Years With Laura Diaz, The (67 page)

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Authors: Carlos Fuentes

BOOK: Years With Laura Diaz, The
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She walked into the forest. Her thoughts thickened as the forest opened up. She was charged with life, her own and that of the people who went with her to live it, well or badly; that’s why her life wasn’t ending, the life of Laura Díaz, because I’m not only my life, there are many lines, many generations, the true history, which is the life lived
but above all imagined; am I only the weeping woman, the suffering woman, the mourning woman? No, I refuse that, I always walked with my head held high, I never begged, I walk and try to measure the distance of my life, measure it by the voices that arise from the past and speak to me as if they were here, the names on the seven silver napkin rings, the names of the four Santiagos and the four men in my life, Orlando and Juan Francisco, Jorge and Harry, I wouldn’t be the suffering woman, I wouldn’t be the weeping woman, I would walk with my head held high, even though I’d humbly accept that I can never own nature because nature survives us and asks us not to own her but to be part of her, to return to her, to leave behind history, time, and the pain of time, no longer to delude ourselves that we have owned anything or anyone, not even our children, not even our loves, Laura Díaz owner only of our art, of what we could give to others from our own body, the body of Laura Díaz, transitory and limited …
She remembered the desire of her brother, the first Santiago, to lose himself in the forest as, eventually, he lost himself in the sea.
She would carry out the desire of Santiago the Elder. She would become forest as he became sea.
She would enter the forest as one enters a void from which no message will return.
With her were the unfulfilled lives of a brother, a son, and a grandson.
With her were the eyes and words of her grandfather Felipe Kelsen, was there ever a single truly finished life, a single life that wasn’t cutoff promise, latent possibility … ?
She remembered the day her grandfather died, when Laura held his hand with its thick veins and old freckles, caressed the skin faded to transparency, and had the sensation that each one of us lives for others: our existence has no other meaning but to complete unfinished destinies …
“Didn’t I tell you, child? One day all my ailments came together and here I am … but before I go I want to tell you that you were right. Yes, there is a statue of a woman, covered with jewels, in the middle of the forest. I lied to you on purpose. I didn’t want you to get caught
up in superstition and witchcraft, Laurita. I took you to see a ceiba so that you would learn to live with reason, not with the fantasy and enthusiasms that cost me so dearly when I was young. Be careful with everything. The ceiba is covered with spines as sharp as daggers, remember?”
“Of course, Grandfather.”
The forest arises like its own deep breathing, its own profound heartbeat.
The forest roads divide.
On one side can be seen the woman of stone, the Indian statue decked out with belts of conch shells and serpents, wearing a crown tinted green by nature imitating art, adorned with necklaces and rings and earrings on ears, nose, and arms …
On the other side is the way to the ceiba, queen of the virgin forest, whose crown is made up of the spines that are also spattered all over its brown body like wounding daggers, ageless, immobile but longing, its branches open like arms awaiting a mortal caress, which the great body of wounding daggers can give and wants to give.
Laura Díaz embraced the mother ceiba with all the strength remaining to her, the protecting ceiba, queen of a void from which no message will return.
Los Angeles: 2000
O
NE YEAR AFTER being attacked in Detroit, Santiago López-Alfaro was given a commission that allowed him to continue his television work on Mexican muralists. This time too his vocation and his profession could miraculously join forces: he was assigned to cover the unveiling of the restoration of the mural that David Alfaro Siqueiros had painted in 1930 on Olvera Street in Los Angeles.
This “typical” street was invented by Anglo Americans to pay homage to the Spanish American past of La Puebla de Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles de Porciúncula, founded in 1769 by a Spanish expedition looking for sites for Christian missions and to give themselves—as Enedina Pliego said to me as we rolled along the Pomona Freeway at about seven miles an hour—a romantic past and a good conscience in the present with respect to Mexicans, who did not live on picturesque Olvera Street but, with or without documentation and numbering over a million, lived in the slums of East Los Angeles, whence they were transported in buses or Chevys to West Los Angeles and its Mexican-manicured lawns and rosebushes.
“My grandfather galloped with Zapata in Morelos,” said the old gardener to whom Enedina and I gave a ride from Pomona. “Now I gallop by bus from Whittier to Wilshire.”
The old man laughed, and added that Los Angeles, California, was now where he worked and that Ocotepec, Morelos, was where he spent his vacations, where he sent his dollars, and where he returned to rest and see his people.
Enedina and I exchanged glances and joined the old man’s laughter. The three of us, Angelenos, talked like foreigners in the city, immigrants as recent as those who at that very moment were slipping past the border patrol at the wall between San Diego and Tijuana, between the two Californias. I’d been out of Los Angeles for a year, enough time for everyone, including my girlfriend Enedina, to think I’d left forever, because that was the rule here: you’ve just arrived and you’re already on your way, or you’d just left, you’re always passing through, and it wasn’t true, we agreed, Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans—all of us were here before anyone else, and instead of disappearing there are more and more of us, wave after wave of Mexican migrations have poured into Los Angeles as if they were returning to Los Angeles. In just the past century, the Mexicans fleeing from Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship came first, then those fleeing the Revolution, then the Cristeros, enemies of the Maximum Leader Calles, then Calles himself expelled by Cárdenas, then
braceros
to aid in the war effort, then the
pachucos
who shouted,
Here we are!,
and always the poor, the poor who made Los Angeles’ wealth and art, the poor Mexicans who worked here and started small businesses and then made money, the illiterates who went to school here and could translate what they had within them—dance, poetry, music, novels. They passed by a gigantic mural of graffiti and of broken, irreplaceable symbols: the Virgin of Guadalupe, Emiliano Zapata, La Calavera Catrina, Comandante Marcos, the masked man of today, and Zorro, the masked man of yesterday, Joaquin Murrieta the bandit, and Fray Junipero Serra the missionary.
“They didn’t manage to erase Siqueiros,” I said cheerfully. I drove
slowly, thinking that driving in Los Angeles was the equivalent of “reading the city in the original.”
“Can you imagine his patroness’s rage if she were to see what you and I are going to see?” wondered Enedina, who had come to Los Angeles as an infant with her father, the cameraman Jesus Anibal Pliego, married to my mother, Lourdes Alfaro de López, both of whom had lost their spouses in Tlatelolco and were parents of children who’d lost a parent—pals, friends, and now lovers, Enedina and I.
Los Angeles was transformed into a gigantic Mexican mural, raised like a multi colored dike so that all California—as we three could see it, two young lovers and an old gardener from the hills of Puente—wouldn’t pour down the mountains into the sea in a final earthquake … Leaving. Returning. Or arriving for the first time. From the hills one could see the Pacific through a veil of pollution, and from the foot of the mountains the city spread without a center, a mestiza city, a polyglot city, a Babel of immigrants, a Constantinople of the Pacific, zone of the great continental drift to nothingness …
There was nothing beyond this. Here the continent ended. It began in New York, the first city, and ended in Los Angeles, the second, perhaps last city. There was no more space to conquer space. Now people would have to go to the moon or to Nicaragua, to Mars or Vietnam. The land conquered by pioneers had run out, the epic of expansion was consummated, the voracity, manifest destiny, philanthropy, urgent need to save the world, to deny others their own destiny, and to impose instead, for their own good, an American future.
I was thinking all this, moving forward at a tortoise pace along highways designed for modern hares. I saw asphalt and concrete, but also development, construction, lots for sale, gas stations, fast-food stands, multiplex cinemas, the baroque-and-roll variety of the great city of Los Angeles. Still, in the mind of a young photographer, great-grandson of Laura Díaz, images alien to my vision of the city were superimposed on it: a tropical river entering the sea in a hurricane shout, thunderbirds crossing the Mexican forests, dust stars disintegrating in instantaneous centuries, a poor careless world, and death
cleansing its bloody hands in a deep
temazcal
in Puerto Escondido, where my father, the third Santiago, and my mother, still alive, Lourdes Alfaro …
A ceiba in the forest.
I shook my head to banish all those images and concentrate on my own projects, which are what brought me back to Los Angeles; they gave intelligible continuity to the impressionist waterfall of the California Byzantium. I wanted to put together a book of photographs about Mexican muralists in the United States. I’d already photographed Orozco’s murals at Dartmouth and Pomona; I’d found on the docks of New York the condemned murals that Diego Rivera had painted for Rockefeller Center; and now I was back in Los Angeles, the city where I’d grown up when my mother and her new husband, Jesus Aníbal, with his daughter, Enedina, left Mexico in 1970, after another wound named Tlatelolco, to photograph, seventy years after it was painted, Siqueiros’ mural on Olvera Street.
“Olvera Street,” exclaimed Enedina portentously. “The Disneyland of Totonacan tropical tourism.”
What caught my attention was the consistency with which the Mexican murals in the United States had been objects of censure, controversy, and obliteration. Were the artists merely provocateurs, the patrons simply cowards, how could they be so naive as to think that Rivera, Orozco, or Siqueiros would paint conventional, decorative works in the taste of those who were paying for them? The gringo Medici of New York, Detroit, and Los Angeles—blind, generous, and vile all at once—thought, perhaps (this was Enedina’s idea) that ordering and paying for a work of art was enough to nullify its critical intention, to make it innocuous, and to incorporate it, castrated, into the patrimony of a kind of tax-free puritan beneficence.
The old gardener thanked us for the ride and got off at Wilshire in search of a second ride to Brentwood. Enedina and I wished him luck.
“And if you know of a garden that needs attention”—the old citizen of Ocotepec smiled at us—“just let me know, and I’ll take care of it. Don’t you two have a garden?”
Enedina and I went on to Olvera Street.
There we found Siqueiros’ mural, painted on the high exterior wall of a three-story building. The work had been restored after seventy years of blindness and silence. In 1930, a rich California lady who had heard of the “Mexican Renaissance” had commissioned it. And since Rivera was committed to Detroit and Orozco was at Dartmouth, she hired Siqueiros and asked him what the theme of his work would be.
“Tropical America,” answered the muralist with frizzy, tangled hair, flashing green eyes, immense nostrils, and, curiously, a way of speaking in which he constantly interrupted his words with hesitations and little crutches, with “well”s and “hmm”s and “don’t you agree”s.
The patron had a marvelous vision of palm trees and sunsets, according to Siqueiros, quivering rumba dancers and gallant
charros,
red tiled roofs and decorative nopals. She signed the check and told him to get started.
On the day of the opening, with the old square crowded with officials and society people, the curtain fell revealing “Tropical America,” and there appeared the mural of a Latin America represented by a dark skinned Christ, enslaved and crucified. A Latin America crucified, naked, in agony, hanging from a cross above which flew, with fierce intent, the emblematic U.S. eagle.
The patron fainted, the officials hit the roof, Siqueiros had placed Los Angeles in hell, and the next morning the mural was completely whitewashed over, made invisible to the world, as if it had never existed. Nothing.
Nada.
Seeing it restored, in place, that afternoon during the first year of the new millennium moved Enedina more than me. The girl with green eyes and olive skin raised her arms and tossed her long hair away from her neck, rolling it into a tight knot that grounded her emotion like a lightning rod. The restored work restored herself, Enedina told me later; it was the diploma proving that the Chicana personality belonged as much to Mexico as to the United States. There was nothing to hide, nothing to cover up, this land belonged to all, all
races, all languages, all histories. That was its destiny because that was its origin.
On the other hand, I was too busy photographing the mural, happy that for once a job coincided with one of my own projects, which had been interrupted in Detroit when I was mugged after leaving the Institute of Arts, after I’d discovered the face of a woman that was mine, of my blood, of my memory, Laura Díaz, grandmother of my father, murdered in Tlatelolco, mother of another Santiago who couldn’t fulfill his artistic promise but who perhaps transmitted to his grandnephew the continuity of the artistic image, sister of a first Santiago shot in Veracruz and delivered to the waves in the Gulf of Mexico.
Now, here, in Los Angeles, the American Babel, Byzantium of the Pacific, the utopia of the new century, I was finishing a chapter in my artistic and family inheritance, the chronicle that Enedina and I had decided to call
The Years with Laura Díaz.
“Is there anything more to say?” Enedina asked me that night, as we embraced, naked, in our Santa Monica apartment near the murmuring of the sea.
Yes, no doubt there was always something more, but between the two of us, almost brother and sister from childhood, but absolute lovers, each one belonging to the other, no explanations asked, from the time we arrived in California as infants and then grew up together, went to school together, studied together at UCLA and became impassioned by our courses in philosophy and history, on the Mexican Revolution, the history of socialism and anarcho-syndicalism, the workers’ movement in Latin America, the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, McCarthyism in the United States, studying the writings of Ortega y Gasset, Husserl, Marx, and Ferdinand Lassalle, seeing Eisenstein’s Mexican films and Leni Riefenstahl’s on Hitler’s glory and Alain Resnais on Auschwitz,
Night and Fog,
reviewing the photographs of Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson, Weegee, André Kertèsz, Rodchenko, and Alvarez Bravo: the totality of these apprenticeships, curiosities, and shared disciplines cemented our love. She flew to Detroit as soon as she found out that I’d been attacked and spent hours by my side in the hospital.
Speaking.
I’d had a concussion, dreamed wild dreams, had to stay in bed before getting back the use of my broken leg, but I didn’t forget my dreams, even when it took forever to regain the use of my leg.
Speaking.
Speaking with Enedina, recalling everything possible, inventing the impossible, freely mixing memory and imagination, what we knew, what we’d been told, what the generations of Laura Díaz knew and dreamed, the factual but also the possible, about their lives, the genealogy of Felipe Kelsen and Cosima Reiter, the sisters Hilda,, Virginia, and María de la O, Léticia (Mutti), and her husband, Fernando Díaz, the first Santiago, son of Fernando, Laura’s first ball at the San Cayetano hacienda, her marriage to Juan Francisco, the birth of the second Santiago and Danton, her love for Orlando Ximénez and for Jorge Maura, her devotion to Harry Jaffe, the death of the third Santiago at Tlatelolco, the liberation, the pain, the glory of Laura Díaz, daughter, wife, lover, mother, artist, old woman, young woman: Enedina and I remembered it all, and what we didn’t remember we imagined and what we didn’t imagine we discarded as unworthy of a life lived for the inseparable possibility of being and not being, of carrying through one part of existence by sacrificing another part and always knowing that nothing is totally possessed, neither truth nor error, neither wisdom nor memory, for we descend from incomplete but intense loves, from intense but incomplete memories, and we can only inherit what our ancestors bequeathed us, the community of the past and the will of the future, united in the present by memory, by desire, and by the knowledge that every act of love today carries out, in the end, the act of love begun yesterday. Today’s memory consecrated, as it deformed, the memory of yesterday. Today’s imagination was the truth of yesterday and tomorrow.
From our bed, Enedina and I stared for a long time at the painting of Adam and Eve ascending from Paradise instead of falling from Paradise, the painting of the first naked lovers, possessors of their own sensuality, created by the second Santiago, Santiago the Younger, before he died. Laura Díaz, in her will, had bequeathed the painting to us.

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