Years With Laura Diaz, The (21 page)

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Authors: Carlos Fuentes

BOOK: Years With Laura Diaz, The
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Laura felt insufficient. She decided to ask Juan Francisco to let her work with him at what he was doing, at his side, helping him at least half the day, the two of them working together, organizing the workers, and he said fine but first come with me for a few days to see if you like it.
They were together only forty-eight hours. The old city was a jumble of small shops, shoemakers, blacksmiths, carpenters, potters, disabled veterans of the revolutionary wars, old camp followers now without men who sold tamales and drinks on the corners, murmuring
corridos
and the names of lost battles, a viceregal city with a proletarian pulse, its palaces now tenements, its wide portals now cluttered with sweet shops and lottery stands, shops that sold anything and everything, saddle makers, ancient inns turned into shelters where vagrants and criminals, homeless beggars and disoriented old people slept in a repugnant collective fog older than the perfume in the streets, where prostitutes plied their trade, leaning against entryways, open to suggestions and propositions, a whorish perfume identical to the scent of funeral parlors, gardenias and penises, both erect, pulque shops reeking of vomit and stray-dog urine, battalions of loose, mangy beasts poking around in garbage dumps that grew and grew, ever grayer and more purulent, like huge, cancerous lungs that would someday suffocate the entire city. Garbage had overflowed from the few canals left from the Aztec city, the assassinated city. People said they’d be drained and filled in with asphalt.
“Where would you like to begin, Laura?”
“You tell me, Juan Francisco.”
“You want me to tell you? Begin at home. Run your own house properly, girl, and you’ll make more of a contribution than if you come to these neighborhoods to organize and save people—who by the
way won’t thank you for your trouble. Leave the work to me. This is not for you.”
He was right. But that evening, back in her house, Laura D
az was in a high state of excitement, not understanding very well why, as if the trip to a city that was both hers and not hers had aroused the passion of her childhood years with which she’d loved and explored the forest and its giant stone women covered with lianas and jewels, the trees and their gods hidden among laurels, and in Veracruz, the passion she’d shared with Santiago that had only grown in the years since his death, and in Xalapa the passion from Orlando’s languid body that she’d rejected, the passion in her father’s broken body that she’d tenaciously embraced. And now Juan Francisco, Mexico City, her house, the boys, and a request dashed by her husband the way you swat a fly: let me become impassioned with you and with what you’re doing, Juan Francisco.
He may be right. He didn’t understand me. But even so he has to give something more to what is stirring in my soul. I love everything I have and wouldn’t exchange it for anything in the world. But I want something else. What is it?
He was asking for the mute obedience of an impassioned soul.
“Where’s the car, Juan Francisco?”
“I gave it back. Don’t give me that look. The comrades asked me for it. They don’t want me to accept anything from the official union. They call it corruption.”
Avenida Sonora: 1928
W
HAT WAS HE THINKING about? What was she thinking about?
He was impenetrable, like a sphere of knives. She could only know what he was thinking about by knowing what she was thinking about. What did she think about when he—repeating something that irritated her more and more and discredited him—accused her of not having gone up to the attic in Xalapa to see the Catalan anarchist. Finally, she tired of it, gave up, set aside her own reasons, and began to note, in a small graph-paper notebook she used to keep household accounts, each time he, with no provocation on her part, would remind her of this omission. It was no longer a scolding but a nervous habit, like the involuntary squinting of eyes that were fixed, without their own light. What did she think when she heard yet again the same speech she’d been hearing now for nine years, so fresh, so powerful the first times, then more difficult to understand because more difficult to hear, excessively rationalist, as she waited in vain for the dream of the speech, not the speech itself but the dream of the speech, especially when she realized that, as a mother, she could speak to her sons Santiago
and Danton only in dreams, in fables. Their father’s speech had lost the dream. It was an insomniac speech. Juan Francisco’s words did not sleep. They kept watch.
“Mama, I’m afraid, look through the window. The sun isn’t there anymore. Where did the sun go? Did the sun die?”
“Juan Francisco, don’t talk to me as if I were an audience of a thousand people. I’m just one person. Laura. Your wife.”
“You don’t admire me the way you did before. Before, you used to admire me.”
She wanted to love him. What was happening to her? What was it that was happening, which she neither knew nor understood?
“Who understands women? Short ideas and long hair.”
She wasn’t going to waste time telling him what the boys understood each time they told a story or asked a question, that words are born from imagination and pleasure, they aren’t for an audience of thousands of people or a plaza filled with flags, they are for you and for me. To whom are you speaking, Juan Francisco? She always saw him at a podium and the podium was a pedestal and that was where she’d placed him herself from the day they married. No one but she had put him there, not the Revolution, not the working class, not the unions, not the government; she was the vestal of the temple named Juan Francisco López Greene, and she’d asked her husband to be worthy of the devotion of the wife. But a temple is a place for repeated ceremonies. And what is repeated becomes boring unless faith sustains it.
It wasn’t that Laura lost faith in Juan Francisco. She was simply being honest with herself, registering the irritations of connubial life, what couple doesn’t get irritated over the course of time? It was normal after eight years of marriage. At first they hadn’t known each other, and everything was a surprise. Now she wished she could recover the astonishment and novelty, but she realized that the second time around astonishment is habit and novelty is nostalgia. Was it her fault? She’d begun by admiring the public figure. Then she’d tried to penetrate it, only to find that behind the public figure was another public figure and another behind that one, until she realized that the dazzling orator,
leader of the masses, was the real figure, there was no trick, no other personality to find, she’d have to resign herself to living with a man who treated his wife and children as a grateful audience. The problem was that the figure on the podium also slept in the conjugal bed, and one evening contact between their feet under the sheets made her, involuntarily, pull hers back, her husband’s elbows began to disgust her, she would stare at that articulation of wrinkles between the upper arm and forearm and imagine all of him as an enormous elbow, a loose hide from head to foot.
“I’m sorry. I’m tired. Not tonight.”
“Why didn’t you say something? Should we hire a maid? I thought that between you and your aunt you managed the house very well.”
“That’s true, Juan Francisco. There’s no need for maids. You have Mar��a de la O and me. You shouldn’t have maids. You serve the working class.”
“How well you understand things, Laura.”
“Know something, Auntie?” she dared to say to María de la O. “Sometimes I miss life in Veracruz. It was more fun.”
The aunt did not agree, simply looked attentively at Laura, and then Laura laughed as if to say the matter was of no importance.
“You stay here with the boys. I’ll go to the market.”
It was not a bother; she found it amusing to go to the Parián in Colonia Roma, because it broke the household routine, which in truth was no routine. Laura loved her aunt, adored her sons, and was delighted to watch them grow. The market was a miniature forest where she could find all the things that delighted her, flowers and fruits, so various and abundant in Mexico, the
azucenas
and gladiolas, the Madonna lilies, the “clouds” and pansies, the mangos, papaya, vanilla that she thought about when she made love: the mamey, the quince, the
tejocote
, the pineapple, limes and lemons,
guanábana,
oranges, the black
zapotes
and the little
zapotes:
the tastes, shapes, flavors of markets filled her with joy and with nostalgia for her childhood and youth.
“But I’m only thirty years old.”
She was pensive as she returned from the Parián to Avenida Sonora
and asked herself, Is there something more? Is this all there is? She answered herself with a slight shrug of her shoulders and walked faster, not even thinking about the weight of the baskets. If there was no more automobile, it was because Juan Francisco was honorable and had returned the gift to the CROM. She remembered that it had not been his idea to return it. The comrades had asked him to do it. Don’t accept gifts from the official union. Don’t become corrupt. It hadn’t been a voluntary act on his part. They’d asked him to do it.
“Juan Francisco, would you have returned the car if your comrades hadn’t asked you to?”
“I serve the working class. That’s that.”
“Sweetheart, why do you depend on injustice so much?”
“You already know I don’t like—”
“My poor Juan Francisco, what would become of you in a just world?”
“Spare me the condescension. Sometimes I just can’t figure you out. Hurry up and make breakfast, I’ve got an important meeting today.”
“Not a day passes without an important meeting. Not a month. Not a year. Every minute there’s an important meeting.”
What did he think of her? Was Laura only a habit of his, a sexual rite, mute obedience, expected gratitude?
“I mean, how good it is that you have people to defend. That’s your strength. It pours out of you. I love to see you come home tired.”
“You’re incomprehensible.”
“What are you talking about? I love it when you fall asleep on my breasts, and I love the idea that I restore your strength. Your work drains you even if you don’t realize it.”
“You’re so flighty, you make me laugh sometimes, but other times—”
“I annoy you … I just love the idea!”
He left without another word. What did he think of her? Did he remember the young woman he met at the Casino ball at Xalapa? The promise he made her that he would educate her, teach her to be a woman in the city and in the world? Would he remember the young
mother who wanted to accompany him in his work, identify herself with him, prove that in their married life the two of them shared the life of the world, the life of work?
This idea weighed more and more on Laura Díaz. Her husband had rejected her, had not carried out the promise that they would be together in everything, united in bed, in being parents, but also in work, in that part of the whole that eats up the life of each day the way children eat the sections of an orange, transforming all the rest—bed and being parents, matrimony and dreams—into minutes to be counted and finally into empty skins to be discarded.
“The mute obedience of impassioned souls.”
Laura blamed herself. She remembered the child from Catemaco, the girl from Veracruz, the young woman from Xalapa, and in each she saw the growing promise that culminated in her wedding eight years before. Ever since then I’ve shrunk instead of growing, I’ve been turning into a little dwarf, as if he didn’t deserve me, as if he’d done me a favor, he didn’t ask me to do it, he didn’t impose it on me, I asked for it, and I imposed it on myself in order to be worthy of him. Now I know I wanted to be worthy of a mystery, I didn’t know him, I was impressed by him physically, his way of speaking, of taking control of the monster of the crowd, I was impressed by that speech he gave in our Xalapa house in honor of the Catalan woman. That’s what I fell in love with—to jump from my love to knowledge of the person I loved, love as a trampoline of knowing, its labyrinth, my God, I’ve spent eight years trying to penetrate a mystery that isn’t mysterious, for my husband is what he seems to be, not more, what appears is what he is, there’s nothing more to discover, I’ll ask the audience whom the leader López Greene speaks to, the man is for real, what he tells them is true, there’s nothing hidden behind his words, his words are his entire truth, every last bit, believe in him, there is no one more authentic, what you see is what he is, what he says is nothing more.
From Laura he demanded out of habit what had satisfied him before. Little by little, she stopped feeling satisfied with what had once satisfied both of them.
“When I met you, I thought I didn’t deserve you. What do you think of that? Why don’t you answer?”
“I thought I could change you.”
“So what you bought in Xalapa seems pretty paltry to you now.”
“You don’t understand. We all progress, we all can either better ourselves or get worse.”
“Are you saying you wanted to change me?”
“For the good.”
“All right then, tell me something, honestly. Am I a good wife and mother? When I wanted to work with you, didn’t you stop me with that little stroll through hell you set up for me? What more did you want?”
“Someone to confide in,” said Juan Francisco, and first he got out of bed, but then quickly looked back at Laura with shining eyes and, with a grimace of pain, threw himself into his wife’s arms.
“My love, my love.”
 
That year, President Obregón was succeeded by Plutarco El
as Calles, another Sonora man, another one of the Agua Prieta triumvirate. The Revolution had been carried out to the chant of
FREE VOTES, NO
REELECTION
because Porfirio Díaz had kept himself in office for three decades with fraudulent reelections. Now, ex-President Obregón wanted to abrogate his own ineligibility and return to the throne of the eagle and serpent. Many said it would betray one of the principles of the Revolution. But the rationale of power had its way. The Constitution was amended to allow a former president’s reelection. Everyone had been certain that the three Sonora men would take turns at being President until they died of old age, just like Don Porfirio D
az, unless another Madero, another revolution, came along.
“Morones wants us union men to back General Obregón’s reelection. I’d like to discuss it with you,” said Juan Francisco to the union leaders gathered once again in his house, as they did every month of every year. In the little living room, Laura put aside her book.

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