Read Years With Laura Diaz, The Online
Authors: Carlos Fuentes
Years With Laura Diaz, The (47 page)
My brother dazzles me, said Santiago to Laura, he makes me feel inferior and stupid, he has all the answers ahead of time, while I think of them too late, when it’s all over. Why should I be like that?
She said the two of them were very different. Danton was made for the outside world, but you were made for the interior world, Santiago, where answers don’t have to be instantaneous or charming, because what really matter are the questions.
“And sometimes there are no answers.” Santiago smiled from bed. “Only questions. You’re right.”
“I know, son. But I believe in you.”
He got out of bed with difficulty and went over to his easel. It was hard to tell the tremor of fever from the tremor of creative anticipation. Sitting in front of the canvas, he transmitted that fever, that doubt. Laura watched him and felt him in her own skin. It’s normal, that’s how he’s been since he discovered his artistic vocation. Every day he surprises himself, feels transformed, discovers the other who’s within him.
“I discover him too, Juan Francisco, but I don’t tell him. You should try to be with him a little.”
Juan Francisco shook his head. He didn’t want to admit it, but Santiago lived in a world he didn’t understand. He didn’t know what to say to his own son, they were never close. Wasn’t it a deception to be near him now, because he was sick?
“It’s more than that, Juan Francisco. Santiago isn’t just sick.”
Juan Francisco didn’t understand that being an artist was synonymous with being sick. It was like imagining a double mirror which, while being itself, has two faces, each one reflecting a different reality, sickness and art, not necessarily twin realities but occasionally, yes, fraternal realities. Which came first, which nourished Santiago’s uneasy days, art or sickness?
Laura watched her son as he slept. She liked to be next to the bed when Santiago awakened. What she saw was this: he awakened surprised,
but it was impossible to know if it was the surprise of waking up alive or the shock of having one more day to paint.
but it was impossible to know if it was the surprise of waking up alive or the shock of having one more day to paint.
She felt excluded from that daily choice, and she confessed she’d have liked to be part of what Santiago chose each day: Lauras, my mother, Laura D
az is part of my day. She would spend it with him, next to him, she’d given up everything to take care of him, but Santiago did not openly recognize that company, she was only in his company, or, as Laura would say, he let her in but without thanking her.
az is part of my day. She would spend it with him, next to him, she’d given up everything to take care of him, but Santiago did not openly recognize that company, she was only in his company, or, as Laura would say, he let her in but without thanking her.“Perhaps he’s got nothing to thank me for, and I should understand and respect that.”
One afternoon, he felt strong and asked Laura to help him to the balcony where the family held its afternoon gatherings. He’d lost so much weight that she could have carried him as she hadn’t since he was small, before he went away with Mutti and the aunts in Xalapa. Now the mother could reproach herself for that abandonment, for her spurious reasons—Juan Francisco was beginning his political career, there was no time for the boys, and worse, Laura Díaz was going to live her independent life, her sons were excess baggage like her husband, she was a provincial girl married young to a man seventeen years older than she; it was her turn to live, take risks, learn, was the nun Gloria Soriano merely a pretext for her to leave home? The time with Orlando Ximénez and Carmen Cortina, with Diego and Frida in Detroit, was no time to be carrying around a child who himself carried so much promise, this Santiago with a brow so clear that glory, creation, and beauty could be read there. Never, she swore to herself, would she neglect to take care of this child, who always, always contained all the promise, all the beauty, all the tenderness, and all the creation in the world.
Now the lost time suddenly materialized before her with the face of guilt. Was that why Santiago did not express gratitude: had her maternal care come too late? Being a mother excluded any desire for gratitude or recognition. It should be enough in itself without argument or expectation, like the instant of sufficient tenderness.
Laura sat down with her son opposite the urban landscape. It really was undergoing a transformation: like a forest of proliferating mushrooms,
skyscrapers were popping up everywhere, the old cabs were changed for taxis whose meters seemed incomprehensible and made their clients suspicious, the broken-down buses were replaced by gigantic vehicles belching black smoke like bat breath, yellow trolleys with their varnished yellow wooden benches and their route maps were replaced by threatening electric buses that looked like prehistoric beasts.
skyscrapers were popping up everywhere, the old cabs were changed for taxis whose meters seemed incomprehensible and made their clients suspicious, the broken-down buses were replaced by gigantic vehicles belching black smoke like bat breath, yellow trolleys with their varnished yellow wooden benches and their route maps were replaced by threatening electric buses that looked like prehistoric beasts.
People no longer came home to eat at two in the afternoon and went back to work at five. They began living the gringo novelty of the unbroken workday. Organ grinders were disappearing, along with ragmen and knife and scissor sharpeners. Street-corner stores and tobacco stands were dying, and the rival telephone companies finally united: Laura remembered Jorge Maura (she barely ever thought of him now) and lost track of what Santiago was saying on the balcony, sitting barefoot in his robe. I love you, city, my city, I love you because you dare to show your soul in your body, I love you because you think with your skin, because you won’t let me see you if I haven’t dreamed you first, like the conquistadors, because even if you’ve been left dry, lake city, you have compassion, and you fill my hands with water when I have to put up with tears, because you let me name you only by seeing you and see you only by naming you, thank you for inventing me so I could try to reinvent you, Mexico City, thank you for letting me speak to you without guitars and colors and bullets, sing to you with promises of dust, promises of wind, promises never to forget you, promises to revive you even if I disappear, promises to name you, promises to see you in the dark, Mexico City, in exchange for a single gift from you: keep on seeing me when I’m no longer here, sitting on the balcony, with my mother next to me …
“To whom are you speaking, son?”
“To your beautiful hands, Mama.”
… To the childhood that was my second mother, to the youth which happens only once, to the nights I shall no longer see, to the dreams I leave her so the city will care for them, to Mexico City which will go on waiting for me forever …
“I love you, city, I love you.”
Laura, leading him back to bed, understood that everything her son was saying to the world he was saying to her. He didn’t have to be explicit; words might betray him. Brought out into the open, a love that could live without words in the deep, moist terrain of daily company might dry out. The silence between the two of them could be eloquent.
“I don’t want to be a pain, I don’t want to be a bother.”
Silence. Tranquillity. Solitude. That’s what unites us, thought Laura, holding Santiago’s burning hand in her own. There is no greater respect or tenderness than that of being together and silent, living together but living the one for the other without ever saying so. With no need to say so. Being explicit might betray that deep tenderness which was only revealed in a skein of complicities, suppositions, and acts of grace.
Laura and Santiago saw all this while he was dying, both of them knowing he was dying, but both accomplices, knowing, and thankful one for the other because the only thing they wordlessly decided to eliminate was compassion. The shining eyes of the boy, sinking deeper and deeper by the day, asked the world and the mother, the two forever identified in the son’s spirit: Who has the right to take pity on me? Don’t betray me with pity … I’ll be a man to the end.
It was hard for her not to feel sorry for her son, not only not showing her sorrow but eliminating it from her spirit and from her very eyes. Not just hiding it, but not having it, because Santiago’s wide-awake, electric senses could detect it instantly. It’s possible to betray with compassion; those were words Laura would repeat as she fell asleep, now every night on a cot next to her feverish and emaciated son, the son of promise, the adored child.
“My son, what do you need, what can I do for you?”
“Nothing, Mama, what can I do for you?”
“You know I wish I could steal all the glories and virtues from the world and give them to you.”
“Thank you. But you already did, didn’t you know?”
“What else? Something else?”
What else. Something else. Sitting on the edge of Santiago’s bed, Laura D
az suddenly recalled a conversation between the two brothers
she had accidentally overheard when Santiago, who always left his bedroom door open, was, extraordinarily, talking to Danton.
az suddenly recalled a conversation between the two brothersshe had accidentally overheard when Santiago, who always left his bedroom door open, was, extraordinarily, talking to Danton.
Papa and Mama are all confused about us, surmised Danton, they imagine too many roads for each of us … How good it is our ambitions don’t conflict, replied Santiago, so we don’t take any shortcuts … Even so, Danton persisted, you think your ambition is good and mine is bad, right? No, Santiago made clear, it isn’t that yours is bad and mine good or vice versa; we’re condemned to carry them out, or at least to try to. Condemned? Danton laughed. Condemned?
Now Danton was married to Magdalena Ayub Longoria and was living, as he’d always wished, on Avenida de Los Virreyes in Las Lomas de Chapultepec. He’d been spared the neo-baroque horrors of Polanco but not because of his in-laws’ wishes. Even so, he dreamed of living in a house with straight lines and undistracting geometries. Laura saw her second son less and less. She rationalized that he too was guilty for not visiting her but acknowledged she was anxiously looking after Santiago. She didn’t have to seek him out because there he was, weakened by recurring sicknesses, right at home. He wasn’t her prisoner. Santiago was a young artist with a destiny no one could destroy because it was the destiny of art, of artworks that would ultimately outlive the artist.
Touching Santiago’s fevered forehead, Laura wondered, nevertheless, if this young artist, her son, hadn’t brought together beginning and ending too quickly. The tortured and erotic figures in his paintings weren’t a promise but a conclusion. They weren’t a beginning but, irremediably, an ending. They were all finished works. Understanding that anguished her, because Laura Díaz wanted to see in her son the complete realization of a personality whose felicity depended on his creativity It was unfair that his body was betraying him, and that the body, calamitously, didn’t depend on will—Santiago’s or his mother’s.
But she was in no mood to give up. She watched her abstracted, absorbed son working, painting alone and only for himself, as it should be, whatever the fate of the painting may be, my son is going to reveal his gifts, but will not have time for his conquests, he’s going to work, to imagine, but will not have time to produce: his painting is an inevitability,
that’s the reward, my son doesn’t take the place of another, and no one can take his place in what he and he alone can do, it doesn’t matter for how long; there is no frustration in his work, even if his life is cut short, his progress is astonishing, dedicating oneself to art means one revelation after another, going from surprise to surprise.
that’s the reward, my son doesn’t take the place of another, and no one can take his place in what he and he alone can do, it doesn’t matter for how long; there is no frustration in his work, even if his life is cut short, his progress is astonishing, dedicating oneself to art means one revelation after another, going from surprise to surprise.
“Everything good is work,” the young Santiago would say as he painted. “The artist doesn’t exist.”
“You’re an artist,” Laura said boldly to him. “Your brother is a mercenary. That’s the difference.”
Santiago laughed, almost accusing her of being vulgarly obvious.
“No, Mama, it’s good that we’re different instead of being divided from within.”
She repented her banality. She didn’t want to make comparisons, neither critical nor reductive. She wanted to tell him it’s been wonderful watching you grow, change, generate new life, I never want to ask myself, could my son have been great? Because you already are great, I watch you paint, and I see you as if you were going to live to be one hundred, my adored son, I listened to you from the first moment, ever since you asked me without saying a word, mother, father, brother, help me to get what’s inside me out, let me
present myself.
present myself.
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