laura and Orlando put on disguises so as not to see each other and not to be seen-all of them climbers to the balcony of Mother Leticia, all except Jorge Maura, the first man independent of the Veracruz tree trunk of the mother, powerful thanks to her integrity, her care, her rigorous attention to each day’s chores, her discretion, her immense ability to offer confidence, to be there and say nothing.
Leticia was gone, and her death brought back Laura’s childhood memories. Today’s death gives presence to yesterday’s life. Even so, Laura could not remember a single word her mother had spoken. It was as if Leticia’s entire life had been one long sigh hidden by the cloud of activities she organized to make everything proceed properly in the houses in Veracruz and Xalapa. Her speech was her kitchen, her cleanliness, her starched clothing, her well-organized dressers scented with lavender, her four-footed bathtubs, her kettles of boiling water and her pitchers of cold water. Her dialogue was her eyes, her wise silence in understanding and in making others understand without offense or lies, without useless reproach. Her modesty was beloved because it let others imagine the presence of a love protected deep within her, with no need ever to show itself. She had had a hard schooclass="underline" the separation of the first years, when Don Fernando lived in Veracruz and she lived in Catemaco. But that distance was imposed by circumstance: hadn’t it allowed Laura, still a little girl, to join her brother Santiago at exactly the right moment, when the two of them together could be both children and adults, playing first and crying later, with no other contact that might muddy the purity of that memory, the deepest and most beautiful in Laura Díaz’s life? Not a night passes without her dreaming about the face of her young, executed brother, buried at sea, disappearing under the waves of the Gulf of Mexico.
The day of her mother’s funeral, Laura lived two lives at the same time. She carried out all the rites automatically, followed all the procedures in the wake and the burial, both very solitary. No one from the old families was left in Xalapa. The loss of fortune, fear of the new anticlerical and socialist expropriating governors, the magnetic power of Mexico City, the promise of new opportunities beyond the provincial country estates, illusion and delusion-these had scattered all the old friends and acquaintances far from Xalapa. Laura visited the San Cayetano hacienda. It was a ruin. The waltzes, laughter, the hustle and bustle of servants, the clink of glass against glass, the upright figure of Doña Genoveva Deschamps existed only in Laura’s memory…
Mutti descended into the earth, but in her daughter’s second life that day, past became present, like a history without relics, the city in the mountains appeared suddenly at the seashore, old trees revealed their roots, birds passed over like lightning bolts, rivers filled with ashes emptied into the sea, the very stars were made of dust, and the forest was a hurricane-force scream.
Night and day ceased to exist.
When the world without Leticia dawned, it was decimated.
Only the perfume of Xalapa’s eternal rain woke Laura Díaz from her reverie, so she could say to María de la O: “Now for certain, Auntie, now for certain you’ll have to come with us to Mexico City.”
But María de la O said nothing. She would never say another word. She would affirm. She would negate. With her head. Leticia’s death left her wordless, and when Laura picked up her aunt’s valise to leave the Xalapa house, the old mulatta stopped and slowly turned around and around, as if she and only she could convoke all the family ghosts, give them a place, confirm them as family members. Laura was deeply touched as she watched the last of the Kelsen sisters bid farewell to the Veracruz house, the one who’d arrived dispossessed and marked, to be redeemed by a good man, Fernando Díaz, for whom doing good was as natural as breathing.
Soon picks and shovels would demolish the Xalapa house on Bocanegra Street with its useless entry gate for useless horse drawn carriages or aged gas-guzzling Isotta-Fraschinis. The eaves that protected the house from the constant drizzle that blew in from the mountains would disappear, as would the interior patio, its huge porcelain flowerpots, encrusted with bits of glass, the kitchen with its fires of diamondlike coal and its humble stone corn grinders and palm-leaf fans, the dining room and the pictures of the rascal nipped by the dog. María de la O rescued only her sisters’ silver napkin rings. The picks and shovels would soon be there.