Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

They had no answers, just questions. What did you do, Juan Fancisco? Were you a hero who tired of being one? Was your heroism a lie? Why have you never told me of your past? Did you want to start over from zero with me? Did you think I’d be offended that you praised yourself? Did you expect, as actually did happen, that someone else would do it for you? That others would fill my ears with your legend without your having to emphasize it or correct it or deny it? Was it enough for you that I heard what others said about you, that was my proof, to believe what others said, and believe in you with something more than knowledge, with pure, blind love? Because that’s how you treated me at first, like a faithful and silent little wife, knitting in the living room next door while you planned the future of Mexico with the other leaders in the dining room, remember? Tell me, which of your myths am I going to transmit to our sons, the complete truth, the half-truth, the part of your life I imagine to be good, the part I imagine to be bad, which part of their father will touch Danton, which Santiago?

“What part of your life serves the lives of your sons best?”

“Do you know something, Laura? In catechism they tell you there’s original sin and that’s why we’re the way we are.”

“I only believe in the original mystery. Which will yours be?”

“Don’t make me laugh, stupid. If it’s a mystery, there’s no way to know it.”

Only time, dissipated like smoke, would reveal the truth of Juan Francisco López Greene, the labor leader from Tabasco. Now she was wrapped in the love of a wholly different man, fervently desired. Jorge Maura is my real husband, Jorge Maura should have been my sons’ real father, she imagined as she walked from the Parque de la Lama that March morning, fully intending, as soon as she reached her house, to tell her husband, I have a lover, a marvelous man, I’d give everything for him, I’d leave everything for him, I’d leave you, my sons.

She would tell him before the boys came home from school. But they had the day off: everyone was going to the Zócalo to celebrate the nationalization of the oil industry by President Cárdenas, a valiant revolutionary who had faced up to the foreign companies, ordering them to leave, recovering the wealth of the nation

the subsoil

the veins of the devil

the English companies that stole the communal lands of Tamaulipas

the Dutch companies that used paid assassins as white guards against the unions

the gringo leaders who received Mexican workers sitting down with their backs to them

gringos, Dutch, English, they all left with their white engineers and their blueprints and the wells filled with salt water

the first Mexican engineer to arrive at Poza Rica had no idea what to say to the worker who came over to ask, “Boss, should I empty the pail of water down the tube now?”

and for that reason the four of them, Juan Francisco and Laura, Danton and Santiago, were squeezed together that afternoon in the crowd in the Zócalo, between the Cathedral and the city hall, their eyes fixed on the main balcony of the Palace and on the revolutionary President, Lázaro Cárdenas, who had taught a lesson to the foreign exploiters, the eternal bloodsuckers of Mexican labor and wealth, The oil is ours! The sea of people in the square cheered Cárdenas and Mexico, the rich ladies donated their jewels and the poor women their hens to help pay the expropriation debt, London and The Hague severed diplomatic relations with Mexico, the oil belongs to the Mexicans, fine, let them drink it, let’s see who’ll buy it, a boycotted Cárdenas had to sell oil to Hitler and Mussolini while he was sending rifles to the Spanish Republic, and in the crowd Jorge Maura watched Laura Díaz and her family from a distance. Laura recognized him. Jorge took off his hat and said hello to all of them. Juan Francisco stared at the man with curiosity, and Laura silently communicated to him, I couldn’t, my love, I couldn’t, forgive me, see me again, I’ll call you, you have Mexicana and I have Ericsson …

“ IHAVE TO TELL you about Raquel Alemán.”

He also told her about his comrades in the Republican cause who were in Mexico on missions different from his. They would meet in a very centrally located place, the Café de Paris on Avenida Cinco de Mayo. It was also the haunt of Mexican intellectuals then, led by a man of great wit and unlimited sarcasm, the poet Octavio Barreda, who was married to a sister of Lupe Marín, Diego, Rivera’s wife before Frida Kahlo. Carmen Barreda would sit in the Café de Paris and listen to her husband’s ironies and jokes without changing expression. She never laughed, and he seemed to thank her for it; it was the best commentary on his dry, deadpan humor; it was fitting that he translated Eliot’s The Waste Land into Spanish.

Everyone expected a great work from him, but it never came. He was a biting critic, a promoter of literary magazines, and a man of great physical distinction — tall, thin, with the features of a hero of the independence movement, light brown skin, and very green, flashing eyes. He was at a table with Xavier Villaurrutia and José Gorostiza, two marvelous poets. The prolific Villaurrutia gave the impression that his poetry, because so spare, was sparse. In point of fact, he was composing a thick volume in which Mexico City took on a nocturnal and amorous sensibility that before him no one had achieved:

Dreaming, dreaming the night, the street, the staircase and the shout of the statue as it turns the corner. Running toward the statue and finding only the shout, wanting to touch the shout and finding only the echo, wanting to grasp the echo and finding only the wall, and running toward the wall only to touch a mirror.

Villaurrutia was small, fragile, always about to be hurt by mysterious and unnamable forces. He spent his life in his poetry. By contrast, Gorostiza — solid, sarcastic, and silent — was the author of one great, long poem, Death Without End , which many thought the best Mexican poem since those written by the nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in the seventeenth century. Its subject was death and form, the form — a glass — postponing death, the water imposing itself, tremulously, as the very condition of life, its flow. Between form and flow stands man, contained in the profile of his vital morality “filled with myself, besieged in my own skin by an ungraspable god who suffocates me.”

There were serious sympathies and antipathies among these Mexican writers, and the source of the discord seemed to be Jaime Torres Bodet, a poet-novelist who could not decide between literature and bureaucracy, who ultimately chose the latter, but who never renounced his literary ambition. Barreda sometimes posed as a Chinese laundry man and spy, Dr. Fu Chan Li, and would say to Gorostiza, affecting a Chinese pronunciation: “You watchee out fol Toles.”

“What’s toles?”

“Toles Bodet.”

Which is to say that Jorge Maura and his friends made themselves at home in this Mexican replica of a Madrid tertulia —a word, Villaurrutia recalled, derived from Tertullian, the Church father who in the second century A.D. liked to gather with his friends in Socratic discussion groups — although it was hard to imagine a discussion with someone as dogmatic as Tertullian, for whom the Church, possessor of the truth, had no need to argue about anything. Barreda improvised, or recalled in Tertullian’s honor, a funny verse:

Dressed as if to go to a tertulia,

Judith departed for Betulia …

Our discussions try to be Socratic, but sometimes they become Tertullianesque, Jorge Maura warned Laura D az before going to the café. The other Socratic or Tertullian discussants were Basilio Baltazar, a young man in his thirties, dark-skinned, with thick hair, dark brows, shining eyes, and a smile like sunshine; and Domingo Vidal, whose face and years on earth seemed to have been hacked out with a hatchet. He seemed to have emerged from a stone calendar. He shaved his head and let his features expand in an aggressive, mobile way, as if to compensate for the sleepy sweetness in his thick-lidded eyes.