The Years with Laura Diaz

2.

Catemaco: 1905

SOMETIMES IT’S POSSIBLE to touch memory. The family legend retold most often concerned the courage of Grandmother Cosima Kelsen when, back in the late 1860s, she journeyed to Mexico City in order to buy furniture and accessories for her house in Veracruz and, on her way back, her stagecoach was stopped by bandits who still wore the picturesque costume derived from the uniforms of nineteenth-century civil wars-wide-brimmed, round hat, short suede jacket, bell-bottom trousers, the ensemble held together by buttons of old silver, short boots, and jingling spurs.

Cosima Kelsen preferred evoking those details to recounting what happened. After all, the anecdote was better-and therefore more incredible, more extraordinary, more long-lasting, and known to more people-when many voices repeated it, when it passed (acknowledging the redundancy) from hand to hand, since the tale concerned hands. Fingers, actually.

The stagecoach was stopped at that strange spot on the Cofre de Perote where instead of ascending through the mist, the traveler descends from the diaphanous height of the mountain into a lake of fog. The gang of bandits, called chinacos, camouflaged by the mist, materialized with the noise of neighing horses and pistol shots. “Your money or your life” is the usual refrain of thieves, but these, more original, demanded “your life or your life,” as if they understood all too well the haughty nobility, the rigid dignity the young Doña Cosima displayed as soon as they appeared.

She didn’t deign to look at them.

Their leader, formerly a captain in Emperor Maximilian’s defeated army, had loitered around the Chapultepec court long enough to be able to recognize social differences. He was famous in the Veracruz region for his sexual appetites-his nickname was the Hunk of Papantla-and equally famous for knowing the difference between a lady and a tart. Even though he’d been reduced to banditry after the imperial defeat, which culminated in the execution in 1867 of Maximilian along with the generals Miramón and Mejía-The three M’s, mierda, the superstitious Mexican condottieri would exclaim-the respect this former cavalry officer showed toward ladies of rank was instinctive, and, after first seeing Doña Cosima’s eyes as brilliant as copper sulphate and then her right hand clearly resting on the sill of the carriage window, he knew exactly what he should say to her:

“Please, madam, give me your rings.”

The hand that Cosima had so provocatively exposed boasted a gold wedding band, a dazzling sapphire, and a pearl ring.

“These are my engagement and wedding rings. You’d have to cut them off me.”

Which is exactly what the fearsome former imperial officer did without missing a beat, as if both knew the protocol of honor: one stroke of his machete and he cut off the four exposed fingers of young Grandmother Cosima Kelsen’s right hand. She didn’t even wince. The savage officer took off the red scarf he was wearing on his head in the old chinaco-bandit style and offered it to Cosima to bandage her hand. He dropped the four fingers into his hat and stood there like a haughty beggar, with the fingers of the beautiful German woman taking the place of alms. When he put his hat back on, blood ran down his face. For him, that red bath seemed as natural as diving into a lake would be for other people.

“Thank you,” said the beautiful young Cosima, looking at him for the first and only time. “Will you be requiring anything else?”

The Hunk of Papantla’s only answer was to lash the rump of the nearest horse, and the coach spun away down the slope toward the hot land of Veracruz, its destination beyond the mountain mists.

“No one is to touch that lady ever again,” said the chief to his crew, who all understood that disobedience would cost them their lives and that their leader, for an instant and perhaps forever, had fallen in love.

“But if he fell in love with Grandmama, why didn’t he give her back the rings?” asked Laura Díaz when she was old enough to think things through.

“Because he had no other souvenir of her,” answered Aunt Hilda, the eldest of Cosima Kelsen’s three daughters.

“But what did he do with the fingers?”

“That’s something we don’t talk about, child,” answered the second of the trio, the young Fräulein Virginia, energetic and irritated, dropping the book she happened to be reading of the twenty she read each month.

“Watch out for die gypsie’,” said the hacienda cook in her greedy coastal accent that devoured s’s. “Dey cut’ off die finger’ for to make tamale’.”

Laura Díaz stared down at her hands-little hands-and held them out and childishly twirled her fingers as if she were playing a piano. Then quickly she hid them under her blue-checkered school apron and observed with growing terror the activity of fingers in her father’s house, as if all of them, at all hours of the day and night, did nothing but exercise what the Hunk of Papantla had taken away from the then young and beautiful and recently arrived Miss Cosima. Aunt Hilda, with a kind of hidden fever, played the Steinway piano brought from the port of Veracruz from New Orleans, a long voyage that seemed short because, as the passengers noted and then told Fräulein Kelsen, seagulls accompanied the ship, or perhaps the piano, from Louisiana to Veracruz.

“Mutti would have been better off going to la Nouvelle-Orléans to buy her trousseau and enjoy her nozze,” bragged and criticized Aunt Virginia in one breath. Mixing languages was as natural for her as mixing her reading matter, and it challenged, in an irreproachable way, one of her father’s goals. New Orleans, in any case, was the civilized commercial point of reference closest to Veracruz, and the place where, exiled by the dictatorship of the peg-legged Santa Anna, the young liberal Benito Juárez had once worked rolling Cuban cigars. Would there be a commemorative plaque in New Orleans after Juárez-so ugly, such a little Indian-defeated the French and ordered the very Habsburg Maximilian-so blond, so handsome-shot?

“The Habsburgs governed Mexico longer than anyone, don’t you forget it. Mexico is more Austrian than anything else,” said the well-read and well-written Virginia to her youngest sister, Leticia, Laura Díaz’s mother. For Leticia, this news of the empire was simply inconsequential since the only things that mattered to her were her home, her daughter, her kitchen, her diligent attention to daily life…

At the same time, the melancholy resonance that Hilda’s agile fingers gave to Chopin’s Preludes, her favorite music, augmented every particle of sadness-real, remembered, or imaginable-in the vast but simple house on the hill above the tropical lake.

“Would we be different if we’d grown up in Germany?” asked sister Hilda nostalgically.

“Yes,” Virginia instantly replied. “And if we’d been born in China we’d be even more different. Assez de chinoiseries, ma chère.”

“Don’t you feel nostalgia?” Hilda asked her youngest sister, Leticia.

“How could I? I’ve never been there.”

“You’re the only one who has,” Virginia berated her, interrupting, although she was looking at Leticia, Laura’s mother.

“There’s a lot to do in the house,” concluded Leticia.

Like all the country houses Spain left in the New World, this one, built on one level, consisted of four whitewashed sides around a central patio onto which opened dining room, living room, and bedrooms. Light entered the sitting rooms from the patio, because the external walls were windowless; defense might someday be necessary and modesty was a permanent concern.

“We live as if Indians, or English pirates, or rebel blacks were going to attack us,” commented young Aunt Virginia with an amused smile. “Aux armes!”

Their modesty, on the other hand, was well served. Seasonal laborers brought in to harvest coffee were curious, impertinent, sometimes insolent, and thought themselves the equal of anyone. Virginia would answer them back with a mixture of Spanish insults and Latin quotations that would scatter them-as if the young woman with black eyes, white skin, and thin lips were just one more of the witches said to live on the far shore of the lake.

To reach the master’s house, one had to walk through the main door, like a guest. The kitchen, to the rear, opened onto poultry yards, stables, storehouses, and fields; tanks and pipes conveyed the coffee fruits to the machines that pulped, fermented, washed, and dried them. There were few animals on the hacienda, baptized by its founder Felipe Kelsen “La Peregrina,” “The Pilgrim,” in honor of his wife, the brave but mutilated Cosima: five riding horses, fourteen mules, and fifty head of cattle. None of that interested little Laura, who would never set foot in those parts, which her grandfather governed with strict discipline, never complaining but noting constantly that the labor necessary to grow coffee was expensive because the product was so fragile and marketing it was so precarious. For that reason Don Felipe found himself forced into the ceaseless work of pruning trees, making sure the coffee bushes had the shade indispensable for their growth, cutting off the old stock, separating it from the new shoots, weeding the planted areas, and maintaining the drying sheds.

“Coffee is not like sugar, not like wild cane that grows anywhere. Coffee requires discipline,” the master, Don Felipe, would declare, as he closely watched over the mills, wagons, stables, and famous drying sheds, dividing his day between paying minute attention to the crop in the field and paying no less careful attention to the bills.

Little Laura took not the slightest interest in any of this. She liked the fact that the hacienda extended out into the coffee hills and that behind them the forest and the lake continued in their seemingly forbidden encounter. She would scramble up to the roof terrace to catch sight, way in the distance, of the quicksilver mirror lake, as her reading aunt, Virginia, called it, and she didn’t wonder why the prettiest thing in the place was also the thing least close to her, the farthest away from the hand the child stretched out as if to touch, giving all the power of the world to her desire. She delivered every victory of her childhood to imagination. The lake. A line of poetry.

From the salon arose the melancholy notes of a prelude, and Laura felt sad, but happy to share that feeling with her eldest aunt, so beautiful and so solitary but mistress of ten musical fingers.

The workers, under orders from her grandfather Don Felipe Kelsen, daubed the walls of the house, their hands wet with a mixture of lime and maguey sap, giving the walls the smoothness of a naked woman’s back. Which is what Don Felipe said to his always upright but now very sick wife one day before Doña Cosima died: “Every time I touch the walls of the house I’m going to think I’m running my fingers over your naked back, your beautiful, delicate naked back, do you remember?”

When Grandmama died with a sigh the next morning, her husband achieved, finally, in her death, something Doña Cosima had always refused in life: to have his wife wear black gloves with cotton stuffing in the four missing fingers of the right one.

He sent her to eternity intact, he said, just as he received her when the mail-order bride arrived from Germany at the age of twenty-two, identical to her daguerreotype-hair parted in the middle and arranged in two large hemispheres that arose from a perfect part in perfect symmetry and covered her ears as if to emphasize the perfection of the mother-of-pearl earrings hanging from her hidden earlobes.

“Ears are the ugliest thing a woman has,” muttered Virginia.

“All you ever do is find defects,” Hilda, shot back.

“I listen to you recite, Virginia, and I listen to you play, Hilda, with my horrid little ears,” laughed Laura Díaz’s mother. “How lucky Mutti Cosima wasn’t wearing her earrings in Perote!”

At the age of twenty-two, she’d arrived from Germany with very dark hair as if to contrast the more sharply with the whiteness of her skin. In the portrait, she held a fan, opened out against her bosom, with the five fingers on her right hand.

This is why Hilda played the piano with shame and passion, as if, at the same time, she wanted to make up for her mother’s deficiency and to offend her by saying, See, I can do it and you can’t, with the hidden anger of the eldest child, the only Kelsen daughter who that one time had returned to Germany with her mother and with her listened, in Cologne, to a recital by the famous pianist and composer Franz Liszt. She had heard the constant sarcastic chatter of many European immigrants. Mexico was a country of Indians and brutes where nature was so abundant and rich that one could satisfy one’s immediate needs without having to work. Encouraging German immigration was one way to remedy that state of affairs, introducing into Mexico another nature, the industrious nature of Europeans. But these immigrants, invited to cultivate the soil, could not endure the rural hardness and isolation, and they migrated to the cities. This is why Felipe Kelsen was faithful to his promise to work the land, to work it hard and resist two temptations: to return to Germany or to make trips to Mexico City like the one which cost his wife Cosima so dearly. As they left the concert in Cologne, Hilda asked her mother, “Mutti, why don’t we stay here to live? How horrible Mexico is!”

It was then Don Felipe forbade not only any return trip to the Vaterland but also the speaking of German in the house, saying this with the utmost severity, fists clenched, and when he calmed down he didn’t strike anything, merely insisted that from now on everyone was going to be Mexican, was going to assimilate, there would be no more visits to the Rhine, and everyone would speak only Spanish. Philip became Felipe, and Cosima, well, stayed Cosima. Only Virginia, with her mischievous tenderness, dared to call her mother Mutti and quote from German books. Don Felipe would shrug his shoulders; the girl had turned out eccentric.

“There are those who are cross-eyed, those who are albinos, and those who are Virginias,” she would say of herself, feigning a squint. “Gesundheit!”

No German, no involvement with anything except the house or, as modern types put it, domestic economy. The daughters became extremely hardworking, perhaps to make up for the deficiencies of their mother, who sat back in her rocking chair (another novelty brought from Louisiana) to fan herself with her left hand and stare into the distance, toward the highway to Mexico City and the mists of Perote where she had left four fingers and, some whispered, her heart.

“When a woman meets the Hunk of Papantla, she never forgets him” was the refrain the people of Veracruz repeated.

At the same time, Don Felipe did not hesitate to reproach his young bride for having made the shopping trip to Mexico City: “See? If you’d gone to New Orleans, this horrible thing wouldn’t have happened to you.”

Cosima had realized from the first day that it was her husband’s fervent wish to assimilate into Mexico. She had been the last concession Philip Kelsen would make to the old country. Cosima simply anticipated her husband’s intention to be forever from here, never more from there. And that is why she lost four fingers. “I’d rather buy my trousseau in the capital of Mexico. We’re Mexicans, aren’t we?”

How dangerous fingers were, little Laura imagined as she awakened from nightmares in which a severed hand scuttled across the floor, climbed the wall, and dropped onto the pillow next to the child’s face. She would wake up screaming, and what she did find next to her face was a spider she didn’t dare kill with a slap because it would have been the same as once again cutting off the fingers of her self absorbed grandmother in her rocker.

“Mama, I want a white canopy over my bed.”

“We keep the house very clean. Not even dust sneaks in.”

“What sneaks in are my horrid, horrid dreams.”

Leticia would laugh and bend down to give a hug to her little girl, who already was showing the keen wit of all the family members except beautiful Grandmother Cosima, sick with melancholy.

To the swine who attributed platonic passions to his wife, Felipe responded with three lovely daughters, one more beautiful, intelligent, and hardworking than the next. “Six fingers are enough for a woman to love a man,” he bragged one night in a tavern, only to repent it immediately as he’d never repented in his life before or after. He was a hardworking man, but he had been tired and a bit drunk. He owned his own coffee plantation. He was trying to relax. He never again said what he blurted out that night. He secretly prayed that anyone who heard him utter that vulgarity would die as soon as possible or go away for good, which was much the same thing.

“To leave is to die a little,” Felipe would say every so often, recalling a saying of his own French mother-when Felipe was Philip and his father Heine Kelsen and his mother Letitia Lassalle, and the Europe that Bonaparte left standing on its pedestal was being made and remade everywhere, because industry was growing and artisans were disappearing, because everyone went off to work in factories, far away from their homes and fields, home and the workplace no longer being united as they always had been; because people were talking about freedom while tyrants held power; because the breast of the nation was split open and the nation was dying from an authoritarian rifle shot; because no one knew if his foot was treading a new furrow or walking on ancient ashes, as the marvelous poet Alfred de Musset put it-a man who brought lovers together in reading, moving the men to raptures and the women to love, touching the hearts of all. Enraptured boys, fainting girls: the young Philip Kelsen, blue eyes, Greek profile, flowing beard, and dragoon cape, top hat, and ivory-handled walking stick, the visage of an eagle, wanted to understand which world he was living in, and he thought he understood it all during a great demonstration in Düsseldorf where he saw himself, recognized himself, and even loved himself, as a disquieting reflection, in the wonderful figure of the young socialist tribune Ferdinand Lassalle.

Philip Kelsen, at the age of twenty-four, felt touched by an omen as he watched and listened when that man spoke. Philip’s mentor, even if almost his contemporary, had the same last name as Philip’s mother, in the same way that she had the name of Napoleon’s mother, Letitia: the favorable signs attracted the young German as he listened to Lassalle and evoked passages from Musset: “From the highest spheres of intelligence to the most impenetrable mysteries of matter and form, your soul and body are your brothers.”

Philip silently addressed his hero as “Lassalle, my brother,” happily forgetting, both voluntarily and involuntarily, the fundamental facts of his life: Heine Kelsen, his father, owed his position to a commercial and financial arrangement, subordinate but respectful, he had with old Johann Buddenbrook, a citizen of Lübeck who had made his fortune by cornering the market in wheat and selling at a high price to Prussian troops during the war against Napoleon. Heine Kelsen represented the interests of old Buddenbrook in Düsseldorf, but his assets-his money and his luck-doubled when he married Letitia Lassalle, goddaughter of the French financier Nucingen, who saw to it she received a lifetime income of a hundred thousand pounds per year as a dowry.

Philip Kelsen forgot all that when, at the age of twenty-four, he heard Ferdinand Lassalle speak for the first time.

Lassalle spoke to the Rhenish workers with the passion of a Romantic and the logic of a politician reminding them that in the new industrial and dynastic Europe, a petty Napoleon had taken the place of the great Napoleon, and the pettiness of this vile, shameless little tyrant had united the government and bourgeoisie against the workers: “The first Napoleon,” Kelsen heard Lassalle, exclaim at the meeting, “was a revolutionary. His nephew is a cretin and represents only the moribund, reactionary faction.”

How much the fiery young Kelsen admired the fiery young Lassalle-whom even the police of Düsseldorf described as a man of “extraordinary intellectual qualities, indefatigable energy, great determination, savagely left-wing ideas, possessed of a wide circle of friendships, with great practical agility and considerable financial resources”! For all those reasons he was dangerous, the police declared; for all those reasons, his young follower Kelsen convinced himself, Lassalle was admirable-because he was well dressed (while his rival, Marx, had grease stains on his vest); because he would go to receptions given by the very class he was fighting (while Marx would not leave the most miserable cafés in London); because he believed in the German nation (while Marx was a cosmopolitan enemy of nationalism); because he loved adventure (while Marx was a boring middle-class paterfamilias unable to give his wife, the aristocratic Madame von Westphalen, a ring).

For the rest of his life, Philip Kelsen would fight the Lassallian fervor of his socialist years. He lost his entire youth in that splendid illusion, which like the poet’s European furrow was, perhaps, only a sinkhole of ashes. The socialist Lassalle ended up joining forces with the feudalistic Bismarck, the ultranationalist, ultrareactionary Prussian Junker, so that between them-this was the reason behind the uncomfortable alliance-they could dominate the voracious capitalists who had no country. The critique of power became power over criticism, and Philip Kelsen abandoned Germany on the same day his handcuffed hero, Ferdinand Lassalle, became his bloodied hero, killed in a duel in a forest near Geneva on August 28, 1864. The reason for the duel was as absurd and romantic as the elegant socialist himself: he fell passionately in love with Helene (von Dönniger, as the newspaper article reported it), challenged her current suitor (Yanko von Racowitz, added the article), who in due course put a bullet in Lassalle’s stomach without the slightest consideration for history, socialism, the workers’ movement, or the Iron Chancellor.

How much farther from the pantheon in the Jewish cemetery in Breslau where Lassalle was buried at the age of thirty-nine could the disillusioned socialist Philip Kelsen go at the age of twenty-five, than to the coasts of the New World, to Veracruz, where the Atlantic breathes its last, after a long crossing from the port of Hamburg, and then inland to Catemaco, hot, fertile, prodigal lands-supremely fertile, they were called in speeches-where nature and man could join forces and prosper, beyond the corrupt disillusion of Europe?

Philip retained only moving memories of Lassalle, nationalism, and the love of adventure that brought him from the Rhine to the Gulf of Mexico. But here, those attributes would be no longer German but Mexican. Old Heine in Düsseldorf applauded the decision of his rebellious son, gave him an endowment of marks, and put him on a ship for the New World. Philip Kelsen made a three-year stopover in New Orleans, working reluctantly in a cigar factory, but he was disgusted by American racism, still blazing hot amid the charred ruins of the Confederacy, so he went on to Veracruz, exploring the coast from Tuxpan in the green Huasteca to the Tuxtlas, flown over by hundreds of birds.

Full stomach, happy heart, said the first woman he slept with in Tuxpan, a mulatta who gave him the same sensuality in bed as she did in the kitchen, alternately placing in the voracious mouth of her young German seducer her two wine-red nipples or an enormous quantity of bocoles, pemoles, and the biggest tamales in all of Mexico, stuffed with pork and chile. Not yet acclimated, Philip Kelsen again found a mulatta and snacks in Santiago Tuxtla. Like her native city, her name was Santiaga, and the dishes she served up for the repose of the recently arrived, sensual little German were Caribbean: lots of sweet potatoes, garlic, and mogo-mogo from plantains. But what seduced Philip Kelsen more than any sexual or gastronomic dish was the beauty of Catemaco, a short distance from the Tuxtlas: a lake that could have been in Switzerland or Germany-surrounded by mountains and thick vegetation, shiny as a mirror but animated by the invisible whispers of waterfalls, birds flying overhead, and colonies of tailless macaques.

Standing on a hill overlooking the quicksilver lake, Philip Kelsen announced, in an act that reconciled all of him-his youth and his future, his romantic spirit and his financial patrimony, his idealism and his pragmatism, his sensuality and his asceticism-“I’m staying here. This is my country.”

Only at a distance and through hearsay did little Laura begin to learn the story of her upright, disciplined, and handsome German grandfather, who spoke only Spanish, although who could tell if he went on thinking in German and who could know the language of his dreams? For the little girl, all dates were soon to come, never far off, and the passage of time was marked most vividly by her birthday, when, so no one would forget to pay attention to her, she would charmingly skip around the patio, starting early in the morning while she was still in her nightie and sing:

on the twelfth of May

the Virgin dressed in white

came walking into sight

with her coat so gay…

The entire household knew the rite by heart, and on the days leading up to Laura’s birthday they would pretend to forget the celebration. If Laura knew that they knew, then she too gave no hint of it. Everyone feigned surprise, and it was prettier that way, especially this twelfth of May in the fifth year of the century, when Laura turned seven, and her grandfather gave her an extraordinary present, a Chinese doll with porcelain head, hands, and feet, its little cotton body covered by a Mandarin costume of red silk, with black edging and a dragon design embroidered in gold. For the little girl being feted, the exoticism of the costume did not detract from the joy and gladness she felt in her instantaneous love for those tiny little feet in white silk stockings and black velvet slippers, for the smiling little pug-nosed face with Asian eyes and high brows painted near the fringe of silk hair. But the diminutive hands were the doll’s most delicate part. As soon as she received this most beautiful gift of her childhood, she took the doll’s hand and with it shook hands with her pianist aunt, Hilda, her writer aunt, Virginia, with Mutti, the cook, Leticia, with her grandfather, the farmer Felipe, and her invalid grandmother Cosima, who involuntarily hid her mutilated right hand under her shawls and awkwardly used her left hand to greet her little granddaughter.

“Do you have a name for her yet?” asked Doña Cosima.

“Li Po,” Laura answered, humming along. “We’ll call her Li Po.”

With a simple glance, her grandmother asked her where she’d found that name; Laura answered with a shrug that meant “just because.” They all kissed her, and the child went back to bed to make Li Po comfortable among the pillows, promising her that even though she might be punished, Li Po would never be scolded, that even if things went badly for Laura, Li Po would always have her throne of cushions whence she might rule over Laura Díaz’s bedroom.

“You rest, Li Po, sleep, live happily. I’ll take care of you forever.”

When she left Li Po behind in her room and went out of the house, her childhood instincts led her to enact, as if in a garden, the feat of returning to the natural world-so abundant, so “prodigal,” but above all so detailed, close, and certain to the gaze and touch of the child who was growing up surrounded with latent forest and impatient lake and renascent coffee groves: that was the way Aunt Virginia put it in her loud, sonorous voice.

“And supremely fertile,” she added, so not a word would be left out. “Most fertile.”

But the fingers of the house held her in, like the vines in the richly detailed world of the tropical forest. Aunt Hilda was playing the piano. (I get dizzy and exalted at the same time, I’m ashamed, but it gives me a secret pleasure to use my ten fingers to abandon myself, get out of myself, to feel and say to everyone that the music they’re hearing is not mine and neither am I, it’s Chopin’s, I play it, I’m the one who lets this marvelous sound pass through my hands, my fingers, in full knowledge that outside on her rocker, my mother listens to me, my mother who did not let me stay in Germany to study and become an important pianist, a real artist, and my father also listens to me, my father who has locked us up in this village with no future, and I reproach them both for the loss of my own destiny, Hilda Kelsen, the Hilda I might have been, the Hilda I’ll never be now, no matter how I try, even if some good fortune I cannot control, to which I could say: I made you, you’re mine, were to bring me luck; it wouldn’t be my luck, it would be an accident, a gift from chance: I play Chopin’s saddest Preludes and am not consoled, I only arm myself with patience and feel the intimate joy of offending my father and mother.) Aunt Virginia was writing a poem. (I live surrounded by resignation, I don’t want to resign myself, I want to escape one day, and I fear that my fondness for reading and writing is merely that, an escape and not a vocation I could just as well fulfill here as in Germany or, as I quipped one day, in China, let’s see if I don’t end up like my little niece’s doll, charming but mute, relaxing forever on a pillow.) Mutti Leticia was helping the cook prepare tamales in the coastal style. (How beautiful it is to stuff them with the smooth mix of cooked pork and chipotle chiles, then finish by wrapping each tamale tenderly in its sheet of banana leaves, like a baby in bunting, and steam them, uniting, conserving all the flavors and aromas, meat and spice, fruit and flour, what a delight for the palate, it reminds me of my husband Fernando’s kisses, but I mustn’t think about that, the arrangements are made, it’s what’s best for everyone, it’s good that the girl will grow up here in the country with me, each of us has obligations, there’s no reason to use up our pleasures while we’re young, we should postpone them for the future, we should receive pleasure as a reward and not as a privilege, gifts are used up as quickly as whims, you think you have the right to have everything and you end with nothing; I prefer to wait, patiently, after all I’m only in my twenties, my whole life ahead of me, my whole life ahead.) Grandfather Felipe put on his glasses and went over the accounts. (I can’t complain, everything has turned out fine, the plantation is prospering, the girls are growing, Hilda has her music, Virginia her books, the one who might complain most would be Leticia, living away from her husband by mutual agreement, not because of any imposition or tyranny on my part but because they want to wait for the future, not realizing that perhaps they’ve already lost it forever because you have to seize things at the moment, the way you catch birds on the wing, or they disappear forever, the way I threw myself into the socialist adventure until that wore itself out and then I threw myself at America, which apparently is something that never wears out, a bottomless continent, while we Europeans swallowed our history whole and now ruminate it, sometimes belching it up, bah, we defecate it, we are defecators of history, and here history has first to be made, without Europe’s errors, without its dreams and disillusions, starting from scratch, what a relief, what power, to start from nothing, to own our own destiny, then one can accept falls, misfortunes, errors because they are part of our own destiny and not part of a distant historical event, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lassalle, Karl Marx… they all had less freedom on their thrones and behind their pulpits than I do here, going over the accounts of a coffee plantation, Himmel und Hölle, then.) And the silent grandmother, Cosima, rocked softly in the rocking chair brought from Louisiana instead of Mexico City. (I wanted to tell Felipe that I too was of this country, that was all; as soon as I arrived and met him, I understood that I was his last concession to his German past; why he chose me, I still don’t know; why he loves me so, I hope it isn’t to make up for my unfortunate adventure on the Perote highway; he’s never made me feel he’s sorry for me-on the contrary, he’s loved me with a real man’s passion, our daughters were conceived with a shameless, foulmouthed passion that no one who knows us could imagine. He treats me like a whore, and I like it, I tell him I imagine making love with the chinaco who mutilated me and he likes it, we’re accomplices in an intense love that has no modesty or reticence, that only he and I know, and the memory of it makes all the more painful the death that’s coming closer and that says to me, to us, Now one of the two of you is going to live without the other, so how are you going to go on loving? I don’t know because I have no idea what comes after, but he’s staying here and can remember me, imagine me, prolong me, think I didn’t die, only ran off with the chinaco whom I never saw again-because if I were to meet up with him again, what would I do, kill him or run off with him? No, I’ll only think the same thing I tell people: I did it to save the other passengers. But how could I ever forget those bestial eyes, that macho stance, that tigerlike way of walking, that unsatisfied desire, mine and his, never, never, never…)

Aunt Hilda was playing the piano; Aunt Virginia was still writing with a quill pen; her mother Leticia was cooking not only because she liked to but because she had a genius for the Veracruz art of uniting rice, beans, plantain, and pork, shredding the meat and adding lemon juice for the dish called ropa vieja, “old clothes,” marinating octopus in its ink, and reserving for the end the meringues, the custards, the jocoques of clotted cream and the tocino del cielo-the sweetest sweet in the world, which had gone from Barcelona to Havana and from Cuba to Veracruz as if to stifle with sweetness all the bitterness of those lands of revolution, conquest, and tyranny.

“None of that, now. I don’t want to know about Mexico’s past: the New World is only future,” declared the grandfather firmly whenever these topics came up. For that reason, he went out less and less to after noon gatherings and dinners, and no longer to taverns, ever since he forgot himself that tired night… At first he didn’t go to Mass either, under the pretext that first he was a socialist and second a Protestant. But small towns are big hells, so he ended up yielding to the customs of a Veracruz that believed in God and miracles but not in the Church and its priests. This pleased Felipe, not because he was a cynic but because it was more comfortable. But the entire town became uncomfortable when Don Elzevir Almonte appeared, a young, dark skinned, and intolerant parish priest sent from the very puritanical clerical city of Puebla de los Angeles. He, along with a good dozen other priests from Mexico’s central plateau, had been charged by the Archbishop of Mexico with establishing discipline and good habits among the lax (if not dissolute) faithful of the Gulf coast.

Cosima Reiter, the mail-order bride, had been born and raised Protestant. Philip-Felipe, who was agnostic, had realized that he’d never find a nonbelieving wife in Mexico; here even atheists believed in God and Protestants were Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman.

To order an atheist bride from the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm seemed not so much like an offense as a tropical joke. Philip went along with the advice of friends and relatives on both sides of the Atlantic; however, what really captivated him was that daguerreotype of the girl holding a fan in her right hand, her black hair divided into two perfectly symmetrical curves by a strict part.

The young Lassallist did not anticipate that the moment his still very young wife reached Veracruz a conformist streak-the rule, no matter how notable the exceptions, in religious communities-would for many reasons become pronounced in her. Social pressure was the least important of those reasons. More significant was her inevitable discovery that Philip, or Felipe, had not lived a saint’s life during his Veracruz bachelorhood. This foreign boy with long wavy hair, blond beard, and Greek profile would never follow a monastic rule. Rumors circulating in the small lakeside population reached Cosima’s ears as soon as she’d unpacked. Twenty-three hours after the civil ceremony, the beautiful, upright German informed her stupefied husband: “Now I want a Catholic, religious wedding.”

“But you and I were confirmed as Protestants. We’ll have to disavow our faith.”

“We’re Christian. No one has any reason to know more.”

“I don’t see the reason for this.”

“It’s so your mulatta daughter can be my maid of honor and carry the train of my wedding dress.”

Thus did María de la O, almost on the first day, enter the home of the newlyweds. Cosima took it upon herself to assign a bedroom to the young lady, ordering the servants to address her as “señorita.” She gave her a place at the table, treated her as a daughter, and refused to acknowledge anything about her origin. No one except María de la O herself heard what Cosima Reiter said to her real mother: “Madam, choose the way in which you’d like your daughter to grow up. Go live in a place where you can make a life for yourself-Tampico or Coatzacoalcos, and you won’t lack for anything.”

“Except the love of my little girl,” wept the black woman.

“Not even you believe that,” said the brand-new Frau Kelsen, speaking to her familiarly, having quickly learned local customs and habits. One day, when she’d become an old lady, she reminded her husband of that event, not knowing that little Laura was listening from behind a potted fern.

María de la O Kelsen was the way Cosima would introduce the beautiful little mulatta, and that was how Don Felipe accepted her. The lady of the house didn’t even have to beg her husband to be faithful to the humanitarian principles of his youth. Cosima took charge and began to go to Mass, first with the mulatta girl and a missal held in both hands; later, with three more daughters and the missal in one hand, proud of her four-sided maternity, indifferent to whispers, shock, or curses, even when evil tongues said that the Hunk of Papantla was the real father-with the difficulty that the bandit was Creole, Doña Cosima German, and María de la O, in that case, explicable only as a racial throwback.

Seven years older than the eldest of her sisters, Hilda, eight years older than Virginia, and ten than Leticia, María de la O was a mulatta with charming features, a quick smile, and an upright gait: Cosima had found her bent over and groveling, like a beaten, cornered little animal, her black eyes filled with even blacker visions; and not wasting a moment, the child’s new mother by will and right, Cosima Reiter de Kelsen, taught María de la O to walk properly, even forcing her: “Put that dictionary on your head and walk toward me without letting it fall. Careful.”

She taught her table manners, how to be neat; she dressed her in the most beautiful starched white dresses because they contrasted dramatically with her dark skin. She made her wear a white silk bow in her hair, which wasn’t stiff like her mother’s but relaxed like her father Philip’s.

“Now you I’d bring back with me to Germany,” Cosima said proudly. “You would certainly attract attention.”

She went to church and told Father Morales, I’m going to have a baby and then at least two more. “I don’t want any of my children to be ashamed of their sister. I want the Kelsens yet to be born to enter the world and find a Kelsen who is different but also better than they.”

She rested a hand on María de la O’s chignon. “Have her baptized, confirmed, rain blessings on her, and for the love of God, pray for her honesty.”

He hesitated an instant and replied: “Let’s hope she doesn’t turn out to be a whore.”

The good thing was that the priest from Veracruz, Don Jesus Morales, was a good-natured man without being servile, and everything in him-his public sermons, his private chats, the confessions he heard in secrecy-protected and exalted the Christian behavior of Doña Cosima Reiter de Kelsen, by now very much a convert to Roman Catholicism.

“Ladies, don’t waste the triumphs of either faith or charity on me. All of you in good order now, dammit.”

The priest Jesus Morales loved his flock. The substitute priest, Elzevir Almonte, wanted to reform it. The fingers Grandmother Cosima was missing seemed to have sprouted on the new priest, and he used them to admonish, censure, condemn… His sermons brought to the tropics the air of the high plateau, rarefied, suffocating, intolerable and intolerant. His parishioners began to count the prohibitions hurled at them from the pulpit by the dark young priest Almonte: no more of these loose camisoles that reveal the female form, especially when it rains and they soak through; from now on, modest undergarments and umbrellas in hand; no more of these foulmouthed Veracruz expressions and actions; though I’m not a magistrate or a justice of the peace, I declare that anyone who curses may not receive the holy body of our savior in his sacrilegious mouth-that much I can do; no more serenades, a pretext for nocturnal excitation that hinders Christian repose; brothels are forthwith closed, taverns are forthwith closed, and under pain of mortal sin a curfew is declared beginning at 9 p.m. whether or not the authorities approve-and if you think I’m joking, just wait and see; you will say from now on “that which I walk on,” not “legs,” just as you will say “that which I sit on” instead of…

All these things the new priest from Puebla proclaimed with an elaborate waving of hands, ridiculous and insolent, as if he wanted to give sculptural form in the air to his categorical prohibitions. The brothels migrated to Santiago Tuxtla, the taverns went to San Andrés, the harpists and guitar players marched to Roca del Rio, and amid the desolation now fallen on the local merchants like a plague, Father Almonte reached the apex of authoritarianism with his techniques in the confessional.

“My child, do you look at yourself nude in the mirror?”

Felipe did not reproach Cosima for her new faith. He simply looked her straight in the eye when she came home from Mass on Sundays, and it was she who for the first time averted her haughty gaze.

“Do you touch yourself in secret, my child?”

Laura looked at herself naked and was not surprised to see what she always saw: she thought the priest might have planted something strange in her body, a flower in her navel or a spider between her legs, like the one her aunts had when they bathed on a deserted beach of the lake, where they never returned once Father Almonte began to cast suspicion everywhere.

“Would you like to see your father’s sexual organ, my child?”

To see if something would happen, Laura repeated in front of the mirror the priest’s strange movements and even more extraordinary words. She also imitated his voice, making it even more bombastic:

“A woman is a temple built over a sewer.”

“Have you ever seen your father naked?”

Laura almost never saw her father, Fernando Díaz, dressed or naked. He was a bookkeeper in a bank, lived in Veracruz with a fifteen-year-old son, the product of an earlier marriage. After his first wife, Elisa Obregón, died in childbirth, Fernando fell in love with the young Leticia Kelsen during a visit to the festivals of Tlacotalpan. Leticia fell in love with this strange bird from the port, who always wore jacket, vest, tie, and tiepin, and whose only concession to the heat was a round straw hat-what the English called a boater, as Aunt Virginia noted, striking a resonant chord in her sister’s Anglophile suitor. The Kelsens, married by mail, did not impede this “love match,” as Mr. Díaz insisted on calling it; he was a man of English readings and influences, which Felipe Kelsen thought was good for helping to erase the German influence. Leticia herself accepted the arrangement of living apart, and when little Laura came into the world, Felipe, now a grandfather, roundly congratulated himself because his daughter and granddaughter lived under his protection in the country and not far away in the noisy port, which was, perhaps, as sinful-he said to Cosima-as some gossiping tongues said it was. She gave him an ironic look. Small towns, big hells.

Fernando Díaz had asked of his new family (Leticia first and then Laura, when she came exactly nine months later) one thing: “I can’t give you what you deserve. Live a good life in Don Felipe’s house. In Catemaco, I’d never be anything but a bookkeeper. In Veracruz, I can rise, and then I’ll have you brought to join me. I don’t want charity from your father or compassion from your sisters. I’m not a hanger-on.”

Discomfort and being hangers-on were, in point of fact, the components of the young couple’s initial situation in the Kelsen house in Catemaco, so everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Fernando Díaz made his decision.

“Why doesn’t your son Santiago ever come to see us?” the maiden aunts asked.

“He’s studying,” Fernando would answer dryly.

Laura Díaz was dying to learn more: how had her parents met, how did they get married, who was the mysterious older half brother who had the right to live with her father at the port? When would they all get together? Was it right that her mother was so hardworking, as if taking care of two houses at the same time, that of her father present here and that of her husband absent there, as if cooking for both those who were there and those who weren’t?… It was true. The solitude of mother and daughter spread more and more to the rest of the house, to the three spinsters, Hilda playing the piano, Virginia writing and reading, María de la O knitting wool shawls for the cold, when the north wind blew…

“We won’t get married, Leticia, until you move in with your husband, as things should be,” Hilda and Virginia would say, almost in a chorus.

“He’s doing it for you and for the girl. It won’t be long now, I’m sure,” María de la O would add.

“Well, he should hurry up, or the three of us will die unmarried,” Virginia, alone, would laugh. “I hope the gentleman, mein Herr, is aware of it!”

But Grandmother Doña Cosima incarnated the true solitude. “I’ve done everything I had to do in life, Felipe. Now respect my silence.”

“And your memories? What about them?”

“Not a one is mine. I share them all with you. All.”

“Don’t worry. I know.”

“Then take good care of them, and don’t ask me for more words. I’ve already given you them all.”

That is what Doña Cosima said in the year 1905, when everything happened.

Witty, wisecracking, and raucous: the people of Catemaco could be all that (when the spirit moved them) and devout, too, as the priest Morales knew very well and the priest Almonte knew not at all. More than the rich and the almost rich, it was the poor, the sowers and reapers, the net weavers, the fishermen, the oarsmen, the bricklayers, and their wives who gave the best offerings in church.

Don Felipe and other coffee growers would give money or sacks of food; the poorest, in secret, would bring jewelry, ancient pieces passed down in their families for centuries and offered to give thanks to the Lord Our God for their own good fortune or someone else’s bad luck, both taken to be miraculous. Onyx necklaces, large silver combs, gold bracelets, unmounted emeralds: luxurious stones retrieved from who knows what hiding place, attic, or cave, from under what mat on which embankment, from what secret mine.

Everything was enthusiastically piled up, because Father Morales was scrupulous about storing away for his flock what rightly belonged to it and would sell a valuable piece in Veracruz only when he knew that the very family who’d piously offered the jewel to the Black Christ of Otatitla n needed money.

As in all the towns on the Gulf coast, the saints were celebrated in Catemaco with dances held on a wooden floor the better to hear the sound of stamping feet. The air would fill with harps, viols, fiddles, and guitars. It was then it happened-everyone remembers it from the year 1905: on the day of the feast of the Holy Child of Zongolica, Father Elzevir Almonte did not appear. People went looking for him, but neither the priest nor the treasure was to be found. The offering chest was empty and the priest from Puebla gone.

“How right he was when he’d say, ‘Puebla breeding ground of saints; Veracruz fountain of crooks.’”

That was the only comment, ironic and sufficient, made by Don. Felipe Kelsen. The people were harder on him, their mildest epithets being “little bastard” and “thief.” The four Kelsen daughters remained impassive. Life would go back to normal without the robber priest, taverns and whorehouses would operate once again, serenades would be heard on tranquil midnights, those who had gone away would come back. Coincidentally, on that day, the self-absorbed grandmother, Cosima Reiter, began to decline, as if she’d wasted her life in a religion that didn’t deserve her and wasted her love (gossips insisted) on an honorable man instead of a romantic bandit.

“Laura, 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 breathlessly-eager, at first, to tell of her discovery, the lady of the forest who gave her jewels to the poor, the lost statue who protected the property of heaven which that nasty priest Almonte had stole-curse him, curse him-and she, Laura Díaz, knew the secret of the forest. But then she realized she could tell no one, not now, not to them.

She stopped running. She returned home slowly along the road of undulating hills and gentle slopes planted with coffee. In the patio, Grandfather Felipe was saying to his foremen that there was nothing to do but cut back the laurel branches, they’re invading us, as if they could move, the laurels are clogging the drains, they’re going to eat up the whole house, flocks of starlings gather right over here in the ceiba tree just outside the house and dirty up the entryway, this can’t go on; besides, we’re coming into the season when the coffee trees get covered with spiderwebs.

“We’re going to have to cut down a few trees.”

Aunt Virginia sighed. With complete naturalness she’d taken over her mother’s rocker, even though she wasn’t the firstborn.

“I just listen to them,” she said to her sisters. “They don’t realize no one alive is as old as a tree…”

Laura didn’t want to tell her aunts anything. She would only talk to her grandfather. She tugged on the sleeve of his black frock coat. Grandfather, there’s an enormous lady in the forest, you have to see her. Child, what are you talking about? I’ll take you to her, Grandfather, if you don’t come, no one will believe me, come on, if you come, I won’t be afraid of her, I’ll hug her.

She imagined: I’ll hug her and bring her back to life, that’s what the stories Grandmama used to tell me say, all you have to do is hug a statue to bring it to life.

She berated herself: how little time her decision to keep the secret of the great forest lady lasted.

Her grandfather took her by the hand and smiled, he shouldn’t smile on a day of mourning, but this pretty little girl with her long, straight hair and more and more well defined features, her baby fat disappearing-her grandfather could tell that day, before Laura saw it in any mirror or even dreamed it, how she’d look when she grew up, with very long arms and legs and a prominent nose and thinner lips than any of the other girls her age (lips like those of her writing aunt Virginia)-this child was reborn life, Cosima restored, one life continued in another and he its guardian, keeper of a soul, which required the living memory of a couple, Cosima and Felipe, to prolong itself and find new energy in the life of a girl, of this girl, the deeply moved old man said to himself-he was sixty-six! Cosima was fifty-seven when she died!-and Laura reached the clearing in the forest.

“This is the statue, Grandfather.”

Don Felipe laughed.

“This is a ceiba, child. Careful now. Look at how beautiful it is but also dangerous. Do you see? It’s covered over with nails, except they aren’t nails but pointy spines like daggers which the ceiba produces to protect itself, don’t you see? Swords come out of the ceiba’s body, the tree arms itself, so no one will come near it, so no one will hug it.” Her grandfather smiled. “What a naughty ceiba!”

Then bad news came. There was a miners’ strike in Cananea, another strike in the textile factory at Rio Blanco, right here in the state of Veracruz, the bodies of strikers killed by the federal army were carried from Orizaba to the sea in open boxcars, so everyone could see the corpses and learn a lesson.

“Do you think Don Porfirio will fall?”

“Are you serious? This shows that Porfirio Díaz has the same energy he always had, even if he’s seventy-five.”

“Boss, we’re going to have to cut down the chalacahuites.”

“It’s a pity we have to cut down trees that shade the coffee.”

“That’s when coffee prices are high. Right now, prices are very low. We’re better off cutting down the trees and selling them as lumber.”

“It’s God’s will. They’ll grow again.”