Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

They asked Laura to go back to Mexico with the summer suitcases, the cardboard boxes full of papers, to put the Coyoacán house in order, to live there if she liked, they didn’t have to say anything else to her because Laura saw they needed each other more than ever after the miscarriage, that Frida wasn’t going to work for a while, and that in New York she wouldn’t need Laura, she wouldn’t be useful, because Frida had many friends there, loved going shopping with them and to the movies, there was going to be a festival of Tarzan films she didn’t want to miss, she adored movies with gorillas, she’d seen King Kong nine times, they restored her sense of humor, made her laugh her head off.

“You know it’s hard for Diego to fall asleep in winter. Now I have to spend all my nights with him so he’ll get some rest and have energy for the new mural. Laura, don’t forget to put a doll in my Coyoacán bed.”

ONE FINE DAY, Aunts Hilda and Virginia disappeared.

Leticia got up at six in the morning, as she usually did, and prepared breakfast — mangos and quinces, mameys and peaches, huevos rancheros, bran bread, café con leche— which at seven o’clock she would arrange on the table at the places marked by the napkins rolled into silver rings.

She glanced sadly — later she realized her melancholy was a premonition — at the places set for her three sisters and the silver initials, H, V, MO. When they failed to appear by seven-fifteen, she went to María de la O’s room and awakened her.

“I’m sorry. I had very annoying dreams.”

“What did you dream about?”

“About a wave … I don’t know,” said the almost embarrassed Auntie. “Damn dreams, why do they leave us so quickly?”

Leticia went right to Hilda’s door, where her knock was not answered. She opened it slightly and saw that the bed hadn’t been slept in. She opened the armoire doors and noticed that one hanger was bare, the one that normally held the long white nightgown with the lacy bodice which Leticia had washed and ironed thousands of times. But the perfectly ordered ranks of slippers and high-top shoes were complete, like an army at ease.

She rushed in anguish to Virginia’s room, certain she wouldn’t find a messy bed there, either. What she did find was a note in an envelope addressed to her, leaning against the mirror:

Dear Little Sister: Hilda couldn’t be what she wished, and neither could I. Yesterday, we looked in the mirror and thought the same thing. Why wait with “Christian” patience for the fatal moment, why not have the valor to walk toward death instead of giving it the satisfaction of knocking at our door one evening? Sitting here in Xalapa, taken care of by your goodness and your efforts, we were fading like two burned-down candles. Both of us wanted to do something that would be the equivalent of what we could not accomplish in life. Our sister stared at her arthritic fingers and hummed a Chopin Nocturne. I looked at the shadows under my eyes, in each wrinkle I counted a poem that was never published. We looked at each other and realized what we were both thinking — so many years living together, just imagine, we haven’t separated since we were born, so we can guess each other’s thoughts! Last night, you may remember, the four of us sat down to play cards in the living room. It was my turn to shuffle (Hilda can’t because of the condition of her fingers), and I began to feel ill, the way someone should feel who enters their final moments without knowing it, but no matter how ill I felt, I couldn’t stop shuffling, I went on aimlessly, until you and María de la O began to stare in astonishment, and then I shuffled frantically, as if my life depended on mixing the cards, and you, Leticia, said the fatal phrase, repeated that sweet, old, terrible saying: A little old lady once died shuffling cards.

Then I looked at Hilda and she at me, and we understood each other. You and our other sister were elsewhere, out of our world.

Looking at the cards. You led with the king of clubs.

Hilda and I looked at each other from the depths of our souls … don’t try to find us. Last night, the two of us put on our white nightgowns, left our feet bare, woke up Zampaya and told him to drive us, in the Isotta, to the sea, to the lake where we were born. He put up no resistance. He looked at us as if we were insane for going out in our nightgowns. But he would always do what any one of us would tell him. So when you wake up and read this letter, you will not find either Hilda or me or Zampaya or the car. Zampaya will let us out where we tell him to do so, and the two of us will lose ourselves, barefoot in the forest, with no plan, no money, no bread basket, barefoot and wearing our nightgowns only out of modesty. If you love us, you will not look for us. Respect our wishes. We want to make death into art. The last. The only. Don’t deprive us of that pleasure. With love from your sisters

VIRGINIA AND HILDA

“Your aunts were never seen again,” said Leticia to Laura. “The car was found on a curve in the Acayucan road. Zampaya was found stabbed to death in, forgive me, daughter, the same bordello where María de la O grew up. Don’t look at me like that. These are absolute mysteries, and I’m not going to be the one to clear them up. Enough headaches with what I already know, no need to add to them with what I don’t know.”

Laura had come to Xalapa the moment she found out about the disappearance of her maiden aunts, although she didn’t yet know the terrible fate of the man who’d been the family’s faithful servant for so many years. It was as if the evil spirit of María de la O’s mother had returned, black as her skin, to take revenge on everyone who kept her from a life that, as her own daughter acknowledged, she exalted madly: “I was so happy when I was a whore. Fuck everyone who made me into a proper lady!”

Leticia went ahead and told Laura everything Laura had known for years. Mutti never bothered with gossip or with ferreting out information. She faced things as they turned up. She didn’t have to ask because she understood everything and, as she’d just said, what she didn’t understand she could imagine.

Back in her Veracruz home, Laura understood retrospectively, as if she were looking at a broken sun dial, that because of her aunts’ fate and her mother’s attitude Leticia knew everything about the failure of her marriage to Juan Francisco, about how her rebellion against her husband had dissolved in Elizabeth’s protective treatment and how she’d drifted from there into her empty, prolonged, and ultimately useless relationship with Orlando; yet weren’t those indispensable stages, if in themselves dispensable, in accumulating isolated instants of perception that, added together, would lead her to a new awareness, still vague, still misty, of things? The sun dial was inseparable from the shade dial.

Leticia took advantage of the flight of the old maids to look deep into Laura’s eyes and silently ask her to do the thing that Laura quickly expressed: It’s very hard for you and Auntie to take care of two boys who will soon be thirteen and fourteen. I’m going to take them back to Mexico City. You and Auntie too.

“No, Laura, we’ll stay here. We look after each other. You’ll have to remake your home on your own.”

“Yes, Mutti. Juan Francisco is waiting for all of us in the house on Avenida Sonora. But I already told you, if you and your sister want to come with us, we’ll get a larger house, so don’t give it a second thought.”

“Get used to living without us.” Leticia smiled. “I don’t want to leave the state of Veracruz ever again. Mexico City horrifies me.”