Years With Laura Diaz, The

by Carlos Fuentes

  I managed to ask myself as I fell if it were possible to live the life of a dead woman exactly as she lived it, to discover the secret of her memory, to remember what she would remember.

  I saw her, I will remember her.

  It’s Laura Díaz.

  2.

  Catemaco: 1905

  SOMETIMES IT’S POSSIBLE to touch memory. The family legend retold most often concerned the courage of Grandmother Cosima Kelsen when, back in the late 1860s, she journeyed to Mexico City in order to buy furniture and accessories for her house in Veracruz and, on her way back, her stagecoach was stopped by bandits who still wore the picturesque costume derived from the uniforms of nineteenth-century civil wars—wide-brimmed, round hat, short suede jacket, bell-bottom trousers, the ensemble held together by buttons of old silver, short boots, and jingling spurs.

  Cosima Kelsen preferred evoking those details to recounting what happened. After all, the anecdote was better—and therefore more incredible, more extraordinary, more long-lasting, and known to more people—when many voices repeated it, when it passed (acknowledging the redundancy) from hand to hand, since the tale concerned hands. Fingers, actually.

  The stagecoach was stopped at that strange spot on the Cofre de Perote where instead of ascending through the mist, the traveler descends from the diaphanous height of the mountain into a lake of fog. The gang of bandits, called chinacos, camouflaged by the mist, materialized with the noise of neighing horses and pistol shots. “Your money or your life” is the usual refrain of thieves, but these, more original, demanded “your life or your life,” as if they understood all too well the haughty nobility, the rigid dignity the young Doña Cosima displayed as soon as they appeared.

  She didn’t deign to look at them.

  Their leader, formerly a captain in Emperor Maximilian’s defeated army, had loitered around the Chapultepec court long enough to be able to recognize social differences. He was famous in the Veracruz region for his sexual appetites—his nickname was the Hunk of Papantla—and equally famous for knowing the difference between a lady and a tart. Even though he’d been reduced to banditry after the imperial defeat, which culminated in the execution in 1867 of Maximilian along with the generals Miramón and Mejía—The three M’s, mierda, the superstitious Mexican condottieri would exclaim—the respect this former cavalry officer showed toward ladies of rank was instinctive, and, after first seeing Doña Cosima’s eyes as brilliant as copper sulphate and then her right hand clearly resting on the sill of the carriage window, he knew exactly what he should say to her:

  “Please, madam, give me your rings.”

  The hand that Cosima had so provocatively exposed boasted a gold wedding band, a dazzling sapphire, and a pearl ring.

  “These are my engagement and wedding rings. You’d have to cut them off me.”

  Which is exactly what the fearsome former imperial officer did without missing a beat, as if both knew the protocol of honor: one stroke of his machete and he cut off the four exposed fingers of young Grandmother Cosima Kelsen’s right hand. She didn’t even wince. The savage officer took off the red scarf he was wearing on his head in the old chinaco-bandit style and offered it to Cosima to bandage her hand. He dropped the four fingers into his hat and stood there like a haughty beggar, with the fingers of the beautiful German woman taking the place of alms. When he put his hat back on, blood ran down his face. For him, that red bath seemed as natural as diving into a lake would be for other people.

  “Thank you,” said the beautiful young Cosima, looking at him for the first and only time. “Will you be requiring anything else?”

  The Hunk of Papantla’s only answer was to lash the rump of the nearest horse, and the coach spun away down the slope toward the hot land of Veracruz, its destination beyond the mountain mists.

  “No one is to touch that lady ever again,” said the chief to his crew, who all understood that disobedience would cost them their lives and that their leader, for an instant and perhaps forever, had fallen in love.

  “But if he fell in love with Grandmama, why didn’t he give her back the rings?” asked Laura Díaz when she was old enough to think things through.

  “Because he had no other souvenir of her,” answered Aunt Hilda, the eldest of Cosima Kelsen’s three daughters.

  “But what did he do with the fingers?”

  “That’s something we don’t talk about, child,” answered the second of the trio, the young Fräulein Virginia, energetic and irritated, dropping the book she happened to be reading of the twenty she read each month.

  “Watch out for die gypsie’,” said the hacienda cook in her greedy coastal accent that devoured s’s. “Dey cut’ off die finger’ for to make tamale’.”

  Laura Díaz stared down at her hands—little hands—and held them out and childishly twirled her fingers as if she were playing a piano. Then quickly she hid them under her blue-checkered school apron and observed with growing terror the activity of fingers in her father’s house, as if all of them, at all hours of the day and night, did nothing but exercise what the Hunk of Papantla had taken away from the then young and beautiful and recently arrived Miss Cosima. Aunt Hilda, with a kind of hidden fever, played the Steinway piano brought from the port of Veracruz from New Orleans, a long voyage that seemed short because, as the passengers noted and then told Fräulein Kelsen, seagulls accompanied the ship, or perhaps the piano, from Louisiana to Veracruz.

  “Mutti would have been better off going to la Nouvelle-Orléans to buy her trousseau and enjoy her nozze,” bragged and criticized Aunt Virginia in one breath. Mixing languages was as natural for her as mixing her reading matter, and it challenged, in an irreproachable way, one of her father’s goals. New Orleans, in any case, was the civilized commercial point of reference closest to Veracruz, and the place where, exiled by the dictatorship of the peg-legged Santa Anna, the young liberal Benito Juárez had once worked rolling Cuban cigars. Would there be a commemorative plaque in New Orleans after Juárez—so ugly, such a little Indian—defeated the French and ordered the very Habsburg Maximilian—so blond, so handsome—shot?

  “The Habsburgs governed Mexico longer than anyone, don’t you forget it. Mexico is more Austrian than anything else,” said the well-read and well-written Virginia to her youngest sister, Leticia, Laura Díaz’s mother. For Leticia, this news of the empire was simply inconsequential since the only things that mattered to her were her home, her daughter, her kitchen, her diligent attention to daily life …

  At the same time, the melancholy resonance that Hilda’s agile fingers gave to Chopin’s Preludes, her favorite music, augmented every particle of sadness—real, remembered, or imaginable—in the vast but simple house on the hill above the tropical lake.

  “Would we be different if we’d grown up in Germany?” asked sister Hilda nostalgically.

  “Yes,” Virginia instantly replied. “And if we’d been born in China we’d be even more different. Assez de chinoiseries, ma chère.”

  “Don’t you feel nostalgia?” Hilda asked her youngest sister, Leticia.

  “How could I? I’ve never been there.”

  “You’re the only one who has,” Virginia berated her, interrupting, although she was looking at Leticia, Laura’s mother.

  “There’s a lot to do in the house,” concluded Leticia.

  Like all the country houses Spain left in the New World, this one, built on one level, consisted of four whitewashed sides around a central patio onto which opened dining room, living room, and bedrooms. Light entered the sitting rooms from the patio, because the external walls were windowless; defense might someday be necessary and modesty was a permanent concern.

  “We live as if Indians, or English pirates, or rebel blacks were going to attack us,” commented young Aunt Virginia with an amused smile. “Aux armes!”

  Their modesty, on the other hand, was well served. Seasonal laborers brought in to harvest coffee were curious, impertinent, sometimes insolent, and thought themselves the eq
ual of anyone. Virginia would answer them back with a mixture of Spanish insults and Latin quotations that would scatter them—as if the young woman with black eyes, white skin, and thin lips were just one more of the witches said to live on the far shore of the lake.

  To reach the master’s house, one had to walk through the main door, like a guest. The kitchen, to the rear, opened onto poultry yards, stables, storehouses, and fields; tanks and pipes conveyed the coffee fruits to the machines that pulped, fermented, washed, and dried them. There were few animals on the hacienda, baptized by its founder Felipe Kelsen “La Peregrina,” “The Pilgrim,” in honor of his wife, the brave but mutilated Cosima: five riding horses, fourteen mules, and fifty head of cattle. None of that interested little Laura, who would never set foot in those parts, which her grandfather governed with strict discipline, never complaining but noting constantly that the labor necessary to grow coffee was expensive because the product was so fragile and marketing it was so precarious. For that reason Don Felipe found himself forced into the ceaseless work of pruning trees, making sure the coffee bushes had the shade indispensable for their growth, cutting off the old stock, separating it from the new shoots, weeding the planted areas, and maintaining the drying sheds.

  “Coffee is not like sugar, not like wild cane that grows anywhere. Coffee requires discipline,” the master, Don Felipe, would declare, as he closely watched over the mills, wagons, stables, and famous drying sheds, dividing his day between paying minute attention to the crop in the field and paying no less careful attention to the bills.

  Little Laura took not the slightest interest in any of this. She liked the fact that the hacienda extended out into the coffee hills and that behind them the forest and the lake continued in their seemingly forbidden encounter. She would scramble up to the roof terrace to catch sight, way in the distance, of the quicksilver mirror lake, as her reading aunt, Virginia, called it, and she didn’t wonder why the prettiest thing in the place was also the thing least close to her, the farthest away from the hand the child stretched out as if to touch, giving all the power of the world to her desire. She delivered every victory of her childhood to imagination. The lake. A line of poetry.

  From the salon arose the melancholy notes of a prelude, and Laura felt sad, but happy to share that feeling with her eldest aunt, so beautiful and so solitary but mistress of ten musical fingers.

  The workers, under orders from her grandfather Don Felipe Kelsen, daubed the walls of the house, their hands wet with a mixture of lime and maguey sap, giving the walls the smoothness of a naked woman’s back. Which is what Don Felipe said to his always upright but now very sick wife one day before Doña Cosima died: “Every time I touch the walls of the house I’m going to think I’m running my fingers over your naked back, your beautiful, delicate naked back, do you remember?”

  When Grandmama died with a sigh the next morning, her husband achieved, finally, in her death, something Doña Cosima had always refused in life: to have his wife wear black gloves with cotton stuffing in the four missing fingers of the right one.

  He sent her to eternity intact, he said, just as he received her when the mail-order bride arrived from Germany at the age of twenty-two, identical to her daguerreotype—hair parted in the middle and arranged in two large hemispheres that arose from a perfect part in perfect symmetry and covered her ears as if to emphasize the perfection of the mother-of-pearl earrings hanging from her hidden earlobes.

  “Ears are the ugliest thing a woman has,” muttered Virginia.

  “All you ever do is find defects,” Hilda, shot back.

  “I listen to you recite, Virginia, and I listen to you play, Hilda, with my horrid little ears,” laughed Laura Díaz’s mother. “How lucky Mutti Cosima wasn’t wearing her earrings in Perote!”

  At the age of twenty-two, she’d arrived from Germany with very dark hair as if to contrast the more sharply with the whiteness of her skin. In the portrait, she held a fan, opened out against her bosom, with the five fingers on her right hand.

  This is why Hilda played the piano with shame and passion, as if, at the same time, she wanted to make up for her mother’s deficiency and to offend her by saying, See, I can do it and you can’t, with the hidden anger of the eldest child, the only Kelsen daughter who that one time had returned to Germany with her mother and with her listened, in Cologne, to a recital by the famous pianist and composer Franz Liszt. She had heard the constant sarcastic chatter of many European immigrants. Mexico was a country of Indians and brutes where nature was so abundant and rich that one could satisfy one’s immediate needs without having to work. Encouraging German immigration was one way to remedy that state of affairs, introducing into Mexico another nature, the industrious nature of Europeans. But these immigrants, invited to cultivate the soil, could not endure the rural hardness and isolation, and they migrated to the cities. This is why Felipe Kelsen was faithful to his promise to work the land, to work it hard and resist two temptations: to return to Germany or to make trips to Mexico City like the one which cost his wife Cosima so dearly. As they left the concert in Cologne, Hilda asked her mother, “Mutti, why don’t we stay here to live? How horrible Mexico is!”

  It was then Don Felipe forbade not only any return trip to the Vaterland but also the speaking of German in the house, saying this with the utmost severity, fists clenched, and when he calmed down he didn’t strike anything, merely insisted that from now on everyone was going to be Mexican, was going to assimilate, there would be no more visits to the Rhine, and everyone would speak only Spanish. Philip became Felipe, and Cosima, well, stayed Cosima. Only Virginia, with her mischievous tenderness, dared to call her mother Mutti and quote from German books. Don Felipe would shrug his shoulders; the girl had turned out eccentric.

  “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, intelli
gent, 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.”