Years With Laura Diaz, The

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Believe in the opportunities of freedom,” said a warm voice behind Laura, a voice that dominated the debates (profound) and conversations (flat) at the Riveras’ house. “Remember that politics is secondary to personal integrity. Without personal integrity the social life is not worth living.”

  “Jorge!” exclaimed Laura in a shock of disbelief, spinning around to see the face of a still young-looking man with thick hair and brows that were no longer black as they once had been but spattered with white.

  “No. I’m sorry to disappoint you. Basilio. Basilio Baltazar. Remember me?”

  They hugged each other with an emotion like that attending a new birth, as if they’d both in some way been reborn in that instant and, in the emotion of their meeting, could fall in love and again be the young people they had been fifteen years earlier. But now they were both accompanied, Laura Díaz by Jorge Maura, Basilio Baltazar by Pilar Méndez. And Jorge, on his island, forever accompanied by the other Mends—Raquel.

  They looked at each other with immense tenderness, unable to speak for a few moments.

  “See?” Basilio smiled behind his moist eyes. “We never escape our problems. We never stop persecuting or being persecuted.”

  “Yes, I do see,” she said in a broken voice.

  “There are some terrific people among these gringos. They’re almost all film or theater directors, writers, not to mention a few veterans of our war and the Lincoln Brigade. Remember?”

  “How could I forget, Basilio?”

  “Most of them live in Cuernavaca. Why don’t we go down one weekend and talk to them.”

  All Laura could do was kiss the cheek of her old friend the Spanish anarchist, as if she were once again kissing Jorge Maura, as if she were seeing for the first time the always hidden face of Armonía Aznar, as if from the bottom of the gulf arose the face of her adored brother, the first Santiago. Basilio was the catalyst of a past Laura missed terribly but considered lost forever.

  “I don’t think so. You make our past into a present, Basilio. Thanks.”

  Going to Cuernavaca to argue about politics, but this time with Americans instead of Spaniards or Mexican labor leaders betrayed by the Revolution, by Calles and Morones … the idea tired and depressed her as she returned that night to the family house on Avenida Sonora, now so solitary without María de la O and Santiago, both dead, Danton married and living, as he always wanted to, in Las Lomas de Chapultepec. Laura, in an aesthetic fit, had sworn she’d never set foot in his house.

  “You said you were going to change your in-laws’ taste, Danton.”

  “Just wait a while, Mama. It’s a period of adjustment, an accommodation. I have to make my father-in-law happy so I can dominate him. Don Aspirin’s half senile. Don’t worry, at least we got rid of the fountains on the terrace.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “Mama, I swear poor Magda was so completely ignorant I had to finish her toilet training.”

  “You’re as vulgar as they come.” But Laura couldn’t keep from laughing.

  “I’ve actually got her convinced that the stork will be bringing the baby.”

  “What baby?” said Laura, hugging her son.

  I’m fifty-two and I’m going to be a grandmother, she kept saying to herself on the way home from the Coyoacán party and Basilio Baltazar. She’d been forty when she met Jorge Maura. Now I live alone with Juan Francisco, but I am going to be a grandmother.

  The mere sight of Juan Francisco in bathrobe and slippers opening the door reminded her that she was, like it or not, a wife. She instantly rejected a repugnant but all too noble idea that had flashed through her mind. We only survive at home. Only those who stay at home survive. Out in the world, chasing the light, the fireflies burn up and die. That had to be what her grandfather must have thought, the old German Don Felipe Kelsen, who crossed the ocean to lock himself away in the Catemaco coffee plantation never to leave again. Was he happier than his descendants? Children shouldn’t be judged by their parents, much less the grandchildren. The idea that the generation gap has never been greater is false. The world has always been made up of generations standing on opposite sides of an abyss. It’s also made up of couples divided at times by clamorous silences, like the one that separated Grandfather Felipe from his beautiful and mutilated Doña Cosima, whose self absorbed gaze was never distracted—Laura knew from the time she was a child—from the dangerous and dashing bandit of Papantla. Seeing Juan Francisco in his robe and slippers open the door—old slippers with a hole for the big toe on his right foot to air, the chenille robe with gaudy stripes like a serape turned into a towel—she was seized with laughter thinking that her husband might be the secret child of that highwayman from the era of Benito Juárez.

  “What the devil are you laughing at?”

  “At the idea that we’re going to be grandparents, old boy,” she said, giggling hysterically.

  In some unconscious way, the news of his daughter-in-law’s pregnancy buried Juan Francisco for good. It was as if the announcement of an imminent birth demanded the sacrifice of a hasty death, so that the child could take the space now uselessly occupied by the old man; he was now sixty-nine. Well, that was an educated guess, said Laura, smiling, because no one had ever seen his birth certificate. She saw him as dead beginning the night when he opened the door of their solitary home. Which is to say, she took away the time left to him.

  Now there would be no time for a few sad caresses.

  She saw him close the door, double-lock it and slide the bolt, as if there were something worthy of being stolen in that sad, poor place.

  Now there would be no time to say that after all he’d had a happy life.

  He shuffled off to the kitchen to make the coffee that both put him to sleep and gave him the sensation of doing something useful, something he could do on his own without Laura’s help.

  Now there would be no time to change that winter smile.

  He sipped his coffee slowly, moistening the remnants of a roll in it.

  Now there would be no time to rejuvenate a soul that had become old. Not even believing in the immortality of the soul would make it conceivable that Juan Francisco’s might survive.

  He cleaned his teeth with a toothpick.

  Now there would be no time for a new and first look of love, neither sought nor foreseen yet astonishing.

  He left the kitchen and glanced at the old newspapers saved for the hot-water heater.

  Now there would be no time for the pity the old deserve even when they’ve lost love and respect.

  He crossed the room filled with the velvet-covered furniture where years ago Laura had whiled away long hours while her husband argued labor politics in the dining room.

  Now there would be no time to become indignant when results and not words were demanded of him.

  He made a half turn back to the dining room, as if he’d left something behind, a memory, a promise.

  Now there would be no time to justify himself, saying he’d joined the official party to convince those in power of the error of their ways.

  Stumbling, he grabbed the banister on the stairway.

  Now there would be no time to try to change things from within the government and the party.

  Each stair took a century.

  Now there would be no time to feel himself judged by her.

  Each stair had turned to stone.

  Now there would be no time to feel himself condemned or satisfied that it was only she who judged him, no one else.

  He managed to reach the second floor.

  Now there would be no time for his own conscience to condemn him.

  He felt disoriented. Where was the bedroom? Which door led to the bathroom?

  Now there would be no time to recover the prestige he’d accumulated over years and lost in an instant, as if nothing counted but that instant when the world turns its back on you.

  Ah yes, this was the bathroom.

  Now there would be no time to he
ar her say, What did you do today? and to answer the usual thing, You know.

  He knocked modestly at the door.

  Now there would be no time to keep an eye on her every moment during the day, to have her followed by detectives, to humiliate her a bit because he loved her too much.

  He went into the bathroom.

  Now there would be no time for her to pass from tedium and disdain to love and tenderness. No more time.

  He looked at himself in the mirror.

  Now there would be no time for the workers to love him, for him to feel loved by the workers.

  He took down his razor, the shaving soap, and brush.

  Now there would be no time to relive the historic days of the Río Blanco strikes.

  Slowly he worked up a lather with the moistened brush and the soap.

  Now there would be no time to form the Red Battalions of the Revolution again.

  He spread the lather on his cheeks, upper lip, and neck.

  Now there would be no time to revive the House of the Workers of the World.

  Slowly he shaved.

  Now there would be no time for his revolutionary deeds to be recognized, because now no one remembered anymore.

  He was in the habit of shaving at night before going to bed, so as to save time in the morning before going to work.

  Now there would be no time for them to give him his rightful place, fucking bastards, he was someone, he did things, he deserved a place.

  He finished shaving.

  Now there would be no time to admit failure.

  He dried his face with a towel.

  Now there would be no time to ask, Where did I go wrong?

  He laughed into the mirror for a long time.

  Now there would be no time to open a door to love.

  He looked at an old man he didn’t recognize, another man who was himself emerging from the depth of the mirror to meet him now.

  Now there would be no time to say I love you.

  He looked at the wrinkled cheeks, defeated chin, curiously elongated ears, the sacks under his eyes, the gray hair everywhere—on his ears, his head, his lips, like frozen hay, a weather-beaten old pine tree.

  He felt a huge desire, painful and pleasurable at the same time, to sit down and shit.

  Now there would be no time to fulfill the promise of an admirable, glorious destiny he could bequeath.

  He lowered the trousers of the striped pajamas that Danton had given him for his birthday and sat down on the toilet.

  Now there would be no time …

  He pushed hard and fell forward, his bowels emptied and his heart stopped.

  Damned weather-beaten old pine tree.

  At Juan Francisco’s wake, Laura set about forgetting her husband, erasing all the memories that weighed on her like an early tombstone on the grave of her marriage, but instead of grieving for Juan Francisco, she closed her eyes, standing next to the coffin, and thought about the pain of giving birth, thought about how her sons were born—so much pain and such an eternity between contraction and contraction for the elder son, smooth as swallowing caramel cream for the second, liquid and smooth like melted butter … but with her hand on her husband’s coffin, she decided to live the pain of childbirth, not that of death, realizing that someone else’s pain, the death of others, ends up being just that in our minds, someone else’s, neither Danton nor Santiago felt his mother’s birth pangs, for them entering the world was a cry of neither happiness nor sadness, the victory cry of the newborn, his Here I am!, while the mother was the one who suffered, and perhaps like her in the terrible traumas when Santiago was on the way, she shouted without caring whether the doctor and nurses heard her, “Damn it all! Why did I have a child? this is horrible!, why didn’t anyone tell me? I can’t bear this, I can’t bear this, just kill me, I want to die, damn brat, I hope he dies too …”

  And now Juan Francisco was dead and didn’t know it. He felt no pain at all.

  Nor did she. Which is why she preferred remembering the pain of giving birth, so that those who came to the wake—old comrades, union men, minor government functionaries, the odd deputy, and, in brutal contrast, Danton’s family and rich friends—could see in her face the traces of a shared pain, but this was false since the pain, the real pain, can be felt only by the one who feels it, the woman giving birth, not the doctor who helps her or the child being born, only the man being shot feels the bullets penetrate him, not the firing squad or the officer giving the order, only the sick person feels it, not the nurses …

  Who knows why, Laura recalled the image of the Spanish woman Pilar Méndez at the gates to Santa Fe de Palencia, shouting in the middle of the night so that her father would show her no mercy, only justice as political fanaticism conceived it, shot at sunrise for betraying the Republic and aiding the Cause. Like her, Laura wished she could shout, but not for her husband, not for her sons, for herself, remembering her own pains, banal and terrible, in giving birth, indescribable and impossible to share. They say pain destroys language. It can only be a shout, a whimper, a disembodied voice. Those who speak of pain don’t feel it. Those who possess the language of pain describe the pain of others. True pain has no words, but Laura Díaz, the night of her husband’s wake, did not want to shout.

  Her eyes still shut, she remembered other cadavers, those of the two Santiagos, Santiago Díaz Obregón, her half brother, shot in Veracruz at the age of twenty, and Santiago López-Díaz, her son, dead at the age of twenty-six in Mexico City. Two handsome dead men, equally beautiful. She dedicated her mourning to them. That night, her two Santiagos, the Elder and the Younger, gathered together the dispersion of the world spilled out in no order over the years so as to give it proper form, the form of two young, handsome bodies. But it’s one thing to be a body and another to be beautiful.

  The comrade workers wanted to lay the red flag with the hammer and sickle over Juan Francisco’s coffin. Laura refused. Symbols were superfluous. There was no need to identify her husband with a red rag that could be put to better use in a bull ring.

  The comrades walked out, offended but silent.

  The priest officiating at the wake offered to say the rosary.

  “My husband wasn’t a believer.”

  “God receives all of us in His mercy.”

  Laura Díaz pulled off the crucifix adorning the lid of the coffin and handed it to the priest.

  “My husband was anticlerical.”

  “Madam, don’t offend us. The cross is sacred.”

  “Take it. The cross is a rack of torture. Why don’t you put a little gallows on the coffin, or a guillotine. In France, Jesus Christ would have been guillotined, right?”

  The murmur of horror and disapproval that arose from the pews where Danton’s family and friends were seated satisfied Laura. She knew she’d done something unnecessary, provocative. It was a natural reaction. She couldn’t have repressed it. It gave her pleasure. It seemed, suddenly, like an act of emancipation, the beginning of something new. After all, who was she now if not a solitary woman, a widow, companionless, with no family but a distant son now captive in a world Laura Díaz found detestable?

  People began to leave, humiliated or offended. Laura exchanged glances with the only person looking at her fondly. It was Basilio Baltazar. But before they could speak to each other, a decrepit small man, shrunken like a badly washed sweater, wrapped in a cape too big for him, a tiny man with features both well defined and faded by time, with little clumps of matted hair above his ears, like frozen grass, handed Laura a letter, telling her in a voice from the depths of time, Read it, Laura, it’s about your husband …

  There was no date, but the handwriting was old-fashioned, ecclesiastical, more appropriate for noting baptisms and funerals, life’s alphas and omegas, than for communicating with another person. She read the letter that night.

  Dear Laura, may I address you that way? After all, I’ve known you since you were a child, and even though the difference in our ages is a thousand y
ears, my memory of you remains fresh. I know that your husband, Juan Francisco, died keeping the secret of his origin as if it were something shameful or disgraceful. But do you realize he died the same way, anonymously, making no noise? Could you yourself, if I were to ask you today, give an account of your husband’s life over the past twenty years? You’d find yourself in the same situation as he did. There’d be nothing to tell. Do you think the vast majority of those who come into this world have something extraordinary to tell about their lives? Are they, therefore, less important, less worthy of respect and, sometimes, of love? I write you, my dear friend, whom I’ve known since you were a girl, to ask you to stop torturing yourself thinking about what Juan Francisco López Greene was before he met and married you. Before making a name for himself as a fighter for justice in the Veracruz strikes and when the Red Battalions were created during the Revolution. That was your husband’s life. Those twenty years of glory, eloquence, fearlessness, they were his life. He had no life before or after his moment of glory, if you’ll permit me to call it that. With you, he sought the safe harbor for a tired hero. Did you give him the peace he silently begged of you? Or did you demand of him what he could no longer give? A tired hero who’d lived something no one lives twice, his moment of glory. He came from far away and from the depths of society, Laura. When I met him, he was a little boy in Macuspana, wandering around like an animal with no master, no family, stealing food here and there when bananas, which Tabasco gives freely to the hungriest of the poor, weren’t enough for him. I took him in. I dressed him. I taught him to read and write. You know well that this is common practice in Mexico. The young priest teaches a poor boy to read and write the language the boy will use against our Holy Mother Church as a man. That was the case with Benito Juárez, and that was the case with López Greene. That last name. Where did he get it, when he had neither father nor mother nor sister nor brother? “I heard it, Father …” López is a very common name in Hispanic genealogy, and Greene is a name found frequently among families in Tabasco that descend from English pirates of colonial times, when Sir Henry Morgan himself attacked the coast of the Gulf of Campeche and sacked the ports whence Mexico’s gold and silver were shipped to Spain. And Juan? Again, the commonest name in the Spanish language. But Francisco because I taught him the virtues of the most admirable saint in Christendom, the man from Assisi … Ah, my dear girl Laura, St. Francis abandoned a life of luxury and pleasure to become God’s jester. I took the opposite route, as you know. Sometimes faith falters. There would be no faith without doubt. I was young when I came to Catemaco to take the place of a beloved parish priest, you remember him, Father Jesus Morales. I’ll confess several things. I was annoyed by the aura of sanctity surrounding Father Morales. I was very young, imaginative, even perverse. If St. Francis went from sin to sanctity, I would do the same, perhaps in reverse, I’d be a perverse, sinful priest, what horrors did I not pour into your ear, Laura, defying the greatest commandment of Our Lord Jesus Christ, not to scandalize children? What greater crime than running off with the treasure of the poorest, offerings to the Holy Child of Zongolica? Believe me, Laura, I sinned to be holy. That was my project, my perverted Franciscanism, if you prefer. I was defrocked, and that’s how you found me, surviving on my stolen money as your mother’s guest, may God have her in His glory, in Xalapa. You must have said something to your husband. He remembered me. He came looking for me. He thanked me for my teaching. He knew about my sin. He confessed his own. He betrayed the nun who called herself Carmela, Sister Gloria Soriano, implicated in the assassination of President-elect Alvaro Obregón. He did it out of revolutionary conviction, he said. The policy then was to extinguish the clericalism that in Mexico had exploited the poor and supported the exploiters. He didn’t hesitate to turn her in: it was his obligation. He never thought that you, Laura—you weren’t even a believer—would take it so seriously. How strange, but how wrong. We never measure the moral consequences of our acts. We think we’re obeying the mandates of ideology, whether we’re revolutionaries, clericalists, liberals, conservatives, Cristeros, and what slips through our fingers is the precious liquid we call, for lack of a better word, “the soul.” Your brutal reaction to his betrayal of Gloria Soriano at first disconcerted Juan Francisco and then depressed him. It was like the tombstone over his career. He was finished. He did ridiculous things, like hiring a detective to spy on you. He repented of his silliness, I assure you. But once a priest always a priest, you know that not even if they cut off my fingertips I could never give up hearing confessions and absolving people of their sins. Laura: Juan Francisco asked me to forgive his betrayal of Gloria Soriano. It was his way of thanking me for having taken in a barefoot, ignorant boy and educated him sixty-five years ago, just imagine. But he did something else. He returned the treasure of the Holy Child of Zongolica. One afternoon, as they came into the church for vespers, the townspeople found the jewelry, the offerings, everything they’d given and saved, back in its proper place. You never knew, because Catemaco news never leaves Catemaco. But the bedazzled town attributed it to a miracle wrought by the Holy Child, capable of re-creating His own treasure and returning it to where it belonged. It was as if He’d said, If I made you wait it was so you would feel the absence of my offerings and rejoice even more when you recovered them. How did you pay for all that? I asked Juan Francisco. With contributions from the workers, he confessed. Did they know? No, I told them it was for victims of an epidemic after the Usumacinta River flooded. No one ever kept any accounts. Laura, I hope you’ll return to your hometown to see how beautiful the altar is thanks to Juan Francisco. Laura, forgive men who have nothing more to give than what they carry within them. Sometimes the well runs dry. As with me, I’m. running out of communions. I don’t think we’ll ever see each other again. I don’t want us to see each other again. It was very hard for me to appear today before you at the funeral parlor. How good it was you didn’t recognize me. Damn, I don’t even recognize myself!