Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

“Why, you are, my generous father-in-law.”

“My daughter doesn’t require generosity. She requires comfort,” blurted out the northern mother, idiotically haughty

“What your daughter needs is a man who will respect and defend her and not make her feel inferior and isolated, which is what you two have accomplished, bad parents that you are.” Danton strode out, slamming the door so hard that he almost broke the vases adorned with the image of Pope Pius XII blessing the city, the world, and the Ayub Longoria family.

He was to come back. Poor Malenita wouldn’t leave her bedroom. She wouldn’t eat anything. She cried all day long, well, like Mary Magdalene.

“I’m not asking for a handout, Don Simon. Let me, both of you, explain, and please, sir, don’t look at me with that expression of impatience, because it makes me impatient. Control yourself. In this matter, you’re not doing me the great favor. I’m doing you the favor, and I’ll explain why, excuse me … I’m offering your daughter what she isn’t and would like to be. She’s already rich. What she doesn’t have is acceptance. She just isn’t accepted.”

“Now I’ve heard everything. You, you poor devil, are a nobody.”

“Since we’re now speaking familiarly, Don Aspirin, let me tell you something: I’m what you can no longer be. Exactly. I’m what’s coming. The future. For twenty years, you’ve had your way around here. But realize this, dearest father-in-law, you came to this country when Enrico Caruso was singing at El Toreo. Your time is over. The war’s over. Now a new world is coming. We’re not going to be able to monopolize anything anymore. Now there’s going to be surplus production in the United States. We’re not going to be indispensable allies. We’re going back to being dispensable beggars. Am I getting through to you, my Aspirin?”

“Let’s both be polite, Mr. Danton, please.”

“As I was saying. Now either we’re going to live off the internal market or we’re not going to live. Now we have to create wealth right here, as well as the people to buy what we’re going to produce.”

“We? Aren’t you abusing the plural, Danton?”

“We, we who love each other so much, yes, sir, Don Simon, sir. You and I, if you’ll bear with me, if instead of dominating the henequen market and exploiting the poor Mayas, you invest in chains of restaurants, wholesale department stores, the things people consume — cheap soft drinks in a tropical country full of thirsty people, vacuum cleaners to reduce the workload of the lady of the house, refrigerators so food doesn’t spoil instead of those inconvenient iceboxes that melt all over the place, radios to bring entertainment to the poorest of the poor … we’re going to be a middle-class country, don’t you see that? Get with the program, boss, don’t settle for small potatoes.”

“You’re very eloquent, Danton. Go on.”

“Seriously? Furniture, tinned foods, cheap clothes in good taste instead of serapes and huaraches, decent restaurants in gringo style with soda fountains and everything, no more stalls or Chinese-run cafés, cheap cars for everyone, no more buses for the poor and Cadillacs for the rich. Did you know my great-grandfather was German? Well, remember this name. Volkswagen, the people’s car. Let the German factories reopen here, and you buy up the license for VW in Mexico, give half the stock to me, and we’re all home free, Don Aspirin — no more headaches. I swear!”

All of them know each other, Danton explained to Laura, Juan Francisco, and Santiago. But that’s all they know. Themselves, themselves, themselves. I’m going to show them today’s world, those miserable mummies from the age of Don Porfirio. I’ve learned to imitate tones of voice, you know, ways of dressing, verbal crutches like saying “ciao” or “ Lord help me” and “voiturette.” I’ve dissected society the way you cut up a steak in a restaurant. Look: I found out with the Lopez-Landa kid that a guy will admire in another guy what he isn’t. That’s what I found out, and what I offered the Jockey Club set was what they aren’t, and that made me interesting to them. I’m offering the same thing to Magdalena, offering her what she isn’t but would like to be, rich but glamorous. I let her know: you aren’t what you could be, my dream, but I’ll make it all come true. The Ayubs thought that they were doing me a big favor and that they could put obstacles in my path. Baloney. In this life, you’ve got to sign your difficulties over to other people as if they were a gift. That’s the big joke.”

“Your mom and dad don’t like me, my dream.”

“I’ll make them like you, Danton.”

“I don’t want to make that kind of trouble for you.”

“It’s no trouble. That will be my gift to you, my love, my Dan …”

Their wealth is cruel, laughed Danton, speaking to his parents and his brother. They’ve been hoarding cash for a day that will never come. They’ve forgotten the reasons why they became rich. I’m going to revive that memory. Now those reasons are mine. Mama, Papa: I’m getting married next month, as soon as I finish my economics degree. I’m a success, why don’t you congratulate me?

My brother dazzles me, said Santiago to Laura, he makes me feel inferior and stupid, he has all the answers ahead of time, while I think of them too late, when it’s all over. Why should I be like that?

She said the two of them were very different. Danton was made for the outside world, but you were made for the interior world, Santiago, where answers don’t have to be instantaneous or charming, because what really matter are the questions.

“And sometimes there are no answers.” Santiago smiled from bed. “Only questions. You’re right.”

“I know, son. But I believe in you.”

He got out of bed with difficulty and went over to his easel. It was hard to tell the tremor of fever from the tremor of creative anticipation. Sitting in front of the canvas, he transmitted that fever, that doubt. Laura watched him and felt him in her own skin. It’s normal, that’s how he’s been since he discovered his artistic vocation. Every day he surprises himself, feels transformed, discovers the other who’s within him.

“I discover him too, Juan Francisco, but I don’t tell him. You should try to be with him a little.”

Juan Francisco shook his head. He didn’t want to admit it, but Santiago lived in a world he didn’t understand. He didn’t know what to say to his own son, they were never close. Wasn’t it a deception to be near him now, because he was sick?

“It’s more than that, Juan Francisco. Santiago isn’t just sick.”

Juan Francisco didn’t understand that being an artist was synonymous with being sick. It was like imagining a double mirror which, while being itself, has two faces, each one reflecting a different reality, sickness and art, not necessarily twin realities but occasionally, yes, fraternal realities. Which came first, which nourished Santiago’s uneasy days, art or sickness?

Laura watched her son as he slept. She liked to be next to the bed when Santiago awakened. What she saw was this: he awakened surprised, but it was impossible to know if it was the surprise of waking up alive or the shock of having one more day to paint.

She felt excluded from that daily choice, and she confessed she’d have liked to be part of what Santiago chose each day: Lauras, my mother, Laura D az is part of my day. She would spend it with him, next to him, she’d given up everything to take care of him, but Santiago did not openly recognize that company, she was only in his company, or, as Laura would say, he let her in but without thanking her.