Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

Coming and going, tricked out like an Englishman taking a stroll, was Luis Cernuda with his houndstooth jackets and Duke of Windsor ties, his slicked-down hair and French movie-star mustache, scattering the most beautiful erotic poems in the Spanish language along the streets of Mexico City. Now it was Santiago who read to his mother, running feverishly from one poem to the next, never finishing one, finding the perfect line, the unforgettable words:

What a sad noise two bodies make when they love.

I could knock down their body, leaving only the truth of your love …

I know no freedom but the freedom of being imprisoned in someone …

I kissed his tracks …

Luis Bun uel was in Mexico City, too, expelled from New York because of the gossip and calumny there of his former friend Salvador Dal , now anagrammed into Avida Dollars. Laura D az learned about him from Jorge Maura, who had shown her Bun uel’s film about the Las Hurdes region in Spain, a film of unbearable pain and abandonment that the Republic itself censored.

And on Amazonas Street lived Don Manuel Pedroso, former rector of the University of Seville, surrounded by first editions of Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Rousseau, with his students at his feet. Danton, brought to one of Pedroso’s tertulias by a fellow student in the law school, remarked to his friend as they walked along Paseo de la Reforma to dine at the Bellinghausen restaurant on Londres Street, “He’s a charming old man. But his ideas are utopian. That stuff’s not for me.”

At the next table, Max Aub was eating with other exiled writers. He looked focused: short, curly hair, immense forehead, eyes lost in the depth of a glass swimming pool, and expressions impossible to separate, like the faces on a coin, where heads was his frown and tails his smile. Aub had shared adventures with André Malraux during the war and predicted for Franco a “true death” that would be totally unrelated to any calendar date, because for the dictator it would be, more than a surprise, an ignorance of his own death.

“My mother knows him,” said Danton to his classmate. “She’s in with the intellectuals because she works with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.”

“And because she was the girlfriend of a Spanish Communist spy,” said the friend, though that was the last thing he said, because Danton broke his nose with a punch. Chairs were turned over, tablecloths were stained, and Laura Díaz’s son angrily shook off the waiters and departed the restaurant.

The torero Manolete, now living in Mexico, was bringing crowds to the bullfights. A Francoist, he was actually El Greco’s last creation: thin, sad, stylized, Manuel Rodríguez “Manolete” was skillful in a priestly way. He fought standing tall, immutable, vertical as a candle. His rival was Pepe Luis Vázquez, Juan Francisco explained to Danton when father and son went to the new Plaza Monumental Mexico along with sixty thousand fans to see Manolete, Pepe Luis being the orthodox Sevillan and Manolete the unorthodox Córdoban, who broke the classic rules by not extending the muleta —the short staff on which the red cape is hung — to calm and control the bull, who didn’t take risks to make the bull enter the space of the fight, who stood still, calmed and ordered, never moving from his place, exposed to the bull, who was bringing the fight to him. And when the bull charged this unmoving bullfighter, the entire stadium gasped in anguish, held its breath, and exploded into an olé of victory when the marvelous Manolete broke the tension with an extremely slow-moving attack and sank his sword into the bull’s body. Did you see that? Juan Francisco asked his son as they walked, in the crush of the crowd, out of the Plaza through the honeycomb of crisscrossing long passageways. Did you see that? He fought the whole time face to face, never bending, dominating the bull from below, our hearts all skipped a beat watching him fight! But Danton remembered only one lesson: The bull and the bullfighter saw each other’s face. They were two faces of death. Only apparently did the bull die and the bullfighter survive. The truth is, the man was mortal and the animal immortal, the hull went on and on and on, charged and charged and charged, again and again, blinded by the sun, and the sand stained by the blood of a single immortal bull who saw generation after generation of mortal bullfighters pass on. When would Manolete die, in what ring would he find the death that he only apparently dealt each bull, what would be the name of the bull that would kill Manolete, where was it waiting for him?

“Manolete casts a spell on the bull,” said a melancholic Juan Francisco, dining alone with Danton in El Parador after the bullfight.

The son wanted to keep to himself the lesson of that afternoon when he saw Manolete fight: triumph and glory are passing things; we have to kill one bull after another so as to put off our own final defeat, the day when our bull kills us, we have to win ear and tail and exit in triumph every day of our lives.

“They say people are selling their cars and their mattresses to buy tickets to the Plaza to see Manolete. Could that be true?” he asked.

“For the first time, there are three programs a week in the Plaza,” said his father. “There must be a reason.”

The dashing bullfighter strolled around the centers of Mexico City’s cosmopolitan nightlife — the Casanova, the Minuit, the Sans Souci — accompanied by Fernanda Montel, a Valkyrian woman who balanced the depth of her décolletés with the height of her hairdos, genuine towers dyed blue, green, rose. In Coyoacán, the dethroned King Carol of Romania, with his drooping mustache, oyster eyes, and receding chin, walked his poodles with his lover, Magda Lupescu, more attentive to her silver fox furs than to her exiled king. From a table at Ciro’s, in the Hotel Reforma, Carmen Cortina made battle plans with her old allies — the actress Andrea Negrete, Butt del Rosal, and the English painter Felicity Smith — to recruit all the international fauna the tides of war had beached in Mexico. God bless you, Adolf Hitler! sighed the hostess to her group, seated not far from Ciro’s owner, a dwarf with a tiepin named A. C. Blumenthal, front man for Bugsy Siegel, the Hollywood gangster, whose discarded lover, Virginia Hill, owner of a tremulous chin and faded hair and that sudden sadness which attacks some women from the city of Los Angeles, was drinking martini after martini, and martinis were what the novelist John Steinbeck, his Gordon’s Gin eyes filled with lost battles and now in Mexico for the filming of his novella The Pearl, served in a bottle to his tame crocodile, thus outdoing the boastful audacity of the film’s director, Emilio (the Indian) Fernández, fond of using a pistol to threaten anyone who disagreed with his plot ideas, who was in love with the actress Olivia de Havilland, in whose honor he had a street renamed “Sweet Olivia”—where he built a castle with his earnings from successes like Flor Silvestre, María Candelaria, Enamorada.

Laura D az had to go to Ciro’s because Diego Rivera was painting a series of female nudes there, all inspired by Rivera’s own starry love, the actress Paulette Goddard, an intelligent, ambitious woman who spoke to Laura only in order to ignore Diego and annoy him, while Laura, in turn, scrutinized Ciro’s clientele with an irony as sweet as the street where “El Indio” Fernández lived: people she hadn’t seen in fifteen years, Carmen Cortina’s group, and the satellites coming and going from her table: the painter from Guadalajara, Tizoc Ambriz, who stubbornly dressed as a young railroad worker though he was fifty. Indelible marks of time were printed on their faces, but they were invulnerable in their pretensions, stuck in their reality like a pantheon of wax figures: two tone Andrea, now quite plump; the once fat and jowly Spaniard Onomástico Galán, now deflated and wrinkled, like a used condom; the British painter James Saxon looking more and more like the entire House of Windsor; and her old companion from Xalapa, Elizabeth García-Dupont, ex-wife of Caraza, now thin as a mummy, one hand trembling and the other clutching a young man: dark, mustached, and imperturbably pimpish.