The Five Acts of Diego Leon (12 page)

“What would you like to talk about?” she asked. Carolina knew him well, probably better than anyone else, except maybe for Elva; he still wondered about her from time to time.

He sighed. “What, um, what do you think about all this commotion? What’s brewing between the church and the government?”

She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Well.” She cocked her head to one side. “I suppose that, if you take away a person’s faith, a person’s need to believe in something else, no matter how intangible, what follows is inner turmoil and chaos. Fanaticism.”

“Whose side are you on?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Does it matter? I think this whole mess, just like the revolution, is more than just sides,” she said. “Lines will be drawn. There’ll be battles and fights and death. It’ll end badly. Then, years from now, it’ll start all over again. The people know nothing about sides. They’re just caught in the middle. The church has too much power, has influenced things in this country far too long. On the other hand, like I said, it’s dangerous to take away a person’s faith, what they believe in.”

“I see it the way the church does,” he finally said. “My grandparents, they—”

“Oh, but,” she interrupted, “the church is just another form of control, another way of keeping you, us, under its thumb with its rules and moral codes.”

“It’s what I believe,” he said, sighing. “It’s what helped me become who I am now.”

“And who are you now?” She rose and walked over to a wire cage lined with straw. It was where Carolina had kept a white rabbit with red eyes like rubies and a nose that constantly wiggled. The cage was empty, though. It had remained so since the day four years before when a cat snuck in and ate the rabbit.

“I’ve grown. Changed,” Diego said.

She regarded the empty cage. “It’s ending now, isn’t it? Our time together? You’ll marry Paloma soon. Start a family. You won’t have time for me, and all of this will end.”

“It ended a long time ago,” he said, remembering the conversation with his grandfather years before.

“I know,” she said. “I just didn’t want to accept it.” She turned to face him now. “Does any part of you miss it?”

“What?” he asked.

“The performing. The singing and dancing. All those things I taught you.”

“At times. I think about it now and again. But what am I supposed to do? Throw everything I have away just to go chase an impractical dream?”

“You’re absolutely certain that this is the course you want your life to take?” she asked him. “That you want to marry this girl and inherit your grandfather’s legacy?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re positive?”

“Yes,” he said once more. “Why do you sound so incredulous?”

Carolina reached out, placed both hands on his shoulders and told him she thought he was making a grave mistake. “You’re good. Not great,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee. “But you can be. I believe it’s your destiny.”

“I haven’t performed in several years now. Haven’t sung a single note. Have hardly danced.”

“You never lose it. It’s always in you.”

“But my grandfather,” he said.

“What about him?” she asked, throwing her hands up in the air. “Why follow his advice? So that your life will be like his? Sitting there in that empty house surrounded by all those old relics? You have a chance. Don’t waste it.”

“I don’t want to,” he said, and Diego could feel himself growing angry. “All I have is here.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not. You have a talent, one I believe is meant to be shared. You should at least give performing a try. Otherwise you may be passing up a great opportunity.”

“What do you propose I do? Start meeting with you in secret? Practicing more speeches and taking more voice and dance lessons?”

She shook her head. “No. There’s only so much I can do for you. There comes a time when every pupil must leave his teacher.”

She told Diego that she’d recently talked with some friends of hers from her art school where she had trained as a vocalist. Ana and Juan Brenton married soon after school and lived in Europe for many years, but they had recently returned to Mexico City with the intention of opening up a small theater house. They were gathering a troupe of actors and performers, and Carolina was convinced they would love him.

“If you want I’ll write them about you,” she said. “I just know they’ll want to work with you. Or you could at least audition.”

“But I can’t,” he said. “My grandfather. I made a promise.”

“I think you should ignore your grandfather,” she said. “You could be making a terrible mistake.”

He watched how her face changed when she said this. Carolina looked around, regarded the patio, the large house looming before her, filled with exquisite pieces of furniture, with pictures, with memories of her and Manuel and Javier.

“Sometimes I wonder,” she began to say, her voice quivering, “what would have happened had I not—”

“No,” he interjected. “I can’t. I’ll stay here. I’ll work by my grandfather’s side. It’s what I must do. I’m sorry.”

With that, he put his coat on and left. He couldn’t listen to her fantasies a moment longer.

January 1927

T
HE
M
ARCH DATE THEY SET THE YEAR BEFORE HAD FELT SO FAR
away then. Now, it was less than eight weeks before the wedding. His grandmother and Lupe and Paloma handled all the planning. Diego was relieved. He didn’t want to think about it more than he had to. It all filled him with an anxiety he couldn’t quell no matter how many cups of cognac he drank. Since the summer, the house had been full of activity, with Lupe and Paloma spending hours planning the menu and deciding on the flowers. His grandmother became another woman. She was more animated, smiling regularly and giving Diego the odd kiss on the cheek or hug. She complimented him sometimes, even when there was no one else around.

As the date approached, Diego began to feel as though he were standing in a room crowded with people, and the walls of the room were closing in. Wedding rings were purchased, a conference with the priest who was to wed them scheduled, the guest list finalized and the invitations sent out. His grandmother hired more servants and cooks to help with the task of planning the meal and the reception. She floated from one part of the house to the other, scolding the maids when they failed to fold the table linens right or yelling at the cooks when she tasted something she didn’t like. One day in February, he sat in the parlor, watching all the commotion, feeling the entire world spinning beneath his feet, careening out of his control. Doroteo walked into the room and sat near him, regarding Diego.

“Are you ill, son? You look terrible.”

He took a deep breath before speaking. “I guess I’m just a little nervous.”

His grandfather laughed. “That’s natural. You should have seen me on the day I married your grandmother. I was a frightful mess.” Doroteo reached out and patted him on the shoulder. “It’ll pass. Paloma’s a sweet girl. You two will be very happy. Trust me. I know what is best for you.”

Work did nothing to keep his mind off the wedding. Instead, he found himself altogether uninterested in the endless task of notarizing and cataloguing. The old documents no longer felt important. They were flimsy, transparent, unreliable. Everything in his life felt this way now. On the days when his grandfather left him alone in the office, Diego closed up early, wandering aimlessly through the streets of Morelia. He bought cigarettes from a street vendor one afternoon and began smoking, drifting from one plaza to the other, watching people, hoping for something to happen. He thought about Javier, imagined him waving at him from across the plaza, walking over and sitting next to Diego. They would share cigarettes and talk and make plans again. Diego would take Carolina’s advice, and he and Javier would move to the capital together. Diego would join Ana and Juan Brenton’s theater troupe. He would become a famous performer, and Javier would be very proud and they’d be happy.

Then the movie houses came to Mexico, and one opened up around the corner from the office. It was in an old building that was dilapidated and falling down. But then there was a ticket booth and a marquee lit up by electric bulbs that flashed and moved in rapid succession. The lines soon began to wrap all the way around the corner and out into the sidewalk, a few feet from the office’s entrance. One day, instead of wandering around again, Diego took a place in the line, leaning against the cracked column where his father once stood. The line inched forward bit by bit until he was before the ticket booth. He paid the attendant inside and stepped into the lobby.

He would never forget the silence, the way in which the theater
cut off all sound and movement from the outside; the silhouettes of the people around him settling down in their chairs; the click and whir of the projector; the snapping and cracking and sputtering of the film as the celluloid strip worked its way through the rivulets and channels of the camera. Soon, a little man with a striped vest and a bowler hat walked onto the stage. He sat at a piano and began playing music from a stack of sheets placed before him.

And, just like that, the moving picture began. It involved a pretty heiress, an evil baron, and a kidnapping. Diego would never forget the thrill of it all, a chase scene involving many horses, a majestic castle, and the pretty heiress by her father’s side, clutching his hand as the mustachioed old man took his last breath and died a dramatic and poignant death.

Diego was riveted. He remained in his seat long after the film had ended. It was only once he was outside, once he was back at his desk in the notary office, that Diego realized that he hadn’t thought about the wedding the entire time he was sitting inside the theater house.

A few newsstands around Morelia began selling magazines solely devoted to the “moving picture business,” as they called it. These featured pages and pages full of glossy black-and-white pictures of movie stars like Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Louise Brooks, and Ramón Novarro, who was also from Mexico. The articles told of lavish poolside parties, of veritable nobodies hopping off trains from all over the world and finding themselves instant movie stars. He kept these magazines under his bed—pulling them out at night, when the house was quiet and free of all the wedding nonsense—and stared at the pictures inside that showed wide avenues flanked with palm trees, rolling verdant hills, and the sunshine which, he learned, always shone every day, year after year. Hollywood was paradise, and Diego wanted to go, to get lost in the masses of people who were flocking there to become stars, to toast their skin under a warm sun that was constant and rejuvenating, to stroll under the shaded branches of orange and grapefruit trees, to go to the fancy restaurants and dance clubs the movie stars went to. Most of all, he dreamed of becoming a famous film actor himself. He stared, night after night, at the picture of Ramón Novarro and told himself
that he too could become like him, that young boy from Mexico. A nobody who became a somebody there. In paradise.

With the wedding only a few weeks away now, Diego found himself spending more time inside the theater. He lied to his grandparents, told them he was going to the church to pray in the evenings after dinner. Instead he went to watch more filmstrips, some of them over and over again. He saw chases, a dance by a woman in a veil and an elaborate headdress. There were pirates on large ships, an old hunchbacked man playing with a group of orphans. He saw Paris and ancient Egypt and Babylon, Greece and Italian villas. The thrill, the pursuits by bandits, the police officers and bank robbers, it all made him think of other things, further away, far from Morelia, Mexico, his grandparents, Paloma.

There were nights when he would watch Doroteo, slumped in a chair, a drink in his hand, his eyes tired and wasted by years and years of notarizing, of documenting the lives of others, not his own. He imagined himself old, in that very chair, nodding off, just like his grandfather was. Paloma would be by his side, hair graying, eyes empty and void of love or passion or all other things that made life worth anything. He wanted to be brave like his mother, who risked everything to be with the man she loved, to seek out, to live the life she truly wanted. But he wasn’t that person. He couldn’t do that now or ever. There was the wedding. There was a suit he still needed to buy.

He hadn’t seen Javier at all, not since their fight after the meeting. Paloma’s maid of honor, her cousin Irma Salas, had enrolled at the university and told Diego that Javier was in some of her classes. He got into the habit of asking Irma from time to time if she had seen him, how he was doing, what he looked like. Through her, he learned that Javier and Esteban were still very close, that they were always together, that they spent the majority of their free time between classes handing out leaflets and organizing meetings.

“That place is such a breeding ground for liberals and atheists,” Paloma told her cousin one day. “I don’t know why you continue to attend.”

“I’m looking for a husband,” Irma said. “That’s all.”

“Well,” Paloma said, gripping Diego’s arm. “There are plenty of other, far more respectable places to find one. Just ask me.”

Diego couldn’t bear the thought of Javier missing the wedding, which was only two weeks away. He put his coat on, adjusted his hat, and took several deep breaths before walking over to his house and knocking on the door. One of the maids answered.

“Doña Carolina and Don Manuel aren’t here,” she said, letting him in. “But Javier’s in his bedroom. He has company.”

“Thank you,” he said, glancing up the stairs.

He thought about leaving, but he couldn’t. He just had to see Javier. They needed to put things right. Diego climbed the steps one at a time, his hand squeezing the banister, the wood cool against his warm, damp skin. The hallway was dark except for the shafts of dim white light seeping out from the bottoms of the doors. He came to Javier’s room and stood there. He raised his hand, balled up in a fist, and was about to rap it when the door creaked slightly open, enough so that he could see inside, could see Javier with his shirt off, his arms wrapped around Esteban’s torso. They were locked in a tight embrace, their eyes closed, their lips pressed together, kissing. All Diego could do was look away. The dark wooden floorboard creaked when he stepped back, and Javier saw him standing there. Diego’s breath was caught in his throat. Before Javier had a chance to do anything—fumble for his shirt, walk over, slam the door shut—Diego turned away and ran down the steps and out of the house as quickly as he could. Those two perverted heathens deserved one another, he thought when he arrived back home. Such a vile and putrid act. Two men with each other. What a disgrace. He wasn’t like that. He had Paloma. They would have children. Lots of them. They would be raised Catholic. God-fearing. There would be a place for them in heaven.