The Years with Laura Diaz

25.

Catemaco: 1972

SHE BOARDED THE INTEROCEANIC TRAIN that had taken her back to Veracruz so many times. Like so many things from the past, the luxurious train of yesteryear linking Mexico City to Xalapa and the port had shrunk and, obviously, aged. Worn-out seat covers, sunken seats, exposed springs, opaque windows, stained head rests, blocked sinks. Laura decided to take a private compartment in the Pullman, separated from the rest of the sleeping car, which during the day was an ordinary car and at night miraculously dropped down beds already made up with white pillows and freshly washed sheets covered by green blankets. Similarly, the regular seats turned into beds hidden, during sleeping hours, by thick canvas curtains with copper buttons.

The compartment Laura took, on the other hand, clung to an elegance Orlando Ximénez would call fané, with its patinated mirrors, a sink with gold-plated faucets, a certain trompe-l’oeil (Orlando), and, as the supreme anachronism, a silver cuspidor, like the ones in the first home of her married life, where Juan Francisco would meet with the labor leaders. The soap was Palmolive. The towels mere veils of their ancient newness. Nevertheless, the private space was permeated by a nostalgia of past glory This was the train that connected Mexico’s capital with its principal port and that night would connect Laura with the feeling of proving that you can go home again. The price of return, that was the problem, and the ticket from the National Railroads of Mexico did not indicate what it was.

She slept through the night. Xalapa passed without making itself felt; the road to the San Cayetano hacienda was overgrown. But the morning port received her with its mix of early coolness already sheltering the heat of the day-that was its delight. The sun would be splendid. Even so, she did not want to linger in nostalgia for a place that revived intense memories of her puberty, of her strolls along the seawall hand in hand with the first Santiago, and of the death of the brother buried under the waves.

Instead, ensconced in the high dovecote that was the Hotel Imperial, she enjoyed the latent challenge of the Gulf’s horizon, where the most brilliant day hides the surprise of a storm, a “norther,” rain, wind… and at night when she went down to the square, she sat down alone at a little table in the arcade, feeling herself more than ever in company-such was the pleasure that nights in Veracruz always arouse in us-amid the noise, the crowd, the coming and going of waiters carrying trays of beer, rum and Coca-Cola, mojitos, and the Veracruz mint. julep, with its toupee of mint soaking in rum.

Bands representing all the music played in Mexico-tamboras from the north, mariachis from the west, trios from the capital performing boleros, jaranas from Yucatán, marimbas from Chiapas, and Veracruz sones played on harp and vihuela-competed in an exalted cacophony that could be jolted into respect and repose only by the danzón in front of the town hall, where the most respectable couples danced with that slight movement which compromises only the feet and imposes incomparable erotic seriousness on the rest of the body, as if the slightest movement from the knee down will unleash the sensual attractions from the knee up.

It was here that Auntie María de la O had come to dance away her final days, married to the famous Matias Matadamas, most certainly a tiny man, as puny, cold, and bluish, all of him-hair and skin, suit. and tie, shoes and socks-as this one who, seeing her alone, invited Laura to join in the rhythm of the danzón hymn, the one called “Nereids.” He asked her to dance without saying a word, said nothing while he danced, but she, during the danzón, asked herself secretly: What did I lose? What did I win? Do I have nothing left to lose? How do I measure the distance of my life? Only by the voices that rise up out of the past and speak to me as if they were here? Should I give thanks because there’s no one left to weep over me? Should I suffer because I have no one else to lose? Is the mere fact that I’m thinking all this enough to certify it: Laura Díaz, you’re an old woman? What did I lose? What did I gain?

The powder-blue little old man respectfully escorted her to her table. One eye oozed tears and he never smiled, but when he danced, he knew a way of caressing the woman’s body with his look, with his rhythm, and with the intense contact of one hand in hers and the other on her waist. Man and woman. The danzón was still the most sensual dance because it was the one that transformed distance into nearness yet didn’t lose the distance.

Would Laura ever hear the danzón “Nereids” again, ever dance to it again after this night before her road trip to Catemaco? She took a Hotel Imperial taxi, and when she reached the lake, she got out and told the driver to go back to Veracruz.

“Don’t you want me to wait?”

“No, thanks. It isn’t necessary.”

“And your bags, ma’am? What should I tell them?”

“Tell them to hold the bags for me.”

From a distance, the Catemaco house again seemed different to her, as if absence made everything smaller but at the same time longer and narrower. Once again, returning to the past meant entering an empty, interminable corridor where one could no longer find the usual things or people one wanted to see again. As if they were playing both with our memory and with our imagination, the people and things of the past challenged us to situate them in the present without forgetting they had a past and would have a future, although that future would be, precisely, only that of memory, again, in the present.

But when it is a matter of accompanying death, what is the valid time for life? Ah, sighed Laura Díaz, she would certainly have to revisit each and every one of the years of her existence, remember, imagine, perhaps invent what never happened, even the unimaginable, with the mere presence of a being who could represent everything that wasn’t, what was, or what could have been, and what could never happen.

Today that being was she herself, Laura Díaz.

From the moment Dr. Teodoro Césarman confirmed that her cancer would allow her, with the best care, no more than a year of life, Laura Díaz decided to travel as soon as possible to the place where she was born. For that reason, on this radiant May morning in 1972, she climbed the little hill leading to the Kelsens’ old family house. It had stood abandoned now for forty years: after Don Felipe the grandfather died, the three spinster sisters had been able to survive on the rent from the estate and the building; then, when Fernando Díaz fell ill, his family in Xalapa was helped by money earned by Laura Díaz’s diligent mother, Doña Leticia Kelsen; then when the property of the hacienda “La Peregrina” was expropriated, Mutti decided to overrule the family’s modesty and rent out rooms to guests “on condition that they be people we know.”

Laura smiled as she remembered her parents’ longing for decency and prepared herself, with her smile, to look directly at the ruin of the old single story coffee-plantation house, with its four whitewashed sides around the central patio where Laura had played as a child, with the patio doors that opened to and closed away the living places in the house-bedrooms, living room, dining room. From the outside, she could see from a distance, the outer walls were still unbroken by windows. An inexplicable reserve came over Laura as she walked toward her ancestral home, as if, before entering the ruined house, her spirit needed renewed contact with the opulent nature surrounding the house, the fig tree, the tulip tree, the red lily, the palo rojo, and the round crown of the mango tree.

Cautiously she opened the gate at the entrance and closed her eyes, blindly walking along an imaginary corridor, expecting the groan of air through the hallways, the whine of sagging doors, the screech of sick hinges, the repose of forgotten dust… Why look right at the ruin of her family home? It was like looking right at the abandonment of her own childhood, however hard, with her eyes closed, Laura Díaz, at the age of seventy-four, could hear the broom of the little black man Zampaya sweeping the patio and singing “Mr. Zampayita’s dance / you can see it in a glance, / will surely cure your every pain, / even help you weight to gain,” recalling herself on her birthday, when she hopped around the patio very early in the morning, still in her nightgown, singing “on the twelfth of May / the Virgin dressed in white / came walking into sight / with her coat so gay,” hearing the melancholy notes of a Chopin nocturne which right at this moment reached her from the room where Aunt Hilda had dreamed of being a great concert pianist in Germany, listening to the voice of Aunt Virginia reciting Rubén Darío’s verses and dreaming in turn of being a great poet published in Mexico City, smelling the tasty stews whose aromas reached her from the kitchen supervised so matter-of-factly by her mother Leticia, awaiting the return of Don Felipe from his farm chores, a hardworking and disciplined man, his dreams as an impassioned young German socialist long forgotten.

In just this way, blindly, Laura Díaz made her way through the family house, certain that her sense of direction would not fail her, that she would reach her own childhood bedroom, open the door from the patio, approach the bed, touch it, sit down, and stretch out her hand to find the doll on its pillows, happy in her Oriental princess repose, Li Po, her adored little doll, the doll with head, hands, and feet made of porcelain, with a little cotton body covered by a mandarin costume of red silk and her eyebrows painted near the silk bangs, which Laura, when she opened her eyes, found there, really, reclining on pillows, waiting for Laura to pick her up in her arms, rock her, allow her, as before, as always, to move her porcelain head, open and shut her eyes, without moving those very thin eyebrows painted over her expectant, serene eyelids. Li Po hadn’t aged.

Laura Díaz held back a cry of emotion when she picked up Li Po, looked around her childhood bedroom only to find it perfectly clean, with the washbasin that had always been there, the dresser she’d used as a little girl, the door with gauze curtains hanging from copper rods. But Li Po had gone to Frida Kahlo’s house. Who had brought her back to Catemaco?

She opened the bedroom door, went out onto the perfectly clean patio, overflowing with geraniums, ran to the living room, and found her grandparents’ wicker furniture, the mahogany tables with marble tops, the lamps brought from New Orleans, the vitrines with the little porcelain shepherdesses, and the twin pictures, the little rascal in the first teasing a sleeping dog with a stick, and in the second bitten on the calf by the same dog, now awake, while the mischievous little boy weeps in pain…

She walked quickly to the dining room, now expecting what she found there, the table set, the big white tablecloth starched, the chairs in place, three on each flank of the armchair at the head of the table where old Don Felipe always sat, but each place set with Dresden china, knives, forks, spoons in order, and to the right of each plate a stiff napkin rolled up in a silver ring inscribed with the initial of the person who would sit there, Felipe, Cosima, Hilda, Virginia, Leticia, María de la O, Laura…

And on Grandmother Cosima’s plate, four jewels, a gold wedding band, a sapphire ring, and a pearl ring…

I’m dreaming, Laura Díaz said to herself… I’m dreaming this. Or perhaps I’m already dead and don’t know it.

She was interrupted when the dining-room door opened brusquely and a rough figure burst in, a dark, bearded man in boots, drill trousers, and a perspiration-soaked shirt. He had a shotgun in one hand and a red handkerchief was tied around his head as a sweatband.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said. His voice was sweet, with a heavy Veracruz accent, no s’s. “The house is private. You have to get permission.”

“Excuse me,” answered Laura Díaz. “It’s that I grew up here. I wanted to see the house before-”

“The master doesn’t want anyone entering without his permission, you’ll excuse me, ma’am.”

“The master?”

“Of course. You should see, ma’am, how carefully he’s restored the house. It was a ruin, after being the most important hacienda in Catemaco, according to what people say. Then the master came and made it just like new. It took him about five years to get everything together, he said he wanted to see the house exactly the way it was a hundred years ago, or something like that.”

“The master?” Laura insisted.

“Sure, my boss. Don Danton. He owns this house and all the land around here right down to the lake.”

Laura had a moment of doubt as to whether she should take Li Po with her or leave her resting comfortably in her bed, surrounded by pillows. She saw her so happy, so pleased in her old bed… She went back over her memories again, the living room, the dining room, the silver rings…

“Rest, Li Po, sleep, live happily ever after. I’ll take care of you forever.”

In the patio, Laura took a long look at the young caretaker, as if she’d known him forever. Then she went out onto the estate, told herself that no matter how big it might be it would always be the poor patch of earth we all finally have forever, after our season on earth. But this May afternoon, she was ever more thankful for the symmetry of the araucaria, which in the flowering of each branch immediately engendered its double, am I going to reproduce myself that way, will I be another Laura Díaz, a second Laura Díaz, not in myself but in my ancestors and descendants, in the people I come from and the people I leave in the world, the people toward whom I’m going and the people I leave behind, the whole world will be like an araucaria that grows a double in each of its flowers, that is not destroyed by storms, that is protected from the lightning by the lightning of its yellow flowers, the marvelous tree that can withstand both hurricanes and droughts?

She walked into the forest. Her thoughts thickened as the forest opened up. She was charged with life, her own and that of the people who went with her to live it, well or badly; that’s why her life wasn’t ending, the life of Laura Díaz, because I’m not only my life, there are many lines, many generations, the true history, which is the life lived but above all imagined; am I only the weeping woman, the suffering woman, the mourning woman? No, I refuse that, I always walked with my head held high, I never begged, I walk and try to measure the distance of my life, measure it by the voices that arise from the past and speak to me as if they were here, the names on the seven silver napkin rings, the names of the four Santiagos and the four men in my life, Orlando and Juan Francisco, Jorge and Harry, I wouldn’t be the suffering woman, I wouldn’t be the weeping woman, I would walk with my head held high, even though I’d humbly accept that I can never own nature because nature survives us and asks us not to own her but to be part of her, to return to her, to leave behind history, time, and the pain of time, no longer to delude ourselves that we have owned anything or anyone, not even our children, not even our loves, Laura Díaz owner only of our art, of what we could give to others from our own body, the body of Laura Díaz, transitory and limited…

She remembered the desire of her brother, the first Santiago, to lose himself in the forest as, eventually, he lost himself in the sea.

She would carry out the desire of Santiago the Elder. She would become forest as he became sea.

She would enter the forest as one enters a void from which no message will return.

With her were the unfulfilled lives of a brother, a son, and a grandson.

With her were the eyes and words of her grandfather Felipe Kelsen, was there ever a single truly finished life, a single life that wasn’t cutoff promise, latent possibility…?

She remembered the day her grandfather died, when Laura held his hand with its thick veins and old freckles, caressed the skin faded to transparency, and had the sensation that each one of us lives for others: our existence has no other meaning but to complete unfinished destinies…

“Didn’t I tell you, child? One day all my ailments came together and here I am… but before I go I want to tell you that you were right. Yes, there is a statue of a woman, covered with jewels, in the middle of the forest. I lied to you on purpose. I didn’t want you to get caught up in superstition and witchcraft, Laurita. I took you to see a ceiba so that you would learn to live with reason, not with the fantasy and enthusiasms that cost me so dearly when I was young. Be careful with everything. The ceiba is covered with spines as sharp as daggers, remember?”

“Of course, Grandfather.”

The forest arises like its own deep breathing, its own profound heartbeat.

The forest roads divide.

On one side can be seen the woman of stone, the Indian statue decked out with belts of conch shells and serpents, wearing a crown tinted green by nature imitating art, adorned with necklaces and rings and earrings on ears, nose, and arms…

On the other side is the way to the ceiba, queen of the virgin forest, whose crown is made up of the spines that are also spattered all over its brown body like wounding daggers, ageless, immobile but longing, its branches open like arms awaiting a mortal caress, which the great body of wounding daggers can give and wants to give.

Laura Díaz embraced the mother ceiba with all the strength remaining to her, the protecting ceiba, queen of a void from which no message will return.