Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“Please, ma’am.”

Laura looked into her eyes. “What’s your name?”

“Carmela.”

“Well, I don’t see why a squad of soldiers should be hunting through the streets for a maid named Carmela.”

“Ma’am, I—”

“Not a word, Carmela. At the back of the patio, there’s an empty maid’s room. Let’s fix it up. It’s filled with old newspapers. Put them next to the boiler. Can you cook?”

“I know how to make communion wafers, ma’am.”

“I’ll teach you. Where are you from?”

“Guadalajara.”

“Say that your parents are from Veracruz.”

“They’re dead.”

“Well then, say they were from Veracruz. I need subjects so I can protect you, Carmela. Things to talk about. Follow my lead.”

“May God reward you, ma’am.”

Juan Francisco reacted most docilely to Carmela’s presence. Laura did not have to give him any explanations. He himself had acknowledged he was unaware of things, rarely alert to the needs of the house, to Laura’s fatigue, to her interest in books and painting. The boys were growing and needed their mother to educate them. María de la O was getting old and tired out.

“Why don’t you all go to Xalapa to rest? Carmela can take care of me here in the house.”

Laura D az looked over at the attic of her old house in Xalapa, visible from the second-story terrace of the boardinghouse where her mother Leticia and her Aunts Hilda and Virginia now lived and worked. Middle age was no longer creeping up on the Kelsen sisters: it had trapped them, they were leaving time itself behind.

Laura loved them, she realized in the narrow parlor where Leticia had gathered, rather inelegantly, her personal furniture, the wicker chairs from her marriage, the marble console, the paintings of the rascal and the dog. Hilda had a huge, rose-colored double chin adorned with white hairs, but her eyes were still very blue despite the thick glasses that from time to time slipped down her straight nose.

“I’m going blind, Laura. It’s a blessing I can’t see my hands, look at my hands, they look like the knots sailors make on the docks, like the roots of an old tree. How can I play the piano like this? At least I have Aunt Virginia, who reads to me.”

Virginia kept her eyes wide open, as if in shock about something, and her hands resting on a kidskin binding, as if it were the skin of a beloved being. She tapped her fingers in time with the blinking of her very black, alert eyes. Was she waiting for the arrival of something imminent or the entrance of some unexpected but providential being? God, a mailman, a lover, a publisher? All those possibilities passed simultaneously before Aunt Virginia’s all too lively eyes.

“You never spoke to Minister Vasconcelos about publishing my book of poems?”

“Aunt Virginia, Vasconcelos isn’t a minister anymore. He’s in opposition to Calles’ government. Besides, I’ve never met him.”

“I don’t know anything about politics. Why don’t the poets govern us?”

“Because they don’t know how to swallow toads without making a face,” laughed Laura.

“What? What are you saying? Are you insane or what? Nett Affe!”

Although the three sisters had decided to run the boarding house, in reality only Leticia worked at it. Weak, nervous, tall, holding her back very straight, her hair graying, a woman of few words but of eloquent punctuality in the execution of all tasks, she had the menus ready, the rooms clean, the plants watered. All with the active help of Zampaya, who went on bringing joy to the house with his dances and songs from who knew where:

ora la cachimbá-bimbá-bimbá

ora la cachimbábá

now my black girl dance to me

now my black girl dance away

Laura was shocked to see the wiry gray hair on the black man’s head. She was sure Zampaya was secretly in contact with a sect of dancing witches and an interminable chorus of invisible voices. These are the people with whom we went to give my brother Santiago’s body to the sea, these are the people with whom we are witnesses. Then Laura looked toward the attic, thought about Armonía Aznar here in Xalapa, and, who knows why? she thought about Carmela with no last name in the maid’s room in Mexico City.

Leticia especially looked after old acquaintances from Veracruz passing through Xalapa. But now, with the arrival of Laura and María de la O, in addition to the presence of Aunts Hilda and Virginia, the two permanent and penniless guests, there was room for only two guests. Laura was astonished to see once more the now adult red-haired tennis player, the big fellow with strong, svelte, hairy legs who had abused the girls at the San Cayetano dances.

He greeted her with a gesture of excuse and submission as unexpected as his presence. He was a traveling salesman, he said, selling automobile tires on the Córdoba-Orizaba-Xalapa-Veracruz circuit. At least he hadn’t been sent to that hell the port of Coatzacoalcos. The company gave him his own car — his face lit up, as it had when he’d frenetically danced the cakewalk in 1915—though of course it wasn’t his hut the company’s.

The lights went out.

The other guest was, Leticia told her, an old man, he never leaves his room, I bring his meals to him.

One afternoon, Leticia was busy with something at the door and left the guest’s tray of food in the kitchen, where it was getting cold. Not thinking anything of it, Laura picked up the tray and took it to the guest, who never allowed himself to be seen.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed with something in his hands that he hid as soon as he heard Laura’s footsteps. She managed to detect the unmistakable sound of rosary beads. When she set the tray down, she felt a tremor run through her entire body, a chill of sudden recognition through veils and more veils of oblivion, time, and, in this case, disdain. Laura’s memory had to make a gigantic leap backward to identify the young priest from Puebla, dark-skinned and intolerant, who’d disappeared one day with the church’s treasure.

“Why, it’s you, the priest.”

“You are Laura, isn’t that right? Please, don’t raise your voice. Don’t get your mother into trouble.”

“Father Elzevir.”

The priest clasped Laura’s hands. “How can you remember? You were just a child.”

There was no need to ask him what he was doing hidden away there. “Please, don’t raise your voice. Don’t get your mother into trouble.” He said she didn’t have to ask him anything. He would tell her he didn’t get very far with what he’d stolen. He was a coward. He admitted it. When the police were about to catch him, he thought it would be better to submit to the pity of the Church, for Don Porfirio’s police had none.

“I asked forgiveness, and it was granted to me. I confessed and was absolved. I repented and again entered the community of my Church. But I felt it was all too easy. It was true and profound, but easy. I had to pay for the evil I’d committed, my temptation. My illusion. God our master did me the favor of sending me this punishment, Calles’ religious persecution.”

He looked at Laura with the eyes of a conquered Indian. “Now I feel guiltier than ever. I have nightmares. I’m sure God punished me for my sacrilege by causing this persecution to fall on His Church. I believe I am responsible, because of my individual act, for a collective evil. I believe it profoundly.”

“Father, you have no reason to confess to me.”

“Oh, but I do.” Elzevir squeezed Laura’s hands, which he’d never stopped holding. “Oh, but I do. You were a child. But who better than a child can I ask for forgiveness for the tumult of my soul? Will you forgive me?”