The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Look.” Orlando returned balancing three manhattans in the bowl of his joined hands. “The Maximum Actress and the Maximum Narcissus have made contact. I was right. Famous women were invented by innocent men.”

  “No”-Laura Rivière took her glass-“by malicious men who condemned us to theatrics.”

  “Darlings,” interrupted Carmen Cortina, “have I introduced you to Querubina de Landa yet?”

  “No one is named Querubina de Landa,” said Orlando to Carmen, to the air, to the night, to the overextended Señorita Querubina de Landa, who was hanging on the arm of the philosophic playboy. Orlando casually skewered him: “They’re right to call you the Great Chicken Thief.”

  “In the matter of names, my dear but ignorant Orlando, no one has said it better than Plato: There are conventional names, there are intrinsic names, and there are names that harmonize nature with necessity, as, for example, Laura Rivière and Laura Díaz. Good night.” O’Higgins bowed to one and all, patted the backside of the conventional, natural, harmoniously named Querubina de Landa, and said (in English), “Let’s, fuck.”

  “I’ll bet her real name is Petra Pérez,” said the cordial hostess, as she ran off to greet an unusual couple entering the living room of the penthouse overlooking Paseo de la Reforma: a very old man on the arm of a perpetually tremulous lady.

  Laura Díaz’s high heels sounded like hammers pounding on the sidewalk. She smiled, arm in arm with Orlando, and told him that they’d met in a Veracruz hacienda and ended up in a penthouse on Paseo de la Reforma, but with the same rules and aspirations in both places: to be admitted or disapproved by society and its empresses-Doña Genoveva Deschamps in San Cayetano, Carmen Cortina in Mexico City.

  “Can’t we escape? We’ve been together now for eighteen months, my love.”

  “For me, time doesn’t matter if I’m with you,” said the no longer very young and now balding Orlando Ximénez.

  “Why is it you never wear a hat? You’re the only one.”

  “For that very reason. To be the only one who doesn’t.”

  They walked along the tree-lined part of the avenue that cold December night, on the earthen bridle path for early-morning riders.

  “I still don’t know anything about you,” Laura dared to say, squeezing his hand harder.

  “I’m not hiding anything from you. The only things you don’t know are the things you don’t want to know.”

  “Orlando, night after night, like this evening, we hear only clichés, predictable, expected…”

  “Keep going. Desperate.”

  “You know something? I’ve just realized that in this world you’ve introduced me to it doesn’t matter how we end up. Tonight was interesting for me. The people who mattered most to each other were Laura Rivière and Artemio Cruz. Do you see? He walked out, the night ended badly. That was the most important thing that happened tonight.”

  “Let me console you. You’re right. It doesn’t matter how we end up. The good thing will be that we don’t notice everything is over.”

  “Oh, my love, I feel as if I’m falling down a collapsing staircase.”

  Orlando hailed a taxi and gave the driver an address unknown to Laura. The cabby stared at the couple in astonishment: “You really want to go there, boss? Sure of that?”

  In 1932, Mexico City streets emptied early. Punctual evening meals brought the entire family together. And families were tight-knit, as if the prolonged civil war-twenty unbroken years-had taught the clans to live in a state of fear, clinging to one another, waiting for the worst, for unemployment, expropriation, execution, kidnapping, rape, life savings erased in an instant, useless paper money, the arrogant confusion of the rebel factions. One society had disappeared. The new one was not yet clearly defined. City dwellers had one foot in the furrow of the plow and the other in ashes, as Musset said about post-Napoleonic France. The bad thing was that sometimes blood covered both furrow and ashes, erasing the lines between soil that would be sterile forever and seed that, to produce its fruits, had first to die.

  Parties like those of the celebrated, shortsighted Carmen Cortina were a relief for a worldly elite that counted among its protagonists both Seeds and Ashes, those who survived the revolutionary catastrophe, those who lived thanks to it, and those who had died in it but had yet to realize it. Carmen’s parties were an exception, a rarity. Proper families would visit one another early, marry one another even earlier, and use both magnifying glass and strainer when letting in elements of the new revolutionary society… If a savage general from Sonora married a charming young lady from Sinaloa, relatives and family friends from Culiacán, the capital, were there immediately to approve or disapprove. General Obregón’s family had no social pretensions, and the One-armed Hero of Celaya would have been better off staying on his hacienda in Huatabampo and tending turkeys instead of getting entangled in reelection and death. The Calles family, on the other hand, did want to get into high society, cut a figure in it, present its daughters at the Churubusco Country Club and then marry them all-but of course!-in religious weddings (private ceremonies, naturally). The most notable and respected case was General Joaquin Amaro, the very model of the revolutionary warlord, an unequaled horseman (he looked like a centaur), an Indian with his neckerchief and pendant earring, ebony complexion, thick, sensual, and challenging lips and eyes lost in the origin of the tribes, who married a young lady of the best northern society and as a wedding gift promised he would learn French and good manners.

  There was always a goodly supply of playboys, and if there was no money anymore to send them abroad to study, they now went to the San Ildefonso Law School or the Santo Domingo School of Medicine, if they were poor; or if they were affluent, they studied architecture. All these schools were in the old center of the city, in a quarter surrounded by bars, cabarets, and bordellos. The Mexico City of the poor was like an invisible anthill that ran day and night, a Mexico City crowded with men still wearing huge straw hats and huaraches or overalls and shawls: that’s what my husband, Juan Francisco, showed me when he took me to see the barrios and convinced me the problems were so gigantic that it was better I stay home and look after my sons.

  “Your husband didn’t show you anything,” said Orlando Ximénez with unexpected ferocity, grabbing Laura’s wrist and making her get out in the middle of a partly built-up lot-that was the brutal shock, the paradox: here were streets, here were houses, yet this was a wasteland within the city, a ruin built of dust, conceived as a ruin, a pyramid of sand on whose flanks, invisible at first sight, began to appear incomplete silhouettes, forms difficult to name, a half-made world, and Laura and Orlando made their way through this gray urban mystery, Orlando leading Laura by the hand like Virgil with Beatrice-not Dante; another Laura, not Petrarch’s; making her look, look, now you can see them, they’re coming out of holes, emerging from the garbage, tell me, Laura, what could you do for that woman over there called the Frog, who hops because her torso is crushed against her thighs, look at her, forced to hop like a frog in search of edible garbage, what could you do for that man over there who drags himself along the street with no nose, no arms, no legs, like a human snake? and look at them now because it’s night, because they only come out when there’s no light, because they fear the sun, because during the day they live locked in fear, so as not to be seen, what are they, Laura? take a good look: are they dwarfs, children? they’re children, but they won’t grow any more, they’re dead children with rigor mortis, on their feet but half buried in the dust, tell me, Laura, did your husband show you this, or did he only show you the pretty side of poverty, the workers with their cheap shirts, the whores with their powder, the organ grinders and locksmiths, the tamale sellers and the saddlers? is that his working class? Do you want to rebel against your husband? hate him because he didn’t give you a chance to do something for others, treated you with contempt? well then, I’ll give you the chance, take you by the shoulders, Laura, and make you open your eyes, what, what can you do aga
inst all this? why don’t you and I spend our evenings here, with the Frog and the Snake and the children who won’t grow and who fear the sun, instead of with Carmen Cortina and Querubina de Landa and Fatso del Valle and the actress who dyes her pubic hair white, why not?

  Laura held on tight to Orlando and released a flood of tears she’d been holding in, she said, since the day she was born, since she’d lost the first person she’d loved and asked herself, why do the people I love die, why were they born…?

  “What can one do? There are thousands, millions of them, perhaps Juan Francisco is right. Where would you begin? What can you do for all these people?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Choose the very poorest. Just one, Laura. Choose one and you’ll save them all.”

  Laura D az watching the calcified plateau pass by from the window of the Pullman car as she goes home, goes to the state of Veracruz, far from the pyramid of sand out of which-like caterpillars, cockroaches, crabs, along invisible rough paths sprouting in the night from holes like chancres-the frog women, snake men, and rachitic children made their way.

  Until that night, she hadn’t really believed in misery. We live protected lives, we’re conditioned to see only what we want to see. That’s what Laura said to Orlando. Now, on her way to Xalapa, she herself felt the anguished need for someone who would take pity on her: she was experiencing an urgent longing for pity, knowing that what she was asking for herself, her portion of compassion, was what was expected of her in the house on Bocanegra Street, a touch of compassion, a bit of attention for everyone forgotten-mother, aunts, two sons-all in order not to tell them the truth, to keep up the original fiction, it was better that Danton and Santiago grow up well looked after, in a provincial city, while Laura and Juan Francisco sorted out their lives, their careers, in a difficult Mexico City, in a most difficult country emerging from the furrows, the ashes, the blood of the Revolution… Only Auntie María de la O knew the truth, but above all she knew that discretion is the truth that hurts no one.

  The four women were sitting in the old armchairs with wicker backs that the family had dragged with them all the way from the port of Veracruz. Zampaya opened the coach gate for her, and he was Laura’s first shock: the jolly dancing man had white hair, and his broom was no longer for him to dance with, “putting your arm around your partner’s waist if she lets you,” but now a cane on which the old family retainer rested his mutilated greeting, his “Miss Laura!” instantly hushed when Laura put her finger over her lips while the black man carried Miss’s valise and she let him do it to keep his self-respect, even though he could barely move it.

  Laura wanted to see them first from the living-room door without their seeing her, the four sisters sitting in silence behind the worn-out curtains: Aunt Hilda nervously moving her arthritic fingers as if playing a muted piano; Aunt Virginia silently muttering a poem she was too weak to consign to paper; Auntie María de la O self-absorbed, staring at her fat ankles; and only Mutti working, Leticia. knitting a thick house coat that extended over her knees, protecting her, as she knitted, from Xalapa’s December chill, when the fogs of Perote Peak combine with those of the dams, the fountains, the brooks that join together in the fertile subtropical zone between the mountains and the coast.

  When she looked up to examine her work, Leticia saw Laura’s eyes and exclaimed, Daughter, my daughter, as she painfully rose while Laura ran to hug her: Don’t move, Mutti, don’t wear yourself out, no one get up, please, and, if she had stood up, would Aunt Hilda have suffocated herself with the ribbon embedded in her double chin that narrowed her myopic eyes even more behind the glasses thick as fishbowls? Would Aunt Virginia have split open? Her face plastered with rice powder was no longer a powdered wrinkle but a wrinkled powder. Would Auntie María de la O have collapsed on the tile floor, recently mopped, her swollen ankles no longer supporting her?

  But Leticia did stand up, straight as an arrow, parallel to the walls of the house, her house, hers, her posture telling Laura of her attitude, the house is mine, I keep it clean, tidy, active, modest but sufficient. Nothing is needed here.

  “We need you, daughter. Your sons need you.”

  Laura embraced her, kissed her, remained silent. She wasn’t going to remind her that they, mother and daughter, had lived for twelve years in Catemaco, separated from her father, Fernando, and her brother, Santiago, and that reasons given in the past could be invoked in the present. Even so, yesterday’s present was not today’s past. Carmen Cortina’s parties swiftly passed through Laura’s mind, at full speed, like the stray dogs near the railroad station; perhaps the dogs secretly admired the speed of the locomotives; perhaps Carmen Cortina’s guests were just another pack of homeless animals.

  “The boys are at school. They’ll be home soon.”

  “How are their studies going?”

  “They’re with the Misses Ramos, of course.”

  Laura was going to exclaim, My God, the ladies haven’t died yet!, but that would have been another blunder, a faux pas as Carmen Cortina would say, Carmen whose world seemed to be disappearing into the most distant and invisible unreality. Laura smiled within. That had been her world, during the year and a half of her love affair with Orlando Ximénez, the daily or rather nightly world of Laura and Orlando together.

  Laura and Orlando. How different that couple sounded here in the Xalapa house, in Veracruz, in the resuscitated memory of Santiago the first. She was surprised to find herself thinking in such terms, for her brother had been shot when he was only twenty, but the new Santiago coming into the living room with his backpack was a little gentleman of eleven, as serious as a portrait and direct in his first announcement:

  “Danton was kept after school. He has to copy twenty pages without a single ink blot.”

  The Misses Ramos would always be the same, but Santiago hadn’t seen his mother in four years, though he immediately understood who she was. He did not run over to embrace her. He let her come to him, kneel down and kiss him. The child’s face never changed. With a look, Laura asked for help from the four women.

  “That’s the way Santiago is,” said Mutti Leticia. “I’ve never met so serious a child.”

  He kissed Laura’s hand: who taught him that, the Misses Ramos, or was it innate courtesy, his distance? Then he scampered out. Laura rejoiced at that childish act; her son skipped in and skipped out, even though he spoke like a judge.

  Dinner was slow and painful. Danton sent word with a maid that he was going to sleep at a friend’s house, and Laura did not want to play the part of the active and emancipated woman from the capital or upset the ambulatory siesta that was her aunts’ waking hours; nor did she want to offend her mother’s admirable and nervous activity, because it was Leticia who cooked, ran about, and served while Zampaya sang his songs in the patio. In the absence of conversation, a peculiar smell, a boardinghouse smell, was taking over everywhere; it was the dead smell of many solitary nights, many hasty visits, many corners where, despite Mutti’s efforts and Zampaya’s broom, dust, time, and oblivion were piling up.

  Because there were no guests at the moment-although one or two a week always turned up, which, along with the help Laura sent for the boys, allowed the house to be maintained modestly-the daughter listened to her mother with growing unease, longing to be alone with her, with her mother Leticia, but also with each of the women in this house without men-to shake them out of the apathy of their eternal siesta. But thinking that was not only an offense for them, but hypocrisy on Laura’s part, who, after all, had lived on Elizabeth’s charity for two years, dividing the monthly allowance sent by Juan Francisco, deputy of the Regional Workers Confederation of Mexico, among payments to Elizabeth, her personal expenses, and a little for her sons given refuge in Xalapa-while Laura slept until noon after staying up until three in the morning, never hearing Orlando when he rose earlier to attend to his mysterious affairs. Laura had fooled herself by reading in bed, telling herself that she wasn’t wasting time, that she wa
s educating herself, reading what she should have read as an adolescent: after discovering Carlos Pellicer, reading Pablo Neruda, Federico Garc a Lorca, and going back to read Quevedo, Garcilaso de la Vega… with Orlando she would go to the Palace of Fine Arts to listen to Carlos Chávez conducting music that was all new for her, because in her memory there only floated like some perfume the Chopin Aunt Hilda played in Catemaco, and now Bach, Beethoven, and Berlioz along with Ponce, Revueltas, and Villalobos combined into a vast musical Mass; no, she hadn’t wasted her time at Carmen Cortina’s parties, in reading books or listening to concerts; she had simultaneously allowed her most interior and deep personal thoughts to flow, with the purpose-she said to herself-of locating herself in the world, understanding the changes in her life, proposing solid goals to herself, more certain than the easy exit-as it seemed to her now, stretched out once again on her adolescent bed, again hugging Li Po-of married life with Juan Francisco or even the very pleasant bohemian life with Orlando, something more for her sons Santiago and Danton, a more mature mother, more self-assured…

  Now she was back at home, and this was the best thing she could have done, return to her roots and quietly sit down to a frothy soda in Don Antonio C. Báez’s La Jalapeña, where a sign assured Don Antonio’s customers: “This establishment does not use saccharine to sweeten its waters.” She could peruse the displays in the Ollivier Brothers shop where La Opera corsets were still for sale. Browsing in Don Raúl Basáñez’s bookshop La Moderna, she could leaf through the European illustrated magazines her father, Fernando D az, awaited with such high expectation on the docks of Veracruz. She sauntered into Wagner and Lieven, opposite Juárez Park, to buy her Aunt Hilda, music by a composer she perhaps did not know, Maurice Ravel, whose works Orlando and Laura had heard conducted by Carlos Chávez in the Palace of Fine Arts.