The Years with Laura Diaz

“Don’t call me ‘darling’ in public.”

“Don’t worry… darling.” The young bride laughed and tossed a pillow at the tousled, hairy head of her sleepy husband, naked, dark, powerful, smiling now with his strong teeth, wide as an Indian frieze. Like kernels of white corn, said Laura in order not to deify her husband, “wow, you’ve got teeth like kernels of white corn,” Juan Francisco was the novelty of her life, the beginning of another history, far from her family, from Veracruz, from memory.

“I hope you’re not choosing him just because he’s different,” warned Aunt Maria de la O.

“Who’s more different than you, Auntie, and whom do I love more than I love you?”

Niece and aunt joyfully hugged and kissed each other, and now, near Juan Francisco’s face while they made love, Laura would feel his attractive darkness, his irresistible difference. Love was like satiating herself with brown sugar or getting drunk on that cinnamon perfume people from the tropics inherit, as if all of them had been conceived in a wild garden amid mangos, papayas, and vanilla. Which is what she thought about in bed with her husband, mangos, papayas, and vanilla, unable not to, thinking it again and again, understanding that in thinking these things she was paying less attention to what she was doing but also prolonging it, fearing at the same time that Juan Francisco might notice her distraction and take it for indifference and confuse the passion of their united bodies in bed with a comparison unfavorable for him, even though he’d proven that Laura was a virgin, that he was the first. Would he suspect that it wasn’t being first that was disturbing him but being another, one more, the second, the third, who knows?-the fourth-in the succession of his wife’s loves?

“You never tell me about your boyfriends.”

“You never tell me about your girlfriends.”

Juan Francisco’s eyes, his movements, the shrugging of his shoulders meant: We machos are different. Why didn’t he say so directly, openly?

“We machos are different.”

Why was it unnecessary to explain that? Why was society like that, and why was it not going to change? Listening to him speak in the gigantic plaza in the heart of the city, in the rain, with his deep voice, Laura was filled from him, with him, for him, with words and arguments to which she wanted to give a meaning in order to understand him, to penetrate his mind the way he penetrated her body, so she could be his comrade, his ally. Did this revolution not include a change in what Mexican men did to their women, did it not begin a new time for women, as important as the new time for workers that Juan Francisco was defending?

She’d belonged to no other man. She chose this one. She wanted to belong completely to this one. Would Juan Francisco let himself be tempted, was he going to take her as totally as she wanted to be taken by him? Did he fear, he who never spoke of his girlfriends, he who would never say “darling” in public or private, would he fear she might penetrate him, invade his person, dispel his mystery? Did a person exist behind the personage she followed from meeting to meeting, with his serene consent, he who never told her to stay home, this is a matter for men, you’ll be bored? On the contrary, he celebrated Laura’s presence, Laura’s giving herself over to the cause, Laura’s attention to the words of her husband the leader, Juan Francisco’s speech, The Speech, because there was only one, in defense of the workers, of the right to strike, of the eight-hour workday. It was one single speech because it was one single memory, that of the textile workers’ strike in Rio Blanco, the miners’ strike in Cananea, the memory of the liberal and anarcho-syndicalist struggle; an evocation with no blank spaces, a river of causes and effects perfectly linked and interrupted only by calls to rebellion that could set water itself, as well as the mines’ copper and silver, on fire.

Laura stopped asking herself questions. Everything was interrupted, nine months after their marriage, by the birth of their first son. Juan Francisco was so happy about the baby’s being a boy that Laura wondered, What if he’d been a girl? The simple fact that she’d borne a little boy and had noted her husband’s satisfaction with this gave Laura the power to name the child.

“We’ll call him Santiago, my brother’s name.”

“Your brother died for the Revolution. It’s a good sign for the boy.”

“I want him to live, Juan Francisco, not to die, not for the Revolution or for anything else.”

It was one of those moments when each one held back what might have been said. The destiny of the people surpasses that of the individual, Laura, we are more than ourselves, we are the people, we are the working class. You can’t be stingy with your brother and lock him up in your little heart the way you’d press a dead flower between the pages of a book. But, Juan Francisco, he’s a new being, can’t you accept him simply for being that, a unique creature on this earth, someone who never existed before and will never exist again? That’s how I celebrate our son, that’s how I kiss, rock, and feed him, singing welcome, my son, you’re unique, irreplaceable, I’m going to give you all my love because you’re you, I’m resisting the temptation to dream of you as a dead Santiago reborn, a second Santiago to fulfill the interrupted destiny of my adored brother.

“When I call my son Santiago, I think about your brother’s heroism.”

“I don’t, Juan Francisco. I hope our Santiago won’t become what you say. It’s very painful to be a hero.”

“All right. I understand you. I thought you’d like to see in the new Santiago something like the resurrection of the first one.”

“Forgive me if I annoy you, but I don’t agree.”

He said nothing. He got up and went to the window to look out at the July rain.

How could she deny Juan Francisco the right to name their second son? Danton was born eleven months after their first, when General Alvaro Obregon had been President for two years and the country was slowly returning to peace. Laura liked this brilliant (or at least clever) President. He had an answer for everything. He’d lost an arm in the battle of Celaya that annihilated Pancho Villa and his Golden Troops, los Dorados de Villa, and was even able to laugh at himself: “The battlefield was like a slaughterhouse. Among all those bodies, how was I going to find the arm they’d shot off me? Gentlemen, I had a brilliant idea. I tossed a gold coin up in the air, and my arm flew up to catch it. No revolutionary general can resist a barrage of fifty thousand pesos!”

Or: “He may have only one hand, but that one is good and heavy,” she heard a labor leader say when they gathered at their house to discuss politics.

She preferred to explore the city she didn’t know and discover tranquil spots, far from the noise of the buses that had their stops painted on them:

ROMAMERIDACHAPULTEPECANDADDITIONALSTOPS PENSILBUENOSAIRESPENITENCIARIASALTODELAGUA COYOACANCALZADADELAPIEDADNINOPERDIDO

And the yellow trams that went even farther-CHURUBUSCO, XOCHIMILCO, MILPA ALTA-and the cars, especially the “frees,” the libres, taxis with signs on their windshields that announced they were “free,” and the fotingos, the Fords that confused Paseo de la Reforma with a racetrack.

Laura was a lover of parks; that’s what she called herself, with a smile on her face. First one child, then two went in the pram that Laura pushed from her home on Avenida Sonora to the Bosque de Chapultepec, where it smelled of eucalyptus, pine, hay, and green lake.

When Danton was born, Aunt Maria de la O offered to come help Laura, and Juan Francisco raised no objections to the presence of the mulatta aunt, who was getting fatter and fatter, with ankles as thick as her arms, and thick, shaky legs. The two-story house was faced with fretted brick on the lower floor and yellowish stucco on the upper. The entrance was through a garage that Juan Francisco inaugurated the day after the birth of his second son with a Ford convertible given to him by the Regional Workers Confederation of Mexico, the CROM. The head of the central committee, Luis Napoleon Morones, gave him the car in recognition, he said, of his meritorious service on behalf of the union during the Revolution.

“Without the working class,” said Morones, not just a fat man, but a thick man with thick lips, thick nose, thick neck, and thick double chins, “without the House of the Workers of the World and the Red Battalions, we would not have triumphed. The workers made the Revolution. The peasants, Villa and Zapata, were a necessary ballast, the reactionary, clerical ballast of Mexico’s black colonial past.”

“He told you exactly what you wanted to hear,” said Laura to Juan Francisco, without a hint of a question in her voice. It was he who queried her words.

“He said nothing more than the truth. The working class is the advance guard of the Revolution.”