The Years with Laura Diaz

times. Like so many things from the past, the luxurious train of yesteryear linking Mexico City to Xalapa and the port had shrunk and, obviously, aged. Worn-out seat covers, sunken seats, exposed springs, opaque windows, stained head rests, blocked sinks. Laura decided to take a private compartment in the Pullman, separated from the rest of the sleeping car, which during the day was an ordinary car and at night miraculously dropped down beds already made up with white pillows and freshly washed sheets covered by green blankets. Similarly, the regular seats turned into beds hidden, during sleeping hours, by thick canvas curtains with copper buttons.

The compartment Laura took, on the other hand, clung to an elegance Orlando Ximenez would call fane, with its patinated mirrors, a sink with gold-plated faucets, a certain trompe-l’oeil (Orlando), and, as the supreme anachronism, a silver cuspidor, like the ones in the first home of her married life, where Juan Francisco would meet with the labor leaders. The soap was Palmolive. The towels mere veils of their ancient newness. Nevertheless, the private space was permeated by a nostalgia of past glory This was the train that connected Mexico’s capital with its principal port and that night would connect Laura with the feeling of proving that you can go home again. The price of return, that was the problem, and the ticket from the National Railroads of Mexico did not indicate what it was.

She slept through the night. Xalapa passed without making itself felt; the road to the San Cayetano hacienda was overgrown. But the morning port received her with its mix of early coolness already sheltering the heat of the day-that was its delight. The sun would be splendid. Even so, she did not want to linger in nostalgia for a place that revived intense memories of her puberty, of her strolls along the seawall hand in hand with the first Santiago, and of the death of the brother buried under the waves.

Instead, ensconced in the high dovecote that was the Hotel Imperial, she enjoyed the latent challenge of the Gulf’s horizon, where the most brilliant day hides the surprise of a storm, a “norther,” rain, wind… and at night when she went down to the square, she sat down alone at a little table in the arcade, feeling herself more than ever in company-such was the pleasure that nights in Veracruz always arouse in us-amid the noise, the crowd, the coming and going of waiters carrying trays of beer, rum and Coca-Cola, mojitos, and the Veracruz mint. julep, with its toupee of mint soaking in rum.

Bands representing all the music played in Mexico-tamboras from the north, mariachis from the west, trios from the capital performing boleros, jaranas from Yucatan, marimbas from Chiapas, and Veracruz sones played on harp and vihuela-competed in an exalted cacophony that could be jolted into respect and repose only by the danzon in front of the town hall, where the most respectable couples danced with that slight movement which compromises only the feet and imposes incomparable erotic seriousness on the rest of the body, as if the slightest movement from the knee down will unleash the sensual attractions from the knee up.

It was here that Auntie Maria de la O had come to dance away her final days, married to the famous Matias Matadamas, most certainly a tiny man, as puny, cold, and bluish, all of him-hair and skin, suit. and tie, shoes and socks-as this one who, seeing her alone, invited Laura to join in the rhythm of the danzon hymn, the one called “Nereids.” He asked her to dance without saying a word, said nothing while he danced, but she, during the danzon, asked herself secretly: What did I lose? What did I win? Do I have nothing left to lose? How do I measure the distance of my life? Only by the voices that rise up out of the past and speak to me as if they were here? Should I give thanks because there’s no one left to weep over me? Should I suffer because I have no one else to lose? Is the mere fact that I’m thinking all this enough to certify it: Laura Diaz, you’re an old woman? What did I lose? What did I gain?

The powder-blue little old man respectfully escorted her to her table. One eye oozed tears and he never smiled, but when he danced, he knew a way of caressing the woman’s body with his look, with his rhythm, and with the intense contact of one hand in hers and the other on her waist. Man and woman. The danzon was still the most sensual dance because it was the one that transformed distance into nearness yet didn’t lose the distance.

Would Laura ever hear the danzon “Nereids” again, ever dance to it again after this night before her road trip to Catemaco? She took a Hotel Imperial taxi, and when she reached the lake, she got out and told the driver to go back to Veracruz.

“Don’t you want me to wait?”

“No, thanks. It isn’t necessary.”

“And your bags, ma’am? What should I tell them?”

“Tell them to hold the bags for me.”

From a distance, the Catemaco house again seemed different to her, as if absence made everything smaller but at the same time longer and narrower. Once again, returning to the past meant entering an empty, interminable corridor where one could no longer find the usual things or people one wanted to see again. As if they were playing both with our memory and with our imagination, the people and things of the past challenged us to situate them in the present without forgetting they had a past and would have a future, although that future would be, precisely, only that of memory, again, in the present.

But when it is a matter of accompanying death, what is the valid time for life? Ah, sighed Laura Diaz, she would certainly have to revisit each and every one of the years of her existence, remember, imagine, perhaps invent what never happened, even the unimaginable, with the mere presence of a being who could represent everything that wasn’t, what was, or what could have been, and what could never happen.

Today that being was she herself, Laura Diaz.

From the moment Dr. Teodoro Cesarman confirmed that her cancer would allow her, with the best care, no more than a year of life, Laura Diaz decided to travel as soon as possible to the place where she was born. For that reason, on this radiant May morning in 1972, she climbed the little hill leading to the Kelsens’ old family house. It had stood abandoned now for forty years: after Don Felipe the grandfather died, the three spinster sisters had been able to survive on the rent from the estate and the building; then, when Fernando Diaz fell ill, his family in Xalapa was helped by money earned by Laura Diaz’s diligent mother, Dona Leticia Kelsen; then when the property of the hacienda “La Peregrina” was expropriated, Mutti decided to overrule the family’s modesty and rent out rooms to guests “on condition that they be people we know.”

Laura smiled as she remembered her parents’ longing for decency and prepared herself, with her smile, to look directly at the ruin of the old single story coffee-plantation house, with its four whitewashed sides around the central patio where Laura had played as a child, with the patio doors that opened to and closed away the living places in the house-bedrooms, living room, dining room. From the outside, she could see from a distance, the outer walls were still unbroken by windows. An inexplicable reserve came over Laura as she walked toward her ancestral home, as if, before entering the ruined house, her spirit needed renewed contact with the opulent nature surrounding the house, the fig tree, the tulip tree, the red lily, the palo rojo, and the round crown of the mango tree.

Cautiously she opened the gate at the entrance and closed her eyes, blindly walking along an imaginary corridor, expecting the groan of air through the hallways, the whine of sagging doors, the screech of sick hinges, the repose of forgotten dust… Why look right at the ruin of her family home? It was like looking right at the abandonment of her own childhood, however hard, with her eyes closed, Laura Diaz, at the age of seventy-four, could hear the broom of the little black man Zampaya sweeping the patio and singing “Mr. Zampayita’s dance / you can see it in a glance, / will surely cure your every pain, / even help you weight to gain,” recalling herself on her birthday, when she hopped around the patio very early in the morning, still in her nightgown, singing “on the twelfth of May / the Virgin dressed in white / came walking into sight / with her coat so gay,” hearing the melancholy notes of a Chopin nocturne which right at this moment reached her from the room where Aunt Hilda had dreamed of being a great concert pianist in Germany, listening to the voice of Aunt Virginia reciting Ruben Dario’s verses and dreaming in turn of being a great poet published in Mexico City, smelling the tasty stews whose aromas reached her from the kitchen supervised so matter-of-factly by her mother Leticia, awaiting the return of Don Felipe from his farm chores, a hardworking and disciplined man, his dreams as an impassioned young German socialist long forgotten.

In just this way, blindly, Laura Diaz made her way through the family house, certain that her sense of direction would not fail her, that she would reach her own childhood bedroom, open the door from the patio, approach the bed, touch it, sit down, and stretch out her hand to find the doll on its pillows, happy in her Oriental princess repose, Li Po, her adored little doll, the doll with head, hands, and feet made of porcelain, with a little cotton body