Read Online Years With Laura Diaz, The by Carlos Fuentes - Free Book Online Page A

studious, such a reader, such a fine writer throughout his adolescence. He’d published in magazines for young people: poetry, art criticism, and literary criticism. The poet Salvador Díaz Mirón, his teacher, praised him as a young man of promise. Who assured me, Fernando Díaz asked himself, that all this augured continuity? Peace, perhaps, but continuity in the end? Did it assure rebellion instead of conformity, the fatal exception? Fernando had imagined that his son, after finishing at the Preparatoria, when he asked for the year off would spend it traveling—his father had set aside the necessary money—and would return, having purged his young man’s curiosity, to take up his literary career again, his university studies, and
then start a family. As in the English novels, he would have done his Grand Tour.
    “I’m staying here, Papa, if you don’t mind.”
    “Not at all, my boy. This is your house. Don’t be silly.”
    He had nothing to fear. Fernando Díaz’s private life was of an exemplary spotlessness. Concerning his past, it was well known that his first wife, Elisa Obregón, a descendant of immigrants from the Canary Islands, died giving birth to Santiago; that for the first seven years of the boy’s life, the now recently graduated poet lived under the protection—and thanks to the charity, almost—of a Jesuit priest from the city of Orizaba; that when Don Fernando remarried, he kept his new family far away in Catemaco but brought Santiago to live with him in Veracruz.
    Asked to explain himself in one or another Veracruz gathering, this honorable if not very imaginative man of numbers said that sometimes it was necessary to defer satisfaction while doing one’s duty, which, ultimately, redoubled satisfaction.
    These arguments, which seemed to convince people, merely provoked the scorn of Salvador Díaz Mirón: “I never would have suspected it, Don Fernando, but you are more baroque than the poet Góngora himself.”
    But just as Don Fernando could not penetrate the mysteries of others, no one penetrated his—perhaps because they didn’t exist. Except for the perfect bride, his second wife, Leticia, who simply was equal to him. Yet the initial arrangement between the two of them was indeed baroque. For eleven years, Leticia, accompanied by her half sister, María de la O, would visit Fernando in Veracruz once a month, and he would take a room at the Hotel Diligencias so they could be alone while María de la O would discreetly disappear. (Only the grandmother, without fingers, Doña Cosima Kelsen, suspected where she went.) Every three months, in turn, Fernando would return to Catemaco, greet the German grandfather, and play with little Laura.
    At the port, father and son lived in adjoining rooms in a boarding house, Santiago in the bedroom so he could study and write, Fernando in the living room, as if in free time between business appointments.
Each one had his washbasin and his mirror for his personal grooming. The public bath was two streets away. A black woman with cloudlike hair took care of the chamber pots. They took their meals at the boardinghouse.
    Now everything changed. The president’s residence above the bank had all the comforts—a big living room with a view of the docks, a wicker sofa because it was cooler, tables of varnished wood with marble tops, rockers, bibelots, electric lights as well as old candelabras, commodes with vitrines that displayed all sorts of Dresden figurines—licentious courtiers, daydreaming shepherdesses—and a pair of typical genre paintings. In the first, a little rascal teases a sleeping dog with a stick; in the second the dog bites the calf of a boy who can’t manage to jump over the wall and falls back bawling …
    “Let sleeping dogs lie,” Mr. Díaz would invariably say in English whenever he looked, even out of the corner of his eye, at the paintings.
    The dining room: with a table big enough to seat twelve and, once again, vitrines, these