The Years with Laura Diaz

It was worse outside. When she stepped out onto the street, Laura could see the full and savage damage the house had suffered. The facade looked not so much smashed as if it had been slashed with a knife, peeled like an orange, uninhabitable…

The earthquake woke up the ghosts. The telephone worked. While Laura was eating a bean-and-sardine snack and having some grape juice, she had calls from Danton and Orlando.

She hadn’t seen her younger son since Juan Francisco’s wake, when she’d scandalized her daughter-in-law’s family and especially her daughter-in-law, Magdalena Ayub Longoria.

“I couldn’t care less what that bunch of snobs think,” Laura told her son.

“It doesn’t matter,” answered Danton. “Water and oil, you know… but don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

“Thank you. I wish we could see each other.”

“So do I.”

In the eyes of her in-laws the scandal grew when Laura went off to Cuernavaca with a gringo Communist, but Danton’s money was always there, punctually and abundantly. It was their agreement, and there was nothing more to say. Until the day of the earthquake.

“Are you all right, Mama?”

“I’m all right. The house is a ruin.”

“I’ll send builders around to look it over. Move into a hotel and then call me so I can take care of things.”

“Thanks. I’ll go to Diego Rivera’s.”

There was an uncomfortable silence, and then Danton, in a cheery voice, said, “The things that happen. The roof collapsed on top of Dona Carmen Cortina. While she was sleeping. Did you know her? Just imagine. Buried in her own bed, as flat as a pancake. Mexico, beautiful and adored! as the song goes. They say she was the life of the party back in the 1930s.”

A little while later, the telephone rang again, and Laura flinched. She remembered the two different telephone companies, Ericsson and Mexicana, with different lines and numbers, complicating everyone’s life, when she had Mexicana and Jorge Maura had Ericsson. Now there was only one telephone company, so today’s lovers, Laura thought nostalgically, were missing the excitement of the game, the telephone as disguise.

As if to put off the insistent caller, Laura tried to think about everything that had come into the world since her grandfather Philip Kelsen had left Germany in 1864: moving pictures, radio, cars, planes, telephones, telegraphs, television, penicillin, mimeograph machines, plastic, Coca Cola, long-playing records, nylon stockings…

Perhaps the sense of being in a catastrophe reminded her of Jorge Maura, and she began to associate the ringing phone with her own heartbeats and hesitated for a few moments. She was afraid to pick up the receiver. “Laura?” She tried to recognize the baritone voice, deliberately high pitched to sound more English, who greeted her saying, “It’s Orlando Ximenez speaking. You’ve heard about Carmen Cortina’s tragedy. She was crushed to death. While she was asleep. The roof fell in on her. We’re holding a wake for her in Gayosso’s, over on Sullivan Street. I thought, well, for old times’ sake…”

The man who stepped out of the taxi at seven that evening said hello from the edge of the sidewalk and then came toward her with an uncertain gait and a mobile smile, as if his mouth were a radio dial searching for the right station.

“Laura. It’s me, Orlando. Don’t you recognize me? Look.” He laughed as he showed her his hand and his gold ring with the initials OX. There was no other way she would have recognized him. He was totally bald and made no effort to hide it. The strange thing-the serious thing, Laura said to herself-was that the extreme smoothness of his skull, bare as a baby’s backside, contrasted brutally with his infinitely wrinkled face, crisscrossed by tiny lines running in all directions. A face that was an insane compass rose, its cardinal points not at north, east, south, and west but scattered in every direction, a cobweb with no symmetry.

Orlando Ximenez’s white skin and blond looks had put up a poor defense against the passage of the years; the wrinkles on his face were as uncountable as furrows in a field plowed for centuries and yielding poorer and poorer crops. Even so, he maintained the distinction of a slim, well-dressed body, with a double-breasted glen plaid suit and a black tie appropriate for the occasion, and-the coquettish touch, inveterate in him-a Liberty handkerchief peeking sans facon from his breast pocket. “Only vulgarians and men from Toluca wear matching ties and handkerchiefs,” he’d once said to her years before in San Cayetano and in the Hotel Regis.

“Laura dear,” he said, speaking first, seeing that she hadn’t recognized him right away, and after planting two fugitive little kisses on her cheeks, stepping back to observe her, keeping hold of her hands. “Let me get a look at you.”

He was the same old Orlando: he’d never let her have an advantage he could take for himself. Without a word from her, he went on, “How you’ve changed, Laura,” before she could blurt out, “How you’ve changed, Orlando.”

On the way to Sullivan Street (who the devil was Sullivan? An English composer of operettas? But he was always linked like a Siamese twin to Gilbert, the way Ortega was joined to Gasset, joked irrepressible Orlando), Laura’s old sweetheart spoke of Carmen Cortina’s horrible death and the mystery that had always surrounded her. The famous hostess of the 1930s, the woman whose energy had saved Mexican society from a drowsy convulsion (if you could say such a thing; I agree, it’s an oxymoron, Orlando said, smiling), had been bedridden for years with phlebitis, which immobilized her. The question was, could Carmen Cortina have gotten out of bed to save herself from the collapse, or did her physical prison condemn her to watch while the ceiling fell on her and crushed her? Well, well, why worry about the fine points? Like the cucaracha in the song, she just couldn’t walk…

“But I am a chatterbox,” he said in English, “forgive me.” Orlando laughed, caressing Laura Diaz’s bare fingers with his gloved hand.

Only when they stepped out of the taxi on Sullivan Street did he take her by the arm and whisper in her ear, don’t be frightened, Laura dear, you’re going to find all our old friends from twenty-five years ago, but you won’t recognize them. If you’re in doubt, just squeeze my arm-don’t let go of me, je t’en prie- and I’ll whisper in your ear who’s who.

“Have you read Proust’s The Past Recaptured? No? Well, it’s the same situation. The narrator returns to a Parisian salon thirty years later and no longer recognizes the intimate friends of his youth. Face to face with the old marionettes, says Proust’s narrator, he has to use not only his eyes but his memory. Old age is like death, he adds. Some face it with indifference, not because they’re braver than the rest but because they have less imagination.”

Orlando made a show of looking for the name Carmen Cortina on the chapel directory.

“Of course, the difference between us and Proust is that he finds old age and the passage of time in an elegant salon in French high society, while you and I, proudly Mexican, find them in a funeral parlor.”

There was no intrusive smell of flowers to nauseate the guests at the wake. So the perfumes on the women asserted themselves all the more offensively. They were like the last clouds in a sky about to fade forever into night, as one by one they passed before Carmen Cortina’s open coffin, where she lay as reconstructed by the mortician, put back together piece by minute piece, looking neither like herself nor like any living being seen before. She was a window-display dummy, as if her turbulent career as a social hostess had prepared her for this final moment, this last act in what had been in life a permanent stage show: a mannequin reposing on white silk cushions under clear plastic, hair carefully tinted mahogany, cheeks smooth and pink, mouth obscenely swollen and half open in a smile that seemed to lick death as if it were a lollipop, nose stuffed with cotton balls, to keep what remained of Carmen’s vital juices from leaking out, eyes closed-but without the glasses that as hostess she had wielded with the wisdom of the elegantly blind-as if they were darts, or a replacement finger, or an exhausted pennant, or a menacing stiletto, but always as the baton with which Carmen Cortina conducted her brilliant social operetta.

Without those glasses Laura Diaz did not recognize Carmen. She was on the verge of suggesting to Orlando- caught up in her first boyfriend’s unshakably festive tone-that some charitable soul should put glasses on the cadaver. Carmen was quite capable of opening her eyes. Of coming back to life. Now Laura failed to recognize a woman with a mother-of-pearl complexion and overflowing corpulence who was being pushed along in a wheelchair by the painter Tizoc Ambriz, recognizable because his picture appeared so frequently on the culture and society pages, though he was transformed, given the color, tautness, and texture of his skin, into a scaly black-and-silver sardine. Thin and small, he was dressed, as always, in blue denim-trousers, shirt, and jacket-as if to stand out while at the same time, in contradiction, imposing a fashion.