The older women acted as if nothing had happened. That was their strength. They would forever be living on the coffee plantation owned by Don Felipe Kelsen, born in Darmstadt in the Rhineland. At dinner, they moved their hands around as if the table service were made of silver and not tin, the plates of porcelain and not pottery, the tablecloth of linen and not cotton. There was something they hadn’t given up: each woman had her own starched linen napkin, carefully folded into a silver ring marked with her initials, V, H, MO, or L, elegantly and elaborately engraved. That was the first thing each one picked up when they sat down to table. It was their pride, their life preserver, the seal of rank. It was the mark of the Kelsens—before husbands, before confirmed celibacy, before death. The silver napkin ring was personality, tradition, memory, affirmation for each one of them and for them all.
A silver napkin ring holding a carefully folded napkin that was clean, crackling with starch. At table, they acted as if nothing had happened.
Laura began to chat with each of them, one at a time, alone, always with the feeling she was hunting them down. They were nervous, fleeing birds from two past seasons, Laura’s and their own. Virginia and Hilda resembled each other more than even they knew. From the pianist aunt, once she’d repeated for the thousandth time her complaint against their father, Felipe Kelsen—that he hadn’t allowed her to stay in Germany to study music—Laura extracted the more profound complaint, I’m a leftover old woman, Laura, a hopeless spinster, and do you know why? Because I spent my life convinced that men would prefer me if I denied them any hope. At the Candlemas party in Tlacotalpan I was besieged—it was there your parents met, remember? —and I took it upon myself, out of pure pride, to make the men who courted me understand that I was inaccessible.
“I’m sorry, Ricardo. Next Saturday, I’m returning to Germany to study the piano.”
“You’re very sweet, Heriberto, but I already have a boyfriend in Germany. We write to each other every day. Any day now, he’ll come to me or I’ll return to him.”
“It isn’t that I don’t like you, Alberto, but you’re just not in my class. You may kiss me if you like, but it will be a farewell kiss.”
And when she turned up at the next Candlemas party without a boyfriend, Ricardo made fun of her, Heriberto appeared with a local girl, and Alberto was already married. Aunt Hilda’s aquamarine eyes filled with tears that flowed from behind her thick glasses, clouded over like the foggy highway to Perote. She finished with the all too familiar adage: Laura, don’t forget the old. Being young means not being faithful and forgetting others.
Aunt Virginia forced herself to stroll around the patio—she could no longer leave the house because of the understandable fear aging people have of falling down, breaking a leg, and not getting up until the Last Judgment. She spent hours putting on powder, and only when she felt herself to be perfectly arranged would she emerge to make the rounds of the patio, reciting in an inaudible voice her own poems or others’—it was impossible to tell which.
“Shall I come with you on your walks, Aunt Virginia?”
“No, don’t come with me.”
“Why?”
“You’re only doing it out of charity. I forbid you.”
“But no. Out of tenderness.”
“Come, come, don’t get me used to your compassion. I live in fear I’ll be the last one left in this house and I’ll die here alone. If I call you when you’re in Mexico City, will you come to see me so I won’t die alone?”
“Of course, I promise.”
“Liar. That day you’ll have a commitment you can’t get out of, you’ll be far away, dancing the fox-trot, and it won’t matter a whit whether I’m dead or alive.”
“Aunt Virginia, I swear I’ll come.”
“Don’t swear in vain, it’s sacrilegious. Why did you have children if you don’t take care of them? Didn’t you promise to look after them?”
“Life is difficult, Aunt Virginia. Sometimes—”
“Nonsense. The difficult thing is loving people. Your own people, understand? Not abandoning them, not forcing anyone to beg a bit of charity before dying, sacre bleu!”
She stopped and fixed her black-diamond eyes on Laura, eyes the more notable because of the quantity of face powder around them.
“You never got Minister Vasconcelos to publish my poems. That’s how you fulfill your promises, ingrate. I’ll die without anyone’s having recited my poems but me.”
She turned her back, with a timorous movement, on her niece.
Laura recounted the conversation with Aunt Virginia to María de la O, who could only say, “Pity, daughter, a little pity for the old left with no love or respect from others.”
“You’re the only one who knows the truth, Auntie. Tell me what I should do.”
“Let me think it over. I don’t want to make a mistake.”
She looked down at her swollen ankles, and burst out laughing.
At night, Laura felt pain and fear, had trouble falling asleep, and, like Aunt Virginia, perambulated alone around the patio, barefoot so she wouldn’t make noise or interrupt the sobs and memory-infused cries that escaped, unknowingly, from the bedrooms where the four sisters slept.
Which would be the first to go? Which the last? Laura swore to herself that no matter where she was, she would take care of the last sister, have the survivor live with her or come to be with her here, and not let Aunt Virginia’s fear be realized: “I’m afraid of being the last and dying alone.”
A nocturnal patio where the nightmares of the four women gathered together.
It was hard for Laura to include her mother, Leticia, in this chorus of fear. She reproached herself when she admitted that she hoped that if one of the four were left alone it would be either Mutti or Auntie. Aunts Hilda and Virginia had become insane and impossible; both, the niece was convinced, were virgins. María de la O was not.
“My mother made me sleep with her customers beginning when I was eleven.”
Laura had felt neither horror nor compassion when Auntie confessed this; it was years earlier, in the house on Avenida Sonora. She knew that the generous, warm-hearted mulatta was telling her so Laura would understand how much Grandfather Felipe Kelsen’s bastard daughter owed to the simple humanity of Grandmother Cosima Reiter—identical to her own despite differences of age, class, and race—and to the generosity of Laura’s father, Fernando Díaz. The niece went to embrace and kiss her aunt, but María de la O stopped her with an outstretched arm: she didn’t want compassion, and Laura only kissed the open palm of the admonitory hand.
Leticia was the last. Laura, back at home, desired with all her heart that Mutti would be the last to die, because she never complained, never gave up, kept the boardinghouse clean and in working order, and without her, Laura could imagine the other three castaways wandering through the corridors like souls in torment while dirty dishes piled up in the kitchen with its braziers, herbs grew unweeded in the garden, the larder emptied out and died of hunger, cats took over the house, and flies covered the sleeping faces of Virginia, Hilda, and María de la O with buzzing masks.
“Yes, we all face a future that has no tenderness,” Leticia said unexpectedly one afternoon while Laura was helping her wash dishes, adding, after a brief pause, that she was happy Laura was back at home.
“Mutti, I’ve felt so much nostalgia for my childhood, for the inside spaces especially. How they stay with you, even though they fade: a bedroom, a dresser, a water pitcher, that horrible pair of pictures—the brat and the dog—I have no idea why you keep them.”
“Nothing reminds me more of your father, and I don’t know why, because he wasn’t like them at all.”
“Neither a brat nor a beauty?” Laura smiled.
“That’s not it. They’re just things I associate with him. I can’t sit down to eat without seeing him at the head of the table with those pictures behind him.”
“Did you love each other a lot?”
“We love each other a lot, Laur
a.”
She took her daughter’s hand and asked her if she thought the past condemned us to death.
“One day you’ll see how much the past matters in order to go on living and, for those who loved each other, to go on loving each other.”
Although she managed to reestablish intimacy with her past, Laura could not establish contact with her own sons. Santiago was a perfect little gentleman, courteous and prematurely serious. Danton was a little devil who didn’t take his mother seriously or, for that matter, unseriously. It was as if she were just one more aunt in a harem with no sultan. Laura didn’t know how to talk to them, to attract them, and she felt the failure was all on her side, an emotional insufficiency that she, and not her sons, had somehow to fill.
Put another way, the younger son, at the age of ten, behaved as if he were the sultan, the prince of the house who had no need to prove anything and could act capriciously and demand (and get) the acquiescence of the four women, who looked on him rather fearfully. At the same time, they looked on the older brother with genuine tenderness. Danton seemed to take pride in the almost frightened reticence that his aunts and grandmother showed in dealing with him, although María de la O once muttered, What this brat needs is a good spanking. The next time he didn’t even bother to tell them he wasn’t going to be sleeping at home, Grandmother Leticia did give him a spanking, to which the child responded by saying he wouldn’t forget the insult.
“I’m not insulting you, snot-nose, I’m just giving you a spanking. I reserve insults for important people, you idiot.”
It was the only time Laura ever saw her mother be violent, and in that act all the lack of authority, all the lack that had begun to mark her own existence, became manifest, as if it were Laura who deserved the spanking for not being the one to discipline her unruly child.
Santiago viewed everything with a serious eye, and sometimes it seemed that the boy was restraining a sigh, resigned but disapproving, with regard to his younger brother.
Laura tried to bring them together to go on walks or play with her. They both stubbornly resisted. They didn’t take offense and didn’t reject her: they rejected each other and acted like rivals in opposing gangs. Laura recalled the old family discord between pro-German and pro-Allied factions during the Great War, but this was different. This was a war of character, of personality. Whom did Santiago the older resemble, whom Danton the younger? Actually, they should have been reversed, with Danton older and Santiago younger, the second Santiago. Would he be like his young uncle who’d been shot soon after his twentieth birthday? Would Danton be ambitious like his father, Juan Francisco, but would he be strong, not weak and ambitious like his father, who was happy with so little?
She had no idea how to talk to them, no idea how to attract them, and she felt that the lack was entirely hers, that it was her emotional insufficiency, not her sons’, and that she would have to fill it.
“I promise you, Mutti,” she said to Leticia as she bid them goodbye, “I’m going to put my life in order so the boys can come back to us.”
She emphasized the plural, and Leticia raised an eyebrow with feigned surprise, reproaching her daughter for that deceitful “us.” It was a wordless way of telling her that that was the difference between you two and your father and me: we put up with separation because we loved each other so much. But Laura had a sharp, undesired premonition when she repeated, “Back to us, to Juan Francisco and me.”
When she took the return train to Mexico City, she knew that she’d lied, that she was going to seek a destiny for herself and her sons without Juan Francisco, that reconciliation with her husband would be the easy way out and the worst thing for the boys’ future.
She lowered the window on the Pullman car, and saw herself and Juan Francisco seated in the Isotta-Fraschini that Xavier Icaza had given them as a wedding present, useless but elegant, and that they had given, also uselessly, to the four Kelsen sisters, who no longer left their house; the car was now in the hands of Zampaya, who could show off from time to time driving it around or taking the boys on a little excursion. She saw the four Kelsen sisters sitting there: they’d made the supreme effort to see her off along with the two boys. Danton didn’t look at her, pretending instead to drive the car and making extravagant noises with his mouth and nose. She would never forget Santiago’s gaze. He was his own ghost.
The train pulled out, and Laura felt a sudden anguish. There weren’t only four women in the Xalapa house. Li Po! She’d forgotten Li Po! Where was the Chinese doll, why didn’t she look for it or think about it? She tried to shout, to ask, but the train pulled out while handkerchiefs were waved.
“Can you imagine a leader in the workers’ movement with a luxury car imported from Europe parked in his garage? Forget about it, Laura. Give it to your mama and your aunts.”
10.
Detroit: 1932
ORLANDO’S NOTE had been waiting for her at the desk of the Hotel Regis when she returned from Xalapa. She’d been expecting it.
Laura my love, I’m not what I say I am nor what I seem to be. And I’d rather keep my secret. You’re getting too close to the mystery of your
Orlando
And without mystery our love would be uninteresting. I’ll always love you …
The hotel manager had told her she needn’t check out immediately, because Mrs. Cortina had taken care of everything until the following week.
“That’s right, Doña Carmen Cortina. She pays for the room that you and your friend Mr. Ximénez occupy. Well, for the past three years, she’s been paying for Mr. Ximénez.”
Friend? Whose friend? she was stupidly going to ask. Friend in what sense?, friend of Laura, friend of Carmen, lover of which, lover of both?
Now, in Detroit, she remembered that a terrible feeling of abandonment had overwhelmed her at that moment, that she’d felt an urgent need for someone who’d feel sorry for her, “my hunger for pity.” And her immediate reaction, just as sudden as the desolation, impelled her to visit Diego Rivera’s house in Coyoacán and say, Here I am, remember me? I need work, I need to put a roof over my head, please accept me, maestro.
“Of course, the kid wearing black.”
“Yes, that’s why I dressed in mourning again. Remember me?”
“Well, mourning clothes still horrify me. They make me feel jinxed. Ask Frida to lend you something more colorful and then we’ll talk. Anyway, you look very different and very pretty.”
“I think so too,” said a melodious voice behind her, and Frida Kahlo made her entrance with a clatter of necklaces, medallions, and rings, rings especially, one on every finger, sometimes two: Laura Daz remembered the incident involving her grandmother Cosima Kelsen and wondered, watching this strange-looking woman enter the studio—black eyebrows, or rather one continuous black eyebrow, braided black hair tied up with wool ribbons, and a wide peasant skirt—whether the Hunk of Papantla hadn’t robbed the rings from Grandmother Cosima just to give them to his lover Frida. The sight of Rivera’s wife had Laura convinced that this was the goddess of transformations she and Grandfather Felipe had discovered in the Veracruz forest, the figure made by the Zapotal people which he had tried to demythologize by turning it into a mere ceiba tree, so that she wouldn’t go on believing in fantasies, a marvelous feminine figure staring at eternity, crisscrossed with belts of seashells and serpents, her head adorned with a crown woven by the forest, ornamented with necklaces and rings and earrings on her arms, nose, ears. No matter what Grandfather had said, a ceiba was more dangerous than a woman. A ceiba was a tree bristling with spines. No one could touch it. No one could embrace it.
Was Frida Kahlo the temporary name of a native goddess who assumed mortal form from time to time, reappearing here and there to make love with guerrilleros, bandits, and artists?
“She can work with me,” said Frida imperiously as she descended the studio stairs, averting her gaze neither from Rivera’s bulging eyes nor from Laura’s shadowy and deep-set ones. In that instant, La
uras, looking at herself in Frida, looked at herself, looked at Laura Díaz looking at Laura Daz, saw herself transformed, with a new personality about to be born in those familiar features but also about to metamorphose and, perhaps, be forgotten by Laura Daz herself, with her sculpted, thin, powerful face, her high, strong, long nose, the bridge flanked by eyes that grew increasingly melancholy, the rings under her eyes like lakes of uncertainty restrained at the edge of her pale cheeks, happy to have found the crimson of her thin lips, now even more severe, as if Laura’s entire visage had become, simply in contrast to Frida’s, more gothic, more statuesque when face to face with the vegetative life of Diego Rivera’s partner, a plucked flower, drained but still blooming.
“She can work with me … I’m going to need help in Detroit while you work and I, well … you know …”
She stumbled and slipped. Laura ran to help her, took her by the arm, and unintentionally touched her thigh—You didn’t hurt yourself, did you?—and what she felt was a dry, fleshless leg, compensated for or was it confirmed—in an act of simultaneous challenge and vulnerability, a dreamy glance that the women strangely exchanged. Rivera laughed.
“Don’t worry. I had no intention of touching her, Friducha. She’s all yours. Just think, this kid is German like you. And one Valkyrie is enough for me, I swear.”
Frida immediately liked Laura. She invited her to her bedroom, and the first thing she did was take out a mirror with an indigo-blue enameled frame. “Have you looked at yourself, woman, do you know how good-looking you are? Well, take advantage of it, you know you’re strange-looking, we just don’t see many great beauties, a profile that looks as if it were slashed out with a machete, the prominent nose, the eyes sunken, deep, and shadowed. Does your Orlando think he can take the mourning out of your eyes? Forget about him. I like you.”