Carlos Fuentes: The Years With Laura Diaz

She didn’t say, Always let yourself be tempted, sweetheart, don’t be afraid, don’t be intimidated, you don’t get a second chance, and she didn’t add temptation to the elegance and fire because she was a proper lady and an exemplary grandmother, but Laura Díaz, for the rest of her days, kept those words in her heart, that lesson imparted to her by her grandmother. Don’t let it pass you by, don’t let it …

“You don’t get a second chance …”

The child Laura looked at herself in the mirror, not to see there the temptations enumerated by the odious priest Almonte (who, for reasons beyond her, simply made her laugh) but to discover in her own reflection a rejuvenation or at least an inheritance from her sick grandmother. My nose is too big, she said to herself, discouraged, soft features to boot, sparkling eyes devoid of seduction except that of being a seven-year-old simpleton. The Chinese doll Li Po had more personality than her pudgy cheeked and obstreperous little mistress, who had no kissable passion, no embraceable ardor, no …

The day their mother was buried, the four Kelsen girls (three unmarried and one married, but for all intents and purposes …) dressed in black; but Leticia, Laura’s mother, saw a marvelous bird fly over the open grave, almost as if escaping from its own funeral, and exclaimed: Look! A white crow!

The others turned to look, but Laura, as if she were obeying an order from her dead grandmother, ran off after the white bird, feeling that she herself could fly, as if the albino crow were calling her, Follow me, girl, fly with me, I want to show you something.

That was the day the girl realized where she was, where she came from, as if her grandmother, in dying, had given her wings to return to the forest: playful, wise, without calling attention to herself, jumping around as she always did, provoking sighs in the family group as they watched her run off, she’s just a child, what do children know about death, she didn’t know Grandmother Cosima in her prime, she isn’t doing it because she’s bad.

She followed the white crow beyond the limits of what she knew, learning about and loving from that moment on, forever, everything she saw and touched, as if that day of death had been set aside for her to learn something unrepeatable, something only for her, and only for the age Laura Díaz had reached at that instant, having been born on May 12, 1898, when the Virgin dressed in white came walking into sight with her coat …

From that moment on, and forever, she learned about and loved the fig tree, the tulip tree, the Chinese lilies, whose little branchlets flowered, every single one, three times a year: she examined what she already knew but had forgotten in the forest, the red lily, the palo rojo, the round crown of the mango tree; she examined what she’d never known or thought but was now remembering instead of discovering, the perfect symmetry of the araucaria, which in each shoot of each branch quickly produces its immediate double, the trueno with its little yellow flowers, a marvelous tree that resists both hurricanes and drought.

She was going to shout in horror, but she swallowed her fear and turned it into astonishment. She’d run into a giant. Laura trembled, closed her eyes, touched the giant, it was made of stone, it was enormous, it stood out in the middle of the forest, more deeply rooted there than the breadfruit tree or even the roots of the invading laurel that devours everything — drains, fields, crops.

Covered with slime, a gigantic female figure stared into eternity, encircled with belts of shells and serpent, wearing a crown tinted green by the mimetic forest. Adorned with necklaces and rings and earrings of arms, noses, ears.

Laura ran home breathlessly — eager, at first, to tell of her discovery, the lady of the forest who gave her jewels to the poor, the lost statue who protected the property of heaven which that nasty priest Almonte had stole— curse him, curse him —and she, Laura Díaz, knew the secret of the forest. But then she realized she could tell no one, not now, not to them.

She stopped running. She returned home slowly along the road of undulating hills and gentle slopes planted with coffee. In the patio, Grandfather Felipe was saying to his foremen that there was nothing to do but cut back the laurel branches, they’re invading us, as if they could move, the laurels are clogging the drains, they’re going to eat up the whole house, flocks of starlings gather right over here in the ceiba tree just outside the house and dirty up the entryway, this can’t go on; besides, we’re coming into the season when the coffee trees get covered with spiderwebs.

“We’re going to have to cut down a few trees.”

Aunt Virginia sighed. With complete naturalness she’d taken over her mother’s rocker, even though she wasn’t the firstborn.

“I just listen to them,” she said to her sisters. “They don’t realize no one alive is as old as a tree …”

Laura didn’t want to tell her aunts anything. She would only talk to her grandfather. She tugged on the sleeve of his black frock coat. Grandfather, there’s an enormous lady in the forest, you have to see her. Child, what are you talking about? I’ll take you to her, Grandfather, if you don’t come, no one will believe me, come on, if you come, I won’t be afraid of her, I’ll hug her.

She imagined: I’ll hug her and bring her back to life, that’s what the stories Grandmama used to tell me say, all you have to do is hug a statue to bring it to life.

She berated herself: how little time her decision to keep the secret of the great forest lady lasted.

Her grandfather took her by the hand and smiled, he shouldn’t smile on a day of mourning, but this pretty little girl with her long, straight hair and more and more well defined features, her baby fat disappearing — her grandfather could tell that day, before Laura saw it in any mirror or even dreamed it, how she’d look when she grew up, with very long arms and legs and a prominent nose and thinner lips than any of the other girls her age (lips like those of her writing aunt Virginia) — this child was reborn life, Cosima restored, one life continued in another and he its guardian, keeper of a soul, which required the living memory of a couple, Cosima and Felipe, to prolong itself and find new energy in the life of a girl, of this girl, the deeply moved old man said to himself — he was sixty-six! Cosima was fifty-seven when she died! — and Laura reached the clearing in the forest.

“This is the statue, Grandfather.”

Don Felipe laughed.

“This is a ceiba, child. Careful now. Look at how beautiful it is but also dangerous. Do you see? It’s covered over with nails, except they aren’t nails but pointy spines like daggers which the ceiba produces to protect itself, don’t you see? Swords come out of the ceiba’s body, the tree arms itself, so no one will come near it, so no one will hug it.” Her grandfather smiled. “What a naughty ceiba!”

Then bad news came. There was a miners’ strike in Cananea, another strike in the textile factory at Rio Blanco, right here in the state of Veracruz, the bodies of strikers killed by the federal army were carried from Orizaba to the sea in open boxcars, so everyone could see the corpses and learn a lesson.

“Do you think Don Porfirio will fall?”

“Are you serious? This shows that Porfirio Díaz has the same energy he always had, even if he’s seventy-five.”

“Boss, we’re going to have to cut down the chalacahuites.”

“It’s a pity we have to cut down trees that shade the coffee.”

“That’s when coffee prices are high. Right now, prices are very low. We’re better off cutting down the trees and selling them as lumber.”