And now Juan Francisco was dead and didn’t know it. He felt no pain at all.
Nor did she. Which is why she preferred remembering the pain of giving birth, so that those who came to the wake-old comrades, union men, minor government functionaries, the odd deputy, and, in brutal contrast, Danton’s family and rich friends-could see in her face the traces of a shared pain, but this was false since the pain, the real pain, can be felt only by the one who feels it, the woman giving birth, not the doctor who helps her or the child being born, only the man being shot feels the bullets penetrate him, not the firing squad or the officer giving the order, only the sick person feels it, not the nurses…
Who knows why, Laura recalled the image of the Spanish woman Pilar Méndez at the gates to Santa Fe de Palencia, shouting in the middle of the night so that her father would show her no mercy, only justice as political fanaticism conceived it, shot at sunrise for betraying the Republic and aiding the Cause. Like her, Laura wished she could shout, but not for her husband, not for her sons, for herself, remembering her own pains, banal and terrible, in giving birth, indescribable and impossible to share. They say pain destroys language. It can only be a shout, a whimper, a disembodied voice. Those who speak of pain don’t feel it. Those who possess the language of pain describe the pain of others. True pain has no words, but Laura Díaz, the night of her husband’s wake, did not want to shout.
Her eyes still shut, she remembered other cadavers, those of the two Santiagos, Santiago Díaz Obregón, her half brother, shot in Veracruz at the age of twenty, and Santiago López-Díaz, her son, dead at the age of twenty-six in Mexico City. Two handsome dead men, equally beautiful. She dedicated her mourning to them. That night, her two Santiagos, the Elder and the Younger, gathered together the dispersion of the world spilled out in no order over the years so as to give it proper form, the form of two young, handsome bodies. But it’s one thing to be a body and another to be beautiful.
The comrade workers wanted to lay the red flag with the hammer and sickle over Juan Francisco’s coffin. Laura refused. Symbols were superfluous. There was no need to identify her husband with a red rag that could be put to better use in a bull ring.
The comrades walked out, offended but silent.
The priest officiating at the wake offered to say the rosary.
“My husband wasn’t a believer.”
“God receives all of us in His mercy.”
Laura Díaz pulled off the crucifix adorning the lid of the coffin and handed it to the priest.
“My husband was anticlerical.”
“Madam, don’t offend us. The cross is sacred.”
“Take it. The cross is a rack of torture. Why don’t you put a little gallows on the coffin, or a guillotine. In France, Jesus Christ would have been guillotined, right?”
The murmur of horror and disapproval that arose from the pews where Danton’s family and friends were seated satisfied Laura. She knew she’d done something unnecessary, provocative. It was a natural reaction. She couldn’t have repressed it. It gave her pleasure. It seemed, suddenly, like an act of emancipation, the beginning of something new. After all, who was she now if not a solitary woman, a widow, companionless, with no family but a distant son now captive in a world Laura Díaz found detestable?
People began to leave, humiliated or offended. Laura exchanged glances with the only person looking at her fondly. It was Basilio Baltazar. But before they could speak to each other, a decrepit small man, shrunken like a badly washed sweater, wrapped in a cape too big for him, a tiny man with features both well defined and faded by time, with little clumps of matted hair above his ears, like frozen grass, handed Laura a letter, telling her in a voice from the depths of time, Read it, Laura, it’s about your husband…
There was no date, but the handwriting was old-fashioned, ecclesiastical, more appropriate for noting baptisms and funerals, life’s alphas and omegas, than for communicating with another person. She read the letter that night.
Dear Laura, may I address you that way? After all, I’ve known you since you were a child, and even though the difference in our ages is a thousand years, my memory of you remains fresh. I know that your husband, Juan Francisco, died keeping the secret of his origin as if it were something shameful or disgraceful. But do you realize he died the same way, anonymously, making no noise? Could you yourself, if I were to ask you today, give an account of your husband’s life over the past twenty years? You’d find yourself in the same situation as he did. There’d be nothing to tell. Do you think the vast majority of those who come into this world have something extraordinary to tell about their lives? Are they, therefore, less important, less worthy of respect and, sometimes, of love? I write you, my dear friend, whom I’ve known since you were a girl, to ask you to stop torturing yourself thinking about what Juan Francisco López Greene was before he met and married you. Before making a name for himself as a fighter for justice in the Veracruz strikes and when the Red Battalions were created during the Revolution. That was your husband’s life. Those twenty years of glory, eloquence, fearlessness, they were his life. He had no life before or after his moment of glory, if you’ll permit me to call it that. With you, he sought the safe harbor for a tired hero. Did you give him the peace he silently begged of you? Or did you demand of him what he could no longer give? A tired hero who’d lived something no one lives twice, his moment of glory. He came from far away and from the depths of society, Laura. When I met him, he was a little boy in Macuspana, wandering around like an animal with no master, no family, stealing food here and there when bananas, which Tabasco gives freely to the hungriest of the poor, weren’t enough for him. I took him in. I dressed him. I taught him to read and write. You know well that this is common practice in Mexico. The young priest teaches a poor boy to read and write the language the boy will use against our Holy Mother Church as a man. That was the case with Benito Juárez, and that was the case with López Greene. That last name. Where did he get it, when he had neither father nor mother nor sister nor brother? “I heard it, Father…” López is a very common name in Hispanic genealogy, and Greene is a name found frequently among families in Tabasco that descend from English pirates of colonial times, when Sir Henry Morgan himself attacked the coast of the Gulf of Campeche and sacked the ports whence Mexico’s gold and silver were shipped to Spain. And Juan? Again, the commonest name in the Spanish language. But Francisco because I taught him the virtues of the most admirable saint in Christendom, the man from Assisi… Ah, my dear girl Laura, St. Francis abandoned a life of luxury and pleasure to become God’s jester. I took the opposite route, as you know. Sometimes faith falters. There would be no faith without doubt. I was young when I came to Catemaco to take the place of a beloved parish priest, you remember him, Father Jesus Morales. I’ll confess several things. I was annoyed by the aura of sanctity surrounding Father Morales. I was very young, imaginative, even perverse. If St. Francis went from sin to sanctity, I would do the same, perhaps in reverse, I’d be a perverse, sinful priest, what horrors did I not pour into your ear, Laura, defying the greatest commandment of Our Lord Jesus Christ, not to scandalize children? What greater crime than running off with the treasure of the poorest, offerings to the Holy Child of Zongolica? Believe me, Laura, I sinned to be holy. That was my project, my perverted Franciscanism, if you prefer. I was defrocked, and that’s how you found me, surviving on my stolen money as your mother’s guest, may God have her in His glory, in Xalapa. You must have said something to your husband. He remembered me. He came looking for me. He thanked me for my teaching. He knew about my sin. He confessed his own. He betrayed the nun who called herself Carmela, Sister Gloria Soriano, implicated in the assassination of President-elect Alvaro Obregón. He did it out of revolutionary conviction, he said. The policy then was to extinguish the clericalism that in Mexico had exploited the poor and supported the exploiters. He didn’t hesitate to turn her in: it was his obligation. He never thought that you, Laura-you weren’t even a believer-would take it so seriously. How strange, but how wrong. We never measure the moral consequences of our acts. We think we’re obeying the mandates of ideology, whether we’re revolutionaries, clericalists, liberals, conservatives, Cristeros, and what slips through our fingers is the precious liquid we call, for lack of a better word, “the soul.” Your brutal reaction to his betrayal of Gloria Soriano at first disconcerted Juan Francisco and then depressed him. It was like the tombstone over his career. He was finished. He did ridiculous things, like hiring a detective to spy on you. He repented of his silliness, I assure you. But once a priest always a priest, you know that not even if they cut off my fingertips I could never give up hearing confessions and absolving people of their sins. Laura: Juan Francisco asked me to forgive his betrayal of Gloria Soriano. It was his way of thanking me for having taken in a barefoot, ignorant boy and educated him sixty-five years ago, just imagine. But he did something else. He returned the treasure of the Holy Child of Zongolica. One afternoon, as they came into the church for vespers, the townspeople found the jewelry, the offerings, everything they’d given and saved, back in its proper place. You never knew, because Catemaco news never leaves Catemaco. But the bedazzled town attributed it to a miracle wrought by the Holy Child, capable of re-creating His own treasure and returning it to where it belonged. It was as if He’d said, If I made you wait it was so you would feel the absence of my offerings and rejoice even more when you recovered them. How did you pay for all that? I asked Juan Francisco. With contributions from the workers, he confessed. Did they know? No, I told them it was for victims of an epidemic after the Usumacinta River flooded. No one ever kept any accounts. Laura, I hope you’ll return to your hometown to see how beautiful the altar is thanks to Juan Francisco. Laura, forgive men who have nothing more to give than what they carry within them. Sometimes the well runs dry. As with me, I’m. running out of communions. I don’t think we’ll ever see each other again. I don’t want us to see each other again. It was very hard for me to appear today before you at the funeral parlor. How good it was you didn’t recognize me. Damn, I don’t even recognize myself!