Years With Laura Diaz, The (34 page)

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Authors: Carlos Fuentes

BOOK: Years With Laura Diaz, The
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Luis Napoleón Morones’ old CROM grew weaker and weaker, incapable of defending the workers. At the same time the star of their new leader, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, rose. Lombardo—once a Thomist philosopher and now a Marxist, a thin man with an ascetic air and sad eyes, forelock dangling over them, and a pipe in his mouth—as head of the General Confederation of Mexican Workers and Peasants created an alternative for the real workers’ struggle: workers struggling for land, good wages, collectively negotiated contracts, began to group themselves with the GCMW, and since Cárdenas had supported union struggles in Michoacán, everything was now expected to change: no longer Calles and Morones but Cárdenas and Lombardo.
“And union independence, Juan Francisco, where is it?” Laura heard the only old comrade who still visited her husband say one night, the now beaten-down Pánfilo, who couldn’t even find a place to spit since Laura had had the hideous copper spittoons removed.
Juan Francisco repeated something that by now was his credo: “In Mexico, things change from within, not from without.”
“When are you going to learn?” Pánfilo answered with a sigh.
Cárdenas was beginning to show signs of independence and Calles signs of irritation. Caught between them, Juan Francisco seemed uncertain as to which direction the workers’ movement would take and what his position in it would be. Laura noted his disquiet and asked him over and over, with an air of legitimate concern: If there’s a break between Calles and Cárdenas, which side will you be on? And he had no choice but to fall back on his old bad habit, political rhetoric: the Revolution is united, there will never be a break among its leaders. But the Revolution has already broken with many of your old ideals, Juan Francisco, when you were an anarcho-syndicalist (and the images of the Xalapa attic and the walled-up life of Armonía Aznar and her mysterious relationship with Orlando and Juan Francisco’s funeral oration all returned to her in a wave), and he would say, like a true believer
repeating the credo, you have to influence things from within, try it from outside and you’ll be squashed like a bug, the battles are waged within the system.
“You have to know how to adapt, isn’t that so?”
“All the time. Of course. Politics is the art of compromise.”
“Of compromise,” she repeated in a most serious tone.
“Yes.”
So as not to acknowledge what was happening, one had to keep one’s heart in the dark. Juan Francisco could explain that political necessity forced him into compromises with the government.
“With all governments? With any government?”
… She could not ask him if his conscience was condemning him. He would have wanted to admit that he wasn’t afraid of the opinions others might have but he was afraid of Laura Díaz, of being judged again by her. Then, one night, the two of them exploded again.
“I’m sick and tired of your judging me.”
“And I’m sick and tired of your spying on me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve locked my soul in a basement.”
“Don’t feel so sorry for yourself, you make me pity you.”
“Don’t talk to me as if you were a saint talking to a sinner. Talk to the real me instead!”
“It’s outrageous that you ask me for results that have nothing to do with reality.”
“Stop imagining that I judge you.”
“As long as it’s only you who judges me, poor little you, it really doesn’t bother me, do you think I came back so you could forgive my sins?” She bit her tongue, night tracks me, sunrise frees me, she went to the boys’ bedroom to watch them sleep, to calm down.
Seeing them sleep.
It was enough to watch the two little heads sunk deep in the pillows, Santiago covered up to his chin, Danton uncovered and spread-eagled, as if even in sleep their two contrary personalities revealed themselves, and Laura D
az asked herself, at that exact moment of her
existence, did she have anything to teach her sons or at least the courage to ask them, what do you want to know, what can I tell you?
Sitting there opposite the twin beds, she could only tell them that they came into this world without being consulted and thus their parents’ freedom in creating them did not save them, creatures of a heritage of rancor, needs, and ignorance that their parents, no matter how they tried, could not erase without damaging their children’s freedom. It would be up to them to fight the earthly evils they’d inherited, and yet, she, the mother, could not step back, disappear, turn into the ghost of her own descendants. She had to resist in their name without ever showing it, remain invisible at the side of her sons, not to diminish the child’s honor, the responsibility of the son who must believe in his own freedom, know that he is forging his own destiny. What was left to her if not to keep watch discreetly, to be tolerant, and to ask as well for a long time to live and a short time to suffer, like Aunts Hilda and Virginia?
Sometimes she would spend the entire night watching them sleep, intent on accompanying her sons wherever they might go, like a very long shoreline where sea and beach are distinct but inseparable; the voyage might last only one night, but she hoped it would never end, and over the heads of her sons floated the question: How much time, how much time will God and men allow my sons on earth?
Seeing them sleep until the sun comes up and the light touches their heads because she herself can touch the sun with her hands, asking herself how many sunrises she and her sons will be able to endure. For each allotment of light had a silhouette of shadow.
Then Laura Díaz rose, disquieted by a mild vertigo, and stepped away from the beds where her sons slept, and she told herself (and almost told them)—so they would understand their own mother and not condemn her to pity first and oblivion later—that to be a mother, hated and liberated by the hatred of her sons, hated, perhaps, but fatally unforgettable, I must be active, ardent and active, but I still don’t know how, I can’t return to what I’ve already done, I want an authentic revelation, a revelation that will be an elevation, not a renunciation.
How easy life would be without children or a husband! Again? This time for sure? Why not? Does the first effort at liberty use it up, a prior failure close the doors to possible happiness beyond the walls of home? Have I used up my destiny? Santiago, Danton: don’t leave me. Let me follow you wherever you go, whatever happens. I don’t want to be adored. I want to be awaited. Help me.
Parque de la Lama: 1938
I
N 1938, the European democracies caved in to Hitler at the Munich Conference and the Nazis occupied Austria, then Bohemia; the Spanish Republic was in full retreat, falling back on all fronts; Walt Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
opened, as did Sergei Eisenstein’s
Alexander Nevsky
and Leni Riefenstahl’s
Olympiad.
On Kristallnacht, Jewish synagogues, businesses, homes, and schools all over Germany were burned by SS troops; in the United States, Congress established the House Un-American Activities Committee, in France Antonin Artaud proposed a “theater of cruelty,” Orson Welles convinced everyone that Martians had invaded New Jersey, Lázaro Cárdenas was nationalizing the oil industry in Mexico, and two rival telephone companies—the Swedish Ericsson and Mexicana, the Mexican national company—simultaneously offered separate telephone services; as luck (bad) would have it, a person signed up with Ericsson could not call someone with Mexicana service and vice versa. This meant that a subscriber to one service had to turn to neighbors, friends, nearby offices, or phone booths to speak to someone with the other service, and vice versa.
“In Mexico, even the telephones are baroque,” Orlando Ximénez declared.
The sheer size of the modern metropolis makes amorous relationships difficult; no one wants to spend an hour in a bus or car in order to enjoy ninety seconds of sex. The telephone enabled lovers to agree on intermediate rendezvous sites. In Paris,
pneumatiques,
the quick
“petits bleus,”
brought couples together; lovers opened those little blue envelopes that might contain all the promises of love with more apprehension than if they were telegrams. But in Mexico, during the year of oil expropriation, the year of the Spanish Republic’s last-ditch defense of Madrid, if lovers didn’t also happen to be neighbors and if one had Ericsson and the other Mexicana, they were doomed to invent bizarre, complex, or, as Orlando said, baroque communication networks.
Nonetheless, the first communication between them, the first personal message, could not have been more direct. It was, simply, a meeting of eyes. Later, she would say she was predisposed to what happened, but when she saw him, it was as if she’d never thought about him. They did not exchange glances; each anchored their eyes in those of the other. She asked herself, Why is this man different from all the rest? And he answered in silence, the two of them separated by the hundred other guests at the party,
because I’m looking only at you.
“Because he’s looking only at me.”
She wanted to leave; she was frightened by this attraction, so sudden but also so complete, the novelty of the encounter alarmed her, it disturbed her to imagine the consequences of an approach, she thought about everything that might happen—passion, giving herself, guilt, remorse, her husband, her sons; it wasn’t that all these issues would come afterward; involuntarily, instantaneously, they were coming first; everything entered the present moment, as in one of those living rooms where only family ghosts sat down to talk and, serenely, to judge her.
She thought of leaving. She was going to flee. He came over to her as if guessing her thoughts and said, “Stay a little longer.”
They looked directly into each other’s eyes; he was as tall as she, not as tall as her husband, but even before he spoke a word to her, she felt he treated her with respect, and his familiar tone was merely the way
Spaniards dealt with one another. His accent was Castilian and his physical appearance, too. He couldn’t have been more than forty, but his hair was quite white, contrasting with the freshness of his skin, which had no notable wrinkles except in his brow. His eyes, his white smile, his straight profile, his courteous but impassioned eyes. His very white complexion, his very black eyes. She wanted to see herself as he saw her.
“Stay a little longer.”
“You’re the boss,” she said impulsively.
“No.” He laughed. “I’m making a suggestion.”
From the first instant, she conceded three virtues to the man: reserve, discretion, and independence, together with impeccable social graces. He wasn’t an upper-class Mexican like so many of those she’d met at the hacienda in San Cayetano or at Carmen Cortina’s cocktail parties. He was a wellborn Spaniard, but in his eyes there was melancholy and in his body a disquiet that fascinated and disturbed her, invited her to penetrate a mystery, and she wondered if this might not be the subtlest trick of a Spanish hidalgo (as she quickly nicknamed him): to present oneself to the world as an enigma.
She tried to penetrate the man’s gaze, his eyes sunk deep in his skull, near the bone, near the brain. The white hair lightened his dark eyes, the same way that here in Mexico it lightens mestizo faces. A dark young man could, with white hair, become a paper-colored old man, as if time had faded his skin.
The hidalgo made her a present of a look that combined adoration with fate. That night, together in bed in the L’Escargot Hotel facing the Parque de la Lama, the two of them caressing each other slowly, over and over, cheeks, hair, temples, he asked her to envy him because he could see her face from various perspectives and, above all, illuminated by the minutes they spent together. What does the light do to a woman’s face, how does a woman’s face depend on the time of day, the light of dawn, morning, midday, sunset, nighttime, what does the light that faces her, outlines her, surprises her from below or crowns her from above, attacks her brutally and without warning in broad daylight or caresses her softly in the half light, what does it say to her face?
he asked her, but she had no answers, no wish to have answers, she felt admired and envied because in bed he asked all the questions that she always wanted a man to ask, knowing they were the questions that all women want to be asked at least once in their lives by just one man.
She no longer thought about minutes or hours, she lived with him, beginning that night, in a time without time of amorous passion, a whirlwind of time that dispensed with all the other concerns of life. All the forgotten scenes. Although at dawn on that night, she feared that the time with him, this night with him, had devoured all the previous moments of her life and had also swallowed up this one. She clung to the man’s body, clasped it with the tenacity of ivy, imagining herself without him, absent but unforgettable, saw herself in that possible but totally undesired moment when he would no longer be there even if the memory of him was; the man would no longer be with her but his memory would be with her forever. That was the price she paid from that moment on, and she was pleased, thought it cheap in comparison with the plenitude of the instant. She could not keep from asking herself, in anguish, What does this face, these eyes, this voice without beginning or end mean? From the first moment, she never wanted to lose him.
“Why are you so different from the rest?”
“Because I look only at you.”
She loved the silence that followed sex. She loved that silence right from the first time. It was the hoped-for promise of a shared solitude. She loved the place they’d chosen because it was at the same time a predestined place. The place of lovers. A hotel next to the shady, cool, and secret park within the city. That was how she wanted it. A place that might always be unknown, a mysterious sensuality in a place that everyone but lovers takes to be normal. For all time, she loved the shape of her man’s body, svelte but strong, well proportioned and passionate, discreet and savage, as if the body of the man were a mirror of transformations, an imaginary duel between the creator god and his inevitable beast. Or the animal and the divinity that inhabit us. She’d never known such sudden metamorphoses, from passion to repose, from tranquillity to fire, from serenity to excess. A moist, fertile couple
one for the other, each one endlessly divining the other. She told him she would have recognized him anywhere.
“Even feeling around in the dark?”
She nodded. Their bodies joined once again in the free obedience of passion. Outside it was growing light; the park surrounded the hotel with a guard of weeping willows, and one could get lost in the labyrinths of high hedges and even higher trees, whose whispering voices were disorienting and could make anyone lose their way with the sound of rustling leaves in lovers’ ears, so far away from what would come next, so close to what was absent.
“How long has it been since you’ve spent a night away from home?”
“Never, since I came back.”
“Are you going to give an excuse?”
“I think so.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes.”
“What excuse will you give?”
“That I spent the night with Frida.”
“Do you have to explain?”
“I have two boys.”
“Do you know the English saying ‘Never complain, never explain’?”
“I think that’s my problem.”
“Explaining or not?”
“I’m going to feel badly about myself if I don’t tell the truth. But I’ll hurt everyone if I do.”
“Haven’t you thought that what’s between you and me is part of our intimate life, and no one has to know about it?”
“Are you saying it’s for the two of us? Do you have to keep quiet or talk?”
“No, I’m only asking you if you know that a married woman can conquer a man.”
“The good thing is that Frida’s telephone is Mexicana and ours is Ericsson. It would be hard for my husband to keep track of my movements.”
He laughed at the telephone complication, but she did not want to
ask him if he was married, if he had a sweetheart. She heard him say that a married woman can conquer a man who isn’t her husband, a married woman can go on conquering men, and his words alone were enough to cause an exciting disturbance, almost an unstated temptation, that threw her back into his strong, slim arms, the dark hair around the sex, the hungry lips of the Spaniard, her hidalgo, her lover, her shared man, she realized immediately, he knew she was married, but she in turn imagined he had another woman, except that she could not manage to understand this intuition of another woman, to visualize her, what kind of relationship would Jorge Maura have with the woman who was and was not there?
Laura D
az opted for cowardice. He didn’t tell her who the other woman was or what she was like. She did tell him who her husband was and what he was like, but she wouldn’t say a word to Juan Francisco until Jorge told her about the other woman. Her new lover (Orlando strolled down the street of her memory) was a two-story man. At the entrance to the house, he was reserved, discreet, and comported himself impeccably. Upstairs he was a man who gave of himself, an open man, holding back nothing at all for the time of love. She could not resist the combination, this complete way of being a man both serene and impassioned, open and secret, discreet while clothed, indiscreet when naked. She admitted she’d always wanted a man like that. Here he was, finally, desired forever or invented right now but revealing an eternal desire.
Looking from the hotel window toward the park that first shared dawn, Laura D
az had the conviction that for the first time she and a man were going to see each other and know each other without having to say anything, without explanations or superfluous calculations. Each one would understand everything. Each shared instant would bring them closer together.
Jorge kissed her again, as if he’d divined her completely, mind and body. She could not tear herself away from him, from the flesh, from the body coupled to her own, she wanted to measure and retain her orgasm, she was proclaiming as hers the looks she shared during the orgasm, she wanted all the couples in the world to have as much pleasure
as she and Maura had in those moments, it was her most universal, most fervent desire. No man, ever, instead of closing his eyes or turning aside his face, had ever looked into her eyes during his orgasm, wagering that by the mere act of having the two of them see each other’s faces they would come at the same time. And that’s how it happened each time: with their impassioned but conscious looks, they named each other man and woman, woman and man, who make love face to face, the only animals who have sex face to face, seeing each other, look at my open eyes, nothing excites me more than seeing you seeing me, the orgasm became part of the gaze, the gaze into the soul of the orgasm, any other position, any other answer remained a temptation, temptation subdued became the promise of the true, the best, and the next excitement of the lovers.

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