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

sweetheart,” she once said when she was already ill, as if she didn’t want the secret to be lost forever, “you should have seen what a handsome man he was, what fire, how bold he was.”
    She didn’t say, Always let yourself be tempted, sweetheart, don’t be afraid, don’t be intimidated, you don’t get a second chance, and she didn’t add temptation to the elegance and fire because she was a proper lady and an exemplary grandmother, but Laura Díaz, for the rest of her days, kept those words in her heart, that lesson imparted to her by her grandmother. Don’t let it pass you by, don’t let it …
    “You don’t get a second chance …”
    The child Laura looked at herself in the mirror, not to see there the temptations enumerated by the odious priest Almonte (who, for reasons beyond her, simply made her laugh) but to discover in her own reflection a rejuvenation or at least an inheritance from her sick grandmother. My nose is too big, she said to herself, discouraged, soft features to boot, sparkling eyes devoid of seduction except that of being a seven-year-old simpleton. The Chinese doll Li Po had more personality than her pudgy cheeked and obstreperous little mistress, who had no kissable passion, no embraceable ardor, no …
    The day their mother was buried, the four Kelsen girls (three unmarried and one married, but for all intents and purposes … ) dressed in black; but Leticia, Laura’s mother, saw a marvelous bird fly over the open grave, almost as if escaping from its own funeral, and exclaimed: Look! A white crow!
    The others turned to look, but Laura, as if she were obeying an order from her dead grandmother, ran off after the white bird, feeling that she herself could fly, as if the albino crow were calling her, Follow me, girl, fly with me, I want to show you something.
    That was the day the girl realized where she was, where she came from, as if her grandmother, in dying, had given her wings to return to the forest: playful, wise, without calling attention to herself, jumping
around as she always did, provoking sighs in the family group as they watched her run off, she’s just a child, what do children know about death, she didn’t know Grandmother Cosima in her prime, she isn’t doing it because she’s bad.
    She followed the white crow beyond the limits of what she knew, learning about and loving from that moment on, forever, everything she saw and touched, as if that day of death had been set aside for her to learn something unrepeatable, something only for her, and only for the age Laura Díaz had reached at that instant, having been born on May 12, 1898, when the Virgin dressed in white came walking into sight with her coat …
    From that moment on, and forever, she learned about and loved the fig tree, the tulip tree, the Chinese lilies, whose little branchlets flowered, every single one, three times a year: she examined what she already knew but had forgotten in the forest, the red lily, the palo rojo, the round crown of the mango tree; she examined what she’d never known or thought but was now remembering instead of discovering, the perfect symmetry of the araucaria, which in each shoot of each branch quickly produces its immediate double, the trueno with its little yellow flowers, a marvelous tree that resists both hurricanes and drought.
    She was going to shout in horror, but she swallowed her fear and turned it into astonishment. She’d run into a giant. Laura trembled, closed her eyes, touched the giant, it was made of stone, it was enormous, it stood out in the middle of the forest, more deeply rooted there than the breadfruit tree or even the roots of the invading laurel that devours everything—drains, fields, crops.
    Covered with slime, a gigantic female figure stared into eternity, encircled with belts of shells and serpent, wearing a crown tinted green by the mimetic forest. Adorned with necklaces and rings and earrings of arms, noses, ears.
    Laura ran home