Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

She began by taking off her rings. She wanted to arrive with clean, agile hands, eager for the body of Orlando, and he from the bed was trying to decipher Laura, his fist clenched and the gold ring with the initials OX daring her, that’s it, reproaching her for the years lost for love, the postponed meeting, this time, yes, now, yes, and she saying yes to him as she took off her own rings, especially those from her marriage to Juan Francisco and the diamond from her grandmother Cosima Kelsen, who was left without fingers because of the amorous machete of the Hunk from Papantla, Laura dropping her rings on the rug, on the way to Orlando’s bed, like Little Red Riding Hood lost in the forest dropping bread crumbs, and the birds, all without exception birds of prey, all of them beautiful predators, will eat the bread crumbs, erasing the trail, telling the lost little girl, “There’s no way back, you’re in the cave of the wolf.”

ON THE SAME TRAIN that had brought her, a newlywed, from Xalapa to Mexico City, Laura was now returning. This time it was by day, not night, and she was alone. Her last companions in the capital, before she got to the Colonia station, had been a pack of dogs that both followed and preceded her, threatening mostly because meeting a pack of dogs was such a novelty. She hadn’t realized two things. First, the city had dried out: one after another, the lakes and canals — Texcoco, La Viga, La Verónica, the moribund tributaries of the Aztec lake — had filled with garbage, then dirt from construction sites, and finally asphalt. The city in a lake had died forever, inexplicably in Laura’s imagination, because she sometimes dreamed of a pyramid surrounded by water.

Second, Mexico City had been invaded by dogs, mixed breeds of no breeding at all, lost, disoriented, objects of simultaneous fear and compassion. Once fine collies, galloping Great Danes, or degenerated German shepherds had mixed together in a vast pack of hounds with no collars, direction, owners, identity. Families with pedigreed dogs had left the capital with the Revolution and let their pets loose to run away — or to die, of loyalty or of hunger. Behind several fancy houses in Colonia Roma and on Paseo de la Reforma one found the bodies of dogs still chained, locked in their doghouses, unable either to eat or to flee. Everyone — dogs and masters — had bet on disloyalty as long as it meant survival.

“They’ve grown up on their own, with no training at all. No dog knows if it has a pedigree, Laura, and if their masters return — and they’re beginning to, mostly from Paris, a few from New York, by the drove from Havana — they’ll never get them back.”

Thus according to Orlando. On the train, she tried to erase the image of the abandoned dogs, but it was a vision that prevailed over all the images of her life with Orlando in the eighteen months that had passed since they slept together for the first time in the Hotel Regis and then stayed on, with Orlando paying for the room and the services. Together they began the social life that he called “observations for my novel,” although Laura sometimes wondered whether her lover really enjoyed the facile frivolity that reigned in Mexico City at peace after twenty years of revolutionary fear, or if Orlando’s tour through all the urban strata was part of a secret plan, like his intermediary relationship with the Catalan anarchist Armonía Aznar.

She never asked him. She wouldn’t dare. That was the difference between him and Juan Francisco, who gave reports on everything that happened to him, turning them into speeches. Orlando never said what he was doing. Laura was likely to know what was going to happen, never what already had. Neither his relationship with the old anarchist in the attic nor that with the brother executed in Veracruz. How easy it would have been for Orlando to brag about the first and take advantage of the second. A heroic aura surrounded anyone linked to Armon a Aznar and Santiago Díaz. Why didn’t Orlando profit from that splendor?

Watching him sleep, exhausted, defenseless under her wide-awake eyes, Laura imagined many things. Public modesty, for starters: he would call it elegance, reserve, though with plenty of satiric barbs aimed at himself and poisonous epigrams aimed at society. She did not hesitate to call it modesty, the modesty of a man who was intensely immodest in his sexuality: perhaps it was related to his commitment to the secrecy required by the political cause — but which one? — anarchism, syndicalism, no reelection, the revolution or rather the Revolution, capitalized to show that it had turned everything in Mexico upside down, the immense mural which they all had lived in, a mural like Diego Rivera’s, with cavalry charges and murders, fights and battles, endless heroism and equal ruination, retreats and advances, huggings and stabbings …? She remembered how as a young married woman she’d discovered the new mural art and had seen Diego painting in the National Palace.

“He threw me out, Orlando, because I was wearing black after Father died.”

“Ever feel nostalgic for Xalapa?”

“I have you. Why would I feel nostalgia?”

“For your sons. Your mother.”

“And my old aunts.” Laura smiled, because Orlando was speaking to her with unaccustomed solemnity. “To think that Diego Rivera is superstitious.”

“Yes, your old aunts, Laura …”

Was he a mysterious hero? Was he a discreet friend? And also, was he a sentimental fellow? Everything that Laura might imagine each morning about the “real” Orlando, the “real” Orlando destroyed each night. Like a vampire, the innocent and loving angel of dawn was transformed into an offensive devil with a poison tongue and a cynical eye as soon as the sun set. True, he never treated her badly, and Laura could still feel the slap her husband, Juan Francisco, had given her that evening when he tried to pull her out of the taxi. She would never forget it. Never forgive it. A man has no idea what a slap in the face means to a woman, an unpunished abuse, the worst offense, cowardice, an offense to the beauty that every single woman holds and exposes in her face … Orlando never made her the butt of irony or cruel jests, but he did oblige her to be present at night to the negation of the daytime Orlando — discreet, sentimental, erotic, sober in his treatment of the feminine body, as if it were his own, Orlando who could be simultaneously passionate and respectful to the feminine body united to his own.

“Get ready,” he said without looking at her, grasping her arm firmly, as if they were two Christians entering the lions’ ring. “Brace yourself, my dear,” in English. “This is the Circus Maximus, but instead of lions roaring, you hear cows mooing, lambs bleating. And yes, the howl of wolves may be detected. Avanti, popolo romano. Here comes our hostess. Just look at her. Just look. It’s Carmen Cortina. Three verbs suffice to define her. She drinks. She smokes. She ages.”

“Darlings! What a pleasure to see you again … and still together! Miracles, miracles …”

“Carmen. Stop drinking. Stop smoking. You’re aging yourself.”

“Orlando!” The hostess burst out laughing. “What would I do without you? You speak the same truths as my mama, may she rest in peace.”

Outside the night was stormy and inside it was enervating.

“Think what you like and don’t expect me to speak well of my friends,” said the lugubrious painter to the critic dressed in white, who intoned his aforementioned “We are all ridiculous.”

“That’s not what I mean. It’s that I only have indefensible friends. If they’re worthy of my friendship, they can’t be worthy of my defense. No one is worth that much.”