Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“I see a weeping willow. I see a nymph. I see an aureole. I see melancholy. I see sickness. I see egoism. I see vanity. I see personal and collective disorganization. I see beautiful poses. I see ugly things.”

“Idiot. You’re a frustrated poet. Give me names. Names, names, names.”

“What’s in a name?”

“What, what did you say?”

“Romeo, Juliet, things like that.”

“What? Who invited them?”

Laura had resisted her friend Elizabeth’s importuning: you’re behaving like a widow without being one, Laura, you got rid of López Greene at just the right time, the way I got rid of Caraza, she would say as they walked along Avenida Madero in search of bargains. It was Elizabeth who organized these expeditions to find sales on clothes and accessories that were beginning to come back to post-Revolutionary Mexico in the shops on Gante, Bolivar, and 16 de Septiembre. These hunting parties would start with a breakfast at Sanborn’s, continue with lunch at Prendes, and finish up with a movie at the Cine Iris on Donceles Street — where Laura liked going because it featured first run American films from Metro Goldwyn-Mayer with the best actors, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, William Powell — while Elizabeth favored the Cine Palacio on Avenida Cinco de Mayo, where they showed only Mexican movies. She loved to laugh with Chato Ortín, cry with Sara Garc a, admire Fernando Soler’s histrionics.

“Remember when we went to see fatso Soto at the Follies? That’s where your life changed.”

“A dead marriage kills everything, Elizabeth.”

“Know what happened to you? You were cleverer than your husband. Just like me.”

“No, I think he loved me.”

“But he didn’t understand you. You walked out the day you understood you were more intelligent than he was. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”

“No. I simply felt that Juan Francisco wasn’t up to the same level as his ideals. Maybe I was more moral than he, though thinking that now annoys me a little.”

“Remember fatso Soto’s farce? To be considered intelligent in Mexico, you’ve got to be a crook. What I recommend, my love, is that you become a liberated, sensual woman, your own kind of crook. Come on, finish off that ice-cream soda, drain those straws, and let’s go shopping and then to the movies.”

Laura said she felt embarrassed that Elizabeth was “shooting” so many things her way. That was the way you put it in Mexico City slang, which abounded in neologisms disguised as archaisms and archaisms disguised as neologisms — all in a kind of linguistic sublimation of the armed struggle: “shooting” meant giving presents, “Carranzifying” meant stealing, “besieging” meant courting, and any serious effort was called “engaging in battle.” To say “I’m doing a Wilson” meant to pass through the triumphal arch of a woman’s legs like the American President who ordered General Pershing’s punitive expedition against Pancho Villa and, before that, the landing at Veracruz with the Marines. Fatality was always compared to the Valentina song — if I’ve got to die tomorrow, why not die right now? Amorous persistence was always compared to the Adelita song — if she went off with another man, I’d follow her o’er land and sea. To compare the country to the city was like singing that only four cornfields are left or that bobbed-hair girls are finished and so is presumption, or like comparing the horribly vulgar charro Buddy-boy Beristáin — who said he was a general without having fought any battles, except against his mother-in-law — with nostalgia for the vanished refinement and grace of the Little White Cat, María Conesa, who sang “Oh, oh, oh, oh, my darling Captain” about her lover, a fearsome military man and leader of a band of thieves called the “gray car gang.” To shoot someone meant to copy that person. And “to Madero” was to do what the two women were doing at that moment — to stroll down Avenida Madero, downtown Mexico City’s main commercial street, once the Silversmiths Street and now rebaptized to honor the Apostle of the Revolution and Democracy.

“I read a very funny book by Julio Torri. It’s called On Executions and he complains that the principal inconvenience in being shot by a firing squad is having to get up so early in the morning,” said Laura, gazing in the shopwindows.

“Don’t worry. My husband, poor Caraza, used to say that a million people died in the Revolution but not on the battlefields. Only in cantina brawls. Laura”—Elizabeth stopped outside the Chamber of Deputies on Donceles Street—“you like coming to the Iris because your husband is a deputy, right?”

They bought tickets to see A Free Soul with Clark Gable and Norma Shearer, and Elizabeth said the smell of candy apples at the entrance to the theater excited her.

“Fresh apples and sticky honey,” sighed the young matron, who was getting blonder and blonder and plumper and plumper, when they left the theater. “Just think, Norma Shearer abandons everything — social position, an aristocratic boyfriend — how distinguished that Englishman Leslie Howard is! — for a gangster sexier than … Clark Gable! Divine, big ears and all! I adore him!”

“Well, I’ll take the blond, Leslie Howard. Anyway, he’s Hungarian, not English.”

“Impossible. Hungarians are gypsies and wear earrings. Where did you read that?”

“In Photoplay.”

“Well maybe you want a blond now — English or kidnapper or whatever he is — but you married that dark, dark Juan Francisco. Honey, you don’t fool me. You like the Cine Iris because it’s next door to the Chamber of Deputies. If you’re lucky, you’ll see him. I mean, you’ll see each other. I mean. I just mean.”

Laura shook her head emphatically but explained nothing to Elizabeth. Sometimes she felt her life was like the seasons of the year, except that her marriage had gone from spring to winter without any summer or fall. She loved Juan Francisco, but a man is only admirable when he admires the woman who loves him. That, in the last instance, is what Laura felt was missing. Perhaps Elizabeth was right: she had to try other waters, swim in other rivers. Even if she didn’t find perfect love, she could build herself a romantic passion. Maybe it could be “platonic,” a word Elizabeth didn’t understand but put into practice at the parties she was always going to.

“Look but don’t touch. If you touch me, you’ll catch something.”

She never gave herself to anyone: her friend Laura imagined that a passion could be created by force of will. This is why the two women could live together without problems and without men, avoiding the multitude of Don Juans in Mexico City liberated from hearth and home by the chaos of the Revolution and looking for lovers when what they really wanted was mothers.

The vernissage for Andrea Negrete’s portrait by Tizoc Ambriz was the pretext for Laura to depart from what Elizabeth, with a certain macabre resonance, called her “stiff widowhood without a stiff,” and attend an artistic “function.” Enough of ruminating about the past, enough of imagining impossible loves, enough of telling stories about Veracruz or missing her sons or feeling ashamed to go to Xalapa because she felt guilty, because it was she who had abandoned her home just as she abandoned her sons, for she knew no way to justify what she’d done, didn’t want to destroy Juan Francisco’s image for the boys, didn’t want to admit to Mutti and to her aunts that she’d made a mistake, that she would have been better off looking for a young man of her own class at the San Cayetano and Xalapa Casino dances, but above all she did not want to speak ill of Juan Francisco, wanted everyone to go on believing she’d put her faith in a fighting, valiant man, above all a leader who personified everything that had happened in Mexico in this century, didn’t want to say to her family I was mistaken, my husband is corrupt or mediocre, my husband is an ambitious man unworthy of his ambition, your father, Santiago, can’t live without having someone recognize his merits, your father, Danton, is defeated by his belief that other people don’t give him what he deserves — my husband, Elizabeth, is incapable of recognizing that he’s already lost his merit. The gold has rubbed off his medals and only the copper is left.