The Years with Laura Diaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  “And what’s your name, blondie?”

  “Blondie! He calls me blondie! People call me the Curate.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because Papa cures people. He’s a doctor. My second last name is Landa. I’m a descendant of the last city governor in the ancien régime. It’s my mother’s name.”

  “And what’s your father’s name?”

  “No jokes, now.”

  “But you’re the one making jokes, sonny.”

  “Sonny! He called me sonny! Ha-ha! No, I’m called the Curate, my father’s named López too, just like yours. Now that’s amusing, really amusing! We’re namesakes in reverse! It’s fate! Anastasio López-Landa. Don’t forget next Sunday. You seem like a good guy. But buy yourself a better tie. The ones you’ve been wearing look like a flag.”

  What would a “better” tie look like? Whom to ask? The next Sunday, Danton turned up in church in riding clothes, jodhpurs and boots, a coffee-colored jacket, an open shirt. And with a riding crop in his hand.

  “Where do you ride? Hmm… What did you say your name was?”

  “López, like you. Danton.”

  “The guillotine, ha-hal Your parents must really be something!”

  “A joke a minute. The Atayde circus hires them when things get rough.”

  “Ha-ha-ha, Danton! You’re a real scream, you know,” said the other López, shifting into English.

  “Yeah, I’m the cat’s pajamas,” said Danton,. A line from an American movie comedy.

  “Listen, everybody, this guy knows everything. He’s the bee’s knees! He’s Tarzan’s mama!”

  “Of course. Me Columbus. Cristobal Col��n!”

  “And my sons are Crystal Balls, ha-ha! Look, I live right around the corner here on Amberes. Come with me, and I’ll lend you a tie, old sport.”

  Danton turned La Votiva and the Jockey into his Sunday obligations, more sacred than taking communion-just to stay on the right side of his new acquaintances-without the benefit of confession.

  At first his presence was disconcerting. He made a detailed study of the way the boys dressed. He did not let himself be put off by the girls’ cool manners, though he’d never seen he who knew only eternal mournings and the flowered silk outfits provincial women wore-so many young ladies in suits or kilts with sweaters, a cardigan over a matching sweater, and a pearl necklace on top of everything else. A Spanish girl, María Luisa Elio, attracted attention with her beauty and elegance; she was ash blond, slim as a little bullfighter, in a black beret like Michèle Morgan in the French movies they all went to see at the Trans-Lux Prado, a checked jacket, pleated skirt, and she leaned on an umbrella.

  Danton was confident in his potency, his virility, in the very fact that he stood out. He was as dark as a gypsy and hadn’t lost his childhood long eyelashes, which now more than ever shaded his green eyes and olive cheeks, his short nose, and his full, feminine lips. He was about five feet ten and tended to be square, like a sportsman, but with the hands of a pianist-so he’d been told-like those of Aunt Hilda, who played Chopin in Catemaco. Danton would say, rather vulgarly, “These thoroughbred mares need a good branding,” and he’d ask Juan Francisco for money, he couldn’t walk in like a beggar every Sunday, he too had to shoot from time to time, I’ve got new friends, Dad, high-class, you don’t want me to make the whole family look bad, do you? And look, I do my work all week, I never miss an eight o’clock class, I take my exams right on schedule and get A or A minus, I have a good head for economics, I swear, Papa, whatever you lend me now I’ll give back with compound interest, I swear… When have I ever let you down?

  The first rows at the Hippodrome were occupied by generals nostalgic for their own, now ancient, cavalry charges; then came big businessmen who’d arrived even more recently than the soldiers, men who’d made their fortunes, paradoxically, with the radical reforms of President Lázaro Cárdenas, thanks to which the peons, who had been locked into their social position, had left the haciendas and worked for almost nothing in new factories in Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Mexico City. Less paradoxically, the new fortunes had been made because of war, monopolies, Mexico’s export of strategic materials, the rising cost of food…

  Linking these groups was a small Italian named Bruno Pagliai, smiling and elegant, manager of the racetrack and possessor of an irresistible furberia that dominated, restrained, and shamed the rustic malice of even the most hard-boiled Mexican general or millionaire. Yet there persisted a clear discrimination. The world of La Votiva, of the Curate (López-Landa) and his friends, dominated the bar, the armchairs, the dance floor, and it left to the merely rich the healthy out door life of the racetrack. The sons and daughters of generals and tycoons were also left on the outs: they weren’t taken seriously; they were-as Miss Chatis Larrazábal put it-“not our kind, dear.” But among those who weren’t “our kind,” Danton one day discovered the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen in his life, a dream.

  The “dream” was a beauty of a kind not found in Mexico, Levantine or Oriental, from that part of the world that the Malet and Isaac general-history textbooks called “Asia Minor.” Magdalena Ayub Longoria’s “Asia Minor” transformed her apparent defects-continuous eyebrows, prominent nose, square jaw-into a counterpoint or frame for eyes worthy of an Arabian princess, dreamy and velvety, eloquent beneath oiled and erotic eyelids, like a hidden sex. Her smile was so warm, sweet, and ingenuous that it would justify the veil and seraglio concealing her from everyone but her master. She was tall, slim, but she hinted here and there at roundnesses now scarcely imaginable: thus did Danton describe her to himself.

  His imagination was on the mark.

  The first time he saw her, she was sipping a “Shirley Temple,” and from that moment on he called her “my dream.” Magdalena Ayub was the daughter of a merchant from Syria or Lebanon-Mexicans always referred to them as “Turks”-named Simón Ayub, who’d come to Mexico barely twenty years before and now had a colossal fortune and the most vulgar neo-baroque mansion in Colonia Polanco. How had he accumulated his cash? By taking over markets that had been monopolies in the days of Obregón and Calles and were enhanced during the war by artificially elevated prices: for henequen, an essential rope-making fiber, for the Allies, bought cheap from Yucatán communal farms and sold dear to the gringos; vegetables exported during the winter for Yankee soldiers; pharmaceutical factories set up when gringo medicines stopped coming and anyway could be manufactured more cheaply in Mexico, even introducing sulfa drugs and penicillin. He was the inventor of black thread and perhaps even of aspirin itself! Which is why he was dubbed Aspirin Ayub, recalling, it may be, the Revolutionary general who cured his soldiers’ headaches with a bullet to the forehead.

  And even if he was uglier than the wrong end of a mule, he’d married a pretty woman from the north, from some border town, one of those women who could tempt the Pope and make St. Joseph a bigamist. Doña Magdalena Longoria de Ayub. Danton looked her over, because everyone said that after a while your girlfriend starts looking like your mother-in-law-all girlfriends, all mothers-in-law. And big Magdalena, who really was big, passed the test. Danton told the Curate, López-Landa, that she was “ripe” or, more biblically, that her cups overfloweth.

  “I swear, Dan, look over there at the mother and the daughter in their box. You tell me which you’d rather have.”

  “If I’m lucky, both of them,” said Danton, with a manhattan in one hand and a Pall Mall in the other.

  He approached the daughter and succeeded. He asked her to dance. He removed her from the isolation of the new and brought her into the community of the old. He himself was shocked it should be he, Danton López-Díaz (and Greene and Kelsen), who led the fortunate princess by the hand into the exclusive circle of the kings of ruin.

  “May I introduce Magdalena Ayub? We’re to be married.”

  Her mouth fell open with all the astonishment a nineteen-year-old can muster. The boy was joking. They’d just met.

>   “Listen, honey. Do you want to go back to your box with your folks to watch the mares run? Or would you like to be a fine mare, as they call these snooty girls over here? Would anyone but me have dared to go over to your box, say hello to your parents, and ask you to dance? What happens next? I who presented you to society, I who am not from society-so you see what the man you’re going to marry is like, my dream-I get what I want. See? And you don’t have the kind of ovaries-dreadful expression, but that’s the kind of fellow I am and you might as well get used to it-to be living alone without me, abandoned in this world. What do you think of that? Do you need me or what, honeybunch?”

  They went to dances, danced cheek to cheek, she began allowing him to take “liberties”-to caress her back, her neck, to tickle her smoothly shaved underarm, to nibble her earlobe; then came the first kiss, the second, thousands of kisses, the entreaty, just on the outside, my dream, no, Dan, I’m having my period, just between your legs, my dream, I’ll use my handkerchief, don’t be frightened, yes, my love, oh, my dream, I like you too much, I didn’t know anything about these things, I’d never met anyone like you, how strong you are, how sure of yourself, how ambitious…

  “I do have one weakness, Magdalena.”

  “What is it, my love?”

  “I’ll do anything that will make people admire me. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “I’ll make you feel someone’s admiring you. I swear. You won’t need anything else.”

  Blue moon, I saw you standing alone

  Magdalena’s family looked him over from head to toe. Insolently, he did the same to them.

  “This house could use a good redecorating,” he declared, looking with disdain at the baroque display of stucco, the false altars, and the wrought iron in the Polanco mansion. “Well, at least when you’re living with me you’ll be surrounded by good taste, my dream.”

  “Is that right?” thundered Ayub furiously. “And who’s going to finance all your luxury, my fine little gentleman?”

  “Why, you are, my generous father-in-law.”

  “My daughter doesn’t require generosity. She requires comfort,” blurted out the northern mother, idiotically haughty

  “What your daughter needs is a man who will respect and defend her and not make her feel inferior and isolated, which is what you two have accomplished, bad parents that you are.” Danton strode out, slamming the door so hard that he almost broke the vases adorned with the image of Pope Pius XII blessing the city, the world, and the Ayub Longoria family.

  He was to come back. Poor Malenita wouldn’t leave her bedroom. She wouldn’t eat anything. She cried all day long, well, like Mary Magdalene.

  “I’m not asking for a handout, Don Simon. Let me, both of you, explain, and please, sir, don’t look at me with that expression of impatience, because it makes me impatient. Control yourself. In this matter, you’re not doing me the great favor. I’m doing you the favor, and I’ll explain why, excuse me… I’m offering your daughter what she isn’t and would like to be. She’s already rich. What she doesn’t have is acceptance. She just isn’t accepted.”

  “Now I’ve heard everything. You, you poor devil, are a nobody.”

  “Since we’re now speaking familiarly, Don Aspirin, let me tell you something: I’m what you can no longer be. Exactly. I’m what’s coming. The future. For twenty years, you’ve had your way around here. But realize this, dearest father-in-law, you came to this country when Enrico Caruso was singing at El Toreo. Your time is over. The war’s over. Now a new world is coming. We’re not going to be able to monopolize anything anymore. Now there’s going to be surplus production in the United States. We’re not going to be indispensable allies. We’re going back to being dispensable beggars. Am I getting through to you, my Aspirin?”

  “Let’s both be polite, Mr. Danton, please.”

  “As I was saying. Now either we’re going to live off the internal market or we’re not going to live. Now we have to create wealth right here, as well as the people to buy what we’re going to produce.”

  “We? Aren’t you abusing the plural, Danton?”

  “We, we who love each other so much, yes, sir, Don Simon, sir. You and I, if you’ll bear with me, if instead of dominating the henequen market and exploiting the poor Mayas, you invest in chains of restaurants, wholesale department stores, the things people consume-cheap soft drinks in a tropical country full of thirsty people, vacuum cleaners to reduce the workload of the lady of the house, refrigerators so food doesn’t spoil instead of those inconvenient iceboxes that melt all over the place, radios to bring entertainment to the poorest of the poor… we’re going to be a middle-class country, don’t you see that? Get with the program, boss, don’t settle for small potatoes.”

  “You’re very eloquent, Danton. Go on.”

  “Seriously? Furniture, tinned foods, cheap clothes in good taste instead of serapes and huaraches, decent restaurants in gringo style with soda fountains and everything, no more stalls or Chinese-run cafés, cheap cars for everyone, no more buses for the poor and Cadillacs for the rich. Did you know my great-grandfather was German? Well, remember this name. Volkswagen, the people’s car. Let the German factories reopen here, and you buy up the license for VW in Mexico, give half the stock to me, and we’re all home free, Don Aspirin-no more headaches. I swear!”

  All of them know each other, Danton explained to Laura, Juan Francisco, and Santiago. But that’s all they know. Themselves, themselves, themselves. I’m going to show them today’s world, those miserable mummies from the age of Don Porfirio. I’ve learned to imitate tones of voice, you know, ways of dressing, verbal crutches like saying “ciao” or “Lord help me” and “voiturette.” I’ve dissected society the way you cut up a steak in a restaurant. Look: I found out with the Lopez-Landa kid that a guy will admire in another guy what he isn’t. That’s what I found out, and what I offered the Jockey Club set was what they aren’t, and that made me interesting to them. I’m offering the same thing to Magdalena, offering her what she isn’t but would like to be, rich but glamorous. I let her know: you aren’t what you could be, my dream, but I’ll make it all come true. The Ayubs thought that they were doing me a big favor and that they could put obstacles in my path. Baloney. In this life, you’ve got to sign your difficulties over to other people as if they were a gift. That’s the big joke.”

  “Your mom and dad don’t like me, my dream.”

  “I’ll make them like you, Danton.”

  “I don’t want to make that kind of trouble for you.”

  “It’s no trouble. That will be my gift to you, my love, my Dan…”

  Their wealth is cruel, laughed Danton, speaking to his parents and his brother. They’ve been hoarding cash for a day that will never come. They’ve forgotten the reasons why they became rich. I’m going to revive that memory. Now those reasons are mine. Mama, Papa: I’m getting married next month, as soon as I finish my economics degree. I’m a success, why don’t you congratulate me?

  My brother dazzles me, said Santiago to Laura, he makes me feel inferior and stupid, he has all the answers ahead of time, while I think of them too late, when it’s all over. Why should I be like that?

  She said the two of them were very different. Danton was made for the outside world, but you were made for the interior world, Santiago, where answers don’t have to be instantaneous or charming, because what really matter are the questions.

  “And sometimes there are no answers.” Santiago smiled from bed. “Only questions. You’re right.”

  “I know, son. But I believe in you.”

  He got out of bed with difficulty and went over to his easel. It was hard to tell the tremor of fever from the tremor of creative anticipation. Sitting in front of the canvas, he transmitted that fever, that doubt. Laura watched him and felt him in her own skin. It’s normal, that’s how he’s been since he discovered his artistic vocation. Every day he surprises himself, feels transformed, discovers the other who’s within hi
m.

  “I discover him too, Juan Francisco, but I don’t tell him. You should try to be with him a little.”

  Juan Francisco shook his head. He didn’t want to admit it, but Santiago lived in a world he didn’t understand. He didn’t know what to say to his own son, they were never close. Wasn’t it a deception to be near him now, because he was sick?

  “It’s more than that, Juan Francisco. Santiago isn’t just sick.”

  Juan Francisco didn’t understand that being an artist was synonymous with being sick. It was like imagining a double mirror which, while being itself, has two faces, each one reflecting a different reality, sickness and art, not necessarily twin realities but occasionally, yes, fraternal realities. Which came first, which nourished Santiago’s uneasy days, art or sickness?

  Laura watched her son as he slept. She liked to be next to the bed when Santiago awakened. What she saw was this: he awakened surprised, but it was impossible to know if it was the surprise of waking up alive or the shock of having one more day to paint.

  She felt excluded from that daily choice, and she confessed she’d have liked to be part of what Santiago chose each day: Lauras, my mother, Laura D az is part of my day. She would spend it with him, next to him, she’d given up everything to take care of him, but Santiago did not openly recognize that company, she was only in his company, or, as Laura would say, he let her in but without thanking her.

  “Perhaps he’s got nothing to thank me for, and I should understand and respect that.”

  One afternoon, he felt strong and asked Laura to help him to the balcony where the family held its afternoon gatherings. He’d lost so much weight that she could have carried him as she hadn’t since he was small, before he went away with Mutti and the aunts in Xalapa. Now the mother could reproach herself for that abandonment, for her spurious reasons-Juan Francisco was beginning his political career, there was no time for the boys, and worse, Laura Díaz was going to live her independent life, her sons were excess baggage like her husband, she was a provincial girl married young to a man seventeen years older than she; it was her turn to live, take risks, learn, was the nun Gloria Soriano merely a pretext for her to leave home? The time with Orlando Ximénez and Carmen Cortina, with Diego and Frida in Detroit, was no time to be carrying around a child who himself carried so much promise, this Santiago with a brow so clear that glory, creation, and beauty could be read there. Never, she swore to herself, would she neglect to take care of this child, who always, always contained all the promise, all the beauty, all the tenderness, and all the creation in the world.