“You know it’s hard for Diego to fall asleep in winter. Now I have to spend all my nights with him so he’ll get some rest and have energy for the new mural. Laura, don’t forget to put a doll in my Coyoacán bed.”
11.
Avenida Sonora: 1934
ONE FINE DAY, Aunts Hilda and Virginia disappeared.
Leticia got up at six in the morning, as she usually did, and prepared breakfast—mangos and quinces, mameys and peaches, huevos rancheros, bran bread, café con leche—which at seven o’clock she would arrange on the table at the places marked by the napkins rolled into silver rings.
She glanced sadly—later she realized her melancholy was a premonition—at the places set for her three sisters and the silver initials, H, V, MO. When they failed to appear by seven-fifteen, she went to María de la O’s room and awakened her.
“I’m sorry. I had very annoying dreams.”
“What did you dream about?”
“About a wave … I don’t know,” said the almost embarrassed Auntie. “Damn dreams, why do they leave us so quickly?”
Leticia went right to Hilda’s door, where her knock was not answered. She opened it slightly and saw that the bed hadn’t been slept in. She opened the armoire doors and noticed that one hanger was bare, the one that normally held the long white nightgown with the lacy bodice which Leticia had washed and ironed thousands of times. But the perfectly ordered ranks of slippers and high-top shoes were complete, like an army at ease.
She rushed in anguish to Virginia’s room, certain she wouldn’t find a messy bed there, either. What she did find was a note in an envelope addressed to her, leaning against the mirror:
Dear Little Sister: Hilda couldn’t be what she wished, and neither could I. Yesterday, we looked in the mirror and thought the same thing. Why wait with “Christian” patience for the fatal moment, why not have the valor to walk toward death instead of giving it the satisfaction of knocking at our door one evening? Sitting here in Xalapa, taken care of by your goodness and your efforts, we were fading like two burned-down candles. Both of us wanted to do something that would be the equivalent of what we could not accomplish in life. Our sister stared at her arthritic fingers and hummed a Chopin Nocturne. I looked at the shadows under my eyes, in each wrinkle I counted a poem that was never published. We looked at each other and realized what we were both thinking—so many years living together, just imagine, we haven’t separated since we were born, so we can guess each other’s thoughts! Last night, you may remember, the four of us sat down to play cards in the living room. It was my turn to shuffle (Hilda can’t because of the condition of her fingers), and I began to feel ill, the way someone should feel who enters their final moments without knowing it, but no matter how ill I felt, I couldn’t stop shuffling, I went on aimlessly, until you and María de la O began to stare in astonishment, and then I shuffled frantically, as if my life depended on mixing the cards, and you, Leticia, said the fatal phrase, repeated that sweet, old, terrible saying: A little old lady once died shuffling cards.
Then I looked at Hilda and she at me, and we understood each other. You and our other sister were elsewhere, out of our world.
Looking at the cards. You led with the king of clubs.
Hilda and I looked at each other from the depths of our souls … don’t try to find us. Last night, the two of us put on our white nightgowns, left our feet bare, woke up Zampaya and told him to drive us, in the Isotta, to the sea, to the lake where we were born. He put up no resistance. He looked at us as if we were insane for going out in our nightgowns. But he would always do what any one of us would tell him. So when you wake up and read this letter, you will not find either Hilda or me or Zampaya or the car. Zampaya will let us out where we tell him to do so, and the two of us will lose ourselves, barefoot in the forest, with no plan, no money, no bread basket, barefoot and wearing our nightgowns only out of modesty. If you love us, you will not look for us. Respect our wishes. We want to make death into art. The last. The only. Don’t deprive us of that pleasure. With love from your sisters
VIRGINIA AND HILDA
“Your aunts were never seen again,” said Leticia to Laura. “The car was found on a curve in the Acayucan road. Zampaya was found stabbed to death in, forgive me, daughter, the same bordello where María de la O grew up. Don’t look at me like that. These are absolute mysteries, and I’m not going to be the one to clear them up. Enough headaches with what I already know, no need to add to them with what I don’t know.”
Laura had come to Xalapa the moment she found out about the disappearance of her maiden aunts, although she didn’t yet know the terrible fate of the man who’d been the family’s faithful servant for so many years. It was as if the evil spirit of María de la O’s mother had returned, black as her skin, to take revenge on everyone who kept her from a life that, as her own daughter acknowledged, she exalted madly: “I was so happy when I was a whore. Fuck everyone who made me into a proper lady!”
Leticia went ahead and told Laura everything Laura had known for years. Mutti never bothered with gossip or with ferreting out information. She faced things as they turned up. She didn’t have to ask because she understood everything and, as she’d just said, what she didn’t understand she could imagine.
Back in her Veracruz home, Laura understood retrospectively, as if she were looking at a broken sun dial, that because of her aunts’ fate and her mother’s attitude Leticia knew everything about the failure of her marriage to Juan Francisco, about how her rebellion against her husband had dissolved in Elizabeth’s protective treatment and how she’d drifted from there into her empty, prolonged, and ultimately useless relationship with Orlando; yet weren’t those indispensable stages, if in themselves dispensable, in accumulating isolated instants of perception that, added together, would lead her to a new awareness, still vague, still misty, of things? The sun dial was inseparable from the shade dial.
Leticia took advantage of the flight of the old maids to look deep into Laura’s eyes and silently ask her to do the thing that Laura quickly expressed: It’s very hard for you and Auntie to take care of two boys who will soon be thirteen and fourteen. I’m going to take them back to Mexico City. You and Auntie too.
“No, Laura, we’ll stay here. We look after each other. You’ll have to remake your home on your own.”
“Yes, Mutti. Juan Francisco is waiting for all of us in the house on Avenida Sonora. But I already told you, if you and your sister want to come with us, we’ll get a larger house, so don’t give it a second thought.”
“Get used to living without us.” Leticia smiled. “I don’t want to leave the state of Veracruz ever again. Mexico City horrifies me.”
Did one have to explain to Leticia that since Orlando had abandoned her she’d decided to rebuild her home with Juan Francisco, not out of weakness but through a strong, essential act of will that summed up for her the lessons she’d learned from her life with Orlando? She’d reproached her husband for a lack of basic sincerity, for not admitting his cowardice in not confessing a betrayal that would forever make him odious in her eyes and make her odious to herself, since the excuses she could invent when she married the labor leader now seemed insufficient to her, no matter whether youth and inexperience might justify them.
That afternoon, close to her mother in the old city of her adolescence, Laura would have wanted to say this to Mutti, but Leticia herself stopped her with a definitive conclusion: “If you want, you can leave the boys here until you settle things with your husband and you resume your married life together. But you already know that.”
The two women were both about to say “Well?” but realized that without having to say a word they each knew everything, Leticia about Laura’s failed marriage, and Laura about having to go back to living with Juan Francisco despite everything, to give their home and their sons a second chance. Then Laura remembered that yes, she’d been on the verge of saying that she’d wasted these last years of her life recklessly deceiv
ing herself, that flagrant disillusion had led her to lies: she’d felt justified in abandoning her home and handing herself over to what those two worlds—the internal one of her own rage and the external one of Mexico City society—exalted as an acceptable vendetta for a humiliated woman: pleasure and independence.
Now Laura didn’t know whether either enjoyment or freedom had ever really been hers. Staying with Elizabeth so long that generosity had turned into patronage, then irritation, and finally disdain. Bound over to the love of Orlando until passion revealed itself as games and trickery. Exploring a new society of artists, of old-family people or new money arrivistes who, it’s true, never fooled her, for at Carmen Cortina’s parties appearance was essence and reality its mask.
Being useful, feeling herself to be useful, imagining she was good for something—that brought her under the wing of the Kahlo-Rivera clan, but all her gratitude toward the extraordinary couple who took her in at a bad moment and treated her as a friend and comrade could not disguise the truth that Laura was ancillary to the two artists’ world, she was a replaceable part in a perfectly lubricated geometry like those machines of glittering steel that Diego celebrated in Detroit, but a machine on a fragile base, fragile like Frida Kahlo’s wounded legs. They could take care of themselves. Laura would always love them, but she had no illusions: they loved but did not need her.
“What do I need, Mama? Who needs me?” asked Laura, after telling Leticia all these things—everything she’d sworn not to tell her and now, having blurted them out so quickly, vertiginously, clasping her mother’s strong and diligent hands, not knowing if she’d actually said it all or if Leticia once again had divined her feelings and ideas without Laura’s saying a word.
“Well?” asked Leticia, and Laura knew she knew.
“So the boys should stay here?”
“Only while you find your husband again.”
“And what if we can’t understand each other, which is very possible?”
“The fact is, the two of you will never understand each other. That’s the problem. The important thing is for you to take on the burden of something real and decide to save it instead of waiting for someone to save you. Which is what you’ve done until now. Excuse me for saying so.”
“Even if I know it will turn out badly again.”
Leticia nodded. “Sometimes we have to do things knowing beforehand we’re going to fail.”
“What do I get from that, Mutti?”
“I’d say the opportunity to become yourself, to leave your failed efforts behind. You won’t go through them again.”
“I should walk into a disaster with my eyes wide open, is that what you’re asking of me?”
“We have to finish things. You’re leaving too much unfinished, too many loose ends. Be yourself, not someone else’s toy, even if it costs you dearly to be a little more authentic.”
“It wasn’t authentic, everything that’s happened to me since I left Orlando?”
This time, Leticia did no more than hand the Chinese doll to her daughter.
“Here. The last time you came, you forgot it. Now Miss Frida needs it.”
Laura took Li Po, kissed the sleeping Danton and Santiago, and returned to what had already been finished before she came to Xalapa so alarmed at the disappearance of her aunts.
They spent the first night sleeping together side by side as if in a tomb, without warmth, without recrimination but without touching, agreeing to say some things, to arrive at certain compromises. They wouldn’t rule out opportunities for sex but by the same token wouldn’t define it as an obligation. Instead they would begin, once again lying side by side, with some questions and tentative affirmations, you understand, Juan Francisco, that before I met you I already knew you because of what people said, you never bragged about anything, I can’t accuse you of that, on the contrary, you appeared in the Xalapa Casino with a simplicity I found very attractive, you didn’t try to impress me, I was already impressed by the brave and exciting man who in my imagination took the place of the sacrificed heroism of my brother Santiago, you survived to continue the struggle in the name of my blood, it wasn’t your fault that you didn’t measure up to my illusions, it was my fault, I hope this time we can live together you and I with no wishful thinking. I never felt love from you, Laura, only respect, admiration, and fantasy, not passion, passion doesn’t last but respect and admiration do, and if that’s lost, well, what’s left, Laura? Living without passion or admiration, I’d say, Juan Francisco, but with respect, respect for what we really are, without illusions and for the sake of our sons who aren’t to blame for anything and whom we bring into the world without asking their permission. Is that the pact between you and me? No, something more, try to allay my fear, I’m afraid of you because you slapped me, swear you’ll never hit me again no matter what happens between us, you can’t imagine the terror a woman feels when a man starts beating her. That’s my principal condition. Don’t worry, I thought I had more strength than I really do have, forgive me.
And then time for some sad caresses on his part and she allowing him some tenderness out of gratitude, before reacting with shame and sitting up in bed. I mustn’t trick you, Juan Francisco, I have to begin like this, I want to tell you everything that happened to me since you informed on that nun Gloria Soriano and then slapped my face in the street when I walked out, I want you to know who I slept with, whom I desired, with whom I experienced pleasure; I want you to understand completely everything I’ve done while I was away so that you can finally answer a question for me which you haven’t yet answered, why did you pass judgment on me for my will to love you but not condemn me for sleeping with someone else? I’m asking you now, Juan Francisco, before telling you everything before everything that happened happens again, are you going to judge me again this time for my will to love you, to come back to you? or are you ready right now to condemn me if I sleep with someone else again? do you have the nerve to answer me? I’m a bitch through and through, I’ll admit that, but listen to what I’m asking you, will you have the courage not to judge me if I cheat on you—for the first time or the next time, that’s the thing you don’t know, right? You’ll never know if what I confess to you is true or if I’ve just made it up to take revenge on you, although I can give you names and addresses, you can find out if I’m lying or telling the truth about my love life after I left you, but that doesn’t change what I asked you in any way, will you not judge me ever again? I’m asking you that as retribution, in the name of the nun you turned in and the cause you betrayed, I’ll forgive you that, will you forgive me? are you capable of that? … . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . … . .
Juan Francisco did not break the long silence that followed Laura’s words until he got out of bed, buttoned up his blue-and-white-striped pajamas, took some water from the pitcher, drank it, and sat on the edge of the bed. The room was cold—it was the thunderstorm season—and hail, as thick as it was unexpected, was drumming on the roof. Through the open window flowed a newly fresh aroma of jacarandas, overcoming with its sensuality the billowing curtains and the little puddle forming under the window. Then Juan Francisco’s words began, very slowly, as if he were a man without a past—where did he come from, who were his parents, why had he never revealed his origins?
“I always knew I was strong on the outside and weak on the inside. I knew it when I was just a kid. That’s why I made such a huge effort to show the rest of the world I was strong. You especially. Because I knew early on the fears and weaknesses I had inside. You’ve heard of Demosthenes, how he overcame his timid stutter walking along the beach with pebbles in his mouth until he could overpower the noise of the waves with his voice and make himself into the most famous public orator in Greece. That’s what happened to me. I made myself strong because I was weak. What you can’t know, Laura, is how long you can keep winning against fear. Because fear is sickly, and when the world offers you gifts to calm you down—money, power
, or sensuality, all together or one at a time, it doesn’t matter—there’s no way around it, you’re grateful the world isn’t sorry for you and you go on yielding the real strength you won when you had nothing to the false strength of the world which is starting to talk to you. Then the weakness ends up overpowering you, almost without your realizing it. If you help me, perhaps I can achieve a balance and be—not as strong as you thought when you met me but not as weak as you thought when you abandoned me.”
Laura was not going to argue about who caused the break. If he went on thinking he’d been abandoned, she’d be compassionate and resign herself to seeing him play that part, and try not to lose even more respect for him. But he, in turn, would have to put up with all her truths, even the cruelest ones, not out of cruelty but so that the two of them could live from then on in the truth, disagreeable as it might be, and especially so that Danton and Santiago could live in a family without lies. Laura recalled Leticia, her mother, and wanted to be like her, to have the gift of understanding everything without using unnecessary words.
When she returned from Xalapa, she brought the Chinese doll to Frida Kahlo. The Coyoacán house was empty. Laura walked into the garden and called out, “Is there anyone at home?” And the tiny voice of a maid answered, “No, miss, there’s no one here.” The couple was still in New York, where Rivera was working on the Rockefeller Center frescoes, so Laura put Li Po on Frida’s bed and added nothing, no note, nothing; Frida would understand, it was Laura’s gift to the lost child. She tried to imagine the purity of the Oriental doll’s ivory amid the tropical undergrowth that would soon invade the bedroom: monkeys, said Frida, parrots, daisies, hairless dogs, ocelots, and a jungle of lianas and orchids.