Just as Laura would look at herself in the mirror when she came home, almost always thinking that her face didn’t change no matter how many vicissitudes rocked it, she discovered that Santiago looked at himself as well, especially in windows, and seemed surprised at himself and by himself, as if he were constantly discovering another person there with him. Perhaps only his mother thought those things. Santiago was no longer a boy. He was something new. Laura, in front of the mirror, confirmed that sometimes she was the unknown woman-a changeling. Would her son see her that way? She was going to be forty-three.
She didn’t dare go in his room. The open door was an invitation but a jealous one, even, paradoxically, a prohibition. Look at me, but don’t come in. He was drawing. With a round mirror so he could look at himself out of the corner of his eye and create-not copy, not reproduce-the face of Santiago which his mother recognized and memorized only when she saw the self-portrait her son was drawing: the sketch became Santiago’s true face, revealed it, forced Laura to realize that she’d gone, returned, and hadn’t really looked at her sons. How right they were not to look at her, to run, to sneak off when she didn’t look at them, either; they reproached her more for not looking at them than they did for not living with them: they wanted to be seen by her, and since she didn’t see them, Santiago discovered himself first in a mirror that seemed to supply the gaze he would have wanted to receive from his parents, his brother, society, always hostile to the adolescent who bursts into it with his insolent promise and ignorant self-sufficiency. A portrait and then a self-portrait.
And Danton-could there be any doubt?-discovered himself in the brightly lit store window of the city.
She returned as if they didn’t exist, as if they’d never felt forgotten or hurt or eager to communicate to her what Santiago was making in that moment: a portrait she could have known during her absence, a portrait the son could have sent to his mother if Laura, as she’d wished, had gone to live with her Spaniard, her “hidalgo.”
Look, Mother. This is who I am. Never come back again.
Laura imagined that she’d never have another face to give her son but the one her son was giving her now: wide forehead, amber eyes set far apart, not dark as in reality, straight nose and thin, defiant lips, straight hair, messy, of a rich, lustrous chestnut, tremulous chin; even in the self-portrait the chin that wanted to bolt from the face, brave but exposed to all the blows of the world. He was Santiago the Younger.
He had several books open and arranged around him. Van Gogh and Egon Schiele.
Where did you get them? Who gave them to you?
The German Bookstore here in Colonia Hipódromo.
Laura was about to call him a chip off the old block, your German stock’s coming to the surface, but he anticipated her: Don’t worry, they’re German Jews in exile in Mexico.
In the nick of time.
Yes, Mama, in the nick of time.
She described Santiago’s features, which the self-portrait translated and facilitated for her, but she didn’t take note of the thickness of the strokes, the somber light that allowed the spectator to approach that tragic, predestined face, as if the young artist had discovered that a face revealed the tragic necessity of each life, but also its possible freedom to overcome failures. Laura stared at that portrait of her son by her son and thought about the tragedy of Raquel Mendes-Alemán and Jorge Maura’s tragedy with her. Was there a difference between the dark fatality of Raquel’s destiny, which she shared with the entire Jewish people, and the dramatic, honorable but ultimately superfluous response of the Spanish hidalgo Jorge Maura, who went to Havana to save Raquel just as he’d tried to save Pilar in Spain? Along with his self-portrait, Santiago gave Laura a light, an answer she wanted to make her own. We have to make time for the things that have taken place. We have to allow pain to become knowledge in some way. Why did her son’s self-portrait presage these ideas?
So he and she were equals. Santiago looked at her and in a matter-of-fact way accepted her looking at him from his bedroom doorway.
She didn’t separate them. They were different. Santiago assimilated everything; Danton rejected, eliminated whatever crossed his path or blocked his way: he could make a pompous teacher look ridiculous in class or, during recess, thrash a classmate he found annoying. Nevertheless, it was Santiago who better resisted the impositions the world put on him, while Danton was the one who finally accepted them after staging a violent rejection. Danton was the protagonist in the dramas about personal liberty, puberty’s declarations of independence, I’m grown up now, it’s my life, not yours, I’ll come home when I like because I control my own time, and it was he who came home drunk, it was he who took the beatings and got gonorrhea, he who shamefacedly begged for money; he was the freer of the two brothers but also the more dependent. He made a show of himself, the more easily to give in.
While still a student, Santiago got a job working on the restoration of frescoes by José Clemente Orozco, and then Laura introduced him to Frida and Diego, so he could be Rivera’s assistant on the National Palace mural project. Santiago punctually turned his salary over to his mother, as if he were a child in Dickens being exploited in a tannery. She would laugh and promise to put it aside only for him.
“It will be our little secret.”
“I hope it won’t be the only one,” said Santiago, impulsively kissing her.
“You love him more because he forgave you,” said Danton insolently. Laura couldn’t stop herself from slapping him across the face.
“I won’t say another word,” said Danton.
Laura Díaz had hidden her passion for Jorge Maura, her passion with Jorge Maura, and she now decided not to hide her passion for and with her son Santiago, almost as an unconscious compensation for the silence that had surrounded her love of Maura. She wouldn’t deny she preferred Santiago over Danton. She also knew it wasn’t conventionally acceptable. “Either they’re both your sons or both your stepsons.” It didn’t matter. Near him, watching him work at home, go out, come back on time, hand over his money, tell her his projects: this proximity wove itself into a complicity between mother and son, which was also a preference, a word that means putting ahead. Santiago began to occupy that place in Laura’s life, the first place. It was almost as if with the fading of Jorge Maura’s love, which revealed her to herself as Laura, Díaz, a unique woman, a passionate woman, a woman who would leave everything for her lover’s sake, all her passion had transferred to Santiago, not the passion of the mother for the son because that was only love and even preference, but the passion of the boy for life and for creation: that’s what Laura began to make hers because Santiago was giving it to her independently of himself, free of any vanity.
Santiago, her son, the second Santiago, was what he did, loved what he did, gave what he did. He was swiftly progressing, assimilating what he’d only seen in reproductions, books, and magazines, or studying the Mexican murals. He’s discovering the other who’s inside him. His mother is discovering him at the same time. Santiago trembled with creative anticipation whenever he had a blank piece of paper before him or, later, when he stood at the easel Laura gave him for his birthday.
He transmits his tremor. He infuses excitement into the canvas he takes possession of in the same way he excites anyone watching him. He’s a committed being.