The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  At the port, father and son lived in adjoining rooms in a boarding house, Santiago in the bedroom so he could study and write, Fernando in the living room, as if in free time between business appointments. Each one had his washbasin and his mirror for his personal grooming. The public bath was two streets away. A black woman with cloudlike hair took care of the chamber pots. They took their meals at the boardinghouse.

  Now everything changed. The president’s residence above the bank had all the comforts-a big living room with a view of the docks, a wicker sofa because it was cooler, tables of varnished wood with marble tops, rockers, bibelots, electric lights as well as old candelabras, commodes with vitrines that displayed all sorts of Dresden figurines-licentious courtiers, daydreaming shepherdesses-and a pair of typical genre paintings. In the first, a little rascal teases a sleeping dog with a stick; in the second the dog bites the calf of a boy who can’t manage to jump over the wall and falls back bawling…

  “Let sleeping dogs lie,” Mr. Díaz would invariably say in English whenever he looked, even out of the corner of his eye, at the paintings.

  The dining room: with a table big enough to seat twelve and, once again, vitrines, these filled with china hand-decorated with scenes from the Napoleonic Wars, some of them edged with gold reliefs in the form of garlands.

  A sort of antechamber or pantry, as Fernando called it, again in English: this connected the dining room and the kitchen redolent with herbs, stews, and tropical fruits that dripped with juice when cut in half, a kitchen of braziers and griddles, where the fire under the skillets and pots required untiring hands waving straw fans to keep it alive. Nothing satisfied Doña Leticia more than going from one brick-and-iron oven to the next, steadily fanning the embers to keep the broths, the rice, the sauces bubbling as she stirred them, while the Indian women from the Zongolica mountains made tortillas and the little black man Zampaya watered the flowerpots in the corridors, muttering a hymn to himself:

  Black Zampayita’s dance,

  you can see it in a glance,

  will surely cure your every pain,

  even help you weight to gain.

  Sometimes, little Laura, with her head in her mother’s lap, would listen delightedly, for the thousandth time, to the story of how her parents met at the Candlemas festival in Tlacotalpan, a doll-house-sized village where on February 2 everyone, even the old-timers, would come at the sound of clarinets and guitars to dance on wooden floors in the plazas next to the Papaloapan River, along which passes the Virgin, from boat to boat, while all the neighbors bet on whether the Mother of God has the same hairdo as last year, hair that once belonged to Dulce María Estévez, or whether it was the hair given to her, at great sacrifice, by María Elena Muñoz. After all, every year the Virgin was supposed to have a fresh new hairdo, and it was a great honor for decent young ladies to sacrifice their hair to St. Mary.

  Rows of men on horseback take off their hats when the Virgin passes, but the Veracruz widower Don Fernando Díaz, now thirty-three years old, has eyes only for the tall, slender, extremely refined Miss Leticia Kelsen (ask, and anyone will tell you), dressed in a stiff, white, parchmentlike fabric and barefoot, at the age of sixteen, not because she lacks shoes but because (as she explained to Fernando when he offered her his arm so she wouldn’t slip in the mud along the riverbank) in Tlacotalpan the greatest pleasure is to walk barefoot on grassy streets. Did he know any other city with grass growing in the streets? No, laughed Fernando, and he himself, to the glee and shock of the citizens of Tlacotalpan, took off his boots with complicated hooks and eyes and his red-and-white-striped socks that sent Miss Leticia into paroxysms of laughter.

  “They look like clown socks!”

  He blushed and blamed himself for having done something so alien to his regular, measured habits. She fell in love with him right on the spot, because he took off his shoes and turned as red as the stripes on his socks.

  “What happened next, what happened next?” asked Laura, who knew the story by heart.

  “No one can describe that town, you have to see it,” added her father.

  “What’s it like, what’s it like?”

  “Like a toy,” Doña Leticia went on. “All the houses are one story high, all even, but each one is painted a different color.”

  “Blue, pink, green, red, orange, white, yellow, violet…” enumerated the child.

  “The most beautiful walls in the world,” concluded her father, lighting up a cigar.

  “A little toy village…”

  Now that they had the big house in the port of Veracruz, the Kelsen sisters came to visit, and Don Fernando would tease them: Weren’t you three going to get married as soon as Leticia, Laura, and I got back together?

  “And who would take care of María de la O?”

  “They’ve always got an excuse,” laughed Don Fernando.

  “That’s the absolute truth,” María de la O agreed with him. “I’ll stay and take care of my father. Hilda and Virginia can go and get married whenever they like.”

  “I don’t need a husband,” exclaimed Virginia the writer, laughing… “Je suis la belle ténébreuse… I don’t need anyone to admire me.”

  Hilda the pianist interrupted the laughing banter, putting an end to the subject with words no one understood: “Everything is hidden and lies in wait for us.”

  Fernando glanced at Leticia, Leticia at Laura, and the girl copied the whitest aunt, moving her hands as if playing the piano, until Aunt Virginia gave her a sharp crack on the head and Laura held in her rage and her tears.

  The visit of the aunts was an occasion to invite in specimens of Veracruz society. Once it happened that a group had gathered and Aunt María de la O came in late, and a lady said to her: “Girl, how good you’ve come. Fan me for a while, please. Don’t be a lazy darky now, it’s so hot…”

  Laughter ceased instantly. María de la O didn’t move. Laura rose, took her arm, and led her to an armchair.

  “Sit here, Auntie, I’ll be happy to fan the lady first and then you, my dear.”

  Laura Díaz thinks something changed forever in her life one night when she was awakened by a harsh moan in her brother Santiago’s bedroom, which was next door to hers. She was frightened, but she did not run on tiptoe into the hall and to the boy’s door until she heard the painful groaning again. Then she went in without knocking, and Santiago’s face of pain in bed combined with an incredible, unique greeting in his eyes, gratitude for her presence, even if his words contradicted his looks: Laura, don’t make any noise, go back to your room, don’t wake up anyone.

  The arm of his shirt was ripped open from the shoulder down, and with his right hand he was squeezing his left forearm. Could the little girl help him in any way?

  “No. Yes. Go back to bed and don’t say a word to anyone. Swear. I can take care of myself.”

  Laura made the sign of the cross. For the first time, someone needed her, even if he didn’t say so, it was not she who was asking for something, she was being asked for something, with words that said “no” but meant “yes, Laura, help me.”

  From that night on, they went out every Saturday to stroll along the seawall. They walked hand in hand, and Laura felt Santiago’s hand was rigid, tense, while the wound on his arm healed. It was their secret, and he knew he was counting on her and she felt newly proud because of this. Also, in this contact with her brother Laura felt for the first time that she belonged to Veracruz, that the sea and the sky met here in a single vibrant bay, sky and sea together, and blowing hard so that behind Veracruz the plain vibrated, too, luminous and clean-swept until it faded into the forest. To him she could tell the stories about Catemaco. He would believe that a woman of stone standing in the middle of the forest was a statue, not a tree.

  “Of course. It’s a figure made by the Zapotal culture. Didn’t your grandfather know that?”

  Laura shook her head, no, Grandfather did not know everything, she now realized, and the girl’s curls shook, dark and scente
d with soap.

  “My father was right when he said that Santiago’s got the lion’s share of the family’s intelligence and the rest of us have leftovers.”

  Santiago apologized for laughing, saying that Laura knew more than he did about trees, flowers, nature. About all that he knew northing, he knew only that he wanted to disappear one day, like that, to become forest, to be transformed into one of those trees the girl knew so well, the palo rojo, the araucaria, the trueno with its perfect yellow flowers, the laurel…

  “No, that’s a bad one.”

  “But it’s pretty.”

  “It destroys everything, eats everything up.”

  “And the ceiba.”

  “No, not the ceiba either. The branches fill up with starlings and they shit on everything.”

  Laughing to die, Santiago went on with the fig tree, the purple iris, the tulip, and she, yes, those, yes, Santiago, laughing now not like a girl, he said to himself in surprise, laughing like a woman, like something else who was no longer the little girl Laura with dark curls and the scent of soap. With Santiago she felt that until now she’d been just like Li Po, the Chinese doll. Now everything was going to be different.

  “No, you can’t hug the ceiba. Daggers are born from its body.”

  She glanced at her brother’s wounded arm, but said nothing.

  He began to wait for her every Saturday at the door of the house they shared, as if he’d come from somewhere else, and brought her a present-a little bouquet of flowers, a conch to hear the sound of the sea, a starfish, a postcard, a paper boat-while Leticia, watching nervously from the roof terrace where she personally was hanging out the wash (as in Catemaco; she adored the coolness of freshly washed sheets against the body), saw the couple stroll away, not knowing that her husband, Fernando, was doing the same from the living-room balcony.

  Laura received something more on those strolls than seashells, flowers, and starfish. Her half brother spoke to her as if she were older, more than the indecisive twelve she was, as if she were nineteen or twenty or even older. Did he need to blow off steam with someone, or did he really take her seriously? In any case did he think she could understand everything he was telling her? For Laura, it was marvelous enough that he took her for a walk, that he brought her things-not the little gifts but the things he carried within himself, the things he told her, what his company gave her.

  One afternoon when he didn’t appear for their rendezvous, she stood there, leaning against the building wall (whose lower floors were the bank offices) and feeling so unprotected in the siesta-hour city that she was on the verge of running back to her room, but that seemed like a desertion, a cowardly act (a concept she didn’t fully understand although from then on she knew the feeling), and she thought it would be better to get lost in the tropical forest, where she could hide and grow up alone, in her own time, without this boy who was so handsome and intelligent who was sweeping her along all too quickly to an age that was not yet her own…

  She started walking, and when she turned the corner she found Santiago leaning against a different wall. They laughed. They kissed. They’d made a mistake. They forgave each other.

  “I was just thinking that out at the lake it would be I who would bring you to see things.”

  “Without you, I’d be lost in the forest, Laura. I’m from here, from the city, from the port. Nature frightens me.”

  She asked why without saying anything.

  “It will outlast you. And me.”

  They walked to a certain spot by the docks, where he stopped, so immersed in thought that she became afraid for him, just as she’d become afraid when she heard him say that he sometimes wanted to go into the forest she loved so well and get lost there, never come out, never see a human face again.

  “What do they expect of me, Laura?”

  “Everyone says you’re super-smart, that you write and talk beautifully. Father is always saying you have promise.”

  “He’s a good man. But he’s just expressing fond hopes. One day I’ll show you what I write.”

  “I can’t wait!”

  “It isn’t great. It’s correct. It’s competent.”

  “Isn’t that enough, Santiago?”

  “No, not at all. Look at it this way: if there’s one thing I hate it’s to be one of the herd. That’s what Father is, excuse me for saying so, a good little lamb from the professional herd. What you can’t be is part of an artistic herd, just one more artist or one more writer. That would kill me, Laura, I’d rather be no one than be mediocre.”

  “You aren’t, Santiago. Don’t say things like that. You’re the best, I swear it.”

  “And you’re the prettiest, I’m telling you.”

  “Oh, Santiago, don’t always try to be the best of the first. Wouldn’t you be better off as the best of the second?”

  He pinched her cheek, and they laughed again, but they returned home in silence. Their parents didn’t have the nerve to say anything because for Fernando it was evil to assume sin where there is none, the way the priest Elzevir did in Catemaco, who succeeded only in ruining people with imagined guilt, and because for Leticia-I know I don’t really know my son, for me that boy is a mystery, but you do know everything about Laura and trust her, isn’t that so?

  He walked her back to that same spot on the docks the next Saturday, and told her to look at the rails, at the freight cars that came right up here loaded with bodies-the Rio Blanco workers murdered by order of Don Porfirio for going on strike and sticking to it so bravely, brought right here and tossed into the sea, the dictator stays in power only by means of blood, the rebel Yaqui Indians shackled and taken out to sea near Sonora and thrown overboard, the Cananea miners shot on his orders in a place called the National Valley, hundreds of workers enslaved right here in Veracruz, the liberals locked up in the Ulúa fort, followers of Madero and the Flores Magón brothers, anarcho-syndicalists like the Spanish relatives of my mother, who came from the Canary Islands, Laura, revolutionaries. Laura, revolutionaries are people who are asking for something very simple for Mexico, democracy, elections, land, education, jobs, no reelection of the incumbent president. Don Porfirio Díaz has been in power for thirty years.

  “I apologize, Laura. I can’t even spare a twelve-year-old girl my speeches.”

  Revolutionaries. That night the word echoed in Laura Díaz’s head, and again the next, and the night after that. She’d never heard it, and when she went back to the coffee plantation on a visit with her mother, she asked her grandfather what it meant and the aged face of the socialist Felipe Kelsen clouded over for an instant. What is a revolutionary?

  “It’s an illusion people should give up at the age of thirty.”

  “Hmm. Santiago is only now turning twenty.”

  “That’s just it. Tell your brother to hurry up.”

  Don Felipe was playing chess in the patio of the country house with an Englishman wearing filthy white gloves. His granddaughter’s question caused him to lose a bishop and be castled. The old German said nothing more on the subject, but the Englishman persevered. “Another revolution? Why? Surely they’re all dead.”

  “As long as you’re at it, Sir Richard, you might wish for no more wars, because if one should come, you’re going to see more dead.” Don Felipe was trying to shift Laura’s attention to the Englishman in gloves and to distract him from the game.

  “And besides, with you a German and me British, well, what is there to say? Fraternal enemies!”

  At that, as Don Felipe protested he was no longer German but Mexican, he allowed his king to be cornered. The Englishman shouted checkmate. Just four years later, Don Felipe and Don Ricardo stopped speaking. Each, deprived of his chess partner, died of boredom and sadness. The cannons at Ypres blasted away, and the trenches witnessed the slaughter of young English and German soldiers. Only then did Grandfather Felipe reveal something to his daughters and his granddaughter.

  “An incredible thing. He wore those white gloves because he
had cut off the tips of his own fingers to purge himself of guilt. In India, the English cut off the fingertips of cotton weavers so as to keep them from competing with the cotton factories in Manchester. There are no people crueler than the English.”

  “La pérfida Albión,” Aunt Virginia said in Spanish, then insisting, “Perfidious Albion.”

  “And what about the Germans, Grandfather?”

  “Well, my dear. There are no people more savage than Europeans. Wait and see. All of them.”

  “Über alles,” Virginia sang under her breath, breaking her father’s rule.

  Laura would see nothing. Nothing more than the body of her brother Santiago Díaz, summarily executed by firing squad during November 1910 for conspiracy against the federal government and for being linked to other Veracruz plotters-liberals, syndicalists, and pro-Madero men like the brothers Carmen and Aquiles Serdán, who that same month were shot in Puebla.

  It did not occur to Don Fernando Díaz, during the wake for his son, with his bullet-pierced body in the living room above the bank, that the serenity of the young man in a white suit, his face paler than usual but his features intact, and with the wounds in his chest, might be disturbed one more time by police intervention.

  “This is an official building.”

  “But, sir, this is my house. It’s the house of my dead son. I demand respect.”

  “Wakes for rebels are held in the cemetery. All right, then, everybody out.”

  “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.”