Philip retained only moving memories of Lassalle, nationalism, and the love of adventure that brought him from the Rhine to the Gulf of Mexico. But here, those attributes would be no longer German but Mexican. Old Heine in Düsseldorf applauded the decision of his rebellious son, gave him an endowment of marks, and put him on a ship for the New World. Philip Kelsen made a three-year stopover in New Orleans, working reluctantly in a cigar factory, but he was disgusted by American racism, still blazing hot amid the charred ruins of the Confederacy, so he went on to Veracruz, exploring the coast from Tuxpan in the green Huasteca to the Tuxtlas, flown over by hundreds of birds.
Full stomach, happy heart, said the first woman he slept with in Tuxpan, a mulatta who gave him the same sensuality in bed as she did in the kitchen, alternately placing in the voracious mouth of her young German seducer her two wine-red nipples or an enormous quantity of bocoles, pemoles, and the biggest tamales in all of Mexico, stuffed with pork and chile. Not yet acclimated, Philip Kelsen again found a mulatta and snacks in Santiago Tuxtla. Like her native city, her name was Santiaga, and the dishes she served up for the repose of the recently arrived, sensual little German were Caribbean: lots of sweet potatoes, garlic, and mogo-mogo from plantains. But what seduced Philip Kelsen more than any sexual or gastronomic dish was the beauty of Catemaco, a short distance from the Tuxtlas: a lake that could have been in Switzerland or Germany-surrounded by mountains and thick vegetation, shiny as a mirror but animated by the invisible whispers of waterfalls, birds flying overhead, and colonies of tailless macaques.
Standing on a hill overlooking the quicksilver lake, Philip Kelsen announced, in an act that reconciled all of him-his youth and his future, his romantic spirit and his financial patrimony, his idealism and his pragmatism, his sensuality and his asceticism-“I’m staying here. This is my country.”
Only at a distance and through hearsay did little Laura begin to learn the story of her upright, disciplined, and handsome German grandfather, who spoke only Spanish, although who could tell if he went on thinking in German and who could know the language of his dreams? For the little girl, all dates were soon to come, never far off, and the passage of time was marked most vividly by her birthday, when, so no one would forget to pay attention to her, she would charmingly skip around the patio, starting early in the morning while she was still in her nightie and sing:
on the twelfth of May
the Virgin dressed in white
came walking into sight
with her coat so gay…
The entire household knew the rite by heart, and on the days leading up to Laura’s birthday they would pretend to forget the celebration. If Laura knew that they knew, then she too gave no hint of it. Everyone feigned surprise, and it was prettier that way, especially this twelfth of May in the fifth year of the century, when Laura turned seven, and her grandfather gave her an extraordinary present, a Chinese doll with porcelain head, hands, and feet, its little cotton body covered by a Mandarin costume of red silk, with black edging and a dragon design embroidered in gold. For the little girl being feted, the exoticism of the costume did not detract from the joy and gladness she felt in her instantaneous love for those tiny little feet in white silk stockings and black velvet slippers, for the smiling little pug-nosed face with Asian eyes and high brows painted near the fringe of silk hair. But the diminutive hands were the doll’s most delicate part. As soon as she received this most beautiful gift of her childhood, she took the doll’s hand and with it shook hands with her pianist aunt, Hilda, her writer aunt, Virginia, with Mutti, the cook, Leticia, with her grandfather, the farmer Felipe, and her invalid grandmother Cosima, who involuntarily hid her mutilated right hand under her shawls and awkwardly used her left hand to greet her little granddaughter.
“Do you have a name for her yet?” asked Doña Cosima.
“Li Po,” Laura answered, humming along. “We’ll call her Li Po.”
With a simple glance, her grandmother asked her where she’d found that name; Laura answered with a shrug that meant “just because.” They all kissed her, and the child went back to bed to make Li Po comfortable among the pillows, promising her that even though she might be punished, Li Po would never be scolded, that even if things went badly for Laura, Li Po would always have her throne of cushions whence she might rule over Laura Díaz’s bedroom.
“You rest, Li Po, sleep, live happily. I’ll take care of you forever.”
When she left Li Po behind in her room and went out of the house, her childhood instincts led her to enact, as if in a garden, the feat of returning to the natural world-so abundant, so “prodigal,” but above all so detailed, close, and certain to the gaze and touch of the child who was growing up surrounded with latent forest and impatient lake and renascent coffee groves: that was the way Aunt Virginia put it in her loud, sonorous voice.
“And supremely fertile,” she added, so not a word would be left out. “Most fertile.”
But the fingers of the house held her in, like the vines in the richly detailed world of the tropical forest. Aunt Hilda was playing the piano. (I get dizzy and exalted at the same time, I’m ashamed, but it gives me a secret pleasure to use my ten fingers to abandon myself, get out of myself, to feel and say to everyone that the music they’re hearing is not mine and neither am I, it’s Chopin’s, I play it, I’m the one who lets this marvelous sound pass through my hands, my fingers, in full knowledge that outside on her rocker, my mother listens to me, my mother who did not let me stay in Germany to study and become an important pianist, a real artist, and my father also listens to me, my father who has locked us up in this village with no future, and I reproach them both for the loss of my own destiny, Hilda Kelsen, the Hilda I might have been, the Hilda I’ll never be now, no matter how I try, even if some good fortune I cannot control, to which I could say: I made you, you’re mine, were to bring me luck; it wouldn’t be my luck, it would be an accident, a gift from chance: I play Chopin’s saddest Preludes and am not consoled, I only arm myself with patience and feel the intimate joy of offending my father and mother.) Aunt Virginia was writing a poem. (I live surrounded by resignation, I don’t want to resign myself, I want to escape one day, and I fear that my fondness for reading and writing is merely that, an escape and not a vocation I could just as well fulfill here as in Germany or, as I quipped one day, in China, let’s see if I don’t end up like my little niece’s doll, charming but mute, relaxing forever on a pillow.) Mutti Leticia was helping the cook prepare tamales in the coastal style. (How beautiful it is to stuff them with the smooth mix of cooked pork and chipotle chiles, then finish by wrapping each tamale tenderly in its sheet of banana leaves, like a baby in bunting, and steam them, uniting, conserving all the flavors and aromas, meat and spice, fruit and flour, what a delight for the palate, it reminds me of my husband Fernando’s kisses, but I mustn’t think about that, the arrangements are made, it’s what’s best for everyone, it’s good that the girl will grow up here in the country with me, each of us has obligations, there’s no reason to use up our pleasures while we’re young, we should postpone them for the future, we should receive pleasure as a reward and not as a privilege, gifts are used up as quickly as whims, you think you have the right to have everything and you end with nothing; I prefer to wait, patiently, after all I’m only in my twenties, my whole life ahead of me, my whole life ahead.) Grandfather Felipe put on his glasses and went over the accounts. (I can’t complain, everything has turned out fine, the plantation is prospering, the girls are growing, Hilda has her music, Virginia her books, the one who might complain most would be Leticia, living away from her husband by mutual agreement, not because of any imposition or tyranny on my part but because they want to wait for the future, not realizing that perhaps they’ve already lost it forever because you have to seize things at the moment, the way you catch birds on the wing, or they disappear forever, the way I threw myself into the socialist adventure until that wore itself out and then I threw myself at America, which apparently is something that never wears out, a bottomless continent, while we Europeans swallowed our history whole and now ruminate it, sometimes belching it up, bah, we defecate it, we are defecators of history, and here history has first to be made, without Europe’s errors, without its dreams and disillusions, starting from scratch, what a relief, what power, to start from nothing, to own our own destiny, then one can accept falls, misfortunes, errors because they are part of our own destiny and not part of a distant historical event, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lassalle, Karl Marx… they all had less freedom on their thrones and behind their pulpits than I do here, going over the accounts of a coffee plantation, Himmel und Hölle, then.) And the silent grandmother, Cosima, rocked softly in the rocking chair brought from Louisiana instead of Mexico City. (I wanted to tell Felipe that I too was of this country, that was all; as soon as I arrived and met him, I understood that I was his last concession to his German past; why he chose me, I still don’t know; why he loves me so, I hope it isn’t to make up for my unfortunate adventure on the Perote highway; he’s never made me feel he’s sorry for me-on the contrary, he’s loved me with a real man’s passion, our daughters were conceived with a shameless, foulmouthed passion that no one who knows us could imagine. He treats me like a whore, and I like it, I tell him I imagine making love with the chinaco who mutilated me and he likes it, we’re accomplices in an intense love that has no modesty or reticence, that only he and I know, and the memory of it makes all the more painful the death that’s coming closer and that says to me, to us, Now one of the two of you is going to live without the other, so how are you going to go on loving? I don’t know because I have no idea what comes after, but he’s staying here and can remember me, imagine me, prolong me, think I didn’t die, only ran off with the chinaco whom I never saw again-because if I were to meet up with him again, what would I do, kill him or run off with him? No, I’ll only think the same thing I tell people: I did it to save the other passengers. But how could I ever forget those bestial eyes, that macho stance, that tigerlike way of walking, that unsatisfied desire, mine and his, never, never, never…)