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
