Laura’s Song

Poor Mexico, the old saying goes, so far from God and so close to the United States. Carlos Fuentes’ sweeping new novel brings the phrase strongly to mind. “The Years with Laura Diaz,” a work intensely preoccupied with Mexican identity--with Mexico’s many shifting identities--opens in Detroit and ends in Los Angeles. It is narrated by Santiago Lopez, an Angeleno and a filmmaker working on a television series about Mexican muralists in the United States. He and his stepsister are remembering the life of their ancestors, and especially his great-grandmother Laura Diaz. Remembering and imagining. “[W]hat we didn’t remember we imagined and what we didn’t imagine we discarded as unworthy. . . .”

Both Santiago and his stepsister are thirtysomething, Mexican half-orphans of the massacre of students in Mexico City in 1968, an act of repressive violence that killed his father and her mother. They are migrants but also the children of a national protest. They are the new Mexico, Fuentes is saying, or one of the new Mexicos, a place whose only borders are those of memory and imagination. Closeness to the United States is seen here as neither a doom nor an opportunity but as a sign of contiguous histories, a reminder of how far one can get from God.

Laura Diaz, we learn, is a famous photographer. “Laura’s camera, depicting the instant, managed to depict the future of the instant.” She shoots many of the various lost cities to be found in Mexico City; her work depicts crimes, corpses, derelict lives, children, images of religious devotion and Spaniards in exile (the filmmaker Luis Bunuel, the poets Emilio Prados and Luis Cernuda). Her pictures sell, she acquires a reputation and joins the Magnum Agency as “a great Mexican photographer, the best after Alvarez Bravo, high priestess of the invis-ible, she was called, the poet writing with light, the woman who learned to photograph what Posada could engrave.” Laura Diaz found this vocation in 1957 when she was 59, and the ingredients of her success are the experiences of her life and of her Mexico, developing through independence and revolution into a sprawling and often incalculable modern state.

In one of the most intricately orchestrated chapters in the book, Fuentes carefully lays out the events and circumstances that led her to declare her vocation: There is an earthquake, in which her apartment is turned upside-down and the Angel of Independence, in a symbolic act no novelist would invent, topples from its plinth at the top of a column on Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma. There is a Proustian parade of old folks from Laura’s past, unrecognizable behind their wrinkles. There is the discovery of a photograph Laura took some time ago of the painter Frida Kahlo, a great friend and mentor of hers and now a beneficent influence from beyond death. There is the camera she uses, left to her by a North American lover. And there is a painting by her son Santiago, an Adam and Eve in the style of Egon Schiele, in which our first parents are pictured as floating in the air, not falling from Eden but ascending to humanity. The desperate optimism of the painting inspires Laura. It confirms what she needs to do. Laura’s vocation is made not only from her personal past and her country’s history but from a precise mixture of wreckage and lost time, of art and technology and unrepentant hope.

Laura’s story begins in 1905, when she is 7, living on a tropical estate with her Mexican mother and aunts and her German grandparents. There are tales of bandits and of the aunts, who play the piano and write poetry. Laura finds a vast pre-Hispanic statue in the forest: “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.” Her mother and father move to Vera Cruz, her stepbrother dies in the early days of the revolution against Porfirio Diaz (no relation). Laura grows up and gets married to an imposing labor leader who turns out to be a time-server or, as he puts it, “a guardian of order,” “an administrator of stability.” The revolution itself becomes an institution, a steady long-lasting system of checks and balances. Laura has children; she has affairs, falling impulsively in love with a radical refugee from Franco’s Spain and compassionately in love with a North American on the run from Joseph McCarthy’s inquisitions. She wonders, and we wonder, why her life takes its meaning from her men, why it “has meaning only if I dedicate it to the life of someone who needs me,” but Fuentes doesn’t allow her to seriously pursue the question of why the machos in her life are so drearily and doggedly disappointing. Even the radical Spaniard, a political and emotional grandee, finally prefers the solipsism of his own pain, and life in a monastery in the Canary Islands, to living out his years with Laura Diaz.

In this novel, Fuentes borrows characters from Thomas Mann, Honore de Balzac and Benito Perez Galdos and from his own earlier work “The Death of Artemio Cruz,” suggesting a strong continuity among imagined worlds. He writes, through Laura, of his and our constantly renegotiated relations with death and promise: “It isn’t the past that dies with each of us. The future dies as well.” That’s the darker truth but not the whole story. The brighter claim, made in another context within the book, is that “[t]oday’s death gives presence to yesterday’s life,” that death can make clear the shape and vivacity of what it takes away. Fuentes, who dedicates the book to his children, one of whom died recently, is saying directly and indirectly that novels are made of new life and old literature and that literature itself is made of loss but not only of loss. Death can kill the future but it can also resurrect the past and, with it, a second future. It is an aspect of Fuentes’ courage, as well as his talent, that he clings to this idea; and because he is a novelist rather than a photographer, he turns not to “the future of the instant” but to the long shadowy history of the Mexican past, to everything evoked by the tumultuous years, remembered and imagined, of the indomitable Laura Diaz.