The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  There were no words, no emotions. Only María de la O allowed old memories to pass through her eyes, now clouded by cataracts, memories of a girl in a Veracruz brothel and a gentleman who rescued her from abandonment and integrated her into this family, overcoming the prejudices of race, of class, and of an immoral morality that in the name of convention takes life instead of giving it.

  Laura and Juan Francisco invited each other to surrender, and the boys stopped running, fighting, skipping to avoid their mother’s face. Santiago slept and lived with the door to his bedroom open, something entirely new to his mother, who interpreted it as an act of freedom and transparency, although it was also, perhaps, a culpable rebellion: I have nothing to hide. Danton would laugh at him: What’s your next stunt going to be? Going to jerk off in the middle of the street? No, answered his older brother, I’m trying to say that we’re enough on our own. Who, you and I? I’d like that, Danton. Well, I’m enough on my own, but with the door closed just in case; come and see the pictures I’ve cut out of Vea whenever you like, incredible babes, unbelievably sexy…

  Just as Laura would look at herself in the mirror when she came home, almost always thinking that her face didn’t change no matter how many vicissitudes rocked it, she discovered that Santiago looked at himself as well, especially in windows, and seemed surprised at himself and by himself, as if he were constantly discovering another person there with him. Perhaps only his mother thought those things. Santiago was no longer a boy. He was something new. Laura, in front of the mirror, confirmed that sometimes she was the unknown woman-a changeling. Would her son see her that way? She was going to be forty-three.

  She didn’t dare go in his room. The open door was an invitation but a jealous one, even, paradoxically, a prohibition. Look at me, but don’t come in. He was drawing. With a round mirror so he could look at himself out of the corner of his eye and create-not copy, not reproduce-the face of Santiago which his mother recognized and memorized only when she saw the self-portrait her son was drawing: the sketch became Santiago’s true face, revealed it, forced Laura to realize that she’d gone, returned, and hadn’t really looked at her sons. How right they were not to look at her, to run, to sneak off when she didn’t look at them, either; they reproached her more for not looking at them than they did for not living with them: they wanted to be seen by her, and since she didn’t see them, Santiago discovered himself first in a mirror that seemed to supply the gaze he would have wanted to receive from his parents, his brother, society, always hostile to the adolescent who bursts into it with his insolent promise and ignorant self-sufficiency. A portrait and then a self-portrait.

  And Danton-could there be any doubt?-discovered himself in the brightly lit store window of the city.

  She returned as if they didn’t exist, as if they’d never felt forgotten or hurt or eager to communicate to her what Santiago was making in that moment: a portrait she could have known during her absence, a portrait the son could have sent to his mother if Laura, as she’d wished, had gone to live with her Spaniard, her “hidalgo.”

  Look, Mother. This is who I am. Never come back again.

  Laura imagined that she’d never have another face to give her son but the one her son was giving her now: wide forehead, amber eyes set far apart, not dark as in reality, straight nose and thin, defiant lips, straight hair, messy, of a rich, lustrous chestnut, tremulous chin; even in the self-portrait the chin that wanted to bolt from the face, brave but exposed to all the blows of the world. He was Santiago the Younger.

  He had several books open and arranged around him. Van Gogh and Egon Schiele.

  Where did you get them? Who gave them to you?

  The German Bookstore here in Colonia Hipódromo.

  Laura was about to call him a chip off the old block, your German stock’s coming to the surface, but he anticipated her: Don’t worry, they’re German Jews in exile in Mexico.

  In the nick of time.

  Yes, Mama, in the nick of time.

  She described Santiago’s features, which the self-portrait translated and facilitated for her, but she didn’t take note of the thickness of the strokes, the somber light that allowed the spectator to approach that tragic, predestined face, as if the young artist had discovered that a face revealed the tragic necessity of each life, but also its possible freedom to overcome failures. Laura stared at that portrait of her son by her son and thought about the tragedy of Raquel Mendes-Alemán and Jorge Maura’s tragedy with her. Was there a difference between the dark fatality of Raquel’s destiny, which she shared with the entire Jewish people, and the dramatic, honorable but ultimately superfluous response of the Spanish hidalgo Jorge Maura, who went to Havana to save Raquel just as he’d tried to save Pilar in Spain? Along with his self-portrait, Santiago gave Laura a light, an answer she wanted to make her own. We have to make time for the things that have taken place. We have to allow pain to become knowledge in some way. Why did her son’s self-portrait presage these ideas?

  So he and she were equals. Santiago looked at her and in a matter-of-fact way accepted her looking at him from his bedroom doorway.

  She didn’t separate them. They were different. Santiago assimilated everything; Danton rejected, eliminated whatever crossed his path or blocked his way: he could make a pompous teacher look ridiculous in class or, during recess, thrash a classmate he found annoying. Nevertheless, it was Santiago who better resisted the impositions the world put on him, while Danton was the one who finally accepted them after staging a violent rejection. Danton was the protagonist in the dramas about personal liberty, puberty’s declarations of independence, I’m grown up now, it’s my life, not yours, I’ll come home when I like because I control my own time, and it was he who came home drunk, it was he who took the beatings and got gonorrhea, he who shamefacedly begged for money; he was the freer of the two brothers but also the more dependent. He made a show of himself, the more easily to give in.

  While still a student, Santiago got a job working on the restoration of frescoes by José Clemente Orozco, and then Laura introduced him to Frida and Diego, so he could be Rivera’s assistant on the National Palace mural project. Santiago punctually turned his salary over to his mother, as if he were a child in Dickens being exploited in a tannery. She would laugh and promise to put it aside only for him.

  “It will be our little secret.”

  “I hope it won’t be the only one,” said Santiago, impulsively kissing her.

  “You love him more because he forgave you,” said Danton insolently. Laura couldn’t stop herself from slapping him across the face.

  “I won’t say another word,” said Danton.

  Laura Díaz had hidden her passion for Jorge Maura, her passion with Jorge Maura, and she now decided not to hide her passion for and with her son Santiago, almost as an unconscious compensation for the silence that had surrounded her love of Maura. She wouldn’t deny she preferred Santiago over Danton. She also knew it wasn’t conventionally acceptable. “Either they’re both your sons or both your stepsons.” It didn’t matter. Near him, watching him work at home, go out, come back on time, hand over his money, tell her his projects: this proximity wove itself into a complicity between mother and son, which was also a preference, a word that means putting ahead. Santiago began to occupy that place in Laura’s life, the first place. It was almost as if with the fading of Jorge Maura’s love, which revealed her to herself as Laura, Díaz, a unique woman, a passionate woman, a woman who would leave everything for her lover’s sake, all her passion had transferred to Santiago, not the passion of the mother for the son because that was only love and even preference, but the passion of the boy for life and for creation: that’s what Laura began to make hers because Santiago was giving it to her independently of himself, free of any vanity.

  Santiago, her son, the second Santiago, was what he did, loved what he did, gave what he did. He was swiftly progressing, assimilating what he’d only seen in reproductions, books, and magazines, or studyin
g the Mexican murals. He’s discovering the other who’s inside him. His mother is discovering him at the same time. Santiago trembled with creative anticipation whenever he had a blank piece of paper before him or, later, when he stood at the easel Laura gave him for his birthday.

  He transmits his tremor. He infuses excitement into the canvas he takes possession of in the same way he excites anyone watching him. He’s a committed being.

  Laura was beginning to live all too much from her son’s artistic tremor. Watching him work and progress, she allowed herself to be infected by anticipation, as if it were a fever the boy was carrying. But he was a happy boy. He liked to eat and asked for all sorts of Mexican snacks, inviting Laura to Yucatán banquets at the Circulo del Sureste in Lucerna Street with their papadzules in egg and almond sauce or sweet Neapolitan cheese, inviting her to the courtyard of the Bellinghausen restaurant on Londres Street during the season when maguey worms were served with guacamole, followed by eggnog flans, inviting her to the Danubio on Uruguay Street to enjoy scallops with a dash of lemon or with thick chipotle chile sauce-aromatic and better than all the mustards in the world.

  I’ll pay, Mama, let me shoot this time.

  Danton’s angry stare harassed them, the dragging footsteps of Juan Francisco’s old slippers harassed them. Laura didn’t care in the least, because life with Santiago was perfection itself for Laura D az this year of 1941, when she recovered her home and prolonged, sometimes with feelings of guilt, her love for Maura in her love for Santiago, knowing too that this Santiago the Second was the continuation of her love for Santiago the First, as if there were no power in heaven or on earth that could force her into a pause, a blameworthy or redemptive solitude, either. The hiatus separating brother, lover, and son was imperceptible. It lasted during a pair of afternoons on a balcony facing the vibrant park and the extinguished volcanoes.

  “I’m going to Havana to rescue Raquel Mendes-Alemán. The Prinz Eugen was not allowed in U.S. waters, and the Cubans do what the Americans tell them to do. The ship is going to sail back to Germany. This time, no one will get out alive. Once again, Hitler set a trap for the democracies. He told them, Well now, look here, I’m sending you a boatload of Jews, give them asylum. Now he’ll say, Just look, you don’t want them either. Well, I want them even less, so they’ll all go to their deaths and so much for that little problem. Laura, if I get there on time, I can save Raquel.”

  Will we ever make peace, Juan Francisco?

  What more do you want from me? I let you come back to my house. I asked our sons to respect you.

  Don’t you realize that someone else is living in this house with us?

  No. Whose ghost is that?

  Two ghosts. You and I. Before.

  I have no idea what to do. Calm down, will you? How’s your work going?

  Well. The Riveras have no idea how to manage paperwork and need someone to answer letters, save documents, review contracts.

  Good. Congratulations. It doesn’t take up too much time?

  Three times a week. I want to put a lot of work in here in the house.

  Her husband’s “good” meant “it’s about time,” but Laura paid no attention. Sometimes she thought that marrying him was like turning the other cheek to destiny. It turned what was and perhaps always should have been an enigma, a distance, into a daily reality: the mystery of Juan Francisco López Greene’s true life. She wouldn’t ask him aloud what she’d asked herself so many times. What did her husband do? Where did he fail? Was he a hero who had tired of being one?

  Someday you’ll understand, he’d say.

  Someday I’ll understand, she repeated until she convinced herself the expression was her own.

  Laura. I’m tired, I get a good salary from the Workers Confederation and the Union Congress. We lack for nothing here at home. If you want to take care of Diego and Frida, that’s up to you. Do you also want me to be the hero of 1908, of 1917, of the House of the Workers of the World and the Red Battalions? I can make you a list of the heroes of the Revolution. It has treated all of us justly, except the dead.

  I want to know. Were you really a hero?

  Juan Francisco began to laugh, he laughed his head off, coughed up phlegm and roared.

  No, there were no heroes, and if there were, they were killed off right away and they were honored with statues. Really ugly ones, too, so no one would go on believing in them. In this country, even the statues are phony. They’re all made of copper-you just have to scrape off the gilt. What do you expect from me? Why don’t you simply respect what I was and leave it at that, dammit?

  I’m making an effort to understand you, Juan Francisco. Since you won’t tell me where you came from, at least tell me what you are today.

  A guard. A guardian of order. An administrator of stability. We won the Revolution. It’s cost us a lot to achieve peace and to have a process of peaceful succession in power without military coups. We’re redistributing land, we have education, roads… Don’t you think that’s something? Would you want me to oppose all that? To end up like all those dissatisfied generals-Serrano and Arnulfo Gómez, Escobar and Saturnino Cedillo-or the philosopher Vasconcelos? They didn’t even get to be heroes. They just burned out. What do you want from me, Laura?

  I’m just looking for a little hole in your armor, where I can love you, Juan Francisco. I’m that stupid.

  A little hole? Why, I’m a sieve, my dear!

  She tried to explain to Santiago, as the boy painted, that she was delighted by his artistic spirit. She told him while his father’s words were still ringing in her ears.

  “Diego uses the word élan. He lived in France for a long time.”

  Santiago was painting, unabashed, a man and a woman, naked but separated, standing, staring at each other, exploring each other with their eyes. Their arms were crossed. Laura told Santiago it was very difficult for a couple to love each other forever because the spirits of two people are almost never equal. There is a moment of total identification that impassions us, a balance between the two which, unfortunately, is only a revelation that one of the two will break the balance.

  “I want you to understand that about your father and me.”

  “Well, Mama, all you did was to anticipate him. You made him understand you were not going to he the sad one. You left that role to him.”

  Santiago cleaned his brushes and looked at his mother.

  “And the day he dies, who’ll be anticipating whom?”

  How could I abandon a man so weak, Laura said to herself, then responded with strength and modesty: no, what we’ve got to do is to change the rules of the game, rules made by men for men and for women because only they legislate for both sexes, because the rules men make are valid both for the faithful and domestic life of women and for the unfaithful and errant life of men. The woman is always guilty of submission in one case, and in the other of rebelliousness; guilty of a fidelity that lets life pass by while she’s stretched out in a cold grave with a man who doesn’t desire her, or guilty of the infidelity of seeking pleasure with another in the same way her husband does, a sin for her, a prize for him, he’s called Don Juan and she Doña Puta, my God, Juan Francisco, why didn’t you cheat on me in style, with some great love, instead of being a camp follower for your boss Fatso Morones? Why didn’t you have a love with a woman as great, as strong, as brave as Jorge Maura, my own love?

  With Danton, Juan Francisco had a relationship that paralleled Laura’s with Santiago: the family formed two parties. The old man-he’d turned sixty but looked seventy-forgave every one of his younger son’s tricks, gave him money, and sat him down so they both could see each other’s face. He did that because neither ever opened his mouth, at least not in the presence of their two rivals in the house, Laura and Santiago. Despite the silence, Laura suspected that Juan Francisco and Danton said things to each other. The old auntie, mute by act of will, confirmed this suspicion one afternoon at the healing ceremony, at the balcony, the repeated, unifying family
ritual. María de la O insisted on sitting between the father and the younger brother, separating them, but she didn’t take her eyes off Laura. Then, when the elderly mulatta, dressed as always in black, had Laura’s attention, she rapidly moved her own eyes, like a dark eagle whose vision was split down the middle and who could see simultaneously in two directions. Several times she glanced from Juan Francisco to Danton and from the son to the father, which said to Laura something like “they understand each other,” which Laura already knew, or “they’re the same,” which was hard to imagine: the agile, party-loving, carefree Danton seemed the complete opposite of the parsimonious, withdrawn, and anguished Juan Francisco. Where was the relationship? Yet María de la O’s intuitions were rarely mistaken.

  One night, when Santiago fell asleep next to his recently acquired easel-this one a gift from Diego Rivera-Laura, who was allowed to watch him paint, covered him with a blanket and cushioned his head as best she could, very softly caressing his unfurrowed brow. Leaving his room, she heard laughter and whispering in her bedroom. She walked in without knocking and found Juan Francisco and Danton on the floor, sitting with their legs crossed, studying a spread-out map of the state of Tabasco.