Los años con Laura Díaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Who will help me?”

  Fernando, Leticia, Zampayita the black man, the Indian maids, Laura with a flower between her incipient breasts, together they carried the coffin. But it was Laura who said, Papa, Mama, he loved the seawall, he loved the sea, he loved Veracruz, this is his grave, please, clinging to her mother’s skirt, staring imploringly at her father and the servants, and they took her advice, as if each feared that if Santiago was buried, he might be exhumed someday to be shot once more.

  How long it took her brother’s white body to disappear into the grave of the sea, the body attached to the cushioned bed of death, the lid of the coffin deliberately open so everyone could see him disappear slowly on that night without waves, Santiago becoming more and more handsome, sadder and sadder, missed more and more, the scene more and more painful as he sank within the open casket, his head soon to be crowned by algae and devoured by sharks along with all the unwritten poems, his face protected by the condemned man’s last wish: “Please don’t shoot my face.”

  With no children other than the sea, Santiago slowly disappeared into the sea as if in a mirror that did not distort him but only sent him farther and farther away, little by little, mysteriously, from the mirror of air where he inscribed his hours on earth. Santiago slowly separated from the horizon of the sea, from the promise of youth. Suspended in the sea, he asked those who loved him, Let me disappear by becoming the sea, I could not become forest as I told you one day, Laura, I lied only about one thing, little sister, I did have things to tell, I did have things to see, I wasn’t going to keep silent out of fear of being mediocre because I came to know you, Laura, and every night I fell asleep dreaming, to whom shall I tell everything if not to Laura? In a dream, I decided I would write for you, precious girl, even if you didn’t find out, even if we never saw each other again, everything would be for you and you would know despite everything, you would receive my words knowing they belonged to you, you would be my only reader, for you not a single word of mine would be lost, now that I’m sinking into the eternity of the sea, I expel the little air I have left in my lungs, I make a gift to you of a few bubbles, my love, it’s an intolerable pain for me to say goodbye because I don’t know to whom I’ll be able to speak from now on, I don’t …

  Laura remembered that her brother had wanted to lose himself forever in the forest, to become forest. She tried to make herself into sea with him, but the only thing that came to mind was to describe the lake where she grew up, how strange, Santiago, to have grown up next to a lake and never really to have seen it, it’s true that it’s a very big lake, almost a small sea, but I remember it in little pieces, here is the place where the aunts would swim before the priest Elzevir Almonte came, over here is where the fishermen would land, over here they’d put the oars, but the lake, Santiago, to see it the way you knew how to see the ocean, that I can’t do, I’m going to have to imagine the place where I grew up, little brother, you are going to make me imagine it, the lake and everything else, right at this very minute, I’m knowing it, from now on, I’m not going to hope for things to happen, I’m not going to let them happen without paying attention to them, you are going to make me imagine the life you did not live but I swear you will live at my side, in my head, in my stories, in my fantasies, I won’t let you escape from my life, Santiago, you are the most important thing that ever happened to me, I’m going to be faithful to you by always imagining you, living in your name, doing what you did not do, I don’t know how, my handsome and young and dead Santiago, I’m going to be frank with you and I don’t know how, but I swear I’ll do it.

  That was all she thought as she turned away from the remains under the waves and went home to the house next to the arcades, prepared, despite her thoughts, to be a child again, to stop being a big girl, to lose the premature maturity Santiago had momentarily given her. She asked if she could have his bullet-ridden glasses and imagined him without his spectacles, waiting for the bullets, having put them in his shirt pocket.

  The next day the little black man swept the halls as if nothing had happened, singing as always:

  You dance putting your arm

  around your partner’s waist

  if she lets you, lets you,

  as she will surely do …

  4.

  San Cayetano: 1915

  “YOU THINK YOU KNEW Santiago well? You think your brother gave everything to you? How little you know of a man so complex, he gave you only a part of himself. He gave you what was left of his boyish soul. Another part he gave to his family, another to his poetry, another to politics. And passion, the passion of love, to whom did he give that?”

  Doña Leticia, in silence, wanted to finish the hem of the ball gown.

  “Stop fidgeting, child.”

  “It’s just that I’m very nervous, Mama.”

  “And for no reason, a ball is nothing extraordinary.”

  “For me it is! It’s the first time, Mutti.”

  “You’ll get used to these things.”

  “What a shame.” Laura smiled.

  “Quiet. Let me finish. This child can’t stand still!”

  As soon as Laura slipped on the pale yellow dress, she ran to the mirror, but she did not see the modern ball gown her mother, as skillful in couture as in every domestic labor, had copied from the most recent issue of La Vie Parisienne, which, though it came late because of the war in Europe and the distance to Xalapa from Veracruz, reached them regularly. Paris had abandoned the complicated, uncomfortable styles of the nineteenth century with their Versailles remnants of crinolines, stays, and corsets. Now the fashion was streamlined, as Don Fernando the Anglophile would say, which is to say, as fluid as a river, simplified and linear, fitted to the real forms of the feminine body, slender and revealing from the shoulders through the bust and waist, then suddenly flaring out from the hips. Laura’s Parisian dress was taken in between the hips and the calves with a lot of draping, as if a queen had picked up the train of her gown, but the train, instead of being wrapped around her forearm, had under its own power draped itself around her legs.

  Laura stared at herself, not at the gown. Her seventeen years had accentuated but not yet resolved the qualities hinted at when she was twelve. She had a strong face, the forehead too wide, the nose too big and aquiline, lips too thin, though she did like her own eyes, to tell the truth; they were a light chestnut, almost golden; sometimes, at daybreak or sunset, they were truly golden. She looked as if she were dreaming while awake.

  “But my nose, Mama …”

  “You’re lucky. Just look at those Italian film actresses. They’ve all got big beaks … distinct profiles. Don’t tell me you’d like to be a little pie-faced pug-nose. Come, come.”

  “But my forehead, Mama …”

  “If you don’t like it, hide it with bangs.”

  “But my lips …”

  “With lipstick you can make them whatever size you please. And just look, sweetheart, what beautiful eyes God gave you …”

  “I’ll go along with that, Mama.”

  “You vain little thing.” Leticia smiled.

  Laura didn’t dare think ahead. And if the lipstick is wiped off by kisses, I’m not going to act like a jerk, he’ll want to kiss me again, or should I suck in my lips like a little old lady, grab my stomach as if I ere about to vomit, and run to the bathroom to put on more lipstick? How complicated it is to become a young woman.

  “Don’t worry about anything. You look divine. You’re going to cause a sensation.”

  She didn’t ask Leticia why she wasn’t accompanying her. She would be the only girl there without a chaperon. Wouldn’t that make a bad impression? Leticia had already sighed enough, but she intended to leave it at that, recalling the habit of her own mother, Cosima, sitting in the rocking chair in the Catemaco family house. She had sighed enough. As Don Fernando would put it, citing, as usual, an English proverb: It never rains but it pours.

  The three maiden aunts were in Catemaco taking care
of Grandfather Felipe Kelsen, whose ailments were slowly but surely joining forces, as he himself predicted the one time he’d been made to see a doctor in Veracruz. What did he say, Papa? asked the three sisters in one voice, a habit that was ever more deeply rooted in them and of which they were unaware.

  “I have bile stones, cardiac arrhythmia, my prostate’s the size of a melon, I have diverticulitis, and a touch of emphysema.”

  His daughters stared at him in fear, anxiety, and shock.

  He merely smiled. “Don’t worry. Dr. Miquis says that no one of these problems will kill me. But the day when they all join forces, I’ll drop like a stone.”

  Leticia wasn’t with her sick father because her husband needed her. After Santiago was executed, the national president of the bank summoned Fernando Díaz to Mexico City.

  “This is not a stab in the back, Don Fernando, but you understand only too well that the bank lives on its good relations with the government. I know, of course, that no one is guilty of his son’s actions, but the fact is they are our sons—I myself have eight, so I know what I’m talking about—and we are, if not guilty, then at least responsible for what they do, especially when they live at home with us.”

  “If you don’t mind, sir, please get to the point. This conversation is painful for me.”

  “All right. Your replacement in Veracruz has already been appointed.”

  Fernando Díaz did not deign to comment. He stared stonily at the national president.

  “But don’t worry. We’re transferring you to our branch in Xalapa. Look, my friend, we aren’t punishing you, but we are trying to exercise prudence while at the same time not failing to recognize your merits. It’s the same position but in a different city.”

  “Where no one will associate me with my son.”

  “No, our children are ours wherever we are.”

  “Very well, sir. This seems to be a discreet solution. My family and I thank you most sincerely.”

  Tearing themselves away from the house facing the sea, the rooms above the bank, was difficult for all of them—for Leticia because she was farther from Catemaco, her father, and her sisters, for Fernando because he was being penalized in a cowardly way, and for all three of them because leaving Veracruz meant leaving behind Santiago, his memory, his watery grave.

  Laura spent a long time in her brother’s bedroom memorizing it, evoking the night when she heard him cry out and discovered he was hurt. Should she have told her parents what had happened? Would that have saved Santiago? Why was what the boy asked her more compelling: Don’t say a word. Now, saying goodbye to the room, she tried to imagine everything Santiago could have written there, everything he left blank, a long book of blind pages waiting for the irreplaceable hand, pen, ink, and handwriting of a single man.

  “Look, Laura, you write alone, but you use something that belongs to everyone, language. The world lends you language, and you return it to the world. Language is like the world: it will outlive us. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Don Fernando cautiously approached the girl. He put his hand on her shoulder and said that he too missed Santiago and constantly thought about what his son’s life might have been. He’d always said, my son has promise, he’s more intelligent than all the others put together, and now, here, the bedroom where the boy was going to spend his sabbatical year would remain solitary, the place where he was going to write his poems. Fernando hugged Laura; she did not want to look into his eyes. We weep for the dead once and only once, and then we try to do what they could no longer do. It isn’t possible to love, write, fight, think, or work with tears clouding our eyes and mind; prolonged mourning is a betrayal of the dead person’s life.

  How different Xalapa was. At night, Veracruz retained—and increased—the heat of the day. Xalapa, in the mountains, had warm days and cold nights. Veracruz had swift, rackety storms, but here the rain became fine, persistent, making everything green and filling a central point in the city—the reservoir behind the El Dique dam, always about to overflow, giving an impression of sadness and security at the same time. It was from the flume that the city’s light mist rose to meet the mountain’s thick fog; Laura Díaz is remembering when she first came to Xalapa and noted: cold air—rain and rain—birds—women dressed in black—beautiful gardens—cast-iron benches—white statues painted green by the humidity—red tiles—steep narrow streets—market smells and bakeries, wet patios and fruit trees, the aroma of orange trees and the stench of slaughterhouses.

  She entered her new home. Everything smelled of varnish. It was a one-story house, for which the family would very soon be thankful. Laura immediately told herself that in this city of intermittent fogs she would let herself be guided by her sense of smell, that that would be the measure of her tranquillity or her disquiet: humidity of parks, abundance of flowers, the many shops, the smell of tanned hides and thick tar, of saddleries and hardware shops, of cotton bales and hemp rope, the smell of shoe shops and pharmacies, of hairdressers and calico. Perfumes of boiled coffee and foamy chocolate. She pretended to be blind. She touched the walls and felt their heat, she opened her eyes and the tile roofs washed by the rain were shining, dangerously pitched, as if they longed for the sun to dry them and the rain to run down the gutters, along the streets, through the gardens, from the sky to the flume, all in motion, in this reticent city, mistress of incessant nature.

  The house replicated the Hispanic model prevalent all over Latin America. Blind, impenetrable walls faced the street, with an unadorned entry, pitched roof, and tiling in place of cornices—a typical “patio house,” with public rooms and bedrooms distributed around an open quadrangle filled with large flowerpots and geraniums. Doña Leticia brought along everything she considered hers, the wicker furniture designed for the tropics that gave no protection here from the moisture, the two paintings of the rascal and the snapping dog, which she hung in the dining room.

  The kitchen satisfied Leticia; it was her private domain, and in a short time the lady of the house adapted her coastal customs to the tastes of the mountains: she began to make tamales and dumplings dusted with white flour, and to the white rice of Veracruz she now added Xalapa’s chileatole, a tasty mix of masa, fresh sweet corn, chicken, and cream cheese, made in the shape of little mushrooms, almost like sandwiches.

  “Careful,” said Don Fernando. “This food is going to fatten you—that’s how people here protect themselves from the cold, with fat.”

  “Don’t worry. We’re a thin family,” answered Leticia while she prepared, under the tender and always admiring eyes of her husband, the Xalapenan molotes, fried turnovers filled with beans and minced meat. They made their own bread: the French military occupation a half century before had imposed the baguette as the bread of fashion, though in Mexico, where diminutives are used as a sign of tenderness for both things and people, baguette became bolillo, and telera were pieces of bread about the size of a hand. Mexico’s traditional sweets were not abandoned—the sugar cookies and the cemita, covered with caraway seeds, as well as the wonderful sweet breads shaped like conch shells—and the tastiest gift of Spanish bakeries, churros, long strips of fried batter cakes covered with sugar and eaten after dipping them in hot chocolate.

  Leticia did not completely give up on the octopus and the crabs of the coast, but she stopped missing them because, without thinking about it much, she adapted naturally to life, especially when life gave her, as it did in this new house, an impressive kitchen with a huge oven and a round fireplace.

  The one-story house had only one attic space, way back above the rear entrance, the coach gate, which Laura wanted to claim for herself, intuitively, as an homage to Santiago. This was because, in some mute place in her head, the girl believed she was going to fulfill her life, the life of Laura Daz, in Santiago’s name; or perhaps it was Santiago who would go on fulfilling, from death, a life that Laura would incarnate in his name. In any case she associated the promise of her brother with her own space, a high, is
olated place where he would have written and she, mysteriously, would find her own vocation, in homage to her dead brother.

  “What are you going to be when you grow up?” asked Elizabeth Garca, the girl who sat next to her in the school run by the Misses Ramos. She had no idea what to say. How could she speak what was secret, incomprehensible for others: I’d like to fulfill the life of my brother Santiago by locking myself away in the attic.

  “No,” her mother told her. “I’m sorry, but that’s where Armona Aznar lives.”

  “And who is she? Why does she have any right to the attic?”

  “I don’t know. Ask your father. It seems she’s always lived there, and one condition when we took the house was that we accept her, that no one bother her, or better still, that no one pay any attention to her.”

  “Is she crazy?”

  “Don’t be foolish, Laura.”

  “No,” Don Fernando repeated, “Mrs. Aznar is there because in a certain sense she’s the owner of the house. She’s a Spaniard, or anyway the daughter of Spanish anarcho-syndicalists—many of them came to Mexico when Benito Juárez defeated the Emperor Maximilian. They thought the future of freedom was here. Then, when Porfirio Díaz came to power, they were disillusioned. A lot of them went back to Barcelona, where there was probably more freedom there in the turnstile governments that Sagasta and Canovas had arranged than here with Don Porfirio. Others just tossed out their ideals and became businessmen, farmers, and bankers.”

  “And just what does all that have to do with this lady who lives in the attic?”

  “The house belongs to her.”

  “Our house?”

  “We don’t own this house, child. We live where the bank tells us to live. When the bank decided to buy this house, Doña Armona didn’t want to sell because she doesn’t believe in private property. Understand it as you please, and understand it if you can. The bank offered to let her stay in the attic in exchange for the use of the house.”