The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  “It is a sin to forget, a sin,” she repeated to herself over and over, telling Lourdes, don’t be afraid, but the young widow did feel fear, every time there was a knock at the door, she wondered, could it be he, a ghost, a murderer, a mouse, a cockroach?

  “Laura, if you had the chance to put someone in a cage like a scorpion and leave him hanging there without bread or water-”

  “Don’t think such thoughts, daughter. He doesn’t deserve it.”

  “What do you think about, then, Laura, aside from him?”

  “I think there are those who suffer and because of their suffering they cannot be replaced.”

  “But who takes on the pain of the rest, who is exempt from that obligation?”

  “No one, daughter, no one.”

  The city had been turned over to death.

  The city was an encampment of barbarians.

  Someone was knocking at the door.

  24.

  Zona Rosa: 1970

  1.

  LAURA, WHO HAD SEEN EVERYTHING with her camera, stopped one August day opposite the mirror in her bathroom and asked herself, How do people see me?

  She kept, perhaps, that memory of a memory which is our past face, not the simple accumulation of years on our skin, not even the layers of years, but a kind of transparency: this is how I am, as I see myself right now, how I always was. The moment can change but it’s always just one moment, even if in my head I keep everything that belongs in my head; I always sensed, but now I know, that what belongs to the mind never leaves it, never says goodbye; everything dies except what lives forever in my mind.

  I’m the girl from Catemaco, the San Cayetano debutante, the young wife in Mexico City, the loving mother and unfaithful wife, Harry Jaffe’s tenacious companion, refuge for my grandson Santiago, but most of all I am Jorge Maura’s lover; among all the faces in my existence, his is the one I keep in my imagination as the face of my faces, the face that contains all faces, the image of my happy passion, the face that supports the masks of my life, the final bones of my features, the one that will remain when the flesh has been devoured by death…

  But the mirror did not reflect the face of Laura Díaz during the 1930s, which she, knowing it had been transitory, imagined was eternal. She read a lot about the ancient history and anthropology of Mexico the better to understand the present she was photographing. Ancient Mexicans had the right to choose a death mask, to put on an ideal face for the journey to Mictlan, that other world of the Indians, both inferno and paradise. If she were an Indian, Laura would choose the mask of her days of love with Jorge and superimpose it on all the others, those of her childhood, her adolescence, her maturity, and her old age. Only the mask of her son Santiago’s death agony could compete with that of Jorge Maura’s amorous passion, which yielded the desire of happiness. This was her mental photograph of herself. That’s what she wanted to see in the mirror on that August morning in 1970. But that morning the mirror was more faithful to the woman than the woman herself.

  She’d taken great care with her appearance. Very early in life, observing Elizabeth García-Dupont’s ridiculous changes in hairstyle, she decided she’d choose a hairstyle for good and never give it up. Orlando’s circle confirmed this: you change your hair, and right away you feel pleased and renovated, but then people notice that your face has changed, look at those crow’s-feet, look at those creases in her forehead, my my my, she’s made the leap into old age, she’s worn out. So Laura Díaz-after toying with the idea of keeping the bangs she’d worn as a girl to cover her forehead that was too high and too wide and to shorten a face that was too long-decided, after meeting Jorge Maura, to reject the hairstyles à la garçon of Mexico’s Clara Bows, or the platinum-blond ones of the silky Jean Harlow, or the undulating marcelled tresses of the local Irene Dunnes; she pulled her hair back, revealing her clear forehead and her “Italian” nose, as Orlando called it, prominent and aristocratic, fine and nervous, as if it never stopped inquiring about things. And she rejected the bee-stung lips of Mae Murray, Erich von Stroheim’s merry widow, and Joan Crawford’s immensely wide mouth, painted like a fearsome entryway into the hell of sex, and kept to her thin lips, with no lipstick, which accentuated the sculptured Gothic look of Laura Díaz’s head, she was descended after all from people of the Rhine and the Canary Islands, from Murcia and Santander. She bet everything on the beauty of her eyes, which were of a chestnut, almost golden color, greenish in the evening, silvery during the open-eyed orgasm Jorge Maura asked of her, I come when I see your eyes, my love, let me see your open eyes when I come, your eyes excite me, and it was true, sexes aren’t beautiful, they’re even grotesque, Laura Díaz says to her mirror this morning in August 1970, what excites us are eyes, skin, the reflection of the sex in the hot eyes and sweet skin that draws us closer to the inevitable thicket of sex, the lair of the great spider that is pleasure and death.

  She no longer looked at her body while bathing. It no longer concerned her. And Frida Kahlo, of course. Frida helped her friend Laura give thanks for her old but intact body. Before Jorge Maura, there was Frida Kahlo, the best example of an invariable style, imposed once and for all, impossible to imitate, imperial and unique. That was not the style of her friend and occasional secretary Laura Díaz, who once had followed the changes in fashion-even now she went through yesterday’s outfits in the closet-the short flapper dresses of the 1920s, the long satin whiteness of the 1930s, the tailored suits of the 1940s, Christian Dior’s “New Look,” when full skirts made a comeback after the scarcity of textiles during the war years. But after her trip to Lanzarote, Laura too adopted a comfortable uniform, as it were, a kind of tunic, with no buttons, zippers, or belt, nothing to hamper her, a long monastic shift she could put on or take off without fuss and which turned out to be ideal, first in the tropical valley of Morelos and then-so she could fly, as if the simple cotton cloth gave her wings-on all the stairways in that Rome of the Americas, Mexico City, city of four, five, seven levels superimposed on each other, as high as the sleeping volcanoes, as deep as the reflection in a smoking mirror.

  But that August day in 1970, while it rained outside and the fat drops beat against the opaque glass of the bathroom, the mirror refleeted back to me, merciless, true, cruel, without dissimulation, no longer the preferred face of my thirties but my face of today, that of my seventy-two years, my high forehead furrowed, my dark-honey eyes lost between the bags beneath them and the lids like used curtains, my nose grown beyond anything she remembered, lips with no lipstick, cracked, all the corners of her mouth and planes of her cheeks worn like tissue paper used too many times to wrap too many useless gifts, and the revelation that nothing can disguise, the neck that proclaims her age.

  “Damned turkey wattle!” Laura decided to laugh into the mirror and go on loving herself, loving her body and combing her graying hair.

  Then she joined her hands over her breasts and felt them frozen. She saw the reflection of her hands, pecked by time, and remembered her young woman’s body, so desired, so well exhibited or hidden according to the decision of that great prompter of vanity which is pleasure, beauty, and seduction.

  She went on loving herself.

  “Rembrandt painted himself at every stage, from adolescence to old age,” said Orlando Ximénez when he invited her, for the umpteenth time, to the Scotch Bar at the Hotel Presidente in the Zona Rosa, and she, “for old times’ sake,” as Orlando himself insisted, agreed just once to see him for a bit at six o’clock, when the bar was empty. “There is no pictorial document more moving than that of a great artist who can see himself without any idealism as he was all through his life, culminating in a self-portrait in old age that has in the eyes all the earlier stages, all of them without exception, as if only old age can reveal not just the totality of a life but each one of the multiple lives we have lived.”

  “You’re still nothing but an aesthete.” Laura laughed.

  “No, listen to me. Rembrandt’s eyes are almost closed under his
old eyelids. His eyes are tearing, not out of emotion but because age liquefies them. Look at my eyes, Laura, I have to wipe them all the time! I look as if I have a perpetual cold!” Orlando laughed in turn, as he picked up his scotch and soda with a tremulous hand.

  “You look very well, very snappy,” offered Laura in genuine admiration of the dry trimness of her old beau, stiff and dressed with outmoded elegance, as if one could still buy clothes in the Duke of Windsor style-glen plaid jackets, ties with wide knots, wide cuffed trousers, Church shoes with thick soles.

  Orlando had turned into a well-dressed broom crowned with a bare skull; a fringe of thin gray hair, well oiled at the temples, was scrupulously combed to the nape of his neck.

  “No, let me tell you, the prodigious thing about that last portrait of the old Rembrandt is that the artist doesn’t blink at the sight of the ravages of time, but lets us remember not only all his earlier years but our own, so we keep the most profound image those little eyes possess. He was resigned-but astute.”

  “What image?”

  “The image of eternal youth, Laura, because it’s the image of the artistic power that created all his work, that of his youth, his maturity, and his old age. That’s the true image Rembrandt’s last self-portrait gives us: I’m eternally young because I’m eternally creative.”

  “How little everything costs you.” Laura laughed again, this time defensively. “Being frivolous, cruel, charming, innocent, perverse. And sometimes even intelligent.”

  “Laura, I’m a firefly, I light up and go dark without wanting to.” Orlando returned her laugh. “It’s my nature. You don’t approve?”

  “I know you’re like that,” Laura answered quickly.

  “Do you remember the first time I asked you, Does your body approve of me, do I get an A?”

  “I’m astonished by your question.”

  “Why?”

  “You talk about the past as if it could be repeated. You talk about the past so that you can proposition me now, in the present.” Laura stretched out her hand and patted Orlando’s; she noted that his old gold ring with the engraved OX was now too big on his thin finger.

  “For me,” said the eternal suitor, “you and I are always on the terrace of the San Cayetano hacienda in 1915…”

  Laura drank her favorite dry martini more quickly than she should have. “No, we’re in a bar in the Zona Rosa in 1970, and it seems ridiculous for you to evoke-what shall I call it?-the romantic lyricism of our first meeting, my poor Orlando.”

  “Don’t you understand?” The old man furrowed his brow. “I didn’t want our relationship to cool off out of habit.”

  “My poor Orlando, age cools everything off.”

  Orlando peered into the bottom of his glass of whiskey. “I didn’t want poetry to turn into prose.”

  Laura fell silent for a few moments. She wanted to tell the truth without hurting her old friend. She didn’t want to take advantage of her age to judge others from an unjust height. That was a temptation of age, to make judgments with impunity. But Orlando spoke first.

  “Laura, would you like to be my wife?”

  Rather than answer, Laura told herself three truths in a row, repeated them several times: absence simplifies things, prolongation corrupts them, profundity kills them. With Orlando, the temptation was to simplify: just to leave. But Laura felt that to walk out on a man and a situation that were already close to absurd was a kind of betrayal, which she wanted to avoid at all costs, I’m not betraying myself or my past if I don’t run off, I’m not simplifying, not laughing, if I prolong this instant even if it ends in disaster, and deepen it even if it ends in death.

  “Orlando.” Laura leaned closer. “We met in San Cayetano. We became lovers in Mexico City. You abandoned me, leaving a note in which you said that you weren’t what you said you were or what you seemed to be. You’re getting too close to my mystery. You reproached me.”

  “Not reproached, warned.”

  “You threw it in my face, Orlando. I’d rather keep my secret, you wrote me then. And without mystery, you added, our love would be uninteresting.”

  “I also said, I’ll always love you.”

  “Orlando, Orlando, my poor Orlando. Now you’re telling me the time has come for us to unite. Does this mean there’s no more mystery?”

  She caressed his cold, emaciated hand with genuine tenderness.

  “Orlando, be faithful to yourself to the end. Be Orlando Ximénez, leave everything in the air, everything open, everything unfinished. That’s your nature, don’t you realize? Actually, that’s what I most admire in you, my poor Orlando.”

  Orlando’s glass of whiskey turned into a crystal ball for a while. The old man wanted to see into the future.

  “I should have asked you to marry me, Laura.”

  “When?” She felt she was wearing out.

  “Do you mean I’m the victim of my own perversity? Have I lost you forever?”

  He had no idea that “forever” had happened half a century before, at the ball in the tropical hacienda, he didn’t realize that then and there, when they met, Orlando had said “never” to Laura Díaz when he meant “forever,” confusing postponement with what he’d just said: I didn’t want our relationship to cool off out of habit, I didn’t want you to get too close to my mystery.

  Laura shivered with cold. Orlando was proposing a marriage for death. An acceptance that now there were no more games to be played, no more ironies to show off, no more paradoxes to explore. Did Orlando realize that when he talked like that he was negating his own life, the mysterious and unfinished vocation of his entire existence?

  “Do you know”-Laura Díaz smiled-“I remember our entire relationship as a fiction? Do you want to write a happy ending for it now?”

  “No,” muttered Orlando. “I don’t want it to end. I want to start over.” He raised the glass to his mouth until she couldn’t see his eyes. “I don’t want to die alone.”

  “Careful. You don’t want to die without knowing what might have been.”

  “That’s right. What might have been.”

  Laura found it very hard to get the register of her voice right. Did she hammer at him, pronounce, summarize, or start over? Whatever she chose she did it with all the tenderness she could muster. “What might have been already was, Orlando. Everything happened exactly as it should have happened.”

  “Should we resign ourselves, then?”

  “No, maybe not. We should carry some mysteries to the grave.”

  “Of course. But where do you bury your demons?” Orlando automatically bit his emaciated finger where the heavy gold ring was slip ping around. “We all carry a little devil around inside us who won’t abandon us even in the hour of our death. We will never be satisfied.”

  After she left the bar, Laura took a long walk through the Zona Rosa, the fashionable new neighborhood where the young generation gathered en masse, the young people who’d survived the Tlatelolco massacre and ended up in jail or at a café, both prisons, both enclosed. They’d invented, in the space bounded by Chapultepec, Paseo de la Reforma, and Insurgentes, an oasis of cafeterias, restaurants, malls, mirrors, where they could stop, look at themselves, be admired, show off the new styles-miniskirts, wide belts, black patent-leather boots, bell-bottom trousers, and Beatles haircuts. Half of Mexico City’s ten million inhabitants were under twenty years of age, and in the Zona Rosa they could have a drink, show off, pick someone up, see and be seen, believe again that the world was livable, conquerable, without spilled blood, without an insomniac past.

  Here in these same streets-Génova, Londres, Hamburgo, and Amberes-the impoverished aristocrats of the Porfirio Díaz era had lived; here the first elegant nightclubs-the Casanova, the Minuit, the Sans Souci-had opened during the Second World War, which transformed the city; here, in the La Votiva church, Danton had daringly begun his climb to success; here too, along Paseo de la Reforma, the young people of Tlatelolco had marched to their death, and here appeared the c
afés which were like guild halls for the young literary set, the Kineret, the Tirol, and the Perro Andaluz; here were restaurants frequented by the rich, the Focolare, the Rivoli, and the Estoril, along with the restaurant that was everyone’s favorite, the Bellinghausen, with its maguey worms, its noodle soups, its escamoles and chemita steaks, its delicious flans flavored with rompope eggnog and its steins of beer, colder than anywhere else. And right here, when the subway system was built, there began to appear, vomited out by the trains, the gandallas, onderos, chaviza-the fuckers, the new wavers, the bucks-all the names invented for the hordes of the new poor from the lost neighborhoods, dispatched from the urban deserts to the oasis where camels drink and caravans repose: the Zona Rosa, as the artist José Luis Cuevas called it.

  Laura, who’d photographed it all, felt powerless to depict this new phenomenon: the city was escaping her eyes. The capital’s epicenter had shifted too many times during her life-from the Zócalo, Madero, and Avenida Juárez to Las Lomas and Polanco, to Reforma (now converted from a residential street like one in Paris to a commercial avenue like one in Dallas), and now the Zona Rosa. But its days, too, were numbered. Laura Díaz could smell it in the air, see it in the faces, feel it on her skin-it was a time of crime, of insecurity and hunger, asphyxiating air, invisible mountains, only the fleeting presence of stars, an opaque sun, a mortal fog over a city transformed into a bottomless, treasureless mine, lifeless canyons replete with death…

  How can one separate passion from violence?

  Mexico’s question, Mexico City’s question, was Laura’s answer: yes, after all is said and done, as she walked away from her final meeting with Orlando Ximénez, Laura Díaz could declare, “Yes, I think I’ve managed to separate passion from violence.”

  What I haven’t achieved, she said to herself as she strolled quietly from Niza Street to Plaza Rio de Janeiro along Orizaba Street, the familiar, almost totemic, places of her daily life-the church of the Holy Family, the Chiandoni ice-cream parlor, the department store, the stationery store, the pharmacy, the newspaper stand at the corner of Puebla Street-what I didn’t do was solve those many mysteries, except Orlando’s, which I finally figured out this afternoon. He was waiting for something that never came; to wait for something that would never come was his fate, which he tried to change this afternoon by proposing to me, but fate-experience transformed into fatality-took control again. That was fatal, murmured Laura, sheltered by the sudden splendor of a long, agonic afternoon enamored of its own beauty, a narcissistic afternoon in the Valley of Mexico. She recited one of Jorge Maura’s favorite poems: