Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“Don’t be discouraged, child. Just look at me. Sometimes you must have thought that life’s been difficult for me, especially when I lived alone with my mother. But you know something? Being born is a joy even if you were conceived in sadness and misery. I mean inner sadness and misery, more than outer. You come into the world, and your origin is erased, being born is always a party, and I’ve done nothing but celebrate my going through life, not caring two cents where I came from, what happened at the beginning, how and where my mother gave birth to me, how my father behaved … Know something? Your grandmother Cosima redeemed everything, but even without her, without all I owe your grandmother and how much I adore her, I celebrate the world, I know I came to the world to celebrate life, through thick and thin, child, and I’m going to go on celebrating, damn it to hell. And excuse me for talking like someone from Alvarado, but that’s where I grew up …”

María de la O drew her hand away from Laura’s head for a moment and gave her niece a radiant smile, as if the little aunt always brought warmth and joy on her lips and in her eyes.

“And something else, Laurita, to complete the picture. Your grandfather brought me to live with you, and that saved me, I can’t say it often enough. But your grandmother did not concern herself any more with my mother, as if it were enough to save me and Old Nick himself could take her. The one who did concern himself was your father, Fernando. I don’t know what would have become of my mother if Fernando hadn’t looked out for her, helped her, given her money, and allowed her to grow old with dignity. Pardon me for being blunt, but there’s nothing sadder than an old whore. What I want to say is just this: the important thing is being alive and where you’re alive. We’re going to save this home and the people in it, Laura. María de la O swears it, the aunt you more than anyone else have respected. I never forget!”

She was getting fat, and it was rather hard for her to move about. Whenever she went for a walk with Fernando in his wheelchair, people would look away, not wanting to feel sorry for the two, the invalid man and the ashen mulatta with fat ankles who insisted on being out and around, ruining things for young, healthy people. María de la O’s will was greater than any obstacle, and the four sisters, the day after Hilda and Virginia arrived, decided not only to find a house for the family but to turn it into a guest house, contribute to its maintenance, each one would give her part, and take care of Fernando.

“And as for you, Laura, I beg you not to worry,” said Aunt Hilda.

“You will lack for nothing,” added Aunt Virginia.

… and I wasn’t worried, dear aunts, Mutti, I wasn’t worried, I know I’ll lack for nothing, I’m the little girl of the house, I’m not twenty-one, I’m still seven, defenseless but protected as before the first death, before the first grief, before the first passion, before the first rage, all that I’ve already experienced, already managed, already mastered, and by now I let myself be mastered by everything that has happened, by now I know how to live with grief, passion, rage, and death, I think I know how to live with them. But what I can’t live with is with the diminution of myself, not by others but by myself, made into a child not by the silly girls or protective aunts or Mutti, who doesn’t want to accept any passion so as to stay lucid and keep house because she knows that without her the house will fall apart like those sand castles children make on the Mocambo beach, and if she doesn’t do the work, who will? While I’m thinking about myself, Laura Díaz, I observe myself distant from my own life, as if I were someone else, a second Laura who sees the first separated from the world around me, indifferent to the people outside my home — is it healthy to be that way? — but concerned with those living here with me, but in both cases separated and yet guilty about being a burden, like the boy in Thomas Hardy’s novel, I am loved by everyone, but I weigh them down even if they don’t say so, I’m the grown-up little girl about to turn twenty-two without bringing bread to the house where she gets her daily bread, the big little girl who thinks herself justified because she reads books to her paralyzed father, because she loves them all and all of them love her. I will live from the love I give and from the love I receive. It isn’t enough, it isn’t enough to love my mother, to weep for my brother, to feel sorry for my father, it isn’t enough to adopt my own grief and my own tenderness as rights that liberate me from other responsibilities. Now I want to overflow my love for them, exceed my grief for them by freeing them from me, taking myself off their backs, giving them the gift of not worrying about me without my giving up worrying about them, Papa Fernando, Mutti Leticia, Aunts Hilda and Virginia and María de la O, Santiago my love, I’m not asking either comprehension or help from you, I’m going to do what I must to be with you without being of you but by being for you …

Juan Francisco López Greene was a very tall man, more than six feet, very dark, with both Indian and Negroid traces in his features — while his lips were thick, his profile was straight; while his hair was crinkly, his skin was smooth and sweet as sugar frosting, night-dark as a gypsy’s. His eyes were green islands in a yellow sea. His broad, muscular shoulders spoiled the look of his neck, which was strong but longer than it seemed, just as his arms were long and his devoutly proletarian hands were large. His torso was short, his legs long, and his feet bigger than miners’ shoes.

He was powerful, awkward, delicate, different.

He had come to the Casino ball with Xavier Icaza, the young labor lawyer, son of a family of aristocrats who now served the working class. It was he who brought to the dance this man so alien to the social profile of good Xalapa families: Juan Francisco López Greene.

Icaza, a brilliant but scarcely conventional man, wrote avant-garde poetry and picaresque tales; his books were illustrated with Cubist vignettes of skyscrapers and airplanes, and his poetry conveyed the sense of modern velocity that the author sought while his novels brought the tradition of Francisco de Quevedo and the Lazarillo de Tormes to modern Mexico City, a city that was filling up — as Icaza explained to groups of guests at the Casino ball — with immigrants from the countryside and that would only go on growing and growing. He winked at the local businessmen, now’s the time to buy cheap, Colonia Hipódromo, Colonia Nápoles, Chapultepec Heights, Parque de la Lama, even Desierto de los Leones, just you wait and see how real estate is going to boom, don’t be fools — he laughed with his cheery teeth — invest now.

He was called a Futurist, a Dadaist, an Estridentista, names that no one had ever heard before in Veracruz and that Icaza introduced with an almost insolent air by driving a yellow Isotta-Fraschini convertible, as if to establish his credentials immediately and well. He asked for the hand of Miss Ana Guido, and when her parents expressed doubts, Xavier Icaza drove his powerful automobile right up the stairs and into the cathedral one Sunday during Mass. The roar of the motor and the insane vision of the car going up the steep stairs with the young, high-spirited lawyer using all the horsepower at his disposal to do it. He dangerously stopped the car where the stairway ended and the atrium began and announced in a loud voice that he’d come to marry Ana and nothing and no one was going to stop him.

“I’m not dealing in make-believe,” the young lawyer Icaza was saying to his old acquaintances at the Casino ball, “this is a matter of mutual convenience. The Revolution has set free all the country’s dormant forces — the businessmen and industrialists who were thwarted while the Dictator turned over the country to foreigners, the functionaries whose careers were blocked by Porfirio’s old bureaucracy, and let’s not even start on the landless peasants and workers eager to organize and have a respected public voice. Listen, who were the rebels in the Rio Blanco factories and the Cananea mines, the first to rise up against the dictatorship? What were they if not workers?”