Years With Laura Diaz, The (41 page)

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Authors: Carlos Fuentes

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George, my love, it was all in vain. The American authorities did not allow us to disembark in Miami. The captain was ordered to go to Havana and wait for the American permit. It didn’t come. Roosevelt is constrained by public opinion, which is averse to allowing more foreigners in the United States. The quotas, they say, are filled. No one speaks up on our behalf. No one. I’ve been told that under the previous pope, Pius XI, an encyclical had been prepared about the “unity of the human race threatened by racists and anti-Semites,” but he died before promulgating it. My Church is not defending us. Democracy is not defending us. George, I depend on you. George, please save me. Come to Havana before your Raquel can no longer even weep. Didn’t Jesus say, “When you are persecuted, flee to another city”? Christ be praised!
MAURA : Let me ask you something, Vidal. Doesn’t the ideal you defend become impossible whenever an individual is murdered for
the sin of thinking with us but differently from us? Because all of us defend the Republic and oppose fascists, but we’re all different, I mean that Azaña is different from Prieto or Companys or Durruti, and José Díaz is different from Largo Caballero, as Enrique Lister is different from Juana Negrín. But none of them individually or taken as a group is like Franco, Mola, Serrano Súñer, or the repressor from Asturias, Doval.
VIDAL : We haven’t excluded anyone. There’s room for everyone in the broad front of the left-wing movements.
MAURA : As long as the left is struggling for power. But when it gets power, the Communist Party sets about eliminating all those who don’t think as you do.
VIDAL: For instance?
MAURA : Bukharin.
VIDAL : Pick another man, one who isn’t a traitor.
MAURA : Victor Serge. And another question: is it revolutionary to take no interest in the fate of a comrade stripped of public position, deported without trial, separated forever from friends and family, just because he’s
only an individual
and a singular, solitary individual doesn’t count in the grand collective epic of history? I don’t see Bukharin’s treason. He might have saved Russia from Stalin’s terror with his project for a pluralist, human, free socialism, which would have been stronger for all those reasons.
VIDAL : Let’s get this over with, and
revenons à nos moutons.
What should the Republic have done, as far as you, Maura and Baltazar, are concerned, to reconcile victory and ethics?
MAURA : Life has to be changed, Rimbaud said. The world has to be changed, Marx said. They are both wrong. We have to diversify life. We have to pluralize the world. We have to give up the romantic illusion that humanity will be happy only if it recovers its lost unity. We have to give up the illusion of totality. The word says it all: there’s only a slight difference between the desire for totality and totalitarian reality.
VIDAL: You’ve got a perfect right to disdain unity. But without unity you can’t win a war.
MAURA: But you do win a better society—isn’t that what we all want?—
VIDAL: What do you mean, Maura?
MAURA:—by placing a value on difference.
VIDAL: And identity?
MAURA: Identity fortifies a culture of differences. Or do you think that a liberated humanity would be a perfectly united humanity, identical, uniform?
VIDAL: There’s no logic to what you’re saying.
MAURA: That’s because logic is only a thing, it’s a way of saying, Only this has meaning. You, as a Marxist, should think about dialectic, which at least offers an option, this or that.
VIDAL : And gives you unity in synthesis.
MAURA : And immediately redivides into thesis and antithesis.
VIDAL: So what do you believe in?
MAURA: In both and more. Does that seem insane to you?
VIDAL: No. But politically useless.
BALTAZAR: May I say something, my Socratic friends? I don’t believe in a happy millennium. I believe in the opportunities of freedom. All the time. Every day. Unlike the poet B��cquer’s swallows—let them pass, and they will not return. And if I have to choose the lesser of two evils, I’d rather choose neither. I think politics is secondary to personal integrity, because without that it isn’t worthwhile living in society. And I’m very afraid that if we, the Republic that we all are, give no proof that we value morality above
means,
the people will turn their backs on us and follow the fascists, because fascism has no doubts about immorality though we may.
MAURA : And your conclusion, Basilio?
BALTAZAR : That the true revolutionary cannot talk about revolution because nothing deserves that name in today’s world. The way you can identify real revolutionaries is by the fact that they never talk about revolution. And yours, Jorge?
MAURA : I find myself between two truths. One is that the world is going to save itself, the other that it’s doomed. Both are true in a double sense. Corrupt society is doomed, but so is revolutionary society.
VIDAL : And you, Laura Díaz? You haven’t said a word. What do you think of all this, comrade?
 
Laura looked down for an instant and then gazed tenderly at each one. Finally, she spoke: “I really enjoy seeing that the hardest-fought polemic among men always reveals what they have in common.”
“You two are very much in love,” said Basilio Baltazar, looking at Jorge and Laura. “How do you measure love in the context of everything that’s going on?”
Vidal joined in. “Rephrase the question like this: Does only personal happiness count and not the disaster about to engulf millions of people?”
“I’m asking a different question, Mr. Vidal,” said Laura Díaz. “Can the love two people share make up for all the unhappiness in the world?”
“Yes, I suppose there are ways of redeeming the world, whether we’re as solitary as our friend Basilio or as affiliated as I am,” Vidal responded, with mixed humility and arrogance.
The look on Vidal’s face did not escape Basilio or Jorge. Laura saw it but did not know how to understand it. What her intuition told her was that this was the
tertulia
of farewells, that there was a tension, a sadness, a resignation, a modesty, and, encompassing them all, a love in those exchanged glances which was the prelude to a fatal separation. For that reason the arguments were as definitive as a tombstone. They were farewells: visions lost forever, they were the lies in heaven that on earth are called politics. Between the two lies, we construct a painful truth, history. But what was there in Basilio Baltazar’s brilliant, sad eyes but a bed with the traces of love, what was there in Domingo Vidal’s frowning gaze but a parade of visions lost forever, what was there in Jorge’s melancholy and sensual face, her own Jorge Maura … ? And what was there, farther back, in the eyes of the mayor of Santa Fe de Palencia but the public secret that he’d ordered his own daughter shot to prove he loved a country, Spain, and an ideology, Communism? And in the eyes of Clemencia standing before the mirror, was
there only the repugnant vision of an ultra-pious, hypocritical old lady satisfied with suppressing the beauty and youth of her possible rival, her own daughter?
Basilio embraced Jorge and told him, “We’ve wept so much that we’ll know the future when it comes.”
“Life goes on,” said Vidal in farewell, embracing both comrades at the same time.
“And fortune ebbs and flows, brother,” said Maura.
“Let’s grab opportunity by the tail.” Vidal moved away from them, laughing. “Let’s not mock fortune, and let’s put aside intemperate pleasures. We’ll see one another in Mexico.”
But they were in Mexico. They said goodbye in the same place where they met. Were the three speaking in the name of defeat? No, thought Laura D
az, they are speaking in the name of what is now beginning, exile, and exile has no country, it isn’t named Mexico, Argentina, or England. Exile is another country.
They covered her mouth with a bandage and ordered all the windows surrounding the Santa Fe plaza shut. Nevertheless, as if nothing could silence the scandal of her death, great shouts, barbarous shouts that perhaps only the woman condemned to death could hear, harassed her all the way from the Roman gate to the bullring. Unless, that is, the neighbors lied, because that dawn they all swore they heard shouts or songs that came from the depth of the dying night.
The windows were closed. The victim was gagged. Only Pilar Méndez’s eyes were shouting—her mouth was shut, as if the execution had already taken place. “Gag her,” begged Clemencia, the wife of the justice-bound mayor, “the only thing I don’t want is to hear her shout, I don’t want to know what she shouted.” “It will be a clean execution. Don’t get worked up.”
I can smell death, Pilar Méndez was saying to herself, stripped now of her fur mantle, wearing only a Carmelite robe that did not hide her
nipples, feet bare, feeling with her feet and her sense of smell, I can smell death, all the graves of Spain are open, what will be left of Spain but the blood the wolves will drink? We Spaniards are hounds of death, we smell it, and we follow it until we’re killed.
Perhaps that was what she thought. Or perhaps the three friends, soldiers of the Republic, thought it when they stayed outside the city gates. They were all ears, attentive only to the report of the rifles that would announce the death of the woman for whom they were ready to give more than their own lives, their honor as Republican soldiers, and also their honor as men united forever by the defense of a woman loved by one of them.
They say that at the end she was dragged through the sand, raising the dust of the plaza until she was covered with dirt and disappeared in a granulated cloud. The truth is, at that dawn, fire and rain, mortal enemies, sealed a pact and fell together on the town of Santa Fe de Palencia, silencing the thunder of the rifles when Basilio, Domingo, and Jorge took root in the world as a final homage to the life of a sacrificed woman. They looked at one another and ran to the mountains to advise the outposts not to put out the fires, that the citadel of the Republic had not fallen.
“What proof do you have?”
A handful of ashes in their hands.
They did not see the autumn river clogged with leaves, struggling to be reborn from the dry summer.
They did not imagine that the ice of the coming winter would paralyze the wings of eagles in midair.
They were very far away when the crowd’s shouting whipped like a scourge the plaza where Pilar Méndez was shot and where her father the mayor said to the people, I acted for the Party and for the Republic, and didn’t dare glance at the shutter through which his wife, Clemencia, glared at him with satisfied hatred, secretly saying to him, Tell them, tell them the truth, you didn’t order her killed, the one who hated her was her mother, I killed her even though I loved her, even though the two of us were followers of Franco, in the same party, both Catholics, but different in age and beauty: Clemencia ran to her bedroom
mirror, tried to recover in her aged face the features of her dead daughter, Pilar dead would be less than an unsatisfied old woman plagued with hot flashes and the rumors that remained buried between her legs. She superimposed the features of her young daughter over her own old ones.
“Don’t put out the fires. The city has not surrendered.”
Laura and Jorge walked along Cinco de Mayo in the direction of the Alameda. Basilio strolled off in the opposite direction, toward the Cathedral. Vidal signaled to stop the Roma—Mérida bus and caught it on the run. But each one looked back to see the others one last time, as if they were sending a final message. “Never abandon the friend who was with you in disaster. Friends save one another or die together.”
Colonia Roma: 1941
W
HEN JORGE MAURA LEFT, Laura Díaz returned to her home and no longer went out at night, no longer disappeared for eternal days. She was disconcerted. She hadn’t told Juan Francisco the truth, and at first she reproached herself. I did the right thing, it all turned out badly. It was a good thing I was cautious. Was I a coward? Was I very clever? Should I have told Juan Francisco everything, betting he’d accept it, risking a break and then finding myself alone again with neither of them, neither Jorge nor Juan Francisco? Didn’t Maura say this was a matter of our intimate life, that it was sacred, that there was no reason, no moral imperative, obliging either of us to tell about our intimacy?
Back in the house on Avenida Sonora, she spent a great deal of time looking at herself in the mirror. Her face hadn’t changed despite the storms rocking it from within. Until now. But from that moment on, she was sometimes the girl she was before and other times an unknown woman—a
changed
woman. How would her sons, her husband, see her? Santiago and Danton did not look at her, avoided her eyes, walked quickly, sometimes running the way boys run, skipping along as if they
were still children, but not joyfully. They were running away from her, so they wouldn’t have to admit either her presence or her absence.
So they don’t have to admit I wasn’t faithful. That their mother was unfaithful.
They didn’t look at her, but she listened to them. The house wasn’t large, and the silence amplified the echoes; the house turned into a seashell.
“Why the hell did Papa and Mama get married?”
She had no other company but the mirrors. She looked at herself and saw more than two ages. She saw two personalities. She saw the rational Laura and the impulsive Laura, a vital Laura and a spineless Laura. She saw her conscience and her desire, locked in battle on a glass surface, smooth as those frozen lakes where battles were fought in Russian movies. She would have gone off with Jorge Maura if he’d asked, gone away with him, abandoned everything …
One afternoon, she was sitting on the little balcony that looked out over Avenida Sonora. She took four more chairs out there and put a fifth in the middle for herself. After a while, Auntie María de la O came in, dragging her feet, and sat next to her, sighing. Then López Greene came home from the union, found them there, and sat down next to Laura. Later on, the boys came home from school, saw the unusual scene, and took the two remaining chairs, one at each end.
It isn’t their mother who’s convoking them, Laura herself said, the place and the time of day convoke us. Mexico City, an afternoon in 1941, when the shadows lengthen and the very white volcanoes seem to float over a burning bed of clouds, and the barrel organ plays that old song “Los Golondrinas,” and posters for the recent election campaign—AVILA CAMACHO/ALMAZÁN—have begun to peel, and that first afternoon of the silent reencounter of the family contains all the afternoons to come, afternoons of dust storms and afternoons of rains that settle the unquiet dust and perfume the Valley where the city, indecisive between its past and future, is located; the barrel organ plays “Amor Chiquito,” the maids hanging out the wash on the terraces sing “I’m walking along the tropical path,” and teenagers in the street dance
tambora
and more
tambora
but what will be will be, cabs go by,
ice trucks pass, and vendors with their jicamas sprinkled with lemon and chile powder, the candy vendor sets up, Adams Chicklets, Mimi bars, Mexican treats—
jamoncillo
and sweet potato—the kiosk closes down with its alarming headlines about the war the Allies are losing and its comics about Blondie and Dagwood and its exotic Argentine ladies’ magazines,
Leoplán
and
El
Hogar,
and for children,
Billiken,
neighborhood movie theaters announce Mexican films with Sara García, the Soler brothers, Sof
a Alvarez, Gloria Marín, and Arturo de Córdoba, the boys, on the sly, would buy cigarettes—Alas, Faros, and Delicados—at the tobacco stand on the corner, all the kids would play hopscotch, trying to land peach pits in improvised holes, exchange bottle caps from Orange Crush, grape Chaparritas; green buses from the Roma—Piedad line race the brown-and-cream buses from the Roma-Mérida line: the Bosque de Chapultepec with an atmosphere of moss and eucalyptus rises up behind the Bauhaus-style houses, continues to ascend to the symbolic miracle of the Alcázar, where Danton and Santiago go every afternoon before coming home, as if they were really conquering an abrupt, mysterious castle reached by scaling steep paths and asphalt roads, and linked routes that hold the surprise of the grand esplanade above the city, its pigeon flights, and its mysterious rooms filled with nineteenth-century furniture.
The boys are sitting next to Laura, Juan Francisco, and the old aunt, thankful that the city offers them this repertory of movement, color, aromas, song, and the crown of Mexico, a castle that reminds all of them that there is more than we imagine in the world, there is more …
Jorge Maura disappeared, and something she would agree to call “reality,” but very much in quotation marks, reappeared behind the romantic fog. Her husband was the first reality. He’s the one who reappears first, telling the boys (Santiago is twenty, Danton nineteen), “I love her.”
He accepts me, she said, cruelly and ungenerously, he accepts me even though I never told him the truth, he accepts me because he knows that his own cruelty and crudeness sanctioned my freedom, the idea that “I should have married a baker who doesn’t care about the rolls he
makes.” Then she realized that his declaring he loved her in the presence of his sons was proof of his failure and at the same time also proof of his possible nobility. Laura Díaz embraced the idea of a regeneration for all of them, parents and sons, by means of a love she had lived with such intensity that now she had enough left over to give away to her own.
She would wake up next to her husband—they’d begun sleeping together again—and hear her husband’s first words, every morning. “Something’s not right.”
Those words saved him and reconciled her. To make her happy, Juan Francisco, thanks to a rediscovered nobility that was perhaps innate in him, was the one who spoke to Danton and Santiago about their mother, recalling when they met, what she was like, how nervous, how independent, telling them they should try to understand her. Laura was offended when she heard him; she should have thanked her husband for interceding, but his intercession offended her, however briefly, and then in the afternoon ceremony—when they sat down in the dusk of the Valley of Mexico, opposite Chapultepec Castle and the volcanoes, which was now the way they all found to say, We’re together despite everything—she said out loud one afternoon: “I fell in love with a man. That’s why I didn’t come home. I was with that man. I would have given my life for him. I would have abandoned all of you for him. But he left me. That’s why I’m back here with you. I could have stayed by myself, but I was afraid. I came back looking for protection. I felt abandoned. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m asking that at your age, boys, you begin to understand that life isn’t easy, that we all make mistakes and wound those we love because we love ourselves more than we love anything else, including the person who fills us with passion at a given moment. Each of you, when the time comes, will want to follow your own path and not the one your father or I would have wanted. Think about me when you do that. Forgive me.”
There were no words, no emotions. Only María de la O allowed old memories to pass through her eyes, now clouded by cataracts, memories of a girl in a Veracruz brothel and a gentleman who rescued her from abandonment and integrated her into this family, overcoming the
prejudices of race, of class, and of an immoral morality that in the name of convention takes life instead of giving it.
Laura and Juan Francisco invited each other to surrender, and the boys stopped running, fighting, skipping to avoid their mother’s face. Santiago slept and lived with the door to his bedroom open, something entirely new to his mother, who interpreted it as an act of freedom and transparency, although it was also, perhaps, a culpable rebellion: I have nothing to hide. Danton would laugh at him: What’s your next stunt going to be? Going to jerk off in the middle of the street? No, answered his older brother, I’m trying to say that we’re enough on our own. Who, you and I? I’d like that, Danton. Well, I’m enough on my own, but with the door closed just in case; come and see the pictures I’ve cut out of
Vea
whenever you like, incredible babes, unbelievably sexy …
Just as Laura would look at herself in the mirror when she came home, almost always thinking that her face didn’t change no matter how many vicissitudes rocked it, she discovered that Santiago looked at himself as well, especially in windows, and seemed surprised at himself and by himself, as if he were constantly discovering another person there with him. Perhaps only his mother thought those things. Santiago was no longer a boy. He was something new. Laura, in front of the mirror, confirmed that sometimes she was the unknown woman—a changeling. Would her son see her that way? She was going to be forty-three.
She didn’t dare go in his room. The open door was an invitation but a jealous one, even, paradoxically, a prohibition. Look at me, but don’t come in. He was drawing. With a round mirror so he could look at himself out of the corner of his eye and create—not copy, not reproduce—the face of Santiago which his mother recognized and memorized only when she saw the self-portrait her son was drawing: the sketch became Santiago’s true face, revealed it, forced Laura to realize that she’d gone, returned, and hadn’t really looked at her sons. How right they were not to look at her, to run, to sneak off when she didn’t look at them, either; they reproached her more for not looking at them than they did for not living with them: they wanted to be seen by her, and since she didn’t see them, Santiago discovered himself first in a mirror that seemed to
supply the gaze he would have wanted to receive from his parents, his brother, society, always hostile to the adolescent who bursts into it with his insolent promise and ignorant self-sufficiency. A portrait and then a self-portrait.
And Danton—could there be any doubt?—discovered himself in the brightly lit store window of the city.
She returned as if they didn’t exist, as if they’d never felt forgotten or hurt or eager to communicate to her what Santiago was making in that moment: a portrait she could have known during her absence, a portrait the son could have sent to his mother if Laura, as she’d wished, had gone to live with her Spaniard, her “hidalgo.”
Look, Mother. This is who I am. Never come back again.
Laura imagined that she’d never have another face to give her son but the one her son was giving her now: wide forehead, amber eyes set far apart, not dark as in reality, straight nose and thin, defiant lips, straight hair, messy, of a rich, lustrous chestnut, tremulous chin; even in the self-portrait the chin that wanted to bolt from the face, brave but exposed to all the blows of the world. He was Santiago the Younger.
He had several books open and arranged around him. Van Gogh and Egon Schiele.
Where did you get them? Who gave them to you?
The German Bookstore here in Colonia Hipódromo.
Laura was about to call him a chip off the old block, your German stock’s coming to the surface, but he anticipated her: Don’t worry, they’re German Jews in exile in Mexico.
In the nick of time.
Yes, Mama, in the nick of time.
She described Santiago’s features, which the self-portrait translated and facilitated for her, but she didn’t take note of the thickness of the strokes, the somber light that allowed the spectator to approach that tragic, predestined face, as if the young artist had discovered that a face revealed the tragic necessity of each life, but also its possible freedom to overcome failures. Laura stared at that portrait of her son by her son and thought about the tragedy of Raquel Mendes-Alemán and Jorge Maura’s tragedy with her. Was there a difference between the dark
fatality of Raquel’s destiny, which she shared with the entire Jewish people, and the dramatic, honorable but ultimately superfluous response of the Spanish hidalgo Jorge Maura, who went to Havana to save Raquel just as he’d tried to save Pilar in Spain? Along with his self-portrait, Santiago gave Laura a light, an answer she wanted to make her own. We have to make time for the things that have taken place. We have to allow pain to become knowledge in some way. Why did her son’s self-portrait presage these ideas?

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