One afternoon when he didn’t appear for their rendezvous, she stood there, leaning against the building wall (whose lower floors were the bank offices) and feeling so unprotected in the siesta-hour city that she was on the verge of running back to her room, but that seemed like a desertion, a cowardly act (a concept she didn’t fully understand although from then on she knew the feeling), and she thought it would be better to get lost in the tropical forest, where she could hide and grow up alone, in her own time, without this boy who was so handsome and intelligent who was sweeping her along all too quickly to an age that was not yet her own…
She started walking, and when she turned the corner she found Santiago leaning against a different wall. They laughed. They kissed. They’d made a mistake. They forgave each other.
“I was just thinking that out at the lake it would be I who would bring you to see things.”
“Without you, I’d be lost in the forest, Laura. I’m from here, from the city, from the port. Nature frightens me.”
She asked why without saying anything.
“It will outlast you. And me.”
They walked to a certain spot by the docks, where he stopped, so immersed in thought that she became afraid for him, just as she’d become afraid when she heard him say that he sometimes wanted to go into the forest she loved so well and get lost there, never come out, never see a human face again.
“What do they expect of me, Laura?”
“Everyone says you’re super-smart, that you write and talk beautifully. Father is always saying you have promise.”
“He’s a good man. But he’s just expressing fond hopes. One day I’ll show you what I write.”
“I can’t wait!”
“It isn’t great. It’s correct. It’s competent.”
“Isn’t that enough, Santiago?”
“No, not at all. Look at it this way: if there’s one thing I hate it’s to be one of the herd. That’s what Father is, excuse me for saying so, a good little lamb from the professional herd. What you can’t be is part of an artistic herd, just one more artist or one more writer. That would kill me, Laura, I’d rather be no one than be mediocre.”
“You aren’t, Santiago. Don’t say things like that. You’re the best, I swear it.”
“And you’re the prettiest, I’m telling you.”
“Oh, Santiago, don’t always try to be the best of the first. Wouldn’t you be better off as the best of the second?”
He pinched her cheek, and they laughed again, but they returned home in silence. Their parents didn’t have the nerve to say anything because for Fernando it was evil to assume sin where there is none, the way the priest Elzevir did in Catemaco, who succeeded only in ruining people with imagined guilt, and because for Leticia-I know I don’t really know my son, for me that boy is a mystery, but you do know everything about Laura and trust her, isn’t that so?
He walked her back to that same spot on the docks the next Saturday, and told her to look at the rails, at the freight cars that came right up here loaded with bodies-the Rio Blanco workers murdered by order of Don Porfirio for going on strike and sticking to it so bravely, brought right here and tossed into the sea, the dictator stays in power only by means of blood, the rebel Yaqui Indians shackled and taken out to sea near Sonora and thrown overboard, the Cananea miners shot on his orders in a place called the National Valley, hundreds of workers enslaved right here in Veracruz, the liberals locked up in the Ulúa fort, followers of Madero and the Flores Magón brothers, anarcho-syndicalists like the Spanish relatives of my mother, who came from the Canary Islands, Laura, revolutionaries. Laura, revolutionaries are people who are asking for something very simple for Mexico, democracy, elections, land, education, jobs, no reelection of the incumbent president. Don Porfirio Díaz has been in power for thirty years.
“I apologize, Laura. I can’t even spare a twelve-year-old girl my speeches.”
Revolutionaries. That night the word echoed in Laura Díaz’s head, and again the next, and the night after that. She’d never heard it, and when she went back to the coffee plantation on a visit with her mother, she asked her grandfather what it meant and the aged face of the socialist Felipe Kelsen clouded over for an instant. What is a revolutionary?
“It’s an illusion people should give up at the age of thirty.”
“Hmm. Santiago is only now turning twenty.”
“That’s just it. Tell your brother to hurry up.”
Don Felipe was playing chess in the patio of the country house with an Englishman wearing filthy white gloves. His granddaughter’s question caused him to lose a bishop and be castled. The old German said nothing more on the subject, but the Englishman persevered. “Another revolution? Why? Surely they’re all dead.”
“As long as you’re at it, Sir Richard, you might wish for no more wars, because if one should come, you’re going to see more dead.” Don Felipe was trying to shift Laura’s attention to the Englishman in gloves and to distract him from the game.
“And besides, with you a German and me British, well, what is there to say? Fraternal enemies!”
At that, as Don Felipe protested he was no longer German but Mexican, he allowed his king to be cornered. The Englishman shouted checkmate. Just four years later, Don Felipe and Don Ricardo stopped speaking. Each, deprived of his chess partner, died of boredom and sadness. The cannons at Ypres blasted away, and the trenches witnessed the slaughter of young English and German soldiers. Only then did Grandfather Felipe reveal something to his daughters and his granddaughter.
“An incredible thing. He wore those white gloves because he had cut off the tips of his own fingers to purge himself of guilt. In India, the English cut off the fingertips of cotton weavers so as to keep them from competing with the cotton factories in Manchester. There are no people crueler than the English.”
“La pérfida Albión,” Aunt Virginia said in Spanish, then insisting, “Perfidious Albion.”
“And what about the Germans, Grandfather?”
“Well, my dear. There are no people more savage than Europeans. Wait and see. All of them.”
“Über alles,” Virginia sang under her breath, breaking her father’s rule.
Laura would see nothing. Nothing more than the body of her brother Santiago Díaz, summarily executed by firing squad during November 1910 for conspiracy against the federal government and for being linked to other Veracruz plotters-liberals, syndicalists, and pro-Madero men like the brothers Carmen and Aquiles Serdán, who that same month were shot in Puebla.
It did not occur to Don Fernando Díaz, during the wake for his son, with his bullet-pierced body in the living room above the bank, that the serenity of the young man in a white suit, his face paler than usual but his features intact, and with the wounds in his chest, might be disturbed one more time by police intervention.
“This is an official building.”
“But, sir, this is my house. It’s the house of my dead son. I demand respect.”
“Wakes for rebels are held in the cemetery. All right, then, everybody out.”
“Who will help me?”
Fernando, Leticia, Zampayita the black man, the Indian maids, Laura with a flower between her incipient breasts, together they carried the coffin. But it was Laura who said, Papa, Mama, he loved the seawall, he loved the sea, he loved Veracruz, this is his grave, please, clinging to her mother’s skirt, staring imploringly at her father and the servants, and they took her advice, as if each feared that if Santiago was buried, he might be exhumed someday to be shot once more.
How long it took her brother’s white body to disappear into the grave of the sea, the body attached to the cushioned bed of death, the lid of the coffin deliberately open so everyone could see him disappear slowly on that night without waves, Santiago becoming more and more handsome, sadder and sadder, missed more and more, the scene more and more painful as he sank within the open casket, his head soon to be crowned by algae and devoured by sharks along with all the unwritten poems, his face protected by the condemned man’s last wish: “Please don’t shoot my face.”