Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

She paused a moment, surrounded by the others’ attentive silence. The world had thought her sacrificed. She had to sacrifice herself for the world. What part of pain comes to us from others, and what part comes from ourselves?

She looked at Basilio. She took his hand.

“I always loved you. I thought my death would preserve our love. My pride was to believe there was no better fate than to die unknown. How was I going to scorn what I was most thankful for in my life — your love, the friendship of Jorge Maura and Domingo Vidal, ready to die with me if necessary?”

“Remember,” interrupted Basilio, “we Spaniards are hounds of death. We sniff it out and follow it until we ourselves get killed.”

“I’d give anything to undo the past,” said Pilar sadly. “I chose my stupid political militancy over the affection of three marvelous men. I hope they forgive me.”

“Violence breeds violence.” Laura smiled. “Luckily, love breeds love. We come out even, in general.” She took Lourdes’ hand on her right and Pilar’s on her left.

“That’s why, when I saw the announcement for an exhibit of portraits of exiled Spaniards, I flew from Acapulco and found Basilio’s empty frame.”

She looked at Laura. “But if you hadn’t been there, we’d never have gotten together again.”

“When did you tell your Mexican lover you weren’t going back to him?” asked Santiago.

“As soon as I saw the empty frame.”

“That was brave of you. Basilio might have been dead.”

Pilar blushed. “No, all the photos had birth and death dates when called for. Basilio’s had no death date, so I knew. Excuse me.”

The young people hadn’t spoken much. They were giving all their attention to the story of Pilar and Basilio. Santiago once exchanged a loving look with his grandmother and found something marvelous in Laura Díaz’s eyes, something he wanted to tell Lourdes about later, something that shouldn’t be forgotten, he didn’t say so, the eyes, the entire attitude of Laura Díaz said so that Christmas of 1965, and those eyes took in the people at the table but also opened to them, gave them a voice, invited them to see and read each other, lovingly to disclose themselves.

But she was the world’s fulcrum.

Laura Díaz had learned to love without asking for explanations because she had learned to see others, with her camera and with her eyes, as they themselves might never see themselves.

She read after dinner a brief note of congratulations from Jorge Maura, written in Lanzarote. Laura could not resist: she’d told him about the marvelous and unexpected reunion of Pilar Méndez and Basilio Baltazar.

Jorge’s note simply asked, “What part of happiness doesn’t come from God?”

On New Year’s Eve, Lourdes Alfaro and Santiago López-Ayub were married. The witnesses were Laura Díaz, Pilar Méndez, and Basilio Baltazar.

Laura thought of a fourth witness. Jorge Maura. They would not see each other again.

“NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT to identify a body. No one has the right to remove a body. We will not tolerate five hundred funeral processions in this city tomorrow. Throw them all in a common grave. Allow no one to identify them.”

Make them disappear.

Laura Díaz photographed her grandson Santiago the night of October 2, 1968. She made her way on foot from the Calzada de la Estrella to watch the marchers enter the Plaza of the Three Cultures. She’d been photographing all the events in the student movement beginning with the first demonstrations — the growing presence of police squads, the bazooka fired against the door of the National Preparatory School, the occupation of University City by the army, the arbitrary destruction of laboratories and libraries by paid thugs, the university protest march headed by the rector, Javier Barros Sierra, and followed by the entire university community, the gathering in the Zócalo, where the crowd shouted to President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz: SHOW YOUR FACE — SHOW YOUR FACE — YOU’RE A DISGRACE — TO THE HUMAN RACE! the silent march of a hundred thousand gagged citizens.

Laura recorded the nights of discussion with Santiago, Lourdes, and a dozen or more young men and women whose passions had been aroused by the events. They met in a room Laura had cleared for them in the Plaza Rio de Janeiro apartment, moving old files and throwing out useless trash that actually represented precious memories, but Laura told Lourdes that if at the age of seventy she hadn’t stored up in her memory what was worth remembering, she’d be crushed by the weight of the miscellaneous past. The past had many forms. For Laura, it was an ocean of paper.

What was a photograph, after all, but an instant transformed into eternity? The flow of time was unstoppable, so trying to save it in its totality would be a kind of madness — time that went on, under the sun and stars, with or without us, in an uninhabited, lunar world. Human time meant sacrificing the totality to give privilege to the instant and the prestige of eternity to the instant. The painting by Santiago the Younger in the apartment dining room said it all: we aren’t falling, we’re rising.

Laura had shuffled the contact sheets nostalgically, thrown the ones that seemed pointless to her into the trash, and cleared out the room for her great-grandchild to come. Shall we paint it blue or pink? Lourdes asked, laughing, and Laura laughed with her. Male or female, the baby would sleep in a cradle surrounded by photography smells, the walls were impregnated with the unmistakable perfume of wet photographs, of developer, of prints hung up with clothespins to dry like freshly washed clothes.

She observed her grandson’s growing enthusiasm and would have wanted to warn him, Don’t let yourself be swept along by enthusiasm, for in Mexico disillusion quickly punishes anyone with faith and tosses that faith out the door. We were taught this in school, Santiago would say to his comrades, kids between seventeen and twenty-five, dark-haired and blond, the way Mexico is, a rainbow country, said a pretty girl with hair down to her waist, very dark skin and very green eyes, a country on its knees that has to be stood on its feet, said a dark boy, tall with very small eyes, a democratic country, said a boy who was pale and short, muscular and calm, with glasses that were always sliding down his nose, a country united with the great revolts in Berkeley, Tokyo, and Paris, a country that won’t ever say “ Interdit d’interdire” and where imagination can seize power, said a blond boy, very Spanish, with a full beard and intense eyes, a country where we don’t forget the others, said another boy who looked Indian, very serious and hidden behind thick glasses, a country where we can all love one another, said Lourdes, a country without exploiters, said Santiago, we’re doing nothing more than bringing to the street what we were taught in school, we were educated with ideas called democracy, justice, freedom, revolution; they asked us to believe in all that, Doña Laura, can you imagine, Grandmama, a student or teacher defending dictatorship, oppression, injustice, reactionary thinking, but they showed themselves and we saw their faces, said the tall dark boy, and we cited demands, said the Indian boy with thick glasses, listen here, where are the things you taught us in school? listen here, the dark girl with green eyes added her voice to the chorus, who do you think you’re fooling? look here, said the boy with the full beard and intense eyes, just dare to look at us, there are millions of us, thirty million Mexicans under the age of twenty-five, do you think you can fool us forever? the tall boy with small eyes leaped to his feet, where is democracy in the farcical elections that the PRI organizes with stuffed ballot boxes? where is the justice — Santiago went on — in a country where seventy people have more money than seventy million citizens? where is the freedom in unions handcuffed by corrupt leaders? asked the girl with hair to her waist, in newspapers paid off by the government, added Lourdes, in television that hides the truth? where is the revolution? concluded the boy who was pale and short, muscular and calm, in the names of Villa and Zapata inscribed in gold on the Chamber of Deputies, concluded Santiago, on the statues the night birds shit on and the morning goldfinches shit on again when they write the PRI’s speeches?