Eight Girls Taking Pictures (19 page)

Vittorio Vidali moved about Mexico like a ghost. He was here, then he was there. He was in some pueblo in the south, then he was out of the country, then he showed up at
El Machete,
the Party offices, or Clara’s soirees. Sometimes he came bearing gifts, other times he seemed a little worn, as if he had been not on any sort of vacation but on some other type of excursion altogether.

Had Clara been inclined to keep in touch with the world beyond Juan Cristian, she would’ve seen what hid in plain sight: that Vidali—for all his seeming goodwill and thoughtfulness—was in love with her. Even more, she would’ve recognized that foxy look she’d noticed the first time they met, a look that said he was waiting.

Diego Rivera wanted Clara to pose for yet another mural. “I should think that you know me by heart by now,” she said. It was called
Distributing Arms.
And it was to depict the workers, with Frida Kahlo in the center, her work shirt embroidered with a red star, giving out weapons. Off in the lower right-hand corner was Clara, holding a bandolier full of bullets, gazing up into the eyes of Juan Cristian, their likenesses so taken with each other it was as if they were in another picture altogether.

Clara never truly forgave Diego for exposing their affection for all the world to see. However, it was her mistake to see only herself and Juan Cristian when she should’ve been looking over her shoulder—for there, with only his hat, eyes, and nose visible, stood Vittorio Vidali, close and studying something that he seemed decided to have.

Diego painted the picture as a warning to Clara, his ex-lover, model, and comrade. He explained that Vidali was dangerous, a Party assassin. “So what?” asked Clara, who was angry with Diego—all of them were because he was anti-Stalin and soon to be expelled from the Party, which led her to decide that his feelings about Vidali were tainted by his feelings about the Party.

“It wouldn’t matter anyway,” said Clara. “He knows how committed we are to the revolution.”

And so January 1929 came, and on that cold night, Clara waited for Juan Cristian to return from a meeting with a man who claimed that a gunman had been sent from Cuba (by the same president Cruz had so angered) to murder him. Of course, Juan Cristian was suspicious, though not enough to stand him up, as Clara had suggested.

“Let’s go,” she said, tugging Juan Cristian’s sleeve as they stood before the doors of La China café. “We don’t know this man, so how can we know if what he says is true?”

Juan Cristian put his hands on Clara’s slim shoulders. “Trust me,” he said.

And in that moment she thought that if someone were to demand she make a choice between politics and Juan Cristian, she would choose Juan Cristian. She would, in a fit of individualism, turn her back on the collective and live her life as an artist in love.

But that wasn’t her choice; her choice was to let him do what he had to do, and that, she knew, was no choice at all.

They agreed that Juan Cristian would meet Clara at the nearby telegraph office at 9:00 in the evening. She waited, on the sidewalk, pulling her sweater around her, pacing. Stopping. She went inside, then outside, then back inside. She refused to succumb to tears because crying would mean that she believed him to have stepped into a trap. It would mean surrender. She should’ve insisted that he cancel; this was her fault. Or at least made him wait for Vidali, who had promised to go with him.

“He said I should come alone,” said Juan Cristian.

“All the more reason for me to go with you,” said Vidali. “You don’t know political operatives like I do,” he said.

“Please listen to him,
amor de mi vida,
” said Clara.

“I can make myself unseen,” said Vidali.

And when Juan Cristian insisted that he was no innocent when it came to spies and subversion—wasn’t he already on the bad side of the Cuban president for a failed coup?—Vidali only placed his hand on Juan
Cristian’s shoulder and said, “You think danger looks like danger. That’s your mistake, comrade.”

Vidali turned to Clara before he left and said, under his breath, “Clarissima, I’ll be there.” Diego was wrong; Vidali would save him.

Stupid, stupid, said Clara to herself. Why didn’t I go with him? Why did I listen to him? The only hope she had was that it wasn’t an ambush or, if it was, that Vidali had met Juan Cristian at La China after all.

She kept her terror at bay until, at 9:25, Juan Cristian hurried inside.

“That man came to warn me that they want me dead,” he told her and shrugged. “They’re trying to scare me, that’s all.”

She wanted to throw herself on him and never let him go. Instead, she slid her arms around him, resting her cheek on his coat, which was scented with the winter night. They stayed in this position for several seconds. “Hey,” he said softly, laying a casual kiss in her hair. “We should go,” he said.

They walked the short distance to their home, down the empty street, Clara’s arm through his and pulling so close that her stride synchronized with his. Her breathing relaxed; she closed her eyes for a moment, relying on his guidance. They passed the bakery with its one lone light.

She heard the shots before they registered, then tasted the gun smoke. Later, she remembered heat and a flash, and then Juan Cristian falling from her arm, pulling her down with him. She scrambled to her knees, crouched on the stones of the street, yanking and tearing at his coat, as if to bunch it up across his chest and stomach to staunch the bleeding.

“Everyone hear this well,” he gasped. “The Cuban government ordered my death.”

And then Clara was screaming for help.

She sat, bloodstained, in one of the hard hospital chairs, waiting as she had waited for him in the telegraph office an hour and a half earlier. He’s
young, she said to herself. He will come through the door. Love matters more than death. He will survive this.

Diego came, and journalists, and her friends, and Vidali (“When I arrived at the café, he was already gone” he told Clara), into whose arms she fell when the doctor emerged with the news that Juan Cristian had passed.

This time, Clara was as reluctant to leave Vidali’s embrace as he was to let her go. But he had to release her because the police had come and Clara Argento was under arrest for the murder of Juan Cristian Cruz.

The police held her for hours. Her clothes, stained with Juan Cristian’s blood, were unchanged. “Tell us again what happened,” the police insisted. “And again,” they said, until an exhausted, broken Clara finally said, “I can tell it twenty times and it will still be the same. If I could change this story, I would.”

The authorities responded by contacting the press and running the nude photographs that Morris Elliot had taken of her when they were first in Mexico and still lovers. She was nothing but an immoral Communist without a shred of modesty or fine Mexican virtues, they said. Whore. Femme fatale. Libertine. It was as if she were starring in one of her old Hollywood movies again.

Next they ransacked her house, claiming it was a legal search. They cried that this was clearly a crime of passion! Much was made again of her beauty. Perhaps it was a love triangle! Clara was in shock from the death of Juan Christian, having lucid dreams that she would return from the market to him sitting at his typewriter saying, “Clara, you must listen” and “Where have you been,
mi amor
?”—only for them to transform into endless interrogations. She would wake up to their repeated questions, their terrible scenarios of the murder, her cell, her filthy clothing, her wrecked home.

Another paper ran her picture of Juan Christian lying in the grass with a caption that read “Photographic study made by Clara Argento of Juan Cristian Cruz while alive, in order to give them both an idea of
what he would look like after he was dead.” They called the case “The Sentimental Problem of Clara Argento.”

Diego and his well-connected friends got her out after five days. The truth was that no one cared about one dead Marxist revolutionary.
Basura.
Trash. There would be no real effort to find the murderer, something the murderer was experienced enough to know.

And Clara never, ever cried until she found the photograph that she had taken of Cruz’s manuel typewriter, upside down and kicked under a dresser, and then she wept.

Vittorio Vidali remained close at hand, in his here-and-gone way. Clara, no longer distracted by happiness, grew wary of Vidali; her belief in their three-way friendship had been compromised. Where was he that night? She remembered his saying to Juan Cristian that he thought “danger looks like danger” and the way he could appear and disappear. She read in the paper, and listened to the whispers at Party headquarters, about “activities” that often seemed to occur in places Vidali had recently visited. All this was complicated by rumors of the Communist Party’s displeasure with Juan Cristian’s popularity, and wasn’t the assassination attempt on the Cuban president an example of rogue, individualistic behavior?

Clara chose to handle Juan Cristian’s death by increasing her devotion to the Party, telling herself that her politics were inextricable from her love, and love was Juan Cristian. Loyalty to Communism was loyalty to Juan Cristian. And Vidali? The Party would never order the death of someone as true to its principles as Juan Cristian, and Vidali would never act against the Party. It was the vengeful Cuban president, she told herself, a man afraid of a better man.