Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“Madero didn’t make any concessions to them,” said the father of the young rooster expert from Córdoba.

“Because Madero didn’t understand anything,” Icaza claimed. “On the other hand, the executioner Huerta, the man who murdered Madero, tried to get the support of the working class and permitted the biggest May Day demonstrations ever seen. He allowed for an eight-hour workday and six-day workweek, but when the unions asked him for democracy, that’s when he turned them down, he arrested the leaders and deported them. One of them is my friend here, Juan Francisco López Greene, to whom I introduce you with great pleasure. The Greene part doesn’t mean he’s English. Everybody in Tabasco is named Greene because they’re descendants of English pirates whose mothers were Indians or blacks, isn’t that right?”

Juan Francisco smiled and nodded. “Laura, you’re a cultured type. I’ll leave him to you,” Icaza said, charming and firm, and wandered off.

Laura suspected that this new arrival, so alien to provincial customs, who had appeared at the San Cayetano soirees like the “Jesus wearing six-guns” the Córdoba landowner had mentioned, would be personally awkward, like his huge miners’ shoes, square, thick, and hobnailed. She imagined that his speaking style was like a rain of stones punctuated by silence. She was therefore surprised to hear a smooth voice, serene and even sweet, in which each word bore the weight of conviction, which is why Juan Francisco López Greene let himself seem so gentle and speak so mildly.

“Is Xavier Icaza right?” Laura asked abruptly, looking for a way to begin the conversation.

Juan Francisco insisted. “Yes. I know very well that they all try to use us.”

“To use whom?” asked Laura, unaffectedly.

“The workers.”

“You’re a worker?” Laura again queried impulsively, speaking in the familiar mode to Juan Francisco, certain this wouldn’t offend him, challenging him slightly to address her as an equal, not as “miss,” uncertainly seeking common ground with this unknown man, sniffing him out, feeling herself a bit of a beast, a bit savage, as she’d never felt with Orlando, who made her think things that were perverse, refined, and so subtle that they evaporated like a poisonous perfume, strong but deleterious and short-lived.

He didn’t accept the challenge. “It’s a risk, miss. We just have to take the chance.”

(If only he’d speak familiarly to me, begged Laura, I want him to speak familiarly to me, not call me miss , I’d like for once to feel different, I want a man to say things to me, do things to me I don’t know or don’t expect or can’t ask for, I can’t ask him for that, it has to come from him, and on that depends everything that may come later, from a simple miss or no miss … )

“What risk might that be, Mr. Greene?” Laura reverted to formality.

“The risk that they’ll manipulate us, Laura.”

He added, without noticing (or perhaps pretending he didn’t see) the change in color of the girl’s face, that “we” could also extract advantages from “them.” Laura became accustomed right then and there to the strange plural which, without pretensions or false modesty, embraced a community — of workers, fighters, comrades, that’s right, and of the man speaking with her.

“Icaza has no illusions. But I do.” He smiled for the first time, with a trace of malice but more than anything else with self-irony, thought Laura. “I do.”

He said he had illusions because the Constitution made concessions to Mexican peasants and workers it did not have to make. Carranza was an old hacienda owner whose long white beard curled when he had to deal with workers and Indians; Alvaro Obregón was an intelligent but opportunistic Creole who could just as well dine with God or with the devil and make the devil believe he was actually God and convince God not to worry, because He could be a devil and had no reason to envy Lucifer; in any case, General Obregón would be the judge and would decree, You are the Devil … The Constitution consecrated the rights of the worker and of the land because without “us”—here we go again, Laura said to herself—“they” would not win the Revolution or keep themselves in power.

He asked her to dance, and she laughed through a grimace of pain and stepped-on dancing shoes, asking the labor leader if they might not better practice out on the balcony, and he also laughed and said yes, neither God nor the devil created me for ball-dancing … but if she was interested in what “we” were doing, he would tell her, out on the balcony, how the workers’ struggle organized itself during the Revolution. People thought the Revolution involved only a Creole elite followed by peasant guerrillas. They forgot that everything began in the factories and mines, in Rio Blanco and Cananea. The workers organized the Red Battalions that went out to fight Huerta’s dictatorship and founded the House of the Workers of the World in the Azulejos palace in Mexico City, in the aristocracy’s former Jockey Club. But because “we” were invaded by Huerta’s police, who arrested us and tried to burn the palace down, “we” were forced to flee. We found ourselves in the open arms of General Obregón.

“Be careful,” said Icaza, rejoining Laura and Juan Francisco. “Obregón is a fox. He wants worker support so he can undercut the followers of the peasant rebels, Zapata and Villa. He talks about a proletarian Mexico to provoke peasant and Indian Mexico. According to the Creole revolutionary leaders, who are cautious on this subject, that’s still the reactionary, backward, religious Mexico, suffocated by its scapularies and fumigated by the incense of too many churches. Be careful with the fraud, Juan Francisco, very careful.”

“But it’s the truth,” said Juan Francisco heatedly. “The peasants wear the image of the Virgin on their hats, they go to Mass on their knees, they aren’t modern, but Catholic and rural, Dr. Icaza.”

“Listen, Juan Francisco, stop calling me doctor or we’ll end up in a fistfight. And stop acting like such a hick. When you meet a young lady from high society whom you like, you do not address her as ‘miss,’ you dummy. Stop behaving like a reactionary, retarded, premodern peasant.” Xavier Icaza’s voice pealed with laughter.

But Juan Francisco insisted, with no trace of humor, that peasants were reactionaries, that urban workers were true revolutionaries, the fifteen thousand workers who fought in the Red Battalions, the hundred and fifty thousand members of the House of the Workers of the World — when had anything like that ever been seen in Mexico?

“Want some contradictions, Juan Francisco?” Icaza interrupted him. “Think about the battalions of Yaqui Indians who joined General Obregón to defeat the oh-so-agrarian Pancho Villa at the battle of Celaya. And start getting used to it, my friend. Revolutions are contradictory, and if they take place in a country as contradictory as Mexico, well, it can drive you crazy,” Icaza wailed, “as crazy as when you stare into Laura D az’s eyes. In short, López Greene: when the Revolution came to power with Carranza and Obregón, did those leaders accept self-governance in the factories and the expulsion of foreign capitalists as the Red Battalions had been promised?”

No, said Juan Francisco, he knew “we” were going to live through a constant give-and-take with the government, but “we” are not going to give in on our fundamental principles; “we” have organized the biggest strikes in all Mexican history, we’ve resisted all the pressures of the revolutionary government that wanted to turn us into official labor puppets, we got salary increases, we always negotiate, we made Carranza nuts because he couldn’t figure out where we were vulnerable, he jailed us, called us traitors, we cut the light in Mexico City, they captured the head of the electricians, Ernesto Velasco, and put a gun to his temple as they asked how to turn the power back on, they broke us again and again, but “we” never give up, we always return to the fight, and we always go back to the negotiating table, we win, we lose, we’ll win a little and lose a lot, but it’s fine, it’s fine, no need to strike the colors, we know how to turn the lights on and off and they don’t, they need us.