“I just listen to them,” she said to her sisters. “They don’t realize no one alive is as old as a tree…”
Laura didn’t want to tell her aunts anything. She would only talk to her grandfather. She tugged on the sleeve of his black frock coat. Grandfather, there’s an enormous lady in the forest, you have to see her. Child, what are you talking about? I’ll take you to her, Grandfather, if you don’t come, no one will believe me, come on, if you come, I won’t be afraid of her, I’ll hug her.
She imagined: I’ll hug her and bring her back to life, that’s what the stories Grandmama used to tell me say, all you have to do is hug a statue to bring it to life.
She berated herself: how little time her decision to keep the secret of the great forest lady lasted.
Her grandfather took her by the hand and smiled, he shouldn’t smile on a day of mourning, but this pretty little girl with her long, straight hair and more and more well defined features, her baby fat disappearing-her grandfather could tell that day, before Laura saw it in any mirror or even dreamed it, how she’d look when she grew up, with very long arms and legs and a prominent nose and thinner lips than any of the other girls her age (lips like those of her writing aunt Virginia)-this child was reborn life, Cosima restored, one life continued in another and he its guardian, keeper of a soul, which required the living memory of a couple, Cosima and Felipe, to prolong itself and find new energy in the life of a girl, of this girl, the deeply moved old man said to himself-he was sixty-six! Cosima was fifty-seven when she died!-and Laura reached the clearing in the forest.
“This is the statue, Grandfather.”
Don Felipe laughed.
“This is a ceiba, child. Careful now. Look at how beautiful it is but also dangerous. Do you see? It’s covered over with nails, except they aren’t nails but pointy spines like daggers which the ceiba produces to protect itself, don’t you see? Swords come out of the ceiba’s body, the tree arms itself, so no one will come near it, so no one will hug it.” Her grandfather smiled. “What a naughty ceiba!”
Then bad news came. There was a miners’ strike in Cananea, another strike in the textile factory at Rio Blanco, right here in the state of Veracruz, the bodies of strikers killed by the federal army were carried from Orizaba to the sea in open boxcars, so everyone could see the corpses and learn a lesson.
“Do you think Don Porfirio will fall?”
“Are you serious? This shows that Porfirio Díaz has the same energy he always had, even if he’s seventy-five.”
“Boss, we’re going to have to cut down the chalacahuites.”
“It’s a pity we have to cut down trees that shade the coffee.”
“That’s when coffee prices are high. Right now, prices are very low. We’re better off cutting down the trees and selling them as lumber.”
“It’s God’s will. They’ll grow again.”
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?