She’d slapped him once. She’d sworn never to do it again.
“What do you want me to tell you about my father? If you slept with him, you could find out all his secrets. Be braver, Mama. I’m telling you the truth.”
“You’re a miserable little worm.”
“No, I’m hoping to graduate and be a big worm, just you wait and see. Just as Kiko Mendive says in his song: guachachacharachá!” He improvised a little dance step, straightened his blue-and-yellow-striped tie, and said, “Don’t worry, Mama, as far as the world is concerned, every man for himself, my brother and I can take care of ourselves. We’re okay. We’re not going to be a burden to you.”
Laura hid her doubts. Danton was going to need all the help in the world, and since the world helps no one for free, he would have to pay. A feeling of profound revulsion toward her younger son flowed over her. She asked herself the useless questions: Where does that come from? What is there in Juan Francisco’s blood? Because in mine…
Santiago entered a febrile stage in his life. He neglected his job with Rivera at the National Palace and transformed his bedroom into a studio reeking aggressively of oil paints and turpentine. Entering his space was like stepping into a savage forest of fir trees, pines, larches, and terebinths. The walls were smeared as if they were a concave extension of the canvases, the bed was covered by a sheet hiding the prostrate body of another Santiago, who slept while his twin the artist painted. The window was darkened by a flight of birds attracted to a rendezvous as irresistible as the call to the south during the autumn equinox, and Santiago recited aloud as he painted, himself attracted by a kind of southern gravity:
a branch was born like an island,
a leaf was shaped like a sword,
a flower was lightning and medusa,
a cluster rounded off its resume,
a root descended into the darkness.
It was the twilight of the iguana.
Then he’d say disconnected things while he painted: “All artists are tame animals; I’m a wild animal.” And it was true. He was a man with a head of long hair and a boyish, scattered beard and a high, clear, fevered brow and eyes filled with a love so intense they frightened Laura, who was finding a perfectly new being in her son, on him “the initials of the earth were inscribed,” because Santiago her son was the “young warrior of darkness and copper” in the Canto General, by the greatest poet in the Americas, Pablo Neruda, which had just been published in Mexico. Mother and son read it together, and she remembered the nights of fire in Madrid that Jorge Maura had evoked, Neruda on a roof in flames under the bombs of fascist planes, in a European world returned to the elemental ode of our America in perpetual destruction and re-creation, “a thousand years of air, months, weeks of air,” “the high place of the human aurora: the tallest vessel that contained the silence of a life of stone after so many lives.” Those words fed the life and work of her son.
She wanted to be just. Her two sons had already burst into extremes, both Santiago and Danton were taking shape in places of the dawn, and they were both “tall vessels” for the promising silence of two nascent lives. Until then, she’d believed in people, older than she or her contemporaries, as intelligible beings. Her sons were, prodigiously, adventurously, mysteries. She asked herself if at any moment in the years with Laura D az she herself had been as indecipherable for her parents as her sons seemed to her now. She vainly sought an explanation from those who could understand her-María de la O, who certainly had lived on the extreme edge of life, the frontier of abandonment that had no night or day, or her own husband, Juan Fancisco, about whom she knew only a legend, first, and then a spoiled myth, and finally an old rancor, cohabiting with a resignation she’d learned to accept.
Despite everything, the alliances between parents and sons became stronger in a natural way; in every home there are gravitational fields as strong as those of the stars-which don’t fall, Maura explained to her once, precisely because some attract others, lean on each other, maintain their integrity despite the tenacious, irresistible force of a universe that is permanently expanding, from beginning (if it really had a beginning) to end (if it really will have an end).
“Gravity doesn’t mean falling, as is commonly thought, Laura. It’s attraction. Attraction not only unites us but makes us bigger.”
Laura and Santiago gave each other mutual support. The son’s artistic project found an echo in the mother’s moral frankness, and Laura’s return to her frustrated marriage was completely justified thanks to her creative union with her son. Santiago saw in his mother a decision to be free that corresponded to his own impulse to paint. The union between Juan Francisco and Danton, on the other hand, was based first on a certain masculine pride on the father’s part-this was the playboy, tough-guy son who was always in love, just like the heroes of the wildly popular Jorge Negrete movies the two went to see together in downtown theaters: the recently opened Chinese Palace on Iturbide Street, a mausoleum of papier-mâché pagodas, smiling Buddhas, and starry heavens (sine qua non for a “movie cathedral” of the time) the Alameda and the Colonial, with their viceregal, baroque references, the Lindavista and the Lido, with their Hollywood pretensions, “streamlined,” as society ladies said of their outfits, their cars, and their kitchens. The father loved inviting his son out for a strong dose of all those challenges to honor, displays of horseback-riding skill, barroom brawls, and serenades to saintly girlfriends. Both of them melted, gaping at Gloria Marín’s liquid eyes-she’d just prayed to the Virgin that her man might show up. Because a charro from Jalisco, even if he thought he was conquering the woman, was always the one who was conquered, thanks to the womanly arts, suffering on the gallows of an all-devouring virginity from a legion of Guadalajara maidens named Esther Fernández, María Luisa Zea, or Consuelito Frank.
Danton knew his father would enjoy his tales of bars, challenges, and serenades which, at the suburban level, reenacted the movie deeds of the Singing Cowboy. In school, he was punished for such escapades. Juan Francisco celebrated them, however, and the son gave thanks, wondering whether his father was nostalgic for the adventures of his own youth or if, thanks to the son, he was enjoying for the first time the youth he had missed. Juan Francisco never spoke of his intimate past. If Laura was betting that her husband would reveal the secrets of his origin to their younger son, she was mistaken. There was a sealed zone in López Greene’s life story, the very awakening of his personality: had he always been the attractive, eloquent, brave leader she met in the Xalapa Casino when she was twenty-one, or was there something before and behind the glory, a blank space that would explain the silent, indifferent, and fearful man who now lived with her?
Juan Francisco taught the son he coddled about the glorious history of the workers movement against the dictatorship of Porfirio D az. After 1867, when Maximilian’s empire fell, Benito Juárez found himself face to face, right here in Mexico City, with well-organized groups of anarchists who had secretly come in with the Hungarian, Austrian, Czech, and French troops who supported the Habsburg archduke. They stayed here when the French withdrew and Juárez had Maximilian shot. Those anarchists had grouped artisans into Resistance Societies. In 1870 the Grand Circle of Mexican Workers was constituted, then in 1876 a secret Bakunin group, The Social, celebrated the first general workers congress in the Mexican Republic.
“So you see, my boy, the Mexican workers movement wasn’t born yesterday, even though it had to struggle against ancient colonial prejudices. There was an anarchist delegate, Soledad Soria. They tried to nullify her membership because the presence of a woman violated tradition, they said. The Congress grew to have eighty thousand members, just imagine. Something to be proud of. It was logical that President Díaz began to repress them, especially in the terrible putting down of miners in Cananea. Don Porfirio began his repression there because the American groups that dominated the copper company had sent in almost a hundred armed men from Arizona, rangers, to protect American property. It’s always the same old song from the gringos. They invade a country to protect life and property. The miners also wanted the same old thing, an eight-hour day, wages, housing, schools. They, too, wanted life and property. They were massacred. But it was there that the Díaz dictatorship cracked for good. They didn’t calculate that a single crack can bring down an entire building.”