Years With Laura Diaz, The

by Carlos Fuentes

  They stood in silence for a while, staring at the poster’s black letters on yellow paper, improperly fastened to a wooden frame unworthy of the marbles and bronzes in the Palace of Fine Arts. Jorge looked at Laura.

  “Forgive me. How beautiful you are.”

  Carlos Chávez was going to conduct his own Indian Symphony and Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges. The pianist Nikita Magaloff would interpret Chopin’s First Concerto, the one Aunt Hilda rehearsed so futilely in Catemaco.

  “How I wish no one on our side had ever committed a single crime.”

  “That’s how Armonía Aznar must have been—a woman I met, or rather never met. I had to guess how she was. Thank you for opening yourself to me without mysteries, without locked doors. Thanks, my hidalgo. You make me feel better, cleaner, clearer in my head.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s like vaudeville. We meet and repeat the same trite lines, like one of those Madrid comedies by Munoz Seca. You saw it today: each one knew exactly what he should say. Perhaps that’s how we’ll exorcise our disgust. I don’t know.”

  He hugged her in the Fine Arts portico, the two of them surrounded by the brownish-black Mexican night, sudden and vicious. “I’m getting tired of this interminable fight. I’d like to live with no more country than my soul, with no more country …”

  They made a half turn and went back to Cinco de Mayo, their arms around each other’s waists. Their words were slowly extinguished, like the lights in the candy shops, bookstores, luggage emporia, as the streetlamps came on, opening a path of light all the way to Herrera’s cathedral, where on the previous March 18 they’d celebrated the nationalization of Mexico’s oil—she and Juan Francisco, Santiago and Danton, and Jorge at a distance, greeting her with his hat in his hand and, on high, a personal greeting that was also a political celebration, above the heads of the crowd, greeting and saying goodbye at the same time, saying I love you and goodbye, I’ve come back and I still love you.

  At the Café de Paris, Barreda, who had been watching them, asked Gorostiza, and Villaurrutia to guess what the Spaniards had been talking about. Politics? Art? No, wine jugs. He recited another pair of verses from the Bible turned into rhyme by a mad Spaniard, the description of Balthazar’s Feast:

  Burgundy, Rhine, Pinot Blanc:

  Sausage? All you could want.

  Villaurrutia said he didn’t find Mexican jokes about Spaniards funny, and Gorostiza asked why there was this ill will against a country that gave us its culture, its language, even its mixed blood …

  “Go ask Cuauhtémoc how it went with the Spaniards at dinnertime,” laughed Barreda. “Toasted tootsies!”

  “No.” Gorostiza smiled. “The thing is, we don’t like to admit that the winners are right. We Mexicans have been defeated too often. We like loving the defeated. They’re ours. They’re us.”

  “Are there winners in history?” asked Villaurrutia, he himself defeated by sleep or languor or death, God knows, thought the beautiful, intelligent, and taciturn Carmen Barreda.

  14.

  Every Place, the Place: 1940

  1.

  HE WENT TO HAVANA, Washington, New York, Santo Domingo, sent telegrams to her at L’Escargot, sometimes called her house and only spoke if he heard her voice saying, “No, it isn’t Ericsson, it’s Mexicana,” which was their personal code for—no problems, neither husband nor children. Sometimes Maura threw caution to the wind and said something anyway, and she would have to stand there in silence or babble nonsense because her husband or her sons were nearby, no I need the plumber today, or when will that dress be ready?, or how expensive everything is, now that there’s going to be a war, while Jorge would be saying these are the best days of our lives, don’t you think?, why don’t you answer me?, and she would laugh nervously, and he’d begin, what a good thing it was we were impatient, my love, can you imagine if we’d restrained ourselves that first night?, in the name of what were we supposed to be patient?, our lives are slipping away in any case, my adored wife, my “freisch and gay wyf,” as he called her, in playful medieval Spanish, and she silently staring at her husband reading El Nacional or her sons doing their homework, wanting to say to Maura, silently telling him, nothing calmed my desire for life until I met you and now I consider myself satisfied. I don’t ask for anything more, my hidalgo, except for you to come back safe and sound so we can be together in our little room and if you ask me to leave everything behind I would without a moment’s hesitation, my sons, my husband, or my mother couldn’t stop me, only you, because with you I feel I haven’t used up my youth, will you allow me to speak frankly? Yesterday I turned forty-two, and I was sorry you weren’t here so we could celebrate it together, Juan Francisco and Danton forgot completely, only Santiago remembered, and I told him, “It’s our secret, don’t tell them,” and my son told me in a hug that we were accomplices, that would be my happiness, you and I my favorite son, why deny it?, why pretend we love all our children equally, it isn’t so, it isn’t so, there are children who have in themselves what you strongly suspect is lacking in you, children who are more than themselves, children like mirrors of the past and the future, that’s how my Santiago is, the one who did not forget my birthday and who made me think you’ve given me a papal indulgence which a woman my age needs, and if I don’t take it, my hidalgo, the life you’re giving me, I will have no life to give in the times to come to my sons, to my poor husband, my mother.

  2.

  The death of Leticia, the magnificent and adored Mutti: the central feminine image in Laura Daz’s life, the column to which clung all the masculine strands of ivy—the grandfather Don Felipe, the father Don Fernando, the equally adored brother Santiago, the dolorous and doleful Orlando Ximénez, the husband Juan Francisco, the sons brought up by the grandmother while the life of Mexico became calmer after the now distant, cruel turbulence of the Revolution, while Laura and Juan Francisco uselessly sought each other out, while Laura and Orlando put on disguises so as not to see each other and not to be seen—all of them climbers to the balcony of Mother Leticia, all except Jorge Maura, the first man independent of the Veracruz tree trunk of the mother, powerful thanks to her integrity, her care, her rigorous attention to each day’s chores, her discretion, her immense ability to offer confidence, to be there and say nothing.

  Leticia was gone, and her death brought back Laura’s childhood memories. Today’s death gives presence to yesterday’s life. Even so, Laura could not remember a single word her mother had spoken. It was as if Leticia’s entire life had been one long sigh hidden by the cloud of activities she organized to make everything proceed properly in the houses in Veracruz and Xalapa. Her speech was her kitchen, her cleanliness, her starched clothing, her well-organized dressers scented with lavender, her four-footed bathtubs, her kettles of boiling water and her pitchers of cold water. Her dialogue was her eyes, her wise silence in understanding and in making others understand without offense or lies, without useless reproach. Her modesty was beloved because it let others imagine the presence of a love protected deep within her, with no need ever to show itself. She had had a hard school: the separation of the first years, when Don Fernando lived in Veracruz and she lived in Catemaco. But that distance was imposed by circumstance: hadn’t it allowed Laura, still a little girl, to join her brother Santiago at exactly the right moment, when the two of them together could be both children and adults, playing first and crying later, with no other contact that might muddy the purity of that memory, the deepest and most beautiful in Laura Díaz’s life? Not a night passes without her dreaming about the face of her young, executed brother, buried at sea, disappearing under the waves of the Gulf of Mexico.

  The day of her mother’s funeral, Laura lived two lives at the same time. She carried out all the rites automatically, followed all the procedures in the wake and the burial, both very solitary. No one from the old families was left in Xalapa. The loss of fortune, fear of the new anticlerical and socialist expropriating governors, the magnetic power of Mexic
o City, the promise of new opportunities beyond the provincial country estates, illusion and delusion—these had scattered all the old friends and acquaintances far from Xalapa. Laura visited the San Cayetano hacienda. It was a ruin. The waltzes, laughter, the hustle and bustle of servants, the clink of glass against glass, the upright figure of Doña Genoveva Deschamps existed only in Laura’s memory …

  Mutti descended into the earth, but in her daughter’s second life that day, past became present, like a history without relics, the city in the mountains appeared suddenly at the seashore, old trees revealed their roots, birds passed over like lightning bolts, rivers filled with ashes emptied into the sea, the very stars were made of dust, and the forest was a hurricane-force scream.

  Night and day ceased to exist.

  When the world without Leticia dawned, it was decimated.

  Only the perfume of Xalapa’s eternal rain woke Laura Díaz from her reverie, so she could say to María de la O: “Now for certain, Auntie, now for certain you’ll have to come with us to Mexico City.”

  But María de la O said nothing. She would never say another word. She would affirm. She would negate. With her head. Leticia’s death left her wordless, and when Laura picked up her aunt’s valise to leave the Xalapa house, the old mulatta stopped and slowly turned around and around, as if she and only she could convoke all the family ghosts, give them a place, confirm them as family members. Laura was deeply touched as she watched the last of the Kelsen sisters bid farewell to the Veracruz house, the one who’d arrived dispossessed and marked, to be redeemed by a good man, Fernando Díaz, for whom doing good was as natural as breathing.

  Soon picks and shovels would demolish the Xalapa house on Bocanegra Street with its useless entry gate for useless horse drawn carriages or aged gas-guzzling Isotta-Fraschinis. The eaves that protected the house from the constant drizzle that blew in from the mountains would disappear, as would the interior patio, its huge porcelain flowerpots, encrusted with bits of glass, the kitchen with its fires of diamondlike coal and its humble stone corn grinders and palm-leaf fans, the dining room and the pictures of the rascal nipped by the dog. María de la O rescued only her sisters’ silver napkin rings. The picks and shovels would soon be there.

  María de la O, last witness to the provincial past of her family line, put up no resistance when Laura led her to the station for the Interoceanic train. She went as gently as Leticia’s cadaver had gone to the Xalapa cemetery to be laid next to the body of her husband. What was she going to do except imitate her dead sister and pretend that she could go on animating her lineage in the only manner left to her: immobile and silent as a dead woman, but discreet and respectful as her unforgettable sister, she who as a girl on her birthday dressed in white and went out on the patio of the Catemaco house to sing:

  on the twelfth of May

  the Virgin dressed in white

  came walking into sight

  with her coat so gay . . .

  Because at the moment of her death, María de la O’s memories of her sister Leticia and her niece Laura blended together.

  3.

  One day, a year earlier, Jorge Maura hastily returned from Washington, and Laura Díaz attributed his mood—the haste, the sadness—to the inevitable: On January 26, Franco’s forces took Barcelona and advanced toward Gerona; the civilian population began its diaspora through the Pyrenees.

  “Barcelona,” said Laura. “That’s where Armonía Aznar came from.”

  “The woman who lived in your house, whom you never saw?”

  “Yes. My own brother Santiago was with the anarcho-syndicalists.”

  “You’ve told me very little about him.”

  “Two loves of that size won’t fit in my mouth at the same time.” She smiled. “He was a very brilliant boy, very handsome and brave. He was like the Scarlet Pimpernel”—now she laughed nervously—“posing like a glamorous fellow to cover up his political activity. He’s my saint, he gave his life for his ideas, he was shot when he was twenty.”

  Jorge Maura kept a disturbing silence. For the first time, Laura saw him lower his head, and she realized he’d always held his Ibero Roman head high and proud, a touch arrogantly. She assumed it was because the two of them were entering the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, where Maura insisted on taking her as an homage to Doña Leticia, whom he’d never met.

  “Are you a Catholic?”

  “Laura, I think that in Spain and Spanish America even atheists are Catholics. Besides, I don’t want to leave Mexico without understanding why the Virgin is the symbol of Mexico’s national unity. Did you know that the Spanish royal troops would shoot the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe during the war of independence?”

  “You’re leaving Mexico?” asked Laura, keeping her tone neutral. “Then the Virgin isn’t protecting me.”

  He shrugged his shoulders in a way that meant: I’m always leaving and returning, why are you so surprised? They were kneeling side by side in the first pew, facing the altar of the Virgin, whose image, Laura, explained to Jorge, framed and protected by glass, was imprinted on the mantle of a humble Indian, Juan Diego, a tameme or porter to whom the Mother of God appeared one day in December 1531, when the Spanish conquest was barely over, on Tepeyac Hill, a place where an Aztec goddess had been worshipped.

  “How clever the Spaniards were in the sixteenth century,” said Maura, smiling. “No sooner had they carried off the military conquest than they set about the spiritual conquest. They destroy—well, we destroy—a culture and its religion, but we give the conquered people our own culture invested with Indian symbols or perhaps we give them back their own culture with European symbols.”

  “That’s true. Here we call her the Dark Virgin. That’s the difference. She isn’t white. She’s the mother whom the Indian orphans needed.”

  “She’s everything, can you imagine anything more ingenious? She’s a Christian and Indian Virgin, but she’s also the Virgin of Israel, the Jewish mother of the long-awaited Messiah. On top of that, she has an Arabic name, Guadalupe, river of wolves. How many cultures for the price of a single image!”

  Their dialogue was interrupted by an underground hymn that was born behind them and advanced from the door of the basilica like an ancient echo that did not spring from the voices of the pilgrims but accompanied them or, perhaps, received them from earlier centuries. Jorge looked toward the choir, but there was no one, neither organist nor singing children, where they might have been. The procession was accompanied by its own cantata, low and monotonous, like all Indian music in Mexico. Even so, it could not drown out the noise of knees being painfully dragged along the stones. Everyone was moving forward on their knees, some with lighted candles in their hands, others with their arms crossed in front of them, others with their fists held tight to their faces. The women carried scapulars, the men nopal leaves over their bare, bloody chests. Some faces were veiled by gauze masks tied behind the head that transformed their features into mere outlines struggling to reveal themselves. The prayers spoken in low voices were like the trilling of birds, high and low chirping—totally unlike the even tone of the Castilian tongue, Maura realized, a language measured in neutral tones that made its angers, its orders, and its speeches all the stronger; here there wasn’t a single voice that one could conceive of as growing angry, giving orders, or speaking to the others except in a tone of advice, perhaps that of destiny, but they have faith, Maura raised his voice, yes, Laura moved forward, they have faith, what’s wrong, Jorge, why are you talking that way?, but she could not understand, you can’t understand, Laura, then explain it to me, tell me, Maura, answered Laura, ready not to give in to the tremor of doubt, to barely controlled rage, the ironic humor of Jorge Maura in the Basilica of Guadalupe, watching a procession of devout Indians enter, people whose faith had no questions, a pure faith sustained by an imagination open to every credulous belief: It’s true because it’s unbelievable, repeated Jorge, suddenly carried away from the place where he was and the person
who he was and the person whom he was with, the Basilica of Guadalupe, Laura Díaz, she felt it with an irrepressible force, there was nothing she could do, all that was left to her was to listen, she wasn’t going to stop the torrent of passion that the entering procession of barefoot Mexican Indians unleashed in Maura, smashing his serene discourse, his rational reflection into a thousand pieces and throwing him into a whirlwind of memories, premonitions, defeats that spun around a single word, faith, faith, what is faith?, why do these Indians have faith?, why did my teacher Edmund Husserl have faith in philosophy?, why did my lover Raquel have faith in Christ?, why did Basilio, Vidal, and I have faith in Spain?, why did Pilar Méndez have faith in Franco?, why did her father the mayor have faith in Communism?, why did the Germans have faith in Nazism?, why do these destitute men and women dying of hunger, who have never received any compensation from the God they adore, have faith?, why do we believe and act in the name of our faith knowing full well we shall never be rewarded for the sacrifices faith imposes on us as a test?, toward what were these poor of the Lord advancing?, who, who, was the crucified figure Jorge Maura was now staring at, because the procession hadn’t come to see Christ but His Mother, believing completely that she conceived without sin, that the Holy Spirit impregnated her, that a randy carpenter was not the true father of Jesus?, did any one of the penitents approaching the altar of Guadalupe on their knees know that Mary’s conception was not immaculate?, why don’t we, I, Jorge Maura and you, Laura Díaz, believe in that?, what do we believe in, you and I?, can we together believe in God because He stripped himself of the sacred impunity of Jehovah by making himself a man in Christ?, can we believe in God because Christ made God so fragile that we human beings could recognize ourselves in Him?, Laura, but in order to be worthy of Christ do we have to abase ourselves even more, so we won’t be more than He?, is that our tragedy, is that our disgrace, that to have faith in Christ and be worthy of His redemption, we must be unworthy of Him, less than He is, sinners, murderers, lechers, full of pride, that the true test of faith is accepting that God asks us to do what He doesn’t allow?, is there a single Indian in this temple who thinks this?, no, Jorge, none, I can’t imagine it, do we have to be as good and simple and beyond temptation as these humble beings to be worthy of God, or do we have to be as rational and vain as you and I and Raquel Mendes-Alemán and Pilar Méndez and her father the mayor of Santa Fe de Palencia to be worthy of what we don’t believe?, the faith of the Mexican Indian or the faith of the German philosopher or the faith of the Jewish woman who converts to Christianity or the faith of the militant fascist or the militant Communist?, which could be, for God Himself, the best, the truest faith of all?, tell me, Laura, tell me about it, Jorge …