Years With Laura Diaz, The (29 page)

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Authors: Carlos Fuentes

BOOK: Years With Laura Diaz, The
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“Aunt Virginia, I swear I’ll come.”
“Don’t swear in vain, it’s sacrilegious. Why did you have children if you don’t take care of them? Didn’t you promise to look after them?”
“Life is difficult, Aunt Virginia. Sometimes—”
“Nonsense. The difficult thing is loving people. Your own people, understand? Not abandoning them, not forcing anyone to beg a bit of charity before dying,
sacre bleu!”
She stopped and fixed her black-diamond eyes on Laura, eyes the more notable because of the quantity of face powder around them.
“You never got Minister Vasconcelos to publish my poems. That’s how you fulfill your promises, ingrate. I’ll die without anyone’s having recited my poems but me.”
She turned her back, with a timorous movement, on her niece.
Laura recounted the conversation with Aunt Virginia to María de la O, who could only say, “Pity, daughter, a little pity for the old left with no love or respect from others.”
“You’re the only one who knows the truth, Auntie. Tell me what I should do.”
“Let me think it over. I don’t want to make a mistake.”
She looked down at her swollen ankles, and burst out laughing.
At night, Laura felt pain and fear, had trouble falling asleep, and, like Aunt Virginia, perambulated alone around the patio, barefoot so she wouldn’t make noise or interrupt the sobs and memory-infused cries that escaped, unknowingly, from the bedrooms where the four sisters slept.
Which would be the first to go? Which the last? Laura swore to herself that no matter where she was, she would take care of the last sister, have the survivor live with her or come to be with her here, and not let Aunt Virginia’s fear be realized: “I’m afraid of being the last and dying alone.”
A nocturnal patio where the nightmares of the four women gathered together.
It was hard for Laura to include her mother, Leticia, in this chorus of fear. She reproached herself when she admitted that she hoped that if one of the four were left alone it would be either Mutti or Auntie. Aunts Hilda and Virginia had become insane and impossible; both, the niece was convinced, were virgins. María de la O was not.
“My mother made me sleep with her customers beginning when I was eleven.”
Laura had felt neither horror nor compassion when Auntie confessed this; it was years earlier, in the house on Avenida Sonora. She knew that the generous, warm-hearted mulatta was telling her so Laura would understand how much Grandfather Felipe Kelsen’s bastard daughter owed to the simple humanity of Grandmother Cosima Reiter—identical to her own despite differences of age, class, and race—and to the generosity of Laura’s father, Fernando Díaz. The niece went to embrace and kiss her aunt, but María de la O stopped her
with an outstretched arm: she didn’t want compassion, and Laura only kissed the open palm of the admonitory hand.
Leticia was the last. Laura, back at home, desired with all her heart that Mutti would be the last to die, because she never complained, never gave up, kept the boardinghouse clean and in working order, and without her, Laura could imagine the other three castaways wandering through the corridors like souls in torment while dirty dishes piled up in the kitchen with its braziers, herbs grew unweeded in the garden, the larder emptied out and died of hunger, cats took over the house, and flies covered the sleeping faces of Virginia, Hilda, and María de la O with buzzing masks.
“Yes, we all face a future that has no tenderness,” Leticia said unexpectedly one afternoon while Laura was helping her wash dishes, adding, after a brief pause, that she was happy Laura was back at home.
“Mutti, I’ve felt so much nostalgia for my childhood, for the inside spaces especially. How they stay with you, even though they fade: a bedroom, a dresser, a water pitcher, that horrible pair of pictures—the brat and the dog—I have no idea why you keep them.”
“Nothing reminds me more of your father, and I don’t know why, because he wasn’t like them at all.”
“Neither a brat nor a beauty?” Laura smiled.
“That’s not it. They’re just things I associate with him. I can’t sit down to eat without seeing him at the head of the table with those pictures behind him.”
“Did you love each other a lot?”
“We love each other a lot, Laura.”
She took her daughter’s hand and asked her if she thought the past condemned us to death.
“One day you’ll see how much the past matters in order to go on living and, for those who loved each other, to go on loving each other.”
Although she managed to reestablish intimacy with her past, Laura could not establish contact with her own sons. Santiago was a perfect little gentleman, courteous and prematurely serious. Danton was a little devil who didn’t take his mother seriously or, for that matter, unseriously. It was as if she were just one more aunt in a harem with no
sultan. Laura didn’t know how to talk to them, to attract them, and she felt the failure was all on her side, an emotional insufficiency that she, and not her sons, had somehow to fill.
Put another way, the younger son, at the age of ten, behaved as if he were the sultan, the prince of the house who had no need to prove anything and could act capriciously and demand (and get) the acquiescence of the four women, who looked on him rather fearfully. At the same time, they looked on the older brother with genuine tenderness. Danton seemed to take pride in the almost frightened reticence that his aunts and grandmother showed in dealing with him, although María de la O once muttered, What this brat needs is a good spanking. The next time he didn’t even bother to tell them he wasn’t going to be sleeping at home, Grandmother Leticia did give him a spanking, to which the child responded by saying he wouldn’t forget the insult.
“I’m not insulting you, snot-nose, I’m just giving you a spanking. I reserve insults for important people, you idiot.”
It was the only time Laura ever saw her mother be violent, and in that act all the lack of authority, all the lack that had begun to mark her own existence, became manifest, as if it were Laura who deserved the spanking for not being the one to discipline her unruly child.
Santiago viewed everything with a serious eye, and sometimes it seemed that the boy was restraining a sigh, resigned but disapproving, with regard to his younger brother.
Laura tried to bring them together to go on walks or play with her. They both stubbornly resisted. They didn’t take offense and didn’t reject her: they rejected each other and acted like rivals in opposing gangs. Laura recalled the old family discord between pro-German and pro-Allied factions during the Great War, but this was different. This was a war of character, of personality. Whom did Santiago the older resemble, whom Danton the younger? Actually, they should have been reversed, with Danton older and Santiago younger, the second Santiago. Would he be like his young uncle who’d been shot soon after his twentieth birthday? Would Danton be ambitious like his father, Juan Francisco, but would he be strong, not weak and ambitious like his father, who was happy with so little?
She had no idea how to talk to them, no idea how to attract them, and she felt that the lack was entirely hers, that it was her emotional insufficiency, not her sons’, and that she would have to fill it.
“I promise you, Mutti,” she said to Leticia as she bid them goodbye, “I’m going to put my life in order so the boys can come back to us.”
She emphasized the plural, and Leticia raised an eyebrow with feigned surprise, reproaching her daughter for that deceitful “us.” It was a wordless way of telling her that that was the difference between you two and your father and me: we put up with separation because we loved each other so much. But Laura had a sharp, undesired premonition when she repeated, “Back to us, to Juan Francisco and me.”
 
When she took the return train to Mexico City, she knew that she’d lied, that she was going to seek a destiny for herself and her sons without Juan Francisco, that reconciliation with her husband would be the easy way out and the worst thing for the boys’ future.
She lowered the window on the Pullman car, and saw herself and Juan Francisco seated in the Isotta-Fraschini that Xavier Icaza had given them as a wedding present, useless but elegant, and that they had given, also uselessly, to the four Kelsen sisters, who no longer left their house; the car was now in the hands of Zampaya, who could show off from time to time driving it around or taking the boys on a little excursion. She saw the four Kelsen sisters sitting there: they’d made the supreme effort to see her off along with the two boys. Danton didn’t look at her, pretending instead to drive the car and making extravagant noises with his mouth and nose. She would never forget Santiago’s gaze. He was his own ghost.
The train pulled out, and Laura felt a sudden anguish. There weren’t only four women in the Xalapa house. Li Po! She’d forgotten Li Po! Where was the Chinese doll, why didn’t she look for it or think about it? She tried to shout, to ask, but the train pulled out while handkerchiefs were waved.
“Can you imagine a leader in the workers’ movement with a luxury car imported from Europe parked in his garage? Forget about it, Laura. Give it to your mama and your aunts.”
Detroit: 1932
O
RLANDO’S NOTE had been waiting for her at the desk of the Hotel Regis when she returned from Xalapa. She’d been expecting it.
Laura my love, I’m not what I say I am nor what I seem to be. And I’d rather keep my secret. You’re getting too close to the mystery of your
Orlando
And without mystery our love would be uninteresting. I’ll always love you …
The hotel manager had told her she needn’t check out immediately, because Mrs. Cortina had taken care of everything until the following week.
“That’s right, Doña Carmen Cortina. She pays for the room that you and your friend Mr. Ximénez occupy. Well, for the past three years, she’s been paying for Mr. Ximénez.”
Friend? Whose friend? she was stupidly going to ask. Friend in what sense?, friend of Laura, friend of Carmen, lover of which, lover of both?
Now, in Detroit, she remembered that a terrible feeling of abandonment had overwhelmed her at that moment, that she’d felt an urgent need for someone who’d feel sorry for her, “my hunger for pity.” And her immediate reaction, just as sudden as the desolation, impelled her to visit Diego Rivera’s house in Coyoacán and say, Here I am, remember me? I need work, I need to put a roof over my head, please accept me, maestro.
“Of course, the kid wearing black.”
“Yes, that’s why I dressed in mourning again. Remember me?”
“Well, mourning clothes still horrify me. They make me feel jinxed. Ask Frida to lend you something more colorful and then we’ll talk. Anyway, you look very different and very pretty.”
“I think so too,” said a melodious voice behind her, and Frida Kahlo made her entrance with a clatter of necklaces, medallions, and rings, rings especially, one on every finger, sometimes two: Laura D
az remembered the incident involving her grandmother Cosima Kelsen and wondered, watching this strange-looking woman enter the studio—black eyebrows, or rather one continuous black eyebrow, braided black hair tied up with wool ribbons, and a wide peasant skirt—whether the Hunk of Papantla hadn’t robbed the rings from Grandmother Cosima just to give them to his lover Frida. The sight of Rivera’s wife had Laura convinced that this was the goddess of transformations she and Grandfather Felipe had discovered in the Veracruz forest, the figure made by the Zapotal people which he had tried to demythologize by turning it into a mere ceiba tree, so that she wouldn’t go on believing in fantasies, a marvelous feminine figure staring at eternity, crisscrossed with belts of seashells and serpents, her head adorned with a crown woven by the forest, ornamented with necklaces and rings and earrings on her arms, nose, ears. No matter what Grandfather had said, a ceiba was more dangerous than a woman. A ceiba was a tree bristling with spines. No one could touch it. No one could embrace it.
Was Frida Kahlo the temporary name of a native goddess who assumed mortal form from time to time, reappearing here and there to make love with
guerrilleros
, bandits, and artists?
“She can work with me,” said Frida imperiously as she descended the studio stairs, averting her gaze neither from Rivera’s bulging eyes nor from Laura’s shadowy and deep-set ones. In that instant, Lauras, looking at herself in Frida, looked at herself, looked at Laura Díaz looking at Laura D
az, saw herself transformed, with a new personality about to be born in those familiar features but also about to metamorphose and, perhaps, be forgotten by Laura D
az herself, with her sculpted, thin, powerful face, her high, strong, long nose, the bridge flanked by eyes that grew increasingly melancholy, the rings under her eyes like lakes of uncertainty restrained at the edge of her pale cheeks, happy to have found the crimson of her thin lips, now even more severe, as if Laura’s entire visage had become, simply in contrast to Frida’s, more gothic, more statuesque when face to face with the vegetative life of Diego Rivera’s partner, a plucked flower, drained but still blooming.
“She can work with me … I’m going to need help in Detroit while you work and I, well … you know …”
She stumbled and slipped. Laura ran to help her, took her by the arm, and unintentionally touched her thigh—You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?—and what she felt was a dry, fleshless leg, compensated for or was it confirmed—in an act of simultaneous challenge and vulnerability, a dreamy glance that the women strangely exchanged. Rivera laughed.
“Don’t worry. I had no intention of touching her, Friducha. She’s all yours. Just think, this kid is German like you. And one Valkyrie is enough for me, I swear.”
Frida immediately liked Laura. She invited her to her bedroom, and the first thing she did was take out a mirror with an indigo-blue enameled frame. “Have you looked at yourself, woman, do you know how good-looking you are? Well, take advantage of it, you know you’re strange-looking, we just don’t see many great beauties, a profile that looks as if it were slashed out with a machete, the prominent nose, the
eyes sunken, deep, and shadowed. Does your Orlando think he can take the mourning out of your eyes? Forget about him. I like you.”
“How do you know about Orlando?”
“Wake up, sweetie. This city’s like a small village. Everyone knows everything.”
Frida fluffed up the pillows on her bed with its brightly painted posts and quickly said, as Laura helped her to pack, “Tomorrow we’re off to Gringoland. Diego’s going to paint a mural in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Commissioned by Henry Ford himself, imagine. You know where all this leads. The Communists around here are attacking him for taking capitalist money. The capitalists up there are attacking him for being a Communist. I just tell him that an artist is above all this stupid bullshit. The important thing is the work. That’s what remains, no one can erase that, and that’s what will speak to the people when all the politicians and critics are pushing up daisies.
“Have you got any clothes of your own? I don’t want you to imitate me. You know I trick myself out as a piñata because of my own fantasies but also to cover up my sick leg and my hobble. She may limp, but she won’t need pimps—that’s my motto,” said Frida, running her hand over the dark down covering her upper lip.
Laura came back with her valise. Would Frida like her in the Balenciaga and Schiaparelli dresses she’d bought with Elizabeth and thanks to Elizabeth’s generosity, or should she revert to a simpler style? A sudden intuition told her that what would matter to this woman, so carefully turned out and decorative, and exactly because of that, would be naturalness in other people. That was her way of making others accept the naturalness of the extraordinary in her, in Frida Kahlo.
Frida kissed her hairless ixcuintle dogs goodbye, and they all took the train to Detroit.
The long journey through Mexico’s northern deserts with their rows upon rows of magueys reminded Rivera of a verse by the young poet Salvador Novo: “The magueys do gymnastics in rows five hundred deep.” But Frida said that Novo was no good, watch out for him, he was a backbiter, a bad fag, not like the tender, gentle queers she knew who were members of her group.
Rivera laughed. “If he’s bad, then the worse he is, the better.”
“Watch out for him. He’s one of those Mexicans who’d sell their own mother just to bring off a cruel joke. You know what he said to me at the show of that Tizoc guy? ‘Bye-bye, Pavlova.’ So I answered, ‘Bye bye, Salivator.’ I thought he was going to explode.”
“How vindictive you can be, Friducha. If you start speaking badly of Novo, you’re giving Novo permission to speak badly about us.”
“Doesn’t he already? The kindest insult he uses on you is to call you a cuckold. And me he calls Free-ass Kulo.”
“It doesn’t matter. Nothing but resentment, gossip, stories. Novo the writer stands. As does Rivera the painter. And so does life itself. The anecdotes evaporate.”
“Fine. Diego, pass me the ukulele. Let’s sing the Mixteca song. It’s my favorite song for watching Mexico pass by.”
How far I am from the land where I was born,
Immense nostalgia invades my thoughts …
They changed trains at the border and then again at St. Louis, Missouri. From there, they went straight to Detroit, Frida singing to her ukulele, telling dirty jokes, and then, at nightfall, while Rivera slept, staring at the passage of the infinite North American plains and talking about the pulsing of the locomotive, that steel heart which excited her with its rhythm, simultaneously spirited and destructive like that of all machines.
“When I was a girl, I would dress up as a man and raise hell in philosophy class with my pals. We called ourselves the Caps. I fit right in, liberated from the conventions of my class, with a group of boys who loved Mexico City as much as I did, and we explored it all the time, the parks, neighborhoods, studying it as if it were a book, from cantina to cantina, from stall to stall, a small, pretty city all blue and pink, a city of sweet, disorganized parks, silent lovers, wide avenues and dark alleys that took you by surprise.”
All her life, she told Laura as they let the plains of Kansas and the wideness of the Mississippi run by, she’d sought out the dark city, discovering
its smells and tastes, seeking above all company, friendship, any way to tell solitude to go fuck itself, to be one of the boys, to keep an eye out for the bastards, Laura, because in Mexico, all you’ve got to do is stick your neck out a little and a regiment of evil dwarfs cuts off your head.
“Resentment and solitude,” said the woman with sweet eyes under the aggressive brows, sticking four roses into her hair instead of a crown and peering into the compartment’s mirror to see the sweetness of her flower hairdo against the sunset over the great river of the plains, the Father of Waters. It smelled of charcoal, mud, dung, fertile land.
“I’d go out with the Caps and do all kinds of crazy things, like robbing trolleys and getting the cops to chase us the way they do in Buster Keaton movies, which are my favorites. Who would have known that a trolley would get even with me for stealing its chicks—because the Caps only stole single trolley cars, left at night in the Indianilla depot. We never took anything from anyone, but we did win the freedom of running around half Mexico City at night, all at whim, Laurita, following our fantasy but always on the rails, you never leave the rails, that’s the secret, admit there are rails but use them to escape, to liberate yourself.”
The great river, wide as a sea, origin of all the waters in the land lost by the Indians, water you can bathe in, the substance that receives you with joy, refreshes you, arranges spaces exactly the way God dreamed them: water is the divine material that welcomes you, unlike hard matter, which rejects you, wounds you, penetrates you.

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