The Years with Laura Diaz

myself, not by others but by myself, made into a child not by the silly girls or protective aunts or Mutti, who doesn’t want to accept any passion so as to stay lucid and keep house because she knows that without her the house will fall apart like those sand castles children make on the Mocambo beach, and if she doesn’t do the work, who will? While I’m thinking about myself, Laura Diaz, I observe myself distant from my own life, as if I were someone else, a second Laura who sees the first separated from the world around me, indifferent to the people outside my home-is it healthy to be that way?-but concerned with those living here with me, but in both cases separated and yet guilty about being a burden, like the boy in Thomas Hardy’s novel, I am loved by everyone, but I weigh them down even if they don’t say so, I’m the grown-up little girl about to turn twenty-two without bringing bread to the house where she gets her daily bread, the big little girl who thinks herself justified because she reads books to her paralyzed father, because she loves them all and all of them love her. I will live from the love I give and from the love I receive. It isn’t enough, it isn’t enough to love my mother, to weep for my brother, to feel sorry for my father, it isn’t enough to adopt my own grief and my own tenderness as rights that liberate me from other responsibilities. Now I want to overflow my love for them, exceed my grief for them by freeing them from me, taking myself off their backs, giving them the gift of not worrying about me without my giving up worrying about them, Papa Fernando, Mutti Leticia, Aunts Hilda and Virginia and Maria de la O, Santiago my love, I’m not asking either comprehension or help from you, I’m going to do what I must to be with you without being of you but by being for you…

Juan Francisco Lopez Greene was a very tall man, more than six feet, very dark, with both Indian and Negroid traces in his features-while his lips were thick, his profile was straight; while his hair was crinkly, his skin was smooth and sweet as sugar frosting, night-dark as a gypsy’s. His eyes were green islands in a yellow sea. His broad, muscular shoulders spoiled the look of his neck, which was strong but longer than it seemed, just as his arms were long and his devoutly proletarian hands were large. His torso was short, his legs long, and his feet bigger than miners’ shoes.

He was powerful, awkward, delicate, different.

He had come to the Casino ball with Xavier Icaza, the young labor lawyer, son of a family of aristocrats who now served the working class. It was he who brought to the dance this man so alien to the social profile of good Xalapa families: Juan Francisco Lopez Greene.

Icaza, a brilliant but scarcely conventional man, wrote avant-garde poetry and picaresque tales; his books were illustrated with Cubist vignettes of skyscrapers and airplanes, and his poetry conveyed the sense of modern velocity that the author sought while his novels brought the tradition of Francisco de Quevedo and the Lazarillo de Tormes to modern Mexico City, a city that was filling up-as Icaza explained to groups of guests at the Casino ball-with immigrants from the countryside and that would only go on growing and growing. He winked at the local businessmen, now’s the time to buy cheap, Colonia Hipodromo, Colonia Napoles, Chapultepec Heights, Parque de la Lama, even Desierto de los Leones, just you wait and see how real estate is going to boom, don’t be fools-he laughed with his cheery teeth-invest now.

He was called a Futurist, a Dadaist, an Estridentista, names that no one had ever heard before in Veracruz and that Icaza introduced with an almost insolent air by driving a yellow Isotta-Fraschini convertible, as if to establish his credentials immediately and well. He asked for the hand of Miss Ana Guido, and when her parents expressed doubts, Xavier Icaza drove his powerful automobile right up the stairs and into the cathedral one Sunday during Mass. The roar of the motor and the insane vision of the car going up the steep stairs with the young, high-spirited lawyer using all the horsepower at his disposal to do it. He dangerously stopped the car where the stairway ended and the atrium began and announced in a loud voice that he’d come to marry Ana and nothing and no one was going to stop him.

“I’m not dealing in make-believe,” the young lawyer Icaza was saying to his old acquaintances at the Casino ball, “this is a matter of mutual convenience. The Revolution has set free all the country’s dormant forces-the businessmen and industrialists who were thwarted while the Dictator turned over the country to foreigners, the functionaries whose careers were blocked by Porfirio’s old bureaucracy, and let’s not even start on the landless peasants and workers eager to organize and have a respected public voice. Listen, who were the rebels in the Rio Blanco factories and the Cananea mines, the first to rise up against the dictatorship? What were they if not workers?”

“Madero didn’t make any concessions to them,” said the father of the young rooster expert from Cordoba.

“Because Madero didn’t understand anything,” Icaza claimed. “On the other hand, the executioner Huerta, the man who murdered Madero, tried to get the support of the working class and permitted the biggest May Day demonstrations ever seen. He allowed for an eight-hour workday and six-day workweek, but when the unions asked him for democracy, that’s when he turned them down, he arrested the leaders and deported them. One of them is my friend here, Juan Francisco Lopez Greene, to whom I introduce you with great pleasure. The Greene part doesn’t mean he’s English. Everybody in Tabasco is named Greene because they’re descendants of English pirates whose mothers were Indians or blacks, isn’t that right?”

Juan Francisco smiled and nodded. “Laura, you’re a cultured type. I’ll leave him to you,” Icaza said, charming and firm, and wandered off.

Laura suspected that this new arrival, so alien to provincial customs, who had appeared at the San Cayetano soirees like the “Jesus wearing six-guns” the Cordoba landowner had mentioned, would be personally awkward, like his huge miners’ shoes, square, thick, and hobnailed. She imagined that his speaking style was like a rain of stones punctuated by silence. She was therefore surprised to hear a smooth voice, serene and even sweet, in which each word bore the weight of conviction, which is why Juan Francisco Lopez Greene let himself seem so gentle and speak so mildly.

“Is Xavier Icaza right?” Laura asked abruptly, looking for a way to begin the conversation.

Juan Francisco insisted. “Yes. I know very well that they all try to use us.”

“To use whom?” asked Laura, unaffectedly.

“The workers.”

“You’re a worker?” Laura again queried impulsively, speaking in the familiar mode to Juan Francisco, certain this wouldn’t offend him, challenging him slightly to address her as an equal, not as “miss,” uncertainly seeking common ground with this unknown man, sniffing him out, feeling herself a bit of a beast, a bit savage, as she’d never felt with Orlando, who made her think things that were perverse, refined, and so subtle that they evaporated like a poisonous perfume, strong but deleterious and short-lived.

He didn’t accept the challenge. “It’s a risk, miss. We just have to take the chance.”

(If only he’d speak familiarly to me, begged Laura, I want him to speak familiarly to me, not call me miss, I’d like for once to feel different, I want a man to say things to me, do things to me I don’t know or don’t expect or can’t ask for, I can’t ask him for that, it has to come from him, and on that depends everything that may come later, from a simple miss or no miss… )

“What risk might that be, Mr. Greene?” Laura reverted to formality.

“The risk that they’ll manipulate us, Laura.”

He added, without noticing (or perhaps pretending he didn’t see) the change in color of the girl’s face, that “we” could also extract advantages from “them.” Laura became accustomed right then and there to the strange plural which, without pretensions or false modesty, embraced a community-of workers, fighters, comrades, that’s right, and of the man speaking with her.

“Icaza has no illusions. But I do.” He smiled for the first time, with a trace of malice but more than anything else with self-irony, thought Laura. “I do.”

He said he had illusions because the Constitution made concessions to Mexican peasants and workers it did not have to make. Carranza was an old hacienda owner whose long white beard curled when he had to deal with workers and Indians; Alvaro Obregon was an intelligent but opportunistic Creole who could just as well dine with God or with the devil and make the devil believe he was actually God and convince God not to worry, because He could be a devil and had no reason to envy Lucifer; in any case, General Obregon would be the judge and would decree, You are the Devil… The Constitution consecrated the rights of the worker and of the land because without “us”-here we go again, Laura said to herself-“they” would not win the Revolution or keep themselves in power.

He asked her to dance, and she laughed through a grimace of pain and stepped-on dancing shoes, asking the labor leader if they might not better practice out on the balcony, and he also laughed and said yes, neither God nor