Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

Laughter ceased instantly. María de la O didn’t move. Laura rose, took her arm, and led her to an armchair.

“Sit here, Auntie, I’ll be happy to fan the lady first and then you, my dear.”

Laura Díaz thinks something changed forever in her life one night when she was awakened by a harsh moan in her brother Santiago’s bedroom, which was next door to hers. She was frightened, but she did not run on tiptoe into the hall and to the boy’s door until she heard the painful groaning again. Then she went in without knocking, and Santiago’s face of pain in bed combined with an incredible, unique greeting in his eyes, gratitude for her presence, even if his words contradicted his looks: Laura, don’t make any noise, go back to your room, don’t wake up anyone.

The arm of his shirt was ripped open from the shoulder down, and with his right hand he was squeezing his left forearm. Could the little girl help him in any way?

“No. Yes. Go back to bed and don’t say a word to anyone. Swear. I can take care of myself.”

Laura made the sign of the cross. For the first time, someone needed her, even if he didn’t say so, it was not she who was asking for something, she was being asked for something, with words that said “no” but meant “yes, Laura, help me.”

From that night on, they went out every Saturday to stroll along the seawall. They walked hand in hand, and Laura felt Santiago’s hand was rigid, tense, while the wound on his arm healed. It was their secret, and he knew he was counting on her and she felt newly proud because of this. Also, in this contact with her brother Laura felt for the first time that she belonged to Veracruz, that the sea and the sky met here in a single vibrant bay, sky and sea together, and blowing hard so that behind Veracruz the plain vibrated, too, luminous and clean-swept until it faded into the forest. To him she could tell the stories about Catemaco. He would believe that a woman of stone standing in the middle of the forest was a statue, not a tree.

“Of course. It’s a figure made by the Zapotal culture. Didn’t your grandfather know that?”

Laura shook her head, no, Grandfather did not know everything, she now realized, and the girl’s curls shook, dark and scented with soap.

“My father was right when he said that Santiago’s got the lion’s share of the family’s intelligence and the rest of us have leftovers.”

Santiago apologized for laughing, saying that Laura knew more than he did about trees, flowers, nature. About all that he knew northing, he knew only that he wanted to disappear one day, like that, to become forest, to be transformed into one of those trees the girl knew so well, the palo rojo, the araucaria, the trueno with its perfect yellow flowers, the laurel …

“No, that’s a bad one.”

“But it’s pretty.”

“It destroys everything, eats everything up.”

“And the ceiba.”

“No, not the ceiba either. The branches fill up with starlings and they shit on everything.”

Laughing to die, Santiago went on with the fig tree, the purple iris, the tulip, and she, yes, those, yes, Santiago, laughing now not like a girl, he said to himself in surprise, laughing like a woman, like something else who was no longer the little girl Laura with dark curls and the scent of soap. With Santiago she felt that until now she’d been just like Li Po, the Chinese doll. Now everything was going to be different.

“No, you can’t hug the ceiba. Daggers are born from its body.”

She glanced at her brother’s wounded arm, but said nothing.

He began to wait for her every Saturday at the door of the house they shared, as if he’d come from somewhere else, and brought her a present — a little bouquet of flowers, a conch to hear the sound of the sea, a starfish, a postcard, a paper boat — while Leticia, watching nervously from the roof terrace where she personally was hanging out the wash (as in Catemaco; she adored the coolness of freshly washed sheets against the body), saw the couple stroll away, not knowing that her husband, Fernando, was doing the same from the living-room balcony.

Laura received something more on those strolls than seashells, flowers, and starfish. Her half brother spoke to her as if she were older, more than the indecisive twelve she was, as if she were nineteen or twenty or even older. Did he need to blow off steam with someone, or did he really take her seriously? In any case did he think she could understand everything he was telling her? For Laura, it was marvelous enough that he took her for a walk, that he brought her things — not the little gifts but the things he carried within himself, the things he told her, what his company gave her.

One afternoon when he didn’t appear for their rendezvous, she stood there, leaning against the building wall (whose lower floors were the bank offices) and feeling so unprotected in the siesta-hour city that she was on the verge of running back to her room, but that seemed like a desertion, a cowardly act (a concept she didn’t fully understand although from then on she knew the feeling), and she thought it would be better to get lost in the tropical forest, where she could hide and grow up alone, in her own time, without this boy who was so handsome and intelligent who was sweeping her along all too quickly to an age that was not yet her own …

She started walking, and when she turned the corner she found Santiago leaning against a different wall. They laughed. They kissed. They’d made a mistake. They forgave each other.

“I was just thinking that out at the lake it would be I who would bring you to see things.”

“Without you, I’d be lost in the forest, Laura. I’m from here, from the city, from the port. Nature frightens me.”

She asked why without saying anything.

“It will outlast you. And me.”

They walked to a certain spot by the docks, where he stopped, so immersed in thought that she became afraid for him, just as she’d become afraid when she heard him say that he sometimes wanted to go into the forest she loved so well and get lost there, never come out, never see a human face again.

“What do they expect of me, Laura?”

“Everyone says you’re super-smart, that you write and talk beautifully. Father is always saying you have promise.”

“He’s a good man. But he’s just expressing fond hopes. One day I’ll show you what I write.”

“I can’t wait!”

“It isn’t great. It’s correct. It’s competent.”

“Isn’t that enough, Santiago?”

“No, not at all. Look at it this way: if there’s one thing I hate it’s to be one of the herd. That’s what Father is, excuse me for saying so, a good little lamb from the professional herd. What you can’t be is part of an artistic herd, just one more artist or one more writer. That would kill me, Laura, I’d rather be no one than be mediocre.”

“You aren’t, Santiago. Don’t say things like that. You’re the best, I swear it.”

“And you’re the prettiest, I’m telling you.”

“Oh, Santiago, don’t always try to be the best of the first. Wouldn’t you be better off as the best of the second?”

He pinched her cheek, and they laughed again, but they returned home in silence. Their parents didn’t have the nerve to say anything because for Fernando it was evil to assume sin where there is none, the way the priest Elzevir did in Catemaco, who succeeded only in ruining people with imagined guilt, and because for Leticia — I know I don’t really know my son, for me that boy is a mystery, but you do know everything about Laura and trust her, isn’t that so?

He walked her back to that same spot on the docks the next Saturday, and told her to look at the rails, at the freight cars that came right up here loaded with bodies — the Rio Blanco workers murdered by order of Don Porfirio for going on strike and sticking to it so bravely, brought right here and tossed into the sea, the dictator stays in power only by means of blood, the rebel Yaqui Indians shackled and taken out to sea near Sonora and thrown overboard, the Cananea miners shot on his orders in a place called the National Valley, hundreds of workers enslaved right here in Veracruz, the liberals locked up in the Ulúa fort, followers of Madero and the Flores Magón brothers, anarcho-syndicalists like the Spanish relatives of my mother, who came from the Canary Islands, Laura, revolutionaries. Laura, revolutionaries are people who are asking for something very simple for Mexico, democracy, elections, land, education, jobs, no reelection of the incumbent president. Don Porfirio Díaz has been in power for thirty years.