Leonora (45 page)

‘The only danger, Álvaro, is not doing what one wishes. Lie down, the earth is really soft here.'

Stretched out beside her, his emotions heightened by the effort, exhausted, and suffering vertigo after the long walk, the crickets and the frogs conspire to have him shut his eyes.

‘There would be nothing unpleasant about dying like this. If I die now then I accept it utterly.'

When he opens his eyes again, he sees that Leonora's are also wide open and that she is crying. How long has he slept? In the profoundly dark night the stars are still shining. He wants to ask her why she is crying, but no sound comes from his mouth. He sees her black hair on the ground, her fine profile and the tears running down her cheeks, and for the first time he has the feeling that up until now his whole life has been meaningless. There can be no doubt about it, he has more than met his match in this woman. When will he be able to express his feelings like she can? Never. When had he ever met a woman more delicate and more mistress of herself at one and the same time? Her instincts, that to start with infuriated him impossibly, now open up parts of him he never thought he possessed. Finally, after who knows how long, the dawn succeeds in restoring his sense of movement and he embraces her. He feels more tenderly towards her than ever: ‘Leonora, my child, Leonora.' She hides her head against his neck, and he plucks bits out of her hair, smoothes down her skirt and leads her to the hotel. ‘Come with me and let's go and have a bath.'

The morning cheese buns offered them by a man with white hair taste of heaven in all its glory, and the water in the stream looks like liquid diamonds. Having seen her once before, the locals recognise Leonora at once: ‘Ah the little foreigner, little German, little Italian, little
gringa,
little French one!' It is true that she belongs to every one of these lands.

At midday, with the sun shining directly overhead in the midst of the skies, Álvaro places his hand on his forehead like a visor and asks her:

‘Why don't we just stay and live here forever?'

‘No,' replies Leonora in a tone of authority. ‘Now it is time for us to leave.'

‘Who did you come here with the last time? Everyone seems to recognise you.'

‘I came with my husband.'

‘Let's go,' and he takes her by the arm and falls silent.

53

DÍAZ ORDAZ, CHIN, CHIN, CHIN

G
ABRIEL AND PABLO CHOOSE DEGREE
courses in Medicine, a clear reflection of and resemblance to their mother, the alchemist who deals in the mysteries of life and death. Gaby soon abandons Medicine, tempted first by Anthropology, then by English Literature, and finally going for Comparative Literature and Philosophy.

‘I want to write, Ma, because writing is an escape from everyday life.'

‘So is painting. To Leonardo da Vinci, painting was dumb poetry and poetry was blind painting.'

‘One always writes for someone else, doesn't one, Ma? Who do you paint for?'

‘For my father. I never believed his death could cause me pain, and it's taken me until today to realise that I've started every picture with him in mind. But you know I paint for you and Pablo too, as well as Kati and Chiki, and for Remedios. Most of all I painted for Edward, and I miss him more than anyone else.'

‘Invent him for yourself, like you invent your whole world.'

‘I think it's much more likely that this world invented me.'

Gaby gets up at any early hour of the dawning morning, whenever a poem comes to mind. Chiki wakes up when he sees light emerging from his son's bedroom.

‘Tomorrow you won't be awake for any of your university courses.'

‘Poetry is a tyrant and if you don't write when the moment is right, it all evaporates.'

‘Now go back to sleep.'

‘I don't want to.'

At university, youth and rebellion weave themselves together; the students have no blueprints for the future, because they have no idea of what it will be. The country denies them this. What most exasperates them are their rulers, who attempt to tell them the way Mexico should be and how they should behave themselves. ‘I'll dress however I want to.' ‘I don't want to take a degree in that, I want to change to Philosophy.' ‘I'm not going to get married, or have any children.' ‘I am in favour of free abortion on demand.' ‘The President of the Republic is a son of a bitch.' Nowadays, women are more daring. When a young man takes their fancy, they say so. It happens to Gaby, and he is left speechless by the familiarity of the redhead who makes a pass at him.

The ‘trots', ‘mamelukes', ‘anarchists' and ‘CP-ers' all attack one another. Roberto Escudero proposes that the President comes to meet the crowds massing in the main square, the Zócalo. He proposes that members of the National Assembly disclose their income; that they enter into dialogue with the people on the necessary measures to be taken; that transparency is introduced into public finances and, above all, in elections, so that every child is provided with a school place and all university graduates have access to a job. The student leader who attracts the most followers is Luis Tomás Cervantes Cabeza de Vaca. Strong and thoughtful and kind-natured, he wants the country to belong to the young, not to the politicians. ‘We are all one, and everything belongs to everyone'; ‘The oppressors are in the government'; ‘The truth belongs to us'; ‘Mexico, freedom'; ‘Yes to books, no to bayonets!'; ‘The real agitators are ignorance, hunger and poverty'; ‘We don't want the Olympics, we demand the Revolution'; ‘Zócalo, Zócalo, Zócalo'.

‘I don't ask for a gun, I want a word,' says José Revueltas, brandishing his pen. ‘This is my gun.'

Students follow him across the area of flat ground in front of the Registry. José – who they call Pepe – jokes and recommends they read Rilke, César Vallejo, Baudelaire. He returns to his sources in Dostoyevsky and Thomas Mann. ‘Do you have enough cash for books, mate? If not, you can use mine.' He looks like a Greek philosopher followed by his retinue. The police are always looking for him, and he lives from one day to the next, sleeping wherever he fetches up. It could be stretched out on the floor of the offices of the Society of Writers at Filomeno Mata Street, number 8. The lecture theatre called ‘Justo Sierra' is renamed ‘Che Guevara'. When it is occupied by students, they sleep on the stage and in the aisles, then cover the walls with paintings of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. They dress and wash in the theatre toilets. When they leave their toothpaste and brush in the sink, nobody steals them.

Helicopters circle over the city centre.

Hijacking a bus is the perfect form of student activism. The driver is afraid, pleading, on the verge of tears, with them not to do anything to him, trying to locate the ringleader: there's always some guy, the strongest one among them, the rebel boss.

‘Please don't do anything to the vehicle, it's not mine, but if you break anything at all, the boss will make me pay for it, and you tell me, what have I got to pay him with? How will I manage to do that?'

Some of them say to leave him in peace, that he's just a poor sod, whereas others urge them on. Just like in a stadium when the Pumas are playing.

‘Come on! Don't be a wimp, we're not going to do anything to you, just take us straight to the Zócalo – right now!'

Three blocks later a police patrol intercepts them and the activists whistle and stamp their feet on the floor.

‘Drive right at them!' orders their leader.

They drag the driver from his seat and accelerate at the patrol.

In the streets of the city centre, traders are afraid of the university students. If two young people pause in front of a shop window, the store owner threatens them: ‘Get a move on, get going now you pieces of shit!' Others just pull the metal shutters down over their shop fronts. Carrying a student card can prove dangerous.

‘We're going to end up having to swallow them up,' Cabeza de Vaca tells his gang of supporters in the Chapingo National School of Agriculture.

Nobody now attends church on Sundays, and nobody bothers to ask Gaby or Pablo whether they are Jews or Catholics any more. Just the opposite: the younger generation loathe religion. The most radical students are in the School of Political Science, and it is the future sociologists and political scientists who are behind the occupation of the Pedregal de Santo Domingo, the patch of stony lava taken over by poor people. Rather than forcing them out, the students from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México help them to build homes there. Real life is unfolding in the Polytechnic and the University City. ‘UNAM, the free territory of America,' a youth proclaims at the top of his voice.

Pablo brings friends home where, seated around the kitchen table, they plan to abolish the official political party, that of the Institutionalised Revolution; to depose all corrupt judges; and to go out and puncture tyres and take part in marches and sit-down protests. ‘I really despise all the men in our government,' declares Martín Dozal. He seems an intelligent man to Gaby, as he talks about machismo in the Mexican home, and relates how the person he most admires is his mother, a seamstress. Pablo takes the mickey out of the formality of the speeches from the Mexican Revolution that keep getting repeated, Dozal explains how he entered the School of Sociology because he thought it the most radical university department, but that from then on he had experienced little but an enormous disappointment. Even the crowd in Anthropology were a load of wet fish. Little Mexican princesses are chauffeured to the School of Education by their family drivers and deny even a glimpse of a smile to their fellow students.

Gaby stays in contact with Renato Leduc. He comes round to dinner, and Gaby complains to him about the university bureaucracy; the secretaries that lose track of academic records; the endless long waits in front of one information desk after another: ‘You are missing a copy of your secondary school graduation certificate'; ‘The date of birth you gave us is not the same as the one we have here.' Renato replies by telling him that there is no worse form of bureaucracy than matrimony, for it's the one that kills love. Also that young people's surrender to the cause of social justice is the worst of inventions, for everyone anyway eventually integrates into the system as they grow old. When he's in his company Gaby laughs a lot, for Renato is the best-informed man in Mexico, he spices bad news with his sense of humour and Gaby roars with laughter when Renato vows that Leonora is a marvellous friend, and a Churchill in skirts as a wife.

‘Well I at any rate intend to get married,' Pablo announces.

Leonora furiously protests: ‘Getting married is like getting involved with the police even when the police aren't getting involved with you.'

‘Ma, we're not going to be with you for the rest of our lives.'

Newsreaders repeat the jargon of ‘pinkos', ‘
provocateurs
', ‘infiltrators', ‘subversives', ‘Communists', ‘de-stabilising elements', and ‘marxists' on a daily basis, and Leonora's indignation mounts.

Edward James turns up at the door with two boa constrictors and asks Pablo: ‘Can you get me some rats to feed them with?'

‘The ones we have in our labs are for scientific experiments.'

With great difficulty, Pablo secretes two fat rats for him. He brings them to Edward at the Hotel Francis: he puts them in his bath tub, where he keeps his boas. Two days later, James goes into his bathroom and the rats have eaten up the boas.

Pablo only finishes his medical practicals late at night, returning home at one or two in the morning. Some nights he forgets his keys and Chiki gets up to let him in. After making him coffee, they take George out for a walk, he's the collie dog Pablo adores. While George sniffs around the walls and the kerbs, Pablo confides his worries to his father. All at once, Chiki looks at his watch: ‘Already four in the morning? I can't believe it – how fast time passes! We'd better get back as your mother is bound to be worried.'

Each time there's a ring at the door, Leonora explodes. Gaby and Pablo have a mimeographer: they print flyers inveighing against the government and the armed forces. They announce the next march or demonstration. When they are not busy printing, they go out to take up collections with tin cans emblazoned with the initials CNH, for the
Comisión Nacional de Huelgas
– the National Council for Strikes. Motorists often verbally abuse them: ‘Why aren't you in school?', ‘You should go and get yourselves a job, you lazy gits!' The young people are motivated by rage: it's high time their voices are heard. Adults have nothing at all to offer them.

Pablo gets up onto a soap box, taking the word onto the streets, speaking on the corner of Sonora market. Gaby distributes propaganda flyers on buses and at the factory gates, and improvises short popular comic plays. The Olympic Games are headline news in both print and broadcast media, and the student movement is damaging the image the Mexican government wants to give the world. It is high time to put a stop to the saboteurs. Pablo rebels. ‘Why won't the President show his face on the balcony of the National Palace?' Meanwhile, Gaby makes fun of the authorities in his impromptu street theatre.

All along the Avenida Álvaro Obregón, trucks of soldiers in blue uniforms and helmets resembling chamber pots trundle up and down. Gaby and Pablo join the medical brigades and Pablo has attended to numerous wounded students. They live amidst real and imaginary terrors, since the army is ever more visible and tales of kidnappings are running through the Faculty of Medicine.

Chiki and Leonora feel as if they are back in the war years. All that's missing are the bombers flying over the capital city. Gaby and Pablo are always rushing to answer the doorbell, and to let in Javier, Mateo, Tita, Naha, Carlos, Raul or Elisa, each looking over their shoulders in case they are being followed. ‘I've come for the flyers.' ‘They've taken Edgardo Bermúdez from the Poly.' ‘They are pursuing all the university lecturers.' Leonora's heart is in her mouth each time her sons leave the house. ‘They tortured Luis Tomás Cervantes Cabeza de Vaca, who was at Chapingo, and almost killed him in the process.' Anguish reddens Chiki's eyes even more than before.

In the classrooms and corridors of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, they lay out mattresses and sleeping bags. ‘Our house is now under surveillance. My parents are furious with me.' The government regards UNAM as a hotbed of agitation. Why does the rector, Barros Sierra, allow them to stay overnight in the classrooms? ‘They aren't students, they're just parasites, illiterates and total cynics.' Gaby and Pablo cross the road whenever they see a policeman. Gaby has grown his hair long. Wherever he goes, he takes a little puppy in his jacket pocket with him. Whenever he opens the front door, this seduces one visitor after another. With his right hand he takes out the little puppy to get some air and the response is always the same: ‘Oh, how adorable! Just look at him, he fits into the palm of your hand!' from yet another enamoured adolescent.

The two brothers march and demonstrate with their Faculties, and Gaby follows up with his
happenings
and his circus turns. ‘Leonora, I saw your boys on the demonstration.' ‘Leonora, I bumped into Pablo in front of the Registry.' ‘Take good care of him, it seems to me as if he is really involved in the movement and Diaz Ordaz is raging against all those who are against the Olympic Games.' The brothers leave the house with their knapsacks on their backs and Leonora never knows when they will be back.