Los años con Laura Díaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  She had the boys sent from Xalapa. Punctilious, Santiago and Danton followed Leticia’s precise and practical instructions and took the Interoceanic train to the Buenavista station, where Laura and Juan Francisco were waiting for them. The boys’ nature, which Laura already knew, was a surprise for Juan Francisco, although it was for Laura, too, in the sense that each of them was rapidly accentuating his personal traits—Danton, clownish and bold, gave his parents two hasty kisses on the cheek and ran off to buy candy, shouting, why did Grand-mama give us money when there were no Larín chocolates or Minnie Mouse lollipops on the train, but anyway the old skinflint only gave us a few cents; then ran to a kiosk and asked for the most recent issues of his favorite magazines, Pepín and Chamaco Chico, but when he realized he didn’t have enough money, resigned himself to buying the latest copy of Los Supersabios. Juan Francisco put his hand in his pocket to pay for the magazines, but Laura stopped him. Then Danton turned his back on them and ran down the street ahead of the rest of the family.

  Santiago was different. He greeted his parents with a handshake that established an uncrossable space and kept kisses at bay. He allowed Laura to put her hand on his shoulder to guide him to the exit and wasn’t too embarrassed to let Juan Francisco carry the two small valises to the black Buick parked on the street. The two boys were noticeably uncomfortable, but since they didn’t want to attribute their discomfort to being with their parents, they kept on running their index fingers under their stiff collars and along the ties of the formal suits Doña Leticia had dressed them in: striped three-button jackets, knickers, knee-high argyle socks, coffee-colored square-toed shoes with hooks.

  Everyone was silent during the trip from the station to Avenida Sonora, Danton absorbed in his comic book, Santiago bravely watching the majestic city pass by—the recently inaugurated monument to the Revolution, which people compared to a gigantic gasoline station, Paseo de la Reforma and all the traffic circles that seemed to do the breathing for everyone, from Caballito, the equestrian statue of Charles IV of Spain at the intersection with Juárez, Bucareli and Ejido, Christopher Columbus and his impassive circle of monks and public scribes, to the proud statue of Cuauhtémoc brandishing his spear at the intersection with Insurgentes; all along the great avenue lined with trees, footpaths, bridle paths for morning riders who at this hour were slowly plodding along, and sumptuous private mansions with Parisian facades and decorations. When they left Paseo de la Reforma, they entered the elegant streets of Colonia Roma with its two story stone houses: garages at street level and reception rooms visible thanks to the white-framed balcony windows left open so the maids, with their complicated braids and blue uniforms, could air the interior rooms and shake out the carpets.

  As they went along, Santiago read the names of the streets—Niza, Génova, Amberes, Praga—until they reached the Bosque de Chapultepec—not even there did Danton raise his eyes from his comics—and thence to their home on Avenida Sonora. To Santiago, it was like a dream—the entrance to the great park of eucalyptus and pine trees, flanked by stone lions in repose and crowned by the mythic Castle where Moctezuma had his baths, from whose parapets the Boy Heroes of the Military School threw themselves rather than surrender the Alcazar to the Yankees in 1848, where all the rulers of Mexico lived, from the Habsburg emperor Maximilian to Abelardo Rodriguez, the casino godfather, to the new President, Lázaro Cárdenas, who decided that such luxury was not for him and moved, in good republican fashion, to the modest villa at the foot of the Castle, Los Pinos.

  Over the course of a second breakfast, the boys listened impassively to the new order of their lives, although the spark in Danton’s eyes silently announced that he would contest each chore with some unpredictable mischief. Santiago’s eyes refused to admit either strangeness or shock; he filled the void, in Laura’s astute reading of her son, with nostalgia for Xalapa, for Grandmother Leticia, for Aunt María de la O. Would the young Santiago have to leave things behind in order to miss them? Laura surprised herself in thinking that—as she observed her elder son’s serious face with its fine features, his chestnut hair so like that of his dead uncle, so different from Danton’s swarthy appearance, his cinnamon complexion, his thick dark eyebrows, his black hair held in check with brilliantine. The only curious detail was that Santiago the fair had black eyes, while the dark-skinned Danton had pale green eyes, almost yellow, like a cat’s.

  Laura sighed. The object of nostalgia was always the past; there was never nostalgia for the future. Even so, Santiago’s gaze lit up and went out like one of those new neon signs on Avenida Juárez: I miss what is going to come …

  They would attend the Gordon School, on Avenida Mazatlán, not far from the house. Juan Francisco would drive them in the Buick in the morning, and they would return at 5 p.m. in the orange school bus. The list of school supplies had been acquired, Eberhard pencils from Switzerland, pens with no name or national origin, meant to be dipped in desk inkwells, graph-paper notebooks for arithmetic, lined paper for essays; a national history textbook by the anticlerical Teja Zabre as if to compensate for the mathematics book by the Marist monk Anfossi; English readings, Spanish grammar, and the green books of general history by the French authors Malet and Isaac. Knapsacks. The sandwiches of beans, sardines, and chiles; the usual orange; the injunction never to buy sweets because they give you cavities …

  Laura wanted to fill her day with her new chores. But night lay in wait for her, then dawn knocked at her door, and even in the middle of the night she could not say, The darkness belongs to us.

  She reproached herself. “I can’t condemn the best of myself to the grave of memory.” But the silent solicitude of her husband—“How little I ask of you. Let me feel I’m needed”—could not calm Laura’s recurring irritation during her time alone, when the boys were at school and Juan Francisco at the union, “How easy life would be without a husband and children.” She went to Coyoacán when the Riveras came back, preceded by the black clouds of a new scandal in New York, where Diego had painted the faces of Marx and Lenin in the Rockefeller Center murals, Nelson Rockefeller asked Diego to erase the effigy of the Soviet leader, Diego refused but offered to balance Lenin’s head with Lincoln’s head, and it ended when twelve armed guards ordered the painter to stop work and handed him a check for $14,000 (“COMMUNIST PAINTER GETS RICH ON CAPITALIST DOLLARS”). The unions tried to save the mural, but the Rockefellers ordered it chiseled out of existence and thrown into the garbage. Good, said the U.S. Communist Party: Rivera’s fresco is “counterrevolutionary.” Diego and Frida returned to Mexico, he depressed, she cursing “Gringolandia.” They were all back, but there was no longer space for Laura: Diego wanted to get even with the gringos with another mural; Frida had painted a sorrowful self-portrait as an empty Tehuana dress hung amid soulless skyscrapers on the Mexican-U.S. border, Hi, Laura, how are you? come see us whenever you like, see you soon.

  Life without a husband or children. Only one irritation, like a fly that insists on landing on one’s nose again and again, chased away but tenacious: Laura knew well what life was like without Juan Francisco and the boys, and hadn’t found anything greater or better in that alternative than in her renovated existence as wife and mother—but if only Juan Francisco didn’t insist on combining (so obviously) the conviction that Laura was judging him with the obligation he felt to love her. Her husband was anchoring himself at an unmoving buoy. On the one hand, the excessive adoration he decided to show Laura to compensate for his mistakes of the past irritated her, because it was a way of asking forgiveness yet resolved itself in something quite different: “I don’t hate him, he tires me, he loves me too much, a man shouldn’t love a woman too much, there’s an intelligent balance that Juan Francisco lacks, he has to learn that there’s a limit between the need a woman has to be loved and her suspicion that she isn’t loved as much as it might seem.”

  Juan Francisco, with his terms of endearment, his courtesy toward her, his diligent paternal concern for the sons he hadn’t
seen for six years, his new obligation to explain to Laura what he’d been doing all day without ever asking her for explanations, his insinuating heavyhanded way of asking for love, touching Laura’s foot with his own under the sheets, suddenly emerging naked from the bathroom, searching like a fool for his pajamas, unaware that he was now carrying a spare tire around his waist, unaware that he’d lost his essential dark, mestizo slenderness, even making her take the initiative, speedily bringing the act to its conclusion, mechanically fulfilling his conjugal obligations …

  She resigned herself to it all, until the day when a shadow began to manifest itself, first immaterial in the traffic on the avenue, then more visible on the sidewalk across the street, finally showing itself completely a few steps behind her, as Laura made her daily journey to the Parián market. She did not want to hire a maid. The memory of the nun Gloria Soriano pained her too much. Domestic chores filled her solitary hours. The surprising thing in this discovery is that Laura, once she realized she was being followed by one of her husband’s lackeys, did not take it seriously. And that affected her more than if it had really mattered to her. Instead, for her it opened a street as narrow as the avenue where they lived was wide. She decided not to shadow him physically—as he, stupidly, was doing to her—but to use a more powerful weapon, moral shadowing.

  Lázaro Cárdenas, a general from Michoacán, ex-governor of his state and head of the official party, had been elected President of Mexico. Everyone thought he would be just one more of the puppets shamelessly manipulated by the Maximum Chief of the Revolution, General Plutarco Elías Calles. The joke was so public that during a preceding presidency, some joker had hung a sign on the door of the presidential residence at Chapultepec: THE PRESIDENT LIVES HERE. THE MAN WHO GIVES THE ORDERS LIVES ACROSS THE STREET. Then President Abelardo Rodríguez, considered yet another of the Maximum Chief’s servants, repressed strike after strike, first the telegraph workers, then the day laborers from New Lombardy and New Italy in Michoacán, farm workers of Italian background who were accustomed to the struggles being waged by Antonio Gramsci’s Communist Party, and finally the national movement of agricultural workers in Chiapas, Veracruz, Puebla, and Nuevo León: President Rodriguez ordered that the strikers be fired and sent soldiers to take their place; the courts, dominated by the executive branch, declared all these strikes “unjustified.” The army and the paramilitary thugs working for the government murdered several workers from the Italo-Mexican communities, and Abelardo Rodriguez sent the national strike leaders, who were fighting for a minimum wage, to the desolate penal colony on the Islas Maras, among them the young writer José Revueltas.

  Luis Napoleón Morones’ old CROM grew weaker and weaker, incapable of defending the workers. At the same time the star of their new leader, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, rose. Lombardo—once a Thomist philosopher and now a Marxist, a thin man with an ascetic air and sad eyes, forelock dangling over them, and a pipe in his mouth—as head of the General Confederation of Mexican Workers and Peasants created an alternative for the real workers’ struggle: workers struggling for land, good wages, collectively negotiated contracts, began to group themselves with the GCMW, and since Cárdenas had supported union struggles in Michoacán, everything was now expected to change: no longer Calles and Morones but Cárdenas and Lombardo.

  “And union independence, Juan Francisco, where is it?” Laura heard the only old comrade who still visited her husband say one night, the now beaten-down Pánfilo, who couldn’t even find a place to spit since Laura had had the hideous copper spittoons removed.

  Juan Francisco repeated something that by now was his credo: “In Mexico, things change from within, not from without.”

  “When are you going to learn?” Pánfilo answered with a sigh.

  Cárdenas was beginning to show signs of independence and Calles signs of irritation. Caught between them, Juan Francisco seemed uncertain as to which direction the workers’ movement would take and what his position in it would be. Laura noted his disquiet and asked him over and over, with an air of legitimate concern: If there’s a break between Calles and Cárdenas, which side will you be on? And he had no choice but to fall back on his old bad habit, political rhetoric: the Revolution is united, there will never be a break among its leaders. But the Revolution has already broken with many of your old ideals, Juan Francisco, when you were an anarcho-syndicalist (and the images of the Xalapa attic and the walled-up life of Armonía Aznar and her mysterious relationship with Orlando and Juan Francisco’s funeral oration all returned to her in a wave), and he would say, like a true believer repeating the credo, you have to influence things from within, try it from outside and you’ll be squashed like a bug, the battles are waged within the system.

  “You have to know how to adapt, isn’t that so?”

  “All the time. Of course. Politics is the art of compromise.”

  “Of compromise,” she repeated in a most serious tone.

  “Yes.”

  So as not to acknowledge what was happening, one had to keep one’s heart in the dark. Juan Francisco could explain that political necessity forced him into compromises with the government.

  “With all governments? With any government?”

  … She could not ask him if his conscience was condemning him. He would have wanted to admit that he wasn’t afraid of the opinions others might have but he was afraid of Laura Díaz, of being judged again by her. Then, one night, the two of them exploded again.

  “I’m sick and tired of your judging me.”

  “And I’m sick and tired of your spying on me.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’ve locked my soul in a basement.”

  “Don’t feel so sorry for yourself, you make me pity you.”

  “Don’t talk to me as if you were a saint talking to a sinner. Talk to the real me instead!”

  “It’s outrageous that you ask me for results that have nothing to do with reality.”

  “Stop imagining that I judge you.”

  “As long as it’s only you who judges me, poor little you, it really doesn’t bother me, do you think I came back so you could forgive my sins?” She bit her tongue, night tracks me, sunrise frees me, she went to the boys’ bedroom to watch them sleep, to calm down.

  Seeing them sleep.

  It was enough to watch the two little heads sunk deep in the pillows, Santiago covered up to his chin, Danton uncovered and spread-eagled, as if even in sleep their two contrary personalities revealed themselves, and Laura Daz asked herself, at that exact moment of her existence, did she have anything to teach her sons or at least the courage to ask them, what do you want to know, what can I tell you?

  Sitting there opposite the twin beds, she could only tell them that they came into this world without being consulted and thus their parents’ freedom in creating them did not save them, creatures of a heritage of rancor, needs, and ignorance that their parents, no matter how they tried, could not erase without damaging their children’s freedom. It would be up to them to fight the earthly evils they’d inherited, and yet, she, the mother, could not step back, disappear, turn into the ghost of her own descendants. She had to resist in their name without ever showing it, remain invisible at the side of her sons, not to diminish the child’s honor, the responsibility of the son who must believe in his own freedom, know that he is forging his own destiny. What was left to her if not to keep watch discreetly, to be tolerant, and to ask as well for a long time to live and a short time to suffer, like Aunts Hilda and Virginia?

  Sometimes she would spend the entire night watching them sleep, intent on accompanying her sons wherever they might go, like a very long shoreline where sea and beach are distinct but inseparable; the voyage might last only one night, but she hoped it would never end, and over the heads of her sons floated the question: How much time, how much time will God and men allow my sons on earth?

  Seeing them sleep until the sun comes up and the light touches their h
eads because she herself can touch the sun with her hands, asking herself how many sunrises she and her sons will be able to endure. For each allotment of light had a silhouette of shadow.

  Then Laura Díaz rose, disquieted by a mild vertigo, and stepped away from the beds where her sons slept, and she told herself (and almost told them)—so they would understand their own mother and not condemn her to pity first and oblivion later—that to be a mother, hated and liberated by the hatred of her sons, hated, perhaps, but fatally unforgettable, I must be active, ardent and active, but I still don’t know how, I can’t return to what I’ve already done, I want an authentic revelation, a revelation that will be an elevation, not a renunciation. How easy life would be without children or a husband! Again? This time for sure? Why not? Does the first effort at liberty use it up, a prior failure close the doors to possible happiness beyond the walls of home? Have I used up my destiny? Santiago, Danton: don’t leave me. Let me follow you wherever you go, whatever happens. I don’t want to be adored. I want to be awaited. Help me.

  12.

  Parque de la Lama: 1938

  IN 1938, the European democracies caved in to Hitler at the Munich Conference and the Nazis occupied Austria, then Bohemia; the Spanish Republic was in full retreat, falling back on all fronts; Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened, as did Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad. On Kristallnacht, Jewish synagogues, businesses, homes, and schools all over Germany were burned by SS troops; in the United States, Congress established the House Un-American Activities Committee, in France Antonin Artaud proposed a “theater of cruelty,” Orson Welles convinced everyone that Martians had invaded New Jersey, Lázaro Cárdenas was nationalizing the oil industry in Mexico, and two rival telephone companies—the Swedish Ericsson and Mexicana, the Mexican national company—simultaneously offered separate telephone services; as luck (bad) would have it, a person signed up with Ericsson could not call someone with Mexicana service and vice versa. This meant that a subscriber to one service had to turn to neighbors, friends, nearby offices, or phone booths to speak to someone with the other service, and vice versa.