Years With Laura Diaz, The (28 page)
Read Years With Laura Diaz, The Online
Authors: Carlos Fuentes
The four women were sitting in the old armchairs with wicker backs that the family had dragged with them all the way from the port of Veracruz. Zampaya opened the coach gate for her, and he was Laura’s first shock: the jolly dancing man had white hair, and his broom was no longer for him to dance with, “putting your arm around your partner’s waist if she lets you,” but now a cane on which the old family retainer rested his mutilated greeting, his “Miss Laura!” instantly hushed when Laura put her finger over her lips while the black man carried Miss’s valise and she let him do it to keep his self-respect, even though he could barely move it.
Laura wanted to see them first from the living-room door without their seeing her, the four sisters sitting in silence behind the worn-out curtains: Aunt Hilda nervously moving her arthritic fingers as if playing a muted piano; Aunt Virginia silently muttering a poem she was too weak to consign to paper; Auntie María de la O self-absorbed, staring at her fat ankles; and only Mutti working, Leticia. knitting a thick house coat that extended over her knees, protecting her, as she knitted, from Xalapa’s December chill, when the fogs of Perote Peak combine with those of the dams, the fountains, the brooks that join together in the fertile subtropical zone between the mountains and the coast.
When she looked up to examine her work, Leticia saw Laura’s eyes and exclaimed, Daughter, my daughter, as she painfully rose while Laura ran to hug her: Don’t move, Mutti, don’t wear yourself out, no one get up, please, and, if she had stood up, would Aunt Hilda have suffocated herself with the ribbon embedded in her double chin that narrowed her myopic eyes even more behind the glasses thick as fishbowls? Would Aunt Virginia have split open? Her face plastered with rice powder was no longer a powdered wrinkle but a wrinkled powder. Would Auntie María de la O have collapsed on the tile floor, recently mopped, her swollen ankles no longer supporting her?
But Leticia did stand up, straight as an arrow, parallel to the walls of
the house, her house, hers, her posture telling Laura of her attitude, the house is mine, I keep it clean, tidy, active, modest but sufficient. Nothing is needed here.
the house, her house, hers, her posture telling Laura of her attitude, the house is mine, I keep it clean, tidy, active, modest but sufficient. Nothing is needed here.
“We need you, daughter. Your sons need you.”
Laura embraced her, kissed her, remained silent. She wasn’t going to remind her that they, mother and daughter, had lived for twelve years in Catemaco, separated from her father, Fernando, and her brother, Santiago, and that reasons given in the past could be invoked in the present. Even so, yesterday’s present was not today’s past. Carmen Cortina’s parties swiftly passed through Laura’s mind, at full speed, like the stray dogs near the railroad station; perhaps the dogs secretly admired the speed of the locomotives; perhaps Carmen Cortina’s guests were just another pack of homeless animals.
“The boys are at school. They’ll be home soon.”
“How are their studies going?”
“They’re with the Misses Ramos, of course.”
Laura was going to exclaim, My God, the ladies haven’t died yet!, but that would have been another blunder, a faux pas as Carmen Cortina would say, Carmen whose world seemed to be disappearing into the most distant and invisible unreality. Laura smiled within. That had been her world, during the year and a half of her love affair with Orlando Ximénez, the daily or rather nightly world of Laura and Orlando together.
Laura and Orlando. How different that couple sounded here in the Xalapa house, in Veracruz, in the resuscitated memory of Santiago the first. She was surprised to find herself thinking in such terms, for her brother had been shot when he was only twenty, but the new Santiago coming into the living room with his backpack was a little gentleman of eleven, as serious as a portrait and direct in his first announcement:
“Danton was kept after school. He has to copy twenty pages without a single ink blot.”
The Misses Ramos would always be the same, but Santiago hadn’t seen his mother in four years, though he immediately understood who she was. He did not run over to embrace her. He let her come to him,
kneel down and kiss him. The child’s face never changed. With a look, Laura asked for help from the four women.
kneel down and kiss him. The child’s face never changed. With a look, Laura asked for help from the four women.
“That’s the way Santiago is,” said Mutti Leticia. “I’ve never met so serious a child.”
He kissed Laura’s hand: who taught him that, the Misses Ramos, or was it innate courtesy, his distance? Then he scampered out. Laura rejoiced at that childish act; her son skipped in and skipped out, even though he spoke like a judge.
Dinner was slow and painful. Danton sent word with a maid that he was going to sleep at a friend’s house, and Laura did not want to play the part of the active and emancipated woman from the capital or upset the ambulatory siesta that was her aunts’ waking hours; nor did she want to offend her mother’s admirable and nervous activity, because it was Leticia who cooked, ran about, and served while Zampaya sang his songs in the patio. In the absence of conversation, a peculiar smell, a boardinghouse smell, was taking over everywhere; it was the dead smell of many solitary nights, many hasty visits, many corners where, despite Mutti’s efforts and Zampaya’s broom, dust, time, and oblivion were piling up.
Because there were no guests at the moment—although one or two a week always turned up, which, along with the help Laura sent for the boys, allowed the house to be maintained modestly—the daughter listened to her mother with growing unease, longing to be alone with her, with her mother Leticia, but also with each of the women in this house without men—to shake them out of the apathy of their eternal siesta. But thinking that was not only an offense for them, but hypocrisy on Laura’s part, who, after all, had lived on Elizabeth’s charity for two years, dividing the monthly allowance sent by Juan Francisco, deputy of the Regional Workers Confederation of Mexico, among payments to Elizabeth, her personal expenses, and a little for her sons given refuge in Xalapa-while Laura slept until noon after staying up until three in the morning, never hearing Orlando when he rose earlier to attend to his mysterious affairs. Laura had fooled herself by reading in bed, telling herself that she wasn’t wasting time, that she was educating herself, reading what she should have read as an adolescent: after discovering
Carlos Pellicer, reading Pablo Neruda, Federico Garc
a Lorca, and going back to read Quevedo, Garcilaso de la Vega … with Orlando she would go to the Palace of Fine Arts to listen to Carlos Chávez conducting music that was all new for her, because in her memory there only floated like some perfume the Chopin Aunt Hilda played in Catemaco, and now Bach, Beethoven, and Berlioz along with Ponce, Revueltas, and Villalobos combined into a vast musical Mass; no, she hadn’t wasted her time at Carmen Cortina’s parties, in reading books or listening to concerts; she had simultaneously allowed her most interior and deep personal thoughts to flow, with the purpose—she said to herself—of locating herself in the world, understanding the changes in her life, proposing solid goals to herself, more certain than the easy exit—as it seemed to her now, stretched out once again on her adolescent bed, again hugging Li Po—of married life with Juan Francisco or even the very pleasant bohemian life with Orlando, something more for her sons Santiago and Danton, a more mature mother, more self-assured …
Carlos Pellicer, reading Pablo Neruda, Federico Garc
a Lorca, and going back to read Quevedo, Garcilaso de la Vega … with Orlando she would go to the Palace of Fine Arts to listen to Carlos Chávez conducting music that was all new for her, because in her memory there only floated like some perfume the Chopin Aunt Hilda played in Catemaco, and now Bach, Beethoven, and Berlioz along with Ponce, Revueltas, and Villalobos combined into a vast musical Mass; no, she hadn’t wasted her time at Carmen Cortina’s parties, in reading books or listening to concerts; she had simultaneously allowed her most interior and deep personal thoughts to flow, with the purpose—she said to herself—of locating herself in the world, understanding the changes in her life, proposing solid goals to herself, more certain than the easy exit—as it seemed to her now, stretched out once again on her adolescent bed, again hugging Li Po—of married life with Juan Francisco or even the very pleasant bohemian life with Orlando, something more for her sons Santiago and Danton, a more mature mother, more self-assured …Now she was back at home, and this was the best thing she could have done, return to her roots and quietly sit down to a frothy soda in Don Antonio C. Báez’s La Jalapeña, where a sign assured Don Antonio’s customers: “This establishment does not use saccharine to sweeten its waters.” She could peruse the displays in the Ollivier Brothers shop where La Opera corsets were still for sale. Browsing in Don Raúl Basáñez’s bookshop La Moderna, she could leaf through the European illustrated magazines her father, Fernando D
az, awaited with such high expectation on the docks of Veracruz. She sauntered into Wagner and Lieven, opposite Juárez Park, to buy her Aunt Hilda, music by a composer she perhaps did not know, Maurice Ravel, whose works Orlando and Laura had heard conducted by Carlos Chávez in the Palace of Fine Arts.
az, awaited with such high expectation on the docks of Veracruz. She sauntered into Wagner and Lieven, opposite Juárez Park, to buy her Aunt Hilda, music by a composer she perhaps did not know, Maurice Ravel, whose works Orlando and Laura had heard conducted by Carlos Chávez in the Palace of Fine Arts.The older women acted as if nothing had happened. That was their strength. They would forever be living on the coffee plantation owned by Don Felipe Kelsen, born in Darmstadt in the Rhineland. At dinner, they moved their hands around as if the table service were made of silver and not tin, the plates of porcelain and not pottery, the tablecloth of
linen and not cotton. There was something they hadn’t given up: each woman had her own starched linen napkin, carefully folded into a silver ring marked with her initials, V, H, MO, or L, elegantly and elaborately engraved. That was the first thing each one picked up when they sat down to table. It was their pride, their life preserver, the seal of rank. It was the mark of the Kelsens—before husbands, before confirmed celibacy, before death. The silver napkin ring was personality, tradition, memory, affirmation for each one of them and for them all.
linen and not cotton. There was something they hadn’t given up: each woman had her own starched linen napkin, carefully folded into a silver ring marked with her initials, V, H, MO, or L, elegantly and elaborately engraved. That was the first thing each one picked up when they sat down to table. It was their pride, their life preserver, the seal of rank. It was the mark of the Kelsens—before husbands, before confirmed celibacy, before death. The silver napkin ring was personality, tradition, memory, affirmation for each one of them and for them all.
A silver napkin ring holding a carefully folded napkin that was clean, crackling with starch. At table, they acted as if nothing had happened.
Laura began to chat with each of them, one at a time, alone, always with the feeling she was hunting them down. They were nervous, fleeing birds from two past seasons, Laura’s and their own. Virginia and Hilda resembled each other more than even they knew. From the pianist aunt, once she’d repeated for the thousandth time her complaint against their father, Felipe Kelsen—that he hadn’t allowed her to stay in Germany to study music—Laura extracted the more profound complaint, I’m a leftover old woman, Laura, a hopeless spinster, and do you know why? Because I spent my life convinced that men would prefer me if I denied them any hope. At the Candlemas party in Tlacotalpan I was besieged—it was there your parents met, remember? —and I took it upon myself, out of pure pride, to make the men who courted me understand that I was inaccessible.
“I’m sorry, Ricardo. Next Saturday, I’m returning to Germany to study the piano.”
“You’re very sweet, Heriberto, but I already have a boyfriend in Germany. We write to each other every day. Any day now, he’ll come to me or I’ll return to him.”
“It isn’t that I don’t like you, Alberto, but you’re just not in my class. You may kiss me if you like, but it will be a farewell kiss.”
And when she turned up at the next Candlemas party without a boyfriend, Ricardo made fun of her, Heriberto appeared with a local girl, and Alberto was already married. Aunt Hilda’s aquamarine eyes filled with tears that flowed from behind her thick glasses, clouded over
like the foggy highway to Perote. She finished with the all too familiar adage: Laura, don’t forget the old. Being young means not being faithful and forgetting others.
like the foggy highway to Perote. She finished with the all too familiar adage: Laura, don’t forget the old. Being young means not being faithful and forgetting others.
Aunt Virginia forced herself to stroll around the patio—she could no longer leave the house because of the understandable fear aging people have of falling down, breaking a leg, and not getting up until the Last Judgment. She spent hours putting on powder, and only when she felt herself to be perfectly arranged would she emerge to make the rounds of the patio, reciting in an inaudible voice her own poems or others’—it was impossible to tell which.
“Shall I come with you on your walks, Aunt Virginia?”
“No, don’t come with me.”
“Why?”
“You’re only doing it out of charity. I forbid you.”
“But no. Out of tenderness.”
“Come, come, don’t get me used to your compassion. I live in fear I’ll be the last one left in this house and I’ll die here alone. If I call you when you’re in Mexico City, will you come to see me so I won’t die alone?”
“Of course, I promise.”
“Liar. That day you’ll have a commitment you can’t get out of, you’ll be far away, dancing the fox-trot, and it won’t matter a whit whether I’m dead or alive.”
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