Rows of men on horseback take off their hats when the Virgin passes, but the Veracruz widower Don Fernando Díaz, now thirty-three years old, has eyes only for the tall, slender, extremely refined Miss Leticia Kelsen (ask, and anyone will tell you), dressed in a stiff, white, parchmentlike fabric and barefoot, at the age of sixteen, not because she lacks shoes but because (as she explained to Fernando when he offered her his arm so she wouldn’t slip in the mud along the riverbank) in Tlacotalpan the greatest pleasure is to walk barefoot on grassy streets. Did he know any other city with grass growing in the streets? No, laughed Fernando, and he himself, to the glee and shock of the citizens of Tlacotalpan, took off his boots with complicated hooks and eyes and his red-and-white-striped socks that sent Miss Leticia into paroxysms of laughter.
“They look like clown socks!”
He blushed and blamed himself for having done something so alien to his regular, measured habits. She fell in love with him right on the spot, because he took off his shoes and turned as red as the stripes on his socks.
“What happened next, what happened next?” asked Laura, who knew the story by heart.
“No one can describe that town, you have to see it,” added her father.
“What’s it like, what’s it like?”
“Like a toy,” Doña Leticia went on. “All the houses are one story high, all even, but each one is painted a different color.”
“Blue, pink, green, red, orange, white, yellow, violet…” enumerated the child.
“The most beautiful walls in the world,” concluded her father, lighting up a cigar.
“A little toy village…”
Now that they had the big house in the port of Veracruz, the Kelsen sisters came to visit, and Don Fernando would tease them: Weren’t you three going to get married as soon as Leticia, Laura, and I got back together?
“And who would take care of María de la O?”
“They’ve always got an excuse,” laughed Don Fernando.
“That’s the absolute truth,” María de la O agreed with him. “I’ll stay and take care of my father. Hilda and Virginia can go and get married whenever they like.”
“I don’t need a husband,” exclaimed Virginia the writer, laughing… “Je suis la belle ténébreuse… I don’t need anyone to admire me.”
Hilda the pianist interrupted the laughing banter, putting an end to the subject with words no one understood: “Everything is hidden and lies in wait for us.”
Fernando glanced at Leticia, Leticia at Laura, and the girl copied the whitest aunt, moving her hands as if playing the piano, until Aunt Virginia gave her a sharp crack on the head and Laura held in her rage and her tears.
The visit of the aunts was an occasion to invite in specimens of Veracruz society. Once it happened that a group had gathered and Aunt María de la O came in late, and a lady said to her: “Girl, how good you’ve come. Fan me for a while, please. Don’t be a lazy darky now, it’s so hot…”
Laughter ceased instantly. María de la O didn’t move. Laura rose, took her arm, and led her to an armchair.
“Sit here, Auntie, I’ll be happy to fan the lady first and then you, my dear.”
Laura Díaz thinks something changed forever in her life one night when she was awakened by a harsh moan in her brother Santiago’s bedroom, which was next door to hers. She was frightened, but she did not run on tiptoe into the hall and to the boy’s door until she heard the painful groaning again. Then she went in without knocking, and Santiago’s face of pain in bed combined with an incredible, unique greeting in his eyes, gratitude for her presence, even if his words contradicted his looks: Laura, don’t make any noise, go back to your room, don’t wake up anyone.
The arm of his shirt was ripped open from the shoulder down, and with his right hand he was squeezing his left forearm. Could the little girl help him in any way?
“No. Yes. Go back to bed and don’t say a word to anyone. Swear. I can take care of myself.”
Laura made the sign of the cross. For the first time, someone needed her, even if he didn’t say so, it was not she who was asking for something, she was being asked for something, with words that said “no” but meant “yes, Laura, help me.”
From that night on, they went out every Saturday to stroll along the seawall. They walked hand in hand, and Laura felt Santiago’s hand was rigid, tense, while the wound on his arm healed. It was their secret, and he knew he was counting on her and she felt newly proud because of this. Also, in this contact with her brother Laura felt for the first time that she belonged to Veracruz, that the sea and the sky met here in a single vibrant bay, sky and sea together, and blowing hard so that behind Veracruz the plain vibrated, too, luminous and clean-swept until it faded into the forest. To him she could tell the stories about Catemaco. He would believe that a woman of stone standing in the middle of the forest was a statue, not a tree.
“Of course. It’s a figure made by the Zapotal culture. Didn’t your grandfather know that?”
Laura shook her head, no, Grandfather did not know everything, she now realized, and the girl’s curls shook, dark and scented with soap.
“My father was right when he said that Santiago’s got the lion’s share of the family’s intelligence and the rest of us have leftovers.”
Santiago apologized for laughing, saying that Laura knew more than he did about trees, flowers, nature. About all that he knew northing, he knew only that he wanted to disappear one day, like that, to become forest, to be transformed into one of those trees the girl knew so well, the palo rojo, the araucaria, the trueno with its perfect yellow flowers, the laurel…
“No, that’s a bad one.”
“But it’s pretty.”
“It destroys everything, eats everything up.”
“And the ceiba.”
“No, not the ceiba either. The branches fill up with starlings and they shit on everything.”
Laughing to die, Santiago went on with the fig tree, the purple iris, the tulip, and she, yes, those, yes, Santiago, laughing now not like a girl, he said to himself in surprise, laughing like a woman, like something else who was no longer the little girl Laura with dark curls and the scent of soap. With Santiago she felt that until now she’d been just like Li Po, the Chinese doll. Now everything was going to be different.
“No, you can’t hug the ceiba. Daggers are born from its body.”
She glanced at her brother’s wounded arm, but said nothing.
He began to wait for her every Saturday at the door of the house they shared, as if he’d come from somewhere else, and brought her a present-a little bouquet of flowers, a conch to hear the sound of the sea, a starfish, a postcard, a paper boat-while Leticia, watching nervously from the roof terrace where she personally was hanging out the wash (as in Catemaco; she adored the coolness of freshly washed sheets against the body), saw the couple stroll away, not knowing that her husband, Fernando, was doing the same from the living-room balcony.
Laura received something more on those strolls than seashells, flowers, and starfish. Her half brother spoke to her as if she were older, more than the indecisive twelve she was, as if she were nineteen or twenty or even older. Did he need to blow off steam with someone, or did he really take her seriously? In any case did he think she could understand everything he was telling her? For Laura, it was marvelous enough that he took her for a walk, that he brought her things-not the little gifts but the things he carried within himself, the things he told her, what his company gave her.