Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

Laura sighed. The object of nostalgia was always the past; there was never nostalgia for the future. Even so, Santiago’s gaze lit up and went out like one of those new neon signs on Avenida Juárez: I miss what is going to come …

They would attend the Gordon School, on Avenida Mazatlán, not far from the house. Juan Francisco would drive them in the Buick in the morning, and they would return at 5 p.m. in the orange school bus. The list of school supplies had been acquired, Eberhard pencils from Switzerland, pens with no name or national origin, meant to be dipped in desk inkwells, graph-paper notebooks for arithmetic, lined paper for essays; a national history textbook by the anticlerical Teja Zabre as if to compensate for the mathematics book by the Marist monk Anfossi; English readings, Spanish grammar, and the green books of general history by the French authors Malet and Isaac. Knapsacks. The sandwiches of beans, sardines, and chiles; the usual orange; the injunction never to buy sweets because they give you cavities …

Laura wanted to fill her day with her new chores. But night lay in wait for her, then dawn knocked at her door, and even in the middle of the night she could not say, The darkness belongs to us.

She reproached herself. “I can’t condemn the best of myself to the grave of memory.” But the silent solicitude of her husband—“How little I ask of you. Let me feel I’m needed”—could not calm Laura’s recurring irritation during her time alone, when the boys were at school and Juan Francisco at the union, “How easy life would be without a husband and children.” She went to Coyoacán when the Riveras came back, preceded by the black clouds of a new scandal in New York, where Diego had painted the faces of Marx and Lenin in the Rockefeller Center murals, Nelson Rockefeller asked Diego to erase the effigy of the Soviet leader, Diego refused but offered to balance Lenin’s head with Lincoln’s head, and it ended when twelve armed guards ordered the painter to stop work and handed him a check for $14,000 (“COMMUNIST PAINTER GETS RICH ON CAPITALIST DOLLARS”). The unions tried to save the mural, but the Rockefellers ordered it chiseled out of existence and thrown into the garbage. Good, said the U.S. Communist Party: Rivera’s fresco is “counterrevolutionary.” Diego and Frida returned to Mexico, he depressed, she cursing “Gringolandia.” They were all back, but there was no longer space for Laura: Diego wanted to get even with the gringos with another mural; Frida had painted a sorrowful self-portrait as an empty Tehuana dress hung amid soulless skyscrapers on the Mexican-U.S. border, Hi, Laura, how are you? come see us whenever you like, see you soon.

Life without a husband or children. Only one irritation, like a fly that insists on landing on one’s nose again and again, chased away but tenacious: Laura knew well what life was like without Juan Francisco and the boys, and hadn’t found anything greater or better in that alternative than in her renovated existence as wife and mother — but if only Juan Francisco didn’t insist on combining (so obviously) the conviction that Laura was judging him with the obligation he felt to love her. Her husband was anchoring himself at an unmoving buoy. On the one hand, the excessive adoration he decided to show Laura to compensate for his mistakes of the past irritated her, because it was a way of asking forgiveness yet resolved itself in something quite different: “I don’t hate him, he tires me, he loves me too much, a man shouldn’t love a woman too much, there’s an intelligent balance that Juan Francisco lacks, he has to learn that there’s a limit between the need a woman has to be loved and her suspicion that she isn’t loved as much as it might seem.”

Juan Francisco, with his terms of endearment, his courtesy toward her, his diligent paternal concern for the sons he hadn’t seen for six years, his new obligation to explain to Laura what he’d been doing all day without ever asking her for explanations, his insinuating heavyhanded way of asking for love, touching Laura’s foot with his own under the sheets, suddenly emerging naked from the bathroom, searching like a fool for his pajamas, unaware that he was now carrying a spare tire around his waist, unaware that he’d lost his essential dark, mestizo slenderness, even making her take the initiative, speedily bringing the act to its conclusion, mechanically fulfilling his conjugal obligations …

She resigned herself to it all, until the day when a shadow began to manifest itself, first immaterial in the traffic on the avenue, then more visible on the sidewalk across the street, finally showing itself completely a few steps behind her, as Laura made her daily journey to the Parián market. She did not want to hire a maid. The memory of the nun Gloria Soriano pained her too much. Domestic chores filled her solitary hours. The surprising thing in this discovery is that Laura, once she realized she was being followed by one of her husband’s lackeys, did not take it seriously. And that affected her more than if it had really mattered to her. Instead, for her it opened a street as narrow as the avenue where they lived was wide. She decided not to shadow him physically — as he, stupidly, was doing to her — but to use a more powerful weapon, moral shadowing.

Lázaro Cárdenas, a general from Michoacán, ex-governor of his state and head of the official party, had been elected President of Mexico. Everyone thought he would be just one more of the puppets shamelessly manipulated by the Maximum Chief of the Revolution, General Plutarco Elías Calles. The joke was so public that during a preceding presidency, some joker had hung a sign on the door of the presidential residence at Chapultepec: THE PRESIDENT LIVES HERE. THE MAN WHO GIVES THE ORDERS LIVES ACROSS THE STREET. Then President Abelardo Rodríguez, considered yet another of the Maximum Chief’s servants, repressed strike after strike, first the telegraph workers, then the day laborers from New Lombardy and New Italy in Michoacán, farm workers of Italian background who were accustomed to the struggles being waged by Antonio Gramsci’s Communist Party, and finally the national movement of agricultural workers in Chiapas, Veracruz, Puebla, and Nuevo León: President Rodriguez ordered that the strikers be fired and sent soldiers to take their place; the courts, dominated by the executive branch, declared all these strikes “unjustified.” The army and the paramilitary thugs working for the government murdered several workers from the Italo-Mexican communities, and Abelardo Rodriguez sent the national strike leaders, who were fighting for a minimum wage, to the desolate penal colony on the Islas Mar as, among them the young writer José Revueltas.

Luis Napoleón Morones’ old CROM grew weaker and weaker, incapable of defending the workers. At the same time the star of their new leader, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, rose. Lombardo — once a Thomist philosopher and now a Marxist, a thin man with an ascetic air and sad eyes, forelock dangling over them, and a pipe in his mouth — as head of the General Confederation of Mexican Workers and Peasants created an alternative for the real workers’ struggle: workers struggling for land, good wages, collectively negotiated contracts, began to group themselves with the GCMW, and since Cárdenas had supported union struggles in Michoacán, everything was now expected to change: no longer Calles and Morones but Cárdenas and Lombardo.

“And union independence, Juan Francisco, where is it?” Laura heard the only old comrade who still visited her husband say one night, the now beaten-down Pánfilo, who couldn’t even find a place to spit since Laura had had the hideous copper spittoons removed.