They had no answers, just questions. What did you do, Juan Fancisco? Were you a hero who tired of being one? Was your heroism a lie? Why have you never told me of your past? Did you want to start over from zero with me? Did you think I’d be offended that you praised yourself? Did you expect, as actually did happen, that someone else would do it for you? That others would fill my ears with your legend without your having to emphasize it or correct it or deny it? Was it enough for you that I heard what others said about you, that was my proof, to believe what others said, and believe in you with something more than knowledge, with pure, blind love? Because that’s how you treated me at first, like a faithful and silent little wife, knitting in the living room next door while you planned the future of Mexico with the other leaders in the dining room, remember? Tell me, which of your myths am I going to transmit to our sons, the complete truth, the half-truth, the part of your life I imagine to be good, the part I imagine to be bad, which part of their father will touch Danton, which Santiago?
“What part of your life serves the lives of your sons best?”
“Do you know something, Laura? In catechism they tell you there’s original sin and that’s why we’re the way we are.”
“I only believe in the original mystery. Which will yours be?”
“Don’t make me laugh, stupid. If it’s a mystery, there’s no way to know it.”
Only time, dissipated like smoke, would reveal the truth of Juan Francisco López Greene, the labor leader from Tabasco. Now she was wrapped in the love of a wholly different man, fervently desired. Jorge Maura is my real husband, Jorge Maura should have been my sons’ real father, she imagined as she walked from the Parque de la Lama that March morning, fully intending, as soon as she reached her house, to tell her husband, I have a lover, a marvelous man, I’d give everything for him, I’d leave everything for him, I’d leave you, my sons.
She would tell him before the boys came home from school. But they had the day off: everyone was going to the Zócalo to celebrate the nationalization of the oil industry by President Cárdenas, a valiant revolutionary who had faced up to the foreign companies, ordering them to leave, recovering the wealth of the nation
the subsoil
the veins of the devil
the English companies that stole the communal lands of Tamaulipas
the Dutch companies that used paid assassins as white guards against the unions
the gringo leaders who received Mexican workers sitting down with their backs to them
gringos, Dutch, English, they all left with their white engineers and their blueprints and the wells filled with salt water
the first Mexican engineer to arrive at Poza Rica had no idea what to say to the worker who came over to ask, “Boss, should I empty the pail of water down the tube now?”
and for that reason the four of them, Juan Francisco and Laura, Danton and Santiago, were squeezed together that afternoon in the crowd in the Zócalo, between the Cathedral and the city hall, their eyes fixed on the main balcony of the Palace and on the revolutionary President, Lázaro Cárdenas, who had taught a lesson to the foreign exploiters, the eternal bloodsuckers of Mexican labor and wealth, The oil is ours! The sea of people in the square cheered Cárdenas and Mexico, the rich ladies donated their jewels and the poor women their hens to help pay the expropriation debt, London and The Hague severed diplomatic relations with Mexico, the oil belongs to the Mexicans, fine, let them drink it, let’s see who’ll buy it, a boycotted Cárdenas had to sell oil to Hitler and Mussolini while he was sending rifles to the Spanish Republic, and in the crowd Jorge Maura watched Laura Díaz and her family from a distance. Laura recognized him. Jorge took off his hat and said hello to all of them. Juan Francisco stared at the man with curiosity, and Laura silently communicated to him, I couldn’t, my love, I couldn’t, forgive me, see me again, I’ll call you, you have Mexicana and I have Ericsson …
13.
Café de Paris: 1939
“I HAVE TO TELL you about Raquel Alemán.”
He also told her about his comrades in the Republican cause who were in Mexico on missions different from his. They would meet in a very centrally located place, the Café de Paris on Avenida Cinco de Mayo. It was also the haunt of Mexican intellectuals then, led by a man of great wit and unlimited sarcasm, the poet Octavio Barreda, who was married to a sister of Lupe Marín, Diego, Rivera’s wife before Frida Kahlo. Carmen Barreda would sit in the Café de Paris and listen to her husband’s ironies and jokes without changing expression. She never laughed, and he seemed to thank her for it; it was the best commentary on his dry, deadpan humor; it was fitting that he translated Eliot’s The Waste Land into Spanish.
Everyone expected a great work from him, but it never came. He was a biting critic, a promoter of literary magazines, and a man of great physical distinction—tall, thin, with the features of a hero of the independence movement, light brown skin, and very green, flashing eyes. He was at a table with Xavier Villaurrutia and José Gorostiza, two marvelous poets. The prolific Villaurrutia gave the impression that his poetry, because so spare, was sparse. In point of fact, he was composing a thick volume in which Mexico City took on a nocturnal and amorous sensibility that before him no one had achieved:
Dreaming, dreaming the night, the street, the staircase and the shout of the statue as it turns the corner. Running toward the statue and finding only the shout, wanting to touch the shout and finding only the echo, wanting to grasp the echo and finding only the wall, and running toward the wall only to touch a mirror.
Villaurrutia was small, fragile, always about to be hurt by mysterious and unnamable forces. He spent his life in his poetry. By contrast, Gorostiza—solid, sarcastic, and silent—was the author of one great, long poem, Death Without End, which many thought the best Mexican poem since those written by the nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in the seventeenth century. Its subject was death and form, the form—a glass—postponing death, the water imposing itself, tremulously, as the very condition of life, its flow. Between form and flow stands man, contained in the profile of his vital morality “filled with myself, besieged in my own skin by an ungraspable god who suffocates me.”
There were serious sympathies and antipathies among these Mexican writers, and the source of the discord seemed to be Jaime Torres Bodet, a poet-novelist who could not decide between literature and bureaucracy, who ultimately chose the latter, but who never renounced his literary ambition. Barreda sometimes posed as a Chinese laundry man and spy, Dr. Fu Chan Li, and would say to Gorostiza, affecting a Chinese pronunciation: “You watchee out fol Toles.”
“What’s toles?”
“Toles Bodet.”
Which is to say that Jorge Maura and his friends made themselves at home in this Mexican replica of a Madrid tertulia—a word, Villaurrutia recalled, derived from Tertullian, the Church father who in the second century A.D. liked to gather with his friends in Socratic discussion groups—although it was hard to imagine a discussion with someone as dogmatic as Tertullian, for whom the Church, possessor of the truth, had no need to argue about anything. Barreda improvised, or recalled in Tertullian’s honor, a funny verse:
Dressed as if to go to a tertulia,
Judith departed for Betulia …
Our discussions try to be Socratic, but sometimes they become Tertullianesque, Jorge Maura warned Laura Daz before going to the café. The other Socratic or Tertullian discussants were Basilio Baltazar, a young man in his thirties, dark-skinned, with thick hair, dark brows, shining eyes, and a smile like sunshine; and Domingo Vidal, whose face and years on earth seemed to have been hacked out with a hatchet. He seemed to have emerged from a stone calendar. He shaved his head and let his features expand in an aggressive, mobile way, as if to compensate for the sleepy sweetness in his thick-lidded eyes.
“Well, my hidalgo, won’t my presence annoy your comrades?”
“I want you to be there, Laura.”
“At least you could warn them.”
“They already know you’re coming with me because you are me and that’s that. And if they don’t understand, they can get lost.”
That afternoon they were going to discuss a theme: the role of the Communist Party in the war. Vidal, Jorge pointed out to Laura as they went into the café, would speak for the Communists and Baltazar for the anarchists. That was arranged.
“And you?”
“Listen to me and decide for yourself.”
The two discussants greeted Laura with open hearts. She was surprised that they both talked of the war as if they were living a year or two before what was currently taking place. The Republic was not only staring defeat in the face. This was defeat. On the other hand, from a distance, Octavio Barreda’s face expressed simple curiosity: who was with that gal Laura Díaz, who’d gone with the Riveras to Detroit when Frida lost the child? Villaurrutia and Gorostiza shrugged.
A dialogue began that Laura could instantly see was scripted or anyway predictable, as if each discussant had a role in a play. But then even this impression had already been determined by what Maura had said. Vidal began, as if following an invisible cue, arguing that the Communists had saved the Republic in 1936 and 1937, that without them Madrid would have fallen in the winter of 1937. Neither the militias nor the people’s army could have withstood the street disorder in Madrid and in the factories, the lack of food and transportation, without the order imposed by the Party.
“You’re forgetting all the others,” Baltazar reminded him. “Those who agreed that the Republic should be saved but who did not agree with you.”
Vidal furrowed his brow but burst into laughter. It wasn’t a matter of disagreement but of doing what was most effective to save the Republic. We Communists imposed order on those who wanted anarchic pluralism in the midst of war, people like you, Baltazar.
“Was a series of small-scale civil wars preferable—anarchists on one side, militiamen on the other, Communists against everyone else, and everyone against us, handing victory to the enemy, who was surely united?” Vidal scratched his unshaven chin.
Basilio Baltazar was silent for a moment, and Laura thought, This man’s trying to remember his lines, but his confusion is authentic and perhaps the mistake is mine, and this has to do with a pain I don’t know.
“But the fact is, we’ve lost,” said the melancholy Basilio after a time.
“We probably would have lost sooner without Communist discipline,” said Vidal in an all too neutral tone, as if he respected Basilio’s absent pain, anticipating the anarchist’s likely question: Are you asking whether we lost because the Communist Party put its interests and the interests of the Soviet Union above those of the collective interests of the Spanish people? Well, I’ll respond by saying that the interests of the Party and the Spanish people coincided, that the Soviet Union helped all of us, not only the Party, with arms and funds. All of us.
“The Communist Party helped Spain,” concluded Vidal, and he started hard at Jorge Maura, as if everyone knew that the next speech was his, except that Basilio Baltazar interrupted on a sudden impulse. Unforeseen by anyone but all the more notable because he asked his question in a hushed tone: “But what was Spain? I say it wasn’t only the Communists, it was us, the anarchists, it was liberals, and parliamentary democrats, but the Party first isolated and then annihilated everyone who wasn’t Communist, then strengthened itself and imposed its will by weakening the other Republicans and mocking any hope that wasn’t the Party’s. They preached unity but practiced division.
“That’s why we lost,” said Baltazar after a pause, his eyes averted, so averted that Laura guessed night away that this was something more personal than a political argument.
“You’re very quiet, Maura,” Vidal turned to say, respecting Baltazar’s silence.
“Well”—Jorge smiled—“I see that I’m drinking coffee and Vidal has a beer, but Basilio has already grown fond of tequila.”
“I don’t want to disguise the fact that we disagree.”
“No,” said Vidal.
“Not at all,” said Baltazar rather quickly.
Maura thought that Spain was more than Spain. He’d always held that opinion. Spain was the rehearsal for the fascists’ general war against the entire world. If Spain fell, Europe and the rest of the world would fall …
(“I have to tell you about Raquel Alemán.”)
“Excuse me for being the devil’s advocate.” Vidal smiled in his peculiar way. He was the first man to enter a café in extremely formal Mexico City wearing a sweater of rough wool, as if he’d just come from a factory. “Just imagine if the revolution had triumphed in Spain. What would have happened then? Well, then Germany would have invaded us,” said the devil.
“But Germany has already invaded us,” Basilio Baltazar interrupted, with his quiet desperation. “Spain is already occupied by Hitler. What are you defending or fearing, comrade?”
“What I fear is a disorganized Republican triumph that only post pones the fascists’ true, permanent triumph.”
Vidal drank his beer like a camel who’s happened on an oasis in the desert.
“You mean that would be better than Franco, so we could fight him later in a general war against the Italians, the Germans, and the Spanish fascists?” Basilio’s tone suggested an even higher level of desperation.
“That’s what my devil says, Basilio. The Nazis fooled the whole world. They’re soaking up all of Europe, and no one puts up any resistance. The French and English are either naive or cowards, and they think that they can negotiate with Hitler. It’s only here that the Nazis don’t fool anyone.”
“Here? In Mexico?” Laura smiled to relieve the tension.
“Pardon, pardon mille fois,” laughed Vidal. “Only in Spain.”
“No, excuse me, please.” Laura smiled again. “I understand your ‘here,’ Mr. Vidal. I would have said ‘here in Mexico’ if I were in Spain.”
“What are you drinking?” Basilio asked her.
“Chocolate. It’s a custom of ours. You grind it first, then add hot water. My Mutti, I mean, my mother …”
“Well.” Vidal went back to his argument. “Let’s have thick chocolate and clear conclusions, if you don’t mind. If the Nazis win in Spain, perhaps Europe will wake up. They’ll see the horror. We already know what it is. Perhaps in order to win the big war we have to lose the battle of Spain so as to alert the world against this evil. Spain, the battle, la petite guerre d’Espagne.” Vidal twisted his lips and suppressed a smile.
Jorge slept badly, talking in his sleep all night, got up to drink water, then to urinate, then to sit in an armchair with a distracted look on his face, observed by naked Laura, also nervous, satisfied after sex with Jorge but sensing with alarm that the sex was not for her, but a way of seeking relief …
“Talk to me. I want to know. I have a right to know, Jorge. I love you. What’s happening? What happened?”
It is a beautiful but harsh nation, as if dying slowly and not wanting anyone to see its agony but at the same time wanting a witness of its mortal beauty. The marks of centuries are stamped on its face, one after another starting with the Iberians, a savage gold helmet with the same value as a clay pot. A Roman gate that endures, eaten away by time and by storms, like a marker of power and a notice of legitimacy. A great medieval city wall, the belt around the Castilian town and its defense against Islam—which nonetheless seeps in everywhere, in the Spanish words for pillow, for terrace, for the bath of cleanliness and for abominable pleasures, for the artichoke whose leaves we pull off like an edible carnation, in the semicircular arches of Christian churches, in the Moorish decoration on doors and windows near the synagogue—empty, ruined, persecuted internally by abandonment and oblivion …
Surrounded by its twelfth-century wall, the town of Santa Fe de Palencia has a unique center, a kind of urban navel from which flows the entire history of a community. Its main plaza is a bullring, an arena of very yellow sand waiting for the other color of the Spa
nish flag to be poured onto it, a plaza that instead of having seats on the sunny or shady side is surrounded by houses with huge shuttered windows, open on Sundays so that people can watch the bullfights, which give vitality and strength to the town. There is only one way into the large, enclosed plaza.
The three Republican soldiers have entered this singular town center, where the mayor, Don Alvaro Méndez, a Communist, is waiting for them. He is not uniformed, but wears a short vest over his big belly, a collarless shirt, and spurless boots. His most attractive feature is his face, with its bushy eyebrows, arched like the entrance to a mosque; his eyes have been veiled for some time by aging eyelids, one would have to search for the hard, secret shine in the depths of that invisible gaze. The faces of the three soldiers are, in contrast, open, frank, and astonished. The old man reads them and says I’m only doing my duty, you saw the Roman gate?, it’s not a party question, it’s a matter of law, this city is legal because it is Republican, it isn’t a city in revolt on the side of fascism, it’s a city governed legitimately by an elected Communist mayor, I, Alvaro Méndez, who must do his duty, no matter how terrible and painful it may be.
“It’s unjust,” said Basilio Baltazar through his tightly closed teeth.
“I’ll tell you something, Basilio, and I’m not going to repeat it,” said the mayor, standing in the center of the bullring with its yellow sand and closed windows, with curious women in black peering through the cracks. “There is fidelity in obeying just orders, but there is a higher fidelity in obeying unjust orders.”