The Love Parade

Deep Vellum Publishing

3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226

deepvellum.org • @deepvellum

Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.

Copyright ©1984 by Sergio Pitol

Translation copyright ©2021 by G. B. Henson

Originally published as El desfile del amor by Editorial Anagrama,

Barcelona, Spain, in 1984.

first edition

, 2021

All rights reserved.

ISBNs: 978-1-64605-113-7 (paperback) | 978-1-64605-114-4 (ebook)

library of congress control number:

2021948209

Front Cover Design by Kit Schluter

Interior Layout and Typesetting by KGT

Printed in the United States of America

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Lya and Luis Cardoza y Aragón,

Luz del Amo, Margo Glantz,

Carlos Monsiváis, and Luis Prieto.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Minerva

Chapter 2: The Vanquished Party

Chapter 3: Perfect Hostess

Chapter 4: Corridors and Surprises

Chapter 5: Ida Werfel Speaks to Her Daughter

Chapter 6: Who Sings and Dances

Chapter 7: In the Garden of Juan Fernández

Chapter 8: Portrait of a Diva

Chapter 9: The Love Parade

Chapter 10: The Detestable Mexican Castrato

Chapter 11: Crabs on the March!

Chapter 12: The End

the minerva building – the name Pitol gives to the iconic Rio de Janeiro Building, located in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma, known to many as the House of Witches

miguel del solar – the novel’s protagonist, a historian who lived at the Minerva in 1942 at the time of a shooting, the mystery around which he is attempting to uncover

dionisio zepeda and eduviges briones de díaz zepeda – Del Solar’s aunt and uncle, residents at the Minerva; Dionisio is Del Solar’s mother’s brother

amparo – Dionisio and Eduviges’s daughter and Del Solar’s cousin

antonio – Dionisio and Eduviges’s son; although sickly as a child, he’d go on to hold a government position and be implicated in a corruption scandal

arnulfo briones – Eduviges’s brother, shady figure and businessman, husband of Adele Waltzer Briones

adele waltzer briones – Arnulfo’s German wife and mother of Erich Maria Pistauer

erich maria pistauer – son of Adele Waltzer and Hanno Pistauer, stepson of Arnulfo Briones; killed following a party given at the home of Delfina Uribe at the Minerva

martínez – the so-called consultant to Arnulfo Briones; in fact, his fixer

delfina uribe – a gallery owner and former tenant in the Minerva Building

ricardo rubio – Delfina Uribe’s son, who was injured during the shooting

cristóbal rubio – Delfina Uribe’s former husband

julio escobedo – an established Mexican artist, client and friend of Delfina Uribe

ruth escobedo – Julio’s wife

cecilia – Del Solar’s wife, now deceased

luis uribe – father of Delfina Uribe, once a prominent politician, known as the Licenciado, a univeristy title that can denote an attorney or a courtesy title extended to men of high political rank

pedro balmorán – an eccentric tenant at the Minerva with ties to Mexico’s ultraconservative Catholic movement, and who claims to have in his possession the account of a nineteenth-century Mexican castrato

ida werfel – a German-Jewish Hispanist who resided at the Minerva at the time of the shooting

emma werfel – daughter and personal secretary of Ida Werfel

malú – Delfina Uribe’s sister-in-law

derny goenaga – Miguel del Solar’s cousin; Arnulfo Briones’s nephew; a successful advertising executive

cruz-garcía – the publisher of Miguel del Solar’s historical books

the bombón sisters – two entertainers who attended the party at the Minerva

the castrato – a nineteenth-century indigenous singer

CHAPTER 1

Minerva

a man stopped in front of the gate of a redbrick building in the heart of Colonia Roma one afternoon in mid-January 1973. Four unwonted turrets, also brick, sit atop the building’s corners. For decades, the building has epitomized an architectural extravagance in a neighborhood of tranquil residences of another style. Truth be told, in the last few years everything has become discordant, as the entire neighborhood has lost its harmony. The hulking mass of the new buildings crushes the graceful homes of two, at most three, floors, built according to the Belle Époque style in Bordeaux, Biarritz, and Auteil. There is something sad and dirty in the district that until recently still maintained certain displays of elegance, of a once powerful class, wronged but not defeated. The opening of the subway station, the ragtag hordes that it regularly vomits, the countless stalls of fried foods, tacos, quesadillas, and elotes, of newspapers and secondhand books, the hawkers that sell dogs, cheap toys, and miracle drugs, have heralded the true demise of that part of the city, the beginning of a different era.

Dusk fell. The man pushed open the metal door, walked toward the interior courtyard, looked up, and surveyed the squalid spectacle of an edifice on the brink of ruin. Just as the building didn’t conform to the neighborhood, and, on second thought, to the city, its internal structure was inconsistent with its faux Gothic façade, with its mansards, porthole windows, and four turrets. The man surveyed the corridors that encircled each of the building’s floors, irregular oases created by clusters of flowerpots and tin pails of different shapes and sizes where palms, lilies, rosebushes, and bougainvillea were growing. The arrangement of the flowers breaks the monotony of the cement, creates an asymmetrical and ultimately harmonious ensemble, and evokes the interior of the city’s humble tenements.

Palms with slender stems used to grow in the jardinières, he tells himself. He wonders if his memory might be laying a trap. His stay here emerges, fades, and reappears in his memories as if drawn in a palatial setting. At that moment, as he examines the interior with care, the spaces, despite their size, seem much smaller than how he’s stored them in his memory. A torrent of words spoken thirty years before rushes over him, echoes of conversations suggest elegance, the building’s social prestige, its art deco interior designed by one of the most renowned architects of the time in 1914, precisely the year in which his book is set, a style superimposed on the original bricks, unfinished just as they appear on the exterior. What he sees at that moment are walls about to implode, crumble before his eyes.

The man must be about forty years old. He’s wearing thick, dark brown flannel trousers and a slightly marbled tweed jacket of the same color. His tie is made of woven wool, ochre. In that corner, and especially in that portico, his attire, as well as his particular way of standing, of bringing his hand to his chin, are absolutely natural, in tune with the tall, dirty reddish brick walls, like those of many London walls and porticos. Under his arm, he’s carrying the newly corrected proofs of his latest book and a treatise on the language of Machiavelli, which he just bought at an Italian bookstore nearby.

Frankly, he could characterize as disappointing the last two days, which he spent revising the proofs of the book he’d worked on over the last few years: a chronicle of the events that took place in Mexico City from Victoriano Huerta’s departure to Carranza’s arrival. He found the style crude and presumptuous. At some times, it seemed incoherent and pedantic; at others, overly affected. But what was worse, the spirit of the book had begun to slip away from him. Did it really make sense to have spent so much time buried in archives and libraries, breathing stale air, coating his hair and lungs with dust, to achieve such mediocre results? It seemed as though during each of his past vacations in Mexico, he’d done nothing but search for, classify, and decipher papers. Suddenly, as he pored with fatigue over those pages, now free of typos, awaiting his final approval, he felt that his work could have been done by any scribe who possessed a modicum of instruction in the technique of evaluating and selecting the information scattered in letters, public and private documents, and the press of a given era. His book was called The Year 1914, although the action also took place during a large part of the following year. He had used 1914 in the title because it was the year of the Convention of Aguascalientes, which was critical to the basis of his work. The story of a city without a government: the capital that, though in the hands of the different factions, is controlled by none of them. During such disarray, in the heart of chaos, anything can happen: Vasconcelos improvises a ministry of public instruction; outside his door, from time to time, soldiers shoot their rifles into the air, obeying who knows what reflexes; etc.

It was necessary to leave that now distant Mexico to find peace. If there was anything that kept him going for the moment, it was a deep interest in studying a series of materials that aspired to be a new book. A few months before, while still in Bristol, he’d discovered the correspondence between the administrator of an English oil company in Mexico’s Huasteca region and its headquarters in London during the oil conflicts that led to the expropriation of the companies and the subsequent break in relations between England and Mexico. He extended his curiosity to the continuation of these difficult relations, the resumption of which was made possible by the war, to the visits paid to General Cedillo by prominent British intellectuals and journalists (Waugh, no less!), who insisted on seeing him as the noble savage in whom the seed of catechism had indeed taken root. The man necessary to defeat chaos. The world press expressed itself without the least sentimentality: if Cedillo refused to lead the rebellion, or if he was defeated, the only way forward was armed intervention. To quell the disorder. He took some notes at the time; he’d reviewed and expanded on them in Mexico. And just two or three weeks earlier, just before the end of the year, he met a fellow student, Mercedes Ríos, with whom he discussed his readings at the time and some still-vague research projects. Mercedes lent him some photocopies of a bundle of papers dealing with the more or less clandestine activities of certain German agents active in Mexico during that same period. These documents had belonged to an uncle of hers, a high-ranking official of the Secretariat of Home Affairs during the war, and she imagined he might find them interesting, since they were in some way linked to his topic. He had thought about doing more focused research—the actions taken by oil companies against Mexico, the outbreak of the Second World War, the country’s participation in the Allied cause, de facto solutions to the problems created by expropriation, etc.—but reading those documents made him aware of a thousand other possibilities. He decided to broaden his scope, to study Mexico’s situation in relation to the international one, and not just in regard to the countries to which the expropriated companies belonged. An extremely stimulating period. Elsewhere he began to find materials that renewed his interest in that critical period, which, despite its proximity in time, seemed as remote as that in which José María Luis Mora attempted to plant the ideas of the Enlightenment in the country and to bring Mexico closer to the Age of Reason. Mercedes had been right about the interest that such documents would arouse in him. He plunged into them one weekend. A bitter perfume of mystery emanated from those scant biographical notes. In a way, they recreated the atmosphere of certain films, certain novels that one is accustomed to finding in Istanbul, Lisbon, Athens, or Shanghai but never in Mexico. There were just over fifty pages. He read them on a Saturday night and was so excited that he couldn’t sleep. On Sunday he studied them again, took notes, and reflected on the information they contained. It was thanks to them that he was there, in the courtyard of that bizarre redbrick building, and he looked indecisively at a corner of the second floor where he supposed, without being entirely sure, that his bedroom had been thirty-one years before, during the months he lived with his Uncle Dionisio and Aunt Eduviges. Dionisio Zepeda and Eduviges Briones de Díaz Zepeda, as she liked to point out.

The bundle of papers that had excited him consisted almost exclusively of this: a dry collection of biographical notes, almost completely without glosses in the margin. The majority of these synoptic biographies were devoid of apparent interest, at least for the time being. As a historian, the only thing he’s learned for certain is that there is no point in time that doesn’t lend itself to the juiciest revelations. There was the possibility that once the names included on that list and the information that accompanied it, for the moment neutral, began to be linked to others, to the corresponding persons and institutions, they would expand, branch out, and lead the researcher to broader areas, some truly significant.

Its mere existence constituted a store of priceless information:

Johannes Holtz, for example, landed in Veracruz in February 1938; he worked as a chemical engineer for a company that manufactured essences and perfumes. He was twenty-seven years old at the time of his arrival. He established residence at the Anatole France, 68B, Colonia Polanco. During the first months of his stay in the country, he established contacts with Rainer Schwartz and Bodo Wünger, both owners of fertilizer concerns. Holtz often traveled, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of some of the aforementioned German nationals, to Cuernavaca, where he attended meetings that were suspected of providing political instruction, though they may well have been for recreation. He had a relationship, whose intimate nature was taken for granted, with the widow Eliza Franger, the daughter of a German father and a Colombian mother, in whose apartment, located at Luis Moya 95-9, he regularly spent the night every Friday. On April 10, 1943, he embarked at Tampico bound for Brazil. As far as anyone knew, he hadn’t reentered Mexico, at least not under the name of Johannes Holtz.

Some of those listed were Germans born in Guatemala, educated in Germany, perfectly bilingual, engaged in carrying out not-so-dangerous work: establishing contacts with Germans residing in Mexico and sponsoring proselytizing activities. At an establishment located on Avenida Juárez, near the corner of Dolores, two or three of those who were trained professionally in complex and delicate work—which they constantly perfected—employed highly sophisticated methods, according to the Home Affairs document, for sending messages to a central receiver in Germany. All this was contained in the brief account, the comings and goings of a handful of gray individuals, linked only tangentially on the edge of what we consider the true story. In fact, it was little more than a cursory police dossier. Notes, notes, and more notes on individuals with Teutonic names, which repeated with monotony their date of entry into Mexico, their domiciles, associations, and trips throughout the country. There was no mention, which would have made them truly interesting, of their contacts with the centers of national Nazism, with those deranged and exalted apostles of the Mexican radical right. Perhaps that was described in another dossier, in some confidential file. The dreaded fifth column! In short, there must have been other important files, and it was possible that they were now available for consultation. He had to try. Perhaps pay a visit to the National Archives. It’s important to note that in the interim he hadn’t been inactive and that during the moments when he wasn’t correcting the proofs of the book he preferred not to think about, he’d visited the newspaper archives and read the newspapers for the month of November 1942. He needed to corroborate certain information from 1914 about which he wasn’t very sure, although in fact he should confess that he made that visit for a more intimate reason.

His friend’s anodyne files had fascinated him for two reasons, one minor and another rather amusing: discovering that the father of a law school classmate, whom at one point he’d begun to detest, was linked to this network of clandestine activities and had transported some German agents in a small plane belonging to him, once to Tampico and several times to San Luis Potosí. He’d met him. Yes, a hazy figure whom on two or three occasions he saw crossing the garden of his detestable classmate’s home with an uncertain look and the air of having fallen into a labyrinth with no exit. At the end of the note, a comment disabused any notion that he was a dangerous agent; to the contrary, it celebrated his many indiscretions (thanks to which it had been possible to learn about some of the suspicious movements of others). Alcohol, it was said, produced an uncontainable logorrhea in him. He found it queer that the man in the dossier and the maniacally silent old man he’d met were the same; nevertheless, there was no doubt whatsoever about his identity. His name and address were listed there, the same home he’d visited on so many occasions during his adolescence and to which he swore each time not to return. He imagined his friend’s father during that time: a young braggart, newly arrived in the country, whom two glasses of brandy transformed into a parrot disposed to talk a blue streak. The authorities had taken full advantage of his trumpeting his exploits. Perhaps his subsequent silence had been penitential. Every project in which he’d participated failed because of him.

The other surprise, which indeed gave him a start, an indescribable excitement, was contained in the final two lines of the dossier. They indicated that the murders in the Minerva Building, the very one in whose courtyard he found himself at that moment, were possibly linked to a dramatic settling of scores between German agents and their local henchmen. He’d lived in this house at the time of these events! He would have been ten years old at the time. An age at which it’s possible to remember everything, or almost everything … And, of course, he remembered many things … But in what an absurd, muddled, and incoherent way! It’s possible that the facts he had in mind weren’t those mentioned in the dossier. Where had the shooting taken place, for example? In the courtyard facing him? On the stairs? Where had the shots actually been fired? Once, when recalling his childhood, he’d felt a flutter, the echo of lost memories, which linked him to the shooting that had disturbed the family’s life. What he felt was a vague echo, despite the impact it had that night on his life, so profound, in fact, that he wasn’t able to finish the school year and had to leave Mexico City.

A thousand times, as he passed the building during university, when his classmates commented with a mixture of enthusiasm and mocking on the eccentricity of its architecture, the spectral air that gradually enveloped it, the look of a Dickens’s novel illustration that its balconies, walls, and towers radiated, he took pride in revealing to them that part of his childhood had been spent in that very building. And he repeated sentences from his archive of familial nostalgia: no one could imagine, when passing in front of that ruin, the elegance of its interiors, the exquisite wood of its parquets and doors, the spaciousness of its rooms, the height of its ceilings. The building, he explained, had been built, just as its twin located on the streets of Marseille, for the purpose of offering quality accommodation to the staff from foreign embassies and legations, less costly and easier to care for than private residences. Small and dark, the ground-floor apartments were less appealing. Those on the second floor, where he lived with his relatives, on the other hand, were palatial. The entire floor was occupied by only two apartments, each with grand living rooms, a large dining room, and long hallways that connected an endless number of bedrooms, studies, sewing rooms, etc. On the upper floors, the apartments were less spacious but no less impressive: they were simply made for smaller families. The system of corridors surrounding a large interior courtyard, unusual at the time of its construction in the late nineteenth century, when in Mexico real estate speculation had exploded, distinguished it from any other building in the city, contemporary or thereafter.

From the interior windows the tenants were able to see the kind of visitors the neighbors received. This ability, in a Mexico like that of the 1940s, still full of provincial vices, must have been very attractive. He’d watch the foreign tenants greet each other unhurriedly, exchanging a few words in unintelligible languages; say goodbye with the same ceremoniousness; then go on their way. He imagines that they visited each other only on prior arrangement. No one would meddle in other people’s affairs, although he couldn’t know for certain, since, as far as his Aunt Eduviges was concerned, she’d done nothing but meddle in other people’s affairs. Her brother, Arnulfo Briones, an old codger whom he’d always disliked, with a shrill voice, dirty, yellow-stained teeth and moustache, and inexpressive eyes that looked to be made of glass, subjected him on several occasions to veritable interrogations, dry, inhospitable, and lacking in affection, about the children with whom he used to play in the courtyard and their families—interrogations to which he later also subjected his Aunt Eduviges, Amparo, and even the servants. Yes, it was a matter of rummaging in his memory. He was already ten when the German was killed.

At that age one remembers everything, he’d said, but it turned out that in his case it wasn’t true. On two or three occasions he’d been in Delfina Uribe’s gallery, had exchanged a few words with her, and yet he didn’t realize that she was linked to the tragedy until much later, when he visited the newspaper archives and consulted a number of old newspapers. He knew Julio Escobedo better, although that also meant little. At one time he’d dealt with him relatively often. At their wedding, some of his wife Cecilia’s cousins had given them one of his oils, which ultimately became his favorite painting: a gray cat playing with a spinning top. In the background, a vase of blue and purple flowers. Never, of this he is sure, did he imagine that the party that had ended so badly might have been offered in the painter’s honor. What’s certain is that he knew, and at the same time he knew nothing, about what had happened there. Nor did a ten-year-old boy have any reason to know that a party was being held in the apartment next door for a painter who over time would become famous. He hadn’t gone to the newspaper archives to find out the details of the case (in the Home Affairs dossier, the word murders was used, in the plural, which intrigued him, as if Arnulfo Briones’s stepson hadn’t been the only victim) but to verify some information about which he’d suddenly felt unsure after reading the latest proofs of The Year 1914. Finding no errors, he was satisfied. The information about which he’d at one point been in doubt was correct, but since he was there, he told himself, he’d take the opportunity to scan the press from 1942. It wasn’t difficult to pinpoint the date. He was in his fourth year of primary school, so it must have been 1942. The period of the blackouts: air-raid drills over Mexico City. The city would grow completely dark under the roar of the planes flying overhead. The shooting, he thought, must have taken place toward the end of the year. It took him no more than half an hour to find the newspapers he was looking for. The party, he was able to confirm, took place on the night of November 14, 1942. On the front page of one of the newspapers, a headline, in large print, read crime committed in the house of luis uribe’s daughter, and the reader was referred to two inner sections—the society page and the nota roja. He read the society article first. The week before, Delfina Uribe celebrated the opening of her gallery and the inaugural Escobedo exhibition. Read thirty years later, the list of guests was a revealing document of the time. Almost everyone had been present that night. Painters, writers, politicians, filmmakers, theater people. Legendary figures, most of whom are gone. He was impressed by the compactness of the setting. A small city where, for that very reason, their personalities stood out more clearly. Delfina’s family relationships and her personal talent allowed her to bring together the whole of Mexico City with little effort. The reporter described in words akin to ecstasy the elegance of that extraordinary apartment that, because of its modern decor, would have been the pride of cities like Los Angeles or New York, which she concluded by describing as a Hollywood dream! She quoted remarks by some of the guests about aluminum columns, a pair of pre-Hispanic masks, and the portrait of the hostess, painted years before by the young Escobedo. She spoke of the dinner’s French and Mexican dishes; she described at length the eveningwear of some of the most prominent social figures of the day: the contrast, for example, between Frida’s opulently embroidered Oaxacan dress and the Greek-style draped tunic worn by Dolores del Río. She commented on the cosmopolitan atmosphere that suddenly flourished in some of the city’s salons, where "because of its refined spirit, a gathering like Delfina Uribe’s constituted un vrai événement, an entrée to a privileged space where all languages could be heard and spoken." The article was a hymn to harmony.