Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

Above all, Laura remembered being under the mattress and the scattered shots in the streets below, now that she was staring at herself in the mirror, so straight and tall, “such a cutie pie,” as her mother said, making ready to go to her first formal dance.

“Are you sure I should go, Mama?”

“Laura, for God’s sake, what can you be thinking about?”

“About Papa.”

“Don’t worry about him. You know I’ll be taking care of him.”

It began with the slightest of pains in his knee, to which Don Fernando paid no special attention. Leticia rubbed on some Sloane’s Liniment when the pain extended the length of his leg to his waist, but soon her husband complained that he was having difficulty walking and that his arms were numb. One morning he fell to the floor trying to get out of bed, and the doctors had no difficulty in diagnosing a diplegia that would affect his legs first and more intensely than his arms.

“Can it be cured?”

The doctors shook their heads.

“How long will it last?”

“It may last the rest of your life, Don Fernando.”

“What about my brain?”

“No effect. You’re fine. You’ll need help moving, that’s all.”

This was why the family was thankful the house was on only one level, and María de la O offered to travel to Xalapa and be her brother-in-law’s nurse, to take care of him, to push him to the bank in a wheelchair.

“Your grandfather’s well taken care of in Catemaco by your Aunts Hilda and Virginia. We talked it over and agreed that I’d come to help your mama.”

“What does Papa always say in English? It never rains but it pours or something like that? In other words, the thunderstorm is upon us, Auntie.”

“Go on, Laura. Just one thing. Don’t try to defend me if someone mistreats me. You’ll just make trouble for yourself. The important thing is to take care of your father and let my sister Leticia tend to the house.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I owe your father as much as I owe your grandmother, who had me come live with all of you. One day I’ll tell you about it.”

The double care that fell on the house, added to their mourning for Santiago, did not terrify Doña Leticia. She simply became thinner and more active. But her hair began to turn gray and the lines of her beautiful Rhenish profile slowly but surely covered with extremely fine wrinkles, like the cobwebs that covered sickly coffee bushes.

“You have to go to the ball. Don’t even think about it. Nothing is going to happen to your father or to me.”

“Swear that if something happens you’ll send someone for me.”

“For heaven’s sake, child. San Cayetano is forty minutes away from here. Besides, it isn’t as if you were all alone and helpless. Elizabeth and her mama will be with you. Remember, no one can say anything about you … if something were to happen, I’d send Zampaya with the landau.”

Elizabeth looked divine, so blond and beautifully shaped as she was at the age of sixteen, although she was shorter and plumper than Laura. And with more décolleté as well, having been shoehorned into a by now old-fashioned, though perhaps also eternal rose-colored taffeta dress with infinite layers of tulle and ruffles.

“Girls, never show your boobs,” said Elizabeth’s mother, Luc a Dupont, who all her life struggled to decide whether her name was as common in France as it was aristocratic in the United States, although how she could have married a Garcia, only the masculine charms of her husband could explain, not her daughter’s obstinacy in saying her name was only Garc a and not Garc a-Dupont, that’s right, with the distinguished Anglo-American hyphen.

“Laura has no problems because she’s flat, Mama, but …”

“Elizabeth, child, don’t shame me.”

“There’s nothing to be done about it. God, with your help, made me this way …”

“All right then, forget your tits,” Elizabeth’s mother blurted out, with no hint of shame. “Just remember that there are more important things. Look for the most distinguished connections. Make a point of making friendly inquiries about the right families — Ollivier, Trigos, Sartorious, Fernández Landero, Estevas, Pasquel, Bouchez, Luengas.”

“And the Carazas,” interrupted Miss Elizabeth.

“Keep your opinions to yourself,” fulminated her mother. “Hold on to the names of those in the best society. If you forget them, they will certainly forget you.” She looked compassionately at the two girls. “Poor things. Just watch what everyone else is doing. Imitate them, imitate them!”

Elizabeth responded with exaggerated condescension. “Enough, Mama! You’re suffocating me! I’m going to faint!”

San Cayetano was a coffee plantation, but it was the plantation house that everyone meant when they said “San Cayetano.” Here Spanish traditions had been forgotten and instead a petit château in the French style had arisen, in the 1860s, in a beech forest near a foaming waterfall and a noisy, narrow river. Its neoclassical facade was supported by columns whose capitals were covered with carved vines.

The main house had two stories, at its entrance an enormous fig tree and a silent fountain, then fifteen steps up to reach the carved door of the ground floor, which was — Leticia warned her daughter — where the bedrooms were. An elegant, wide stone staircase led to the second floor, where the receptions were held: salons, dining rooms, and especially — this was the most notable feature of the place — a grand balustraded terrace, equal in size to half the floor space within, roofed over by an upper terrace and wrapped around three sides of the house, open to the cool night breezes and, during the afternoon, a place for sun-drenched siestas in sleepy rocking chairs.

Here, couples could rest, leaning against the balustrade of the beautiful gallery, and chat, putting their glasses down when they decided to dance right here, on any of the three sides of the second-floor terrace. All her life, this place returned again and again in Laura’s memory as the site of youthful enchantment, the space where she felt the joy of knowing herself to be young.

There, awaiting her guests, was Doña Genoveva Deschamps de la Trinidad, legendary mistress of the hacienda and tutelary leader of provincial society. Laura expected to meet a tall and dominating, even haughty woman, and instead found a small, erect lady with a flashing smile, dimples in her rosy cheeks, and cordial eyes, gray, like the elegant monotone of her gown. Apparently, Mrs. Deschamps de la Trinidad also read La Vie Parisienne, for her gown was even more modern than Laura’s: it eliminated every kind of false padding and followed, in a shine of gray silk, the lady’s natural shape. Doña Genoveva’s bare shoulders were wrapped in a veil of fine gauze, also gray, the entire ensemble harmonizing with her steely gaze and allowing her jewels, as transparent as water, to shine even more brightly.

Laura was thankful that her hostess was such an amiable woman, but she realized that Mrs. Deschamps, before and after cordially greeting each guest, fixed them with a strangely cold stare, even calculated, almost judicial. The stare of the rich and envied lady conveyed her seal of approbation or disapproval. People would know, at the next annual ball at the hacienda, who had received the placet and who had been damned. That cold gaze of censure or approval lasted no longer than the few seconds between one guest moving on and the next arriving, when the affable smile would glitter again.