age. But Héctor, a lawyer and local politician, was ten years older. He was dressed all in white that evening and carried a white guitar. He wasn’t exactly handsome, Juanita always said, but his wheat-hued face was full ofcharacter, he was soft-spoken and funny, and he had a sad, sweet smile. A true orphan, adopted by a childless couple in San José Tacuaya—an accountant-bookkeeper and his wife—he’d gone to law school at the University of Guanajuato and shined there. A brilliant mind, everybody said so, and a brilliant future—a rising star in the PRI, even more so than Juanita’s brother Leopoldo, who was already an operator in the official party too. Héctor could perform any Beatles song on his guitar, and when he sang “In the Summertime,” in English, he sounded just like Mungo Jerry’s singer with a Mexican accent. Juanita and Héctor were married about two years after that meeting, and less than a year later Aura was born in a hospital in León, Guanajuato. They lived in San José Tacuaya. The PRI had selected Héctor to be the party’s candidate for the office of municipal president of that small city; it was like being mayor. Back then the official party’s candidates didn’t lose elections. Campaigning alongside his beautiful, fresh-faced young wife, with her long, wavy, chestnut hair, who wore jeans and embroidered peasant shirts, his own hair worn like Bobby Kennedy’s, falling over his big ears and into his eyes, Héctor represented the new image of the PRI, a chastened revolutionary party that had learned how to renew itself in the decade since the bloody cataclysm of the ’68 student massacres, in touch with youth and the times after all. As the Primera Dama Municipal, Aura’s mother was forced to be in the local public eye as much or even more than her husband, by his side at ceremonies and banquets, presiding over women’s lunches, afternoon teas, benefits, and all manner of festivals and events on the strawberry farms. Once Héctor had decided that he no longer wanted her for a wife, Juanita knew that the public spectacle of her and her daughter’s abandonment would make life unbearable in San José Tacuaya. It was unthinkable that she could raise Aura in such an environment. Anyway, she hated that boring, crass little city. One thing she would never in her life regret was the decision to come to the Distrito Federal to start their lives over.
Was there another woman involved, Ma? Aura would sometimes ask her mother.
Who knows, hija. Nothing would surprise me. But Héctor was never much of a womanizer.
But what about me? Aura would ask. Why did he want to leave me? Why doesn’t he answer my letters?
Sometimes even adults who’ve made the most wonderful child can fall out of love, Juanita would try to explain, and she’d tell Aura all over again how much her father had loved her. But Héctor changed, she would say. It seemed obvious now that something was wrong with him—psychologically, she meant. He always doubted every good thing life gave him, hija. So charming and brilliant, but on the inside, never able to overcome whatever it was that had predestined him to always ruin his own chances for happiness.
Things hadn’t gone at all well for her father, Aura knew, since his glory days as municipal president. Instead of rising higher, he’d plummeted—swiftly or gradually, she didn’t know. Tía Vicky sometimes had news about him: he was teaching law at a community college, but he also had a side business delivering bottled soft drinks to market stalls and collecting the empty bottles to bring back to the distributors. It was hard to believe that her father had fallen so far. And then, years later, as if the official party had never understood how much they needed the former young hotshot presidente municipal of San José Tacuaya to help lead them into the future, the PRI, rotted and loathed, had finally fallen, too.
Aura’s earliest memories of their new life in Mexico City
Was there another woman involved, Ma? Aura would sometimes ask her mother.
Who knows, hija. Nothing would surprise me. But Héctor was never much of a womanizer.
But what about me? Aura would ask. Why did he want to leave me? Why doesn’t he answer my letters?
Sometimes even adults who’ve made the most wonderful child can fall out of love, Juanita would try to explain, and she’d tell Aura all over again how much her father had loved her. But Héctor changed, she would say. It seemed obvious now that something was wrong with him—psychologically, she meant. He always doubted every good thing life gave him, hija. So charming and brilliant, but on the inside, never able to overcome whatever it was that had predestined him to always ruin his own chances for happiness.
Things hadn’t gone at all well for her father, Aura knew, since his glory days as municipal president. Instead of rising higher, he’d plummeted—swiftly or gradually, she didn’t know. Tía Vicky sometimes had news about him: he was teaching law at a community college, but he also had a side business delivering bottled soft drinks to market stalls and collecting the empty bottles to bring back to the distributors. It was hard to believe that her father had fallen so far. And then, years later, as if the official party had never understood how much they needed the former young hotshot presidente municipal of San José Tacuaya to help lead them into the future, the PRI, rotted and loathed, had finally fallen, too.
Aura’s earliest memories of their new life in Mexico City
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