Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“Yes, I suppose there are ways of redeeming the world, whether we’re as solitary as our friend Basilio or as affiliated as I am,” Vidal responded, with mixed humility and arrogance.

The look on Vidal’s face did not escape Basilio or Jorge. Laura saw it but did not know how to understand it. What her intuition told her was that this was the tertulia of farewells, that there was a tension, a sadness, a resignation, a modesty, and, encompassing them all, a love in those exchanged glances which was the prelude to a fatal separation. For that reason the arguments were as definitive as a tombstone. They were farewells: visions lost forever, they were the lies in heaven that on earth are called politics. Between the two lies, we construct a painful truth, history. But what was there in Basilio Baltazar’s brilliant, sad eyes but a bed with the traces of love, what was there in Domingo Vidal’s frowning gaze but a parade of visions lost forever, what was there in Jorge’s melancholy and sensual face, her own Jorge Maura …? And what was there, farther back, in the eyes of the mayor of Santa Fe de Palencia but the public secret that he’d ordered his own daughter shot to prove he loved a country, Spain, and an ideology, Communism? And in the eyes of Clemencia standing before the mirror, was there only the repugnant vision of an ultra-pious, hypocritical old lady satisfied with suppressing the beauty and youth of her possible rival, her own daughter?

Basilio embraced Jorge and told him, “We’ve wept so much that we’ll know the future when it comes.”

“Life goes on,” said Vidal in farewell, embracing both comrades at the same time.

“And fortune ebbs and flows, brother,” said Maura.

“Let’s grab opportunity by the tail.” Vidal moved away from them, laughing. “Let’s not mock fortune, and let’s put aside intemperate pleasures. We’ll see one another in Mexico.”

But they were in Mexico. They said goodbye in the same place where they met. Were the three speaking in the name of defeat? No, thought Laura D az, they are speaking in the name of what is now beginning, exile, and exile has no country, it isn’t named Mexico, Argentina, or England. Exile is another country.

They covered her mouth with a bandage and ordered all the windows surrounding the Santa Fe plaza shut. Nevertheless, as if nothing could silence the scandal of her death, great shouts, barbarous shouts that perhaps only the woman condemned to death could hear, harassed her all the way from the Roman gate to the bullring. Unless, that is, the neighbors lied, because that dawn they all swore they heard shouts or songs that came from the depth of the dying night.

The windows were closed. The victim was gagged. Only Pilar Méndez’s eyes were shouting — her mouth was shut, as if the execution had already taken place. “Gag her,” begged Clemencia, the wife of the justice-bound mayor, “the only thing I don’t want is to hear her shout, I don’t want to know what she shouted.” “It will be a clean execution. Don’t get worked up.”

I can smell death, Pilar Méndez was saying to herself, stripped now of her fur mantle, wearing only a Carmelite robe that did not hide her nipples, feet bare, feeling with her feet and her sense of smell, I can smell death, all the graves of Spain are open, what will be left of Spain but the blood the wolves will drink? We Spaniards are hounds of death, we smell it, and we follow it until we’re killed.

Perhaps that was what she thought. Or perhaps the three friends, soldiers of the Republic, thought it when they stayed outside the city gates. They were all ears, attentive only to the report of the rifles that would announce the death of the woman for whom they were ready to give more than their own lives, their honor as Republican soldiers, and also their honor as men united forever by the defense of a woman loved by one of them.

They say that at the end she was dragged through the sand, raising the dust of the plaza until she was covered with dirt and disappeared in a granulated cloud. The truth is, at that dawn, fire and rain, mortal enemies, sealed a pact and fell together on the town of Santa Fe de Palencia, silencing the thunder of the rifles when Basilio, Domingo, and Jorge took root in the world as a final homage to the life of a sacrificed woman. They looked at one another and ran to the mountains to advise the outposts not to put out the fires, that the citadel of the Republic had not fallen.

“What proof do you have?”

A handful of ashes in their hands.

They did not see the autumn river clogged with leaves, struggling to be reborn from the dry summer.

They did not imagine that the ice of the coming winter would paralyze the wings of eagles in midair.

They were very far away when the crowd’s shouting whipped like a scourge the plaza where Pilar Méndez was shot and where her father the mayor said to the people, I acted for the Party and for the Republic, and didn’t dare glance at the shutter through which his wife, Clemencia, glared at him with satisfied hatred, secretly saying to him, Tell them, tell them the truth, you didn’t order her killed, the one who hated her was her mother, I killed her even though I loved her, even though the two of us were followers of Franco, in the same party, both Catholics, but different in age and beauty: Clemencia ran to her bedroom mirror, tried to recover in her aged face the features of her dead daughter, Pilar dead would be less than an unsatisfied old woman plagued with hot flashes and the rumors that remained buried between her legs. She superimposed the features of her young daughter over her own old ones.

“Don’t put out the fires. The city has not surrendered.”

Laura and Jorge walked along Cinco de Mayo in the direction of the Alameda. Basilio strolled off in the opposite direction, toward the Cathedral. Vidal signaled to stop the Roma — Mérida bus and caught it on the run. But each one looked back to see the others one last time, as if they were sending a final message. “Never abandon the friend who was with you in disaster. Friends save one another or die together.”

WHEN JORGE MAURA LEFT, Laura Díaz returned to her home and no longer went out at night, no longer disappeared for eternal days. She was disconcerted. She hadn’t told Juan Francisco the truth, and at first she reproached herself. I did the right thing, it all turned out badly. It was a good thing I was cautious. Was I a coward? Was I very clever? Should I have told Juan Francisco everything, betting he’d accept it, risking a break and then finding myself alone again with neither of them, neither Jorge nor Juan Francisco? Didn’t Maura say this was a matter of our intimate life, that it was sacred, that there was no reason, no moral imperative, obliging either of us to tell about our intimacy?

Back in the house on Avenida Sonora, she spent a great deal of time looking at herself in the mirror. Her face hadn’t changed despite the storms rocking it from within. Until now. But from that moment on, she was sometimes the girl she was before and other times an unknown woman — a changed woman. How would her sons, her husband, see her? Santiago and Danton did not look at her, avoided her eyes, walked quickly, sometimes running the way boys run, skipping along as if they were still children, but not joyfully. They were running away from her, so they wouldn’t have to admit either her presence or her absence.

So they don’t have to admit I wasn’t faithful. That their mother was unfaithful.

They didn’t look at her, but she listened to them. The house wasn’t large, and the silence amplified the echoes; the house turned into a seashell.