Authors: Carlos Fuentes

Years With Laura Diaz, The (33 page)

BOOK: Years With Laura Diaz, The

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Juan Francisco did not break the long silence that followed Laura’s words until he got out of bed, buttoned up his blue-and-white-striped pajamas, took some water from the pitcher, drank it, and sat on the edge of the bed. The room was cold—it was the thunderstorm season—and hail, as thick as it was unexpected, was drumming on the roof. Through the open window flowed a newly fresh aroma of jacarandas, overcoming with its sensuality the billowing curtains and the little puddle forming under the window. Then Juan Francisco’s words began, very slowly, as if he were a man without a past—where did he come from, who were his parents, why had he never revealed his origins?

“I always knew I was strong on the outside and weak on the inside. I knew it when I was just a kid. That’s why I made such a huge effort
to show the rest of the world I was strong. You especially. Because I knew early on the fears and weaknesses I had inside. You’ve heard of Demosthenes, how he overcame his timid stutter walking along the beach with pebbles in his mouth until he could overpower the noise of the waves with his voice and make himself into the most famous public orator in Greece. That’s what happened to me. I made myself strong because I was weak. What you can’t know, Laura, is how long you can keep winning against fear. Because fear is sickly, and when the world offers you gifts to calm you down—money, power, or sensuality, all together or one at a time, it doesn’t matter—there’s no way around it, you’re grateful the world isn’t sorry for you and you go on yielding the real strength you won when you had nothing to the false strength of the world which is starting to talk to you. Then the weakness ends up overpowering you, almost without your realizing it. If you help me, perhaps I can achieve a balance and be—not as strong as you thought when you met me but not as weak as you thought when you abandoned me.”

Laura was not going to argue about who caused the break. If he went on thinking he’d been abandoned, she’d be compassionate and resign herself to seeing him play that part, and try not to lose even more respect for him. But he, in turn, would have to put up with all her truths, even the cruelest ones, not out of cruelty but so that the two of them could live from then on in the truth, disagreeable as it might be, and especially so that Danton and Santiago could live in a family without lies. Laura recalled Leticia, her mother, and wanted to be like her, to have the gift of understanding everything without using unnecessary words.

When she returned from Xalapa, she brought the Chinese doll to Frida Kahlo. The Coyoacán house was empty. Laura walked into the garden and called out, “Is there anyone at home?” And the tiny voice of a maid answered, “No, miss, there’s no one here.” The couple was still in New York, where Rivera was working on the Rockefeller Center frescoes, so Laura put Li Po on Frida’s bed and added nothing, no note, nothing; Frida would understand, it was Laura’s gift to the lost child. She tried to imagine the purity of the Oriental doll’s ivory amid the
tropical undergrowth that would soon invade the bedroom: monkeys, said Frida, parrots, daisies, hairless dogs, ocelots, and a jungle of lianas and orchids.

She had the boys sent from Xalapa. Punctilious, Santiago and Danton followed Leticia’s precise and practical instructions and took the Interoceanic train to the Buenavista station, where Laura and Juan Francisco were waiting for them. The boys’ nature, which Laura already knew, was a surprise for Juan Francisco, although it was for Laura, too, in the sense that each of them was rapidly accentuating his personal traits—Danton, clownish and bold, gave his parents two hasty kisses on the cheek and ran off to buy candy, shouting, why did Grand-mama give us money when there were no Larín chocolates or Minnie Mouse lollipops on the train, but anyway the old skinflint only gave us a few cents; then ran to a kiosk and asked for the most recent issues of his favorite magazines,
Pepín
and
Chamaco Chico,
but when he realized he didn’t have enough money, resigned himself to buying the latest copy of
Los Supersabios.
Juan Francisco put his hand in his pocket to pay for the magazines, but Laura stopped him. Then Danton turned his back on them and ran down the street ahead of the rest of the family.

Santiago was different. He greeted his parents with a handshake that established an uncrossable space and kept kisses at bay. He allowed Laura to put her hand on his shoulder to guide him to the exit and wasn’t too embarrassed to let Juan Francisco carry the two small valises to the black Buick parked on the street. The two boys were noticeably uncomfortable, but since they didn’t want to attribute their discomfort to being with their parents, they kept on running their index fingers under their stiff collars and along the ties of the formal suits Doña Leticia had dressed them in: striped three-button jackets, knickers, knee-high argyle socks, coffee-colored square-toed shoes with hooks.

Everyone was silent during the trip from the station to Avenida Sonora, Danton absorbed in his comic book, Santiago bravely watching the majestic city pass by—the recently inaugurated monument to the Revolution, which people compared to a gigantic gasoline station, Paseo de la Reforma and all the traffic circles that seemed to do the breathing for everyone, from Caballito, the equestrian statue of Charles IV
of Spain at the intersection with Juárez, Bucareli and Ejido, Christopher Columbus and his impassive circle of monks and public scribes, to the proud statue of Cuauhtémoc brandishing his spear at the intersection with Insurgentes; all along the great avenue lined with trees, footpaths, bridle paths for morning riders who at this hour were slowly plodding along, and sumptuous private mansions with Parisian facades and decorations. When they left Paseo de la Reforma, they entered the elegant streets of Colonia Roma with its two story stone houses: garages at street level and reception rooms visible thanks to the white-framed balcony windows left open so the maids, with their complicated braids and blue uniforms, could air the interior rooms and shake out the carpets.

As they went along, Santiago read the names of the streets—Niza, Génova, Amberes, Praga—until they reached the Bosque de Chapultepec—not even there did Danton raise his eyes from his comics—and thence to their home on Avenida Sonora. To Santiago, it was like a dream—the entrance to the great park of eucalyptus and pine trees, flanked by stone lions in repose and crowned by the mythic Castle where Moctezuma had his baths, from whose parapets the Boy Heroes of the Military School threw themselves rather than surrender the Alcazar to the Yankees in 1848, where all the rulers of Mexico lived, from the Habsburg emperor Maximilian to Abelardo Rodriguez, the casino godfather, to the new President, Lázaro Cárdenas, who decided that such luxury was not for him and moved, in good republican fashion, to the modest villa at the foot of the Castle, Los Pinos.

Over the course of a second breakfast, the boys listened impassively to the new order of their lives, although the spark in Danton’s eyes silently announced that he would contest each chore with some unpredictable mischief. Santiago’s eyes refused to admit either strangeness or shock; he filled the void, in Laura’s astute reading of her son, with nostalgia for Xalapa, for Grandmother Leticia, for Aunt María de la O. Would the young Santiago have to leave things behind in order to miss them? Laura surprised herself in thinking that—as she observed her elder son’s serious face with its fine features, his chestnut hair so like that of his dead uncle, so different from Danton’s swarthy appearance,
his cinnamon complexion, his thick dark eyebrows, his black hair held in check with brilliantine. The only curious detail was that Santiago the fair had black eyes, while the dark-skinned Danton had pale green eyes, almost yellow, like a cat’s.

Laura sighed. The object of nostalgia was always the past; there was never nostalgia for the future. Even so, Santiago’s gaze lit up and went out like one of those new neon signs on Avenida Juárez: I miss what is going to come …

They would attend the Gordon School, on Avenida Mazatlán, not far from the house. Juan Francisco would drive them in the Buick in the morning, and they would return at 5 p.m. in the orange school bus. The list of school supplies had been acquired, Eberhard pencils from Switzerland, pens with no name or national origin, meant to be dipped in desk inkwells, graph-paper notebooks for arithmetic, lined paper for essays; a national history textbook by the anticlerical Teja Zabre as if to compensate for the mathematics book by the Marist monk Anfossi; English readings, Spanish grammar, and the green books of general history by the French authors Malet and Isaac. Knapsacks. The sandwiches of beans, sardines, and chiles; the usual orange; the injunction never to buy sweets because they give you cavities …

Laura wanted to fill her day with her new chores. But night lay in wait for her, then dawn knocked at her door, and even in the middle of the night she could not say, The darkness belongs to us.

She reproached herself. “I can’t condemn the best of myself to the grave of memory.” But the silent solicitude of her husband—“How little I ask of you. Let me feel I’m needed”—could not calm Laura’s recurring irritation during her time alone, when the boys were at school and Juan Francisco at the union, “How easy life would be without a husband and children.” She went to Coyoacán when the Riveras came back, preceded by the black clouds of a new scandal in New York, where Diego had painted the faces of Marx and Lenin in the Rockefeller Center murals, Nelson Rockefeller asked Diego to erase the effigy of the Soviet leader, Diego refused but offered to balance Lenin’s head with Lincoln’s head, and it ended when twelve armed guards ordered the painter to stop work and handed him a check for $14,000 (“COMMUNIST
PAINTER GETS RICH ON CAPITALIST DOLLARS”). The unions tried to save the mural, but the Rockefellers ordered it chiseled out of existence and thrown into the garbage. Good, said the U.S. Communist Party: Rivera’s fresco is “counterrevolutionary.” Diego and Frida returned to Mexico, he depressed, she cursing “Gringolandia.” They were all back, but there was no longer space for Laura: Diego wanted to get even with the gringos with another mural; Frida had painted a sorrowful self-portrait as an empty Tehuana dress hung amid soulless skyscrapers on the Mexican-U.S. border, Hi, Laura, how are you? come see us whenever you like, see you soon.

Life without a husband or children. Only one irritation, like a fly that insists on landing on one’s nose again and again, chased away but tenacious: Laura knew well what life was like without Juan Francisco and the boys, and hadn’t found anything greater or better in that alternative than in her renovated existence as wife and mother—but if only Juan Francisco didn’t insist on combining (so obviously) the conviction that Laura was judging him with the obligation he felt to love her. Her husband was anchoring himself at an unmoving buoy. On the one hand, the excessive adoration he decided to show Laura to compensate for his mistakes of the past irritated her, because it was a way of asking forgiveness yet resolved itself in something quite different: “I don’t hate him, he tires me, he loves me too much, a man shouldn’t love a woman too much, there’s an intelligent balance that Juan Francisco lacks, he has to learn that there’s a limit between the need a woman has to be loved and her suspicion that she isn’t loved as much as it might seem.”

Juan Francisco, with his terms of endearment, his courtesy toward her, his diligent paternal concern for the sons he hadn’t seen for six years, his new obligation to explain to Laura what he’d been doing all day without ever asking her for explanations, his insinuating heavyhanded way of asking for love, touching Laura’s foot with his own under the sheets, suddenly emerging naked from the bathroom, searching like a fool for his pajamas, unaware that he was now carrying a spare tire around his waist, unaware that he’d lost his essential dark, mestizo slenderness, even making her take the initiative, speedily
bringing the act to its conclusion, mechanically fulfilling his conjugal obligations …

She resigned herself to it all, until the day when a shadow began to manifest itself, first immaterial in the traffic on the avenue, then more visible on the sidewalk across the street, finally showing itself completely a few steps behind her, as Laura made her daily journey to the Parián market. She did not want to hire a maid. The memory of the nun Gloria Soriano pained her too much. Domestic chores filled her solitary hours. The surprising thing in this discovery is that Laura, once she realized she was being followed by one of her husband’s lackeys, did not take it seriously. And that affected her more than if it had really mattered to her. Instead, for her it opened a street as narrow as the avenue where they lived was wide. She decided not to shadow him physically—as he, stupidly, was doing to her—but to use a more powerful weapon, moral shadowing.

Lázaro Cárdenas, a general from Michoacán, ex-governor of his state and head of the official party, had been elected President of Mexico. Everyone thought he would be just one more of the puppets shamelessly manipulated by the Maximum Chief of the Revolution, General Plutarco Elías Calles. The joke was so public that during a preceding presidency, some joker had hung a sign on the door of the presidential residence at Chapultepec: THE PRESIDENT LIVES HERE. THE MAN WHO GIVES THE ORDERS LIVES ACROSS THE STREET. Then President Abelardo Rodríguez, considered yet another of the Maximum Chief’s servants, repressed strike after strike, first the telegraph workers, then the day laborers from New Lombardy and New Italy in Michoacán, farm workers of Italian background who were accustomed to the struggles being waged by Antonio Gramsci’s Communist Party, and finally the national movement of agricultural workers in Chiapas, Veracruz, Puebla, and Nuevo León: President Rodriguez ordered that the strikers be fired and sent soldiers to take their place; the courts, dominated by the executive branch, declared all these strikes “unjustified.” The army and the paramilitary thugs working for the government murdered several workers from the Italo-Mexican communities, and Abelardo
Rodriguez sent the national strike leaders, who were fighting for a minimum wage, to the desolate penal colony on the Islas Mar