The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  “My grandfather galloped with Zapata in Morelos,” said the old gardener to whom Enedina and I gave a ride from Pomona. “Now I gallop by bus from Whittier to Wilshire.”

  The old man laughed, and added that Los Angeles, California, was now where he worked and that Ocotepec, Morelos, was where he spent his vacations, where he sent his dollars, and where he returned to rest and see his people.

  Enedina and I exchanged glances and joined the old man’s laughter. The three of us, Angelenos, talked like foreigners in the city, immigrants as recent as those who at that very moment were slipping past the border patrol at the wall between San Diego and Tijuana, between the two Californias. I’d been out of Los Angeles for a year, enough time for everyone, including my girlfriend Enedina, to think I’d left forever, because that was the rule here: you’ve just arrived and you’re already on your way, or you’d just left, you’re always passing through, and it wasn’t true, we agreed, Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans-all of us were here before anyone else, and instead of disappearing there are more and more of us, wave after wave of Mexican migrations have poured into Los Angeles as if they were returning to Los Angeles. In just the past century, the Mexicans fleeing from Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship came first, then those fleeing the Revolution, then the Cristeros, enemies of the Maximum Leader Calles, then Calles himself expelled by Cárdenas, then braceros to aid in the war effort, then the pachucos who shouted, Here we are!, and always the poor, the poor who made Los Angeles’ wealth and art, the poor Mexicans who worked here and started small businesses and then made money, the illiterates who went to school here and could translate what they had within them-dance, poetry, music, novels. They passed by a gigantic mural of graffiti and of broken, irreplaceable symbols: the Virgin of Guadalupe, Emiliano Zapata, La Calavera Catrina, Comandante Marcos, the masked man of today, and Zorro, the masked man of yesterday, Joaquin Murrieta the bandit, and Fray Junipero Serra the missionary.

  “They didn’t manage to erase Siqueiros,” I said cheerfully. I drove slowly, thinking that driving in Los Angeles was the equivalent of “reading the city in the original.”

  “Can you imagine his patroness’s rage if she were to see what you and I are going to see?” wondered Enedina, who had come to Los Angeles as an infant with her father, the cameraman Jesus Anibal Pliego, married to my mother, Lourdes Alfaro de López, both of whom had lost their spouses in Tlatelolco and were parents of children who’d lost a parent-pals, friends, and now lovers, Enedina and I.

  Los Angeles was transformed into a gigantic Mexican mural, raised like a multi colored dike so that all California-as we three could see it, two young lovers and an old gardener from the hills of Puente-wouldn’t pour down the mountains into the sea in a final earthquake… Leaving. Returning. Or arriving for the first time. From the hills one could see the Pacific through a veil of pollution, and from the foot of the mountains the city spread without a center, a mestiza city, a polyglot city, a Babel of immigrants, a Constantinople of the Pacific, zone of the great continental drift to nothingness…

  There was nothing beyond this. Here the continent ended. It began in New York, the first city, and ended in Los Angeles, the second, perhaps last city. There was no more space to conquer space. Now people would have to go to the moon or to Nicaragua, to Mars or Vietnam. The land conquered by pioneers had run out, the epic of expansion was consummated, the voracity, manifest destiny, philanthropy, urgent need to save the world, to deny others their own destiny, and to impose instead, for their own good, an American future.

  I was thinking all this, moving forward at a tortoise pace along highways designed for modern hares. I saw asphalt and concrete, but also development, construction, lots for sale, gas stations, fast-food stands, multiplex cinemas, the baroque-and-roll variety of the great city of Los Angeles. Still, in the mind of a young photographer, great-grandson of Laura Díaz, images alien to my vision of the city were superimposed on it: a tropical river entering the sea in a hurricane shout, thunderbirds crossing the Mexican forests, dust stars disintegrating in instantaneous centuries, a poor careless world, and death cleansing its bloody hands in a deep temazcal in Puerto Escondido, where my father, the third Santiago, and my mother, still alive, Lourdes Alfaro…

  A ceiba in the forest.

  I shook my head to banish all those images and concentrate on my own projects, which are what brought me back to Los Angeles; they gave intelligible continuity to the impressionist waterfall of the California Byzantium. I wanted to put together a book of photographs about Mexican muralists in the United States. I’d already photographed Orozco’s murals at Dartmouth and Pomona; I’d found on the docks of New York the condemned murals that Diego Rivera had painted for Rockefeller Center; and now I was back in Los Angeles, the city where I’d grown up when my mother and her new husband, Jesus Aníbal, with his daughter, Enedina, left Mexico in 1970, after another wound named Tlatelolco, to photograph, seventy years after it was painted, Siqueiros’ mural on Olvera Street.

  “Olvera Street,” exclaimed Enedina portentously. “The Disneyland of Totonacan tropical tourism.”

  What caught my attention was the consistency with which the Mexican murals in the United States had been objects of censure, controversy, and obliteration. Were the artists merely provocateurs, the patrons simply cowards, how could they be so naive as to think that Rivera, Orozco, or Siqueiros would paint conventional, decorative works in the taste of those who were paying for them? The gringo Medici of New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles-blind, generous, and vile all at once-thought, perhaps (this was Enedina’s idea) that ordering and paying for a work of art was enough to nullify its critical intention, to make it innocuous, and to incorporate it, castrated, into the patrimony of a kind of tax-free puritan beneficence.

  The old gardener thanked us for the ride and got off at Wilshire in search of a second ride to Brentwood. Enedina and I wished him luck.

  “And if you know of a garden that needs attention”-the old citizen of Ocotepec smiled at us-“just let me know, and I’ll take care of it. Don’t you two have a garden?”

  Enedina and I went on to Olvera Street.

  There we found Siqueiros’ mural, painted on the high exterior wall of a three-story building. The work had been restored after seventy years of blindness and silence. In 1930, a rich California lady who had heard of the “Mexican Renaissance” had commissioned it. And since Rivera was committed to Detroit and Orozco was at Dartmouth, she hired Siqueiros and asked him what the theme of his work would be.

  “Tropical America,” answered the muralist with frizzy, tangled hair, flashing green eyes, immense nostrils, and, curiously, a way of speaking in which he constantly interrupted his words with hesitations and little crutches, with “well”s and “hmm”s and “don’t you agree”s.

  The patron had a marvelous vision of palm trees and sunsets, according to Siqueiros, quivering rumba dancers and gallant charros, red tiled roofs and decorative nopals. She signed the check and told him to get started.

  On the day of the opening, with the old square crowded with officials and society people, the curtain fell revealing “Tropical America,” and there appeared the mural of a Latin America represented by a dark skinned Christ, enslaved and crucified. A Latin America crucified, naked, in agony, hanging from a cross above which flew, with fierce intent, the emblematic U.S. eagle.

  The patron fainted, the officials hit the roof, Siqueiros had placed Los Angeles in hell, and the next morning the mural was completely whitewashed over, made invisible to the world, as if it had never existed. Nothing. Nada.

  Seeing it restored, in place, that afternoon during the first year of the new millennium moved Enedina more than me. The girl with green eyes and olive skin raised her arms and tossed her long hair away from her neck, rolling it into a tight knot that grounded her emotion like a lightning rod. The restored work restored herself, Enedina told me later; it was the diploma proving that the Chicana personality belonged as much to Mexico as to the Unite
d States. There was nothing to hide, nothing to cover up, this land belonged to all, all races, all languages, all histories. That was its destiny because that was its origin.

  On the other hand, I was too busy photographing the mural, happy that for once a job coincided with one of my own projects, which had been interrupted in Detroit when I was mugged after leaving the Institute of Arts, after I’d discovered the face of a woman that was mine, of my blood, of my memory, Laura Díaz, grandmother of my father, murdered in Tlatelolco, mother of another Santiago who couldn’t fulfill his artistic promise but who perhaps transmitted to his grandnephew the continuity of the artistic image, sister of a first Santiago shot in Veracruz and delivered to the waves in the Gulf of Mexico.

  Now, here, in Los Angeles, the American Babel, Byzantium of the Pacific, the utopia of the new century, I was finishing a chapter in my artistic and family inheritance, the chronicle that Enedina and I had decided to call The Years with Laura Díaz.

  “Is there anything more to say?” Enedina asked me that night, as we embraced, naked, in our Santa Monica apartment near the murmuring of the sea.

  Yes, no doubt there was always something more, but between the two of us, almost brother and sister from childhood, but absolute lovers, each one belonging to the other, no explanations asked, from the time we arrived in California as infants and then grew up together, went to school together, studied together at UCLA and became impassioned by our courses in philosophy and history, on the Mexican Revolution, the history of socialism and anarcho-syndicalism, the workers’ movement in Latin America, the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, McCarthyism in the United States, studying the writings of Ortega y Gasset, Husserl, Marx, and Ferdinand Lassalle, seeing Eisenstein’s Mexican films and Leni Riefenstahl’s on Hitler’s glory and Alain Resnais on Auschwitz, Night and Fog, reviewing the photographs of Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, André Kertèsz, Rodchenko, and Alvarez Bravo: the totality of these apprenticeships, curiosities, and shared disciplines cemented our love. She flew to Detroit as soon as she found out that I’d been attacked and spent hours by my side in the hospital.

  Speaking.

  I’d had a concussion, dreamed wild dreams, had to stay in bed before getting back the use of my broken leg, but I didn’t forget my dreams, even when it took forever to regain the use of my leg.

  Speaking.

  Speaking with Enedina, recalling everything possible, inventing the impossible, freely mixing memory and imagination, what we knew, what we’d been told, what the generations of Laura Díaz knew and dreamed, the factual but also the possible, about their lives, the genealogy of Felipe Kelsen and Cosima Reiter, the sisters Hilda,, Virginia, and María de la O, Léticia (Mutti), and her husband, Fernando Díaz, the first Santiago, son of Fernando, Laura’s first ball at the San Cayetano hacienda, her marriage to Juan Francisco, the birth of the second Santiago and Danton, her love for Orlando Ximénez and for Jorge Maura, her devotion to Harry Jaffe, the death of the third Santiago at Tlatelolco, the liberation, the pain, the glory of Laura Díaz, daughter, wife, lover, mother, artist, old woman, young woman: Enedina and I remembered it all, and what we didn’t remember we imagined and what we didn’t imagine we discarded as unworthy of a life lived for the inseparable possibility of being and not being, of carrying through one part of existence by sacrificing another part and always knowing that nothing is totally possessed, neither truth nor error, neither wisdom nor memory, for we descend from incomplete but intense loves, from intense but incomplete memories, and we can only inherit what our ancestors bequeathed us, the community of the past and the will of the future, united in the present by memory, by desire, and by the knowledge that every act of love today carries out, in the end, the act of love begun yesterday. Today’s memory consecrated, as it deformed, the memory of yesterday. Today’s imagination was the truth of yesterday and tomorrow.

  From our bed, Enedina and I stared for a long time at the painting of Adam and Eve ascending from Paradise instead of falling from Paradise, the painting of the first naked lovers, possessors of their own sensuality, created by the second Santiago, Santiago the Younger, before he died. Laura Díaz, in her will, had bequeathed the painting to us.

  “I love you, Santiago.”

  “And I love you, Enedina.”

  “I love Laura Díaz a lot.”

  “How wonderful that between the two of us we could recreate her life.”

  “Her years. The years with Laura Díaz.”

  Acknowledgments

  THE BEST NOVELISTS in the world are our grandmothers, and it is to them I owe the first memory on which this novel is based. My maternal grandmother was Emilia Rivas Gil de Macías, widow of Manuel Macias Gutiérrez; she born in Alamos, Sonora, he in Guadalajara, Jalisco; she the descendant of Spanish immigrants from Santander and, according to rumors I’ve heard, Yaqui Indians from Sonora. My grandfather Macías died tragically in 1919, leaving my grandmother with four young daughters-María Emilia, Sélika, Carmen, and my mother, Berta Macías de Fuentes.

  My paternal grandmother, Emilia Boettiger de Fuentes, was born in Catemaco, Veracruz, daughter of Philip Boettiger Keller, a German immigrant from Darmstadt, married to a young lady of Spanish origin, Ana María Murcia de Boettiger, with whom he had three daughters: Luisa (Boettiger de Salgado), María (Boettiger de Alvarez), and Emilia (Boettiger de Fuentes). Emilia married Rafael Fuentes Vélez, president of the National Bank of Mexico in Veracruz and son of Carlos Fuentes Benítez and Clotilde Vélez, who was attacked and mutilated on the stagecoach between Mexico City and Veracruz. A fourth Boettiger sister, Anita, was a mulatta, the issue of a never acknowledged love affair of my great-grandfather. She was always a confident and loving member of the Boettiger family.

  My paternal grandparents had three sons, Carlos Fuentes Boettiger, my young uncle, a promising poet, disciple of Salvador Díaz Mirón, and editor of the Xalapa magazine Bohemian Muse. He died in Mexico City, where he’d gone to study, at the age of twenty-one, of typhoid fever. My aunt, Emilia Fuentes Boettiger, remained unmarried for many years, taking care of my grandfather Don Rafael, who’d been afflicted with a progressive paralysis. My parents, Rafael Fuentes Boettiger and Berta Macías Rivas, married in January 1928. I was born in November of that year and inherited the constellation of stories my family transmitted to me.

  But many other stories were told to me by two magnificent survivors of “the years with Laura Díaz,” Doña Julieta Olivier de Fernández Landero, widow of the Orizaba industrialist Manuel Ferná ndez Landero, and Doña Ana Guido de Icaza, widow of the lawyer and writer Xavier Icaza López-Negrete, who appears as a character in this novel. I have emotional and grateful memories of them both.

  Finally, I began The Years with Laura Díaz during a detailed, informative, and most of all affecting trip with my friend Federico Reyes Heroles to places that are part of our shared background: Xalapa, Coatepec, Catemaco, Tlacotalpan, and the Tuxtlas, Santiago and San Andrés. My very special thanks to Federico and his wife, Beatriz Scharrer, herself deeply schooled in agrarian life and the German migration to the state of Veracruz.

  London

  August 1998

  Carlos Fuentes

  ***

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