Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“My love, my love.”

That year, President Obregón was succeeded by Plutarco El as Calles, another Sonora man, another one of the Agua Prieta triumvirate. The Revolution had been carried out to the chant of FREE VOTES, NO REELECTION because Porfirio Díaz had kept himself in office for three decades with fraudulent reelections. Now, ex-President Obregón wanted to abrogate his own ineligibility and return to the throne of the eagle and serpent. Many said it would betray one of the principles of the Revolution. But the rationale of power had its way. The Constitution was amended to allow a former president’s reelection. Everyone had been certain that the three Sonora men would take turns at being President until they died of old age, just like Don Porfirio D az, unless another Madero, another revolution, came along.

“Morones wants us union men to back General Obregón’s reelection. I’d like to discuss it with you,” said Juan Francisco to the union leaders gathered once again in his house, as they did every month of every year. In the little living room, Laura put aside her book.

“Morones is an opportunist. He doesn’t think the way we do. He hates the anarcho-syndicalists. He adores the corporate unionists who thicken the government’s broth. If we support Obregón, our independence is over. He’ll turn us into little lambs or he’ll lead us to slaughter, which is pretty much the same thing.”

“You’re right, Palomo. What are we going to be, Juan Francisco, independent, militant unions or corporate sectors of the official labor movement? I want all of you to tell me,” said another of those faceless voices that Laura struggled vainly to link, when they came in, when they left, with the faces filing through the little living room.

“Dammit, Juan Francisco — and begging the pardon of the lady in the next room — we are the heirs of Light, of the Red Tribunal, the House of the Workers of the World, the Red Battalions of the Revolution. Are we going to end up as lackeys to a government that uses us just to put on fancy revolutionary airs? Revolutionary? Hooey is what I say.”

“What’s in our best interest?” Laura heard her husband’s voice. “To achieve what we want, a better life for the workers? Or are we going to wear ourselves out, fighting the government, wasting our energy in squabbles, and letting others turn the promises of the Revolution into realities? Are we going to lose our chance?”

“We’re going to lose everything, right down to our long Johns.”

“Does anyone here believe in the soul?”

“A revolution becomes legitimate on its own and engenders rights, comrades,” Juan Francisco summed up. “Obregón has the support of those who made the Revolution. Even Zapata’s and Villa’s people support him. He figured out a way to win them over. Are we going to be the exception?”

“I think we should be, Juan Francisco. The workers’ movement was born to be the exception. Come on, pal, don’t keep us from being the ones who get to rain on the government’s parade.”

For her entire life as a young married woman she’d been listening to the same discussion: it was like going to church every Sunday to hear the same sermon. Habit, Laura once thought, has to have meaning, it must become ritual. She went back over the ritual moments in her own life — birth, childhood, puberty, marriage, death — she was thirty years old, and she’d known them all by now, a personal knowledge, a knowledge that intimately touched her family. It became a collective knowledge, as if the entire nation could not bring itself to divorce its bride: death; that July day when Juan Francisco returned home unexpectedly sometime around six in the afternoon, completely upset, and said, “President Obregón was assassinated at a banquet.”

“Who did it?”

“A Catholic.”

“Was he killed?”

“Who? Obregón? I already said he was.”

“No, I mean the killer.”

“No, he’s in jail. His name is Toral. A fanatic.”

Of all the coincidences she’d experienced in her life until that moment, none alarmed Laura so much as the one that began with the sound, one afternoon, of a hand lightly knocking at the door of the house. María de la O had taken the boys to the park; Juan Francisco was returning later and later from work. The dining-room discussions had yielded to the need to act: Obregón was dead; he and Calles had divided power between them, so now only one of the strong men was left. Had Calles murdered Obregón? Was Mexico an endless chain of sacrifices, each one engendering the next, and the last certain of its eventual destiny; to be the same as the act that created it — death to reach power, death to leave it?

“Just look, Juan Francisco, Morones and the CROM are overjoyed because Obregón is dead. Morones wants to be a presidential candidate.”

“That fatso will need a double — sized chair …”

“No jokes, Palomo. No reelection was the sacred principle.”

“Cut it out, Pánfilo. Don’t use religious expressions, it really—”

“I’m telling you to be serious. The untouchable principle is that all right? — of the Revolution. Calles betrayed Morones’ presidential hopes to help out his buddy Obregón. Who comes out ahead because of the crime? Just ask yourself that simple question. Who comes out ahead?”

“Calles and Morones. And who takes all the blame? The Catholics.”

“But you’ve always been anticlerical, Palomo. You criticize the peasants for being so Catholic.”

“For that very reason, I’m telling you there’s no better way to strengthen the Church than by persecuting it. That’s what I’m afraid of now.”

“Why is Calles persecuting the Church now? The Turk is no jackass.”

“To nip the fat guy’s rage in the bud, José Miguel. He had to find some way to show he’s revolutionary.”

“Now I don’t understand anything.”

“Understand this. In Mexico, even cripples are acrobats.”

“Okay, but don’t you forget something else. Politics is the art of swallowing toads without making a face.”

She was as white as the moon, and her whiteness emphasized her thick, continuous, black eyebrows, which ran across her forehead and cast more of a shadow over the circles under her eyes, circles like the shadow of her immense eyes, as black as they say sin is black, although the eyes of this woman were swimming in a lake of omens. She was dressed in black, with long skirts and low-heeled shoes, her blouse buttoned up to her neck, and a black shawl nervously covering her back, tightly but carelessly wrapped, slipping down to her waist. Her disarray embarrassed her, as if it gave her a clownish air, and made her readjust the shawl over her shoulders, though not over her hair, which was divided strictly by a center part and gathered into a bun at the nape of her neck, where long, loose hairs had escaped as if a secret part of her were rebelling against the discipline of her costume. The loosened hairs were not as black as the tight hairdo of this pale, nervous woman, as if they were announcing something, antennas for some undesired news.

“Excuse me, but I was told a maid was needed here.”

“No, miss, in this house we don’t exploit anyone.” Laura smiled with her ever more irrepressible irony. Was irony her only possible defense against flat and unrelieved routine, in itself neither degrading nor exalting, but stretching out as long as the horizon of her years?

“I know you need help, ma’am.”

“Look, I just told you—”

She said nothing more because the white, sunken-eyed woman dressed in black thrust herself into the garage. She begged silence with her eyes and clasped Laura’s hands alarmingly, then closed her eyes as if facing a physical catastrophe, while in the street a group of metallic soldiers came running, breaking the pavement with the force of their boots, sounding like steel as they marched over steel streets in a soulless city. the woman trembled in Laura’s arms.