Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

He was the same old Orlando: he’d never let her have an advantage he could take for himself. Without a word from her, he went on, “How you’ve changed, Laura,” before she could blurt out, “How you’ve changed, Orlando.”

On the way to Sullivan Street (who the devil was Sullivan? An English composer of operettas? But he was always linked like a Siamese twin to Gilbert, the way Ortega was joined to Gasset, joked irrepressible Orlando), Laura’s old sweetheart spoke of Carmen Cortina’s horrible death and the mystery that had always surrounded her. The famous hostess of the 1930s, the woman whose energy had saved Mexican society from a drowsy convulsion (if you could say such a thing; I agree, it’s an oxymoron, Orlando said, smiling), had been bedridden for years with phlebitis, which immobilized her. The question was, could Carmen Cortina have gotten out of bed to save herself from the collapse, or did her physical prison condemn her to watch while the ceiling fell on her and crushed her? Well, well, why worry about the fine points? Like the cucaracha in the song, she just couldn’t walk …

“But I am a chatterbox,” he said in English, “forgive me.” Orlando laughed, caressing Laura Díaz’s bare fingers with his gloved hand.

Only when they stepped out of the taxi on Sullivan Street did he take her by the arm and whisper in her ear, don’t be frightened, Laura dear, you’re going to find all our old friends from twenty-five years ago, but you won’t recognize them. If you’re in doubt, just squeeze my arm — don’t let go of me, je t’en prie —and I’ll whisper in your ear who’s who.

“Have you read Proust’s The Past Recaptured? No? Well, it’s the same situation. The narrator returns to a Parisian salon thirty years later and no longer recognizes the intimate friends of his youth. Face to face with the old marionettes, says Proust’s narrator, he has to use not only his eyes but his memory. Old age is like death, he adds. Some face it with indifference, not because they’re braver than the rest but because they have less imagination.”

Orlando made a show of looking for the name Carmen Cortina on the chapel directory.

“Of course, the difference between us and Proust is that he finds old age and the passage of time in an elegant salon in French high society, while you and I, proudly Mexican, find them in a funeral parlor.”

There was no intrusive smell of flowers to nauseate the guests at the wake. So the perfumes on the women asserted themselves all the more offensively. They were like the last clouds in a sky about to fade forever into night, as one by one they passed before Carmen Cortina’s open coffin, where she lay as reconstructed by the mortician, put back together piece by minute piece, looking neither like herself nor like any living being seen before. She was a window-display dummy, as if her turbulent career as a social hostess had prepared her for this final moment, this last act in what had been in life a permanent stage show: a mannequin reposing on white silk cushions under clear plastic, hair carefully tinted mahogany, cheeks smooth and pink, mouth obscenely swollen and half open in a smile that seemed to lick death as if it were a lollipop, nose stuffed with cotton balls, to keep what remained of Carmen’s vital juices from leaking out, eyes closed — but without the glasses that as hostess she had wielded with the wisdom of the elegantly blind — as if they were darts, or a replacement finger, or an exhausted pennant, or a menacing stiletto, but always as the baton with which Carmen Cortina conducted her brilliant social operetta.

Without those glasses Laura Díaz did not recognize Carmen. She was on the verge of suggesting to Orlando — caught up in her first boyfriend’s unshakably festive tone — that some charitable soul should put glasses on the cadaver. Carmen was quite capable of opening her eyes. Of coming back to life. Now Laura failed to recognize a woman with a mother-of-pearl complexion and overflowing corpulence who was being pushed along in a wheelchair by the painter Tizoc Ambriz, recognizable because his picture appeared so frequently on the culture and society pages, though he was transformed, given the color, tautness, and texture of his skin, into a scaly black-and-silver sardine. Thin and small, he was dressed, as always, in blue denim — trousers, shirt, and jacket — as if to stand out while at the same time, in contradiction, imposing a fashion.

He devoutly pushed the wheelchair of the woman with drowsy eyes, invisible eyebrows, hut — Oh! exclaimed Orlando — no longer a face of perfect symmetry with that eternal maturity which presumes eternal youth, as she had been thirty years earlier, at the very edge of an opulence that Laura’s companion had once compared to a piece of fruit at the peak of ripeness, freshly cut from the branch.

“It’s Andrea Negrete. Don’t you remember the vernissage of her portrait by Tizoc in Carmen’s little flat? She was nude — in the painting of course — with two white streaks at her temples and her pubis also painted white, bragging about having gone gray in the groin— can you imagine . Dear, dear, now she doesn’t have any use for dye.”

“Eat me,” Andrea whispered to Orlando as they entered the room where a priest was leading the prayer for the dead in front of a dozen of Carmen Cortina’s friends.

“Eat me.”

“Peel me.”

“You vulgarian,” laughed the actress, while the whisper of Lux per petua luceat eis vaguely drowned out the comments and gossip.

The painter Tizoc Ambriz, on the other hand, had lost all facial expression. He was an idol, a diminutive Tezcatlipoca, Puck of the Aztecs, condemned to wander like a ghost through the bewitched nights of México-Tenochtitlán.

Tizoc looked toward the entrance, where a tall, dark young man with curly hair was coming in with a woman on his arm, a woman swollen in every roll of her obesity and reworked in every centimeter of her epidermis. She made her way forward proudly, even impertinently, on the arm of her ephebe, showing off how light her step was despite the immensity of her weight. She sailed like a galleon in Spain’s Invincible Armada over the tempestuous seas of life. Her tiny feet supported a solid fleshly sphere crowned by a minuscule head with blond curls framing a sculpted, surgically enhanced, restored, composed, replaced, and displaced face — stretched like a balloon about to burst yet lacking expression, a pure mask fixed by invisible pins around her ears and stitched under a chin that had eliminated the double chin visibly struggling to be reborn.

“Laura, Laura dearest!” exclaimed this nightmare apparition wrapped in black veils and dripping with jewelry. My God, who can it be? Laura asked herself. I don’t remember her! Then she realized that the scarred blimp wasn’t greeting her but was lightly making her way to someone behind her, and Laura turned to follow this living advertisement for face-lifts and saw her kiss on both cheeks a woman who was her opposite, a thin, small lady in a black suit, with pearls and a tiny pillbox hat from which hung a black veil so close to her skin that it seemed an integral part of her face.

“Laura Rivière, how happy I am to see you,” exclaimed the scarfaced fatty.

“What a pleasure, Elizabeth,” answered Laura Rivière, discreetly drawing away from the exuberant Elizabeth García-Dupont, formerly Caraza. Laura Díaz was astonished: it was her adolescent pal in Xalapa, whose mother, Doña Lucía Dupont, had said, Girls, never show your boobs, as she stuffed Elizabeth into her old-fashioned ball gown, rose-colored with layer upon layer of infinitely floating tulle …

(Laura has no problems because she’s flat, Mama, but I …