The earthquake woke up the ghosts. The telephone worked. While Laura was eating a bean-and-sardine snack and having some grape juice, she had calls from Danton and Orlando.
She hadn’t seen her younger son since Juan Francisco’s wake, when she’d scandalized her daughter-in-law’s family and especially her daughter-in-law, Magdalena Ayub Longoria.
“I couldn’t care less what that bunch of snobs think,” Laura told her son.
“It doesn’t matter,” answered Danton. “Water and oil, you know… but don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”
“Thank you. I wish we could see each other.”
“So do I.”
In the eyes of her in-laws the scandal grew when Laura went off to Cuernavaca with a gringo Communist, but Danton’s money was always there, punctually and abundantly. It was their agreement, and there was nothing more to say. Until the day of the earthquake.
“Are you all right, Mama?”
“I’m all right. The house is a ruin.”
“I’ll send builders around to look it over. Move into a hotel and then call me so I can take care of things.”
“Thanks. I’ll go to Diego Rivera’s.”
There was an uncomfortable silence, and then Danton, in a cheery voice, said, “The things that happen. The roof collapsed on top of Doña Carmen Cortina. While she was sleeping. Did you know her? Just imagine. Buried in her own bed, as flat as a pancake. Mexico, beautiful and adored! as the song goes. They say she was the life of the party back in the 1930s.”
A little while later, the telephone rang again, and Laura flinched. She remembered the two different telephone companies, Ericsson and Mexicana, with different lines and numbers, complicating everyone’s life, when she had Mexicana and Jorge Maura had Ericsson. Now there was only one telephone company, so today’s lovers, Laura thought nostalgically, were missing the excitement of the game, the telephone as disguise.
As if to put off the insistent caller, Laura tried to think about everything that had come into the world since her grandfather Philip Kelsen had left Germany in 1864: moving pictures, radio, cars, planes, telephones, telegraphs, television, penicillin, mimeograph machines, plastic, Coca Cola, long-playing records, nylon stockings…
Perhaps the sense of being in a catastrophe reminded her of Jorge Maura, and she began to associate the ringing phone with her own heartbeats and hesitated for a few moments. She was afraid to pick up the receiver. “Laura?” She tried to recognize the baritone voice, deliberately high pitched to sound more English, who greeted her saying, “It’s Orlando Ximénez speaking. You’ve heard about Carmen Cortina’s tragedy. She was crushed to death. While she was asleep. The roof fell in on her. We’re holding a wake for her in Gayosso’s, over on Sullivan Street. I thought, well, for old times’ sake…”
The man who stepped out of the taxi at seven that evening said hello from the edge of the sidewalk and then came toward her with an uncertain gait and a mobile smile, as if his mouth were a radio dial searching for the right station.
“Laura. It’s me, Orlando. Don’t you recognize me? Look.” He laughed as he showed her his hand and his gold ring with the initials OX. There was no other way she would have recognized him. He was totally bald and made no effort to hide it. The strange thing-the serious thing, Laura said to herself-was that the extreme smoothness of his skull, bare as a baby’s backside, contrasted brutally with his infinitely wrinkled face, crisscrossed by tiny lines running in all directions. A face that was an insane compass rose, its cardinal points not at north, east, south, and west but scattered in every direction, a cobweb with no symmetry.
Orlando Ximénez’s white skin and blond looks had put up a poor defense against the passage of the years; the wrinkles on his face were as uncountable as furrows in a field plowed for centuries and yielding poorer and poorer crops. Even so, he maintained the distinction of a slim, well-dressed body, with a double-breasted glen plaid suit and a black tie appropriate for the occasion, and-the coquettish touch, inveterate in him-a Liberty handkerchief peeking sans façon from his breast pocket. “Only vulgarians and men from Toluca wear matching ties and handkerchiefs,” he’d once said to her years before in San Cayetano and in the Hotel Regis.
“Laura dear,” he said, speaking first, seeing that she hadn’t recognized him right away, and after planting two fugitive little kisses on her cheeks, stepping back to observe her, keeping hold of her hands. “Let me get a look at you.”
He was the same old Orlando: he’d never let her have an advantage he could take for himself. Without a word from her, he went on, “How you’ve changed, Laura,” before she could blurt out, “How you’ve changed, Orlando.”
On the way to Sullivan Street (who the devil was Sullivan? An English composer of operettas? But he was always linked like a Siamese twin to Gilbert, the way Ortega was joined to Gasset, joked irrepressible Orlando), Laura’s old sweetheart spoke of Carmen Cortina’s horrible death and the mystery that had always surrounded her. The famous hostess of the 1930s, the woman whose energy had saved Mexican society from a drowsy convulsion (if you could say such a thing; I agree, it’s an oxymoron, Orlando said, smiling), had been bedridden for years with phlebitis, which immobilized her. The question was, could Carmen Cortina have gotten out of bed to save herself from the collapse, or did her physical prison condemn her to watch while the ceiling fell on her and crushed her? Well, well, why worry about the fine points? Like the cucaracha in the song, she just couldn’t walk…
“But I am a chatterbox,” he said in English, “forgive me.” Orlando laughed, caressing Laura Díaz’s bare fingers with his gloved hand.
Only when they stepped out of the taxi on Sullivan Street did he take her by the arm and whisper in her ear, don’t be frightened, Laura dear, you’re going to find all our old friends from twenty-five years ago, but you won’t recognize them. If you’re in doubt, just squeeze my arm-don’t let go of me, je t’en prie-and I’ll whisper in your ear who’s who.
“Have you read Proust’s The Past Recaptured? No? Well, it’s the same situation. The narrator returns to a Parisian salon thirty years later and no longer recognizes the intimate friends of his youth. Face to face with the old marionettes, says Proust’s narrator, he has to use not only his eyes but his memory. Old age is like death, he adds. Some face it with indifference, not because they’re braver than the rest but because they have less imagination.”
Orlando made a show of looking for the name Carmen Cortina on the chapel directory.
“Of course, the difference between us and Proust is that he finds old age and the passage of time in an elegant salon in French high society, while you and I, proudly Mexican, find them in a funeral parlor.”
There was no intrusive smell of flowers to nauseate the guests at the wake. So the perfumes on the women asserted themselves all the more offensively. They were like the last clouds in a sky about to fade forever into night, as one by one they passed before Carmen Cortina’s open coffin, where she lay as reconstructed by the mortician, put back together piece by minute piece, looking neither like herself nor like any living being seen before. She was a window-display dummy, as if her turbulent career as a social hostess had prepared her for this final moment, this last act in what had been in life a permanent stage show: a mannequin reposing on white silk cushions under clear plastic, hair carefully tinted mahogany, cheeks smooth and pink, mouth obscenely swollen and half open in a smile that seemed to lick death as if it were a lollipop, nose stuffed with cotton balls, to keep what remained of Carmen’s vital juices from leaking out, eyes closed-but without the glasses that as hostess she had wielded with the wisdom of the elegantly blind-as if they were darts, or a replacement finger, or an exhausted pennant, or a menacing stiletto, but always as the baton with which Carmen Cortina conducted her brilliant social operetta.
Without those glasses Laura Díaz did not recognize Carmen. She was on the verge of suggesting to Orlando-caught up in her first boyfriend’s unshakably festive tone-that so
me charitable soul should put glasses on the cadaver. Carmen was quite capable of opening her eyes. Of coming back to life. Now Laura failed to recognize a woman with a mother-of-pearl complexion and overflowing corpulence who was being pushed along in a wheelchair by the painter Tizoc Ambriz, recognizable because his picture appeared so frequently on the culture and society pages, though he was transformed, given the color, tautness, and texture of his skin, into a scaly black-and-silver sardine. Thin and small, he was dressed, as always, in blue denim-trousers, shirt, and jacket-as if to stand out while at the same time, in contradiction, imposing a fashion.
He devoutly pushed the wheelchair of the woman with drowsy eyes, invisible eyebrows, hut-Oh! exclaimed Orlando-no longer a face of perfect symmetry with that eternal maturity which presumes eternal youth, as she had been thirty years earlier, at the very edge of an opulence that Laura’s companion had once compared to a piece of fruit at the peak of ripeness, freshly cut from the branch.
“It’s Andrea Negrete. Don’t you remember the vernissage of her portrait by Tizoc in Carmen’s little flat? She was nude-in the painting of course-with two white streaks at her temples and her pubis also painted white, bragging about having gone gray in the groin-can you imagine. Dear, dear, now she doesn’t have any use for dye.”
“Eat me,” Andrea whispered to Orlando as they entered the room where a priest was leading the prayer for the dead in front of a dozen of Carmen Cortina’s friends.
“Eat me.”
“Peel me.”
“You vulgarian,” laughed the actress, while the whisper of Lux per petua luceat eis vaguely drowned out the comments and gossip.
The painter Tizoc Ambriz, on the other hand, had lost all facial expression. He was an idol, a diminutive Tezcatlipoca, Puck of the Aztecs, condemned to wander like a ghost through the bewitched nights of México-Tenochtitlán.
Tizoc looked toward the entrance, where a tall, dark young man with curly hair was coming in with a woman on his arm, a woman swollen in every roll of her obesity and reworked in every centimeter of her epidermis. She made her way forward proudly, even impertinently, on the arm of her ephebe, showing off how light her step was despite the immensity of her weight. She sailed like a galleon in Spain’s Invincible Armada over the tempestuous seas of life. Her tiny feet supported a solid fleshly sphere crowned by a minuscule head with blond curls framing a sculpted, surgically enhanced, restored, composed, replaced, and displaced face-stretched like a balloon about to burst yet lacking expression, a pure mask fixed by invisible pins around her ears and stitched under a chin that had eliminated the double chin visibly struggling to be reborn.
“Laura, Laura dearest!” exclaimed this nightmare apparition wrapped in black veils and dripping with jewelry. My God, who can it be? Laura asked herself. I don’t remember her! Then she realized that the scarred blimp wasn’t greeting her but was lightly making her way to someone behind her, and Laura turned to follow this living advertisement for face-lifts and saw her kiss on both cheeks a woman who was her opposite, a thin, small lady in a black suit, with pearls and a tiny pillbox hat from which hung a black veil so close to her skin that it seemed an integral part of her face.
“Laura Rivière, how happy I am to see you,” exclaimed the scarfaced fatty.
“What a pleasure, Elizabeth,” answered Laura Rivière, discreetly drawing away from the exuberant Elizabeth García-Dupont, formerly Caraza. Laura Díaz was astonished: it was her adolescent pal in Xalapa, whose mother, Doña Lucía Dupont, had said, Girls, never show your boobs, as she stuffed Elizabeth into her old-fashioned ball gown, rose-colored with layer upon layer of infinitely floating tulle…
(Laura has no problems because she’s flat, Mama, but I…
(Elizabeth, child, don’t shame me.
(There’s nothing to be done about it. God, with your help, made me this way.)
She hadn’t recognized Laura just as Laura hadn’t recognized her, either because Laura-glancing at herself in the mortuary mirror-had changed just as much, or perhaps Elizabeth actually had recognized her but didn’t want to say hello because resentment, however old, was still alive. Or perhaps to avoid comparisons, lies, you haven’t changed a bit! How do you do it? Made a pact with the devil? The last time, in Ciro’s in the Hotel Reforma, Elizabeth had looked like an anorexic mummy.
Laura Díaz waited for Elizabeth Garcia to separate from Laura Rivière before approaching her namesake, offering her hand, receiving one that was dry, fine, and then she tried to recognize her in the depth of the black veil, in the very well-cared-for white skin below the cylindrical, low hat crowning her head instead of the languid ash-blond hair-cut of her youth.
“I’m Laura Díaz.”
“I’ve been waiting for you. You promised to call me.”
“I’m sorry. You told me to save myself.”
“Did you think I couldn’t help you?”
“You told me yourself, remember? It’s too late for me. I’m a prisoner. My body’s been captured by routine.”
“But if I could escape from my own body…” Laura Rivière smiled. “I detest it. That’s what I told you, you probably remember…”
“I’m sorry I didn’t call you.”
“So am I.”
“You know? We might have been friends.”
“Hélas.” Laura Rivière sighed. Then she turned away from Laura Díaz with a melancholy smile.
“She really loved Artemio Cruz,” Orlando Ximénez confided to Laura as he took her back to Avenida Sonora, threading their way through the rubble of the city. “She was a woman obsessed by light, lamps, light in interiors, yes, the proper arrangement of lamps, the exact wattage, how to illuminate faces. She’s her own self-portrait.”
(I can’t go on, my love. You have to choose.
(Be patient, Laura. Just realize… Don’t force me…
(To do what? Are you afraid of me?
(Aren’t we fine just as we are? Is something missing?
(Who knows? Artemio. It may well be that nothing’s missing.
(I didn’t deceive you. I didn’t force you.
(I didn’t transform you, which is different. You’re not ready. I’m getting tired.
(I love you. As I did the first day.
(It’s no longer the first day. No longer. Make the music louder.)
As she was getting out of the taxi, Orlando tried to kiss her. Laura felt the touch of those wrinkled lips, the nearness of that skin which looked like graph paper, like a weak, pink piece of meat on the grill. And she felt it repellent. She pushed him away, disgusted and shocked.
“I love you, Laura. As I did the first day.”
“It’s not the first day anymore. Now we know each other. Far too well. Goodbye, Orlando.”
And the mystery? Will they both die without Orlando’s ever revealing his secrets? Orlando, intimate friend of the first Santiago in Veracruz; Orlando, seducer of Laura because of that; mysterious mailman between the invisible anarchist Armonía Aznar and the world; Orlando, her lover and her Virgil in the infernal circles of Mexico City. It was impossible to attribute any mystery whatsoever to this out-of-fashion lounge lizard, mummified and banal, who had gone with her to Carmen Cortina’s wake, to the burial of an entire era in the history of Mexico City. She preferred to hold on to the mystery. The homage to “old times” nevertheless left Laura with a bitter taste in her mouth.
The electricity had been restored. She began to pick up fallen objects, pots and pans in the kitchen; she straightened up the dining room, then especially the living room, and the balcony where, when the family reconciled after Laura Díaz’s passion for Jorge Maura, she and her husband Juan Francisco, her sons Santiago and Danton, and the ancient auntie from Veracruz, María de la O, had watched the afternoons fade in the Bosque de Cohapultepec. She replaced the books knocked off their shelves. Out from between the pages of Bertram D. Wolfe’s biography of Diego Rivera had fallen the photograph Laura Díaz took of Frida Kahlo the day she died, July 13, 1954. The day Laura
left Harry Jaffe alone in Tepoztlán and raced to the Riveras’ house in Coyoacán.
“Here,” Harry said, handing her a Leica. “I used it to take stills in Hollywood. Don’t come back without bringing me Frida Kahlo dead.”
She had restrained the rage Harry sometimes aroused in her. Frida was dying, amputated and ill, but even on her deathbed she’d gone on painting-right to the last moment. Harry was dying in a tropical valley, but he was too cowardly to pick up pen and paper. The main reason why Laura took the photo of Frida’s body was to show it to Harry and tell him, “She never stopped creating, not even on the day she died.”
But now Harry, too, was dead. So was Carmen Cortina, and the rage Laura felt toward Harry, like the sense of absurdity she felt seeing Carmen Cortina’s embalmed body, was turning, as she stared at the photo of Frida dead, into something more than love or admiration.
In her coffin, Frida Kahlo showed off her black hair braided with colored ribbons. Her ring-covered fingers and her arms laden with bracelets rested on a bosom decked out for the final journey in sumptuous necklaces of thin gold and silver from Morelia. Her pendant earrings of green turquoise no longer hung from her earlobes but lay at rest like her, mysteriously retaining the dead woman’s final warmth.
Frida Kahlo’s face did not change in death. Her eyes were closed but seemed alert, thanks to the inquisitive vivacity of her thick unbroken eyebrows, her trademark, that dangerous and fascinating whip. The thickness of her brows did not succeed in masking Frida’s mustache, the notorious and notable down on her upper lip that made you think that a penis, the twin of Diego’s, might be trying to spring up between her legs to confirm the probability, not just the illusion, that she was a hermaphrodite, and parthenogenic to boot, able to fertilize herself and generate with her own semen the new being that her feminine half would bear thanks to the vigor of her masculine half.
That’s how Laura Díaz photographed her, for Laura thought she was taking the picture of an inert body, not realizing that Frida Kahlo had already set out on the journey to Mictlan, the Mexican Indian underworld you can reach only if you are guided by three hundred ixcuintles, those hairless dogs Frida collected which now, motherless, were howling disconsolately on the patios and in the kitchens and on the roof terraces of the funeral home.
The Years with Laura Diaz Page 47