“Yes, I know President Cárdenas promised you a cooperative, comrades. And we’re going to have it. The problem is that the requirements of production demand a strong leadership nationally linked to the CTM and the Party of the Mexican Revolution. If we don’t have that, comrades, we’ll be swallowed up by priests and landowners, as always.”
“Have faith.”
Wasn’t he going to request a sightly more elegant office?
No, Juan Francisco told Danton, a spot like this is appropriate for me, modest, and better to work from. This way I don’t offend anyone.
But I thought you made money to show off.
Then you should work as a contractor or a businessman. Those people can do what they like.
Why?
Because they create jobs. That’s the formula.
And you?
We all have to play the role assigned us. That’s the law of the world. Which do you like, son: businessman, newspaperman, soldier … ?
None of those, Papa.
Well, what do you want to do?
Whatever I have to.
16.
Chapultepec-Polanco: 1947
THE INAUGURATION of President Miguel Alemán in December 1946 coincided with an astonishing event in the Avenida Sonora household. Aunt María de la O started speaking again. “He’s from Veracruz, a jarocho,” she said—of the new, young, elegant head of state, the first civilian President, after a series of military men.
Everyone—Laura Daz, Juan Francisco, Santiago, Danton—was taken aback, but Aunt María’s surprises didn’t stop there: for no reason at all, she started dancing la bamba at all hours of the day or night, her swollen ankles notwithstanding.
“No fool like an old fool,” said a scornful Danton.
Then, at the beginning of the new year, María de la O made her sensational announcement: “The time of sadness is over. I’m going back to live in Veracruz. An old beau of mine from the port has asked me to marry him. He’s my age, though I don’t know exactly what my age is, because Mama never registered me. She wanted me to grow up quickly and follow her in the crazy life. Silly cunt, I hope she’s sizzling in hell. All I know is that Matías Matadamas—that’s my boyfriend—can dance the danzón like an angel, and he’s promised to take me dancing twice a week in the city square, right along with everyone else.”
“Nobody’s named Matías Matadamas,” said Danton the wet blanket.
“You little snot,” replied Auntie. “For your information, St. Matías was the last apostle, the one who took the place of Judas the Traitor after the crucifixion so there would be an even dozen.”
“Apostle and boyfriend all at the last minute!” Danton laughed. “As if Jesus Christ were a peddler who sold saints cheaper by the dozen.”
“Just you wait and see if the last minute isn’t sometimes the first, you disbeliever.” María de la O was berating him, but truth to tell, she was not in the mood for reproofs. What she wanted was to be dancing bulerías. “I can just see myself, holding on to him tight,” she went on with her best daydream air, “cheek to cheek, dancing on a brick, which is how you should dance the danzón, barely moving your body, just your feet, your feet tapping out the beat, slow, delicious, sexy. Oh boy, family, I am going to live!”
Nobody could explain Aunt María de la O’s miracle; nobody could thwart her will or even take her to the train, much less to Veracruz.
“He’s my boyfriend. He’s my life. My time has come. I’m tired of being a parasite. From now to the grave, pure Caribbean fun and nights on the town. A little old lady died shuffling cards. To hell with that! Not me!”
With those words, a not unusual proof that the tongues of the old loosen up when there’s nothing to lose, she boarded the Interoceanic train almost with relief, a renewed woman, a miracle.
Even though Auntie’s chair was empty, Laura Díaz insisted on continuing the afternoon ceremony of sitting at the balcony and observing the to-and-fro of the city. It had changed little between the inauguration of General Avila Camacho and that of Mr. Alemán. During the war, Mexico had become a Latin American Lisbon (Casablanca with nopales, quipped Orlando), a refuge for the many men and women fleeing from the European conflict. Two hundred thousand Spanish Republicans came, and Laura told herself that Jorge Maura’s labors had not been in vain. The cream of the Spanish intelligentsia arrived, a terrible bloodletting for the contemptible Franco dictatorship but a magnificent transfusion for Mexico’s university life, literature, art, and science. In exchange for shelter, the Spanish Republicans renovated Mexico’s culture—a wonderful example of the universalism that saves cultures from nationalist viruses.
In a small apartment on Lerma Street, the great poet Emilio Prados, with his blind man’s glasses and his tangled, graying mane, lived modestly. Prados had already foreseen the “flight” and “arrival” in his beautiful poems about the “persecuted body,” which Laura memorized and recited to Santiago. The poet wanted to flee, he said, “tired of hiding in the branches … tired of this wound. There are limits.” As Laura recited, she heard the voice of Jorge Maura reaching her from far off, as if poetry were the only form of true actuality allowed by the eternal God to His poor mortal creatures. Prados, Jorge Maura, Laura Daz, and perhaps Santiago López-Díaz as he listened to her read the poems—they all wanted to arrive “with my rigid body … that flows like a river without water, walking on foot through a dream with five sharp flames nailed to my chest.”
Coming and going, tricked out like an Englishman taking a stroll, was Luis Cernuda with his houndstooth jackets and Duke of Windsor ties, his slicked-down hair and French movie-star mustache, scattering the most beautiful erotic poems in the Spanish language along the streets of Mexico City. Now it was Santiago who read to his mother, running feverishly from one poem to the next, never finishing one, finding the perfect line, the unforgettable words:
What a sad noise two bodies make when they love.
I could knock down their body, leaving only the truth of your love …
I know no freedom but the freedom of being imprisoned in someone …
I kissed his tracks …
Luis Bunuel was in Mexico City, too, expelled from New York because of the gossip and calumny there of his former friend Salvador Dal, now anagrammed into Avida Dollars. Laura Daz learned about him from Jorge Maura, who had shown her Bunuel’s film about the Las Hurdes region in Spain, a film of unbearable pain and abandonment that the Republic itself censored.
And on Amazonas Street lived Don Manuel Pedroso, former rector of the University of Seville, surrounded by first editions of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, with his students at his feet. Danton, brought to one of Pedroso’s tertulias by a fellow student in the law school, remarked to his friend as they walked along Paseo de la Reforma to dine at the Bellinghausen restaurant on Londres Street, “He’s a charming old man. But his ideas are utopian. That stuff’s not for me.”
At the next table, Max Aub was eating with other exiled writers. He looked focused: short, curly hair, immense forehead, eyes lost in the depth of a glass swimming pool, and expressions impossible to separate, like the faces on a coin, where heads was his frown and tails his smile. Aub had shared adventures with André Malraux during the war and predicted for Franco a “true death” that would be totally unrelated to any calendar date, because for the dictator it would be, more than a surprise, an ignorance of his own death.
“My mother knows him,” said Danton to his classmate. “She’s in with the intellectuals because she works with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.”
“And because she was the girlfriend of a Spanish Communist spy,” said the friend, though that was the last thing he said, because Danton broke his nose with a punch. Chairs were turned over, tablecloths were stained, and Laura Díaz’s son angrily shook off the waiters and departed the restaurant.
The torero Manolete, now living in Mexico, was bringing crowds to the bullfights. A Francoist, he was actually El Greco’s last creation: thin, sad,
stylized, Manuel Rodríguez “Manolete” was skillful in a priestly way. He fought standing tall, immutable, vertical as a candle. His rival was Pepe Luis Vázquez, Juan Francisco explained to Danton when father and son went to the new Plaza Monumental Mexico along with sixty thousand fans to see Manolete, Pepe Luis being the orthodox Sevillan and Manolete the unorthodox Córdoban, who broke the classic rules by not extending the muleta—the short staff on which the red cape is hung—to calm and control the bull, who didn’t take risks to make the bull enter the space of the fight, who stood still, calmed and ordered, never moving from his place, exposed to the bull, who was bringing the fight to him. And when the bull charged this unmoving bullfighter, the entire stadium gasped in anguish, held its breath, and exploded into an olé of victory when the marvelous Manolete broke the tension with an extremely slow-moving attack and sank his sword into the bull’s body. Did you see that? Juan Francisco asked his son as they walked, in the crush of the crowd, out of the Plaza through the honeycomb of crisscrossing long passageways. Did you see that? He fought the whole time face to face, never bending, dominating the bull from below, our hearts all skipped a beat watching him fight! But Danton remembered only one lesson: The bull and the bullfighter saw each other’s face. They were two faces of death. Only apparently did the bull die and the bullfighter survive. The truth is, the man was mortal and the animal immortal, the hull went on and on and on, charged and charged and charged, again and again, blinded by the sun, and the sand stained by the blood of a single immortal bull who saw generation after generation of mortal bullfighters pass on. When would Manolete die, in what ring would he find the death that he only apparently dealt each bull, what would be the name of the bull that would kill Manolete, where was it waiting for him?
“Manolete casts a spell on the bull,” said a melancholic Juan Francisco, dining alone with Danton in El Parador after the bullfight.
The son wanted to keep to himself the lesson of that afternoon when he saw Manolete fight: triumph and glory are passing things; we have to kill one bull after another so as to put off our own final defeat, the day when our bull kills us, we have to win ear and tail and exit in triumph every day of our lives.
“They say people are selling their cars and their mattresses to buy tickets to the Plaza to see Manolete. Could that be true?” he asked.
“For the first time, there are three programs a week in the Plaza,” said his father. “There must be a reason.”
The dashing bullfighter strolled around the centers of Mexico City’s cosmopolitan nightlife—the Casanova, the Minuit, the Sans Souci—accompanied by Fernanda Montel, a Valkyrian woman who balanced the depth of her décolletés with the height of her hairdos, genuine towers dyed blue, green, rose. In Coyoacán, the dethroned King Carol of Romania, with his drooping mustache, oyster eyes, and receding chin, walked his poodles with his lover, Magda Lupescu, more attentive to her silver fox furs than to her exiled king. From a table at Ciro’s, in the Hotel Reforma, Carmen Cortina made battle plans with her old allies—the actress Andrea Negrete, Butt del Rosal, and the English painter Felicity Smith—to recruit all the international fauna the tides of war had beached in Mexico. God bless you, Adolf Hitler! sighed the hostess to her group, seated not far from Ciro’s owner, a dwarf with a tiepin named A. C. Blumenthal, front man for Bugsy Siegel, the Hollywood gangster, whose discarded lover, Virginia Hill, owner of a tremulous chin and faded hair and that sudden sadness which attacks some women from the city of Los Angeles, was drinking martini after martini, and martinis were what the novelist John Steinbeck, his Gordon’s Gin eyes filled with lost battles and now in Mexico for the filming of his novella The Pearl, served in a bottle to his tame crocodile, thus outdoing the boastful audacity of the film’s director, Emilio (the Indian) Fernández, fond of using a pistol to threaten anyone who disagreed with his plot ideas, who was in love with the actress Olivia de Havilland, in whose honor he had a street renamed “Sweet Olivia”—where he built a castle with his earnings from successes like Flor Silvestre, María Candelaria, Enamorada.
Laura Daz had to go to Ciro’s because Diego Rivera was painting a series of female nudes there, all inspired by Rivera’s own starry love, the actress Paulette Goddard, an intelligent, ambitious woman who spoke to Laura only in order to ignore Diego and annoy him, while Laura, in turn, scrutinized Ciro’s clientele with an irony as sweet as the street where “El Indio” Fernández lived: people she hadn’t seen in fifteen years, Carmen Cortina’s group, and the satellites coming and going from her table: the painter from Guadalajara, Tizoc Ambriz, who stubbornly dressed as a young railroad worker though he was fifty. Indelible marks of time were printed on their faces, but they were invulnerable in their pretensions, stuck in their reality like a pantheon of wax figures: two tone Andrea, now quite plump; the once fat and jowly Spaniard Onomástico Galán, now deflated and wrinkled, like a used condom; the British painter James Saxon looking more and more like the entire House of Windsor; and her old companion from Xalapa, Elizabeth García-Dupont, ex-wife of Caraza, now thin as a mummy, one hand trembling and the other clutching a young man: dark, mustached, and imperturbably pimpish.
A hand touched Laura Díaz’s shoulder. She recognized Laura Rivière, Artemio Cruz’s lover, who had overcome the fifteen years that had passed thanks to the elegant opalescent beauty concentrated in her unaging melancholy eyes.
“Come see me whenever you like. Why haven’t you ever visited?”
And then, homburg hat in hand, Orlando Ximénez came in. Laura, could not measure time; the only face she could confer on Orlando was the same youthful one he’d had at the dances at San Cayetano more than thirty years before. She felt a mild vertigo seeing the image of the boy who made love to her on the terraces scented with nocturnal oranges and sleeping coffee trees; she excused herself and left.
Gravitating toward something is not the same as falling toward it; it’s drawing closer, it’s when you draw close, Laura told Danton, who had thought, after the day with his father at the CTM and the Chamber of Deputies, This isn’t for me, but my dad’s right, what is for me? He too was gazing out from the balcony overlooking the Bosque de Chapultepec, and he knew that on the other side of the park was Las Lomas de Chapultepec section. That’s where the rich people lived, new and old money, he didn’t care, it was there that new mansions with swimming pools and lawns for garden parties and society weddings were being built, three-car garages, interior decoration by Pani and Paco el de La Granja, wardrobes by Valdés Peza, hats by Henri de Chatillon, flowers by Matsumoto, and banquets catered by Mayita.
How could a simple poor boy like himself, whose poverty was neither old nor new, get into those places? Because that’s what Danton López-Díaz wanted to do. He gave due attention to his father’s modest suggestions: should he be a politician, a businessman, a journalist, a military officer? Then he decided to create his own destiny—that is, his own fortune. And since in Mexico it was hard to acquire class without money, the young economics student decided he had no option but to acquire money with class. Leafing through the society magazines was enough to make him see the difference. There was the new society created by the Revolution, rich, living in Las Lomas de Chapultepec, insecure but daring, dark skinned but cosmetically lightened, impertinently showing off its recently acquired wealth for good or ill: dark men—soldiers, politicians, impresarios—married to light women—creoles in distress, long-suffering. The revolutionaries, in their armed descent from the north, had harvested the prettiest virginal buds from Hermosillo and Culiacán, from Torreón and San Luis, from Zacatecas and El Bajo. Mothers of their children. Vestals of their homes. Resigned to the affairs of their powerful sultans.
And then there was the old, aristocratic, and impoverished society that lived on streets with the names of European cities, between Avenida Insurgentes and Paseo de la Reforma. Their houses were small but elegant, built around 1918–20, two-story buildings with stone facades, balconies, coach houses, and, overlooking the street, a piano nobil
e where one might glimpse mementos from the past—paintings and portraits, medals in velvet-lined frames, bibelots, mirrors darkened with age. Behind the public spaces, the mystery of the bedrooms, the unknown nature of the daily life of people who had once owned haciendas the size of Belgium, taken away by Zapata, Villa, and Cárdenas. Where did they bathe? How did they cook? How did they survive the catastrophe that had destroyed their world?
But oh how they prayed. That was visible. Every Sunday, just after one, the boys and girls of this “good society” met to go to Mass in La Votiva church on the corner of Génova and Reforma. Later, chatting, flirting, making plans to eat, where? At El Parador de José Luis around the corner on Niza? At Luisito Munoz’s 1–2–3 on Liverpool? At the Jockey Club at the Américas Hippodrome? At the home of one of those people with picturesquely intimate names—Gifty, Princess, Miss Chubby, Missy, Froggy, Skinny, Cheeky, Diver, Kitty? In Mexico, only aristocrats and thugs were known by their nicknames. What was the name of that highwayman who sliced off the fingers of Danton’s great-grandmother with a machete? The Hunk from where?
Danton explored, calculated, and decided to begin there: one o’clock Mass in the white-and-blue La Votiva, Moorish as a repentant mosque.
The first time, no one turned around to see who he was. The second time, people looked at him with puzzled astonishment. The third time, a tall blond boy came over and asked who he was.
“I’m López.”
“López?”
“Yes, López, the most well-known name in the telephone book.”
That got a laugh out of the boy, who threw his head of wavy hair back, revealing a long neck where his Adam’s apple bounced up and down.