Los años con Laura Díaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  One night, when Santiago fell asleep next to his recently acquired easel—this one a gift from Diego Rivera—Laura, who was allowed to watch him paint, covered him with a blanket and cushioned his head as best she could, very softly caressing his unfurrowed brow. Leaving his room, she heard laughter and whispering in her bedroom. She walked in without knocking and found Juan Francisco and Danton on the floor, sitting with their legs crossed, studying a spread-out map of the state of Tabasco.

  “Excuse me,” interrupted Laura. “It’s late, and you have school tomorrow, Danton.”

  The boy laughed. “My best school is right here with my dad.”

  They’d been drinking. The bottle of Potrero rum was half empty, and Juan Francisco’s alcoholic heaviness kept him from raising the hand he’d stretched out over the surface of his home state.

  “Off to bed now, my fine young gentleman.”

  “Oh, what a pain. We were having so much fun.”

  “But, son, tomorrow you won’t be able to hold your head up if you don’t get some sleep.”

  “Fun, son, head, dead,” rhymed Danton as he marched off.

  Laura stared hard at her husband and the map.

  “What place is that right under your finger?” Laura smiled. “Let me see. Macuspana. Was that just an accident, or does that mean something to you?”

  “It’s a place hidden in the forest.”

  “That much I can imagine. What’s it mean to you?”

  “Elzevir Almonte.”

  Laura couldn’t speak. Like an arrow, her mind flew back to the figure of the priest from Puebla who appeared one day in Catemaco to sow intolerance, impose ridiculous moral restrictions, disturb innocence in the confessional, and disappear another fine day with the offerings to the Holy Child of Zongolica.

  “Elzevir Almonte,” repeated Laura in a trance, remembering the priest’s question that day in confession: Would you like to see your father’s sex, child?

  “He took refuge in Tabasco. He passed himself off as a layman, of course, and no one knew where he got his money. He would go to Villahermosa once a month and the next, day pay off all his debts in one shot. The day my mother died there was no priest in the entire zone. I ran everywhere shouting, My mother wants to confess, wants to go to heaven, isn’t there a padre to bless her? It was then Almonte revealed he was a priest and gave my mother the last rites. I’ll never forget the expression of peace on my poor old mother’s face. She died thanking me for sending her to heaven. Why did you hide out here? I asked Father Elzevir. He told me, and I told him, it’s time you redeemed yourself. I brought him to the Rio Blanco strike. He attended the workers left wounded by the rural police. The army had killed two hundred of them. Almonte blessed each and every one. They couldn’t stop him even if they were in a hurry to load the corpses onto open cars and dump them into the sea at Veracruz. But Father Elzevir was indefatigable. He got together with Margarito Ramirez, a brave worker who set fire to the company store. Then he became an outlaw on two fronts. The Church was hunting him down because of his robbery in Catemaco, the government because of his rebellion at Rio Blanco. I ended up asking myself, What good are these priests? Everything Father Elzevir did he could have done without the Church. My mother was going to die with or without a blessing. Porfirio Díaz’s army killed the Rio Blanco workers and threw them into the sea with or without a priest’s blessing, and Margarita Ramírez had no need of the priest to set fire to the store. In all good faith, I asked myself what the hell the purpose of the Church was. As if to confirm my doubts, Elzevir showed what he was made of. He went to Veracruz, and declared that everything that happened at Rio Blanco was an ‘anarchist conspiracy’ and appeared in the newspapers alongside the U.S. consul congratulating the government for its ‘decisive action.’ He would have done anything to get a pardon for his robbery and for running away from Catemaco. He had betrayal in his veins. He used me when he thought we were going to win, and he betrayed us as soon as we lost. He didn’t know we’d win in the long run. I came to despise him and acquired a profound hatred for the Church. That explains why I approved the persecution unleashed by Calles and why I turned in the nun Soriano. They’re a plague, and we’ve got to be implacable with them.”

  “You don’t owe them anything?”

  “I do owe Elzevir Almonte something. He told me all about your family. He described you as the most beautiful girl in Veracruz. I think he desired you. He told me how you’d make your confession with him. He even aroused me. I decided to meet you, Laura. I went to Xalapa to meet you.”

  Juan Francisco carefully folded the map. He was already in his pajamas and went to bed without another word.

  Laura couldn’t sleep. She was thinking hard about the immense impunity a reputation based on old sentiments can give one, as if, having drunk life’s hemlock, there is nothing left but to sit back and wait for death. Do we have to suffer in order to be someone? Do we receive it or seek it out? Perhaps Juan Francisco, without realizing, would have taken the story of Father Almonte—whom she’d thought of as a refugee, more a shadow than a man, in Mutti Leticia’s boardinghouse in Xalapa—as more a pain than a sin. Who knows what deep religious roots each individual and each family had in Mexico? Maybe rebelling against religion was a way of being religious. And the Revolution itself, with its national ceremonies, its civil saints and its warrior martyrs: wasn’t it a parallel, lay church—just as confident that it was the depository and dispenser of health as was the Apostolic and Holy Roman Church that had educated, protected, and exploited Mexicans all at the same time since the Conquest? But in the end none of that explained or justified betraying a woman who’d been granted asylum in a home, her home, the home of Laura Daz.

  Juan Francisco was unforgivable. He would die—Laura closed her eyes to fall asleep—without his wife’s forgiveness. That night, she felt herself to be more the sister of Gloria Soriano than the wife of Juan Francisco López Greene. More the sister than the wife, more the sis …

  The fact is—she went on caviling when morning came—she didn’t want to attribute the change in her husband’s life, from energetic and generous labor tribune in the Revolution to second-rate politico and functionary, merely and simply to the need for survival. Perhaps the game that father and son were playing with the map held the key to Juan Francisco, beyond the poor saga of Father Almonte, beyond Danton, who could be very secretive or very much a chatterbox, even a braggart, if that suited his self-esteem, reputation, and convenience. No, she was not going to disguise sympathies and differences in this house; here people would speak the truth from now on, just as she did, giving an example for them all. She’d confessed before her family and, instead of losing respect, had won it.

  That weekend she said exactly that to Danton. “I was very frank, son.”

  “You confess before a husband who’s impotent, one son who’s gay, another who’s drunk, and an aunt born in a whorehouse. Wow, what bravery!”

  She’d slapped him once. She’d sworn never to do it again.

  “What do you want me to tell you about my father? If you slept with him, you could find out all his secrets. Be braver, Mama. I’m telling you the truth.”

  “You’re a miserable little worm.”

  “No, I’m hoping to graduate and be a big worm, just you wait and see. Just as Kiko Mendive says in his song: guachachacharachá!” He improvised a little dance step, straightened his blue-and-yellow-striped tie, and said, “Don’t worry, Mama, as far as the world is concerned, every man for himself, my brother and I can take care of ourselves. We’re okay. We’re not going to be a burden to you.”

  Laura hid her doubts. Danton was going to need all the help in the world, and since the world helps no one for free, he would have to pay. A feeling of profound revulsion toward her younger son flowed over her. She asked herself the useless questions: Where does that come from? What is there in Juan Francisco’s blood? Because in mine …

  Santiago entered a febrile stage in his life. He neglected h
is job with Rivera at the National Palace and transformed his bedroom into a studio reeking aggressively of oil paints and turpentine. Entering his space was like stepping into a savage forest of fir trees, pines, larches, and terebinths. The walls were smeared as if they were a concave extension of the canvases, the bed was covered by a sheet hiding the prostrate body of another Santiago, who slept while his twin the artist painted. The window was darkened by a flight of birds attracted to a rendezvous as irresistible as the call to the south during the autumn equinox, and Santiago recited aloud as he painted, himself attracted by a kind of southern gravity:

  a branch was born like an island,

  a leaf was shaped like a sword,

  a flower was lightning and medusa,

  a cluster rounded off its resume,

  a root descended into the darkness.

  It was the twilight of the iguana.

  Then he’d say disconnected things while he painted: “All artists are tame animals; I’m a wild animal.” And it was true. He was a man with a head of long hair and a boyish, scattered beard and a high, clear, fevered brow and eyes filled with a love so intense they frightened Laura, who was finding a perfectly new being in her son, on him “the initials of the earth were inscribed,” because Santiago her son was the “young warrior of darkness and copper” in the Canto General, by the greatest poet in the Americas, Pablo Neruda, which had just been published in Mexico. Mother and son read it together, and she remembered the nights of fire in Madrid that Jorge Maura had evoked, Neruda on a roof in flames under the bombs of fascist planes, in a European world returned to the elemental ode of our America in perpetual destruction and re-creation, “a thousand years of air, months, weeks of air,” “the high place of the human aurora: the tallest vessel that contained the silence of a life of stone after so many lives.” Those words fed the life and work of her son.

  She wanted to be just. Her two sons had already burst into extremes, both Santiago and Danton were taking shape in places of the dawn, and they were both “tall vessels” for the promising silence of two nascent lives. Until then, she’d believed in people, older than she or her contemporaries, as intelligible beings. Her sons were, prodigiously, adventurously, mysteries. She asked herself if at any moment in the years with Laura Daz she herself had been as indecipherable for her parents as her sons seemed to her now. She vainly sought an explanation from those who could understand her—María de la O , who certainly had lived on the extreme edge of life, the frontier of abandonment that had no night or day, or her own husband, Juan Fancisco, about whom she knew only a legend, first, and then a spoiled myth, and finally an old rancor, cohabiting with a resignation she’d learned to accept.

  Despite everything, the alliances between parents and sons became stronger in a natural way; in every home there are gravitational fields as strong as those of the stars—which don’t fall, Maura explained to her once, precisely because some attract others, lean on each other, maintain their integrity despite the tenacious, irresistible force of a universe that is permanently expanding, from beginning (if it really had a beginning) to end (if it really will have an end).

  “Gravity doesn’t mean falling, as is commonly thought, Laura. It’s attraction. Attraction not only unites us but makes us bigger.”

  Laura and Santiago gave each other mutual support. The son’s artistic project found an echo in the mother’s moral frankness, and Laura’s return to her frustrated marriage was completely justified thanks to her creative union with her son. Santiago saw in his mother a decision to be free that corresponded to his own impulse to paint. The union between Juan Francisco and Danton, on the other hand, was based first on a certain masculine pride on the father’s part—this was the playboy, tough-guy son who was always in love, just like the heroes of the wildly popular Jorge Negrete movies the two went to see together in downtown theaters: the recently opened Chinese Palace on Iturbide Street, a mausoleum of papier-mâché pagodas, smiling Buddhas, and starry heavens (sine qua non for a “movie cathedral” of the time) the Alameda and the Colonial, with their viceregal, baroque references, the Lindavista and the Lido, with their Hollywood pretensions, “streamlined,” as society ladies said of their outfits, their cars, and their kitchens. The father loved inviting his son out for a strong dose of all those challenges to honor, displays of horseback-riding skill, barroom brawls, and serenades to saintly girlfriends. Both of them melted, gaping at Gloria Marín’s liquid eyes—she’d just prayed to the Virgin that her man might show up. Because a charro from Jalisco, even if he thought he was conquering the woman, was always the one who was conquered, thanks to the womanly arts, suffering on the gallows of an all-devouring virginity from a legion of Guadalajara maidens named Esther Fernández, María Luisa Zea, or Consuelito Frank.

  Danton knew his father would enjoy his tales of bars, challenges, and serenades which, at the suburban level, reenacted the movie deeds of the Singing Cowboy. In school, he was punished for such escapades. Juan Francisco celebrated them, however, and the son gave thanks, wondering whether his father was nostalgic for the adventures of his own youth or if, thanks to the son, he was enjoying for the first time the youth he had missed. Juan Francisco never spoke of his intimate past. If Laura was betting that her husband would reveal the secrets of his origin to their younger son, she was mistaken. There was a sealed zone in López Greene’s life story, the very awakening of his personality: had he always been the attractive, eloquent, brave leader she met in the Xalapa Casino when she was twenty-one, or was there something before and behind the glory, a blank space that would explain the silent, indifferent, and fearful man who now lived with her?

  Juan Francisco taught the son he coddled about the glorious history of the workers movement against the dictatorship of Porfirio Daz. After 1867, when Maximilian’s empire fell, Benito Juárez found himself face to face, right here in Mexico City, with well-organized groups of anarchists who had secretly come in with the Hungarian, Austrian, Czech, and French troops who supported the Habsburg archduke. They stayed here when the French withdrew and Juárez had Maximilian shot. Those anarchists had grouped artisans into Resistance Societies. In 1870 the Grand Circle of Mexican Workers was constituted, then in 1876 a secret Bakunin group, The Social, celebrated the first general workers congress in the Mexican Republic.

  “So you see, my boy, the Mexican workers movement wasn’t born yesterday, even though it had to struggle against ancient colonial prejudices. There was an anarchist delegate, Soledad Soria. They tried to nullify her membership because the presence of a woman violated tradition, they said. The Congress grew to have eighty thousand members, just imagine. Something to be proud of. It was logical that President Díaz began to repress them, especially in the terrible putting down of miners in Cananea. Don Porfirio began his repression there because the American groups that dominated the copper company had sent in almost a hundred armed men from Arizona, rangers, to protect American property. It’s always the same old song from the gringos. They invade a country to protect life and property. The miners also wanted the same old thing, an eight-hour day, wages, housing, schools. They, too, wanted life and property. They were massacred. But it was there that the Díaz dictatorship cracked for good. They didn’t calculate that a single crack can bring down an entire building.”

  Juan Francisco was delighted to have an attentive audience, his own son, for whom he could rehearse those heroic stories of the Mexican workers movement, culminating in the textile strike at Rio Blanco in 1907, where Don Porfirio’s Finance Minister, Yves Limantour, supported the French owners and planned to prohibit uncensored books, require passports to enter and leave the factory, as if it were a foreign country, and note in company documents the rebellious history of each worker.

  “Once again it was a woman, Margarita Romero by name, who led the march to the company store and set it on fire. The army came in and shot two hundred workers. The troops set up their garrison in Veracruz, and it was then that I came to organized the resistance.”


  “What did you do before, Papa?”

  “I think my story begins with the Revolution. Before that, I have no biography, my boy.”

  He brought Danton to the offices of the CTM, to a cubicle where he received telephone calls, which always ended with his saying “yes, sir,” “just as you say,” and “an order is an order, sir,” before he went off to Congress to communicate to the labor deputies the orders of the President and Secretary of State.

  That’s how he spent the day. But en route from the union offices to the Chamber and then back, Danton saw a world he didn’t like. It all seemed a circus of complicities, a minuet of agreements dictated from above by the real powers and repeated below mechanically in Congress and the unions, without argument or doubt but in an interminable circle of hugs, pats on the back, secrets whispered into ears, envelopes with official seals, occasional bursts of laughter, vulgar horseplay that had the obvious purpose of salvaging the leaders’ and deputies’ ill-treated masculinity, constant dates for grand banquets that might end at midnight in the House of the Lady Bandit, winks of “you know what I mean” in matters of sex and money, and Juan Francisco circulating among all this.

  “It’s orders …”

  “It’s convenient …”

  “Of course they’re communal lands, but the beachfront hotels will give jobs to the whole community …”

  “The hospital, the school, the highway—these will all integrate your region better, Congressman, especially the highway, which will run right next to your property …”

  “Well, yes, I do know it’s his lady’s whim, but let’s give in. What do we have to lose? The Secretary will be grateful to us for the rest of his life …”

  “No, there’s an interest higher up that wants to stop this strike. It’s over, understand? Everything can be achieved through laws and conciliation, without fights. You have to realize, Mr. Congressman, that the government’s raison d’être is to ensure stability and social peace in Mexico. That, today, is what revolutionary means.”