Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

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.”