“I’ve finished college. My father has given me a sabbatical.”
“What’s that?”
“A year of freedom to decide seriously about my vocation. I’m reading. As you can see.”
“Well, I really don’t see much of you, Santiago. You’re always out of sight.”
The boy laughed, hooked his walking stick on his forearm, and tousled the hair of his little sister, furious now at his condescension.
“I’m already twelve. Almost.”
“If I were only fifteen, I’d carry you off,” laughed Santiago.
Don Fernando, from the window of his office, saw his slim, elegant son pass by, and now he feared his wife would reproach him, not so much for the twelve years of separation and waiting, not so much for the shared life of father and son that had excluded mother and daughter… they, after all, had been happy to be with each other, and the separation had been agreed upon and understood as a bond of permanent, sure values that would give the family stability, when the time came, in their shared life. Indeed, Don Fernando was certain that the test to which they had subjected themselves not only was exceptional in the era they were living in, with its endless engagements, but would give a kind of retrospective halo (let’s call it, instead of test, sacrifice, anticipation, wager, or merely postponed happiness) to their marriage.
The fear was now of something else. Santiago himself.
His son was proof that all the nurturing will of a father cannot force a son to conform to the paternal mold. Fernando wondered, If I’d given him complete freedom, would he have conformed more? Did I make him different by proposing my own values to him?
The answer remained on the edge of that mystery Fernando Díaz had no idea how to pierce: the personality of others. Who was his son: what did he want, what was he doing, what was he thinking? The father had no answers. When, at the end of secondary school, Santiago asked him for a year before deciding on going on to a university, Fernando was happy to grant it to him. Everything seemed to coincide in the ordered mind of the accountant and bank president: the graduation of the son and the arrival of his second wife along with his second child, and now Santiago’s absence on “sabbatical” (Fernando told himself, somewhat shamefaced), would let the new home life take shape without problems.
“Where are you going to spend your sabbatical?”
“Right here in Veracruz, Papa. Quite clever, don’t you think? It’s something I know little about-this port, my own city. What do you think?”
He’d been so studious, such a reader, such a fine writer throughout his adolescence. He’d published in magazines for young people: poetry, art criticism, and literary criticism. The poet Salvador Díaz Mirón, his teacher, praised him as a young man of promise. Who assured me, Fernando Díaz asked himself, that all this augured continuity? Peace, perhaps, but continuity in the end? Did it assure rebellion instead of conformity, the fatal exception? Fernando had imagined that his son, after finishing at the Preparatoria, when he asked for the year off would spend it traveling-his father had set aside the necessary money-and would return, having purged his young man’s curiosity, to take up his literary career again, his university studies, and then start a family. As in the English novels, he would have done his Grand Tour.
“I’m staying here, Papa, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all, my boy. This is your house. Don’t be silly.”
He had nothing to fear. Fernando Díaz’s private life was of an exemplary spotlessness. Concerning his past, it was well known that his first wife, Elisa Obregón, a descendant of immigrants from the Canary Islands, died giving birth to Santiago; that for the first seven years of the boy’s life, the now recently graduated poet lived under the protection-and thanks to the charity, almost-of a Jesuit priest from the city of Orizaba; that when Don Fernando remarried, he kept his new family far away in Catemaco but brought Santiago to live with him in Veracruz.
Asked to explain himself in one or another Veracruz gathering, this honorable if not very imaginative man of numbers said that sometimes it was necessary to defer satisfaction while doing one’s duty, which, ultimately, redoubled satisfaction.
These arguments, which seemed to convince people, merely provoked the scorn of Salvador Díaz Mirón: “I never would have suspected it, Don Fernando, but you are more baroque than the poet Góngora himself.”
But just as Don Fernando could not penetrate the mysteries of others, no one penetrated his-perhaps because they didn’t exist. Except for the perfect bride, his second wife, Leticia, who simply was equal to him. Yet the initial arrangement between the two of them was indeed baroque. For eleven years, Leticia, accompanied by her half sister, María de la O, would visit Fernando in Veracruz once a month, and he would take a room at the Hotel Diligencias so they could be alone while María de la O would discreetly disappear. (Only the grandmother, without fingers, Doña Cosima Kelsen, suspected where she went.) Every three months, in turn, Fernando would return to Catemaco, greet the German grandfather, and play with little Laura.
At the port, father and son lived in adjoining rooms in a boarding house, Santiago in the bedroom so he could study and write, Fernando in the living room, as if in free time between business appointments. Each one had his washbasin and his mirror for his personal grooming. The public bath was two streets away. A black woman with cloudlike hair took care of the chamber pots. They took their meals at the boardinghouse.
Now everything changed. The president’s residence above the bank had all the comforts-a big living room with a view of the docks, a wicker sofa because it was cooler, tables of varnished wood with marble tops, rockers, bibelots, electric lights as well as old candelabras, commodes with vitrines that displayed all sorts of Dresden figurines-licentious courtiers, daydreaming shepherdesses-and a pair of typical genre paintings. In the first, a little rascal teases a sleeping dog with a stick; in the second the dog bites the calf of a boy who can’t manage to jump over the wall and falls back bawling…
“Let sleeping dogs lie,” Mr. Díaz would invariably say in English whenever he looked, even out of the corner of his eye, at the paintings.
The dining room: with a table big enough to seat twelve and, once again, vitrines, these filled with china hand-decorated with scenes from the Napoleonic Wars, some of them edged with gold reliefs in the form of garlands.
A sort of antechamber or pantry, as Fernando called it, again in English: this connected the dining room and the kitchen redolent with herbs, stews, and tropical fruits that dripped with juice when cut in half, a kitchen of braziers and griddles, where the fire under the skillets and pots required untiring hands waving straw fans to keep it alive. Nothing satisfied Doña Leticia more than going from one brick-and-iron oven to the next, steadily fanning the embers to keep the broths, the rice, the sauces bubbling as she stirred them, while the Indian women from the Zongolica mountains made tortillas and the little black man Zampaya watered the flowerpots in the corridors, muttering a hymn to himself:
Black Zampayita’s dance,
you can see it in a glance,
will surely cure your every pain,
even help you weight to gain.
Sometimes, little Laura, with her head in her mother’s lap, would listen delightedly, for the thousandth time, to the story of how her parents met at the Candlemas festival in Tlacotalpan, a doll-house-sized village where on February 2 everyone, even the old-timers, would come at the sound of clarinets and guitars to dance on wooden floors in the plazas next to the Papaloapan River, along which passes the Virgin, from boat to boat, while all the neighbors bet on whether the Mother of God has the same hairdo as last year, hair that once belonged to Dulce María Estévez, or whether it was the hair given to her, at great sacrifice, by María Elena Muñoz. After all, every year the Virgin was supposed to have a fresh new hairdo, and it was a great honor for decent young ladies to sacrifice their hair to St. Mary.