The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  Laura found herself looking at a very vulnerable woman, almost hunched over, shrunken, swimming in the roomy peasant costumes that hid not only her physical diminution but also her fear, her imperceptible tremor, the second fear, a fear that came from within her, that not only extended or duplicated the physical fear of the shattered woman but replaced it with another, unexpressed and shared with the being gestating within her. There was a complicity between the mother and the child who was growing in her womb. No one could enter that secret circle.

  Frida guffawed and asked Laura to help her braid her hair, arrange her skirts and blouse, drape her rebozo over her shoulders, and comb her mustache. Laura lent her a hand and both sallied forth into Gringoland, to the dinners and parties in honor of the “most famous painter in the world and Mrs. Rivera,” to dance with the millionaires of industry, challenging them to inquire into the invalid missteps Frida covered up by saying they were steps from Oaxaca folk dances, astonishing Indian dances, as astonishing as Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic face when Frida asked him during a dinner, Mr. Ford, is it true you’re Jewish? She scandalized Michigan high society with her feigned ignorance of how vulgar certain expressions were that she used in English, saying, with the most courteous smile, Shit on you! when she stood up after a banquet or, when she announced during a card game with society ladies, I enjoy fucking, don’t you? Accompanied by Laura in theaters blazing hot in a city where it was already 100 degrees Fahrenheit, she saw Chaplin in City Lights, Laurel and Hardy-the cream pies, the houses turned upside down, the police chase, a plate of spaghetti emptied down the bodice of a stately matron-all of that killed her with laughter, she would take Laura by the hand, weep with laughter, weep, laugh, weep, shout with laughter, shout…

  The stretcher rolled along under the lights like eyes without eyelids, and the doctors asked Laura, How has she been feeling? She feels the heat a lot, her skin gets blotchy, her uterus hurts, a handrail pierced her vagina, she was hit by a trolley. What did she eat today? Two cups of custard, salad, she threw it all up, she’s the woman deflowered by a trolley. Did you know that? Her husband paints clean, shiny, steel machines, but she was raped by an old machine, rusty, indecent, toot toot and off we go, she shouted in the movie theater, she turned blue, began to bleed, they picked her up in a lake of blood, surrounded by clots of blood she’d lost from laughing, did you know? Laurel and Hardy.

  She looked like a twelve-year-old girl resting in bed, her hair wet from weeping, shrunken, skinny, silent.

  “I want to see my baby.”

  “But, Frida, it’s only a fetus.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “The doctors won’t allow it.”

  “Tell them it’s for artistic reasons.”

  “Frida, it was born in shreds. It broke apart in your womb. It has no form.”

  “Then I’ll give it a form.”

  She slept. She awakened. She couldn’t bear the heat. She got out of bed. She tried to escape. She was put back to bed. She asked to see the child. Diego came to visit, tender, understanding, distant, pressed to return to work, his gaze fixed on the absent wall, not on the woman before him.

  Then, one night, Laura heard a forgotten noise that reminded her of the days of her childhood in the Catemaco forest. She was sleeping on a cot in Frida’s hospital room, and the noise awakened her. She saw Frida in her bed, completely naked with her body broken, one leg thinner than the other, her vagina eternally bleeding a flood of carnations, her back screwed in place like a sealed window, and her hair growing, visibly growing second by second, longer and longer, hair sprouting like Medusa’s from her cranium, trailing like spiders over her pillow, slinking like snakes along the mattress, putting down roots around the bedposts, while Frida stretched out her hands and showed her the wounded vagina, asked her to touch it, not to be afraid, we women are pink inside, take the colors out of my sex, smear them on your fingers, bring me brushes and a drawing book, Laura, don’t look at me that way, how does one naked woman see another naked woman? because you’re naked too, Laura, even if you don’t know it, I do, I see you with your head covered with ribbons and a hundred umbilical cords tangled between your thighs: I dream your dreams, Laura Díaz, I see that you’re dreaming of snails, the slowest snails that travel through your years with a fragile, slimy slowness not knowing they’re in a garden that is also a cemetery and the plants in that garden weep and shriek and ask for milk, ask for the breast, the little girl plants are hungry, the little boy snails are deaf and pay no attention to their mothers, only I see them, I hear them and I understand them, only I see the real colors of the world, of the snail boys, the plant girls, the mother forest, they are blue, green, yellow, sulphur, amaranth… the earth is a garden, a tomb, and what you see is the truth, the hospital room is the only prodigal forest in this cement wasteland called Detroit, the hospital room fills up with yellow parrots and gray cats and white eagles and black monkeys, everyone brings me presents but you, Laura, what are you going to give me?

  Diego saw her and asked Laura to bring her drawing books, pencils, and watercolors. All he needed was a look and an exchange of very few words.

  “Sweetheart, you’re not ugly no matter what they say, actually…”

  “Friducha, I love you more and more.”

  “Who told you that you’re ugly, my love?”

  “Look, a newspaper clipping from Mexico. They call me the obese Huitzilopochtli.”

  “And what do they call me?”

  “An Aztec goddess in decline.”

  She laughed, held Laura’s hand, they all laughed a lot, and Laura?

  “I baptize you Obsidian Butterfly,” said Diego. “I have spoken.”

  With Laura at her side handing her pencils, brushes, colors, paper, Frida began to paint while talking, just like her husband, as if neither of them could create without the protective shadow of language, simultaneously alien to artists and their indispensable shadow. Frida spoke to Laura, but she was really speaking to herself speaking to Laura, she asked her to let herself be seen seeing herself in a mirror and Laura, watching the reduced woman, curled up in the bed with her hair greasy and her eyebrows in open revolt and her mustache unclipped, could do nothing, and Frida told her to consider it carefully, it was one thing to be a body and another to be beautiful, for her, knowing she was a body was enough for now, knowing she’d survived, beauty would come later, the first thing was to give form to the body that every so often and more and more threatened to disintegrate like that fetus she could only expel in a roar of laughter: she drew more and more rapidly and feverishly, like her words which Laura would never forget, ugliness is the body without shape, help me gather together everything that was scattered, Laura, give it its own shape, catch the cloud on the wing, the sun, the chalk silhouette of my dress, the red ribbon that links me to my fetus, the bloody bedsheet that is my toga, the coagulated crystal of the tears running down my cheeks, all together, please, help me gather together everything that was scattered and give it its own shape, won’t you?, the theme doesn’t matter, pain, love, death, birth, revolution, power, pride, vanity, dream, memory, will, it doesn’t matter what animates the body so long as it gives it form and then it isn’t ugly anymore, beauty only belongs to the person who understands it, not to the person who possesses it, beauty is nothing more than the truth that belongs to each one of us, that of Diego when he paints, mine I’m inventing right in this hospital bed, yours you still have to find, Laura, you understand from everything I’ve said to you that I’m not going to reveal it to you, it’s up to you to understand it and find it, your truth, you can look at me without modesty, Laura D az, say that I look horrible, you wouldn’t dare show me the mirror, in your eyes today I am not beautiful, on this day and in this place I am not pretty, and I won’t answer you with words, I’m asking you instead for some colors and a sheet of paper and I turn the horror of my wounded body and my spilled blood into my truth and into my beauty, because you know, my true friend, my true buddy all the w
ay, you know?, knowing ourselves makes us beautiful because it identifies our desires; when a woman desires, she’s always beautiful…

  The hospital room was filling up, first with drawing books, separate sheets of paper later, then sheets of tin when Diego brought some church retables from Guanajuato and reminded Frida how people painted in villages and out in the country, on sheets of tin and abandoned wooden planks that became, when touched by rustic hands, ex votos giving thanks to the Holy Child of Atocha, the Virgin of Remedies, the Lord of Chalma, for the miracle that had been granted, the daily miracle that saved the child from sickness, the father from the mine collapse, the mother from drowning in the river where she bathed, Frida from dying pierced by a handrail, Grandmother Cosima from being chopped to pieces on the road to Perote, Auntie María de la O from being abandoned in a bordello for blacks, Grandfather Felipe from dying in a trench on the Marne, brother Santiago from being shot at dawn in Veracruz, Frida again from bleeding to death in giving birth, and Laura-from what? for being saved from what should she give thanks for her salvation?

  “Read this poem to Frida.” Rivera handed a slim volume to Laura. “This is the best Mexican poem since Sor Juana. Read what it says on this page:

  Filled with myself, besieged in my own skin

  by an ungraspable god who suffocates me

  And look ahead here:

  Oh intelligence, solitude in flames,

  that conceives all without creating it!

  And then at the end:

  with Him, with me, with the three of us…

  See how Gorostiza understands everything? We are only three, always three. Father, mother, and child. Woman, man, and lover. Change it around any way you like, at the end you’ll always be left with three, because four is immoral, five is unmanageable, two is insufferable, and one is the threshold between solitude and death.”

  “And why does four have to be immoral?” Frida asked in surprise. “Laura got married and had two sons.”

  “My husband walked out.” Laura smiled timidly. “Actually, I left him.”

  “And there’s always one child you favor, even if you have a dozen,” added Frida.

  “Three, always three,” muttered Rivera as he walked out.

  “That bastard’s got something up his sleeve.” Frida furrowed her bushy brows. “Hand those tin sheets to me, will you, Laura?”

  When the hospital complained about the growing disorder in the room, the shreds of paper everywhere and the smell of the paints, Diego appeared like a god in a classical tragedy, Jupiter the Thunderer, and said in English, This woman is an artist, didn’t these idiots understand that? He scolded them, but said it to her, with love and pride, This woman who is my wife puts all the truth, suffering, and cruelty of the world into the painting that pain has forced her to create: you, surrounded by the routine suffering of a hospital, have never seen so much agonizing poetry, and that’s why you don’t understand her.

  “My little sweetheart,” Frida said to him. “Mi chiquito lindo.”

  When she could be moved, they returned to the hotel and Laura sorted Frida’s paintings for her. One day, the two of them finally went to see Diego painting at the Institute. Great progress had been made on the mural, but Frida saw the problem and how he had resolved it. The shining, devouring machines were woven together like great serpents of steel and proclaimed their primacy over the world of the workers who maintained them. Frida looked in vain for the faces of the American workers and understood. Diego had painted all of them with their backs turned because he didn’t understand them, because they were faces of unbaked dough with no personality, flour faces. But he had introduced dark faces-blacks and Mexicans-who did, yes, face the viewers, the world.

  Every day, the two women brought him a nice tasty lunch in a basket and silently sat down to watch him work while he poured out his river of words. Frida sipped teaspoonfuls of cajeta from Celaya, which she brought to enjoy so she could fill up on that confection of caramelized condensed milk, each day a bit more as she got her strength back. Laura was dressed very simply in a tailored suit, but Frida was decked out in green, purple, and yellow rebozos, braids of colored ribbons, and necklaces of jadeite.

  Rivera had left three blank spaces in his mural of industry. He began looking more and more often at the female couple sitting at one side of the scaffolding watching him work-Frida sipping cajeta and clanking her necklaces, Laura carefully crossing her legs-under the scrutiny of his assistants. One day, the two came in and saw themselves transformed into men, two workers with short hair and long overalls, in work shirts and with gloved hands grasping steel tools, Frida and Laura dominating the light of the mural at the far end of the wall, Laura with her angular features accentuated, her hatchet profile, her shadowed eyes, her hair even shorter than the old hairdo she’d rejected when the woman from Veracruz decided on her bangs and pageboy, Frida too with short hair and sideburns, her eyebrows thick but her most masculine trait, the down on her upper lip, eliminated by the painter, to the stupefaction of the model: “Hey, I’d have put in the mustache.”

  There was another unpainted area in the center of the wall and in the upper part of the fresco, and Frida would glance nervously at those absences until one afternoon when she took Laura by the hand and said, Let’s get out of here. They took a taxi back to the hotel, and Frida ripped off a sheet of paper, spread it out over the table, and began to draw again and again, insatiably, the sun and the moon, the moon and the sun, separated, together.

  Laura looked out of the hotel room’s high window searching for the star and its satellite, elevated by Frida to equal rank as day and night stars, sun and moon born of Venus, the first star of the day and the last of night, moon and sun equal in rank but opposite in hours, seen by the eyes of the world, not by the eyes of the universe, Laura, what will Diego put in those blank spaces in his mural?

  “It scares me. He’s never kept a secret like that from me.”

  They found out only on the day of the inauguration. A holy family of workers presided over the work of the machines and the white men with their backs to the world, the dark men facing the world, and, at the far end of the fresco, the two women dressed as men staring at the men, and above the depiction of the work and the machines a virgin wearing a humble calico dress and white beads like any Detroit shop-girl, holding a naked child, also with a halo, and seeking in vain the support of the eyes of a carpenter who had turned his back on the mother and child. The carpenter was holding the tools of his trade, hammer and nails, in one hand and two planks arranged in a cross in the other. His halo was faded and contrasted with the brilliant scarlet of a sea of flags that separated the holy family from the machines and workers.

  The murmuring grew when the curtains were pulled back.

  A joke, a parody, a joke on the capitalists who’d hired him, a parody of the spirit of Detroit, sacrilege, Communism. Another wall, this one of voices, began to rise opposite Diego Rivera’s, the assistants began to divide up, the shouting grew louder, Edsel Ford, son of the magnate, called for calm, Rivera climbed up on a stepladder and proclaimed the birth of a new art for the society of the future and had to scramble down painted yellow and red because the pots of paint that agitators had prepared beforehand at the direction of Rivera himself were beginning to be thrown at him, while another brigade of workers, also organized by Diego, stood in front of the mural and proclaimed they would guard it forever.

  The next day, Diego, Frida, and Laura took the train to New York to start work on the Rockefeller Center mural project. Rivera was euphoric, cleaning his face with kerosene, happy as a mischievous child planning his next practical joke and succeeding at them all: attacked by capitalists for being a Communist and by Communists for being a capitalist, Rivera felt he was a pure Mexican, a joking, devilish Mexican with more quills than a porcupine to defend himself from bastards on both sides of the Rio Grande, devoid of the rancor that defeated both Mexicans and Americans before the game started, and delighted to be th
e target in the Mexican national sport of attacking Diego Rivera, which now would be seen as a national tradition as opposed to the new gringo sport of attacking Diego Rivera. Diego the fat Puck, who instead of laughing at the world from a thicket on a midsummer night could laugh from the thicket of his fresco scaffolding one moment, then fall to the floor and discover he had an ass’s head but find an amorous lap where he could take refuge and be caressed by the queen of the night, who saw not an ugly donkey but an enchanted prince, the frog transformed into the prince sent by the moon to love and protect his Friducha, mi chiquita, my adored little girl, broken, suffering, everything is for you, you know that, don’t you? And when I say, Frida, “Let me help you, poor little thing,” what am I saying but help me, poor little me, help your Diego?

  They asked Laura to go back to Mexico with the summer suitcases, the cardboard boxes full of papers, to put the Coyoacán house in order, to live there if she liked, they didn’t have to say anything else to her because Laura saw they needed each other more than ever after the miscarriage, that Frida wasn’t going to work for a while, and that in New York she wouldn’t need Laura, she wouldn’t be useful, because Frida had many friends there, loved going shopping with them and to the movies, there was going to be a festival of Tarzan films she didn’t want to miss, she adored movies with gorillas, she’d seen King Kong nine times, they restored her sense of humor, made her laugh her head off.

  “You know it’s hard for Diego to fall asleep in winter. Now I have to spend all my nights with him so he’ll get some rest and have energy for the new mural. Laura, don’t forget to put a doll in my Coyoacán bed.”