“Listen. They’ve gone hack to Strauss. I can’t stand modern dances.”
He took her by the waist and by the hand, stared deeply at her with his Asian eyes, right into the depths of her eyes of shifting light, looked at her as no one had ever looked at her, and she, dancing the waltz with Orlando, had the startling sensation that beneath their evening clothes the two of them were naked, as naked as the priest Elzevir might imagine them, and that the distance between their bodies, imposed by the rhythm of the waltz, was fictitious: they were naked, and they were embracing.
Laura awoke from her trance the instant she averted her eyes from Orlando’s, and she saw that all the others were observing them, standing hack from them, pausing in their dance to watch Laura D az. and Orlando Ximé nez dance.
This was interrupted by a gaggle of children in nightclothes who hadn’t been able to fall asleep and now burst in with a racket, carrying huge hats filled with oranges stolen from the garden.
“Well, well. You were the sensation of the ball,” Elizabeth Garcia told her schoolmate as they traveled back to Xalapa.
“That boy’s got a very bad reputation,” Elizabeth’s mother added quickly.
“In that case, I wish he’d asked me to dance,” whispered Elizabeth. “He paid me not the slightest attention.”
“But you wanted to dance with Eduardo Caraza, he was your dream,” said Laura, astonished.
“He didn’t even talk to me. He’s rude. He dances without speaking.”
“You’ll have other chances, sweetie.”
“No, Mama, I’m disillusioned and will be for the rest of my life.” And the girl dressed in rose burst into tears in her mother’s arms.
Instead of consoling her directly, Mrs. Garc a-Dupont preferred to go off on a tangent, warning Laura: “I feel I must tell your mother everything.”
“There’s no need for a fuss, ma’am. I’ll never see that boy again.”
“You’re better off for it. Bad company, you know…”
Zampaya opened the main entrance, and the Garc a-Duponts, mother and daughter, took out their handkerchiefs-the mother’s dry, Elizabeth’s soaked with tears-to say goodbye to Laura.
“How cold it is here, miss,” complained the black man. “When are we going back to Veracruz?” He did a little dance step, but Laura didn’t look at him. She had eyes only for the attic occupied by the Catalan lady, Armon a Aznar.
They had to leave very early, in the landau, for Catemaco: Grandfather was going, announced Aunt María de la O. Laura stared sadly at the tropical countryside she loved so much as it was reborn under her tender gaze, already foreseeing the sadness of saying goodbye to Grandfather Felipe.
He was in his bedroom, his for so many years, first when he was a bachelor, then with his beloved wife, Cosima Reiter, and now, once again alone, with no company except for his three daughters, who used him, he knew, as a pretext for continuing to be unmarried, obliged by their widower father…
“Let’s see if you get married now, girls,” said Felipe Kelsen sarcastically from his sickbed.
The entryway to the Catemaco house seemed different to Laura, as if absence made everything smaller but at the same time longer and narrower. Returning to the past meant entering an empty, interminable corridor where one could no longer find the usual things or people one wanted to see again. As if they were playing with both our memory and our imagination, the people and things of the past challenged us to situate them in the present, not forgetting they had a past and would have a future although that future would be, precisely, only that of memory, again, in the present.
But when it is a matter of accompanying death, what is the valid time for life? That was why it took Laura so long to reach her grandfather’s bedroom, as if to get there she’d had to traverse the old man’s very life, from a German childhood of which she knew nothing, to a youth impassioned by the poetry of Musset and the politics of Lassalle, to political disenchantment and emigration to Mexico, to starting the work and establishing the wealth of the Catemaco coffee plantation, the love by correspondence with his bride-to-be, Cosima, the terrible incident on the highway with the bandit from Papantla, the embrace of the bastard daughter, the birth of the three daughters, the marriage of Leticia and Fernando, the birth of Laura-a passage of a time that in youth is slow and impatient and in old age our patience can’t manage to slow down, which is both mocking and tragic. That is why it took Laura so long to reach her grandfather’s bedroom. Reaching the dying man’s bed required her to touch each and every one of the days of his existence, to remember, imagine, perhaps invent what never happened and even what wasn’t imaginable, and to do so by the mere presence of a beloved being who represented everything that wasn’t, that was, that could be, and that never could take place.
Now, on this exact day, near her grandfather, holding his hand with its thick veins and old freckles, caressing that skin worn transparent over time, Laura Díaz again had the sensation that she was living for others; her existence had no other meaning except that of completing unfinished destinies. How could she think that, as she caressed the hand of a dying seventy-five-year old man, a complete man with a finished life?
Santiago had been an unfulfilled promise. Was that what Grandfather was, too, despite his age? Was there any really finished life, a single life that wasn’t also a truncated promise, a latent possibility, even more…? It isn’t the past that dies with each of us. The future dies as well.
Laura stared as deeply as she could into her grandfather’s light and dreaming eyes, still alive behind the constant deathly blinking. She asked him the same question she was asking herself. Felipe Kelsen smiled painfully.
“Didn’t I tell you, child? One day all my ailments came together, and here I am… but before I go I want to tell you that you were right. Yes, there is a statue of a woman, covered with jewels, in the middle of the forest. I misled you on purpose. I didn’t want you to fall into superstition and witchcraft. I took you to see a ceiba so that you would learn to live with reason, not with the fantasy and enthusiasms that cost me so dearly when I was young. Be careful with everything. The ceiba was covered with spines as sharp as daggers, remember?”
“Of course, Grandfather.”
Abruptly, as if he had no time left for other words, not caring to whom he said them or even if no one heard them, the old man whispered: “I’m a young socialist. I live in Darmstadt, and I shall die here. I need the nearness of my river and my streets and my squares. I need the yellow smell of the chemical factories. I need to believe in something. This is my life, and I wouldn’t trade it for any other. For any other…” His mouth filled with mustard-colored bubbles and remained open forever.
When the dance was over, Orlando had brought his lips-fleshy like those of a little girl-close to Laura’s ear.
“Let’s separate. We’re attracting attention. I’ll wait for you in the attic of your house.”
Laura was left suspended amid the noise of the party, the curious scrutiny of the guests, and Orlando’s astounding proposition.
“But Señora Aznar lives there.”
“No more. She wanted to go to Barcelona to die. I paid her passage. Now the attic is mine.”
“But my parents…”
“No one knows. Only you. I’ll wait for you there. Come when you want.” And he removed his lips from Laura’s ear. “I want to give you the same thing I gave to Santiago. Don’t disappoint me now. He liked it.”
When she returned from her grandfather’s funeral, Laura lived for several days with Orlando’s words echoing like a howl in her head: You think you knew Santiago well, you think your brother gave everything to you? How little you know of a man so complex; he gave you only a part of his existence; and passion, the passion of love, to whom did he give that?