Years With Laura Diaz, The (3 page)

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Authors: Carlos Fuentes

BOOK: Years With Laura Diaz, The
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“There are those who are cross-eyed, those who are albinos, and those who are Virginias,” she would say of herself, feigning a squint.
“Gesundheit!
”
No German, no involvement with anything except the house or, as modern types put it, domestic economy. The daughters became extremely hardworking, perhaps to make up for the deficiencies of their mother, who sat back in her rocking chair (another novelty brought from Louisiana) to fan herself with her left hand and stare into the distance, toward the highway to Mexico City and the mists of Perote where she had left four fingers and, some whispered, her heart.
“When a woman meets the Hunk of Papantla, she never forgets him” was the refrain the people of Veracruz repeated.
At the same time, Don Felipe did not hesitate to reproach his young bride for having made the shopping trip to Mexico City: “See? If you’d gone to New Orleans, this horrible thing wouldn’t have happened to you.”
Cosima had realized from the first day that it was her husband’s fervent wish to assimilate into Mexico. She had been the last concession Philip Kelsen would make to the old country. Cosima simply anticipated her husband’s intention to be forever from here, never more from there. And that is why she lost four fingers. “I’d rather buy my trousseau in the capital of Mexico. We’re Mexicans, aren’t we?”
How dangerous fingers were, little Laura imagined as she awakened from nightmares in which a severed hand scuttled across the floor, climbed the wall, and dropped onto the pillow next to the child’s face. She would wake up screaming, and what she did find next to her face was a spider she didn’t dare kill with a slap because it would have been the same as once again cutting off the fingers of her self absorbed grandmother in her rocker.
“Mama, I want a white canopy over my bed.”
“We keep the house very clean. Not even dust sneaks in.”
“What sneaks in are my horrid, horrid dreams.”
Leticia would laugh and bend down to give a hug to her little girl, who already was showing the keen wit of all the family members except beautiful Grandmother Cosima, sick with melancholy.
To the swine who attributed platonic passions to his wife, Felipe responded with three lovely daughters, one more beautiful, intelligent, and hardworking than the next. “Six fingers are enough for a woman to love a man,” he bragged one night in a tavern, only to repent it immediately as he’d never repented in his life before or after. He was a hardworking man, but he had been tired and a bit drunk. He owned his own coffee plantation. He was trying to relax. He never again said what he blurted out that night. He secretly prayed that anyone who heard him utter that vulgarity would die as soon as possible or go away for good, which was much the same thing.
“To leave is to die a little,” Felipe would say every so often, recalling a saying of his own French mother—when Felipe was Philip and his father Heine Kelsen and his mother Letitia Lassalle, and the Europe that Bonaparte left standing on its pedestal was being made and remade everywhere, because industry was growing and artisans were disappearing, because everyone went off to work in factories, far away from their homes and fields, home and the workplace no longer being united as they always had been; because people were talking about freedom while tyrants held power; because the breast of the nation was split open and the nation was dying from an authoritarian rifle shot; because no one knew if his foot was treading a new furrow or walking on ancient ashes, as the marvelous poet Alfred de Musset put it—a man who brought lovers together in reading, moving the men to raptures and the women to love, touching the hearts of all. Enraptured boys, fainting girls: the young Philip Kelsen, blue eyes, Greek profile, flowing beard, and dragoon cape, top hat, and ivory-handled walking stick, the visage of an eagle, wanted to understand which world he was living in, and he thought he understood it all during a great demonstration in Düsseldorf where he saw himself, recognized himself, and even loved himself, as a disquieting reflection, in the wonderful figure of the young socialist tribune Ferdinand Lassalle.
Philip Kelsen, at the age of twenty-four, felt touched by an omen as
he watched and listened when that man spoke. Philip’s mentor, even if almost his contemporary, had the same last name as Philip’s mother, in the same way that she had the name of Napoleon’s mother, Letitia: the favorable signs attracted the young German as he listened to Lassalle and evoked passages from Musset: “From the highest spheres of intelligence to the most impenetrable mysteries of matter and form, your soul and body are your brothers.”
Philip silently addressed his hero as “Lassalle, my brother,” happily forgetting, both voluntarily and involuntarily, the fundamental facts of his life: Heine Kelsen, his father, owed his position to a commercial and financial arrangement, subordinate but respectful, he had with old Johann Buddenbrook, a citizen of Lübeck who had made his fortune by cornering the market in wheat and selling at a high price to Prussian troops during the war against Napoleon. Heine Kelsen represented the interests of old Buddenbrook in Düsseldorf, but his assets—his money and his luck—doubled when he married Letitia Lassalle, goddaughter of the French financier Nucingen, who saw to it she received a lifetime income of a hundred thousand pounds per year as a dowry.
Philip Kelsen forgot all that when, at the age of twenty-four, he heard Ferdinand Lassalle speak for the first time.
Lassalle spoke to the Rhenish workers with the passion of a Romantic and the logic of a politician reminding them that in the new industrial and dynastic Europe, a petty Napoleon had taken the place of the great Napoleon, and the pettiness of this vile, shameless little tyrant had united the government and bourgeoisie against the workers: “The first Napoleon,” Kelsen heard Lassalle, exclaim at the meeting, “was a revolutionary. His nephew is a cretin and represents only the moribund, reactionary faction.”
How much the fiery young Kelsen admired the fiery young Lassalle—whom even the police of Düsseldorf described as a man of “extraordinary intellectual qualities, indefatigable energy, great determination, savagely left-wing ideas, possessed of a wide circle of friendships, with great practical agility and considerable financial resources”! For all those reasons he was dangerous, the police declared; for all those reasons, his young follower Kelsen convinced himself, Lassalle was
admirable—because he was well dressed (while his rival, Marx, had grease stains on his vest); because he would go to receptions given by the very class he was fighting (while Marx would not leave the most miserable cafés in London); because he believed in the German nation (while Marx was a cosmopolitan enemy of nationalism); because he loved adventure (while Marx was a boring middle-class paterfamilias unable to give his wife, the aristocratic Madame von Westphalen, a ring).
For the rest of his life, Philip Kelsen would fight the Lassallian fervor of his socialist years. He lost his entire youth in that splendid illusion, which like the poet’s European furrow was, perhaps, only a sinkhole of ashes. The socialist Lassalle ended up joining forces with the feudalistic Bismarck, the ultranationalist, ultrareactionary Prussian Junker, so that between them—this was the reason behind the uncomfortable alliance—they could dominate the voracious capitalists who had no country. The critique of power became power over criticism, and Philip Kelsen abandoned Germany on the same day his handcuffed hero, Ferdinand Lassalle, became his bloodied hero, killed in a duel in a forest near Geneva on August 28, 1864. The reason for the duel was as absurd and romantic as the elegant socialist himself: he fell passionately in love with Helene (von Dönniger, as the newspaper article reported it), challenged her current suitor (Yanko von Racowitz, added the article), who in due course put a bullet in Lassalle’s stomach without the slightest consideration for history, socialism, the workers’ movement, or the Iron Chancellor.
How much farther from the pantheon in the Jewish cemetery in Breslau where Lassalle was buried at the age of thirty-nine could the disillusioned socialist Philip Kelsen go at the age of twenty-five, than to the coasts of the New World, to Veracruz, where the Atlantic breathes its last, after a long crossing from the port of Hamburg, and then inland to Catemaco, hot, fertile, prodigal lands—
supremely fertile
, they were called in speeches—where nature and man could join forces and prosper, beyond the corrupt disillusion of Europe?
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.”

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