Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“Why the hell did Papa and Mama get married?”

She had no other company but the mirrors. She looked at herself and saw more than two ages. She saw two personalities. She saw the rational Laura and the impulsive Laura, a vital Laura and a spineless Laura. She saw her conscience and her desire, locked in battle on a glass surface, smooth as those frozen lakes where battles were fought in Russian movies. She would have gone off with Jorge Maura if he’d asked, gone away with him, abandoned everything …

One afternoon, she was sitting on the little balcony that looked out over Avenida Sonora. She took four more chairs out there and put a fifth in the middle for herself. After a while, Auntie María de la O came in, dragging her feet, and sat next to her, sighing. Then López Greene came home from the union, found them there, and sat down next to Laura. Later on, the boys came home from school, saw the unusual scene, and took the two remaining chairs, one at each end.

It isn’t their mother who’s convoking them, Laura herself said, the place and the time of day convoke us. Mexico City, an afternoon in 1941, when the shadows lengthen and the very white volcanoes seem to float over a burning bed of clouds, and the barrel organ plays that old song “Los Golondrinas,” and posters for the recent election campaign — AVILA CAMACHO/ALMAZÁN — have begun to peel, and that first afternoon of the silent reencounter of the family contains all the afternoons to come, afternoons of dust storms and afternoons of rains that settle the unquiet dust and perfume the Valley where the city, indecisive between its past and future, is located; the barrel organ plays “Amor Chiquito,” the maids hanging out the wash on the terraces sing “I’m walking along the tropical path,” and teenagers in the street dance tambora and more tambora but what will be will be, cabs go by, ice trucks pass, and vendors with their jicamas sprinkled with lemon and chile powder, the candy vendor sets up, Adams Chicklets, Mimi bars, Mexican treats— jamoncillo and sweet potato — the kiosk closes down with its alarming headlines about the war the Allies are losing and its comics about Blondie and Dagwood and its exotic Argentine ladies’ magazines, Leoplán and El Hogar, and for children, Billiken, neighborhood movie theaters announce Mexican films with Sara García, the Soler brothers, Sof a Alvarez, Gloria Marín, and Arturo de Córdoba, the boys, on the sly, would buy cigarettes — Alas, Faros, and Delicados — at the tobacco stand on the corner, all the kids would play hopscotch, trying to land peach pits in improvised holes, exchange bottle caps from Orange Crush, grape Chaparritas; green buses from the Roma — Piedad line race the brown-and-cream buses from the Roma-Mérida line: the Bosque de Chapultepec with an atmosphere of moss and eucalyptus rises up behind the Bauhaus-style houses, continues to ascend to the symbolic miracle of the Alcázar, where Danton and Santiago go every afternoon before coming home, as if they were really conquering an abrupt, mysterious castle reached by scaling steep paths and asphalt roads, and linked routes that hold the surprise of the grand esplanade above the city, its pigeon flights, and its mysterious rooms filled with nineteenth-century furniture.

The boys are sitting next to Laura, Juan Francisco, and the old aunt, thankful that the city offers them this repertory of movement, color, aromas, song, and the crown of Mexico, a castle that reminds all of them that there is more than we imagine in the world, there is more …

Jorge Maura disappeared, and something she would agree to call “reality,” but very much in quotation marks, reappeared behind the romantic fog. Her husband was the first reality. He’s the one who reappears first, telling the boys (Santiago is twenty, Danton nineteen), “I love her.”

He accepts me, she said, cruelly and ungenerously, he accepts me even though I never told him the truth, he accepts me because he knows that his own cruelty and crudeness sanctioned my freedom, the idea that “I should have married a baker who doesn’t care about the rolls he makes.” Then she realized that his declaring he loved her in the presence of his sons was proof of his failure and at the same time also proof of his possible nobility. Laura Díaz embraced the idea of a regeneration for all of them, parents and sons, by means of a love she had lived with such intensity that now she had enough left over to give away to her own.

She would wake up next to her husband — they’d begun sleeping together again — and hear her husband’s first words, every morning. “Something’s not right.”

Those words saved him and reconciled her. To make her happy, Juan Francisco, thanks to a rediscovered nobility that was perhaps innate in him, was the one who spoke to Danton and Santiago about their mother, recalling when they met, what she was like, how nervous, how independent, telling them they should try to understand her. Laura was offended when she heard him; she should have thanked her husband for interceding, but his intercession offended her, however briefly, and then in the afternoon ceremony — when they sat down in the dusk of the Valley of Mexico, opposite Chapultepec Castle and the volcanoes, which was now the way they all found to say, We’re together despite everything — she said out loud one afternoon: “I fell in love with a man. That’s why I didn’t come home. I was with that man. I would have given my life for him. I would have abandoned all of you for him. But he left me. That’s why I’m back here with you. I could have stayed by myself, but I was afraid. I came back looking for protection. I felt abandoned. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m asking that at your age, boys, you begin to understand that life isn’t easy, that we all make mistakes and wound those we love because we love ourselves more than we love anything else, including the person who fills us with passion at a given moment. Each of you, when the time comes, will want to follow your own path and not the one your father or I would have wanted. Think about me when you do that. Forgive me.”

There were no words, no emotions. Only María de la O allowed old memories to pass through her eyes, now clouded by cataracts, memories of a girl in a Veracruz brothel and a gentleman who rescued her from abandonment and integrated her into this family, overcoming the prejudices of race, of class, and of an immoral morality that in the name of convention takes life instead of giving it.

Laura and Juan Francisco invited each other to surrender, and the boys stopped running, fighting, skipping to avoid their mother’s face. Santiago slept and lived with the door to his bedroom open, something entirely new to his mother, who interpreted it as an act of freedom and transparency, although it was also, perhaps, a culpable rebellion: I have nothing to hide. Danton would laugh at him: What’s your next stunt going to be? Going to jerk off in the middle of the street? No, answered his older brother, I’m trying to say that we’re enough on our own. Who, you and I? I’d like that, Danton. Well, I’m enough on my own, but with the door closed just in case; come and see the pictures I’ve cut out of Vea whenever you like, incredible babes, unbelievably sexy …

Just as Laura would look at herself in the mirror when she came home, almost always thinking that her face didn’t change no matter how many vicissitudes rocked it, she discovered that Santiago looked at himself as well, especially in windows, and seemed surprised at himself and by himself, as if he were constantly discovering another person there with him. Perhaps only his mother thought those things. Santiago was no longer a boy. He was something new. Laura, in front of the mirror, confirmed that sometimes she was the unknown woman — a changeling. Would her son see her that way? She was going to be forty-three.