Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

Armon a Aznar — no one ever saw her — disappeared from Laura’s mind when she went to the Misses Ramos’ school. These cultured but impoverished young women ran the best private school in Xalapa, the first, besides, to be open to both sexes. Although they weren’t twins, the Misses Ramos dressed, wore their hair, spoke, and moved in exactly the same way, so everyone thought they were twins.

“Why would anyone believe that, when all you have to do is look at them to see how different they are?” Laura asked her deskmate Elizabeth Garcia.

“Because they want us to see them that way,” answered the radiant blond girl, who always wore white and who, in Laura’s eyes, was either very stupid or very clever. It was impossible to know for certain if she pretended to be a fool because she was secretive or if she pretended to be intelligent to hide her stupidity. “Just figure it out. Between the two of them they know more than either one alone. But when you put them together, the one who knows music also turns out to be a mathematician, and the one who recites poetry can also describe heart murmurs. Laura, just think: poets talk about the heart this and the heart that, and it turns out the heart is nothing more than a rather unreliable muscle.”

Laura decided she would devise a way to tell the Misses Ramos apart, seeing as how one was one and the other was the opposite, but when it came time to make the distinctions Laura got confused and became mute, wondering: Suppose they truly are one and the same, and both know everything, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica Papa has in his library?

Suppose they say they are the misses but they’re actually just one miss? insisted Elizabeth another day, with a perverse smile. Laura said that then it was a mystery like the Holy Trinity. You simply had to believe in it without knowing anything more. Similarly the Misses Ramos were one who was two who was one, and that was that.

It was hard for Laura to resign herself to this faith, and she wondered if Santiago would have accepted the fiction of the duplicated and united teachers or if, daringly, he would have turned up at night at their house to catch them by surprise in their nightgowns and ascertain that there were two of them. Because at school they both took care never to appear together at the same time. This was the source — intentional or accidental, who knows? — of the mystery. And Santiago would also have climbed the creaking stairs to the attic over the coach house or, as people were now beginning to say, the garage . Yet in Xalapa, even at this late date, no one had yet seen a horseless carriage, an “auto-mobile.” Besides, the colonial roads wouldn’t have allowed motor traffic. The train and the horse were enough to traverse the earth, in the opinion of the writer, Doña Virginia, and if it was the sea, then a ship of war, as that song the rebels sang had it …

“And the stagecoach, when Grandmother’s fingers were cut off.”

The horses and trains of the Revolution had passed though Xalapa but almost without noticing. Those bands of men had the port as their goal, and the Veracruz customs house. It was there they could control the flow of money as well as feed and clothe the troops, not to mention the symbolic value of owning the alternate capital of the country, the place where rebel or constitutional powers established themselves to challenge the government in Mexico City: me, not you. Veracruz had been occupied by the United States Marine Corps in April 1914 in order to put pressure on the dictator, Victoriano Huerta, the murderer of the democrat Madero, for whom young Santiago had given his life. “What fools these Yankees are,” said Don Fernando the Anglophile. “Instead of bringing down Huerta, they transform him into the knight of national independence against the gringos. Who would dare fight against a Latin American dictator, no matter how sinister, when the United States is attacking him? Huerta has used the occupation of Veracruz as a pretext to intensify his conscription of troops, saying his pelones, his ‘bald boys,’ are going to Veracruz to go up against the Yankees, when in fact he’s sending them north to fight Pancho Villa and south against Zapata.”

The young students of the Xalapa Preparatory School mustered in their French kepis and their navy blue uniforms with gold buttons and marched off with their rifles toward Veracruz to fight the gringos. They didn’t get there on time. Huerta fell, and the gringos withdrew; Villa and Zapata battled Carranza, the Maximum Leader of Mexico’s revolution, and occupied Mexico City; Carranza took refuge in Veracruz until the fearsome General Alvaro Obrego n defeated Villa at Celaya in April 1915 and retook Mexico City.

All this passed through Xalapa, sometimes as rumor, sometimes as news; as songs sung as corridos and ballads when newsprint was under embargo; and only once as a cavalry charge accompanied by shouts and crackling rifle fire from some rebel group. Leticia closed the windows, threw Laura to the floor and covered her with the mattress. By 1915, it seemed that peace was returning to Mexico, but the habits of the small provincial capital hadn’t been much disturbed.

Rumors reached them of a great famine in Mexico City, when the rest of the nation, convulsed and self-regarding, forgot about the luxurious and egoistic capital, stopped sending it meat, fish, corn, beans, tropical fruit, and flour, reducing it to the squalid products of milk cows in the Milpa Alta area and of the gardens scattered between Xochimilco and Ixtapalapa. As usual, there were many flowers in the Valley, but who eats carnations or calla lilies?

The rumors spread: merchants were hoarding what little food there was. Into Mexico City marched General Obrego n, whose first act was to make the shopkeepers sweep the city streets, to put them to shame. He emptied their shops and reopened communications so supplies could flow into the famished capital.

This was all rumor. Just to be on the safe side, Doña Leticia. slept with a dagger under her pillow.

Photographic images of the Revolution appeared in the newspapers and magazines Don Fernando consumed by the cartload: the dictator Porfirio Díaz was an ancient man with a square face, Indian cheek bones, white mustache, and a chest covered with medals saying farewell to the cowntry (as he pronounced it) from the German steamship Ipiranga, sailing from Veracruz; Madero was a tiny man, bald, with black beard and mustache, dreamy eyes astonished by his triumph in bringing down the tyrant; those eyes announced his own sacrifice at the hands of the sinister General Victoriano Huerta, an executioner with a head like a skull, black sunglasses, and a mouth like that of a serpent, with no lips; Venustiano Carranza was an old man with a white heard and blue sunglasses, whose vocation was to be the national paterhe; Obrego n was a brilliant young general with blue eyes and haughty mustache, whose arm was shot off during the battle of Celaya; Emiliano Zapata was a man of silence and mystery, as if a ghost manifesting himself for only a short time: Laura became fascinated with the enormous, ardent eyes of this gentleman, whom newspapers referred to as “Attila of the South,” in the same way they called Pancho Villa “Centaur of the North.” Laura had never seen a single photo of Pancho Villa in which he wasn’t smiling, showing his white teeth like corn kernels and his little slits of eyes that made him look like an astute Chinese.