The Years with Laura Diaz

Acknowledgments

THE BEST NOVELISTS in the world are our grandmothers, and it is to them I owe the first memory on which this novel is based. My maternal grandmother was Emilia Rivas Gil de Macías, widow of Manuel Macias Gutiérrez; she born in Alamos, Sonora, he in Guadalajara, Jalisco; she the descendant of Spanish immigrants from Santander and, according to rumors I’ve heard, Yaqui Indians from Sonora. My grandfather Macías died tragically in 1919, leaving my grandmother with four young daughters-María Emilia, Sélika, Carmen, and my mother, Berta Macías de Fuentes.

My paternal grandmother, Emilia Boettiger de Fuentes, was born in Catemaco, Veracruz, daughter of Philip Boettiger Keller, a German immigrant from Darmstadt, married to a young lady of Spanish origin, Ana María Murcia de Boettiger, with whom he had three daughters: Luisa (Boettiger de Salgado), María (Boettiger de Alvarez), and Emilia (Boettiger de Fuentes). Emilia married Rafael Fuentes Vélez, president of the National Bank of Mexico in Veracruz and son of Carlos Fuentes Benítez and Clotilde Vélez, who was attacked and mutilated on the stagecoach between Mexico City and Veracruz. A fourth Boettiger sister, Anita, was a mulatta, the issue of a never acknowledged love affair of my great-grandfather. She was always a confident and loving member of the Boettiger family.

My paternal grandparents had three sons, Carlos Fuentes Boettiger, my young uncle, a promising poet, disciple of Salvador Díaz Mirón, and editor of the Xalapa magazine Bohemian Muse. He died in Mexico City, where he’d gone to study, at the age of twenty-one, of typhoid fever. My aunt, Emilia Fuentes Boettiger, remained unmarried for many years, taking care of my grandfather Don Rafael, who’d been afflicted with a progressive paralysis. My parents, Rafael Fuentes Boettiger and Berta Macías Rivas, married in January 1928. I was born in November of that year and inherited the constellation of stories my family transmitted to me.

But many other stories were told to me by two magnificent survivors of “the years with Laura Díaz,” Doña Julieta Olivier de Fernández Landero, widow of the Orizaba industrialist Manuel Ferná ndez Landero, and Doña Ana Guido de Icaza, widow of the lawyer and writer Xavier Icaza López-Negrete, who appears as a character in this novel. I have emotional and grateful memories of them both.

Finally, I began The Years with Laura Díaz during a detailed, informative, and most of all affecting trip with my friend Federico Reyes Heroles to places that are part of our shared background: Xalapa, Coatepec, Catemaco, Tlacotalpan, and the Tuxtlas, Santiago and San Andrés. My very special thanks to Federico and his wife, Beatriz Scharrer, herself deeply schooled in agrarian life and the German migration to the state of Veracruz.

London

August 1998

Carlos Fuentes