The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  Love for everyone in the family, including Santiago, was happy, warm, and chaste. Now, for the first time, a man excited her in another way. Was this man real or was he a lie? Would he satisfy her, or was Laura risking sexual initiation with a man who wasn’t worth her while, who wasn’t for her, who was only a phantom, an extension of her brother, a deceiver, handsome, attractive, tempting, lying in ambush, diabolical, right at hand, comfortable, waiting for her in her own house, under her parents’ roof?

  Zampaya had supplied the key to the mystery, perhaps, without knowing it, when he drove the three of them-Laura, Elizabeth, and Mrs. Garc a-Dupont-back to Xalapa on the night of the ball.

  “Did your ladyships see the fig tree at the entrance to the cage?” asked the black man.

  “What cage?” replied Mrs. Garc a-Dupont. “It’s the most elegant hacienda in the district, you ignoramus. The ball of the year.”

  “The best balls take place in the street, ma’am, begging your pardon.”

  “That’s your opinion,” sighed the lady.

  “You didn’t get cold waiting outside, now, did you, Zampaya?” asked the solicitous Laura.

  “No, child. I stood there looking at the fig tree. I remembered the story of Santo Felipe de Jesus. He was a proud, spoiled boy, like some of those I saw tonight. He was living in a house with a barren fig tree. His nanny would say, The day little Felipe becomes a saint, the fig tree will flower.”

  “Why are you going on like this about the saints, darky?” The lady tried to cut him off. “San Felipe went to the Orient to convert the Japanese, who vilely crucified him. Now he is a saint, don’t you know that?”

  “It’s what his nanny would say, begging your pardon, ma’am. The day Felipe was killed, the fig tree flowered.”

  “Well, this one is barren.” Elizabeth laughed roguishly.

  “Santiago’s strength was that he never needed anyone,” Orlando had told Laura on the San Cayetano terrace. “That’s why we were always at his feet.”

  A month later, they say Armon a Aznar’s body was found in the attic. They say it was found when the bank employee came to deliver her monthly check before Zampaya left her daily food tray at the door. She’d been dead for less than two days. There was still no stench.

  “Everything is hidden and lies in wait for us.” Laura repeated her Aunt Hilda’s mysterious and habitual phrase. She said it to her Chinese doll, Li Po, comfortable among the pillows. And she herself, Laura D az, decided to save the memory of her first ball, imagining herself svelte and transparent, so transparent that her gown was her body, there was nothing under the dress, and Laura whirled, floated in a waltz of liquid elegance, until she, thankful, was covered by the veil of sleep.

  5.

  Xalapa: 1920

  “YOU WERE WRONG, ORLANDO. Not here. Find another way for us to meet. Use your imagination. Don’t mock my family or make me hate myself.”

  Laura resumed family life, which had been injured by the death of her grandfather and by her father’s broken health. As for the death of Mrs. Aznar and being seduced by Orlando, Laura expelled both not from memory but from recollection; she never referred to either of them again, never mentioned them to anyone, never mentioned them to herself. She was not to recollect them, no matter how hard her memory may have worked to retain them, forever, under lock and key, in the vault of the past from which nothing was to be removed. To add “Orlando Ximénez” and “Armon a Aznar” to the sorrows and difficulties of her home life would have been unendurable, and likewise the unhealthy contagion with which Orlando infected her memory of Santiago, which Laura did indeed want to preserve pure and explicit. She could not forgive him for having damaged that part of Santiago’s life she still kept in her soul.

  Does Santiago also live in my father’s soul? wondered the girl, staring at Fernando D az’s stricken face.

  It was impossible to know. The accountant-banker’s diplegia was advancing at a wicked pace, rapid and regular. First he lost the use of his legs, soon the rest of his body, and later his ability to speak. Laura had no room in her heart for anything but intense pity for him-confined, finally, to a wheelchair, wearing a bib, fed as if he were a baby by the devoted María de la O, staring at the world with indecipherable eyes that did not signal whether he was listening, thinking, or communicating, except for a desperate blinking and an equally desperate effort not to blink by keeping his eyes open, alert, inquisitive, beyond a person’s normal endurance, as if one day, should he close his eyes, he would not be able to open them ever again. His gaze filled with glass and water, while his eyebrows developed remarkable movement, giving their unusual new positions an expressiveness that made Laura fearful. Like two arches supporting all that was left of his personality, her father’s eyebrows did not rise in surprise but arched even more, as if both questioning and communicating.

  Aunt María de la O did her best to attend to the invalid while Leticia attended to the household. But it was Leticia who learned, slowly but surely, to read her husband’s eyes, to hold his hand and communicate with him.

  “He wants you to put his tiepin in his tie, María de la O.”

  “He wants us to take him for an outing to Los Berros.”

  “He’s in the mood for rice and beans.”

  Was her mother telling the truth or was she creating a simulacrum of communication and, therefore, of life? Mar a de la O would do the painful chores for Leticia; she took charge of cleaning the invalid with warm towels and oatmeal soap, dressed him every morning in a suit, vest, starched collar, tie, dark socks, and low boots, as if the head of the household were going to the office, and undressed him at night to put him, with the help of Zampaya, in bed at nine.

  The only thing Laura knew to do was to take her father’s hand and read him the French and English novels he adored, learning those languages in a kind of homage to her broken father. Fernando D az’s physical collapse was swiftly apparent on his features. He aged, but he kept control over his feelings, and Laura saw him weep only once: when she read him the emotional death scene of the boy Little Father Time, in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, who commits suicide when he hears his parents say they can’t feed so many mouths. That weeping, nevertheless, cheered Laura. Her father understood her. Her father was listening and feeling, behind the opaque veil of his sickness.

  “Go out, daughter. Live the life of people your own age. Nothing would sadden your father more than knowing you’d sacrificed yourself for him.”

  Why did her mother use that subjunctive mode of speech, which according to the Misses Ramos was a mode that had to be connected with another verb in order to have meaning-indicating hypothesis, the first Miss Ramos would say; or desire, the second would add; something like “If I were you…,” the two of them would say in one voice, although in different places. Living day to day with the invalid, without foreseeing any end, was the only health that father and daughter could share. If Fernando understood her, Laura would tell him what she was doing every day, how life was in Xalapa, what new things were going on… and then Laura realized there were no new things. Her schoolmates had graduated, married, gone off to live in Mexico City, far away, because their husbands took them off, because the Revolution was centralizing power even more than the D az dictatorship had, because new agrarian and labor laws were threatening the rich provincials, many of whom had resigned themselves to losing what they’d had, to abandoning the lands and industries that had been devastated by the fighting in order to remake their lives in the capital, safe from rural and provincial abandonment-all that carried Laura’s friends far away.

  Left behind were the stimulants provided by Orlando and by the Catalan anarchist; even Laura’s ardent cult of Santiago cooled, yielding to a mere succession of hours, days, years. Customs in Xalapa did not change, as if the outside world couldn’t penetrate its sphere of tradition, placid self-satisfaction, and, perhaps, wisdom in a city that miraculously-although by force of will, too-had not been touched physically by the national tur
bulence of those years. The Revolution in Veracruz meant, more than anything, for the rich a fear of losing what they had and for the poor a desire to conquer what they needed. While they were still in Veracruz, Don Fernando had spoken, vaguely, about the influence of anarcho-syndicalist ideas that came to Mexico through the port, and later the presence in his own house of the never-seen Armonía Aznar gave life to those concepts, which Laura did not know much about. The end of her school years and the disappearance of her friends-because they married and Laura didn’t, because they went off to the capital and Laura stayed in Xalapa-forced her, in order to have the normalcy her mother Leticia wanted for her as a relief from the family penury, to befriend girls younger than she, juvenile compared to Laura not only in age but in experience-for she was Santiago’s sister, the young object of Orlando’s seduction, the daughter of a father battered by sickness and a mother unshakable in her sense of duty.

  Perhaps Laura, to numb her wounded sensibility, let herself be led without much thought into a life that both was and was not her own. It was at hand, it was comfortable, it didn’t matter much, she wasn’t in the mood to reflect on impossibilities, not even on something simply different from daily life in Xalapa. Nothing would perturb the daily stroll through her favorite garden, Los Berros, and its tall poplars with their silvery leaves and its iron benches, its fountains of greenish water, its moss-covered railings, the title girls skipping rope, the older girls walking in one direction and boys in the other, all of them flirting, brazenly staring or averting their eyes, but all of them with the chance to look at each other for a moment, yet as often as excitement or patience might demand.

  “Watch out for gentlemen with walking sticks on their shoulders in Juárez Park,” mothers would warn their daughters. “Their intentions are dishonorable.”

  The park was the other preferred open-air meeting place. Avenues of beech trees, laurels, araucarias, and jacarandas formed a cool, perfumed vault over the minor pleasures of skating in the park, going to charity fairs in the park, and, on clear days, seeing from the park the marvel of Orizaba Peak-Citlaltépetl, mountain of the star, the highest volcano in Mexico. Citlaltépetl had a magic all its own because the great mountain seemed to move according to the quality of the daylight or season of the year: near in the diaphanous dawn, farther away in the solar heat of midday, veiled in the afternoon drizzles, given its most visible glory during sunset-the day’s second birth-and at night, everyone knew that the great crest was the invisible but immobile star in the Veracruz firmament, its fairy godmother.

  It rained constantly, and then Laura and her new unequal girlfriends (she couldn’t even remember their names) ran to take cover outside the park, zigzagging under the eaves of houses and leaping over the gushes of water crisscrossing in the middle of the street. But it was lovely to listen to the warm showers on the roofs and the whisper of the plants. The little things decide to live. Then, as night became calm, the recently washed streets would fill with the scent of tulips and jonquils. Young people came out to stroll. From seven to eight was “the window hour,” when suitors would visit their favorite girls at balconies intentionally left open and-something normal in Xalapa but strange in any other part of the world-husbands would court their own wives again at “the window hour,” as if they wanted to renew their vows and rekindle their emotions.

  In those years, when at almost the same time the Mexican Revolution and the European war culminated and ended, movies became the great novelty. The armed revolution was winding down: the battles after General Obregón’s great victory over Pancho Villa at Celaya were only skirmishes. The once powerful Division of the North was disintegrating into bands of outlaws with each faction seeking support, arrangements, advantages, and ideals (in that order) after the triumph of Venustiano Carranza, the Constitutionalist Army, and, in 1917, the promulgation of the new Magna Carta-that was what the newspapers called it-the object of examination, debate, and constant fear among the gentlemen who gathered every evening at the Xalapa Casino.

  “If the agrarian reform is put into effect exactly as written, we’ll be ruined,” said the father of the young man from Córdoba whom Laura had danced with and who had talked only of roosters and hens.

  “They won’t do that. The country has to eat. Only the big properties produce,” said the father of the red-haired and abusive young tennis player, trying to be conciliatory.

  “And workers’ rights?” joined in the elderly husband of the lady who had waxed nostalgic about the oh-so-handsome French Zouaves. “What is there to say about ‘workers’ rights’ stuck into the Constitution like a pair of banderillas in a bull’s back?”

  “Like Jesus wearing six-guns, my dear man.”

  “Red Battalions, House of the Workers of the World… I assure you, Carranza and Obregón are Communists and are going to do the same thing here that Lenin and Trotsky are doing in Russia.”

  “None of this is relevant here, as you gentlemen will soon see.”

  “A million dead, gentlemen, and all for what?”

  “I assure you, most of them died not in battles but in bars.”

  That provoked general hilarity, but when some films of revolutionary battles made by the Abitia brothers were shown in the Victoria Salon, the cultivated public protested. No one wanted to go to the movies to see huarache-wearing men wielding rifles. Movies meant Italian movies, only Italian. Emotion and beauty were the exclusive privilege of Italy’s divas and vamps of the silver screen; society suffered and exulted with the dramas of Pina Menichelli, Italia Almirante Manzini, Giovanna Terribili González-stupendous women with darkly shadowed shining eyes, disturbing brows, electric hairdos, voracious mouths, and tragic gestures. Why did the Gish sisters hide their faces when they wept, why did Mary Pickford dress up as a beggar? If you want poverty, go out on the street; if you want to avoid emotion, visit your neighbors.

  The neighbors’ homes went on being, in Laura’s life and in the life of everyone in provincial society, the irreplaceable seats of communal life. People “received” constantly if sporadically, almost taking turns. In private homes, people played lottery and blackjack, forming large circles around the tables. It was there that culinary customs were preserved. It was there the youngest girls were taught to dance, taking little steps through the rooms, “you do it this way, lifting your skirt,” preparing them for the grand soirees at the Casino; and it was the place for baptism parties, for setting up the crèche at Christmas, with the Christ Child in his manger and the Wise Men and, in the center of the room, the “French Ship” filled with sweets that was opened up after midnight. Mass. And then Carnival and its masked balls, the tableaux vivants at the end of term at the Misses Ramos’ school, with their representations of Father Hidalgo Proclaiming Independence or the Indian Juan Diego negotiating with the Virgin of Guadalupe. But the principal party was the Casino hall every August 19. It was there that all of local society met.

  Laura would have preferred to stay at home, not only to be with her parents but because since the death of the Catalan anarchist the attic had been sealed. She began to assign a special value to every corner of her house, as if she knew that the pleasure of living and growing up there would not last forever. Her grandfather’s Catemaco house, the apartment above the bank and facing the sea in Veracruz, and now the one-story home on Lerdo Street in Xalapa… how many more homes would she live in over the years of her life? She could foresee none of them. She could only recall yesterday’s homes and memorize today’s, creating sanctuaries in her uncertain life-never again foreseeable and secure as it had been during her childhood near the lake-which she would need to hold on to in the time to come. A time that young Laura could not imagine, no matter how often she said to herself, “No matter what happens, the future will be different from this present.” She did not want to imagine the worst reasons why life would change. The worst of all was the death of her father. She was going to say that the saddest was staying behind, lost and forgotten, in a little town, like Aunts Hilda
and Virginia in their father’s house, stripped of the reason for being settled there and being unmarried. Grandfather was dead; Hilda played the piano for nothing, for no one; Virginia piled up pages, poems, that no one would ever know. The active life was preferable, a life committed to another life, which was the case of Aunt María de la O, constantly caring for Fernando Díaz.

  “What would I do without you, María de la O?” the indefatigable Mutti Leticia would ask-seriously, without sighing.

  Laura, as once she had memorized Santiago’s bedroom in Veracruz, now, eyes closed, ran through the patios, the corridors, the floors of Marseilles brick, the palms, the ferns, the mahogany armoires, the mirrors, the four-poster beds, the clay jugs of filtered water, the dressing table, the pitcher, the closet, and, in her mother’s domain, the kitchen redolent of mint and parsley.