The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Don’t turn in on yourself the way your Grandmother Kelsen did,” Leticia would say. She could no longer endure the sadness of her own gaze. “Go out with your girlfriends. Have fun. You’re only twenty-one.”

  “What you mean, Mutti, is that I’m already twenty-one. At my age, you’d been married for years, and I’d been born-and no, Mutti, don’t even bother asking: I’m not fond of any boy.”

  “Have they stopped coming to see you? Because of everything that’s happened?”

  “No, Mutti, I’m the one who’s been avoiding them.”

  As if responding to a warning of an incomprehensible change, vibrating like late-summer leaves, the girls Laura would visit, younger than she, had all decided to prolong their childhood, even if they made coquettish concessions to an adulthood they, disconcerted, did not wish. They called themselves “the chubbies” and played practical jokes inappropriate to their eighteen years. They jumped rope in the park so they’d have color in their cheeks before going on the seductive evening stroll; they would take long siestas before tennis at Los Berros; they would innocently mock their costumed boyfriends during Carnival:

  “Are you a circus clown?”

  “Don’t insult me. Can’t you see I’m a prince?”

  They would skate in Juárez Park to lose the pounds they put on eating “devils,” cakes filled with chocolate and covered with marzipan, the delight of sweet-tooths in this city that smelled like a bakery. They volunteered to be in the tableaux vivants at the end of the term in the Misses Ramos’ academy, the only time when one could see that the teachers really were two different people, since one presided over the tableaux while the other worked behind the scenes.

  “Something awful happened to me, Laura. I was playing the part of the Virgin, when I suddenly had to go. I had to make terrible faces so Miss Ramos would close the curtain. I ran to make wee-wee and came back to be the Virgin again.”

  “In my house, they’ve gotten bored with my comedies and costumes, Laura. My parents have hired only one spectator to admire me. What do you think of that?”

  “You must be happy, Margarita.”

  “The thing is, I’ve decided to become an actress.”

  Then they all rushed madly to the balcony to see the cadets from the Preparatoria march by, rifles on their shoulders, wearing their French képis, their uniforms with gold buttons, and their very taut flies.

  The bank informed them they’d have to give up the house in September, after the Casino ball. Don Fernando would get a pension, but the new bank director would, as is natural, be coming to live in the house. There would also be a ceremony up in the attic, the unveiling of a plaque in honor of Doña Armonía Aznar. The Mexican trade unions had decided to honor the valiant comrade who had donated money, had delivered mail to the Red Battalions and the House of the Workers of the World during the Revolution, and had even sheltered union men on the run right here, in the house of the bank director.

  “Did you know that, Mutti?”

  “No, Laura. And what about you, sister?”

  “Not a clue!”

  “It’s better not to know everything, isn’t that so?”

  None of the three dared to think that a man as honorable as Don Fernando would knowingly have tolerated a conspiracy under his own roof, especially with Santiago’s having been shot on November 21, 1910. When she thought about it, Laura imagined that Orlando Ximénez knew the truth, that he was the intermediary between the attic and Doña Armonía’s anarcho-syndicalists. Then she discarded that suspicion; Orlando. the frivolous… or perhaps for that very reason was he the likeliest suspect? Laura laughed heartily. She’d just read Baroness d’Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel to her father, so she was imagining poor Orlando as a Mexican Pimpernel, a dandy at night and an anarchist by day… saving union men from the firing squad.

  No novel prepared Laura for the next episode of her life. Leticia and María de la O set about looking for a comfortable house that they could afford under Fernando’s pension. The half sister thought that given the circumstances, Hilda and Virginia should sell the Catemaco coffee plantation and use the money to buy a house in Xalapa where they could all live together and save on expenses.

  “And why shouldn’t we all go back to Catemaco? After all, we did live there… and we were happy,” said Leticia, without sighing like her self-absorbed mother.

  Her question became superfluous as soon as the unmarried sisters Hilda and Virginia appeared at the Xalapa house, loaded with packages, boxes of books, steamer chests, seamstress dummies, cages filled with parrots, and even the Steinway piano.

  People gathered in Lerdo Street to observe the arrival of such curious baggage, for the two sisters’ belongings filled a mule cart to overflowing. Covered with dust, the sisters themselves looked like refugees from a battle lost many years ago, with huge straw hats tied under their chins and gauze veils that protected their faces from flies, the sun, and the highway filth.

  Theirs was a brief story. The Veracruz farm workers had armed themselves and quickly occupied the Kelsen hacienda and all the other properties in the area, declared them agrarian cooperatives, and run the owners off the land.

  “There was no way to warn you,” said Aunt Virginia. “Here we are.”

  They hadn’t known that the Xalapa house would no longer be theirs in September, after the Casino ball in August. Now, with her sisters added to her burden, her husband an invalid, and Laura having no marriage on the horizon, Leticia finally gave in and burst into tears. The expropriated sisters exchanged perplexed glances. Leticia begged their pardon, drying her tears on her apron, and invited them to make themselves at home. That night, Aunt María de la O came to Laura’s bedroom, sat down next to her, and caressed the girl’s head.

  “Don’t be discouraged, child. Just look at me. Sometimes you must have thought that life’s been difficult for me, especially when I lived alone with my mother. But you know something? Being born is a joy even if you were conceived in sadness and misery. I mean inner sadness and misery, more than outer. You come into the world, and your origin is erased, being born is always a party, and I’ve done nothing but celebrate my going through life, not caring two cents where I came from, what happened at the beginning, how and where my mother gave birth to me, how my father behaved… Know something? Your grandmother Cosima redeemed everything, but even without her, without all I owe your grandmother and how much I adore her, I celebrate the world, I know I came to the world to celebrate life, through thick and thin, child, and I’m going to go on celebrating, damn it to hell. And excuse me for talking like someone from Alvarado, but that’s where I grew up…”

  María de la O drew her hand away from Laura’s head for a moment and gave her niece a radiant smile, as if the little aunt always brought warmth and joy on her lips and in her eyes.

  “And something else, Laurita, to complete the picture. Your grandfather brought me to live with you, and that saved me, I can’t say it often enough. But your grandmother did not concern herself any more with my mother, as if it were enough to save me and Old Nick himself could take her. The one who did concern himself was your father, Fernando. I don’t know what would have become of my mother if Fernando hadn’t looked out for her, helped her, given her money, and allowed her to grow old with dignity. Pardon me for being blunt, but there’s nothing sadder than an old whore. What I want to say is just this: the important thing is being alive and where you’re alive. We’re going to save this home and the people in it, Laura. María de la O swears it, the aunt you more than anyone else have respected. I never forget!”

  She was getting fat, and it was rather hard for her to move about. Whenever she went for a walk with Fernando in his wheelchair, people would look away, not wanting to feel sorry for the two, the invalid man and the ashen mulatta with fat ankles who insisted on being out and around, ruining things for young, healthy people. María de la O’s will was greater than any obstacle, and the four sisters, the day after Hilda and Virginia arrived, d
ecided not only to find a house for the family but to turn it into a guest house, contribute to its maintenance, each one would give her part, and take care of Fernando.

  “And as for you, Laura, I beg you not to worry,” said Aunt Hilda.

  “You will lack for nothing,” added Aunt Virginia.

  … and I wasn’t worried, dear aunts, Mutti, I wasn’t worried, I know I’ll lack for nothing, I’m the little girl of the house, I’m not twenty-one, I’m still seven, defenseless but protected as before the first death, before the first grief, before the first passion, before the first rage, all that I’ve already experienced, already managed, already mastered, and by now I let myself be mastered by everything that has happened, by now I know how to live with grief, passion, rage, and death, I think I know how to live with them. But what I can’t live with is with the diminution of myself, not by others but by myself, made into a child not by the silly girls or protective aunts or Mutti, who doesn’t want to accept any passion so as to stay lucid and keep house because she knows that without her the house will fall apart like those sand castles children make on the Mocambo beach, and if she doesn’t do the work, who will? While I’m thinking about myself, Laura Díaz, I observe myself distant from my own life, as if I were someone else, a second Laura who sees the first separated from the world around me, indifferent to the people outside my home-is it healthy to be that way?-but concerned with those living here with me, but in both cases separated and yet guilty about being a burden, like the boy in Thomas Hardy’s novel, I am loved by everyone, but I weigh them down even if they don’t say so, I’m the grown-up little girl about to turn twenty-two without bringing bread to the house where she gets her daily bread, the big little girl who thinks herself justified because she reads books to her paralyzed father, because she loves them all and all of them love her. I will live from the love I give and from the love I receive. It isn’t enough, it isn’t enough to love my mother, to weep for my brother, to feel sorry for my father, it isn’t enough to adopt my own grief and my own tenderness as rights that liberate me from other responsibilities. Now I want to overflow my love for them, exceed my grief for them by freeing them from me, taking myself off their backs, giving them the gift of not worrying about me without my giving up worrying about them, Papa Fernando, Mutti Leticia, Aunts Hilda and Virginia and María de la O, Santiago my love, I’m not asking either comprehension or help from you, I’m going to do what I must to be with you without being of you but by being for you…

  Juan Francisco López Greene was a very tall man, more than six feet, very dark, with both Indian and Negroid traces in his features-while his lips were thick, his profile was straight; while his hair was crinkly, his skin was smooth and sweet as sugar frosting, night-dark as a gypsy’s. His eyes were green islands in a yellow sea. His broad, muscular shoulders spoiled the look of his neck, which was strong but longer than it seemed, just as his arms were long and his devoutly proletarian hands were large. His torso was short, his legs long, and his feet bigger than miners’ shoes.

  He was powerful, awkward, delicate, different.

  He had come to the Casino ball with Xavier Icaza, the young labor lawyer, son of a family of aristocrats who now served the working class. It was he who brought to the dance this man so alien to the social profile of good Xalapa families: Juan Francisco López Greene.

  Icaza, a brilliant but scarcely conventional man, wrote avant-garde poetry and picaresque tales; his books were illustrated with Cubist vignettes of skyscrapers and airplanes, and his poetry conveyed the sense of modern velocity that the author sought while his novels brought the tradition of Francisco de Quevedo and the Lazarillo de Tormes to modern Mexico City, a city that was filling up-as Icaza explained to groups of guests at the Casino ball-with immigrants from the countryside and that would only go on growing and growing. He winked at the local businessmen, now’s the time to buy cheap, Colonia Hipódromo, Colonia Nápoles, Chapultepec Heights, Parque de la Lama, even Desierto de los Leones, just you wait and see how real estate is going to boom, don’t be fools-he laughed with his cheery teeth-invest now.

  He was called a Futurist, a Dadaist, an Estridentista, names that no one had ever heard before in Veracruz and that Icaza introduced with an almost insolent air by driving a yellow Isotta-Fraschini convertible, as if to establish his credentials immediately and well. He asked for the hand of Miss Ana Guido, and when her parents expressed doubts, Xavier Icaza drove his powerful automobile right up the stairs and into the cathedral one Sunday during Mass. The roar of the motor and the insane vision of the car going up the steep stairs with the young, high-spirited lawyer using all the horsepower at his disposal to do it. He dangerously stopped the car where the stairway ended and the atrium began and announced in a loud voice that he’d come to marry Ana and nothing and no one was going to stop him.

  “I’m not dealing in make-believe,” the young lawyer Icaza was saying to his old acquaintances at the Casino ball, “this is a matter of mutual convenience. The Revolution has set free all the country’s dormant forces-the businessmen and industrialists who were thwarted while the Dictator turned over the country to foreigners, the functionaries whose careers were blocked by Porfirio’s old bureaucracy, and let’s not even start on the landless peasants and workers eager to organize and have a respected public voice. Listen, who were the rebels in the Rio Blanco factories and the Cananea mines, the first to rise up against the dictatorship? What were they if not workers?”

  “Madero didn’t make any concessions to them,” said the father of the young rooster expert from Córdoba.

  “Because Madero didn’t understand anything,” Icaza claimed. “On the other hand, the executioner Huerta, the man who murdered Madero, tried to get the support of the working class and permitted the biggest May Day demonstrations ever seen. He allowed for an eight-hour workday and six-day workweek, but when the unions asked him for democracy, that’s when he turned them down, he arrested the leaders and deported them. One of them is my friend here, Juan Francisco López Greene, to whom I introduce you with great pleasure. The Greene part doesn’t mean he’s English. Everybody in Tabasco is named Greene because they’re descendants of English pirates whose mothers were Indians or blacks, isn’t that right?”

  Juan Francisco smiled and nodded. “Laura, you’re a cultured type. I’ll leave him to you,” Icaza said, charming and firm, and wandered off.

  Laura suspected that this new arrival, so alien to provincial customs, who had appeared at the San Cayetano soirees like the “Jesus wearing six-guns” the Córdoba landowner had mentioned, would be personally awkward, like his huge miners’ shoes, square, thick, and hobnailed. She imagined that his speaking style was like a rain of stones punctuated by silence. She was therefore surprised to hear a smooth voice, serene and even sweet, in which each word bore the weight of conviction, which is why Juan Francisco López Greene let himself seem so gentle and speak so mildly.

  “Is Xavier Icaza right?” Laura asked abruptly, looking for a way to begin the conversation.

  Juan Francisco insisted. “Yes. I know very well that they all try to use us.”

  “To use whom?” asked Laura, unaffectedly.

  “The workers.”

  “You’re a worker?” Laura again queried impulsively, speaking in the familiar mode to Juan Francisco, certain this wouldn’t offend him, challenging him slightly to address her as an equal, not as “miss,” uncertainly seeking common ground with this unknown man, sniffing him out, feeling herself a bit of a beast, a bit savage, as she’d never felt with Orlando, who made her think things that were perverse, refined, and so subtle that they evaporated like a poisonous perfume, strong but deleterious and short-lived.

  He didn’t accept the challenge. “It’s a risk, miss. We just have to take the chance.”

  (If only he’d speak familiarly to me, begged Laura, I want him to speak familiarly to me, not call me miss, I’d like for once to feel different, I want a man to say things to me, do things to me I don�
��t know or don’t expect or can’t ask for, I can’t ask him for that, it has to come from him, and on that depends everything that may come later, from a simple miss or no miss…)

  “What risk might that be, Mr. Greene?” Laura reverted to formality.

  “The risk that they’ll manipulate us, Laura.”

  He added, without noticing (or perhaps pretending he didn’t see) the change in color of the girl’s face, that “we” could also extract advantages from “them.” Laura became accustomed right then and there to the strange plural which, without pretensions or false modesty, embraced a community-of workers, fighters, comrades, that’s right, and of the man speaking with her.

  “Icaza has no illusions. But I do.” He smiled for the first time, with a trace of malice but more than anything else with self-irony, thought Laura. “I do.”

  He said he had illusions because the Constitution made concessions to Mexican peasants and workers it did not have to make. Carranza was an old hacienda owner whose long white beard curled when he had to deal with workers and Indians; Alvaro Obregón was an intelligent but opportunistic Creole who could just as well dine with God or with the devil and make the devil believe he was actually God and convince God not to worry, because He could be a devil and had no reason to envy Lucifer; in any case, General Obregón would be the judge and would decree, You are the Devil… The Constitution consecrated the rights of the worker and of the land because without “us”-here we go again, Laura said to herself-“they” would not win the Revolution or keep themselves in power.

  He asked her to dance, and she laughed through a grimace of pain and stepped-on dancing shoes, asking the labor leader if they might not better practice out on the balcony, and he also laughed and said yes, neither God nor the devil created me for ball-dancing… but if she was interested in what “we” were doing, he would tell her, out on the balcony, how the workers’ struggle organized itself during the Revolution. People thought the Revolution involved only a Creole elite followed by peasant guerrillas. They forgot that everything began in the factories and mines, in Rio Blanco and Cananea. The workers organized the Red Battalions that went out to fight Huerta’s dictatorship and founded the House of the Workers of the World in the Azulejos palace in Mexico City, in the aristocracy’s former Jockey Club. But because “we” were invaded by Huerta’s police, who arrested us and tried to burn the palace down, “we” were forced to flee. We found ourselves in the open arms of General Obregón.