Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“Tell your parents I’m very, very sorry not to see them here tonight,” said Doña Genoveva, lightly touching Laura’s hair, as if putting an unruly curl back in place. “Keep me abreast of Don Fernando’s health.”

Laura curtsied, a lesson learned from the Misses Ramos, and set about exploring the place so discussed and admired by Xalapa society. She felt rapture on seeing the pale green painted ceilings, the fleurons on the walls, the multicolored skylights, and, beyond, the heart of the party, on the terrace wrapped by balustrades adorned with urns, the orchestra whose musicians were all wearing dinner jackets, and the guests, especially the young people, the boys in white tie and tail coats and the girls in various styles, which led Laura to conclude that a man dressed in a black uniform, white tie, and pique shirtfront would always look elegant, would never expose anything — while every woman was obliged to exhibit, dangerously, her personal, eccentric, conformist though always arbitrary idea of elegance.

The ball had not yet begun, and each young lady received from the hands of the majordomo a dance card embossed with the initials of the hostess — DLT. They then got into position to await requests from the gallants to dance. Laura and Elizabeth had seen some of them at the much less elegant parties held at the Xalapa Casino, but the boys hadn’t seen them because they were graceless girls, one flat-chested and the other bovine, frankly. Now, at the point of attaining perfect femininity, well dressed, feigning more self-confidence than they really had, Elizabeth and Laura first greeted school and family friends and allowed the boys, stiff in their frock coats, to approach.

A boy with caramel colored eyes came up to Elizabeth and asked her for the first dance.

“Thank you, but I already have a partner.”

The boy made a polite bow, and Laura kicked her friend.

“Liar. We just arrived.”

“Either Eduardo Caraza dances with me first or I won’t dance with anyone.”

“What is it about him you like so much?”

“Everything. Money. Good looks. Look at him. Here he comes. I told you.”

To Laura this Eduardo seemed neither better nor worse than anyone else.

Any outsider would have to admit it and probably be shocked: Xalapa society was whiter than it was mestizo, and as for people of color, like Aunt María de la O, there were none, although the few people with Indian features were noticeable precisely because they were presentable. Laura felt an attraction for a very dark, very thin boy who looked like one of those pirates from Malaysia in the novels of Emilio Salgari which she’d inherited from Santiago along with the rest of his books. He had perfect dark skin, without the slightest blemish, completely clean-shaven, and slow, light, elegant movements. He looked like Sandokan, Salgari’s Hindu prince. He was the first to dance with her. Doña Genoveva put the waltzes first, then modern dances, and, at the end, returning to an era prior to the waltz, the polkas, lancers, and the Madrid schottische.

The Hindu prince said not a word, to the point that Laura wondered if his accent or his stupidity would destroy the illusion of his marooned Malayan elegance. Her second partner, on the other hand, was a chatterbox from a rich Córdoba family, dizzying her with inanities about breeding hens and how to mate them with roosters, all without the slightest allusive or salacious intent, merely stupid. And the third, a tall redhead she’d already seen on tennis courts showing off his strong legs, svelte and down-covered, did not hesitate to abuse Laura, squeezing her against his chest, rubbing his crotch against her, nibbling her earlobe.

“Who invited that jerk?” Laura asked Elizabeth.

“He usually behaves better than tonight. I think you got him excited. Or maybe the spiked pineapple juice has gone to his head. If you like, you can complain to Doña Genoveva.”

“And how about you, Elizabeth?” asked Laura as she vigorously shook her head.

“Look at him. Isn’t he a delight?”

The selfsame Eduardo Caraza waltzed by, his gaze fixed vacantly on the ceiling.

“See that? He’s not even looking at his partner.”

“He wants everyone to look at him.”

“Same thing.”

“He dances very well.”

“What should I do, Laura, what should I do?” stammered Elizabeth, on the point of tears. “He’ll never take any notice of me.”

At which point the dancing stopped and Doña Genoveva came over, inviting Elizabeth to follow her to where Eduardo Caraza was blowing his nose.

“Young lady,” the hostess pronounced in a low voice to the lachrymose blonde, “don’t let on in public when you’re in love. You make everyone feel you’re superior to them and then they hate you. Eduardo, now the modern dances are coming, and Elizabeth wants you to show her how to dance the cakewalk better than Irene Castle.”

She left them arm in arm and returned to her post, a general obliged to review her troops, looking over each guest head to foot, fingernails, ties, shoes. What wouldn’t provincial society have given to look over Doña Genoveva’s social notebook, where every young person was graded as if in school, passed or failed for the next year. Nevertheless, sighed the perfect hostess, there were always people you simply had to invite even if they didn’t come up to standards, even if they didn’t cut their nails properly, even if their shoes didn’t go with their frock coats, even if they didn’t know how to tie their ties, or even if they were plainly vulgar, like that tennis player.

“You can be a social arbiter, but power and money will always have more privileges than elegance and good manners.”

Doña Genoveva’s dinners were famous and never disappointing. A majordomo in a white wig and eighteenth-century livery announced in French: Madame est servie.

Laura laughed to see this dark-skinned servant, obviously from Veracruz, intone perfectly the only sentence in French that Doña Genoveva had taught him, although Elizabeth’s mother, leading her two wards to the dining room, revealed another facet of the subject:

“Last year she had a little black fellow in a white wig. Everyone thought he was Haitian. But disguising an Indian as Louis XV, well …”

The parade of European faces that began to walk toward the dining room justified the hostess. These were the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Spaniards, French, Italians, Scots, and Germans, like Laura D az Kelsen or her brother Santiago, descendants of immigrants from the Rhineland and the Canary Islands, who passed through the entry port of Veracruz and remained here to make their fortunes — in the port, in Xalapa, in Co rdoba, in Orizaba, in coffee, in cattle, in sugar, banking, importing, the professions, even politics.

“Look at this photograph of Don Porfirio’s cabinet. He’s the only Indian. All the others are white, with light eyes and English suits,” pontificated a portly gentleman in his sixties, an importer of wines and exporter of sugar. “Look at the eyes of Limantour, Minister of the Treasury, they look like water; look at Landa y Escando n, the governor of Mexico City, with his bald pate like a Roman senator; look at the Minister of Justice, Justino Fernández, with his beard in Gothic-patrician style; or the Catalan bandit eyes of Casasú s, Don Porfirio’s favorite. And it’s said about D az that he used rice powder to whiten himself. To think he was once a liberal guerrillero, a hero of the Reform.”