Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

To the right, far away, the gilded Angel of Independence added to its own painted gleam the glow of spotlights outlining its air-borne silhouette, golden damsel of the Porfirio Díaz era disguised as a Greek goddess but representing, like a celestial transvestite, the virile angel of a feminine saga, Independence … The he/she Angel held up a laurel branch in his/her right hand, stretched his/her wings, and began a flight — but not the one intended, a flight that instead was catastrophic, brutal, and abrupt, from the top of the airy column into the very air, then crashing into shattered pieces at the base of its own pedestal, a fall like Lucifer’s, the ruined he/she Angel vanquished by the shaking earth.

Laura Díaz saw the Angel fall and — who knows why? — thought that it wasn’t the Angel but Antonieta Rivas Mercado, who had posed mythically for the sculptor Enrique Alciati, never imagining that one day her beautiful effigy, her entire body, would fall to pieces at the foot of the slender commemorative column. She watched the treetops ebb and flow and she watched the Angel fall but, more than anything else, she felt her own house creaking, snapping apart like the Angel’s wings, breaking into pieces like a fried tortilla between the teeth of the monstrous city — where she’d toured with Orlando Ximénez one night to see the face of its true misery, the invisible misery, the most horrible of all, the misery that didn’t dare show itself because it could beg for nothing, and because no one would give it anything anyway.

She waited for the earthquake to wear itself out.

The best thing to do was to stay where she was. There was no other way to fight that underground force, one had to resign oneself to it and then overcome it with its mirror opposite: immobility.

She’d only once before experienced a serious tremor, in 1943, when the city quavered because of an extraordinary event: as a peasant in Michoacán was plowing his field, smoke began to pour out of a hole, and out of the hole emerged, in just a few hours, as if the earth had really borne it, a baby volcano, Paricutín, vomiting stone, lava, sparks. Every night its glow was visible from farther and farther away. The Paricutín phenomenon was amusing, astonishing, but comprehensible precisely because so bizarre (the name of the place was unpronounceably Tarascan: Paranguaritécuaro, abbreviated to Paricutín). A country where a volcano can appear overnight, out of nowhere, is a country where anything can happen …

The 1957 earthquake was crueler, faster, dry, and it slashed the sleeping body of Mexico City like a machete. When calm returned, Laura carefully walked down the cast-iron circular stairs to the bedroom floor and found things scattered every which way: armoires and drawers, toothbrushes, glasses and soaps, pumice stones and sponges, and on the ground floor pictures hung at crazy angles, not a single light burning, plates broken, parsley knocked over, bottles of Electropura water smashed in pieces.

It was worse outside. When she stepped out onto the street, Laura could see the full and savage damage the house had suffered. The facade looked not so much smashed as if it had been slashed with a knife, peeled like an orange, uninhabitable …

The earthquake woke up the ghosts. The telephone worked. While Laura was eating a bean-and-sardine snack and having some grape juice, she had calls from Danton and Orlando.

She hadn’t seen her younger son since Juan Francisco’s wake, when she’d scandalized her daughter-in-law’s family and especially her daughter-in-law, Magdalena Ayub Longoria.

“I couldn’t care less what that bunch of snobs think,” Laura told her son.

“It doesn’t matter,” answered Danton. “Water and oil, you know … but don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

“Thank you. I wish we could see each other.”

“So do I.”

In the eyes of her in-laws the scandal grew when Laura went off to Cuernavaca with a gringo Communist, but Danton’s money was always there, punctually and abundantly. It was their agreement, and there was nothing more to say. Until the day of the earthquake.

“Are you all right, Mama?”

“I’m all right. The house is a ruin.”

“I’ll send builders around to look it over. Move into a hotel and then call me so I can take care of things.”

“Thanks. I’ll go to Diego Rivera’s.”

There was an uncomfortable silence, and then Danton, in a cheery voice, said, “The things that happen. The roof collapsed on top of Doña Carmen Cortina. While she was sleeping. Did you know her? Just imagine. Buried in her own bed, as flat as a pancake. Mexico, beautiful and adored! as the song goes. They say she was the life of the party back in the 1930s.”

A little while later, the telephone rang again, and Laura flinched. She remembered the two different telephone companies, Ericsson and Mexicana, with different lines and numbers, complicating everyone’s life, when she had Mexicana and Jorge Maura had Ericsson. Now there was only one telephone company, so today’s lovers, Laura thought nostalgically, were missing the excitement of the game, the telephone as disguise.

As if to put off the insistent caller, Laura tried to think about everything that had come into the world since her grandfather Philip Kelsen had left Germany in 1864: moving pictures, radio, cars, planes, telephones, telegraphs, television, penicillin, mimeograph machines, plastic, Coca Cola, long-playing records, nylon stockings …

Perhaps the sense of being in a catastrophe reminded her of Jorge Maura, and she began to associate the ringing phone with her own heartbeats and hesitated for a few moments. She was afraid to pick up the receiver. “Laura?” She tried to recognize the baritone voice, deliberately high pitched to sound more English, who greeted her saying, “It’s Orlando Ximénez speaking. You’ve heard about Carmen Cortina’s tragedy. She was crushed to death. While she was asleep. The roof fell in on her. We’re holding a wake for her in Gayosso’s, over on Sullivan Street. I thought, well, for old times’ sake …”

The man who stepped out of the taxi at seven that evening said hello from the edge of the sidewalk and then came toward her with an uncertain gait and a mobile smile, as if his mouth were a radio dial searching for the right station.

“Laura. It’s me, Orlando. Don’t you recognize me? Look.” He laughed as he showed her his hand and his gold ring with the initials OX. There was no other way she would have recognized him. He was totally bald and made no effort to hide it. The strange thing — the serious thing, Laura said to herself — was that the extreme smoothness of his skull, bare as a baby’s backside, contrasted brutally with his infinitely wrinkled face, crisscrossed by tiny lines running in all directions. A face that was an insane compass rose, its cardinal points not at north, east, south, and west but scattered in every direction, a cobweb with no symmetry.

Orlando Ximénez’s white skin and blond looks had put up a poor defense against the passage of the years; the wrinkles on his face were as uncountable as furrows in a field plowed for centuries and yielding poorer and poorer crops. Even so, he maintained the distinction of a slim, well-dressed body, with a double-breasted glen plaid suit and a black tie appropriate for the occasion, and — the coquettish touch, inveterate in him — a Liberty handkerchief peeking sans façon from his breast pocket. “Only vulgarians and men from Toluca wear matching ties and handkerchiefs,” he’d once said to her years before in San Cayetano and in the Hotel Regis.

“Laura dear,” he said, speaking first, seeing that she hadn’t recognized him right away, and after planting two fugitive little kisses on her cheeks, stepping back to observe her, keeping hold of her hands. “Let me get a look at you.”