Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

Laura held on tight to Orlando and released a flood of tears she’d been holding in, she said, since the day she was born, since she’d lost the first person she’d loved and asked herself, why do the people I love die, why were they born …?

“What can one do? There are thousands, millions of them, perhaps Juan Francisco is right. Where would you begin? What can you do for all these people?”

“Tell me.”

“Choose the very poorest. Just one, Laura. Choose one and you’ll save them all.”

Laura D az watching the calcified plateau pass by from the window of the Pullman car as she goes home, goes to the state of Veracruz, far from the pyramid of sand out of which — like caterpillars, cockroaches, crabs, along invisible rough paths sprouting in the night from holes like chancres — the frog women, snake men, and rachitic children made their way.

Until that night, she hadn’t really believed in misery. We live protected lives, we’re conditioned to see only what we want to see. That’s what Laura said to Orlando. Now, on her way to Xalapa, she herself felt the anguished need for someone who would take pity on her: she was experiencing an urgent longing for pity, knowing that what she was asking for herself, her portion of compassion, was what was expected of her in the house on Bocanegra Street, a touch of compassion, a bit of attention for everyone forgotten — mother, aunts, two sons — all in order not to tell them the truth, to keep up the original fiction, it was better that Danton and Santiago grow up well looked after, in a provincial city, while Laura and Juan Francisco sorted out their lives, their careers, in a difficult Mexico City, in a most difficult country emerging from the furrows, the ashes, the blood of the Revolution … Only Auntie María de la O knew the truth, but above all she knew that discretion is the truth that hurts no one.

The four women were sitting in the old armchairs with wicker backs that the family had dragged with them all the way from the port of Veracruz. Zampaya opened the coach gate for her, and he was Laura’s first shock: the jolly dancing man had white hair, and his broom was no longer for him to dance with, “putting your arm around your partner’s waist if she lets you,” but now a cane on which the old family retainer rested his mutilated greeting, his “Miss Laura!” instantly hushed when Laura put her finger over her lips while the black man carried Miss’s valise and she let him do it to keep his self-respect, even though he could barely move it.

Laura wanted to see them first from the living-room door without their seeing her, the four sisters sitting in silence behind the worn-out curtains: Aunt Hilda nervously moving her arthritic fingers as if playing a muted piano; Aunt Virginia silently muttering a poem she was too weak to consign to paper; Auntie María de la O self-absorbed, staring at her fat ankles; and only Mutti working, Leticia. knitting a thick house coat that extended over her knees, protecting her, as she knitted, from Xalapa’s December chill, when the fogs of Perote Peak combine with those of the dams, the fountains, the brooks that join together in the fertile subtropical zone between the mountains and the coast.

When she looked up to examine her work, Leticia saw Laura’s eyes and exclaimed, Daughter, my daughter, as she painfully rose while Laura ran to hug her: Don’t move, Mutti, don’t wear yourself out, no one get up, please, and, if she had stood up, would Aunt Hilda have suffocated herself with the ribbon embedded in her double chin that narrowed her myopic eyes even more behind the glasses thick as fishbowls? Would Aunt Virginia have split open? Her face plastered with rice powder was no longer a powdered wrinkle but a wrinkled powder. Would Auntie María de la O have collapsed on the tile floor, recently mopped, her swollen ankles no longer supporting her?

But Leticia did stand up, straight as an arrow, parallel to the walls of the house, her house, hers, her posture telling Laura of her attitude, the house is mine, I keep it clean, tidy, active, modest but sufficient. Nothing is needed here.

“We need you, daughter. Your sons need you.”

Laura embraced her, kissed her, remained silent. She wasn’t going to remind her that they, mother and daughter, had lived for twelve years in Catemaco, separated from her father, Fernando, and her brother, Santiago, and that reasons given in the past could be invoked in the present. Even so, yesterday’s present was not today’s past. Carmen Cortina’s parties swiftly passed through Laura’s mind, at full speed, like the stray dogs near the railroad station; perhaps the dogs secretly admired the speed of the locomotives; perhaps Carmen Cortina’s guests were just another pack of homeless animals.

“The boys are at school. They’ll be home soon.”

“How are their studies going?”

“They’re with the Misses Ramos, of course.”

Laura was going to exclaim, My God, the ladies haven’t died yet! but that would have been another blunder, a faux pas as Carmen Cortina would say, Carmen whose world seemed to be disappearing into the most distant and invisible unreality. Laura smiled within. That had been her world, during the year and a half of her love affair with Orlando Ximénez, the daily or rather nightly world of Laura and Orlando together.

Laura and Orlando. How different that couple sounded here in the Xalapa house, in Veracruz, in the resuscitated memory of Santiago the first. She was surprised to find herself thinking in such terms, for her brother had been shot when he was only twenty, but the new Santiago coming into the living room with his backpack was a little gentleman of eleven, as serious as a portrait and direct in his first announcement:

“Danton was kept after school. He has to copy twenty pages without a single ink blot.”

The Misses Ramos would always be the same, but Santiago hadn’t seen his mother in four years, though he immediately understood who she was. He did not run over to embrace her. He let her come to him, kneel down and kiss him. The child’s face never changed. With a look, Laura asked for help from the four women.

“That’s the way Santiago is,” said Mutti Leticia. “I’ve never met so serious a child.”

He kissed Laura’s hand: who taught him that, the Misses Ramos, or was it innate courtesy, his distance? Then he scampered out. Laura rejoiced at that childish act; her son skipped in and skipped out, even though he spoke like a judge.

Dinner was slow and painful. Danton sent word with a maid that he was going to sleep at a friend’s house, and Laura did not want to play the part of the active and emancipated woman from the capital or upset the ambulatory siesta that was her aunts’ waking hours; nor did she want to offend her mother’s admirable and nervous activity, because it was Leticia who cooked, ran about, and served while Zampaya sang his songs in the patio. In the absence of conversation, a peculiar smell, a boardinghouse smell, was taking over everywhere; it was the dead smell of many solitary nights, many hasty visits, many corners where, despite Mutti’s efforts and Zampaya’s broom, dust, time, and oblivion were piling up.

Because there were no guests at the moment — although one or two a week always turned up, which, along with the help Laura sent for the boys, allowed the house to be maintained modestly — the daughter listened to her mother with growing unease, longing to be alone with her, with her mother Leticia, but also with each of the women in this house without men — to shake them out of the apathy of their eternal siesta. But thinking that was not only an offense for them, but hypocrisy on Laura’s part, who, after all, had lived on Elizabeth’s charity for two years, dividing the monthly allowance sent by Juan Francisco, deputy of the Regional Workers Confederation of Mexico, among payments to Elizabeth, her personal expenses, and a little for her sons given refuge in Xalapa-while Laura slept until noon after staying up until three in the morning, never hearing Orlando when he rose earlier to attend to his mysterious affairs. Laura had fooled herself by reading in bed, telling herself that she wasn’t wasting time, that she was educating herself, reading what she should have read as an adolescent: after discovering Carlos Pellicer, reading Pablo Neruda, Federico Garc a Lorca, and going back to read Quevedo, Garcilaso de la Vega … with Orlando she would go to the Palace of Fine Arts to listen to Carlos Chávez conducting music that was all new for her, because in her memory there only floated like some perfume the Chopin Aunt Hilda played in Catemaco, and now Bach, Beethoven, and Berlioz along with Ponce, Revueltas, and Villalobos combined into a vast musical Mass; no, she hadn’t wasted her time at Carmen Cortina’s parties, in reading books or listening to concerts; she had simultaneously allowed her most interior and deep personal thoughts to flow, with the purpose — she said to herself — of locating herself in the world, understanding the changes in her life, proposing solid goals to herself, more certain than the easy exit — as it seemed to her now, stretched out once again on her adolescent bed, again hugging Li Po — of married life with Juan Francisco or even the very pleasant bohemian life with Orlando, something more for her sons Santiago and Danton, a more mature mother, more self-assured …