Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“No”—Laura Rivière took her glass—“by malicious men who condemned us to theatrics.”

“Darlings,” interrupted Carmen Cortina, “have I introduced you to Querubina de Landa yet?”

“No one is named Querubina de Landa,” said Orlando to Carmen, to the air, to the night, to the overextended Señorita Querubina de Landa, who was hanging on the arm of the philosophic playboy. Orlando casually skewered him: “They’re right to call you the Great Chicken Thief.”

“In the matter of names, my dear but ignorant Orlando, no one has said it better than Plato: There are conventional names, there are intrinsic names, and there are names that harmonize nature with necessity, as, for example, Laura Rivière and Laura Díaz. Good night.” O’Higgins bowed to one and all, patted the backside of the conventional, natural, harmoniously named Querubina de Landa, and said (in English), “Let’s, fuck.”

“I’ll bet her real name is Petra Pérez,” said the cordial hostess, as she ran off to greet an unusual couple entering the living room of the penthouse overlooking Paseo de la Reforma: a very old man on the arm of a perpetually tremulous lady.

Laura Díaz’s high heels sounded like hammers pounding on the sidewalk. She smiled, arm in arm with Orlando, and told him that they’d met in a Veracruz hacienda and ended up in a penthouse on Paseo de la Reforma, but with the same rules and aspirations in both places: to be admitted or disapproved by society and its empresses — Doña Genoveva Deschamps in San Cayetano, Carmen Cortina in Mexico City.

“Can’t we escape? We’ve been together now for eighteen months, my love.”

“For me, time doesn’t matter if I’m with you,” said the no longer very young and now balding Orlando Ximénez.

“Why is it you never wear a hat? You’re the only one.”

“For that very reason. To be the only one who doesn’t.”

They walked along the tree-lined part of the avenue that cold December night, on the earthen bridle path for early-morning riders.

“I still don’t know anything about you,” Laura dared to say, squeezing his hand harder.

“I’m not hiding anything from you. The only things you don’t know are the things you don’t want to know.”

“Orlando, night after night, like this evening, we hear only clichés, predictable, expected …”

“Keep going. Desperate.”

“You know something? I’ve just realized that in this world you’ve introduced me to it doesn’t matter how we end up. Tonight was interesting for me. The people who mattered most to each other were Laura Rivière and Artemio Cruz. Do you see? He walked out, the night ended badly. That was the most important thing that happened tonight.”

“Let me console you. You’re right. It doesn’t matter how we end up. The good thing will be that we don’t notice everything is over.”

“Oh, my love, I feel as if I’m falling down a collapsing staircase.”

Orlando hailed a taxi and gave the driver an address unknown to Laura. The cabby stared at the couple in astonishment: “You really want to go there, boss? Sure of that?”

In 1932, Mexico City streets emptied early. Punctual evening meals brought the entire family together. And families were tight-knit, as if the prolonged civil war — twenty unbroken years — had taught the clans to live in a state of fear, clinging to one another, waiting for the worst, for unemployment, expropriation, execution, kidnapping, rape, life savings erased in an instant, useless paper money, the arrogant confusion of the rebel factions. One society had disappeared. The new one was not yet clearly defined. City dwellers had one foot in the furrow of the plow and the other in ashes, as Musset said about post-Napoleonic France. The bad thing was that sometimes blood covered both furrow and ashes, erasing the lines between soil that would be sterile forever and seed that, to produce its fruits, had first to die.

Parties like those of the celebrated, shortsighted Carmen Cortina were a relief for a worldly elite that counted among its protagonists both Seeds and Ashes, those who survived the revolutionary catastrophe, those who lived thanks to it, and those who had died in it but had yet to realize it. Carmen’s parties were an exception, a rarity. Proper families would visit one another early, marry one another even earlier, and use both magnifying glass and strainer when letting in elements of the new revolutionary society … If a savage general from Sonora married a charming young lady from Sinaloa, relatives and family friends from Culiacán, the capital, were there immediately to approve or disapprove. General Obregón’s family had no social pretensions, and the One-armed Hero of Celaya would have been better off staying on his hacienda in Huatabampo and tending turkeys instead of getting entangled in reelection and death. The Calles family, on the other hand, did want to get into high society, cut a figure in it, present its daughters at the Churubusco Country Club and then marry them all — but of course! — in religious weddings (private ceremonies, naturally). The most notable and respected case was General Joaquin Amaro, the very model of the revolutionary warlord, an unequaled horseman (he looked like a centaur), an Indian with his neckerchief and pendant earring, ebony complexion, thick, sensual, and challenging lips and eyes lost in the origin of the tribes, who married a young lady of the best northern society and as a wedding gift promised he would learn French and good manners.

There was always a goodly supply of playboys, and if there was no money anymore to send them abroad to study, they now went to the San Ildefonso Law School or the Santo Domingo School of Medicine, if they were poor; or if they were affluent, they studied architecture. All these schools were in the old center of the city, in a quarter surrounded by bars, cabarets, and bordellos. The Mexico City of the poor was like an invisible anthill that ran day and night, a Mexico City crowded with men still wearing huge straw hats and huaraches or overalls and shawls: that’s what my husband, Juan Francisco, showed me when he took me to see the barrios and convinced me the problems were so gigantic that it was better I stay home and look after my sons.

“Your husband didn’t show you anything,” said Orlando Ximénez with unexpected ferocity, grabbing Laura’s wrist and making her get out in the middle of a partly built-up lot — that was the brutal shock, the paradox: here were streets, here were houses, yet this was a wasteland within the city, a ruin built of dust, conceived as a ruin, a pyramid of sand on whose flanks, invisible at first sight, began to appear incomplete silhouettes, forms difficult to name, a half-made world, and Laura and Orlando made their way through this gray urban mystery, Orlando leading Laura by the hand like Virgil with Beatrice — not Dante; another Laura, not Petrarch’s; making her look, look, now you can see them, they’re coming out of holes, emerging from the garbage, tell me, Laura, what could you do for that woman over there called the Frog, who hops because her torso is crushed against her thighs, look at her, forced to hop like a frog in search of edible garbage, what could you do for that man over there who drags himself along the street with no nose, no arms, no legs, like a human snake? and look at them now because it’s night, because they only come out when there’s no light, because they fear the sun, because during the day they live locked in fear, so as not to be seen, what are they, Laura? take a good look: are they dwarfs, children? they’re children, but they won’t grow any more, they’re dead children with rigor mortis, on their feet but half buried in the dust, tell me, Laura, did your husband show you this, or did he only show you the pretty side of poverty, the workers with their cheap shirts, the whores with their powder, the organ grinders and locksmiths, the tamale sellers and the saddlers? is that his working class? Do you want to rebel against your husband? hate him because he didn’t give you a chance to do something for others, treated you with contempt? well then, I’ll give you the chance, take you by the shoulders, Laura, and make you open your eyes, what, what can you do against all this? why don’t you and I spend our evenings here, with the Frog and the Snake and the children who won’t grow and who fear the sun, instead of with Carmen Cortina and Querubina de Landa and Fatso del Valle and the actress who dyes her pubic hair white, why not?