Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

I’ll pay, Mama, let me shoot this time.

Danton’s angry stare harassed them, the dragging footsteps of Juan Francisco’s old slippers harassed them. Laura didn’t care in the least, because life with Santiago was perfection itself for Laura D az this year of 1941, when she recovered her home and prolonged, sometimes with feelings of guilt, her love for Maura in her love for Santiago, knowing too that this Santiago the Second was the continuation of her love for Santiago the First, as if there were no power in heaven or on earth that could force her into a pause, a blameworthy or redemptive solitude, either. The hiatus separating brother, lover, and son was imperceptible. It lasted during a pair of afternoons on a balcony facing the vibrant park and the extinguished volcanoes.

“I’m going to Havana to rescue Raquel Mendes-Alemán. The Prinz Eugen was not allowed in U.S. waters, and the Cubans do what the Americans tell them to do. The ship is going to sail back to Germany. This time, no one will get out alive. Once again, Hitler set a trap for the democracies. He told them, Well now, look here, I’m sending you a boatload of Jews, give them asylum. Now he’ll say, Just look, you don’t want them either. Well, I want them even less, so they’ll all go to their deaths and so much for that little problem. Laura, if I get there on time, I can save Raquel.”

Will we ever make peace, Juan Francisco?

What more do you want from me? I let you come back to my house. I asked our sons to respect you.

Don’t you realize that someone else is living in this house with us?

No. Whose ghost is that?

Two ghosts. You and I. Before.

I have no idea what to do. Calm down, will you? How’s your work going?

Well. The Riveras have no idea how to manage paperwork and need someone to answer letters, save documents, review contracts.

Good. Congratulations. It doesn’t take up too much time?

Three times a week. I want to put a lot of work in here in the house.

Her husband’s “good” meant “it’s about time,” but Laura paid no attention. Sometimes she thought that marrying him was like turning the other cheek to destiny. It turned what was and perhaps always should have been an enigma, a distance, into a daily reality: the mystery of Juan Francisco López Greene’s true life. She wouldn’t ask him aloud what she’d asked herself so many times. What did her husband do? Where did he fail? Was he a hero who had tired of being one?

Someday you’ll understand, he’d say.

Someday I’ll understand, she repeated until she convinced herself the expression was her own.

Laura. I’m tired, I get a good salary from the Workers Confederation and the Union Congress. We lack for nothing here at home. If you want to take care of Diego and Frida, that’s up to you. Do you also want me to be the hero of 1908, of 1917, of the House of the Workers of the World and the Red Battalions? I can make you a list of the heroes of the Revolution. It has treated all of us justly, except the dead.

I want to know. Were you really a hero?

Juan Francisco began to laugh, he laughed his head off, coughed up phlegm and roared.

No, there were no heroes, and if there were, they were killed off right away and they were honored with statues. Really ugly ones, too, so no one would go on believing in them. In this country, even the statues are phony. They’re all made of copper — you just have to scrape off the gilt. What do you expect from me? Why don’t you simply respect what I was and leave it at that, dammit?

I’m making an effort to understand you, Juan Francisco. Since you won’t tell me where you came from, at least tell me what you are today.

A guard. A guardian of order. An administrator of stability. We won the Revolution. It’s cost us a lot to achieve peace and to have a process of peaceful succession in power without military coups. We’re redistributing land, we have education, roads … Don’t you think that’s something? Would you want me to oppose all that? To end up like all those dissatisfied generals — Serrano and Arnulfo Gómez, Escobar and Saturnino Cedillo — or the philosopher Vasconcelos? They didn’t even get to be heroes. They just burned out. What do you want from me, Laura?

I’m just looking for a little hole in your armor, where I can love you, Juan Francisco. I’m that stupid.

A little hole? Why, I’m a sieve, my dear!

She tried to explain to Santiago, as the boy painted, that she was delighted by his artistic spirit. She told him while his father’s words were still ringing in her ears.

“Diego uses the word élan. He lived in France for a long time.”

Santiago was painting, unabashed, a man and a woman, naked but separated, standing, staring at each other, exploring each other with their eyes. Their arms were crossed. Laura told Santiago it was very difficult for a couple to love each other forever because the spirits of two people are almost never equal. There is a moment of total identification that impassions us, a balance between the two which, unfortunately, is only a revelation that one of the two will break the balance.

“I want you to understand that about your father and me.”

“Well, Mama, all you did was to anticipate him. You made him understand you were not going to he the sad one. You left that role to him.”

Santiago cleaned his brushes and looked at his mother.

“And the day he dies, who’ll be anticipating whom?”

How could I abandon a man so weak, Laura said to herself, then responded with strength and modesty: no, what we’ve got to do is to change the rules of the game, rules made by men for men and for women because only they legislate for both sexes, because the rules men make are valid both for the faithful and domestic life of women and for the unfaithful and errant life of men. The woman is always guilty of submission in one case, and in the other of rebelliousness; guilty of a fidelity that lets life pass by while she’s stretched out in a cold grave with a man who doesn’t desire her, or guilty of the infidelity of seeking pleasure with another in the same way her husband does, a sin for her, a prize for him, he’s called Don Juan and she Doña Puta, my God, Juan Francisco, why didn’t you cheat on me in style, with some great love, instead of being a camp follower for your boss Fatso Morones? Why didn’t you have a love with a woman as great, as strong, as brave as Jorge Maura, my own love?

With Danton, Juan Francisco had a relationship that paralleled Laura’s with Santiago: the family formed two parties. The old man — he’d turned sixty but looked seventy — forgave every one of his younger son’s tricks, gave him money, and sat him down so they both could see each other’s face. He did that because neither ever opened his mouth, at least not in the presence of their two rivals in the house, Laura and Santiago. Despite the silence, Laura suspected that Juan Francisco and Danton said things to each other. The old auntie, mute by act of will, confirmed this suspicion one afternoon at the healing ceremony, at the balcony, the repeated, unifying family ritual. María de la O insisted on sitting between the father and the younger brother, separating them, but she didn’t take her eyes off Laura. Then, when the elderly mulatta, dressed as always in black, had Laura’s attention, she rapidly moved her own eyes, like a dark eagle whose vision was split down the middle and who could see simultaneously in two directions. Several times she glanced from Juan Francisco to Danton and from the son to the father, which said to Laura something like “they understand each other,” which Laura already knew, or “they’re the same,” which was hard to imagine: the agile, party-loving, carefree Danton seemed the complete opposite of the parsimonious, withdrawn, and anguished Juan Francisco. Where was the relationship? Yet María de la O’s intuitions were rarely mistaken.