Years With Laura Diaz, The

by Carlos Fuentes

  Laura said she felt embarrassed that Elizabeth was “shooting” so many things her way. That was the way you put it in Mexico City slang, which abounded in neologisms disguised as archaisms and archaisms disguised as neologisms—all in a kind of linguistic sublimation of the armed struggle: “shooting” meant giving presents, “Carranzifying” meant stealing, “besieging” meant courting, and any serious effort was called “engaging in battle.” To say “I’m doing a Wilson” meant to pass through the triumphal arch of a woman’s legs like the American President who ordered General Pershing’s punitive expedition against Pancho Villa and, before that, the landing at Veracruz with the Marines. Fatality was always compared to the Valentina song—if I’ve got to die tomorrow, why not die right now? Amorous persistence was always compared to the Adelita song—if she went off with another man, I’d follow her o’er land and sea. To compare the country to the city was like singing that only four cornfields are left or that bobbed-hair girls are finished and so is presumption, or like comparing the horribly vulgar charro Buddy-boy Beristáin—who said he was a general without having fought any battles, except against his mother-in-law—with nostalgia for the vanished refinement and grace of the Little White Cat, María Conesa, who sang “Oh, oh, oh, oh, my darling Captain” about her lover, a fearsome military man and leader of a band of thieves called the “gray car gang.” To shoot someone meant to copy that person. And “to Madero” was to do what the two women were doing at that moment—to stroll down Avenida Madero, downtown Mexico City’s main commercial street, once the Silversmiths Street and now rebaptized to honor the Apostle of the Revolution and Democracy.

  “I read a very funny book by Julio Torri. It’s called On Executions and he complains that the principal inconvenience in being shot by a firing squad is having to get up so early in the morning,” said Laura, gazing in the shopwindows.

  “Don’t worry. My husband, poor Caraza, used to say that a million people died in the Revolution but not on the battlefields. Only in cantina brawls. Laura”—Elizabeth stopped outside the Chamber of Deputies on Donceles Street—“you like coming to the Iris because your husband is a deputy, right?”

  They bought tickets to see A Free Soul with Clark Gable and Norma Shearer, and Elizabeth said the smell of candy apples at the entrance to the theater excited her.

  “Fresh apples and sticky honey,” sighed the young matron, who was getting blonder and blonder and plumper and plumper, when they left the theater. “Just think, Norma Shearer abandons everything—social position, an aristocratic boyfriend—how distinguished that Englishman Leslie Howard is!—for a gangster sexier than … Clark Gable! Divine, big ears and all! I adore him!”

  “Well, I’ll take the blond, Leslie Howard. Anyway, he’s Hungarian, not English.”

  “Impossible. Hungarians are gypsies and wear earrings. Where did you read that?”

  “In Photoplay.”

  “Well maybe you want a blond now—English or kidnapper or whatever he is—but you married that dark, dark Juan Francisco. Honey, you don’t fool me. You like the Cine Iris because it’s next door to the Chamber of Deputies. If you’re lucky, you’ll see him. I mean, you’ll see each other. I mean. I just mean.”

  Laura shook her head emphatically but explained nothing to Elizabeth. Sometimes she felt her life was like the seasons of the year, except that her marriage had gone from spring to winter without any summer or fall. She loved Juan Francisco, but a man is only admirable when he admires the woman who loves him. That, in the last instance, is what Laura felt was missing. Perhaps Elizabeth was right: she had to try other waters, swim in other rivers. Even if she didn’t find perfect love, she could build herself a romantic passion. Maybe it could be “platonic,” a word Elizabeth didn’t understand but put into practice at the parties she was always going to.

  “Look but don’t touch. If you touch me, you’ll catch something.”

  She never gave herself to anyone: her friend Laura imagined that a passion could be created by force of will. This is why the two women could live together without problems and without men, avoiding the multitude of Don Juans in Mexico City liberated from hearth and home by the chaos of the Revolution and looking for lovers when what they really wanted was mothers.

  The vernissage for Andrea Negrete’s portrait by Tizoc Ambriz was the pretext for Laura to depart from what Elizabeth, with a certain macabre resonance, called her “stiff widowhood without a stiff,” and attend an artistic “function.” Enough of ruminating about the past, enough of imagining impossible loves, enough of telling stories about Veracruz or missing her sons or feeling ashamed to go to Xalapa because she felt guilty, because it was she who had abandoned her home just as she abandoned her sons, for she knew no way to justify what she’d done, didn’t want to destroy Juan Francisco’s image for the boys, didn’t want to admit to Mutti and to her aunts that she’d made a mistake, that she would have been better off looking for a young man of her own class at the San Cayetano and Xalapa Casino dances, but above all she did not want to speak ill of Juan Francisco, wanted everyone to go on believing she’d put her faith in a fighting, valiant man, above all a leader who personified everything that had happened in Mexico in this century, didn’t want to say to her family I was mistaken, my husband is corrupt or mediocre, my husband is an ambitious man unworthy of his ambition, your father, Santiago, can’t live without having someone recognize his merits, your father, Danton, is defeated by his belief that other people don’t give him what he deserves—my husband, Elizabeth, is incapable of recognizing that he’s already lost his merit. The gold has rubbed off his medals and only the copper is left.

  “Your father hasn’t done anything except inform on a persecuted woman.”

  How could she say that to Santiago and Danton, who were going to turn, respectively, nine and eight? How could she explain herself to Mutti and her aunts? How could she tell them that all the prestige won over years of struggle had evaporated in a second because one thing had been done badly? It was better, Laura told herself in her self-imposed solitude, for Juan Francisco to go on thinking she had judged and condemned him. It didn’t matter to her, so long as he believed it was only she and no one else—not the world, not his sons, not some middle aged women hidden in a Xalapa boardinghouse and unimportant to him—who judged him. Her husband’s pride would remain intact. The wife’s sorrow would only be the wife’s.

  She did not know how to say all that to the insistent Elizabeth, just as she couldn’t explain it to the family in Veracruz, to whom she wrote as if nothing had happened. The letters would arrive at Avenida Sonora, and Juan Francisco’s new maid would turn them over to Laura every week. Laura would go to her old home at midday when he wasn’t in. Laura was sure: if María de la O suspected something, she would keep quiet about it. Discretion was born with María de la O.

  The invitation to the unveiling of Andrea Negrete’s portrait was irresistible because, one day before, Elizabeth had spoken about expenses with her guest.

  “Don’t worry about anything, Laura. The hat, the dresses, you’ll pay me back when you can.”

  “Juan Francisco’s monthly allotment to me hasn’t come yet.”

  “It wouldn’t be enough!” laughed the rose-colored blonde tenderly. “You’ve got a wardrobe like Marlene’s.”

  “I like pretty things. Perhaps because I don’t have, for the moment, any compensation for such an … absence, I guess I’d call it.”

  “Something will come your way. Don’t upset yourself.”

  The truth is that she wasn’t spending very much money. She read. She went to concerts and museums alone, to the movies and to dinner with Elizabeth. The situation that separated her from her husband was for her a period of mourning. Between them was a betrayal, a death—a dead woman. But the Chanel perfume, the little Schiaparelli hat, the suit tailored by Balenciaga … So much had changed so quickly. Fashion: How was Laura going to appear in public wearing a flapper’s short skirt like a Charleston dancer and Clar
a Bow hair when everyone had to dress like the new Hollywood stars? Skirts were longer, hair was wavier, busts were decked out with huge pique lapels, those who dared wore silk evening dresses sculpted to the shape of the body, like the platinum blonde Jean Harlow, and a fashionable hat was indispensable. A woman took off her hat only to sleep or play tennis. A rubber bathing cap was called for even in the swimming pool—marcelled hair had to be protected.

  “Come on now, pluck up your courage.”

  Before she could say hello to the hostess or admire the severe Bauhaus lines of the penthouse, decorated by Pani, or pay respects to the guest of honor, two hands covered Laura Díaz’s eyes. Then came a coquettish “Guess who!” (in English), and before Laura’s half-opened eye, the heavy gold ring with the initials OX.

  For an instant, she did not want to see it. Behind Orlando Ximénez’s hands was the young man she hadn’t wanted to look at the first time she’d met him, in the dining room of the San Cayetano hacienda. Once again she smelled the English cologne, once again she heard the baritone voice raised intentionally as, it seemed, was the custom among the English. She imagined the tenuous light of the tropical terrace, and saw in her mind’s eye the chiseled profile, the straight nose, the blond curls …

  She opened her eyes and recognized the upper lip, slightly recessive, and the prominent chin, a bit like the Habsburg kings’. But this time there were no curls, only a receding hairline, a mature face, and quite yellowish skin, like that of the Chinese workers on the Veracruz docks.

  Orlando saw the sad shock in Laura’s eyes and said, “Orlando Ximénez. You don’t recognize me, but I recognize you. Santiago spoke of you so tenderly. I think you were—what did I tell you … ?

  “His favorite virgin.”

  “No longer?”

  “Two sons.”

  “Husband?”

  “He no longer exists.”

  “Did he die?”

  “You figure it out.”

  “And here we are, you and I, still alive. Hmm. Funny how things work out.”

  Orlando looked around as if he were once again trying to find the San Cayetano balcony, the corner where they could be alone again and speak. A bittersweet wave of lost opportunity rolled across Laura’s breast, but Carmen Cortina would not allow frivolous intimacy or shameful solitude at her parties. As if she sensed a private—that is, exclusive—situation in the making, she interrupted the couple and introduced them around: to Butt del Rosal, an old aristocrat who used a monocle and whose joke was to take the lens out of his eye and, look at this, ingest it as if it were a communion wafer—it was phony, made of gelatin; then Onomástico Galán, a fat, red-faced Spaniard who went to parties in a nightshirt and matching cap with stripes and a red tassel, carrying a candle in one hand—in case there was a power failure in this disorganized and revolutionary country, which needed a good, soft dictatorship like Primo de Rivera’s in Spain; after him came a couple in sailor costumes, he with short pants and a blue cap with the words KISS ME on it and she as Mary Pickford, with a wig of big blond curls, white knee socks, patent-leather shoes, frilly panties, and a daringly short pink skirt, in addition to the requisite bow on her curly head; behind them came an art critic in an impeccable white suit and its contemptuous corollary on his lips, which he repeated constantly: “These people are all ridiculous!”

  He was hand in hand with his sister, a tall, beautiful statue made of confectioner’s sugar who would repeat, like some sisterly echo, “Ridiculous, we’re all ridiculous,” while an old painter with invisible, sharp, and powerful halitosis announced he was the teacher of this new artist, Tizoc, a position disputed by another painter of melancholic and disillusioned mien, famous for his funerary black-and-white paintings and for his pure-black lover and disciple, nicknamed “Xangó” by the painter, by Mexico City, and by the world, although to gild, I mean geld, I mean gild the lily, as Carmen Cortina would say, the powerful black had an Italian wife whom he introduced as the model for La Gioconda.

  This whole circle was watched from a distance and with clinical disapproval by an English couple whom Carmen introduced as Felicity Smith, an extremely tall woman who could not observe what was going on without lowering her disdainful eyes, although, because she was courteous, she preferred to fix them on the distance; and a short, bearded, elegant man whom Carmen introduced as James Saxon and (sotto voce) as King George’s bastard son, who’d taken refuge in a tropical hacienda in the Huasteca area of the state of San Luis Potos, which said bâtard had transformed into a folie worthy, as his companion Felicity pointed out, of the king of literary eccentrics William Beckford: “When you live in James’s house, you have to fight your way through orchids, cockatoos, and bamboo blinds.”

  “The problem,” whispered Carmen to Orlando and Laura, “is that everyone here is in love with everyone else. Felicity’s in love with James, who is homosexual and very interested in the critic who says ‘ridiculous,’ who is mad for the black Xangó, who’s a false fag, who gives the melancholy painter satisfaction for reasons of state but who in fact has his fun with the Neapolitan, although she—the so-called Mona Lisa—has proposed converting the melancholy painter to heterosexuality, thus forming a menage à trois that would be not only pleasant but economically convenient in times of crisis, my dear, when no one, absolutely no one, will buy an easel painting and the government is the only patron of the daubers, quelle horreur!, except that Mary Pickford is in love with the Italian woman, who secretly sleeps with the sailor, who is also something else, but she wants to prove to him that he’s a real man, which is true, except that Popeye knows that by passing himself off as a fag he arouses the maternal instincts of ladies who want to protect him while he takes advantage of them by surprising them, except that La Gioconda, knowing her husband is Lothar and not Mandrake the Magician, would like to see herself playing the Narda role—are you following me, dearies, don’t you read the comic strips in El Universal?—and try, with Xangó, to bring about the conversion to normalcy of the melancholy painter so as to integrate the trio, as I said, which threatens, as things seem to be going, to turn into a quartet, and even a quintet if we include Mary Pickford, what a mess and what a problem for a hostess who is, after all, from a proper family like my own!”

  “Carmen,” observed Orlando, resigned, “leave well enough alone. Imagine, if Dostoyevsky had psychoanalyzed himself he might not have written The Idiot.”

  “Mr. Orlando,” murmured Carmen Cortina, “I only invite people with high IQs, never an idiot! God forbid!” She gasped, but she still managed to introduce Pimpinela de Ovando, an aristocrat fallen on hard times, and Gloria Iturbe, suspected of being a spy for Germany’s Chancellor Franz von Papen, the things people say!, but everything, my dears, is so international nowadays, that no one even bothers to mention the sins of La Malinche!

  Carmen Cortina’s verbal cascades multiplied into similar cataracts in the mouths of all her guests, except the cadaverous black-and-white painter (“I’ve eliminated everything superfluous from my paintings”), who was the one who supplied Orlando’s famous dictum: “Some Mexicans look well only in their coffins,” words mumbled a moment before the introduction of the Minister of Education in the current government, which gave the hostess and her protégé the painter from Veracruz the chance to unveil the painting, which they did together, raising the excitement and the scandal of the party to a fever pitch when what everyone saw was the true image of the actress who’d played in Poppy: You Won’t Be Alone Anymore in all her splendid nakedness, stretched out on a blue sofa that emphasized the whiteness of her skin and the absence of hair, the one vain, the other coy, united by the art of the painter in a sublime expression of spiritual totality, as if nudity were the habit this nun wore, inclined as she was to flagellation as a superior form of fornication, eager to sacrifice her pleasure for the sake of something more than modesty, or, as Orlando summed it up, “Look, Laura, it’s like the title of that novel from the last century: Nun, Wife, Virgin, and Martyr.”

/>   “It’s the portrait of my soul,” Andrea Negrete said to the Minister of Education.

  “Well, your soul has hair on it,” he retorted, his sharp eye having noticed that the painter hadn’t shaved Doña Andrea’s pubis but had painted her pubic hair white, just like the hair around the actress’s temples.

  At that, the party crested, after which the waters, as we say, became calm. Voices dropped to a whisper of shock, of damnation or admiration. It was impossible to know what people thought of Tizoc’s art or Andrea’s audacity. The Minister said goodbye with an impudent expression on his face and a whispered comment to Carmen, “You told me this would be a cultural event.”

  “It’s like Goya’s Maja, Mr. Minister. One day I’ll introduce you, it’s the Duchess of Alba, a great friend of mine.”

  “Duchess of Tarts,” said the member of Ortiz Rubio’s cabinet.

  “Oh, how I’d love to see the members of all the members in all the cabinets,” said the little sailor boy wearing the KISS ME cap.

  “Goodbye.” The Minister nodded his head when the sailor in short pants inflated a balloon with BLOW JOB written on it and let it float to the ceiling.

  “This is over,” said the merry mini-Popeye. “Where do we go from here?”

  “The Leda,” called out Mary Pickford.

  “The Candles,” suggested the painter with halitosis.

  “The Crouchers,” sighed the critic in white.

  “How ridiculous,” intoned his sister.

  “The Rio Rosa,” chimed in the Italian woman.

  “El Salon México,” decreed the Englishman of la main gauche.

  “Mexico beautiful and beloved,” yawned the extremely tall Englishwoman.

  “Mexico little Africa,” growled a society columnist.

  “I’m getting a highball,” said Orlando to Laura.

  “We have the same name.” A very beautiful woman smiled at Laura as she sat down on a sofa and tried to adjust the lamp next to it. She laughed. “After a certain age, a woman depends on light.”