The Years with Laura Diaz

3.

Veracruz: 1910

HE WOULD ARRIVE LATE. He would arrive early. Always, either too late or too early. He would turn up unexpectedly for dinner. Other times, he wouldn’t turn up at all.

As soon as her husband, Fernando Díaz, had her brought to Veracruz, Leticia established-as if they were the most natural things in the world, not feeling she was imposing them on anyone-the same schedules and the same order she’d had in her previous life on the Catemaco coffee plantation. It didn’t matter how boisterous and disorderly the port was: the sun still rose at the same time whether she was next to the lake or the sea. Breakfast at six, midday meal at one, light supper at seven, or dinner, in special cases, at nine.

Veracruz gave Leticia Kelsen its many kinds of shellfish and fish, and Laura’s mother would combine them in marvelous ways: octopus in its ink with white rice, fried plantain with beans, refried of course; white snapper from the Gulf swimming in onion, peppers, and olives; meat shredded with cilantro or congealed in dark sauces called “tablecloth stainers”; monastic desserts and worldly coffees-slowing you down, knowing all about heat and insomnia, friend to both siestas and moons.

Coffee could be had at any hour of the day in the celebrated Café de la Parroquia, where a wasp’s nest of waiters with white aprons and bow ties ran through the buzz of customers carrying rolls and huevos rancheros, like underpaid magicians in a carnival where performances went on around the clock, poured coffee and hot milk into glasses with astonishing simultaneity from acrobatic heights. The great silver coffeemaker, imported from Germany, presided over all this, occupying the center-rear of the café like a silver queen decorated with faucets, spigots, foam, steam, and factory seals. Lebrecht und Justus Krüger, Lübeck, 1887.

Also from Europe came illustrated magazines and the novels for which Laura’s father, Fernando Díaz, would impatiently wait every month, when the packet boats from Southampton and Le Havre dropped anchor in Veracruz for the sole purpose, or so it seemed, of satisfying his needs. There he’d be, the accountant waiting with his boater firmly in place to protect him from a sun heavy as a wet sheet. With the suit that had made people stop and stare in Catemaco when Fernando courted and won Leticia. With his walking stick with its ivory handle in one hand. His other hand in that of Laura, his twelve-year-old daughter.

“The magazines, Papa, first the magazines.”

“No. First the books for your brother. Tell him they’re here.”

“It’s better if I bring them to his room.”

“As you please.”

“Is it proper for a twelve-year-old girl to go into the bedroom of a boy who’s almost twenty?” asked Leticia as soon as Laura, still skipping like a child, left the room.

“It’s more important they love and trust each other,” her husband, Fernando Díaz, would answer calmly.

Leticia would shrug her shoulders and blush, remembering the moral lessons of the cynical, fugitive priest Elzevir Almonte. But she quickly glanced around the living room of her new house proudly. It was on the upper floor above the Bank of the Republic, of which her husband, for just a month now, was the president.

He had kept his word. Through hard work, just as he’d promised, he had risen from teller to accountant to president, by sacrificing, as he said to Leticia, twelve years of conjugal life, of being close to Laura, and of domestic order, since his home, if he dared call it that, had consisted of men living alone. Fernando and his son Santiago, fruit of his first marriage to the deceased Elisa Obregó n-no matter how diligent the servants might be-would leave their cigars burning here or extinguished there, a book open on a bed, their socks lost under the same bed, and, finally, the bed itself unmade for all too long.

Now Santiago could stretch out again on his bed, but now in a comfortable, almost sumptuous new home. His long nightshirt with its ruffled front looked like a nest of doves. He brought his legs together when his half sister Laura walked in carrying the books, holding them from below, her hands linked like an unstable swing, the pile forming an abbreviated Tower of Pisa that Santiago quickly caught before Anatole France and Paul Bourget spilled their words on the floor.

As soon as Santiago and Laura met, they “sympathized” with each other, as the expression of the times put it, and though of course their meeting was inevitable, both Leticia and Fernando had, each for different reasons, fears that at first they refrained from communicating to each other. The mother feared that a girl at the threshold of adolescence would suffer improper influences, even contacts, from the nearness of a young man almost eight years older than she. Her brother, yes of course, but in any case a stranger, a novelty in her life. Wasn’t there novelty enough in having moved, as they always knew they would even if they’d postponed it so often, away from rural life and Don Felipe Kelsen’s patriarchy, from the mutilated grandmother and the three busy aunts, to a new life, to being separated from her mother, who stopped sleeping in the same bedroom with her to move to the bed of the father, who until then had slept alone, abandoning the child, who could not sleep with her half brother (as was her first, naive desire)? Can bars be put up to keep out waves on the lake?

“We women mature rapidly in the tropics, Fernando. I married you when I was barely sixteen.”

She didn’t tell the whole truth. In the faces of my sisters and my half sister, I saw a solitary life, the three of them fated to be spinsters because they wanted other things-Virginia, to write; Hilda, to be a concert pianist-and knew they’d never have any of them yet would never, never give them up, and their silent, painful devotion would mean they’d write poems and play the piano surrounded by invisible readers and listeners except for the two people for whom “their sonnets and sonatas were a reproach”: their parents, Felipe and Cosima. María de la O, on the other hand, would never marry, out of simple gratitude. Cosima had saved her from a miserable fate. María de la O would be eternally faithful to the family who took her in. Leticia-a child who quickly learned the rules of an advantageous silence in a home that divided unequally the fortune of Don Felipe and the misfortunes of Cosima and the other daughters-decided she’d get married as soon as possible and almost without conditions so as to escape the fate of the dissipated, erased, gray, and shapeless dreams of the other daughters, dreams that transformed the three Catemaco women into pantomime actresses performing in the fog. She married Fernando and saved herself from spinsterhood. She had a daughter and saved herself from being childless. She remained among her own and saved herself-this was her excuse-from ingratitude. Her husband, Fernando, understood her. He needed time to establish a career so that he could give Leticia and Laura a good life at the same time that he gave his son Santiago the attention a motherless boy required; so to both Fernando and Leticia their bizarre agreement seemed not only reasonable but bearable.

What consolidated it was the need Felipe Kelsen came to have for his son-in-law in those years-when President Porfirio Díaz grew older, the strikes were bloodily repressed, revolutionary uprisings erupted in the north of the country, anarcho-syndicalist activity started up right there in Veracruz, Don Porfirio made politically ill-timed statements to the North American reporter James Creelman (“Mexico is ripe for democracy”), and Madero and the Flores Magón brothers mounted their anti-reelection campaign: all this spread disquiet in the markets, Veracruz lost ground in its competition with the Cuban sugar industry, which had been restored after the cruel war between Spain and the United States, and not even the traditional appeal of the German business community there to the German Mining Company had any effect. War in Europe was possible. The Balkans were catching fire. France and England had concluded the Entente Cordiale, and Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary had signed the Triple Alliance: the only thing left to do was to dig trenches and wait for the spark that would set Europe ablaze. Capital was being set aside to finance the war and raise commodity prices, not to extend credit to German-Mexican plantations.

“I have two hundred thousand coffee trees producing fifteen hundred hundredweights of beans,” added Don Felipe. “What I need is credit, what I need is money.”

Not to worry, his son-in-law Fernando Díaz told him. By now he was president of the Bank of the Republic in Veracruz, and he would see to it that credit was granted to Don Fernando and the beautiful plantation “Las Peregrina”-the name a reminder of the lovely German bride Doña Cosima. The bank would make up the amount by handing over the crop to the commercial houses in the port, taking a commission and crediting the rest back to the Kelsen plantation. And Leticia, together with her child Laura, could finally come to live with the paterfamilias Don Fernando Díaz and his son Santiago, all gathered together under the roof of the presidency of the Bank of the Republic in Veracruz.

How different it was for Laura to live in a house surrounded by streets instead of fields, to see people she didn’t know pass under the balconies all day, to live on the second floor and have the business downstairs, to lick the railing on the balcony because it tasted of salt, and to stare at the Veracruz sea-slow, leaden, heavy, shining after the storm that had just passed and while it was getting ready for the next one, giving off hot vapors instead of the coolness of the lake… and the forest presided over by the statue of the jewel-covered giant woman, which she saw, which she did not dream, which was no ceiba: Grandfather Felipe must have thought she was such a fool.

“Thick walls, the sound of running water, moving air, and lots of hot coffee: that’s the best defense against the heat,” declared Leticia, more and more self-confident now that she was mistress of her own home, free finally of paternal tutelage and rediscovering in her bus band what had delighted her when they were courting, that time they met at the Candlemas festivals in Tlacotalpan.

He was a tender man. Efficient and conscientious in his work. Determined to better himself. He read English and French, although he was more Anglophile than Francophile. But he knew that a strange void kept him from understanding the mysteries of life, secrets that are an essential part of each personality, without prejudging others to be good or evil. He read many novels to make up for the defect. Ultimately, however, for Fernando things were as they were-steady work, doing more than was expected, moderation in pleasure, and personalities (his own or others’) a mystery to be respected.

For this man, now fully formed at the age of forty-five, to inquire into the souls of others was to gossip, was the prying of old busybodies. Leticia always loved him because, at the age of twenty-eight (even if she’d married when she was sixteen, she shared these virtues and, like him, was helpless when confronted by the mystery of others. Although the only time she used that formulation-“others”-Fernando dropped the Thomas Hardy novel he was reading and said, Never say “others,” because it sounds as if they were superfluous, mere extras. “I suggest you always give people names.”

“Even if I don’t know them?”

“Make up names. Features or clothes will always tell you who a person is.”

“Mr. Cross-eyed, Mr. Ugly, Mr. Street Sweeper?” laughed Leticia, her husband joining her in the silent happiness peculiar to him.

The Hunk. From the time she was a child, Laura had heard that nickname applied to the former army officer who cut off Grandmama Cosima’s fingers, and now she wanted to confide that story (I mean tell it in secret, she thought) to her handsome half brother, dressed at twelve noon, all in white, with a high, starched collar and silk tie, linen jacket and trousers, and high black boots which laced up in a complicated way with hooks and eyelets. His features, more than regular, were of an attractive symmetry that reminded Laura of the araucaria leaves in the tropical forest. In him, everything was exactly the same on both sides, and if he had a shadow when he got out of bed, the shadow would accompany him like an identical twin, never absent, never bent over, always next to Santiago.

As if to give the lie to the perfection of a face that was exactly symmetrical, he wore fragile eyeglasses with scarcely visible silver frames. They deepened his gaze whenever he used them, but that didn’t make his eyes wander when he took them off. Which is why he could play with them-hide them for a moment in his jacket pocket, use them like banderillas the next, toss them into the air and casually catch them before putting them back in his pocket. Laura Díaz had never seen such a being.

“I’ve finished college. My father has given me a sabbatical.”

“What’s that?”

“A year of freedom to decide seriously about my vocation. I’m reading. As you can see.”

“Well, I really don’t see much of you, Santiago. You’re always out of sight.”

The boy laughed, hooked his walking stick on his forearm, and tousled the hair of his little sister, furious now at his condescension.

“I’m already twelve. Almost.”

“If I were only fifteen, I’d carry you off,” laughed Santiago.

Don Fernando, from the window of his office, saw his slim, elegant son pass by, and now he feared his wife would reproach him, not so much for the twelve years of separation and waiting, not so much for the shared life of father and son that had excluded mother and daughter… they, after all, had been happy to be with each other, and the separation had been agreed upon and understood as a bond of permanent, sure values that would give the family stability, when the time came, in their shared life. Indeed, Don Fernando was certain that the test to which they had subjected themselves not only was exceptional in the era they were living in, with its endless engagements, but would give a kind of retrospective halo (let’s call it, instead of test, sacrifice, anticipation, wager, or merely postponed happiness) to their marriage.

The fear was now of something else. Santiago himself.

His son was proof that all the nurturing will of a father cannot force a son to conform to the paternal mold. Fernando wondered, If I’d given him complete freedom, would he have conformed more? Did I make him different by proposing my own values to him?

The answer remained on the edge of that mystery Fernando Díaz had no idea how to pierce: the personality of others. Who was his son: what did he want, what was he doing, what was he thinking? The father had no answers. When, at the end of secondary school, Santiago asked him for a year before deciding on going on to a university, Fernando was happy to grant it to him. Everything seemed to coincide in the ordered mind of the accountant and bank president: the graduation of the son and the arrival of his second wife along with his second child, and now Santiago’s absence on “sabbatical” (Fernando told himself, somewhat shamefaced), would let the new home life take shape without problems.

“Where are you going to spend your sabbatical?”

“Right here in Veracruz, Papa. Quite clever, don’t you think? It’s something I know little about-this port, my own city. What do you think?”

He’d been so studious, such a reader, such a fine writer throughout his adolescence. He’d published in magazines for young people: poetry, art criticism, and literary criticism. The poet Salvador Díaz Mirón, his teacher, praised him as a young man of promise. Who assured me, Fernando Díaz asked himself, that all this augured continuity? Peace, perhaps, but continuity in the end? Did it assure rebellion instead of conformity, the fatal exception? Fernando had imagined that his son, after finishing at the Preparatoria, when he asked for the year off would spend it traveling-his father had set aside the necessary money-and would return, having purged his young man’s curiosity, to take up his literary career again, his university studies, and then start a family. As in the English novels, he would have done his Grand Tour.

“I’m staying here, Papa, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all, my boy. This is your house. Don’t be silly.”

He had nothing to fear. Fernando Díaz’s private life was of an exemplary spotlessness. Concerning his past, it was well known that his first wife, Elisa Obregón, a descendant of immigrants from the Canary Islands, died giving birth to Santiago; that for the first seven years of the boy’s life, the now recently graduated poet lived under the protection-and thanks to the charity, almost-of a Jesuit priest from the city of Orizaba; that when Don Fernando remarried, he kept his new family far away in Catemaco but brought Santiago to live with him in Veracruz.

Asked to explain himself in one or another Veracruz gathering, this honorable if not very imaginative man of numbers said that sometimes it was necessary to defer satisfaction while doing one’s duty, which, ultimately, redoubled satisfaction.

These arguments, which seemed to convince people, merely provoked the scorn of Salvador Díaz Mirón: “I never would have suspected it, Don Fernando, but you are more baroque than the poet Góngora himself.”

But just as Don Fernando could not penetrate the mysteries of others, no one penetrated his-perhaps because they didn’t exist. Except for the perfect bride, his second wife, Leticia, who simply was equal to him. Yet the initial arrangement between the two of them was indeed baroque. For eleven years, Leticia, accompanied by her half sister, María de la O, would visit Fernando in Veracruz once a month, and he would take a room at the Hotel Diligencias so they could be alone while María de la O would discreetly disappear. (Only the grandmother, without fingers, Doña Cosima Kelsen, suspected where she went.) Every three months, in turn, Fernando would return to Catemaco, greet the German grandfather, and play with little Laura.

At the port, father and son lived in adjoining rooms in a boarding house, Santiago in the bedroom so he could study and write, Fernando in the living room, as if in free time between business appointments. Each one had his washbasin and his mirror for his personal grooming. The public bath was two streets away. A black woman with cloudlike hair took care of the chamber pots. They took their meals at the boardinghouse.

Now everything changed. The president’s residence above the bank had all the comforts-a big living room with a view of the docks, a wicker sofa because it was cooler, tables of varnished wood with marble tops, rockers, bibelots, electric lights as well as old candelabras, commodes with vitrines that displayed all sorts of Dresden figurines-licentious courtiers, daydreaming shepherdesses-and a pair of typical genre paintings. In the first, a little rascal teases a sleeping dog with a stick; in the second the dog bites the calf of a boy who can’t manage to jump over the wall and falls back bawling…

“Let sleeping dogs lie,” Mr. Díaz would invariably say in English whenever he looked, even out of the corner of his eye, at the paintings.

The dining room: with a table big enough to seat twelve and, once again, vitrines, these filled with china hand-decorated with scenes from the Napoleonic Wars, some of them edged with gold reliefs in the form of garlands.

A sort of antechamber or pantry, as Fernando called it, again in English: this connected the dining room and the kitchen redolent with herbs, stews, and tropical fruits that dripped with juice when cut in half, a kitchen of braziers and griddles, where the fire under the skillets and pots required untiring hands waving straw fans to keep it alive. Nothing satisfied Doña Leticia more than going from one brick-and-iron oven to the next, steadily fanning the embers to keep the broths, the rice, the sauces bubbling as she stirred them, while the Indian women from the Zongolica mountains made tortillas and the little black man Zampaya watered the flowerpots in the corridors, muttering a hymn to himself:

Black Zampayita’s dance,

you can see it in a glance,

will surely cure your every pain,

even help you weight to gain.

Sometimes, little Laura, with her head in her mother’s lap, would listen delightedly, for the thousandth time, to the story of how her parents met at the Candlemas festival in Tlacotalpan, a doll-house-sized village where on February 2 everyone, even the old-timers, would come at the sound of clarinets and guitars to dance on wooden floors in the plazas next to the Papaloapan River, along which passes the Virgin, from boat to boat, while all the neighbors bet on whether the Mother of God has the same hairdo as last year, hair that once belonged to Dulce María Estévez, or whether it was the hair given to her, at great sacrifice, by María Elena Muñoz. After all, every year the Virgin was supposed to have a fresh new hairdo, and it was a great honor for decent young ladies to sacrifice their hair to St. Mary.

Rows of men on horseback take off their hats when the Virgin passes, but the Veracruz widower Don Fernando Díaz, now thirty-three years old, has eyes only for the tall, slender, extremely refined Miss Leticia Kelsen (ask, and anyone will tell you), dressed in a stiff, white, parchmentlike fabric and barefoot, at the age of sixteen, not because she lacks shoes but because (as she explained to Fernando when he offered her his arm so she wouldn’t slip in the mud along the riverbank) in Tlacotalpan the greatest pleasure is to walk barefoot on grassy streets. Did he know any other city with grass growing in the streets? No, laughed Fernando, and he himself, to the glee and shock of the citizens of Tlacotalpan, took off his boots with complicated hooks and eyes and his red-and-white-striped socks that sent Miss Leticia into paroxysms of laughter.

“They look like clown socks!”

He blushed and blamed himself for having done something so alien to his regular, measured habits. She fell in love with him right on the spot, because he took off his shoes and turned as red as the stripes on his socks.

“What happened next, what happened next?” asked Laura, who knew the story by heart.

“No one can describe that town, you have to see it,” added her father.

“What’s it like, what’s it like?”

“Like a toy,” Doña Leticia went on. “All the houses are one story high, all even, but each one is painted a different color.”

“Blue, pink, green, red, orange, white, yellow, violet…” enumerated the child.

“The most beautiful walls in the world,” concluded her father, lighting up a cigar.

“A little toy village…”

Now that they had the big house in the port of Veracruz, the Kelsen sisters came to visit, and Don Fernando would tease them: Weren’t you three going to get married as soon as Leticia, Laura, and I got back together?

“And who would take care of María de la O?”

“They’ve always got an excuse,” laughed Don Fernando.

“That’s the absolute truth,” María de la O agreed with him. “I’ll stay and take care of my father. Hilda and Virginia can go and get married whenever they like.”

“I don’t need a husband,” exclaimed Virginia the writer, laughing… “Je suis la belle ténébreuse… I don’t need anyone to admire me.”

Hilda the pianist interrupted the laughing banter, putting an end to the subject with words no one understood: “Everything is hidden and lies in wait for us.”

Fernando glanced at Leticia, Leticia at Laura, and the girl copied the whitest aunt, moving her hands as if playing the piano, until Aunt Virginia gave her a sharp crack on the head and Laura held in her rage and her tears.

The visit of the aunts was an occasion to invite in specimens of Veracruz society. Once it happened that a group had gathered and Aunt María de la O came in late, and a lady said to her: “Girl, how good you’ve come. Fan me for a while, please. Don’t be a lazy darky now, it’s so hot…”

Laughter ceased instantly. María de la O didn’t move. Laura rose, took her arm, and led her to an armchair.

“Sit here, Auntie, I’ll be happy to fan the lady first and then you, my dear.”

Laura Díaz thinks something changed forever in her life one night when she was awakened by a harsh moan in her brother Santiago’s bedroom, which was next door to hers. She was frightened, but she did not run on tiptoe into the hall and to the boy’s door until she heard the painful groaning again. Then she went in without knocking, and Santiago’s face of pain in bed combined with an incredible, unique greeting in his eyes, gratitude for her presence, even if his words contradicted his looks: Laura, don’t make any noise, go back to your room, don’t wake up anyone.

The arm of his shirt was ripped open from the shoulder down, and with his right hand he was squeezing his left forearm. Could the little girl help him in any way?

“No. Yes. Go back to bed and don’t say a word to anyone. Swear. I can take care of myself.”

Laura made the sign of the cross. For the first time, someone needed her, even if he didn’t say so, it was not she who was asking for something, she was being asked for something, with words that said “no” but meant “yes, Laura, help me.”

From that night on, they went out every Saturday to stroll along the seawall. They walked hand in hand, and Laura felt Santiago’s hand was rigid, tense, while the wound on his arm healed. It was their secret, and he knew he was counting on her and she felt newly proud because of this. Also, in this contact with her brother Laura felt for the first time that she belonged to Veracruz, that the sea and the sky met here in a single vibrant bay, sky and sea together, and blowing hard so that behind Veracruz the plain vibrated, too, luminous and clean-swept until it faded into the forest. To him she could tell the stories about Catemaco. He would believe that a woman of stone standing in the middle of the forest was a statue, not a tree.

“Of course. It’s a figure made by the Zapotal culture. Didn’t your grandfather know that?”

Laura shook her head, no, Grandfather did not know everything, she now realized, and the girl’s curls shook, dark and scented with soap.

“My father was right when he said that Santiago’s got the lion’s share of the family’s intelligence and the rest of us have leftovers.”

Santiago apologized for laughing, saying that Laura knew more than he did about trees, flowers, nature. About all that he knew northing, he knew only that he wanted to disappear one day, like that, to become forest, to be transformed into one of those trees the girl knew so well, the palo rojo, the araucaria, the trueno with its perfect yellow flowers, the laurel…

“No, that’s a bad one.”

“But it’s pretty.”

“It destroys everything, eats everything up.”

“And the ceiba.”

“No, not the ceiba either. The branches fill up with starlings and they shit on everything.”

Laughing to die, Santiago went on with the fig tree, the purple iris, the tulip, and she, yes, those, yes, Santiago, laughing now not like a girl, he said to himself in surprise, laughing like a woman, like something else who was no longer the little girl Laura with dark curls and the scent of soap. With Santiago she felt that until now she’d been just like Li Po, the Chinese doll. Now everything was going to be different.

“No, you can’t hug the ceiba. Daggers are born from its body.”

She glanced at her brother’s wounded arm, but said nothing.

He began to wait for her every Saturday at the door of the house they shared, as if he’d come from somewhere else, and brought her a present-a little bouquet of flowers, a conch to hear the sound of the sea, a starfish, a postcard, a paper boat-while Leticia, watching nervously from the roof terrace where she personally was hanging out the wash (as in Catemaco; she adored the coolness of freshly washed sheets against the body), saw the couple stroll away, not knowing that her husband, Fernando, was doing the same from the living-room balcony.

Laura received something more on those strolls than seashells, flowers, and starfish. Her half brother spoke to her as if she were older, more than the indecisive twelve she was, as if she were nineteen or twenty or even older. Did he need to blow off steam with someone, or did he really take her seriously? In any case did he think she could understand everything he was telling her? For Laura, it was marvelous enough that he took her for a walk, that he brought her things-not the little gifts but the things he carried within himself, the things he told her, what his company gave her.

One afternoon when he didn’t appear for their rendezvous, she stood there, leaning against the building wall (whose lower floors were the bank offices) and feeling so unprotected in the siesta-hour city that she was on the verge of running back to her room, but that seemed like a desertion, a cowardly act (a concept she didn’t fully understand although from then on she knew the feeling), and she thought it would be better to get lost in the tropical forest, where she could hide and grow up alone, in her own time, without this boy who was so handsome and intelligent who was sweeping her along all too quickly to an age that was not yet her own…

She started walking, and when she turned the corner she found Santiago leaning against a different wall. They laughed. They kissed. They’d made a mistake. They forgave each other.

“I was just thinking that out at the lake it would be I who would bring you to see things.”

“Without you, I’d be lost in the forest, Laura. I’m from here, from the city, from the port. Nature frightens me.”

She asked why without saying anything.

“It will outlast you. And me.”

They walked to a certain spot by the docks, where he stopped, so immersed in thought that she became afraid for him, just as she’d become afraid when she heard him say that he sometimes wanted to go into the forest she loved so well and get lost there, never come out, never see a human face again.

“What do they expect of me, Laura?”

“Everyone says you’re super-smart, that you write and talk beautifully. Father is always saying you have promise.”

“He’s a good man. But he’s just expressing fond hopes. One day I’ll show you what I write.”

“I can’t wait!”

“It isn’t great. It’s correct. It’s competent.”

“Isn’t that enough, Santiago?”

“No, not at all. Look at it this way: if there’s one thing I hate it’s to be one of the herd. That’s what Father is, excuse me for saying so, a good little lamb from the professional herd. What you can’t be is part of an artistic herd, just one more artist or one more writer. That would kill me, Laura, I’d rather be no one than be mediocre.”

“You aren’t, Santiago. Don’t say things like that. You’re the best, I swear it.”

“And you’re the prettiest, I’m telling you.”

“Oh, Santiago, don’t always try to be the best of the first. Wouldn’t you be better off as the best of the second?”

He pinched her cheek, and they laughed again, but they returned home in silence. Their parents didn’t have the nerve to say anything because for Fernando it was evil to assume sin where there is none, the way the priest Elzevir did in Catemaco, who succeeded only in ruining people with imagined guilt, and because for Leticia-I know I don’t really know my son, for me that boy is a mystery, but you do know everything about Laura and trust her, isn’t that so?

He walked her back to that same spot on the docks the next Saturday, and told her to look at the rails, at the freight cars that came right up here loaded with bodies-the Rio Blanco workers murdered by order of Don Porfirio for going on strike and sticking to it so bravely, brought right here and tossed into the sea, the dictator stays in power only by means of blood, the rebel Yaqui Indians shackled and taken out to sea near Sonora and thrown overboard, the Cananea miners shot on his orders in a place called the National Valley, hundreds of workers enslaved right here in Veracruz, the liberals locked up in the Ulúa fort, followers of Madero and the Flores Magón brothers, anarcho-syndicalists like the Spanish relatives of my mother, who came from the Canary Islands, Laura, revolutionaries. Laura, revolutionaries are people who are asking for something very simple for Mexico, democracy, elections, land, education, jobs, no reelection of the incumbent president. Don Porfirio Díaz has been in power for thirty years.

“I apologize, Laura. I can’t even spare a twelve-year-old girl my speeches.”

Revolutionaries. That night the word echoed in Laura Díaz’s head, and again the next, and the night after that. She’d never heard it, and when she went back to the coffee plantation on a visit with her mother, she asked her grandfather what it meant and the aged face of the socialist Felipe Kelsen clouded over for an instant. What is a revolutionary?

“It’s an illusion people should give up at the age of thirty.”

“Hmm. Santiago is only now turning twenty.”

“That’s just it. Tell your brother to hurry up.”

Don Felipe was playing chess in the patio of the country house with an Englishman wearing filthy white gloves. His granddaughter’s question caused him to lose a bishop and be castled. The old German said nothing more on the subject, but the Englishman persevered. “Another revolution? Why? Surely they’re all dead.”

“As long as you’re at it, Sir Richard, you might wish for no more wars, because if one should come, you’re going to see more dead.” Don Felipe was trying to shift Laura’s attention to the Englishman in gloves and to distract him from the game.

“And besides, with you a German and me British, well, what is there to say? Fraternal enemies!”

At that, as Don Felipe protested he was no longer German but Mexican, he allowed his king to be cornered. The Englishman shouted checkmate. Just four years later, Don Felipe and Don Ricardo stopped speaking. Each, deprived of his chess partner, died of boredom and sadness. The cannons at Ypres blasted away, and the trenches witnessed the slaughter of young English and German soldiers. Only then did Grandfather Felipe reveal something to his daughters and his granddaughter.

“An incredible thing. He wore those white gloves because he had cut off the tips of his own fingers to purge himself of guilt. In India, the English cut off the fingertips of cotton weavers so as to keep them from competing with the cotton factories in Manchester. There are no people crueler than the English.”

“La pérfida Albión,” Aunt Virginia said in Spanish, then insisting, “Perfidious Albion.”

“And what about the Germans, Grandfather?”

“Well, my dear. There are no people more savage than Europeans. Wait and see. All of them.”

“Über alles,” Virginia sang under her breath, breaking her father’s rule.

Laura would see nothing. Nothing more than the body of her brother Santiago Díaz, summarily executed by firing squad during November 1910 for conspiracy against the federal government and for being linked to other Veracruz plotters-liberals, syndicalists, and pro-Madero men like the brothers Carmen and Aquiles Serdán, who that same month were shot in Puebla.

It did not occur to Don Fernando Díaz, during the wake for his son, with his bullet-pierced body in the living room above the bank, that the serenity of the young man in a white suit, his face paler than usual but his features intact, and with the wounds in his chest, might be disturbed one more time by police intervention.

“This is an official building.”

“But, sir, this is my house. It’s the house of my dead son. I demand respect.”

“Wakes for rebels are held in the cemetery. All right, then, everybody out.”

“Who will help me?”

Fernando, Leticia, Zampayita the black man, the Indian maids, Laura with a flower between her incipient breasts, together they carried the coffin. But it was Laura who said, Papa, Mama, he loved the seawall, he loved the sea, he loved Veracruz, this is his grave, please, clinging to her mother’s skirt, staring imploringly at her father and the servants, and they took her advice, as if each feared that if Santiago was buried, he might be exhumed someday to be shot once more.

How long it took her brother’s white body to disappear into the grave of the sea, the body attached to the cushioned bed of death, the lid of the coffin deliberately open so everyone could see him disappear slowly on that night without waves, Santiago becoming more and more handsome, sadder and sadder, missed more and more, the scene more and more painful as he sank within the open casket, his head soon to be crowned by algae and devoured by sharks along with all the unwritten poems, his face protected by the condemned man’s last wish: “Please don’t shoot my face.”

With no children other than the sea, Santiago slowly disappeared into the sea as if in a mirror that did not distort him but only sent him farther and farther away, little by little, mysteriously, from the mirror of air where he inscribed his hours on earth. Santiago slowly separated from the horizon of the sea, from the promise of youth. Suspended in the sea, he asked those who loved him, Let me disappear by becoming the sea, I could not become forest as I told you one day, Laura, I lied only about one thing, little sister, I did have things to tell, I did have things to see, I wasn’t going to keep silent out of fear of being mediocre because I came to know you, Laura, and every night I fell asleep dreaming, to whom shall I tell everything if not to Laura? In a dream, I decided I would write for you, precious girl, even if you didn’t find out, even if we never saw each other again, everything would be for you and you would know despite everything, you would receive my words knowing they belonged to you, you would be my only reader, for you not a single word of mine would be lost, now that I’m sinking into the eternity of the sea, I expel the little air I have left in my lungs, I make a gift to you of a few bubbles, my love, it’s an intolerable pain for me to say goodbye because I don’t know to whom I’ll be able to speak from now on, I don’t…

Laura remembered that her brother had wanted to lose himself forever in the forest, to become forest. She tried to make herself into sea with him, but the only thing that came to mind was to describe the lake where she grew up, how strange, Santiago, to have grown up next to a lake and never really to have seen it, it’s true that it’s a very big lake, almost a small sea, but I remember it in little pieces, here is the place where the aunts would swim before the priest Elzevir Almonte came, over here is where the fishermen would land, over here they’d put the oars, but the lake, Santiago, to see it the way you knew how to see the ocean, that I can’t do, I’m going to have to imagine the place where I grew up, little brother, you are going to make me imagine it, the lake and everything else, right at this very minute, I’m knowing it, from now on, I’m not going to hope for things to happen, I’m not going to let them happen without paying attention to them, you are going to make me imagine the life you did not live but I swear you will live at my side, in my head, in my stories, in my fantasies, I won’t let you escape from my life, Santiago, you are the most important thing that ever happened to me, I’m going to be faithful to you by always imagining you, living in your name, doing what you did not do, I don’t know how, my handsome and young and dead Santiago, I’m going to be frank with you and I don’t know how, but I swear I’ll do it.

That was all she thought as she turned away from the remains under the waves and went home to the house next to the arcades, prepared, despite her thoughts, to be a child again, to stop being a big girl, to lose the premature maturity Santiago had momentarily given her. She asked if she could have his bullet-ridden glasses and imagined him without his spectacles, waiting for the bullets, having put them in his shirt pocket.

The next day the little black man swept the halls as if nothing had happened, singing as always:

You dance putting your arm

around your partner’s waist

if she lets you, lets you,

as she will surely do…