“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.