Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

Now she was back at home, and this was the best thing she could have done, return to her roots and quietly sit down to a frothy soda in Don Antonio C. Báez’s La Jalapeña, where a sign assured Don Antonio’s customers: “This establishment does not use saccharine to sweeten its waters.” She could peruse the displays in the Ollivier Brothers shop where La Opera corsets were still for sale. Browsing in Don Raúl Basáñez’s bookshop La Moderna, she could leaf through the European illustrated magazines her father, Fernando D az, awaited with such high expectation on the docks of Veracruz. She sauntered into Wagner and Lieven, opposite Juárez Park, to buy her Aunt Hilda, music by a composer she perhaps did not know, Maurice Ravel, whose works Orlando and Laura had heard conducted by Carlos Chávez in the Palace of Fine Arts.

The older women acted as if nothing had happened. That was their strength. They would forever be living on the coffee plantation owned by Don Felipe Kelsen, born in Darmstadt in the Rhineland. At dinner, they moved their hands around as if the table service were made of silver and not tin, the plates of porcelain and not pottery, the tablecloth of linen and not cotton. There was something they hadn’t given up: each woman had her own starched linen napkin, carefully folded into a silver ring marked with her initials, V, H, MO, or L, elegantly and elaborately engraved. That was the first thing each one picked up when they sat down to table. It was their pride, their life preserver, the seal of rank. It was the mark of the Kelsens — before husbands, before confirmed celibacy, before death. The silver napkin ring was personality, tradition, memory, affirmation for each one of them and for them all.

A silver napkin ring holding a carefully folded napkin that was clean, crackling with starch. At table, they acted as if nothing had happened.

Laura began to chat with each of them, one at a time, alone, always with the feeling she was hunting them down. They were nervous, fleeing birds from two past seasons, Laura’s and their own. Virginia and Hilda resembled each other more than even they knew. From the pianist aunt, once she’d repeated for the thousandth time her complaint against their father, Felipe Kelsen — that he hadn’t allowed her to stay in Germany to study music — Laura extracted the more profound complaint, I’m a leftover old woman, Laura, a hopeless spinster, and do you know why? Because I spent my life convinced that men would prefer me if I denied them any hope. At the Candlemas party in Tlacotalpan I was besieged — it was there your parents met, remember? — and I took it upon myself, out of pure pride, to make the men who courted me understand that I was inaccessible.

“I’m sorry, Ricardo. Next Saturday, I’m returning to Germany to study the piano.”

“You’re very sweet, Heriberto, but I already have a boyfriend in Germany. We write to each other every day. Any day now, he’ll come to me or I’ll return to him.”

“It isn’t that I don’t like you, Alberto, but you’re just not in my class. You may kiss me if you like, but it will be a farewell kiss.”

And when she turned up at the next Candlemas party without a boyfriend, Ricardo made fun of her, Heriberto appeared with a local girl, and Alberto was already married. Aunt Hilda’s aquamarine eyes filled with tears that flowed from behind her thick glasses, clouded over like the foggy highway to Perote. She finished with the all too familiar adage: Laura, don’t forget the old. Being young means not being faithful and forgetting others.

Aunt Virginia forced herself to stroll around the patio — she could no longer leave the house because of the understandable fear aging people have of falling down, breaking a leg, and not getting up until the Last Judgment. She spent hours putting on powder, and only when she felt herself to be perfectly arranged would she emerge to make the rounds of the patio, reciting in an inaudible voice her own poems or others’—it was impossible to tell which.

“Shall I come with you on your walks, Aunt Virginia?”

“No, don’t come with me.”

“Why?”

“You’re only doing it out of charity. I forbid you.”

“But no. Out of tenderness.”

“Come, come, don’t get me used to your compassion. I live in fear I’ll be the last one left in this house and I’ll die here alone. If I call you when you’re in Mexico City, will you come to see me so I won’t die alone?”

“Of course, I promise.”

“Liar. That day you’ll have a commitment you can’t get out of, you’ll be far away, dancing the fox-trot, and it won’t matter a whit whether I’m dead or alive.”

“Aunt Virginia, I swear I’ll come.”

“Don’t swear in vain, it’s sacrilegious. Why did you have children if you don’t take care of them? Didn’t you promise to look after them?”

“Life is difficult, Aunt Virginia. Sometimes—”

“Nonsense. The difficult thing is loving people. Your own people, understand? Not abandoning them, not forcing anyone to beg a bit of charity before dying, sacre bleu!”

She stopped and fixed her black-diamond eyes on Laura, eyes the more notable because of the quantity of face powder around them.

“You never got Minister Vasconcelos to publish my poems. That’s how you fulfill your promises, ingrate. I’ll die without anyone’s having recited my poems but me.”

She turned her back, with a timorous movement, on her niece.

Laura recounted the conversation with Aunt Virginia to María de la O, who could only say, “Pity, daughter, a little pity for the old left with no love or respect from others.”

“You’re the only one who knows the truth, Auntie. Tell me what I should do.”

“Let me think it over. I don’t want to make a mistake.”

She looked down at her swollen ankles, and burst out laughing.

At night, Laura felt pain and fear, had trouble falling asleep, and, like Aunt Virginia, perambulated alone around the patio, barefoot so she wouldn’t make noise or interrupt the sobs and memory-infused cries that escaped, unknowingly, from the bedrooms where the four sisters slept.

Which would be the first to go? Which the last? Laura swore to herself that no matter where she was, she would take care of the last sister, have the survivor live with her or come to be with her here, and not let Aunt Virginia’s fear be realized: “I’m afraid of being the last and dying alone.”

A nocturnal patio where the nightmares of the four women gathered together.

It was hard for Laura to include her mother, Leticia, in this chorus of fear. She reproached herself when she admitted that she hoped that if one of the four were left alone it would be either Mutti or Auntie. Aunts Hilda and Virginia had become insane and impossible; both, the niece was convinced, were virgins. María de la O was not.

“My mother made me sleep with her customers beginning when I was eleven.”

Laura had felt neither horror nor compassion when Auntie confessed this; it was years earlier, in the house on Avenida Sonora. She knew that the generous, warm-hearted mulatta was telling her so Laura would understand how much Grandfather Felipe Kelsen’s bastard daughter owed to the simple humanity of Grandmother Cosima Reiter — identical to her own despite differences of age, class, and race — and to the generosity of Laura’s father, Fernando Díaz. The niece went to embrace and kiss her aunt, but María de la O stopped her with an outstretched arm: she didn’t want compassion, and Laura only kissed the open palm of the admonitory hand.

Leticia was the last. Laura, back at home, desired with all her heart that Mutti would be the last to die, because she never complained, never gave up, kept the boardinghouse clean and in working order, and without her, Laura could imagine the other three castaways wandering through the corridors like souls in torment while dirty dishes piled up in the kitchen with its braziers, herbs grew unweeded in the garden, the larder emptied out and died of hunger, cats took over the house, and flies covered the sleeping faces of Virginia, Hilda, and María de la O with buzzing masks.