“Except the love of my little girl,” wept the black woman.
“Not even you believe that,” said the brand-new Frau Kelsen, speaking to her familiarly, having quickly learned local customs and habits. One day, when she’d become an old lady, she reminded her husband of that event, not knowing that little Laura was listening from behind a potted fern.
María de la O Kelsen was the way Cosima would introduce the beautiful little mulatta, and that was how Don Felipe accepted her. The lady of the house didn’t even have to beg her husband to be faithful to the humanitarian principles of his youth. Cosima took charge and began to go to Mass, first with the mulatta girl and a missal held in both hands; later, with three more daughters and the missal in one hand, proud of her four-sided maternity, indifferent to whispers, shock, or curses, even when evil tongues said that the Hunk of Papantla was the real father—with the difficulty that the bandit was Creole, Doña Cosima German, and María de la O, in that case, explicable only as a racial throwback.
Seven years older than the eldest of her sisters, Hilda, eight years older than Virginia, and ten than Leticia, María de la O was a mulatta with charming features, a quick smile, and an upright gait: Cosima had found her bent over and groveling, like a beaten, cornered little animal, her black eyes filled with even blacker visions; and not wasting a moment, the child’s new mother by will and right, Cosima Reiter de Kelsen, taught María de la O to walk properly, even forcing her: “Put that dictionary on your head and walk toward me without letting it fall. Careful.”
She taught her table manners, how to be neat; she dressed her in the most beautiful starched white dresses because they contrasted dramatically with her dark skin. She made her wear a white silk bow in her hair, which wasn’t stiff like her mother’s but relaxed like her father Philip’s.
“Now you I’d bring back with me to Germany,” Cosima said proudly. “You would certainly attract attention.”
She went to church and told Father Morales, I’m going to have a baby and then at least two more. “I don’t want any of my children to be ashamed of their sister. I want the Kelsens yet to be born to enter the world and find a Kelsen who is different but also better than they.”
She rested a hand on María de la O’s chignon. “Have her baptized, confirmed, rain blessings on her, and for the love of God, pray for her honesty.”
He hesitated an instant and replied: “Let’s hope she doesn’t turn out to be a whore.”
The good thing was that the priest from Veracruz, Don Jesus Morales, was a good-natured man without being servile, and everything in him—his public sermons, his private chats, the confessions he heard in secrecy—protected and exalted the Christian behavior of Doña Cosima Reiter de Kelsen, by now very much a convert to Roman Catholicism.
“Ladies, don’t waste the triumphs of either faith or charity on me. All of you in good order now, dammit.”
The priest Jesus Morales loved his flock. The substitute priest, Elzevir Almonte, wanted to reform it. The fingers Grandmother Cosima was missing seemed to have sprouted on the new priest, and he used them to admonish, censure, condemn … His sermons brought to the tropics the air of the high plateau, rarefied, suffocating, intolerable and intolerant. His parishioners began to count the prohibitions hurled at them from the pulpit by the dark young priest Almonte: no more of these loose camisoles that reveal the female form, especially when it rains and they soak through; from now on, modest undergarments and umbrellas in hand; no more of these foulmouthed Veracruz expressions and actions; though I’m not a magistrate or a justice of the peace, I declare that anyone who curses may not receive the holy body of our savior in his sacrilegious mouth—that much I can do; no more serenades, a pretext for nocturnal excitation that hinders Christian repose; brothels are forthwith closed, taverns are forthwith closed, and under pain of mortal sin a curfew is declared beginning at 9 p.m. whether or not the authorities approve—and if you think I’m joking, just wait and see; you will say from now on “that which I walk on,” not “legs,” just as you will say “that which I sit on” instead of …
All these things the new priest from Puebla proclaimed with an elaborate waving of hands, ridiculous and insolent, as if he wanted to give sculptural form in the air to his categorical prohibitions. The brothels migrated to Santiago Tuxtla, the taverns went to San Andrés, the harpists and guitar players marched to Roca del Rio, and amid the desolation now fallen on the local merchants like a plague, Father Almonte reached the apex of authoritarianism with his techniques in the confessional.
“My child, do you look at yourself nude in the mirror?”
Felipe did not reproach Cosima for her new faith. He simply looked her straight in the eye when she came home from Mass on Sundays, and it was she who for the first time averted her haughty gaze.
“Do you touch yourself in secret, my child?”
Laura looked at herself naked and was not surprised to see what she always saw: she thought the priest might have planted something strange in her body, a flower in her navel or a spider between her legs, like the one her aunts had when they bathed on a deserted beach of the lake, where they never returned once Father Almonte began to cast suspicion everywhere.
“Would you like to see your father’s sexual organ, my child?”
To see if something would happen, Laura repeated in front of the mirror the priest’s strange movements and even more extraordinary words. She also imitated his voice, making it even more bombastic:
“A woman is a temple built over a sewer.”
“Have you ever seen your father naked?”
Laura almost never saw her father, Fernando Díaz, dressed or naked. He was a bookkeeper in a bank, lived in Veracruz with a fifteen-year-old son, the product of an earlier marriage. After his first wife, Elisa Obregón, died in childbirth, Fernando fell in love with the young Leticia Kelsen during a visit to the festivals of Tlacotalpan. Leticia fell in love with this strange bird from the port, who always wore jacket, vest, tie, and tiepin, and whose only concession to the heat was a round straw hat—what the English called a boater, as Aunt Virginia noted, striking a resonant chord in her sister’s Anglophile suitor. The Kelsens, married by mail, did not impede this “love match,” as Mr. Díaz insisted on calling it; he was a man of English readings and influences, which Felipe Kelsen thought was good for helping to erase the German influence. Leticia herself accepted the arrangement of living apart, and when little Laura came into the world, Felipe, now a grandfather, roundly congratulated himself because his daughter and granddaughter lived under his protection in the country and not far away in the noisy port, which was, perhaps, as sinful—he said to Cosima—as some gossiping tongues said it was. She gave him an ironic look. Small towns, big hells.
Fernando Díaz had asked of his new family (Leticia first and then Laura, when she came exactly nine months later) one thing: “I can’t give you what you deserve. Live a good life in Don Felipe’s house. In Catemaco, I’d never be anything but a bookkeeper. In Veracruz, I can rise, and then I’ll have you brought to join me. I don’t want charity from your father or compassion from your sisters. I’m not a hanger-on.”
Discomfort and being hangers-on were, in point of fact, the components of the young couple’s initial situation in the Kelsen house in Catemaco, so everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Fernando Díaz made his decision.
“Why doesn’t your son Santiago ever come to see us?” the maiden aunts asked.
“He’s studying,” Fernando would answer dryly.
Laura Díaz was dying to learn more: how had her parents met, how did they get married, who was the mysterious older half brother who had the right to live with her father at the port? When would they all get together? Was it right that her mother was so hardworking, as if taking care of two houses at the same time, that of her father present here and that of her husband absent there, as if cooking for both those who were there and those who weren’t? … It was true. The solitude of mother and daughter spread mor
e and more to the rest of the house, to the three spinsters, Hilda playing the piano, Virginia writing and reading, María de la O knitting wool shawls for the cold, when the north wind blew …
“We won’t get married, Leticia, until you move in with your husband, as things should be,” Hilda and Virginia would say, almost in a chorus.
“He’s doing it for you and for the girl. It won’t be long now, I’m sure,” María de la O would add.
“Well, he should hurry up, or the three of us will die unmarried,” Virginia, alone, would laugh. “I hope the gentleman, mein Herr, is aware of it!”
But Grandmother Doña Cosima incarnated the true solitude. “I’ve done everything I had to do in life, Felipe. Now respect my silence.”
“And your memories? What about them?”
“Not a one is mine. I share them all with you. All.”
“Don’t worry. I know.”
“Then take good care of them, and don’t ask me for more words. I’ve already given you them all.”
That is what Doña Cosima said in the year 1905, when everything happened.
Witty, wisecracking, and raucous: the people of Catemaco could be all that (when the spirit moved them) and devout, too, as the priest Morales knew very well and the priest Almonte knew not at all. More than the rich and the almost rich, it was the poor, the sowers and reapers, the net weavers, the fishermen, the oarsmen, the bricklayers, and their wives who gave the best offerings in church.
Don Felipe and other coffee growers would give money or sacks of food; the poorest, in secret, would bring jewelry, ancient pieces passed down in their families for centuries and offered to give thanks to the Lord Our God for their own good fortune or someone else’s bad luck, both taken to be miraculous. Onyx necklaces, large silver combs, gold bracelets, unmounted emeralds: luxurious stones retrieved from who knows what hiding place, attic, or cave, from under what mat on which embankment, from what secret mine.
Everything was enthusiastically piled up, because Father Morales was scrupulous about storing away for his flock what rightly belonged to it and would sell a valuable piece in Veracruz only when he knew that the very family who’d piously offered the jewel to the Black Christ of Otatitlan needed money.
As in all the towns on the Gulf coast, the saints were celebrated in Catemaco with dances held on a wooden floor the better to hear the sound of stamping feet. The air would fill with harps, viols, fiddles, and guitars. It was then it happened—everyone remembers it from the year 1905: on the day of the feast of the Holy Child of Zongolica, Father Elzevir Almonte did not appear. People went looking for him, but neither the priest nor the treasure was to be found. The offering chest was empty and the priest from Puebla gone.
“How right he was when he’d say, ‘Puebla breeding ground of saints; Veracruz fountain of crooks.’”
That was the only comment, ironic and sufficient, made by Don . Felipe Kelsen. The people were harder on him, their mildest epithets being “little bastard” and “thief.” The four Kelsen daughters remained impassive. Life would go back to normal without the robber priest, taverns and whorehouses would operate once again, serenades would be heard on tranquil midnights, those who had gone away would come back. Coincidentally, on that day, the self-absorbed grandmother, Cosima Reiter, began to decline, as if she’d wasted her life in a religion that didn’t deserve her and wasted her love (gossips insisted) on an honorable man instead of a romantic bandit.
“Laura, sweetheart,” she once said when she was already ill, as if she didn’t want the secret to be lost forever, “you should have seen what a handsome man he was, what fire, how bold he was.”
She didn’t say, Always let yourself be tempted, sweetheart, don’t be afraid, don’t be intimidated, you don’t get a second chance, and she didn’t add temptation to the elegance and fire because she was a proper lady and an exemplary grandmother, but Laura Díaz, for the rest of her days, kept those words in her heart, that lesson imparted to her by her grandmother. Don’t let it pass you by, don’t let it …
“You don’t get a second chance …”
The child Laura looked at herself in the mirror, not to see there the temptations enumerated by the odious priest Almonte (who, for reasons beyond her, simply made her laugh) but to discover in her own reflection a rejuvenation or at least an inheritance from her sick grandmother. My nose is too big, she said to herself, discouraged, soft features to boot, sparkling eyes devoid of seduction except that of being a seven-year-old simpleton. The Chinese doll Li Po had more personality than her pudgy cheeked and obstreperous little mistress, who had no kissable passion, no embraceable ardor, no …
The day their mother was buried, the four Kelsen girls (three unmarried and one married, but for all intents and purposes … ) dressed in black; but Leticia, Laura’s mother, saw a marvelous bird fly over the open grave, almost as if escaping from its own funeral, and exclaimed: Look! A white crow!
The others turned to look, but Laura, as if she were obeying an order from her dead grandmother, ran off after the white bird, feeling that she herself could fly, as if the albino crow were calling her, Follow me, girl, fly with me, I want to show you something.
That was the day the girl realized where she was, where she came from, as if her grandmother, in dying, had given her wings to return to the forest: playful, wise, without calling attention to herself, jumping around as she always did, provoking sighs in the family group as they watched her run off, she’s just a child, what do children know about death, she didn’t know Grandmother Cosima in her prime, she isn’t doing it because she’s bad.
She followed the white crow beyond the limits of what she knew, learning about and loving from that moment on, forever, everything she saw and touched, as if that day of death had been set aside for her to learn something unrepeatable, something only for her, and only for the age Laura Díaz had reached at that instant, having been born on May 12, 1898, when the Virgin dressed in white came walking into sight with her coat …
From that moment on, and forever, she learned about and loved the fig tree, the tulip tree, the Chinese lilies, whose little branchlets flowered, every single one, three times a year: she examined what she already knew but had forgotten in the forest, the red lily, the palo rojo, the round crown of the mango tree; she examined what she’d never known or thought but was now remembering instead of discovering, the perfect symmetry of the araucaria, which in each shoot of each branch quickly produces its immediate double, the trueno with its little yellow flowers, a marvelous tree that resists both hurricanes and drought.
She was going to shout in horror, but she swallowed her fear and turned it into astonishment. She’d run into a giant. Laura trembled, closed her eyes, touched the giant, it was made of stone, it was enormous, it stood out in the middle of the forest, more deeply rooted there than the breadfruit tree or even the roots of the invading laurel that devours everything—drains, fields, crops.
Covered with slime, a gigantic female figure stared into eternity, encircled with belts of shells and serpent, wearing a crown tinted green by the mimetic forest. Adorned with necklaces and rings and earrings of arms, noses, ears.
Laura ran home breathlessly—eager, at first, to tell of her discovery, the lady of the forest who gave her jewels to the poor, the lost statue who protected the property of heaven which that nasty priest Almonte had stole—curse him, curse him—and she, Laura Díaz, knew the secret of the forest. But then she realized she could tell no one, not now, not to them.
She stopped running. She returned home slowly along the road of undulating hills and gentle slopes planted with coffee. In the patio, Grandfather Felipe was saying to his foremen that there was nothing to do but cut back the laurel branches, they’re invading us, as if they could move, the laurels are clogging the drains, they’re going to eat up the whole house, flocks of starlings gather right over here in the ceiba tree just outside the house and dirty up the entryway, this can’t go on; besides, we’re coming into the season w
hen the coffee trees get covered with spiderwebs.
“We’re going to have to cut down a few trees.”
Aunt Virginia sighed. With complete naturalness she’d taken over her mother’s rocker, even though she wasn’t the firstborn.
“I just listen to them,” she said to her sisters. “They don’t realize no one alive is as old as a tree …”
Laura didn’t want to tell her aunts anything. She would only talk to her grandfather. She tugged on the sleeve of his black frock coat. Grandfather, there’s an enormous lady in the forest, you have to see her. Child, what are you talking about? I’ll take you to her, Grandfather, if you don’t come, no one will believe me, come on, if you come, I won’t be afraid of her, I’ll hug her.
She imagined: I’ll hug her and bring her back to life, that’s what the stories Grandmama used to tell me say, all you have to do is hug a statue to bring it to life.
She berated herself: how little time her decision to keep the secret of the great forest lady lasted.
Her grandfather took her by the hand and smiled, he shouldn’t smile on a day of mourning, but this pretty little girl with her long, straight hair and more and more well defined features, her baby fat disappearing—her grandfather could tell that day, before Laura saw it in any mirror or even dreamed it, how she’d look when she grew up, with very long arms and legs and a prominent nose and thinner lips than any of the other girls her age (lips like those of her writing aunt Virginia)—this child was reborn life, Cosima restored, one life continued in another and he its guardian, keeper of a soul, which required the living memory of a couple, Cosima and Felipe, to prolong itself and find new energy in the life of a girl, of this girl, the deeply moved old man said to himself—he was sixty-six! Cosima was fifty-seven when she died!—and Laura reached the clearing in the forest.
“This is the statue, Grandfather.”
Don Felipe laughed.