Los años con Laura Díaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  “You never tell me about your boyfriends.”

  “You never tell me about your girlfriends.”

  Juan Francisco’s eyes, his movements, the shrugging of his shoulders meant: We machos are different. Why didn’t he say so directly, openly?

  “We machos are different.”

  Why was it unnecessary to explain that? Why was society like that, and why was it not going to change? Listening to him speak in the gigantic plaza in the heart of the city, in the rain, with his deep voice, Laura was filled from him, with him, for him, with words and arguments to which she wanted to give a meaning in order to understand him, to penetrate his mind the way he penetrated her body, so she could be his comrade, his ally. Did this revolution not include a change in what Mexican men did to their women, did it not begin a new time for women, as important as the new time for workers that Juan Francisco was defending?

  She’d belonged to no other man. She chose this one. She wanted to belong completely to this one. Would Juan Francisco let himself be tempted, was he going to take her as totally as she wanted to be taken by him? Did he fear, he who never spoke of his girlfriends, he who would never say “darling” in public or private, would he fear she might penetrate him, invade his person, dispel his mystery? Did a person exist behind the personage she followed from meeting to meeting, with his serene consent, he who never told her to stay home, this is a matter for men, you’ll be bored? On the contrary, he celebrated Laura’s presence, Laura’s giving herself over to the cause, Laura’s attention to the words of her husband the leader, Juan Francisco’s speech, The Speech, because there was only one, in defense of the workers, of the right to strike, of the eight-hour workday. It was one single speech because it was one single memory, that of the textile workers’ strike in Rio Blanco, the miners’ strike in Cananea, the memory of the liberal and anarcho-syndicalist struggle; an evocation with no blank spaces, a river of causes and effects perfectly linked and interrupted only by calls to rebellion that could set water itself, as well as the mines’ copper and silver, on fire.

  Laura stopped asking herself questions. Everything was interrupted, nine months after their marriage, by the birth of their first son. Juan Francisco was so happy about the baby’s being a boy that Laura wondered, What if he’d been a girl? The simple fact that she’d borne a little boy and had noted her husband’s satisfaction with this gave Laura the power to name the child.

  “We’ll call him Santiago, my brother’s name.”

  “Your brother died for the Revolution. It’s a good sign for the boy.”

  “I want him to live, Juan Francisco, not to die, not for the Revolution or for anything else.”

  It was one of those moments when each one held back what might have been said. The destiny of the people surpasses that of the individual, Laura, we are more than ourselves, we are the people, we are the working class. You can’t be stingy with your brother and lock him up in your little heart the way you’d press a dead flower between the pages of a book. But, Juan Francisco, he’s a new being, can’t you accept him simply for being that, a unique creature on this earth, someone who never existed before and will never exist again? That’s how I celebrate our son, that’s how I kiss, rock, and feed him, singing welcome, my son, you’re unique, irreplaceable, I’m going to give you all my love because you’re you, I’m resisting the temptation to dream of you as a dead Santiago reborn, a second Santiago to fulfill the interrupted destiny of my adored brother.

  “When I call my son Santiago, I think about your brother’s heroism.”

  “I don’t, Juan Francisco. I hope our Santiago won’t become what you say. It’s very painful to be a hero.”

  “All right. I understand you. I thought you’d like to see in the new Santiago something like the resurrection of the first one.”

  “Forgive me if I annoy you, but I don’t agree.”

  He said nothing. He got up and went to the window to look out at the July rain.

  How could she deny Juan Francisco the right to name their second son? Danton was born eleven months after their first, when General Alvaro Obregón had been President for two years and the country was slowly returning to peace. Laura liked this brilliant (or at least clever) President. He had an answer for everything. He’d lost an arm in the battle of Celaya that annihilated Pancho Villa and his Golden Troops, los Dorados de Villa, and was even able to laugh at himself: “The battlefield was like a slaughterhouse. Among all those bodies, how was I going to find the arm they’d shot off me? Gentlemen, I had a brilliant idea. I tossed a gold coin up in the air, and my arm flew up to catch it. No revolutionary general can resist a barrage of fifty thousand pesos!”

  Or: “He may have only one hand, but that one is good and heavy,” she heard a labor leader say when they gathered at their house to discuss politics.

  She preferred to explore the city she didn’t know and discover tranquil spots, far from the noise of the buses that had their stops painted on them:

  ROMAMERIDACHAPULTEPECANDADDITIONALSTOPS PENSILBUENOSAIRESPENITENCIARIASALTODELAGUA COYOACANCALZADADELAPIEDADNIÑOPERDIDO

  And the yellow trams that went even farther—CHURUBUSCO, XOCHIMILCO, MILPA ALTA—and the cars, especially the “frees,” the libres, taxis with signs on their windshields that announced they were “free,” and the fotingos, the Fords that confused Paseo de la Reforma with a racetrack.

  Laura was a lover of parks; that’s what she called herself, with a smile on her face. First one child, then two went in the pram that Laura pushed from her home on Avenida Sonora to the Bosque de Chapultepec, where it smelled of eucalyptus, pine, hay, and green lake.

  When Danton was born, Aunt María de la O offered to come help Laura, and Juan Francisco raised no objections to the presence of the mulatta aunt, who was getting fatter and fatter, with ankles as thick as her arms, and thick, shaky legs. The two-story house was faced with fretted brick on the lower floor and yellowish stucco on the upper. The entrance was through a garage that Juan Francisco inaugurated the day after the birth of his second son with a Ford convertible given to him by the Regional Workers Confederation of Mexico, the CROM. The head of the central committee, Luis Napoleon Morones, gave him the car in recognition, he said, of his meritorious service on behalf of the union during the Revolution.

  “Without the working class,” said Morones, not just a fat man, but a thick man with thick lips, thick nose, thick neck, and thick double chins, “without the House of the Workers of the World and the Red Battalions, we would not have triumphed. The workers made the Revolution. The peasants, Villa and Zapata, were a necessary ballast, the reactionary, clerical ballast of Mexico’s black colonial past.”

  “He told you exactly what you wanted to hear,” said Laura to Juan Francisco, without a hint of a question in her voice. It was he who queried her words.

  “He said nothing more than the truth. The working class is the advance guard of the Revolution.”

  There sat the Model T Ford, less impressive than the luxurious Isotta-Fraschini that Xavier Icaza had brought to Xalapa but very comfortable for a family of five making an excursion to the Tenayuca pyramids or the floating gardens of Xochimilco. At the back of the garage, in the place of honor, were the hot-water boilers, fed by stacks of wood and newsprint. The garage led to a small foyer with tiled mosaic floors and thence to the living room, furnished simply and comfortably. Laura had opened an account at the Palacio de Hierro department store, and Juan Francisco gave her free rein to buy a sofa and armchairs in blue velvet and lamps that imitated the Art Deco fashion much admired in the illustrated magazines.

  “Don’t worry, darling. There’s a new arrangement called the installment plan. You don’t have to pay the whole bill at once.” It was a pretty living room. It rose several meters above street level and had a little balcony from which one could admire the Bosque de Chapultepec.

  Glass doors led to the dining room with its square table resting on a pedestal of hollow wood, eight heavy mahogany chairs with
rigid backrests, a mirror that stored up the afternoon light, and the service entrance to the kitchen with its coal stove and icebox, which required the daily visit of the wood vendor and the coal man, the milk truck and the ice truck.

  Above, up a rather pretentious stairway considering the size of the house, there were four bedrooms and a bathroom with a tub, a toilet, and—something Aunt María de la O had never seen—a French bidet. Juan Francisco wanted to have it taken out, but Laura begged him to leave it, for it was a novelty and so amusing.

  “You’re imagining my union friends sitting there.”

  “No, I imagine that potbellied Morones. Don’t say anything to them. Let them figure it out for themselves.”

  Juan Francisco’s friends sometimes came back from the bathroom with an uncomfortable air and even with wet trousers. Juan Francisco turned a blind eye to it all, with his innate, dignified seriousness, which countenanced no jokes or extinguished them with a lightning glance, at once fiery and cold.

  They would gather in the dining room, and Laura would stay in the living room, reading. Reading at her invalid father’s bedside in the hopes that he would understand her, as chancy as a shipwrecked sailor’s tossing a bottle into the sea, became for the married woman a silent, pleasurable habit. A living literature was coming into being concerned with the recent past, and Laura read The Underdogs by a physician named Mariano Azuela, agreeing with the people in the novel who spoke of peasant troops as a horde of savages, albeit alive, while the urban politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals were perfidious savages, opportunists and traitors. She realized that the Revolution had passed through Veracruz almost like an omen while it roared in the north and center of Mexico.

  For Laura, the gift in these readings was the discovery of a young poet from Tabasco barely twenty-three years old. His name was Carlos Pellicer, and when Laura read his first book, Colors in the Sea, she didn’t know whether to kneel and give thanks or pray or weep, because now the tropics of her childhood came alive and were at hand between the covers of a book. And since Pellicer, like Juan Francisco, was from Tabasco, reading him drew her even closer to her husband:

  Tropics, why did you give me hands

  Full of color?

  Besides, Laura knew that Juan Francisco liked to have her nearby to serve his friends if the meeting went on for long, but the real reason was to be a witness of what he was saying to his comrades while the aunt took care of the children. It was hard for her to put faces on the voices that reached her from the dining room because when the men came out, they were silent, distant, as if very recently emerged from dark, even invisible places. Some wore jackets and ties, but others wore collarless shirts and wool caps, and some even wore blue overalls and striped shirts with sleeves rolled up to the elbow.

  One rainy afternoon the men arrived wet, some wearing raincoats, most unprotected. In Mexico City, almost no one used umbrellas, though the rain came punctually and powerfully, falling in cataracts at about two o’clock in the afternoon and continuing on and off until dawn. Then the morning sun would return. The men smelled strongly of wet clothes, muddy shoes, moist socks.

  Laura watched them silently file in and silently file out. Those with caps would take them off when they saw her and then put them right back on. Those with hats would leave them at the entrance. Others didn’t know what to do with their hands when they saw her. Yet they were eloquent in the dining room, and Laura, invisible to them but attentive to everything they were saying, believed she was hearing voices buried for a long time, possessors of an eloquence that had been muted for centuries. They had fought against the dictatorship of Don Porfirio Díaz—this Laura heard, that they’d fought, the oldest among them—in Light, an anarcho-syndicalist group, then in the House of the Workers of the World founded by the anarchist Professor Moncaleano, and finally in the Labor Party after Carranza dissolved the House once the Revolution triumphed, when the old ingrate forgot everything he owed his Red Battalions and the House of the Workers. But Obregón (had he ordered the death of Carranza?) offered the workers a new party, the Labor Party, and a new central workers’ association, the Regional Workers Confederation of Mexico, the CROM, so they could continue their struggles for justice.

  “Just tricks. You’ve got to realize, comrades, that governments, every single one of them, have done nothing but trick us. Madero, who was supposed to be the apostle of the Revolution, unleashed his Cossacks on us.”

  “What did you expect, Dionisio? That twerp wasn’t a revolutionary. He was only a democrat. But we owe him a big favor, because, look, Madero thought he was going to create democracy in Mexico without revolution, without real changes. He was naive, and it cost him his life. He was bumped off by the army, the landowners, all the people he didn’t dare touch because he thought that it was enough simply to enact democratic laws. Right away.”

  “But look at Huerta. He murdered Madero, and he did take us into account. Did you ever see a demonstration bigger than the one on May Day in 1913? The eight-hour workday, the six-day workweek, General Huerta accepted it all.”

  “Just tricks. No sooner did we start talking about democracy than he ordered our offices burned, arrested us, and deported us. Don’t forget that. It’s a lesson. A dictatorship can give labor guarantees but not political liberty. Of course we were going to welcome General Obregón like a savior when he took Mexico City in 1915 and right away started talking about proletarian revolution, about teaching the capitalists a lesson, about—”

  “You were there, Palomo, you remember how Obregón came to our meeting and embraced us one by one—he still had two arms then—and he said to each of us, You’re right, pal. He told us what we wanted to hear.”

  “Just tricks, José Miguel. What Obregón wanted to do was to use us as allies against the peasants, against Villa and Zapata. And he got what he wanted. He convinced us the peasants were reactionaries, clerical, wore pictures of the Virgin on their hats, who knows what else, they were the past.”

  “Just tricks, Pánfilo. Carranza was a hacienda owner and hated the peasants. Zapata and Villa were right to distribute land without asking the old goat’s permission.”

  “But now Obregón has won. He always defended us, even if it was to win support against Zapata and Villa. Figure it out, comrades. Obregón won out over everyone.”

  “You mean he killed everyone.”

  “If you like. That’s how politics works.”

  “Does it have to be that way? Let’s change it, Dionisio.”

  “Obregón won, that’s reality. He won, and he’s going to stick. Mexico is at peace.”

  “Tell it to all those restless generals. They all want a piece of the government, power has yet to be distributed, Palomo, there are miracles yet to come. Let’s see how it plays out for us.”

  “Just tricks, that’s how it’ll play out for us. Tricks. Hoaxes.”

  “Comrades,” Juan Francisco ended the discussion. “What matters to us are very concrete things—the right to strike, wages, the workday, and then further victories like paid vacations, paid maternity leave, social security. That’s what’s important for us to win. Don’t lose sight of those goals, comrades. Don’t get lost in the maze of politics.”

  Laura stopped knitting, closed her eyes, and tried to imagine her husband in the dining room next door, standing up, ending the argument, telling the truth, but the intelligent truth, the possible truth: they simply had to collaborate with Obregón, with the CROM, and its leader Luis Napoleon Morones. The rain fell harder, and Laura listened harder. Juan Francisco’s comrades used the copper spittoons which were an indispensable part of every well-appointed home, of all public places, and, especially, of any room where men gathered.

  “Why don’t we women spit?”

  Then they filed out of the dining room and wordlessly said goodbye to Laura, and she would vainly try to attribute the ideas she’d heard to the faces she watched pass—this one with sunken eyes (Pánfilo?), that one with a nose as narrow as the gates of h
eaven (José Miguel?), the sunny look of one (Dionisio?), the blind stumbling of another (Palomo?), the whole group and all the details about these men, the dissimulated limping, the desire to weep for some loved one, the salty saliva, the last cold, the ancient passage of hours remembered because they never took place, youth wanting to be more than youth all at once, eyes mortgaged with blood, loves postponed, the handful of dead men, the longed-for generations, hopelessness without power, life exalted without the need for happiness, a parade of promises, crumbs on shirts, a strand of white hair on a lapel, a remnant of breakfast’s scrambled eggs on a lip, the haste to return to what had been abandoned, delay in order to avoid return—Laura saw all that as her husband’s comrades passed by.

  No one was smiling, and that alarmed her. Wasn’t Juan Francisco right? Was it she who didn’t understand anything? She wanted to give words to the faces leaving her house, saying farewell wordlessly. She was upset, actually came to feel guilty for wanting reasons where perhaps there were only dreams and desires.

  She liked President Obregón. He was astute, intelligent, even though he didn’t seem as handsome as he had in the battle photos, or as blond, young, and svelte as when he had fought with two arms; now, maimed and graying, he’d put on weight, as if he weren’t getting enough exercise or the presidential sash didn’t quite compensate for the lost hand. But as she strolled through the parks in the morning, before the cloudbursts, with the boys in the pram, Laura felt something new was happening. José Vasconcelos, an overexcited but brilliant philosopher, was the revolutionary government’s first Minister of Education, and he had turned over the walls of public buildings to artists to paint what they pleased—attacks on the clergy, the bourgeoisie, the Holy Trinity, or, rather worse, the very government that was paying for their labor. There was freedom! Laura exclaimed to herself—taking advantage of her aunt’s minding the boys to make an excursion to the National Preparatory School, where Orozco was painting, or to the National Palace, where Rivera was painting.