Los años con Laura Díaz

by Carlos Fuentes

  Danton parked and went into a house with plaster statues of Apollo and Venus in the entry way. The door closed, and mystery reigned. After a while, music and laughter could be heard. The lights went on and off capriciously.

  They came back one morning when a gardener was clipping hedges around the entrance and a maid was dusting the erotic statues. The front door was ajar. Lourdes and Santiago caught a glimpse of a normal bourgeois living room with brocade armchairs and vases filled with calla lilies, marble floors, and a staircase right out of a Mexican movie.

  Suddenly at the top of the stairs appeared an arrogant young man with closely cropped hair wearing a silk dressing gown, a cravat at the neck, and—an extravagant detail—putting on white gloves.

  “What do you want?” he asked, his brow highly arched and very well plucked, in contrast to his hoarse voice. “Who are you?”

  “So sorry, we’re at the wrong house,” said Lourdes.

  “Jerks,” muttered the man with the gloves.

  I guess it’s all right, said CRAP’s file clerk to Santiago, if you’re the boss’s son, go right ahead.

  Every afternoon, while his father prolonged his lunches at the Focolare, the Rivoli, or the Ambassadeurs, Santiago went very carefully, yet despite everything painfully, through the company’s papers, passing them, as it were, through a strainer of mixed repugnance and love, because, as the young student ceaselessly repeated to himself, He’s my father, I’ve lived on this money, this money educated me, these deals are the roof and floors of my house, I drive a brand-new Renault thanks to my father’s business …

  “Let’s act as if we’re secret lovers,” Santiago said to Lourdes. “Imagine we don’t want to be seen.”

  “By whom? By each other?”

  “No! Come on, honey, I mean this seriously. Where would we go if we didn’t want to be seen?”

  “Santiago, don’t be silly. Just follow your father’s car!” She laughed.

  Chez Soi was a spacious dark place on Avenida de los Insurgentes, with lots of room between tables, only intimate lighting with a small, low lamp at each table: it was perpetual twilight. Red-and-white-checked tablecloths gave the French touch.

  Lourdes and Santiago followed Danton and watched him go to Chez Soi three weeks in a row, punctually at nine every Tuesday evening. But he entered and left alone.

  One night, Santiago and Lourdes went at eight-thirty, sat down, and ordered rum and Cokes. The French waiter looked down at them scornfully. There were couples at every table but one. A woman with an outrageous décolleté, proudly showing off half her bosom, raised an arm to arrange her abundant reddish hair, revealing a perfectly shaved armpit, took out a compact and touched up her abundantly whitened face around her plucked eyebrows, her arrogant eyes, and her exaggeratedly wide mouth, like a Joan Crawford in decline. The curious thing was that she did all this without taking off her white gloves.

  When Danton made his entrance, he kissed her on the lips and sat down next to her. Lourdes and Santiago were off in a dark corner and had already paid their check. That night, they drove the Renault to the Oaxaca coast. Santiago drove all night without saying a word, wide awake, negotiating the endless serpent of curves linking Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Puerto Escondido. Lourdes slept with her head on his shoulder, but Santiago had eyes only for the dark forms of the landscape, the great backbones of the mountain range, the wild, abundant body of the country in all its contrasts: pine forests and clay deserts, basalt walls and crowns of snow, immense organ cactuses, sudden spurts of jacaranda. A desolate geography, without villages or inhabitants. The country yet to be created busy destroying itself first.

  The sea appeared at eight in the morning. No one was on the beach; Lourdes awakened with a cry of joy, this is the best beach on the coast, she said, stripping to go in, then Santiago took off his clothes and together they went naked into the sea, the Pacific was their sheet, their kisses deeper than the green, placid waters, they felt their bodies supported over the sandy bottom and excited by the saline vigor, and Lourdes raised her legs when she felt the tip of Santiago’s penis rubbing her clitoris, wrapped her legs around him as he embraced and entered her in the sea, thrusting hard against her mons as women like it while he felt himself within her as men like it, and they came and they washed and they frightened off the seagulls.

  As soon as you can, learn the rules of the game, Danton had said to Santiago when he began working at CRAP. Those who want to rise by going into the PRI have to be content with whatever comes their way. It’s true. They’re seasoning for any sauce. Whatever’s offered them, they take. One day you can be a high official, the next Secretary of State, and the day after that a mere bridge and road inspector. It doesn’t matter. They have to swallow everything. Discipline pays off. Or not. But they don’t have an alternative. That’s where the common code begins for everyone, those who are rising and those who already have it made. Never make an enemy of someone who has power or who might have it, son. If you’re going to get into a fight, it should be over something serious, not just a joke. Don’t make waves, son. This country can only navigate in a Sargasso Sea. The calmer it is, the more we believe we’re making progress. It’s kept secret and it’s a paradox, I agree. Never say anything in public that might make for controversy. We don’t have problems here, Mexico progresses in peace. There’s national unity, and anyone who acts up and disturbs the peace pays dearly for it. We’re living the Mexican miracle. We want something more than a chicken in every pot, as the gringos say. We want a fully stocked refrigerator in every home and, if possible, stocked with products purchased in the supermarkets of your grandfather, Don Aspirin, God bless him. I convinced him that business has to be big business. Dear Don Aspirin, he was a small-time player.

  He poured two fingers of Chivas Regal into a heavy cut crystal tumbler, took a sip, and went on.

  “I’m going to make sure you’re well connected, Santiago, don’t you worry. We all have to begin young, but the hard thing is to last it out. Look, the politicians also begin young, but most of them don’t last. We businessmen begin young and last a lifetime. No one chooses us, and as long as we don’t say anything in public, we’re neither seen nor criticized. You don’t have to make a splash. Publicity and self-promotion are forms of rebellion in our system. Forget that stuff. Don’t ever risk yourself by saying something you’ll be sorry for the next day. Your thoughts, keep them for yourself. And no witnesses.”

  Santiago accepted the glass his father handed him and emptied it in one swallow.

  “That’s what I like to see,” laughed Danton. “You have everything. Be discreet. Don’t take chances. Put money on all the horses, but stay close to the winner when the big race comes around, the presidential succession. Loyalty means nothing, being attentive and courteous does. Take advantage of the first three years of the six-year term to make deals. Then come the falling-off, the craziness, the dreams of being reelected or winning the Nobel Prize. And Presidents go nuts. You have to accommodate yourself to the successor, who, even if the incumbent chose him, will tear his predecessor apart, along with his family and friends, the moment he sits on the presidential throne. Sail in silence, Santiago. We’re the secret continuity. They’re the noisy divisiveness—and sometimes ruinous, of course.”

  He should take this girl out dancing, and that one out to dinner. This Perengana’s papa is one of Don Danton’s partners and has a modest fortune of fifty million dollars, but Loli Parada’s papa has around two hundred million, and even though he’s less manipulable than the partner, he adores his daughter and would give her everything …

  Everything? Santiago asked his father. What do you call everything, Father? Shit, you don’t even follow your own advice, Papa asshole, you leave too many papers around, even if you do hide them well, your files are full of evidence you’ve been storing up to blackmail the people you did favors for and refresh the memories of those you owe favors to; both ways you were corrupt, you old bastard, don’t look at me like that, I’
m not going to be cautious, fucker, I have photocopies of all your stinking maneuvers, I know by heart every bribe you got from a Secretary of State to take care of a public matter as if it were private, every commission you got for being an intermediary and straw man in an illegal real estate deal in Acapulco, every check you received for being a front for gringos investing in activities from which foreigners are barred, every peso you banked for taking over community lands of Indians who were evicted while peasants were murdered so that a President and his partners could develop tourism there; I know about the murder of independent union leaders and of stubborn agrarian leaders, you were paid for it all and you paid everybody, my father, you son of a bitch, you haven’t committed a legal act in your fucking life, you live off the system and the system lives off you, you’re proven guilty by the evidence you needed to condemn everyone who either served you or was served by you, but the secret’s out now, old bastard, I have copies of everything, don’t worry, I’m not going to give anything to the newspapers, what would I get from that? I’m not going to say a word, unless you go crazier than you already have, asshole, and have me killed, and in that case everything’s set to see the light of day, and not here, where you pay off the press, shitty corrupter that you are, but in the United States, where it will really hurt you, where you’ll be ruined, son of a bitch, because you launder money for Yankee and Mexican criminals, because you break the sacred laws of the sacred American democracy, you bribe their bankers, you send little presents to their congressmen, motherfucker, you even have your own personal lobby in Washington, I swear I actually admire you, Papa, you’re better than Willie Mays, you touch all the bases, I also swear I have even more contempt for the fucking system you’ve helped to build than I do for you, you and those like you are rotten to the core, from the President to the last policeman you’re rottener than a piece of dry shit that you’ve divided up among yourselves for forty years and you’ve been feeding us all, go fuck yourself Don Danton López-Díaz! I don’t want to eat shit, I don’t want a cent from you, I don’t want to see your fucking face ever again in my life, I don’t want to see a single one of your partners, or any leaders of the CTM, or redeemers of the CNC, or bankers saved from ruin by the government, not a single one … I swear, I’m going to fight against all of you, and if something happens to me, something worse is going to happen to you, Papa dear.

  Santiago threw the copies of the papers into his father’s face, Danton mute, trembling, his cramped fingers reflexively poised over the alarm buttons though he couldn’t move, reduced to the brutal impotence his son wanted for him.

  “Remember. There’re copies of every single document. In Mexico. In the United States. In a safe place. You’d better protect me, Papa, because you have no other protection than your disobedient son. Fuck you!”

  And Santiago embraced his father, embraced him and whispered into his ear, I love you, Papa, you know that despite everything I love you, you old bastard.

  Laura Díaz presided over the table that Christmas night of 1966. She sat at the head of the table, the two couples on either side. She felt secure, perfected in some way by the symmetry of love between her grandchildren on one side and her friends on the other. She was no longer alone. On her right, her grandson Santiago and his girlfriend Lourdes announced they would be getting married on New Year’s Eve, he would look for a job, and meanwhile …

  “No,” Laura interrupted him. “This is your house, Santiago. You and your wife should stay here and bring joy to the life of an old woman …”

  Because having the third Santiago with her was like having the other two, the elder and the younger, brother and son. They should have their child, Santiago should finish his studies. For her it was a party, filling the house with love, noise …

  “Your Uncle Santiago never shut his bedroom door.”

  To fill the house with happy love. Right from the start, Laura wanted to protect the young, handsome couple, perhaps because on her left was sitting the couple who had waited thirty years to reunite and be happy.

  Basilio Baltazar had gone gray, but he still had the dark, precisely outlined gypsy profile of his youth. Pilar Méndez, on the other hand, showed the ravages of a life of bad luck and deprivation. Not physical deprivation, she hadn’t gone hungry, but an internal desolation: her face was etched with the doubts, the divided loyalties, the constant obligation to choose and then to bind up with love the wounds caused by family cruelty, so factious and also fantastic. The woman with the ash-blond hair and bad teeth, beautiful still with her Iberian profile, with all the mixed encounters—Islamic and Goth, Jew and Roman—carried on her face like a map of her homeland, also still bore the signs of those hard words, declaimed as if in an ancient tragedy staged opposite the classical background of the Roman gate to Santa Fe.

  “The greater fidelity consists in disobeying unjust orders.”

  “Save her in the name of honor.”

  “Have mercy.”

  “Heaven is full of lies.”

  “I’m dying so that my father and mother will hate each other forever.”

  “She must die in the name of justice.”

  “What part of pain doesn’t come from God?”

  Laura said to Pilar that the grandchildren, Santiago and Lourdes, had a right to hear about the drama that had taken place in Santa Fe in 1937.

  “It’s a very old story,” said Pilar.

  “There’s no story of the past that’s not repeated in our time.” Laura caressed the Spanish woman’s hand. “I really mean that.”

  Pilar said she hadn’t complained when facing death hack then, and she wouldn’t do so now. Complaint only augments pain. Enough is enough.

  “We thought she’d been shot at dawn outside the city walls,” said Basilio. “We thought so for thirty years.”

  “Why did you believe it?” asked Pilar.

  “Because that’s what your father told us. He was one of us, the Communist mayor of Santa Fe, so of course we believed him.”

  “There’s no better fate than to die unknown,” said Pilar, looking at the young Santiago.

  “Why is that, ma’am?”

  “Because if you’re identified, Santiago, you have to apologize for some people and condemn others and you end up betraying them all.”

  Basilio wanted to tell the young people what he’d already told Laura, about how he’d asked for emergency leave and had rushed back to Mexico to see his wife, his Pilar. Don Alvaro Méndez, Pilar’s father, had faked his daughter’s execution that morning and had hidden her in a ruined house out in the Sierra de Gredos, where she’d lack for nothing for the duration of the war; the owners of the neighboring farm were impartial, friends of both Don Alvaro and his wife, Doña Clemencia. They wouldn’t betray anyone. Even so, Pilar’s father said nothing to his wife, who remained convinced that her daughter was a Martyr to the Movement. That’s how she described it when Franco triumphed. Don Alvaro was executed on the very spot where his daughter was supposed to have died. The mother cultivated a devotion to her martyred daughter, dedicating the place where Pilar had supposedly fallen, though the body was never found because the reds must have taken it away, most likely tossing it into a common grave …

  The heroine Pilar Méndez, the martyr executed by the reds, was put on the Falange’s list of saints, and the real Pilar, hidden in the mountains, could not reveal herself, lived invisibly, torn at first between revealing herself and telling the truth or hiding out and maintaining the myth, but in the end convinced, when she learned of her father’s death, that in Spain history is tragic and always ends badly, therefore it was better to go on being invisible, because that protected both the faithful memory of her father and the holy hypocrisy of her mother. She became accustomed to it, first in the refuge given her by her father’s friends’ kindness and then, much later, when they feared they were in danger because of Franco’s avenging siege, protected by the charity of a convent of Discalced Carmelites, the order founded by St. Teresa of Avila and under
her regulations, in which Pilar Méndez—protected by Christian charity though longing to join the rules of the sisters—found a discipline that, as she accustomed herself to it, was a salvation: poverty, the woolen Carmelite habit, rough sandals, abstinence from meat; sweeping, sewing, praying, and reading, because St. Teresa said that nothing seemed more detestable than “a stupid nun.”

  The nuns soon discovered Pilar’s gifts. She was a girl who could read and write, so they gave her the Saint’s books and with the passing years so ingrained the customs of the convent in her (her personal austerity reminded the sisters of their Holy Founder, that “errant woman,” as King Philip II had called her) that the authorities raised no objections when the Mother Superior asked for a pass for this humble, intelligent convent worker, Ursula Sánchez, who wanted to visit some relatives in France and had no documents because the Communists had burned all the papers in her hometown.

  “I left blinded, but with such an intense memory of my past that it wasn’t hard for me to remember it when I got to Paris, to recover what might have been my fate if I hadn’t spent my life in towns with bad water where the rivers flow down the mountains white with lime. The sisters had recommended me to the Carmelites in Paris, where I began to stroll the boulevards, regain my feminine tastes, covet elegant clothes—I was thirty four and wanted to look pretty and well dressed—and I made friends in the diplomatic corps, managed to get a job in the Mexican House at the Cite Universitaire and I met a rich Mexican whose son was studying there, we had an affair, he brought me to Mexico, he was jealous, so now I was living in a tropical cage in Acapulco filled with parrots, and he gave me jewels, but I felt I’d been living in cages all my life, village cages, convent cages, and now a gilded cage, but always a prisoner, incarcerated mostly by myself, first so I wouldn’t betray my father, then so I wouldn’t rob my mother of her satisfied rancor, or of the holiness she ascribed to me thinking I was dead, which let her feel saintly, and I was used to living in secret, to being someone else, to never breaking the silence imposed on me by my parents, the war, Spain, the peasants who protected me, the nuns who gave me refuge, the Mexican who brought me to America.”