The neighbors’ homes went on being, in Laura’s life and in the life of everyone in provincial society, the irreplaceable seats of communal life. People “received” constantly if sporadically, almost taking turns. In private homes, people played lottery and blackjack, forming large circles around the tables. It was there that culinary customs were preserved. It was there the youngest girls were taught to dance, taking little steps through the rooms, “you do it this way, lifting your skirt,” preparing them for the grand soirees at the Casino; and it was the place for baptism parties, for setting up the crèche at Christmas, with the Christ Child in his manger and the Wise Men and, in the center of the room, the “French Ship” filled with sweets that was opened up after midnight. Mass. And then Carnival and its masked balls, the tableaux vivants at the end of term at the Misses Ramos’ school, with their representations of Father Hidalgo Proclaiming Independence or the Indian Juan Diego negotiating with the Virgin of Guadalupe. But the principal party was the Casino hall every August 19. It was there that all of local society met.
Laura would have preferred to stay at home, not only to be with her parents but because since the death of the Catalan anarchist the attic had been sealed. She began to assign a special value to every corner of her house, as if she knew that the pleasure of living and growing up there would not last forever. Her grandfather’s Catemaco house, the apartment above the bank and facing the sea in Veracruz, and now the one-story home on Lerdo Street in Xalapa… how many more homes would she live in over the years of her life? She could foresee none of them. She could only recall yesterday’s homes and memorize today’s, creating sanctuaries in her uncertain life-never again foreseeable and secure as it had been during her childhood near the lake-which she would need to hold on to in the time to come. A time that young Laura could not imagine, no matter how often she said to herself, “No matter what happens, the future will be different from this present.” She did not want to imagine the worst reasons why life would change. The worst of all was the death of her father. She was going to say that the saddest was staying behind, lost and forgotten, in a little town, like Aunts Hilda and Virginia in their father’s house, stripped of the reason for being settled there and being unmarried. Grandfather was dead; Hilda played the piano for nothing, for no one; Virginia piled up pages, poems, that no one would ever know. The active life was preferable, a life committed to another life, which was the case of Aunt María de la O, constantly caring for Fernando Díaz.
“What would I do without you, María de la O?” the indefatigable Mutti Leticia would ask-seriously, without sighing.
Laura, as once she had memorized Santiago’s bedroom in Veracruz, now, eyes closed, ran through the patios, the corridors, the floors of Marseilles brick, the palms, the ferns, the mahogany armoires, the mirrors, the four-poster beds, the clay jugs of filtered water, the dressing table, the pitcher, the closet, and, in her mother’s domain, the kitchen redolent of mint and parsley.
“Don’t turn in on yourself the way your Grandmother Kelsen did,” Leticia would say. She could no longer endure the sadness of her own gaze. “Go out with your girlfriends. Have fun. You’re only twenty-one.”
“What you mean, Mutti, is that I’m already twenty-one. At my age, you’d been married for years, and I’d been born-and no, Mutti, don’t even bother asking: I’m not fond of any boy.”
“Have they stopped coming to see you? Because of everything that’s happened?”
“No, Mutti, I’m the one who’s been avoiding them.”
As if responding to a warning of an incomprehensible change, vibrating like late-summer leaves, the girls Laura would visit, younger than she, had all decided to prolong their childhood, even if they made coquettish concessions to an adulthood they, disconcerted, did not wish. They called themselves “the chubbies” and played practical jokes inappropriate to their eighteen years. They jumped rope in the park so they’d have color in their cheeks before going on the seductive evening stroll; they would take long siestas before tennis at Los Berros; they would innocently mock their costumed boyfriends during Carnivaclass="underline"
“Are you a circus clown?”
“Don’t insult me. Can’t you see I’m a prince?”
They would skate in Juárez Park to lose the pounds they put on eating “devils,” cakes filled with chocolate and covered with marzipan, the delight of sweet-tooths in this city that smelled like a bakery. They volunteered to be in the tableaux vivants at the end of the term in the Misses Ramos’ academy, the only time when one could see that the teachers really were two different people, since one presided over the tableaux while the other worked behind the scenes.
“Something awful happened to me, Laura. I was playing the part of the Virgin, when I suddenly had to go. I had to make terrible faces so Miss Ramos would close the curtain. I ran to make wee-wee and came back to be the Virgin again.”
“In my house, they’ve gotten bored with my comedies and costumes, Laura. My parents have hired only one spectator to admire me. What do you think of that?”
“You must be happy, Margarita.”
“The thing is, I’ve decided to become an actress.”
Then they all rushed madly to the balcony to see the cadets from the Preparatoria march by, rifles on their shoulders, wearing their French képis, their uniforms with gold buttons, and their very taut flies.
The bank informed them they’d have to give up the house in September, after the Casino ball. Don Fernando would get a pension, but the new bank director would, as is natural, be coming to live in the house. There would also be a ceremony up in the attic, the unveiling of a plaque in honor of Doña Armonía Aznar. The Mexican trade unions had decided to honor the valiant comrade who had donated money, had delivered mail to the Red Battalions and the House of the Workers of the World during the Revolution, and had even sheltered union men on the run right here, in the house of the bank director.
“Did you know that, Mutti?”
“No, Laura. And what about you, sister?”
“Not a clue!”
“It’s better not to know everything, isn’t that so?”
None of the three dared to think that a man as honorable as Don Fernando would knowingly have tolerated a conspiracy under his own roof, especially with Santiago’s having been shot on November 21, 1910. When she thought about it, Laura imagined that Orlando Ximénez knew the truth, that he was the intermediary between the attic and Doña Armonía’s anarcho-syndicalists. Then she discarded that suspicion; Orlando. the frivolous… or perhaps for that very reason was he the likeliest suspect? Laura laughed heartily. She’d just read Baroness d’Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel to her father, so she was imagining poor Orlando as a Mexican Pimpernel, a dandy at night and an anarchist by day… saving union men from the firing squad.
No novel prepared Laura for the next episode of her life. Leticia and María de la O set about looking for a comfortable house that they could afford under Fernando’s pension. The half sister thought that given the circumstances, Hilda and Virginia should sell the Catemaco coffee plantation and use the money to buy a house in Xalapa where they could all live together and save on expenses.
“And why shouldn’t we all go back to Catemaco? After all, we did live there… and we were happy,” said Leticia, without sighing like her self-absorbed mother.