Carlos Fuentes - The Years With Laura Diaz

This time he nodded his head.

“What did you do, Juan Francisco? Were you a hero who simply got tired? Was your heroism a lie? Do you know that’s what I’ve come to believe? What myth are you going to transmit to your sons, the living and the dead one, too — have you thought about that? What are you going to leave us? The whole truth? A half-truth? The good part? The bad? Which part goes to Danton, who’s alive? Which to Santiago, who’s dead?”

She knew that only time, which fades like smoke, would reveal her husband’s jealously guarded secret. How many times had they each invited the other to give up? Could they ever say, I’m giving everything to you, right now?

“Later you’ll understand,” said the man. He was more and more beaten down.

“Do you realize what you’re making me do? You’re making me ask you questions. What must I give you, Juan Francisco, what do you want from me? Would you like me to call you ‘sweetheart’ and ‘my love’ again, even though you know I reserve those words for another man and for my sons, they’re not your words, you’re my husband, Juan Francisco, not my tenderness, my dear one, my love (my hidalgo, my adored little Spanish boy …)?”

She feared — or only wanted to believe — that at a certain moment Juan Francisco would shake off his lethargy and touch her with another voice, the voice, new and old at the same time, of the end. She schooled herself in patience for the end to come, visibly approaching in the physical collapse of this oversized man with wide shoulders and immense hands, short torso and long legs, like others in his caste. His caste: Laura wanted to attribute something to Juan Francisco, at least race, caste, descent, family, father, mother, lovers, first wife, illegitimate or legitimate children, what difference did it make? One day, she was on the verge of taking the Interoceanic train back to Veracruz and from there going by boat and highway to Tabasco to consult registries, but that made her feel like a contemptible busybody. So she followed her daily routine, helping Frida Kahlo, in more pain than ever, with one leg amputated, a prisoner of her bed and wheelchair, and she went to gatherings hosted by the Riveras in honor of the new wave of exiles — Americans persecuted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

A new war had begun, the Cold War. Churchill had recognized it in a famous speech: “An iron curtain has descended over Europe …” Stalin proved that the democracies’ suspicions of the Soviet Union were well founded. The old dictator’s paranoia led him to commit delirious crimes: he jailed and ordered the execution not of his nonexistent enemies but of his friends, out of fear that one day they might become enemies. He carried out preventive assassination and imprisonment, cruel and horribly unnecessary. Yet Picasso painted the “realistic” portrait of Stalin with a dove, because devotees of that strange monster — so argued about during the evenings with Domingo Vidal, Basilio Baltazar, and Jorge Maura in the Café de Paris during the Spanish Civil War — believed he was now champion of peace, enemy of U.S. imperialism. For their part, Americans invented their own anti-Communist paranoia and saw Stalinist agents under every rug, on every New York stage, and in every Hollywood film.

The new exiles began gathering at the Riveras’ house, but many stopped coming because Diego’s Marxist logorrhea bored them and they were indignant about Frida’s devotion to Uncle Joe, to whom she dedicated a portrait and unlimited praise despite the fact that (or perhaps because) Stalin had had her lover Leon Trotsky murdered.

Laura Díaz remembered Jorge Maura’s words — there’s no need to change life, no need to transform the world. We have to diversify life. We have to give up the illusion that a recovered unity is the key to a new paradise. We have to see difference as a value. Difference strengthens identity. Jorge Maura had said he found himself between two truths: that the world was going to save itself, and that the world was doomed. Both are true: capitalism’s corrupt society is doomed, but the revolution’s ideal society is also doomed.

“Believe in the opportunities of freedom,” said a warm voice behind Laura, a voice that dominated the debates (profound) and conversations (flat) at the Riveras’ house. “Remember that politics is secondary to personal integrity. Without personal integrity the social life is not worth living.”

“Jorge!” exclaimed Laura in a shock of disbelief, spinning around to see the face of a still young-looking man with thick hair and brows that were no longer black as they once had been but spattered with white.

“No. I’m sorry to disappoint you. Basilio. Basilio Baltazar. Remember me?”

They hugged each other with an emotion like that attending a new birth, as if they’d both in some way been reborn in that instant and, in the emotion of their meeting, could fall in love and again be the young people they had been fifteen years earlier. But now they were both accompanied, Laura Díaz by Jorge Maura, Basilio Baltazar by Pilar Méndez. And Jorge, on his island, forever accompanied by the other Mends — Raquel.

They looked at each other with immense tenderness, unable to speak for a few moments.

“See?” Basilio smiled behind his moist eyes. “We never escape our problems. We never stop persecuting or being persecuted.”

“Yes, I do see,” she said in a broken voice.

“There are some terrific people among these gringos. They’re almost all film or theater directors, writers, not to mention a few veterans of our war and the Lincoln Brigade. Remember?”

“How could I forget, Basilio?”

“Most of them live in Cuernavaca. Why don’t we go down one weekend and talk to them.”

All Laura could do was kiss the cheek of her old friend the Spanish anarchist, as if she were once again kissing Jorge Maura, as if she were seeing for the first time the always hidden face of Armonía Aznar, as if from the bottom of the gulf arose the face of her adored brother, the first Santiago. Basilio was the catalyst of a past Laura missed terribly but considered lost forever.

“I don’t think so. You make our past into a present, Basilio. Thanks.”

Going to Cuernavaca to argue about politics, but this time with Americans instead of Spaniards or Mexican labor leaders betrayed by the Revolution, by Calles and Morones … the idea tired and depressed her as she returned that night to the family house on Avenida Sonora, now so solitary without María de la O and Santiago, both dead, Danton married and living, as he always wanted to, in Las Lomas de Chapultepec. Laura, in an aesthetic fit, had sworn she’d never set foot in his house.

“You said you were going to change your in-laws’ taste, Danton.”

“Just wait a while, Mama. It’s a period of adjustment, an accommodation. I have to make my father-in-law happy so I can dominate him. Don Aspirin’s half senile. Don’t worry, at least we got rid of the fountains on the terrace.”

“What about your wife?”

“Mama, I swear poor Magda was so completely ignorant I had to finish her toilet training.”

“You’re as vulgar as they come.” But Laura couldn’t keep from laughing.

“I’ve actually got her convinced that the stork will be bringing the baby.”

“What baby?” said Laura, hugging her son.

I’m fifty-two and I’m going to be a grandmother, she kept saying to herself on the way home from the Coyoacán party and Basilio Baltazar. She’d been forty when she met Jorge Maura. Now I live alone with Juan Francisco, but I am going to be a grandmother.

The mere sight of Juan Francisco in bathrobe and slippers opening the door reminded her that she was, like it or not, a wife. She instantly rejected a repugnant but all too noble idea that had flashed through her mind. We only survive at home. Only those who stay at home survive. Out in the world, chasing the light, the fireflies burn up and die. That had to be what her grandfather must have thought, the old German Don Felipe Kelsen, who crossed the ocean to lock himself away in the Catemaco coffee plantation never to leave again. Was he happier than his descendants? Children shouldn’t be judged by their parents, much less the grandchildren. The idea that the generation gap has never been greater is false. The world has always been made up of generations standing on opposite sides of an abyss. It’s also made up of couples divided at times by clamorous silences, like the one that separated Grandfather Felipe from his beautiful and mutilated Doña Cosima, whose self absorbed gaze was never distracted — Laura knew from the time she was a child — from the dangerous and dashing bandit of Papantla. Seeing Juan Francisco in his robe and slippers open the door — old slippers with a hole for the big toe on his right foot to air, the chenille robe with gaudy stripes like a serape turned into a towel — she was seized with laughter thinking that her husband might be the secret child of that highwayman from the era of Benito Juárez.