When We Were Golden

Chapter 1: The City of Light and Dust

The train from Laredo crossed into Mexico on the morning of September 14, 1924, and Caroline Vining pressed her forehead against the glass until it ached. The landscape was nothing she had prepared herself for. Not the gentle green of Massachusetts, not the orderly farms of the Midwest they had passed through in the night. This was something older and more violent—scrubland and cactus and mountains the color of bruised plums rising against a sky so blue it seemed to vibrate.

"You're fogging the window," Leo said from across the compartment, not looking up from his sketchbook. His pencil moved in quick, confident strokes. He was drawing the old woman in the seat ahead of them, the one with the braided hair and the basket of chiles on her lap.

Caroline wiped the glass with her sleeve. "I don't care. Look at those mountains."

"I've been looking at mountains for three days."

"Not like those."

Leo glanced up, and for a moment his face softened into the expression she loved best—the one where his restlessness stilled and he simply saw. His eyes were the color of weak tea, and when he was truly looking at something, they seemed to go transparent, as if the world were passing straight through him onto some interior canvas.

"No," he admitted. "Not like those."

They had been married fourteen months. Caroline was twenty-three years old, the youngest daughter of Douglas Vining, who ran a modest but respected shipping insurance firm on State Street in Boston. She had attended Radcliffe for two years before her father's business had suffered a downturn, and she had come home to help her mother manage the household—a duty she performed with quiet competence and equally quiet resentment. She had met Leo Torrey at a gallery opening in Cambridge, where he was showing a series of harbor paintings that the Boston Globe called "muscular and unsentimental." He was twenty-eight, tall, with dark hair that fell across his forehead and a way of talking about art that made it sound like the most urgent thing in the world.

They had married quickly—too quickly, her mother said, her lips pressed into a line thin as a paper cut. Leo had no family money. His father was a house painter in Germantown, Philadelphia, and his mother had died when he was twelve. He had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on a scholarship and then in Paris for a year on borrowed money. He painted like a man trying to outrun something, and Caroline had found this thrilling. She still found it thrilling, though the thrill had begun to shade into something more complicated, the way a bruise changes color as it ages.

Now they were going to Mexico City because Leo had secured a commission. A friend of a friend—an American journalist named George Purdy who had been living in the capital for years—had connected Leo with a contact in the Ministry of Education. The Mexican government, in the flush of post-revolutionary nation-building, was commissioning murals for public buildings. The great ones—Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco—were already at work on massive projects. But there were smaller commissions too, for lesser-known artists willing to come and learn the techniques. Leo had been offered a wall in a secondary ministry building, a modest space, but it was a wall, and it was Mexico, and it was a beginning.

"This is where everything is happening," Leo had told her, pacing their small apartment in Cambridge with a cigarette burning between his fingers. "Not Paris anymore. Mexico. The revolution made something possible here that doesn't exist anywhere else. Art that matters, Caroline. Art that belongs to everyone."

She had said yes without hesitation. Not because she was a dutiful wife—though she was, in her way—but because she wanted to see it. She wanted to see everything. She had spent her whole life in rooms that smelled of lemon polish and old books, and something in her was desperate for a world that smelled of something else entirely.

The train pulled into Mexico City's Buenavista station at four in the afternoon, and the heat hit her like a wall. Not the damp, sulking heat of a Boston summer but something dry and bright and punishing, as if the sun had a personal grievance against the earth. The station was chaos—porters shouting, vendors selling tamales wrapped in corn husks, children darting between the legs of travelers. Caroline clutched her handbag and followed Leo through the crowd, her traveling suit already damp beneath the arms.

George Purdy was waiting for them outside, leaning against a battered Ford with a straw hat pushed back on his head. He was a short, barrel-chested man in his forties with a sunburned nose and the easy manner of someone who had long ago stopped caring what anyone thought of him.

"Torrey!" He seized Leo's hand and pumped it. "And Mrs. Torrey. Welcome to the Paris of the Western Hemisphere, if Paris were run by socialists and had better food."

"Call me Caroline, please."

"Caroline, then. You look like you could use a drink. Both of you. Throw your bags in the back."

The drive from the station to their lodgings took them through streets that made Caroline forget her thirst, her exhaustion, everything. The buildings were painted in colors she had no names for—a pink that was almost salmon, a blue that was almost purple, a yellow so deep it seemed to have been mixed with gold. Trees she didn't recognize lined the boulevards, their branches heavy with unfamiliar flowers. And everywhere, people—more people than she had ever seen in one place, moving with a purposeful energy that was nothing like the measured pace of Boston.

"The altitude will get you for the first few days," George said, navigating around a donkey cart with practiced ease. "Seven thousand feet. You'll feel it in your head, your lungs. Drink water. Drink pulque if you're brave. Don't drink the tap water unless you want to spend a week in bed."

"Where are we staying?" Leo asked. He was leaning forward, his sketchbook forgotten, his eyes consuming the city.

"I found you a place in the Colonia Roma. Nice neighborhood—lots of trees, good light. A couple of other Americans nearby, but mostly Mexican families. The landlady is a widow named Señora Gutierrez. She's a terror, but her cook makes the best mole in the district."

The apartment was on the second floor of a colonial building with a courtyard full of bougainvillea. Two rooms, a small kitchen, a bathroom with erratic plumbing. The walls were thick and white, the floors were tile, and the windows opened onto a balcony that looked out over the street. Caroline stood on that balcony as the sun went down and watched the sky turn colors she had never seen before—not the gentle pastels of a New England sunset but something operatic, almost violent, bands of orange and crimson and deep violet that seemed to set the mountains on fire.

"Leo," she called. "Come look at this."

He came and stood behind her, his hands on the iron railing, and for a long moment neither of them spoke. The street below was quieting. Somewhere a radio was playing a song she didn't know, a woman's voice rising and falling over guitar chords that seemed to ache.

"We're going to be happy here," Leo said.

Caroline believed him. She had no reason not to.

That first week was a blur of heat and color and disorientation. The altitude made her head swim, and she spent the first two days in bed with a headache that felt like a band of iron around her skull. Leo was impatient—he wanted to see the ministry building, meet his contacts, begin work—but George told him to wait, to let the city come to him.

"Mexico doesn't reward impatience," George said over dinner at a cantina near the Zócalo, the great central square that made Caroline feel as if she had stepped into a painting. "You push too hard here, the whole thing slides away from you. Let it breathe."

Leo did not let things breathe. It was not in his nature. But he listened to George, or at least pretended to, and spent the first days sketching—the courtyard, the street vendors, the extraordinary light that fell through the jacaranda trees in long, lavender-tinted shafts. Caroline watched him work and felt the old familiar admiration, the sense that Leo's talent was a living thing that inhabited him, restless and demanding as a caged animal.

She began her own project on the third day. She had brought a leather-bound journal—a gift from her sister Nell, who had pressed it into her hands at the train station in Boston with the instruction to "write down everything, so I can pretend I'm there." Caroline had always been a letter writer, a keeper of diaries, but something about Mexico made her want to write differently. Not the chatty, descriptive letters she sent to her mother and sister, but something more deliberate. She wanted to capture the city the way Leo was trying to capture it—in its essence, not just its surface.

She sat on the balcony with her journal and wrote about the light. She wrote about the old woman who sold flowers on the corner every morning, her face as lined and brown as a walnut shell. She wrote about the sound of church bells that seemed to come from everywhere at once, layering over each other until the whole city rang like the inside of a bell. She wrote about the smell of corn tortillas cooking on a comal, and the way the smoke rose in thin blue threads against the morning air.

She wrote: "I came here as Leo's wife, as Leo's companion, as Leo's audience. But the city does not know this. The city does not care whose wife I am. It simply presents itself, enormous and indifferent and beautiful, and asks me what I am going to do with what I see."

She did not show this to Leo. She was not sure why.

On the fifth day, George took them to a party.

It was held in the home of a painter named Rodrigo Fuentes, whose canvases—huge, violent things full of jaguars and volcanoes and women with their hair on fire—covered every wall of his sprawling house in Coyoacán. The house was full of people: painters, poets, journalists, musicians, a few diplomats, several beautiful women whose exact occupations were unclear. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of mezcal, and someone was playing a piano badly but enthusiastically in a back room.

Caroline had dressed carefully—a green silk dress she had bought in Boston for the trip, her hair pinned up in the style she had seen in a magazine. She felt immediately overdressed. The women here wore bright cotton blouses and long skirts, silver jewelry, their hair loose or braided. They moved through the rooms with a confidence that Caroline envied—not the studied poise of Boston society women, but something more fundamental, as if they had never been taught to doubt their right to take up space.

Leo was in his element. He had a gift for this—for walking into a room full of strangers and making them feel as if they had been waiting for him. Within twenty minutes he was deep in conversation with Rodrigo Fuentes and a thin, intense man named Emilio Bernal, who George identified as "a painter, a communist, and possibly a genius, in that order."

Caroline drifted. She accepted a glass of something that tasted like smoke and fire and stood near the open windows, watching the garden, where lanterns hung in the trees and a couple was dancing to music only they could hear.

"You look like someone who is trying to decide whether to stay or run."

The voice came from beside her—a woman about her own age, perhaps a year or two older, with a broad, striking face and dark eyes that held a glint of amusement. She was wearing a white blouse embroidered with red flowers and a long blue skirt, and her black hair was cut short, almost boyishly so.

"I'm trying to decide whether I'm allowed to like the mezcal," Caroline said.

The woman laughed. "You are allowed to like whatever you want. This is Mexico. We are very permissive about pleasure." She extended her hand. "Consuelo Ibarra."

"Caroline Torrey. Well, Caroline Vining. I mean—" She felt herself flush. "My married name is Torrey. My maiden name is Vining. I never know which one to use."

"Use the one that feels more like you."

Caroline considered this. "Vining," she said, surprising herself.

"Good." Consuelo smiled. "Are you a painter, Caroline Vining?"

"No. My husband is. Leo Torrey—he's over there, the tall one with the dark hair, talking to Rodrigo."

Consuelo glanced in Leo's direction. "Ah. The American who has come to paint our walls. George Purdy told me about him. And what do you do?"

No one had ever asked Caroline this question with such directness. In Boston, the question would have been "What does your husband do?" or, at most, "Do you have any hobbies?"

"I write," Caroline said, and felt a small shock of recognition, as if she had stated a fact she had not previously known.

"What do you write?"

"I'm not sure yet. I keep a journal. I write about what I see."

"That is a beginning." Consuelo took a sip of her drink. "I paint. I also write, a little. And I organize. There is an exhibition next month of women painters—Mexican women. I am one of the organizers. You should come."

"I'm not a painter."

"You don't have to be a painter to look at paintings. You just have to be willing to see."

They talked for an hour. Consuelo was from Guadalajara, the daughter of a schoolteacher and a pharmacist. She had come to Mexico City three years ago to study at the Academia de San Carlos and had never left. She painted portraits, mostly—unflinching, unsentimental portraits of working women, market vendors, laundresses, seamstresses. She was also involved in politics, though she was vague about the specifics.

"The revolution is not over," she said, her voice dropping. "They tell us it is over, that we have a new government, new institutions. But the people who were hungry before are still hungry. The women who had no voice before still have no voice. The revolution must continue, in different forms."

Caroline listened with an intensity that surprised her. She had grown up in a household where politics was discussed at dinner but always at a comfortable remove—her father's opinions delivered with the same measured authority he brought to insurance assessments. She had never heard a woman speak about politics with this kind of urgency, this kind of personal investment.

When Leo finally came to collect her—flushed, exhilarated, already a little drunk—Caroline introduced him to Consuelo.

"My wife has been monopolizing the most interesting woman at the party," Leo said, with the charming smile that Caroline knew was genuine but also, always, a performance.

"Your wife is the most interesting woman at the party," Consuelo said evenly. "She just doesn't know it yet."

Leo laughed, but Caroline saw something flicker in his eyes—a brief, quickly suppressed flash of something that might have been annoyance. She filed it away and did not think about it again for weeks.

They walked home through streets that smelled of night-blooming jasmine and woodsmoke, Leo's arm around her shoulders, both of them slightly unsteady from mezcal and altitude.

"I love this city," Leo said. "I love it already. Emilio Bernal—did you meet him? Thin fellow, looks like a saint in an El Greco painting? He's brilliant. He's going to help me with the mural. He knows the techniques, the pigments, everything. And the politics, Caroline—the politics here are real. Not like at home, where everyone sits around parlors arguing about tariffs. Here they're actually building something."

"I met Consuelo Ibarra," Caroline said.

"The woman with the short hair? She seemed fierce."

"She is fierce. I liked her very much."

"Good. You need a friend here. I'm going to be working all hours."

He kissed her on the balcony, with the city spread out below them like a jeweled carpet, and she kissed him back, and for that moment everything was exactly as she had imagined it would be. She was twenty-three years old, in a city that felt like the beginning of the world, married to a man who was going to make something that mattered. She had a journal full of words that were starting to feel like her own. She had a new friend who told her she was interesting.

She did not yet know that the golden time was already beginning to tarnish. But even if she had known, she would not have traded a single day of it.