The Years with Laura Diaz

4.

San Cayetano: 1915

“YOU THINK YOU KNEW Santiago well? You think your brother gave everything to you? How little you know of a man so complex, he gave you only a part of himself. He gave you what was left of his boyish soul. Another part he gave to his family, another to his poetry, another to politics. And passion, the passion of love, to whom did he give that?”

Doña Leticia, in silence, wanted to finish the hem of the ball gown.

“Stop fidgeting, child.”

“It’s just that I’m very nervous, Mama.”

“And for no reason, a ball is nothing extraordinary.”

“For me it is! It’s the first time, Mutti.”

“You’ll get used to these things.”

“What a shame.” Laura smiled.

“Quiet. Let me finish. This child can’t stand still!”

As soon as Laura slipped on the pale yellow dress, she ran to the mirror, but she did not see the modern ball gown her mother, as skillful in couture as in every domestic labor, had copied from the most recent issue of La Vie Parisienne, which, though it came late because of the war in Europe and the distance to Xalapa from Veracruz, reached them regularly. Paris had abandoned the complicated, uncomfortable styles of the nineteenth century with their Versailles remnants of crinolines, stays, and corsets. Now the fashion was streamlined, as Don Fernando the Anglophile would say, which is to say, as fluid as a river, simplified and linear, fitted to the real forms of the feminine body, slender and revealing from the shoulders through the bust and waist, then suddenly flaring out from the hips. Laura’s Parisian dress was taken in between the hips and the calves with a lot of draping, as if a queen had picked up the train of her gown, but the train, instead of being wrapped around her forearm, had under its own power draped itself around her legs.

Laura stared at herself, not at the gown. Her seventeen years had accentuated but not yet resolved the qualities hinted at when she was twelve. She had a strong face, the forehead too wide, the nose too big and aquiline, lips too thin, though she did like her own eyes, to tell the truth; they were a light chestnut, almost golden; sometimes, at daybreak or sunset, they were truly golden. She looked as if she were dreaming while awake.

“But my nose, Mama…”

“You’re lucky. Just look at those Italian film actresses. They’ve all got big beaks… distinct profiles. Don’t tell me you’d like to be a little pie-faced pug-nose. Come, come.”

“But my forehead, Mama…”

“If you don’t like it, hide it with bangs.”

“But my lips…”

“With lipstick you can make them whatever size you please. And just look, sweetheart, what beautiful eyes God gave you…”

“I’ll go along with that, Mama.”

“You vain little thing.” Leticia smiled.

Laura didn’t dare think ahead. And if the lipstick is wiped off by kisses, I’m not going to act like a jerk, he’ll want to kiss me again, or should I suck in my lips like a little old lady, grab my stomach as if I ere about to vomit, and run to the bathroom to put on more lipstick? How complicated it is to become a young woman.

“Don’t worry about anything. You look divine. You’re going to cause a sensation.”

She didn’t ask Leticia why she wasn’t accompanying her. She would be the only girl there without a chaperon. Wouldn’t that make a bad impression? Leticia had already sighed enough, but she intended to leave it at that, recalling the habit of her own mother, Cosima, sitting in the rocking chair in the Catemaco family house. She had sighed enough. As Don Fernando would put it, citing, as usual, an English proverb: It never rains but it pours.

The three maiden aunts were in Catemaco taking care of Grandfather Felipe Kelsen, whose ailments were slowly but surely joining forces, as he himself predicted the one time he’d been made to see a doctor in Veracruz. What did he say, Papa? asked the three sisters in one voice, a habit that was ever more deeply rooted in them and of which they were unaware.

“I have bile stones, cardiac arrhythmia, my prostate’s the size of a melon, I have diverticulitis, and a touch of emphysema.”

His daughters stared at him in fear, anxiety, and shock.

He merely smiled. “Don’t worry. Dr. Miquis says that no one of these problems will kill me. But the day when they all join forces, I’ll drop like a stone.”

Leticia wasn’t with her sick father because her husband needed her. After Santiago was executed, the national president of the bank summoned Fernando Díaz to Mexico City.

“This is not a stab in the back, Don Fernando, but you understand only too well that the bank lives on its good relations with the government. I know, of course, that no one is guilty of his son’s actions, but the fact is they are our sons-I myself have eight, so I know what I’m talking about-and we are, if not guilty, then at least responsible for what they do, especially when they live at home with us.”

“If you don’t mind, sir, please get to the point. This conversation is painful for me.”

“All right. Your replacement in Veracruz has already been appointed.”

Fernando Díaz did not deign to comment. He stared stonily at the national president.

“But don’t worry. We’re transferring you to our branch in Xalapa. Look, my friend, we aren’t punishing you, but we are trying to exercise prudence while at the same time not failing to recognize your merits. It’s the same position but in a different city.”

“Where no one will associate me with my son.”

“No, our children are ours wherever we are.”

“Very well, sir. This seems to be a discreet solution. My family and I thank you most sincerely.”

Tearing themselves away from the house facing the sea, the rooms above the bank, was difficult for all of them-for Leticia because she was farther from Catemaco, her father, and her sisters, for Fernando because he was being penalized in a cowardly way, and for all three of them because leaving Veracruz meant leaving behind Santiago, his memory, his watery grave.

Laura spent a long time in her brother’s bedroom memorizing it, evoking the night when she heard him cry out and discovered he was hurt. Should she have told her parents what had happened? Would that have saved Santiago? Why was what the boy asked her more compelling: Don’t say a word. Now, saying goodbye to the room, she tried to imagine everything Santiago could have written there, everything he left blank, a long book of blind pages waiting for the irreplaceable hand, pen, ink, and handwriting of a single man.

“Look, Laura, you write alone, but you use something that belongs to everyone, language. The world lends you language, and you return it to the world. Language is like the world: it will outlive us. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Don Fernando cautiously approached the girl. He put his hand on her shoulder and said that he too missed Santiago and constantly thought about what his son’s life might have been. He’d always said, my son has promise, he’s more intelligent than all the others put together, and now, here, the bedroom where the boy was going to spend his sabbatical year would remain solitary, the place where he was going to write his poems. Fernando hugged Laura; she did not want to look into his eyes. We weep for the dead once and only once, and then we try to do what they could no longer do. It isn’t possible to love, write, fight, think, or work with tears clouding our eyes and mind; prolonged mourning is a betrayal of the dead person’s life.

How different Xalapa was. At night, Veracruz retained-and increased-the heat of the day. Xalapa, in the mountains, had warm days and cold nights. Veracruz had swift, rackety storms, but here the rain became fine, persistent, making everything green and filling a central point in the city-the reservoir behind the El Dique dam, always about to overflow, giving an impression of sadness and security at the same time. It was from the flume that the city’s light mist rose to meet the mountain’s thick fog; Laura Díaz is remembering when she first came to Xalapa and noted: cold air-rain and rain-birds-women dressed in black-beautiful gardens-cast-iron benches-white statues painted green by the humidity-red tiles-steep narrow streets-market smells and bakeries, wet patios and fruit trees, the aroma of orange trees and the stench of slaughterhouses.

She entered her new home. Everything smelled of varnish. It was a one-story house, for which the family would very soon be thankful. Laura immediately told herself that in this city of intermittent fogs she would let herself be guided by her sense of smell, that that would be the measure of her tranquillity or her disquiet: humidity of parks, abundance of flowers, the many shops, the smell of tanned hides and thick tar, of saddleries and hardware shops, of cotton bales and hemp rope, the smell of shoe shops and pharmacies, of hairdressers and calico. Perfumes of boiled coffee and foamy chocolate. She pretended to be blind. She touched the walls and felt their heat, she opened her eyes and the tile roofs washed by the rain were shining, dangerously pitched, as if they longed for the sun to dry them and the rain to run down the gutters, along the streets, through the gardens, from the sky to the flume, all in motion, in this reticent city, mistress of incessant nature.

The house replicated the Hispanic model prevalent all over Latin America. Blind, impenetrable walls faced the street, with an unadorned entry, pitched roof, and tiling in place of cornices-a typical “patio house,” with public rooms and bedrooms distributed around an open quadrangle filled with large flowerpots and geraniums. Doña Leticia brought along everything she considered hers, the wicker furniture designed for the tropics that gave no protection here from the moisture, the two paintings of the rascal and the snapping dog, which she hung in the dining room.

The kitchen satisfied Leticia; it was her private domain, and in a short time the lady of the house adapted her coastal customs to the tastes of the mountains: she began to make tamales and dumplings dusted with white flour, and to the white rice of Veracruz she now added Xalapa’s chileatole, a tasty mix of masa, fresh sweet corn, chicken, and cream cheese, made in the shape of little mushrooms, almost like sandwiches.

“Careful,” said Don Fernando. “This food is going to fatten you-that’s how people here protect themselves from the cold, with fat.”

“Don’t worry. We’re a thin family,” answered Leticia while she prepared, under the tender and always admiring eyes of her husband, the Xalapen an molotes, fried turnovers filled with beans and minced meat. They made their own bread: the French military occupation a half century before had imposed the baguette as the bread of fashion, though in Mexico, where diminutives are used as a sign of tenderness for both things and people, baguette became bolillo, and telera were pieces of bread about the size of a hand. Mexico’s traditional sweets were not abandoned-the sugar cookies and the cemita, covered with caraway seeds, as well as the wonderful sweet breads shaped like conch shells-and the tastiest gift of Spanish bakeries, churros, long strips of fried batter cakes covered with sugar and eaten after dipping them in hot chocolate.

Leticia did not completely give up on the octopus and the crabs of the coast, but she stopped missing them because, without thinking about it much, she adapted naturally to life, especially when life gave her, as it did in this new house, an impressive kitchen with a huge oven and a round fireplace.

The one-story house had only one attic space, way back above the rear entrance, the coach gate, which Laura wanted to claim for herself, intuitively, as an homage to Santiago. This was because, in some mute place in her head, the girl believed she was going to fulfill her life, the life of Laura D az, in Santiago’s name; or perhaps it was Santiago who would go on fulfilling, from death, a life that Laura would incarnate in his name. In any case she associated the promise of her brother with her own space, a high, isolated place where he would have written and she, mysteriously, would find her own vocation, in homage to her dead brother.

“What are you going to be when you grow up?” asked Elizabeth Garc a, the girl who sat next to her in the school run by the Misses Ramos. She had no idea what to say. How could she speak what was secret, incomprehensible for others: I’d like to fulfill the life of my brother Santiago by locking myself away in the attic.

“No,” her mother told her. “I’m sorry, but that’s where Armon a Aznar lives.”

“And who is she? Why does she have any right to the attic?”

“I don’t know. Ask your father. It seems she’s always lived there, and one condition when we took the house was that we accept her, that no one bother her, or better still, that no one pay any attention to her.”

“Is she crazy?”

“Don’t be foolish, Laura.”

“No,” Don Fernando repeated, “Mrs. Aznar is there because in a certain sense she’s the owner of the house. She’s a Spaniard, or anyway the daughter of Spanish anarcho-syndicalists-many of them came to Mexico when Benito Ju árez defeated the Emperor Maximilian. They thought the future of freedom was here. Then, when Porfirio Díaz came to power, they were disillusioned. A lot of them went back to Barcelona, where there was probably more freedom there in the turnstile governments that Sagasta and Ca novas had arranged than here with Don Porfirio. Others just tossed out their ideals and became businessmen, farmers, and bankers.”

“And just what does all that have to do with this lady who lives in the attic?”

“The house belongs to her.”

“Our house?”

“We don’t own this house, child. We live where the bank tells us to live. When the bank decided to buy this house, Doña Armon a didn’t want to sell because she doesn’t believe in private property. Understand it as you please, and understand it if you can. The bank offered to let her stay in the attic in exchange for the use of the house.”

“But how does she live, how does she eat?”

“The bank gives her everything she needs, telling her the money comes from her comrades in Barcelona.”

“Is she crazy?”

“No, just stubborn. She thinks her dreams are realities.”

Laura disliked Doña Armon a because, without knowing it, she became a rival for Santiago: she was depriving the young man of a place in the new house.

Armon a Aznar-no one ever saw her-disappeared from Laura’s mind when she went to the Misses Ramos’ school. These cultured but impoverished young women ran the best private school in Xalapa, the first, besides, to be open to both sexes. Although they weren’t twins, the Misses Ramos dressed, wore their hair, spoke, and moved in exactly the same way, so everyone thought they were twins.

“Why would anyone believe that, when all you have to do is look at them to see how different they are?” Laura asked her deskmate Elizabeth Garcia.

“Because they want us to see them that way,” answered the radiant blond girl, who always wore white and who, in Laura’s eyes, was either very stupid or very clever. It was impossible to know for certain if she pretended to be a fool because she was secretive or if she pretended to be intelligent to hide her stupidity. “Just figure it out. Between the two of them they know more than either one alone. But when you put them together, the one who knows music also turns out to be a mathematician, and the one who recites poetry can also describe heart murmurs. Laura, just think: poets talk about the heart this and the heart that, and it turns out the heart is nothing more than a rather unreliable muscle.”

Laura decided she would devise a way to tell the Misses Ramos apart, seeing as how one was one and the other was the opposite, but when it came time to make the distinctions Laura got confused and became mute, wondering: Suppose they truly are one and the same, and both know everything, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica Papa has in his library?

Suppose they say they are the misses but they’re actually just one miss? insisted Elizabeth another day, with a perverse smile. Laura said that then it was a mystery like the Holy Trinity. You simply had to believe in it without knowing anything more. Similarly the Misses Ramos were one who was two who was one, and that was that.

It was hard for Laura to resign herself to this faith, and she wondered if Santiago would have accepted the fiction of the duplicated and united teachers or if, daringly, he would have turned up at night at their house to catch them by surprise in their nightgowns and ascertain that there were two of them. Because at school they both took care never to appear together at the same time. This was the source-intentional or accidental, who knows?-of the mystery. And Santiago would also have climbed the creaking stairs to the attic over the coach house or, as people were now beginning to say, the garage. Yet in Xalapa, even at this late date, no one had yet seen a horseless carriage, an “auto-mobile.” Besides, the colonial roads wouldn’t have allowed motor traffic. The train and the horse were enough to traverse the earth, in the opinion of the writer, Doña Virginia, and if it was the sea, then a ship of war, as that song the rebels sang had it…

“And the stagecoach, when Grandmother’s fingers were cut off.”

The horses and trains of the Revolution had passed though Xalapa but almost without noticing. Those bands of men had the port as their goal, and the Veracruz customs house. It was there they could control the flow of money as well as feed and clothe the troops, not to mention the symbolic value of owning the alternate capital of the country, the place where rebel or constitutional powers established themselves to challenge the government in Mexico City: me, not you. Veracruz had been occupied by the United States Marine Corps in April 1914 in order to put pressure on the dictator, Victoriano Huerta, the murderer of the democrat Madero, for whom young Santiago had given his life. “What fools these Yankees are,” said Don Fernando the Anglophile. “Instead of bringing down Huerta, they transform him into the knight of national independence against the gringos. Who would dare fight against a Latin American dictator, no matter how sinister, when the United States is attacking him? Huerta has used the occupation of Veracruz as a pretext to intensify his conscription of troops, saying his pelones, his ‘bald boys,’ are going to Veracruz to go up against the Yankees, when in fact he’s sending them north to fight Pancho Villa and south against Zapata.”

The young students of the Xalapa Preparatory School mustered in their French kepis and their navy blue uniforms with gold buttons and marched off with their rifles toward Veracruz to fight the gringos. They didn’t get there on time. Huerta fell, and the gringos withdrew; Villa and Zapata battled Carranza, the Maximum Leader of Mexico’s revolution, and occupied Mexico City; Carranza took refuge in Veracruz until the fearsome General Alvaro Obrego n defeated Villa at Celaya in April 1915 and retook Mexico City.

All this passed through Xalapa, sometimes as rumor, sometimes as news; as songs sung as corridos and ballads when newsprint was under embargo; and only once as a cavalry charge accompanied by shouts and crackling rifle fire from some rebel group. Leticia closed the windows, threw Laura to the floor and covered her with the mattress. By 1915, it seemed that peace was returning to Mexico, but the habits of the small provincial capital hadn’t been much disturbed.

Rumors reached them of a great famine in Mexico City, when the rest of the nation, convulsed and self-regarding, forgot about the luxurious and egoistic capital, stopped sending it meat, fish, corn, beans, tropical fruit, and flour, reducing it to the squalid products of milk cows in the Milpa Alta area and of the gardens scattered between Xochimilco and Ixtapalapa. As usual, there were many flowers in the Valley, but who eats carnations or calla lilies?

The rumors spread: merchants were hoarding what little food there was. Into Mexico City marched General Obrego n, whose first act was to make the shopkeepers sweep the city streets, to put them to shame. He emptied their shops and reopened communications so supplies could flow into the famished capital.

This was all rumor. Just to be on the safe side, Doña Leticia. slept with a dagger under her pillow.

Photographic images of the Revolution appeared in the newspapers and magazines Don Fernando consumed by the cartload: the dictator Porfirio Díaz was an ancient man with a square face, Indian cheek bones, white mustache, and a chest covered with medals saying farewell to the cowntry (as he pronounced it) from the German steamship Ipiranga, sailing from Veracruz; Madero was a tiny man, bald, with black beard and mustache, dreamy eyes astonished by his triumph in bringing down the tyrant; those eyes announced his own sacrifice at the hands of the sinister General Victoriano Huerta, an executioner with a head like a skull, black sunglasses, and a mouth like that of a serpent, with no lips; Venustiano Carranza was an old man with a white heard and blue sunglasses, whose vocation was to be the national paterhe; Obrego n was a brilliant young general with blue eyes and haughty mustache, whose arm was shot off during the battle of Celaya; Emiliano Zapata was a man of silence and mystery, as if a ghost manifesting himself for only a short time: Laura became fascinated with the enormous, ardent eyes of this gentleman, whom newspapers referred to as “Attila of the South,” in the same way they called Pancho Villa “Centaur of the North.” Laura had never seen a single photo of Pancho Villa in which he wasn’t smiling, showing his white teeth like corn kernels and his little slits of eyes that made him look like an astute Chinese.

Above all, Laura remembered being under the mattress and the scattered shots in the streets below, now that she was staring at herself in the mirror, so straight and tall, “such a cutie pie,” as her mother said, making ready to go to her first formal dance.

“Are you sure I should go, Mama?”

“Laura, for God’s sake, what can you be thinking about?”

“About Papa.”

“Don’t worry about him. You know I’ll be taking care of him.”

It began with the slightest of pains in his knee, to which Don Fernando paid no special attention. Leticia rubbed on some Sloane’s Liniment when the pain extended the length of his leg to his waist, but soon her husband complained that he was having difficulty walking and that his arms were numb. One morning he fell to the floor trying to get out of bed, and the doctors had no difficulty in diagnosing a diplegia that would affect his legs first and more intensely than his arms.

“Can it be cured?”

The doctors shook their heads.

“How long will it last?”

“It may last the rest of your life, Don Fernando.”

“What about my brain?”

“No effect. You’re fine. You’ll need help moving, that’s all.”

This was why the family was thankful the house was on only one level, and María de la O offered to travel to Xalapa and be her brother-in-law’s nurse, to take care of him, to push him to the bank in a wheelchair.

“Your grandfather’s well taken care of in Catemaco by your Aunts Hilda and Virginia. We talked it over and agreed that I’d come to help your mama.”

“What does Papa always say in English? It never rains but it pours or something like that? In other words, the thunderstorm is upon us, Auntie.”

“Go on, Laura. Just one thing. Don’t try to defend me if someone mistreats me. You’ll just make trouble for yourself. The important thing is to take care of your father and let my sister Leticia tend to the house.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I owe your father as much as I owe your grandmother, who had me come live with all of you. One day I’ll tell you about it.”

The double care that fell on the house, added to their mourning for Santiago, did not terrify Doña Leticia. She simply became thinner and more active. But her hair began to turn gray and the lines of her beautiful Rhenish profile slowly but surely covered with extremely fine wrinkles, like the cobwebs that covered sickly coffee bushes.

“You have to go to the ball. Don’t even think about it. Nothing is going to happen to your father or to me.”

“Swear that if something happens you’ll send someone for me.”

“For heaven’s sake, child. San Cayetano is forty minutes away from here. Besides, it isn’t as if you were all alone and helpless. Elizabeth and her mama will be with you. Remember, no one can say anything about you… if something were to happen, I’d send Zampaya with the landau.”

Elizabeth looked divine, so blond and beautifully shaped as she was at the age of sixteen, although she was shorter and plumper than Laura. And with more décolleté as well, having been shoehorned into a by now old-fashioned, though perhaps also eternal rose-colored taffeta dress with infinite layers of tulle and ruffles.

“Girls, never show your boobs,” said Elizabeth’s mother, Luc a Dupont, who all her life struggled to decide whether her name was as common in France as it was aristocratic in the United States, although how she could have married a Garcia, only the masculine charms of her husband could explain, not her daughter’s obstinacy in saying her name was only Garc a and not Garc a-Dupont, that’s right, with the distinguished Anglo-American hyphen.

“Laura has no problems because she’s flat, Mama, but…”

“Elizabeth, child, don’t shame me.”

“There’s nothing to be done about it. God, with your help, made me this way…”

“All right then, forget your tits,” Elizabeth’s mother blurted out, with no hint of shame. “Just remember that there are more important things. Look for the most distinguished connections. Make a point of making friendly inquiries about the right families-Ollivier, Trigos, Sartorious, Fernández Landero, Estevas, Pasquel, Bouchez, Luengas.”

“And the Carazas,” interrupted Miss Elizabeth.

“Keep your opinions to yourself,” fulminated her mother. “Hold on to the names of those in the best society. If you forget them, they will certainly forget you.” She looked compassionately at the two girls. “Poor things. Just watch what everyone else is doing. Imitate them, imitate them!”

Elizabeth responded with exaggerated condescension. “Enough, Mama! You’re suffocating me! I’m going to faint!”

San Cayetano was a coffee plantation, but it was the plantation house that everyone meant when they said “San Cayetano.” Here Spanish traditions had been forgotten and instead a petit château in the French style had arisen, in the 1860s, in a beech forest near a foaming waterfall and a noisy, narrow river. Its neoclassical facade was supported by columns whose capitals were covered with carved vines.

The main house had two stories, at its entrance an enormous fig tree and a silent fountain, then fifteen steps up to reach the carved door of the ground floor, which was-Leticia warned her daughter-where the bedrooms were. An elegant, wide stone staircase led to the second floor, where the receptions were held: salons, dining rooms, and especially-this was the most notable feature of the place-a grand balustraded terrace, equal in size to half the floor space within, roofed over by an upper terrace and wrapped around three sides of the house, open to the cool night breezes and, during the afternoon, a place for sun-drenched siestas in sleepy rocking chairs.

Here, couples could rest, leaning against the balustrade of the beautiful gallery, and chat, putting their glasses down when they decided to dance right here, on any of the three sides of the second-floor terrace. All her life, this place returned again and again in Laura’s memory as the site of youthful enchantment, the space where she felt the joy of knowing herself to be young.

There, awaiting her guests, was Doña Genoveva Deschamps de la Trinidad, legendary mistress of the hacienda and tutelary leader of provincial society. Laura expected to meet a tall and dominating, even haughty woman, and instead found a small, erect lady with a flashing smile, dimples in her rosy cheeks, and cordial eyes, gray, like the elegant monotone of her gown. Apparently, Mrs. Deschamps de la Trinidad also read La Vie Parisienne, for her gown was even more modern than Laura’s: it eliminated every kind of false padding and followed, in a shine of gray silk, the lady’s natural shape. Doña Genoveva’s bare shoulders were wrapped in a veil of fine gauze, also gray, the entire ensemble harmonizing with her steely gaze and allowing her jewels, as transparent as water, to shine even more brightly.

Laura was thankful that her hostess was such an amiable woman, but she realized that Mrs. Deschamps, before and after cordially greeting each guest, fixed them with a strangely cold stare, even calculated, almost judicial. The stare of the rich and envied lady conveyed her seal of approbation or disapproval. People would know, at the next annual ball at the hacienda, who had received the placet and who had been damned. That cold gaze of censure or approval lasted no longer than the few seconds between one guest moving on and the next arriving, when the affable smile would glitter again.

“Tell your parents I’m very, very sorry not to see them here tonight,” said Doña Genoveva, lightly touching Laura’s hair, as if putting an unruly curl back in place. “Keep me abreast of Don Fernando’s health.”

Laura curtsied, a lesson learned from the Misses Ramos, and set about exploring the place so discussed and admired by Xalapa society. She felt rapture on seeing the pale green painted ceilings, the fleurons on the walls, the multicolored skylights, and, beyond, the heart of the party, on the terrace wrapped by balustrades adorned with urns, the orchestra whose musicians were all wearing dinner jackets, and the guests, especially the young people, the boys in white tie and tail coats and the girls in various styles, which led Laura to conclude that a man dressed in a black uniform, white tie, and pique shirtfront would always look elegant, would never expose anything-while every woman was obliged to exhibit, dangerously, her personal, eccentric, conformist though always arbitrary idea of elegance.

The ball had not yet begun, and each young lady received from the hands of the majordomo a dance card embossed with the initials of the hostess-DLT. They then got into position to await requests from the gallants to dance. Laura and Elizabeth had seen some of them at the much less elegant parties held at the Xalapa Casino, but the boys hadn’t seen them because they were graceless girls, one flat-chested and the other bovine, frankly. Now, at the point of attaining perfect femininity, well dressed, feigning more self-confidence than they really had, Elizabeth and Laura first greeted school and family friends and allowed the boys, stiff in their frock coats, to approach.

A boy with caramel colored eyes came up to Elizabeth and asked her for the first dance.

“Thank you, but I already have a partner.”

The boy made a polite bow, and Laura kicked her friend.

“Liar. We just arrived.”

“Either Eduardo Caraza dances with me first or I won’t dance with anyone.”

“What is it about him you like so much?”

“Everything. Money. Good looks. Look at him. Here he comes. I told you.”

To Laura this Eduardo seemed neither better nor worse than anyone else.

Any outsider would have to admit it and probably be shocked: Xalapa society was whiter than it was mestizo, and as for people of color, like Aunt María de la O, there were none, although the few people with Indian features were noticeable precisely because they were presentable. Laura felt an attraction for a very dark, very thin boy who looked like one of those pirates from Malaysia in the novels of Emilio Salgari which she’d inherited from Santiago along with the rest of his books. He had perfect dark skin, without the slightest blemish, completely clean-shaven, and slow, light, elegant movements. He looked like Sandokan, Salgari’s Hindu prince. He was the first to dance with her. Doña Genoveva put the waltzes first, then modern dances, and, at the end, returning to an era prior to the waltz, the polkas, lancers, and the Madrid schottische.

The Hindu prince said not a word, to the point that Laura wondered if his accent or his stupidity would destroy the illusion of his marooned Malayan elegance. Her second partner, on the other hand, was a chatterbox from a rich Córdoba family, dizzying her with inanities about breeding hens and how to mate them with roosters, all without the slightest allusive or salacious intent, merely stupid. And the third, a tall redhead she’d already seen on tennis courts showing off his strong legs, svelte and down-covered, did not hesitate to abuse Laura, squeezing her against his chest, rubbing his crotch against her, nibbling her earlobe.

“Who invited that jerk?” Laura asked Elizabeth.

“He usually behaves better than tonight. I think you got him excited. Or maybe the spiked pineapple juice has gone to his head. If you like, you can complain to Doña Genoveva.”

“And how about you, Elizabeth?” asked Laura as she vigorously shook her head.

“Look at him. Isn’t he a delight?”

The selfsame Eduardo Caraza waltzed by, his gaze fixed vacantly on the ceiling.

“See that? He’s not even looking at his partner.”

“He wants everyone to look at him.”

“Same thing.”

“He dances very well.”

“What should I do, Laura, what should I do?” stammered Elizabeth, on the point of tears. “He’ll never take any notice of me.”

At which point the dancing stopped and Doña Genoveva came over, inviting Elizabeth to follow her to where Eduardo Caraza was blowing his nose.

“Young lady,” the hostess pronounced in a low voice to the lachrymose blonde, “don’t let on in public when you’re in love. You make everyone feel you’re superior to them and then they hate you. Eduardo, now the modern dances are coming, and Elizabeth wants you to show her how to dance the cakewalk better than Irene Castle.”

She left them arm in arm and returned to her post, a general obliged to review her troops, looking over each guest head to foot, fingernails, ties, shoes. What wouldn’t provincial society have given to look over Doña Genoveva’s social notebook, where every young person was graded as if in school, passed or failed for the next year. Nevertheless, sighed the perfect hostess, there were always people you simply had to invite even if they didn’t come up to standards, even if they didn’t cut their nails properly, even if their shoes didn’t go with their frock coats, even if they didn’t know how to tie their ties, or even if they were plainly vulgar, like that tennis player.

“You can be a social arbiter, but power and money will always have more privileges than elegance and good manners.”

Doña Genoveva’s dinners were famous and never disappointing. A majordomo in a white wig and eighteenth-century livery announced in French: Madame est servie.

Laura laughed to see this dark-skinned servant, obviously from Veracruz, intone perfectly the only sentence in French that Doña Genoveva had taught him, although Elizabeth’s mother, leading her two wards to the dining room, revealed another facet of the subject:

“Last year she had a little black fellow in a white wig. Everyone thought he was Haitian. But disguising an Indian as Louis XV, well…”

The parade of European faces that began to walk toward the dining room justified the hostess. These were the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Spaniards, French, Italians, Scots, and Germans, like Laura D az Kelsen or her brother Santiago, descendants of immigrants from the Rhineland and the Canary Islands, who passed through the entry port of Veracruz and remained here to make their fortunes-in the port, in Xalapa, in Co rdoba, in Orizaba, in coffee, in cattle, in sugar, banking, importing, the professions, even politics.

“Look at this photograph of Don Porfirio’s cabinet. He’s the only Indian. All the others are white, with light eyes and English suits,” pontificated a portly gentleman in his sixties, an importer of wines and exporter of sugar. “Look at the eyes of Limantour, Minister of the Treasury, they look like water; look at Landa y Escando n, the governor of Mexico City, with his bald pate like a Roman senator; look at the Minister of Justice, Justino Fernández, with his beard in Gothic-patrician style; or the Catalan bandit eyes of Casasú s, Don Porfirio’s favorite. And it’s said about D az that he used rice powder to whiten himself. To think he was once a liberal guerrillero, a hero of the Reform.”

“And what would you like, that we return to the times of the Aztecs?” answered one of the ladies to whom the exporter-importer had uselessly directed his words.

“Don’t make jokes about the only serious man in the history of Mexico,” interjected another gentleman with an expression of fierce nostalgia on his face. “We’re going to miss Porfirio D az. Just you wait and see.”

“We haven’t until now,” answered the businessman. “Thanks to the war, we’re exporting more than ever and making more money than ever.”

“But thanks to the Revolution, we’re going to lose everything, right down to our underwear, begging the ladies’ pardon,” was the answer he received.

“Oh, but those Zouaves were very handsome,” Laura heard the lady who was angry with the Aztecs say. She missed the rest of the guests’ conversation as they slowly advanced toward the tables piled high with galantines, pates, slices of ham, roast beef…

A very pale, almost yellow hand offered Laura an already prepared plate. She noted a gold ring with the initials OX and the starched cuff of a dress shirt, cuff links of black onyx, good-quality cloth. Something kept Laura from raising her eyes and meeting those of this person.

“Do you think you knew Santiago well?” said the naturally grave but deliberately high-pitched voice; it was obvious that his attenuated words emanated from baritone vocal cords. Why was Laura refusing to look at his face? He himself raised her chin and said to her, The terrace has three sides, on the right we can be alone.

He took her by the arm, and she, with her hands around her plate, felt at her side a svelte masculine figure, lightly perfumed with English cologne, who guided her without a pause, at a normal speed, to the farthest terrace, left of the bandstand, where the musicians had deposited their instrument cases. He helped her avoid these obstacles, but she awkwardly dropped the plate, and it smashed on the marble floor, scattering the pate and roast beef.

“I’ll get another,” said the unexpected gallant in a suddenly deep voice.

“No, it doesn’t matter. I’m not really hungry.”

“Just as you like.”

There was little light in that corner. Laura first saw a backlit profile, perfectly outlined, and a straight nose with no bridge that stopped at the edge of the upper lip, slightly withdrawn with respect to the lower lip and the prominent jaw, like those of the Habsburg monarchs who appeared in her history textbook.

The young man did not release Laura’s arm. She was shocked, even fearful because of his next statement: “Orlando Ximé nez. You don’t know me, but I do know you. Very well. Santiago talked about you with great tenderness. I think you were his favorite virgin.” Orlando burst into a silent giggle, throwing his head back.

When the moonlight fell on it, Laura discovered a head of blond curls and a strange, yellowish face with Western aspects but decidedly Asian eyes. His skin was like that of the Chinese workers on the Veracruz docks.

“You speak as if we knew each other.”

“Speak familiarly please, or I’ll be offended. Or perhaps your’d rather I left you in peace?”

“I don’t understand, Mr… Orlando… I don’t know what you’re saying to me.”

Orlando took Laura’s hand and kissed her soap-perfumed knuckles.

“I’m talking to you about Santiago.”

“Did you know him? I never met any of his friends.”

“Et pour cause.” Orlando’s noiseless laugh made Laura nervous. “You think your brother gave you everything, only you?”

“No, why would I believe that?” stammered the girl.

“Yes, that’s what you think. Everyone who knew Santiago thinks that. He took it upon himself to convince each one of us that we were unique, irreplaceable. C’était son charme. He had that talent: I’m only yours.”

“Yes, he was a very good man.”

“Laura, Laura, ‘good’ c’est pas le mot! If someone had called him ‘good,’ Santiago wouldn’t have slapped him, he’d have snubbed him. That was his cruelest weapon.”

“He wasn’t cruel. You’re wrong. You just want to get me angry, that’s all.” Laura moved as if to leave.

Orlando stopped her with a strong and delicate hand whose gesture contained, surprisingly, a caress. “Don’t leave.”

“You’re annoying me.”

“It doesn’t suit you. Are you going to complain?”

“No, I just want to go.”

“Good, I hope at least I’ve upset you.”

“I loved my brother. You didn’t.”

“Laura, I loved your brother much more than you did. But also I must admit I envy you. You knew the angelic part of Santiago. I… well, I must admit I envy you. How many times he said to me… ‘What a shame Laura’s a little girl! I hope she grows up soon. I confess I desire her madly.’ Madly. He never said that to me. With me he was more severe… Think I should call him that instead of cruel? Santiago the Severe instead of Santiago the Cruel, or better, pourquoi pas, Santiago the Promiscuous, the man who wanted to be loved by everyone, men and women, boys and girls, poor and rich. And do you know why he wanted to be loved? So he wouldn’t have to reciprocate the love. What passion, Laura, what hunger for life, in insatiable Santiago the Apostle! As if he knew he was going to die young. That he did know. That’s why he gobbled down everything life offered him. Yet still, he was selective. Don’t believe he was just anything for anyone. Il savait choisir. That’s why he chose you and me, Laura.”

Laura had no idea what to say to this immodest, insolent, handsome young man. But the more she listened to him, the richer her feelings for Santiago became.

She began by rejecting this guest (lounge lizard, fop, dandy: Orlando smiled again, as if he’d guessed Laura’s thoughts, searching for the epithets that others repeatedly attached to him) and ended by feeling attracted to him despite herself, listening to him speak, giving her more than she knew about Santiago; her initial rejection of Orlando was going to be overwhelmed by an appetite, a need to know more about Santiago. Laura struggled between those two impulses, and Orlando guessed it, stopped speaking, and invited her to dance.

“Listen. They’ve gone hack to Strauss. I can’t stand modern dances.”

He took her by the waist and by the hand, stared deeply at her with his Asian eyes, right into the depths of her eyes of shifting light, looked at her as no one had ever looked at her, and she, dancing the waltz with Orlando, had the startling sensation that beneath their evening clothes the two of them were naked, as naked as the priest Elzevir might imagine them, and that the distance between their bodies, imposed by the rhythm of the waltz, was fictitious: they were naked, and they were embracing.

Laura awoke from her trance the instant she averted her eyes from Orlando’s, and she saw that all the others were observing them, standing hack from them, pausing in their dance to watch Laura D az. and Orlando Ximé nez dance.

This was interrupted by a gaggle of children in nightclothes who hadn’t been able to fall asleep and now burst in with a racket, carrying huge hats filled with oranges stolen from the garden.

“Well, well. You were the sensation of the ball,” Elizabeth Garcia told her schoolmate as they traveled back to Xalapa.

“That boy’s got a very bad reputation,” Elizabeth’s mother added quickly.

“In that case, I wish he’d asked me to dance,” whispered Elizabeth. “He paid me not the slightest attention.”

“But you wanted to dance with Eduardo Caraza, he was your dream,” said Laura, astonished.

“He didn’t even talk to me. He’s rude. He dances without speaking.”

“You’ll have other chances, sweetie.”

“No, Mama, I’m disillusioned and will be for the rest of my life.” And the girl dressed in rose burst into tears in her mother’s arms.

Instead of consoling her directly, Mrs. Garc a-Dupont preferred to go off on a tangent, warning Laura: “I feel I must tell your mother everything.”

“There’s no need for a fuss, ma’am. I’ll never see that boy again.”

“You’re better off for it. Bad company, you know…”

Zampaya opened the main entrance, and the Garc a-Duponts, mother and daughter, took out their handkerchiefs-the mother’s dry, Elizabeth’s soaked with tears-to say goodbye to Laura.

“How cold it is here, miss,” complained the black man. “When are we going back to Veracruz?” He did a little dance step, but Laura didn’t look at him. She had eyes only for the attic occupied by the Catalan lady, Armon a Aznar.

They had to leave very early, in the landau, for Catemaco: Grandfather was going, announced Aunt María de la O. Laura stared sadly at the tropical countryside she loved so much as it was reborn under her tender gaze, already foreseeing the sadness of saying goodbye to Grandfather Felipe.

He was in his bedroom, his for so many years, first when he was a bachelor, then with his beloved wife, Cosima Reiter, and now, once again alone, with no company except for his three daughters, who used him, he knew, as a pretext for continuing to be unmarried, obliged by their widower father…

“Let’s see if you get married now, girls,” said Felipe Kelsen sarcastically from his sickbed.

The entryway to the Catemaco house seemed different to Laura, as if absence made everything smaller but at the same time longer and narrower. Returning to the past meant entering an empty, interminable corridor where one could no longer find the usual things or people one wanted to see again. As if they were playing with both our memory and our imagination, the people and things of the past challenged us to situate them in the present, not forgetting they had a past and would have a future although that future would be, precisely, only that of memory, again, in the present.

But when it is a matter of accompanying death, what is the valid time for life? That was why it took Laura so long to reach her grandfather’s bedroom, as if to get there she’d had to traverse the old man’s very life, from a German childhood of which she knew nothing, to a youth impassioned by the poetry of Musset and the politics of Lassalle, to political disenchantment and emigration to Mexico, to starting the work and establishing the wealth of the Catemaco coffee plantation, the love by correspondence with his bride-to-be, Cosima, the terrible incident on the highway with the bandit from Papantla, the embrace of the bastard daughter, the birth of the three daughters, the marriage of Leticia and Fernando, the birth of Laura-a passage of a time that in youth is slow and impatient and in old age our patience can’t manage to slow down, which is both mocking and tragic. That is why it took Laura so long to reach her grandfather’s bedroom. Reaching the dying man’s bed required her to touch each and every one of the days of his existence, to remember, imagine, perhaps invent what never happened and even what wasn’t imaginable, and to do so by the mere presence of a beloved being who represented everything that wasn’t, that was, that could be, and that never could take place.

Now, on this exact day, near her grandfather, holding his hand with its thick veins and old freckles, caressing that skin worn transparent over time, Laura Díaz again had the sensation that she was living for others; her existence had no other meaning except that of completing unfinished destinies. How could she think that, as she caressed the hand of a dying seventy-five-year old man, a complete man with a finished life?

Santiago had been an unfulfilled promise. Was that what Grandfather was, too, despite his age? Was there any really finished life, a single life that wasn’t also a truncated promise, a latent possibility, even more…? It isn’t the past that dies with each of us. The future dies as well.

Laura stared as deeply as she could into her grandfather’s light and dreaming eyes, still alive behind the constant deathly blinking. She asked him the same question she was asking herself. Felipe Kelsen smiled painfully.

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

“Of course, Grandfather.”

Abruptly, as if he had no time left for other words, not caring to whom he said them or even if no one heard them, the old man whispered: “I’m a young socialist. I live in Darmstadt, and I shall die here. I need the nearness of my river and my streets and my squares. I need the yellow smell of the chemical factories. I need to believe in something. This is my life, and I wouldn’t trade it for any other. For any other…” His mouth filled with mustard-colored bubbles and remained open forever.

When the dance was over, Orlando had brought his lips-fleshy like those of a little girl-close to Laura’s ear.

“Let’s separate. We’re attracting attention. I’ll wait for you in the attic of your house.”

Laura was left suspended amid the noise of the party, the curious scrutiny of the guests, and Orlando’s astounding proposition.

“But Señora Aznar lives there.”

“No more. She wanted to go to Barcelona to die. I paid her passage. Now the attic is mine.”

“But my parents…”

“No one knows. Only you. I’ll wait for you there. Come when you want.” And he removed his lips from Laura’s ear. “I want to give you the same thing I gave to Santiago. Don’t disappoint me now. He liked it.”

When she returned from her grandfather’s funeral, Laura lived for several days with Orlando’s words echoing like a howl in her head: You think you knew Santiago well, you think your brother gave everything to you? How little you know of a man so complex; he gave you only a part of his existence; and passion, the passion of love, to whom did he give that?

She glanced constantly toward the attic. Nothing had changed. Only she had. She did not understand very well what the change consisted of. Perhaps it was the announcement that would become fact only if she cautiously climbed the stairs to the attic, taking care that no one saw her her father, her mother, Aunt María de la O, Zampaya, the Indian maids. She wouldn’t have to knock at the door, because Orlando would leave it ajar. Orlando was waiting for her. Orlando was handsome, strange, ambiguous in the moonlight. But perhaps Orlando was ugly, common, lying by daylight. Laura’s entire body cried out to be near Orlando’s body-for him, for her, for the unexpected romantic encounter at the hacienda ball, but also for Santiago, because loving Orlando was the indirect but sanctioned way of loving her brother. Could Orlando’s insinuations be true? If they were lies, could she love Orlando for himself, without the specter of Santiago? Or might she come to hate both Orlando and Santiago? Hate Santiago because of Orlando? She had the chilling suspicion that it might all be a huge farce, a huge lie orchestrated by the young seducer. Laura did not need the diabolical admonitions of the priest Elzevir Almonte to shun all sexual pleasure or ease; she only needed to look at herself naked in the mirror when she was seven years old, and to see there none of the horrors the priest proclaimed, in order not to fall into the temptations that seemed, thanks to an early and radical intuition, useless if not shared with a loved one.

Love for everyone in the family, including Santiago, was happy, warm, and chaste. Now, for the first time, a man excited her in another way. Was this man real or was he a lie? Would he satisfy her, or was Laura risking sexual initiation with a man who wasn’t worth her while, who wasn’t for her, who was only a phantom, an extension of her brother, a deceiver, handsome, attractive, tempting, lying in ambush, diabolical, right at hand, comfortable, waiting for her in her own house, under her parents’ roof?

Zampaya had supplied the key to the mystery, perhaps, without knowing it, when he drove the three of them-Laura, Elizabeth, and Mrs. Garc a-Dupont-back to Xalapa on the night of the ball.

“Did your ladyships see the fig tree at the entrance to the cage?” asked the black man.

“What cage?” replied Mrs. Garc a-Dupont. “It’s the most elegant hacienda in the district, you ignoramus. The ball of the year.”

“The best balls take place in the street, ma’am, begging your pardon.”

“That’s your opinion,” sighed the lady.

“You didn’t get cold waiting outside, now, did you, Zampaya?” asked the solicitous Laura.

“No, child. I stood there looking at the fig tree. I remembered the story of Santo Felipe de Jesus. He was a proud, spoiled boy, like some of those I saw tonight. He was living in a house with a barren fig tree. His nanny would say, The day little Felipe becomes a saint, the fig tree will flower.”

“Why are you going on like this about the saints, darky?” The lady tried to cut him off. “San Felipe went to the Orient to convert the Japanese, who vilely crucified him. Now he is a saint, don’t you know that?”

“It’s what his nanny would say, begging your pardon, ma’am. The day Felipe was killed, the fig tree flowered.”

“Well, this one is barren.” Elizabeth laughed roguishly.

“Santiago’s strength was that he never needed anyone,” Orlando had told Laura on the San Cayetano terrace. “That’s why we were always at his feet.”

A month later, they say Armon a Aznar’s body was found in the attic. They say it was found when the bank employee came to deliver her monthly check before Zampaya left her daily food tray at the door. She’d been dead for less than two days. There was still no stench.

“Everything is hidden and lies in wait for us.” Laura repeated her Aunt Hilda’s mysterious and habitual phrase. She said it to her Chinese doll, Li Po, comfortable among the pillows. And she herself, Laura D az, decided to save the memory of her first ball, imagining herself svelte and transparent, so transparent that her gown was her body, there was nothing under the dress, and Laura whirled, floated in a waltz of liquid elegance, until she, thankful, was covered by the veil of sleep.