The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Do you think Don Porfirio will fall?”

  “Are you serious? This shows that Porfirio Díaz has the same energy he always had, even if he’s seventy-five.”

  “Boss, we’re going to have to cut down the chalacahuites.”

  “It’s a pity we have to cut down trees that shade the coffee.”

  “That’s when coffee prices are high. Right now, prices are very low. We’re better off cutting down the trees and selling them as lumber.”

  “It’s God’s will. They’ll grow again.”

  3.

  Veracruz: 1910

  HE WOULD ARRIVE LATE. He would arrive early. Always, either too late or too early. He would turn up unexpectedly for dinner. Other times, he wouldn’t turn up at all.

  As soon as her husband, Fernando Díaz, had her brought to Veracruz, Leticia established-as if they were the most natural things in the world, not feeling she was imposing them on anyone-the same schedules and the same order she’d had in her previous life on the Catemaco coffee plantation. It didn’t matter how boisterous and disorderly the port was: the sun still rose at the same time whether she was next to the lake or the sea. Breakfast at six, midday meal at one, light supper at seven, or dinner, in special cases, at nine.

  Veracruz gave Leticia Kelsen its many kinds of shellfish and fish, and Laura’s mother would combine them in marvelous ways: octopus in its ink with white rice, fried plantain with beans, refried of course; white snapper from the Gulf swimming in onion, peppers, and olives; meat shredded with cilantro or congealed in dark sauces called “tablecloth stainers”; monastic desserts and worldly coffees-slowing you down, knowing all about heat and insomnia, friend to both siestas and moons.

  Coffee could be had at any hour of the day in the celebrated Café de la Parroquia, where a wasp’s nest of waiters with white aprons and bow ties ran through the buzz of customers carrying rolls and huevos rancheros, like underpaid magicians in a carnival where performances went on around the clock, poured coffee and hot milk into glasses with astonishing simultaneity from acrobatic heights. The great silver coffeemaker, imported from Germany, presided over all this, occupying the center-rear of the café like a silver queen decorated with faucets, spigots, foam, steam, and factory seals. Lebrecht und Justus Krüger, Lübeck, 1887.

  Also from Europe came illustrated magazines and the novels for which Laura’s father, Fernando Díaz, would impatiently wait every month, when the packet boats from Southampton and Le Havre dropped anchor in Veracruz for the sole purpose, or so it seemed, of satisfying his needs. There he’d be, the accountant waiting with his boater firmly in place to protect him from a sun heavy as a wet sheet. With the suit that had made people stop and stare in Catemaco when Fernando courted and won Leticia. With his walking stick with its ivory handle in one hand. His other hand in that of Laura, his twelve-year-old daughter.

  “The magazines, Papa, first the magazines.”

  “No. First the books for your brother. Tell him they’re here.”

  “It’s better if I bring them to his room.”

  “As you please.”

  “Is it proper for a twelve-year-old girl to go into the bedroom of a boy who’s almost twenty?” asked Leticia as soon as Laura, still skipping like a child, left the room.

  “It’s more important they love and trust each other,” her husband, Fernando Díaz, would answer calmly.

  Leticia would shrug her shoulders and blush, remembering the moral lessons of the cynical, fugitive priest Elzevir Almonte. But she quickly glanced around the living room of her new house proudly. It was on the upper floor above the Bank of the Republic, of which her husband, for just a month now, was the president.

  He had kept his word. Through hard work, just as he’d promised, he had risen from teller to accountant to president, by sacrificing, as he said to Leticia, twelve years of conjugal life, of being close to Laura, and of domestic order, since his home, if he dared call it that, had consisted of men living alone. Fernando and his son Santiago, fruit of his first marriage to the deceased Elisa Obregó n-no matter how diligent the servants might be-would leave their cigars burning here or extinguished there, a book open on a bed, their socks lost under the same bed, and, finally, the bed itself unmade for all too long.

  Now Santiago could stretch out again on his bed, but now in a comfortable, almost sumptuous new home. His long nightshirt with its ruffled front looked like a nest of doves. He brought his legs together when his half sister Laura walked in carrying the books, holding them from below, her hands linked like an unstable swing, the pile forming an abbreviated Tower of Pisa that Santiago quickly caught before Anatole France and Paul Bourget spilled their words on the floor.

  As soon as Santiago and Laura met, they “sympathized” with each other, as the expression of the times put it, and though of course their meeting was inevitable, both Leticia and Fernando had, each for different reasons, fears that at first they refrained from communicating to each other. The mother feared that a girl at the threshold of adolescence would suffer improper influences, even contacts, from the nearness of a young man almost eight years older than she. Her brother, yes of course, but in any case a stranger, a novelty in her life. Wasn’t there novelty enough in having moved, as they always knew they would even if they’d postponed it so often, away from rural life and Don Felipe Kelsen’s patriarchy, from the mutilated grandmother and the three busy aunts, to a new life, to being separated from her mother, who stopped sleeping in the same bedroom with her to move to the bed of the father, who until then had slept alone, abandoning the child, who could not sleep with her half brother (as was her first, naive desire)? Can bars be put up to keep out waves on the lake?

  “We women mature rapidly in the tropics, Fernando. I married you when I was barely sixteen.”

  She didn’t tell the whole truth. In the faces of my sisters and my half sister, I saw a solitary life, the three of them fated to be spinsters because they wanted other things-Virginia, to write; Hilda, to be a concert pianist-and knew they’d never have any of them yet would never, never give them up, and their silent, painful devotion would mean they’d write poems and play the piano surrounded by invisible readers and listeners except for the two people for whom “their sonnets and sonatas were a reproach”: their parents, Felipe and Cosima. María de la O, on the other hand, would never marry, out of simple gratitude. Cosima had saved her from a miserable fate. María de la O would be eternally faithful to the family who took her in. Leticia-a child who quickly learned the rules of an advantageous silence in a home that divided unequally the fortune of Don Felipe and the misfortunes of Cosima and the other daughters-decided she’d get married as soon as possible and almost without conditions so as to escape the fate of the dissipated, erased, gray, and shapeless dreams of the other daughters, dreams that transformed the three Catemaco women into pantomime actresses performing in the fog. She married Fernando and saved herself from spinsterhood. She had a daughter and saved herself from being childless. She remained among her own and saved herself-this was her excuse-from ingratitude. Her husband, Fernando, understood her. He needed time to establish a career so that he could give Leticia and Laura a good life at the same time that he gave his son Santiago the attention a motherless boy required; so to both Fernando and Leticia their bizarre agreement seemed not only reasonable but bearable.

  What consolidated it was the need Felipe Kelsen came to have for his son-in-law in those years-when President Porfirio Díaz grew older, the strikes were bloodily repressed, revolutionary uprisings erupted in the north of the country, anarcho-syndicalist activity started up right there in Veracruz, Don Porfirio made politically ill-timed statements to the North American reporter James Creelman (“Mexico is ripe for democracy”), and Madero and the Flores Magón brothers mounted their anti-reelection campaign: all this spread disquiet in the markets, Veracruz lost ground in its competition with the Cuban sugar industry, which had been restored after the cruel war between Spain and the United States, and no
t even the traditional appeal of the German business community there to the German Mining Company had any effect. War in Europe was possible. The Balkans were catching fire. France and England had concluded the Entente Cordiale, and Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary had signed the Triple Alliance: the only thing left to do was to dig trenches and wait for the spark that would set Europe ablaze. Capital was being set aside to finance the war and raise commodity prices, not to extend credit to German-Mexican plantations.

  “I have two hundred thousand coffee trees producing fifteen hundred hundredweights of beans,” added Don Felipe. “What I need is credit, what I need is money.”

  Not to worry, his son-in-law Fernando Díaz told him. By now he was president of the Bank of the Republic in Veracruz, and he would see to it that credit was granted to Don Fernando and the beautiful plantation “Las Peregrina”-the name a reminder of the lovely German bride Doña Cosima. The bank would make up the amount by handing over the crop to the commercial houses in the port, taking a commission and crediting the rest back to the Kelsen plantation. And Leticia, together with her child Laura, could finally come to live with the paterfamilias Don Fernando Díaz and his son Santiago, all gathered together under the roof of the presidency of the Bank of the Republic in Veracruz.

  How different it was for Laura to live in a house surrounded by streets instead of fields, to see people she didn’t know pass under the balconies all day, to live on the second floor and have the business downstairs, to lick the railing on the balcony because it tasted of salt, and to stare at the Veracruz sea-slow, leaden, heavy, shining after the storm that had just passed and while it was getting ready for the next one, giving off hot vapors instead of the coolness of the lake… and the forest presided over by the statue of the jewel-covered giant woman, which she saw, which she did not dream, which was no ceiba: Grandfather Felipe must have thought she was such a fool.

  “Thick walls, the sound of running water, moving air, and lots of hot coffee: that’s the best defense against the heat,” declared Leticia, more and more self-confident now that she was mistress of her own home, free finally of paternal tutelage and rediscovering in her bus band what had delighted her when they were courting, that time they met at the Candlemas festivals in Tlacotalpan.

  He was a tender man. Efficient and conscientious in his work. Determined to better himself. He read English and French, although he was more Anglophile than Francophile. But he knew that a strange void kept him from understanding the mysteries of life, secrets that are an essential part of each personality, without prejudging others to be good or evil. He read many novels to make up for the defect. Ultimately, however, for Fernando things were as they were-steady work, doing more than was expected, moderation in pleasure, and personalities (his own or others’) a mystery to be respected.

  For this man, now fully formed at the age of forty-five, to inquire into the souls of others was to gossip, was the prying of old busybodies. Leticia always loved him because, at the age of twenty-eight (even if she’d married when she was sixteen, she shared these virtues and, like him, was helpless when confronted by the mystery of others. Although the only time she used that formulation-“others”-Fernando dropped the Thomas Hardy novel he was reading and said, Never say “others,” because it sounds as if they were superfluous, mere extras. “I suggest you always give people names.”

  “Even if I don’t know them?”

  “Make up names. Features or clothes will always tell you who a person is.”

  “Mr. Cross-eyed, Mr. Ugly, Mr. Street Sweeper?” laughed Leticia, her husband joining her in the silent happiness peculiar to him.

  The Hunk. From the time she was a child, Laura had heard that nickname applied to the former army officer who cut off Grandmama Cosima’s fingers, and now she wanted to confide that story (I mean tell it in secret, she thought) to her handsome half brother, dressed at twelve noon, all in white, with a high, starched collar and silk tie, linen jacket and trousers, and high black boots which laced up in a complicated way with hooks and eyelets. His features, more than regular, were of an attractive symmetry that reminded Laura of the araucaria leaves in the tropical forest. In him, everything was exactly the same on both sides, and if he had a shadow when he got out of bed, the shadow would accompany him like an identical twin, never absent, never bent over, always next to Santiago.

  As if to give the lie to the perfection of a face that was exactly symmetrical, he wore fragile eyeglasses with scarcely visible silver frames. They deepened his gaze whenever he used them, but that didn’t make his eyes wander when he took them off. Which is why he could play with them-hide them for a moment in his jacket pocket, use them like banderillas the next, toss them into the air and casually catch them before putting them back in his pocket. Laura Díaz had never seen such a being.

  “I’ve finished college. My father has given me a sabbatical.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A year of freedom to decide seriously about my vocation. I’m reading. As you can see.”

  “Well, I really don’t see much of you, Santiago. You’re always out of sight.”

  The boy laughed, hooked his walking stick on his forearm, and tousled the hair of his little sister, furious now at his condescension.

  “I’m already twelve. Almost.”

  “If I were only fifteen, I’d carry you off,” laughed Santiago.

  Don Fernando, from the window of his office, saw his slim, elegant son pass by, and now he feared his wife would reproach him, not so much for the twelve years of separation and waiting, not so much for the shared life of father and son that had excluded mother and daughter… they, after all, had been happy to be with each other, and the separation had been agreed upon and understood as a bond of permanent, sure values that would give the family stability, when the time came, in their shared life. Indeed, Don Fernando was certain that the test to which they had subjected themselves not only was exceptional in the era they were living in, with its endless engagements, but would give a kind of retrospective halo (let’s call it, instead of test, sacrifice, anticipation, wager, or merely postponed happiness) to their marriage.

  The fear was now of something else. Santiago himself.

  His son was proof that all the nurturing will of a father cannot force a son to conform to the paternal mold. Fernando wondered, If I’d given him complete freedom, would he have conformed more? Did I make him different by proposing my own values to him?

  The answer remained on the edge of that mystery Fernando Díaz had no idea how to pierce: the personality of others. Who was his son: what did he want, what was he doing, what was he thinking? The father had no answers. When, at the end of secondary school, Santiago asked him for a year before deciding on going on to a university, Fernando was happy to grant it to him. Everything seemed to coincide in the ordered mind of the accountant and bank president: the graduation of the son and the arrival of his second wife along with his second child, and now Santiago’s absence on “sabbatical” (Fernando told himself, somewhat shamefaced), would let the new home life take shape without problems.

  “Where are you going to spend your sabbatical?”

  “Right here in Veracruz, Papa. Quite clever, don’t you think? It’s something I know little about-this port, my own city. What do you think?”

  He’d been so studious, such a reader, such a fine writer throughout his adolescence. He’d published in magazines for young people: poetry, art criticism, and literary criticism. The poet Salvador Díaz Mirón, his teacher, praised him as a young man of promise. Who assured me, Fernando Díaz asked himself, that all this augured continuity? Peace, perhaps, but continuity in the end? Did it assure rebellion instead of conformity, the fatal exception? Fernando had imagined that his son, after finishing at the Preparatoria, when he asked for the year off would spend it traveling-his father had set aside the necessary money-and would return, having purged his young man’s curiosity, to take up his literary career again, his university studies, and th
en start a family. As in the English novels, he would have done his Grand Tour.

  “I’m staying here, Papa, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all, my boy. This is your house. Don’t be silly.”

  He had nothing to fear. Fernando Díaz’s private life was of an exemplary spotlessness. Concerning his past, it was well known that his first wife, Elisa Obregón, a descendant of immigrants from the Canary Islands, died giving birth to Santiago; that for the first seven years of the boy’s life, the now recently graduated poet lived under the protection-and thanks to the charity, almost-of a Jesuit priest from the city of Orizaba; that when Don Fernando remarried, he kept his new family far away in Catemaco but brought Santiago to live with him in Veracruz.

  Asked to explain himself in one or another Veracruz gathering, this honorable if not very imaginative man of numbers said that sometimes it was necessary to defer satisfaction while doing one’s duty, which, ultimately, redoubled satisfaction.

  These arguments, which seemed to convince people, merely provoked the scorn of Salvador Díaz Mirón: “I never would have suspected it, Don Fernando, but you are more baroque than the poet Góngora himself.”

  But just as Don Fernando could not penetrate the mysteries of others, no one penetrated his-perhaps because they didn’t exist. Except for the perfect bride, his second wife, Leticia, who simply was equal to him. Yet the initial arrangement between the two of them was indeed baroque. For eleven years, Leticia, accompanied by her half sister, María de la O, would visit Fernando in Veracruz once a month, and he would take a room at the Hotel Diligencias so they could be alone while María de la O would discreetly disappear. (Only the grandmother, without fingers, Doña Cosima Kelsen, suspected where she went.) Every three months, in turn, Fernando would return to Catemaco, greet the German grandfather, and play with little Laura.