Years With Laura Diaz, The (4 page)
Read Years With Laura Diaz, The Online
Authors: Carlos Fuentes
But the fingers of the house held her in, like the vines in the richly detailed world of the tropical forest. Aunt Hilda was playing the piano. (I get dizzy and exalted at the same time, I’m ashamed, but it gives me a secret pleasure to use my ten fingers to abandon myself, get out of myself, to feel and say to everyone that the music they’re hearing is not mine and neither am I, it’s Chopin’s, I play it, I’m the one who lets this marvelous sound pass through my hands, my fingers, in full knowledge that outside on her rocker, my mother listens to me, my mother who did not let me stay in Germany to study and become an important pianist, a real artist, and my father also listens to me, my father who has locked us up in this village with no future, and I reproach them both for the loss of my own destiny, Hilda Kelsen, the Hilda I might have been, the Hilda I’ll never be now, no matter how I try, even if some good fortune I cannot control, to which I could say:
I made you, you’re mine
, were to bring me luck; it wouldn’t be my luck, it would be an accident, a gift from chance: I play Chopin’s saddest Preludes and am not consoled, I only arm myself with patience and feel the intimate joy of offending my father and mother.) Aunt Virginia was writing a poem. (I live surrounded by resignation, I don’t want to resign myself, I want to escape one day, and I fear that my fondness for reading and writing is merely that, an escape and not a vocation I could just as well fulfill here as in Germany or, as I quipped one day, in China, let’s see if I don’t end up like my little niece’s doll, charming but mute, relaxing forever on a
pillow.) Mutti Leticia was helping the cook prepare tamales in the coastal style. (How beautiful it is to stuff them with the smooth mix of cooked pork and chipotle chiles, then finish by wrapping each tamale tenderly in its sheet of banana leaves, like a baby in bunting, and steam them, uniting, conserving all the flavors and aromas, meat and spice, fruit and flour, what a delight for the palate, it reminds me of my husband Fernando’s kisses, but I mustn’t think about that, the arrangements are made, it’s what’s best for everyone, it’s good that the girl will grow up here in the country with me, each of us has obligations, there’s no reason to use up our pleasures while we’re young, we should postpone them for the future, we should receive pleasure as a reward and not as a privilege, gifts are used up as quickly as whims, you think you have the right to have everything and you end with nothing; I prefer to wait, patiently, after all I’m only in my twenties, my whole life ahead of me, my whole life ahead.) Grandfather Felipe put on his glasses and went over the accounts. (I can’t complain, everything has turned out fine, the plantation is prospering, the girls are growing, Hilda has her music, Virginia her books, the one who might complain most would be Leticia, living away from her husband by mutual agreement, not because of any imposition or tyranny on my part but because they want to wait for the future, not realizing that perhaps they’ve already lost it forever because you have to seize things at the moment, the way you catch birds on the wing, or they disappear forever, the way I threw myself into the socialist adventure until that wore itself out and then I threw myself at America, which apparently is something that never wears out, a bottomless continent, while we Europeans swallowed our history whole and now ruminate it, sometimes belching it up, bah, we defecate it, we are defecators of history, and here history has first to be made, without Europe’s errors, without its dreams and disillusions, starting from scratch, what a relief, what power, to start from nothing, to own our own destiny, then one can accept falls, misfortunes, errors because they are part of our own destiny and not part of a distant historical event, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lassalle, Karl Marx … they all had less freedom on their thrones and behind their pulpits than I do here, going over the accounts of a coffee plantation,
Himmel und Hölle,
then.) And the silent grandmother, Cosima, rocked softly in the rocking chair brought from Louisiana instead of Mexico City. (I wanted to tell Felipe that I too was of this country, that was all; as soon as I arrived and met him, I understood that I was his last concession to his German past; why he chose me, I still don’t know; why he loves me so, I hope it isn’t to make up for my unfortunate adventure on the Perote highway; he’s never made me feel he’s sorry for me—on the contrary, he’s loved me with a real man’s passion, our daughters were conceived with a shameless, foulmouthed passion that no one who knows us could imagine. He treats me like a whore, and I like it, I tell him I imagine making love with the
chinaco
who mutilated me and he likes it, we’re accomplices in an intense love that has no modesty or reticence, that only he and I know, and the memory of it makes all the more painful the death that’s coming closer and that says to me, to us, Now one of the two of you is going to live without the other, so how are you going to go on loving? I don’t know because I have no idea what comes after, but he’s staying here and can remember me, imagine me, prolong me, think I didn’t die, only ran off with the
chinaco
whom I never saw again—because if I were to meet up with him again, what would I do, kill him or run off with him? No, I’ll only think the same thing I tell people: I did it to save the other passengers. But how could I ever forget those bestial eyes, that macho stance, that tigerlike way of walking, that unsatisfied desire, mine and his, never, never, never … )
I made you, you’re mine
, were to bring me luck; it wouldn’t be my luck, it would be an accident, a gift from chance: I play Chopin’s saddest Preludes and am not consoled, I only arm myself with patience and feel the intimate joy of offending my father and mother.) Aunt Virginia was writing a poem. (I live surrounded by resignation, I don’t want to resign myself, I want to escape one day, and I fear that my fondness for reading and writing is merely that, an escape and not a vocation I could just as well fulfill here as in Germany or, as I quipped one day, in China, let’s see if I don’t end up like my little niece’s doll, charming but mute, relaxing forever on a
pillow.) Mutti Leticia was helping the cook prepare tamales in the coastal style. (How beautiful it is to stuff them with the smooth mix of cooked pork and chipotle chiles, then finish by wrapping each tamale tenderly in its sheet of banana leaves, like a baby in bunting, and steam them, uniting, conserving all the flavors and aromas, meat and spice, fruit and flour, what a delight for the palate, it reminds me of my husband Fernando’s kisses, but I mustn’t think about that, the arrangements are made, it’s what’s best for everyone, it’s good that the girl will grow up here in the country with me, each of us has obligations, there’s no reason to use up our pleasures while we’re young, we should postpone them for the future, we should receive pleasure as a reward and not as a privilege, gifts are used up as quickly as whims, you think you have the right to have everything and you end with nothing; I prefer to wait, patiently, after all I’m only in my twenties, my whole life ahead of me, my whole life ahead.) Grandfather Felipe put on his glasses and went over the accounts. (I can’t complain, everything has turned out fine, the plantation is prospering, the girls are growing, Hilda has her music, Virginia her books, the one who might complain most would be Leticia, living away from her husband by mutual agreement, not because of any imposition or tyranny on my part but because they want to wait for the future, not realizing that perhaps they’ve already lost it forever because you have to seize things at the moment, the way you catch birds on the wing, or they disappear forever, the way I threw myself into the socialist adventure until that wore itself out and then I threw myself at America, which apparently is something that never wears out, a bottomless continent, while we Europeans swallowed our history whole and now ruminate it, sometimes belching it up, bah, we defecate it, we are defecators of history, and here history has first to be made, without Europe’s errors, without its dreams and disillusions, starting from scratch, what a relief, what power, to start from nothing, to own our own destiny, then one can accept falls, misfortunes, errors because they are part of our own destiny and not part of a distant historical event, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lassalle, Karl Marx … they all had less freedom on their thrones and behind their pulpits than I do here, going over the accounts of a coffee plantation,
Himmel und Hölle,
then.) And the silent grandmother, Cosima, rocked softly in the rocking chair brought from Louisiana instead of Mexico City. (I wanted to tell Felipe that I too was of this country, that was all; as soon as I arrived and met him, I understood that I was his last concession to his German past; why he chose me, I still don’t know; why he loves me so, I hope it isn’t to make up for my unfortunate adventure on the Perote highway; he’s never made me feel he’s sorry for me—on the contrary, he’s loved me with a real man’s passion, our daughters were conceived with a shameless, foulmouthed passion that no one who knows us could imagine. He treats me like a whore, and I like it, I tell him I imagine making love with the
chinaco
who mutilated me and he likes it, we’re accomplices in an intense love that has no modesty or reticence, that only he and I know, and the memory of it makes all the more painful the death that’s coming closer and that says to me, to us, Now one of the two of you is going to live without the other, so how are you going to go on loving? I don’t know because I have no idea what comes after, but he’s staying here and can remember me, imagine me, prolong me, think I didn’t die, only ran off with the
chinaco
whom I never saw again—because if I were to meet up with him again, what would I do, kill him or run off with him? No, I’ll only think the same thing I tell people: I did it to save the other passengers. But how could I ever forget those bestial eyes, that macho stance, that tigerlike way of walking, that unsatisfied desire, mine and his, never, never, never … )
Aunt Hilda was playing the piano; Aunt Virginia was still writing with a quill pen; her mother Leticia was cooking not only because she liked to but because she had a genius for the Veracruz art of uniting rice, beans, plantain, and pork, shredding the meat and adding lemon juice for the dish called
ropa vieja,
“old clothes,” marinating octopus in its ink, and reserving for the end the meringues, the custards, the
jocoques
of clotted cream and the
tocino del cielo
—the sweetest sweet in the world, which had gone from Barcelona to Havana and from Cuba to Veracruz as if to stifle with sweetness all the bitterness of those lands of revolution, conquest, and tyranny.
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.
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.”
the beautiful, upright German informed her stupefied husband: “Now I want a Catholic, religious wedding.”
“But you and I were confirmed as Protestants. We’ll have to disavow our faith.”
“We’re Christian. No one has any reason to know more.”
“I don’t see the reason for this.”
“It’s so your mulatta daughter can be my maid of honor and carry the train of my wedding dress.”
Thus did María de la O, almost on the first day, enter the home of the newlyweds. Cosima took it upon herself to assign a bedroom to the young lady, ordering the servants to address her as “señorita.” She gave her a place at the table, treated her as a daughter, and refused to acknowledge anything about her origin. No one except María de la O herself heard what Cosima Reiter said to her real mother: “Madam, choose the way in which you’d like your daughter to grow up. Go live in a place where you can make a life for yourself—Tampico or Coatzacoalcos, and you won’t lack for anything.”
“Except the love of my little girl,” wept the black woman.
“Not even you believe that,” said the brand-new Frau Kelsen, speaking to her familiarly, having quickly learned local customs and habits. One day, when she’d become an old lady, she reminded her husband of that event, not knowing that little Laura was listening from behind a potted fern.
María de la O Kelsen was the way Cosima would introduce the beautiful little mulatta, and that was how Don Felipe accepted her. The lady of the house didn’t even have to beg her husband to be faithful to the humanitarian principles of his youth. Cosima took charge and began to go to Mass, first with the mulatta girl and a missal held in both hands; later, with three more daughters and the missal in one hand, proud of her four-sided maternity, indifferent to whispers, shock, or curses, even when evil tongues said that the Hunk of Papantla was the real father—with the difficulty that the bandit was Creole, Doña Cosima German, and María de la O, in that case, explicable only as a racial throwback.
Seven years older than the eldest of her sisters, Hilda, eight years older than Virginia, and ten than Leticia, María de la O was a mulatta with charming features, a quick smile, and an upright gait: Cosima had found her bent over and groveling, like a beaten, cornered little animal, her black eyes filled with even blacker visions; and not wasting a moment, the child’s new mother by will and right, Cosima Reiter de Kelsen, taught María de la O to walk properly, even forcing her: “Put that dictionary on your head and walk toward me without letting it fall. Careful.”
She taught her table manners, how to be neat; she dressed her in the most beautiful starched white dresses because they contrasted dramatically with her dark skin. She made her wear a white silk bow in her hair, which wasn’t stiff like her mother’s but relaxed like her father Philip’s.
“Now you I’d bring back with me to Germany,” Cosima said proudly. “You would certainly attract attention.”
She went to church and told Father Morales, I’m going to have a baby and then at least two more. “I don’t want any of my children to be ashamed of their sister. I want the Kelsens yet to be born to enter the world and find a Kelsen who is different but also better than they.”
She rested a hand on María de la O’s chignon. “Have her baptized, confirmed, rain blessings on her, and for the love of God, pray for her honesty.”
He hesitated an instant and replied: “Let’s hope she doesn’t turn out to be a whore.”
The good thing was that the priest from Veracruz, Don Jesus Morales, was a good-natured man without being servile, and everything in him—his public sermons, his private chats, the confessions he heard in secrecy—protected and exalted the Christian behavior of Doña Cosima Reiter de Kelsen, by now very much a convert to Roman Catholicism.
“Ladies, don’t waste the triumphs of either faith or charity on me. All of you in good order now, dammit.”
The priest Jesus Morales loved his flock. The substitute priest, Elzevir Almonte, wanted to reform it. The fingers Grandmother Cosima
was missing seemed to have sprouted on the new priest, and he used them to admonish, censure, condemn … His sermons brought to the tropics the air of the high plateau, rarefied, suffocating, intolerable and intolerant. His parishioners began to count the prohibitions hurled at them from the pulpit by the dark young priest Almonte: no more of these loose camisoles that reveal the female form, especially when it rains and they soak through; from now on, modest undergarments and umbrellas in hand; no more of these foulmouthed Veracruz expressions and actions; though I’m not a magistrate or a justice of the peace, I declare that anyone who curses may not receive the holy body of our savior in his sacrilegious mouth—that much I can do; no more serenades, a pretext for nocturnal excitation that hinders Christian repose; brothels are forthwith closed, taverns are forthwith closed, and under pain of mortal sin a curfew is declared beginning at 9 p.m. whether or not the authorities approve—and if you think I’m joking, just wait and see; you will say from now on “that which I walk on,” not “legs,” just as you will say “that which I sit on” instead of …
was missing seemed to have sprouted on the new priest, and he used them to admonish, censure, condemn … His sermons brought to the tropics the air of the high plateau, rarefied, suffocating, intolerable and intolerant. His parishioners began to count the prohibitions hurled at them from the pulpit by the dark young priest Almonte: no more of these loose camisoles that reveal the female form, especially when it rains and they soak through; from now on, modest undergarments and umbrellas in hand; no more of these foulmouthed Veracruz expressions and actions; though I’m not a magistrate or a justice of the peace, I declare that anyone who curses may not receive the holy body of our savior in his sacrilegious mouth—that much I can do; no more serenades, a pretext for nocturnal excitation that hinders Christian repose; brothels are forthwith closed, taverns are forthwith closed, and under pain of mortal sin a curfew is declared beginning at 9 p.m. whether or not the authorities approve—and if you think I’m joking, just wait and see; you will say from now on “that which I walk on,” not “legs,” just as you will say “that which I sit on” instead of …
All these things the new priest from Puebla proclaimed with an elaborate waving of hands, ridiculous and insolent, as if he wanted to give sculptural form in the air to his categorical prohibitions. The brothels migrated to Santiago Tuxtla, the taverns went to San Andrés, the harpists and guitar players marched to Roca del Rio, and amid the desolation now fallen on the local merchants like a plague, Father Almonte reached the apex of authoritarianism with his techniques in the confessional.
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