Years With Laura Diaz, The (15 page)
Read Years With Laura Diaz, The Online
Authors: Carlos Fuentes
Xalapa: 1920
“
Y
OU WERE WRONG, ORLANDO. Not here. Find another way for us to meet. Use your imagination. Don’t mock my family or make me hate myself.”
Y
OU WERE WRONG, ORLANDO. Not here. Find another way for us to meet. Use your imagination. Don’t mock my family or make me hate myself.”
Laura resumed family life, which had been injured by the death of her grandfather and by her father’s broken health. As for the death of Mrs. Aznar and being seduced by Orlando, Laura expelled both not from memory but from recollection; she never referred to either of them again, never mentioned them to anyone, never mentioned them to herself. She was not to recollect them, no matter how hard her memory may have worked to retain them, forever, under lock and key, in the vault of the past from which nothing was to be removed. To add “Orlando Ximénez” and “Armon
a Aznar” to the sorrows and difficulties of her home life would have been unendurable, and likewise the unhealthy contagion with which Orlando infected her memory of Santiago, which Laura did indeed want to preserve pure and explicit. She could not forgive him for having damaged that part of Santiago’s life she still kept in her soul.
a Aznar” to the sorrows and difficulties of her home life would have been unendurable, and likewise the unhealthy contagion with which Orlando infected her memory of Santiago, which Laura did indeed want to preserve pure and explicit. She could not forgive him for having damaged that part of Santiago’s life she still kept in her soul.Does Santiago also live in my father’s soul? wondered the girl, staring at Fernando D
az’s stricken face.
az’s stricken face.It was impossible to know. The accountant-banker’s diplegia was advancing at a wicked pace, rapid and regular. First he lost the use of his legs, soon the rest of his body, and later his ability to speak. Laura had no room in her heart for anything but intense pity for him—confined, finally, to a wheelchair, wearing a bib, fed as if he were a baby by the devoted María de la O, staring at the world with indecipherable eyes that did not signal whether he was listening, thinking, or communicating, except for a desperate blinking and an equally desperate effort not to blink by keeping his eyes open, alert, inquisitive, beyond a person’s normal endurance, as if one day, should he close his eyes, he would not be able to open them ever again. His gaze filled with glass and water, while his eyebrows developed remarkable movement, giving their unusual new positions an expressiveness that made Laura fearful. Like two arches supporting all that was left of his personality, her father’s eyebrows did not rise in surprise but arched even more, as if both questioning and communicating.
Aunt María de la O did her best to attend to the invalid while Leticia attended to the household. But it was Leticia who learned, slowly but surely, to read her husband’s eyes, to hold his hand and communicate with him.
“He wants you to put his tiepin in his tie, María de la O.”
“He wants us to take him for an outing to Los Berros.”
“He’s in the mood for rice and beans.”
Was her mother telling the truth or was she creating a simulacrum of communication and, therefore, of life? Mar
a de la O would do the painful chores for Leticia; she took charge of cleaning the invalid with warm towels and oatmeal soap, dressed him every morning in a suit, vest, starched collar, tie, dark socks, and low boots, as if the head of the household were going to the office, and undressed him at night to put him, with the help of Zampaya, in bed at nine.
a de la O would do the painful chores for Leticia; she took charge of cleaning the invalid with warm towels and oatmeal soap, dressed him every morning in a suit, vest, starched collar, tie, dark socks, and low boots, as if the head of the household were going to the office, and undressed him at night to put him, with the help of Zampaya, in bed at nine.The only thing Laura knew to do was to take her father’s hand and read him the French and English novels he adored, learning those languages
in a kind of homage to her broken father. Fernando D
az’s physical collapse was swiftly apparent on his features. He aged, but he kept control over his feelings, and Laura saw him weep only once: when she read him the emotional death scene of the boy Little Father Time, in Thomas Hardy’s
Jude the Obscure
, who commits suicide when he hears his parents say they can’t feed so many mouths. That weeping, nevertheless, cheered Laura. Her father understood her. Her father was listening and feeling, behind the opaque veil of his sickness.
in a kind of homage to her broken father. Fernando D
az’s physical collapse was swiftly apparent on his features. He aged, but he kept control over his feelings, and Laura saw him weep only once: when she read him the emotional death scene of the boy Little Father Time, in Thomas Hardy’sJude the Obscure
, who commits suicide when he hears his parents say they can’t feed so many mouths. That weeping, nevertheless, cheered Laura. Her father understood her. Her father was listening and feeling, behind the opaque veil of his sickness.
“Go out, daughter. Live the life of people your own age. Nothing would sadden your father more than knowing you’d sacrificed yourself for him.”
Why did her mother use that subjunctive mode of speech, which according to the Misses Ramos was a mode that had to be connected with another verb in order to have meaning—indicating hypothesis, the first Miss Ramos would say; or desire, the second would add; something like “If I were you … ,” the two of them would say in one voice, although in different places. Living day to day with the invalid, without foreseeing any end, was the only health that father and daughter could share. If Fernando understood her, Laura would tell him what she was doing every day, how life was in Xalapa, what new things were going on … and then Laura realized there were no new things. Her schoolmates had graduated, married, gone off to live in Mexico City, far away, because their husbands took them off, because the Revolution was centralizing power even more than the D
az dictatorship had, because new agrarian and labor laws were threatening the rich provincials, many of whom had resigned themselves to losing what they’d had, to abandoning the lands and industries that had been devastated by the fighting in order to remake their lives in the capital, safe from rural and provincial abandonment—all that carried Laura’s friends far away.
az dictatorship had, because new agrarian and labor laws were threatening the rich provincials, many of whom had resigned themselves to losing what they’d had, to abandoning the lands and industries that had been devastated by the fighting in order to remake their lives in the capital, safe from rural and provincial abandonment—all that carried Laura’s friends far away.Left behind were the stimulants provided by Orlando and by the Catalan anarchist; even Laura’s ardent cult of Santiago cooled, yielding to a mere succession of hours, days, years. Customs in Xalapa did not change, as if the outside world couldn’t penetrate its sphere of tradition, placid self-satisfaction, and, perhaps, wisdom in a city that miraculously—although
by force of will, too—had not been touched physically by the national turbulence of those years. The Revolution in Veracruz meant, more than anything, for the rich a fear of losing what they had and for the poor a desire to conquer what they needed. While they were still in Veracruz, Don Fernando had spoken, vaguely, about the influence of anarcho-syndicalist ideas that came to Mexico through the port, and later the presence in his own house of the never-seen Armonía Aznar gave life to those concepts, which Laura did not know much about. The end of her school years and the disappearance of her friends—because they married and Laura didn’t, because they went off to the capital and Laura stayed in Xalapa—forced her, in order to have the normalcy her mother Leticia wanted for her as a relief from the family penury, to befriend girls younger than she, juvenile compared to Laura not only in age but in experience—for she was Santiago’s sister, the young object of Orlando’s seduction, the daughter of a father battered by sickness and a mother unshakable in her sense of duty.
by force of will, too—had not been touched physically by the national turbulence of those years. The Revolution in Veracruz meant, more than anything, for the rich a fear of losing what they had and for the poor a desire to conquer what they needed. While they were still in Veracruz, Don Fernando had spoken, vaguely, about the influence of anarcho-syndicalist ideas that came to Mexico through the port, and later the presence in his own house of the never-seen Armonía Aznar gave life to those concepts, which Laura did not know much about. The end of her school years and the disappearance of her friends—because they married and Laura didn’t, because they went off to the capital and Laura stayed in Xalapa—forced her, in order to have the normalcy her mother Leticia wanted for her as a relief from the family penury, to befriend girls younger than she, juvenile compared to Laura not only in age but in experience—for she was Santiago’s sister, the young object of Orlando’s seduction, the daughter of a father battered by sickness and a mother unshakable in her sense of duty.
Perhaps Laura, to numb her wounded sensibility, let herself be led without much thought into a life that both was and was not her own. It was at hand, it was comfortable, it didn’t matter much, she wasn’t in the mood to reflect on impossibilities, not even on something simply different from daily life in Xalapa. Nothing would perturb the daily stroll through her favorite garden, Los Berros, and its tall poplars with their silvery leaves and its iron benches, its fountains of greenish water, its moss-covered railings, the title girls skipping rope, the older girls walking in one direction and boys in the other, all of them flirting, brazenly staring or averting their eyes, but all of them with the chance to look at each other for a moment, yet as often as excitement or patience might demand.
“Watch out for gentlemen with walking sticks on their shoulders in Juárez Park,” mothers would warn their daughters. “Their intentions are dishonorable.”
The park was the other preferred open-air meeting place. Avenues of beech trees, laurels, araucarias, and jacarandas formed a cool, perfumed vault over the minor pleasures of skating in the park, going to charity fairs in the park, and, on clear days, seeing from the park the
marvel of Orizaba Peak—Citlaltépetl, mountain of the star, the highest volcano in Mexico. Citlaltépetl had a magic all its own because the great mountain seemed to move according to the quality of the daylight or season of the year: near in the diaphanous dawn, farther away in the solar heat of midday, veiled in the afternoon drizzles, given its most visible glory during sunset—the day’s second birth—and at night, everyone knew that the great crest was the invisible but immobile star in the Veracruz firmament, its fairy godmother.
marvel of Orizaba Peak—Citlaltépetl, mountain of the star, the highest volcano in Mexico. Citlaltépetl had a magic all its own because the great mountain seemed to move according to the quality of the daylight or season of the year: near in the diaphanous dawn, farther away in the solar heat of midday, veiled in the afternoon drizzles, given its most visible glory during sunset—the day’s second birth—and at night, everyone knew that the great crest was the invisible but immobile star in the Veracruz firmament, its fairy godmother.
It rained constantly, and then Laura and her new unequal girlfriends (she couldn’t even remember their names) ran to take cover outside the park, zigzagging under the eaves of houses and leaping over the gushes of water crisscrossing in the middle of the street. But it was lovely to listen to the warm showers on the roofs and the whisper of the plants. The little things decide to live. Then, as night became calm, the recently washed streets would fill with the scent of tulips and jonquils. Young people came out to stroll. From seven to eight was “the window hour,” when suitors would visit their favorite girls at balconies intentionally left open and—something normal in Xalapa but strange in any other part of the world—husbands would court their own wives again at “the window hour,” as if they wanted to renew their vows and rekindle their emotions.
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