Aunt Hilda was playing the piano; Aunt Virginia was still writing with a quill pen; her mother Leticia was cooking not only because she liked to but because she had a genius for the Veracruz art of uniting rice, beans, plantain, and pork, shredding the meat and adding lemon juice for the dish called ropa vieja, “old clothes,” marinating octopus in its ink, and reserving for the end the meringues, the custards, the jocoques of clotted cream and the tocino del cielo-the sweetest sweet in the world, which had gone from Barcelona to Havana and from Cuba to Veracruz as if to stifle with sweetness all the bitterness of those lands of revolution, conquest, and tyranny.
“None of that, now. I don’t want to know about Mexico’s past: the New World is only future,” declared the grandfather firmly whenever these topics came up. For that reason, he went out less and less to after noon gatherings and dinners, and no longer to taverns, ever since he forgot himself that tired night… At first he didn’t go to Mass either, under the pretext that first he was a socialist and second a Protestant. But small towns are big hells, so he ended up yielding to the customs of a Veracruz that believed in God and miracles but not in the Church and its priests. This pleased Felipe, not because he was a cynic but because it was more comfortable. But the entire town became uncomfortable when Don Elzevir Almonte appeared, a young, dark skinned, and intolerant parish priest sent from the very puritanical clerical city of Puebla de los Angeles. He, along with a good dozen other priests from Mexico’s central plateau, had been charged by the Archbishop of Mexico with establishing discipline and good habits among the lax (if not dissolute) faithful of the Gulf coast.
Cosima Reiter, the mail-order bride, had been born and raised Protestant. Philip-Felipe, who was agnostic, had realized that he’d never find a nonbelieving wife in Mexico; here even atheists believed in God and Protestants were Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman.
To order an atheist bride from the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm seemed not so much like an offense as a tropical joke. Philip went along with the advice of friends and relatives on both sides of the Atlantic; however, what really captivated him was that daguerreotype of the girl holding a fan in her right hand, her black hair divided into two perfectly symmetrical curves by a strict part.
The young Lassallist did not anticipate that the moment his still very young wife reached Veracruz a conformist streak-the rule, no matter how notable the exceptions, in religious communities-would for many reasons become pronounced in her. Social pressure was the least important of those reasons. More significant was her inevitable discovery that Philip, or Felipe, had not lived a saint’s life during his Veracruz bachelorhood. This foreign boy with long wavy hair, blond beard, and Greek profile would never follow a monastic rule. Rumors circulating in the small lakeside population reached Cosima’s ears as soon as she’d unpacked. Twenty-three hours after the civil ceremony, the beautiful, upright German informed her stupefied husband: “Now I want a Catholic, religious wedding.”
“But you and I were confirmed as Protestants. We’ll have to disavow our faith.”
“We’re Christian. No one has any reason to know more.”
“I don’t see the reason for this.”
“It’s so your mulatta daughter can be my maid of honor and carry the train of my wedding dress.”
Thus did María de la O, almost on the first day, enter the home of the newlyweds. Cosima took it upon herself to assign a bedroom to the young lady, ordering the servants to address her as “señorita.” She gave her a place at the table, treated her as a daughter, and refused to acknowledge anything about her origin. No one except María de la O herself heard what Cosima Reiter said to her real mother: “Madam, choose the way in which you’d like your daughter to grow up. Go live in a place where you can make a life for yourself-Tampico or Coatzacoalcos, and you won’t lack for anything.”
“Except the love of my little girl,” wept the black woman.
“Not even you believe that,” said the brand-new Frau Kelsen, speaking to her familiarly, having quickly learned local customs and habits. One day, when she’d become an old lady, she reminded her husband of that event, not knowing that little Laura was listening from behind a potted fern.
María de la O Kelsen was the way Cosima would introduce the beautiful little mulatta, and that was how Don Felipe accepted her. The lady of the house didn’t even have to beg her husband to be faithful to the humanitarian principles of his youth. Cosima took charge and began to go to Mass, first with the mulatta girl and a missal held in both hands; later, with three more daughters and the missal in one hand, proud of her four-sided maternity, indifferent to whispers, shock, or curses, even when evil tongues said that the Hunk of Papantla was the real father-with the difficulty that the bandit was Creole, Doña Cosima German, and María de la O, in that case, explicable only as a racial throwback.