“Who invited that jerk?” Laura asked Elizabeth.
“He usually behaves better than tonight. I think you got him excited. Or maybe the spiked pineapple juice has gone to his head. If you like, you can complain to Doña Genoveva.”
“And how about you, Elizabeth?” asked Laura as she vigorously shook her head.
“Look at him. Isn’t he a delight?”
The selfsame Eduardo Caraza waltzed by, his gaze fixed vacantly on the ceiling.
“See that? He’s not even looking at his partner.”
“He wants everyone to look at him.”
“Same thing.”
“He dances very well.”
“What should I do, Laura, what should I do?” stammered Elizabeth, on the point of tears. “He’ll never take any notice of me.”
At which point the dancing stopped and Doña Genoveva came over, inviting Elizabeth to follow her to where Eduardo Caraza was blowing his nose.
“Young lady,” the hostess pronounced in a low voice to the lachrymose blonde, “don’t let on in public when you’re in love. You make everyone feel you’re superior to them and then they hate you. Eduardo, now the modern dances are coming, and Elizabeth wants you to show her how to dance the cakewalk better than Irene Castle.”
She left them arm in arm and returned to her post, a general obliged to review her troops, looking over each guest head to foot, fingernails, ties, shoes. What wouldn’t provincial society have given to look over Doña Genoveva’s social notebook, where every young person was graded as if in school, passed or failed for the next year. Nevertheless, sighed the perfect hostess, there were always people you simply had to invite even if they didn’t come up to standards, even if they didn’t cut their nails properly, even if their shoes didn’t go with their frock coats, even if they didn’t know how to tie their ties, or even if they were plainly vulgar, like that tennis player.
“You can be a social arbiter, but power and money will always have more privileges than elegance and good manners.”
Doña Genoveva’s dinners were famous and never disappointing. A majordomo in a white wig and eighteenth-century livery announced in French: Madame est servie.
Laura laughed to see this dark-skinned servant, obviously from Veracruz, intone perfectly the only sentence in French that Doña Genoveva had taught him, although Elizabeth’s mother, leading her two wards to the dining room, revealed another facet of the subject:
“Last year she had a little black fellow in a white wig. Everyone thought he was Haitian. But disguising an Indian as Louis XV, well …”
The parade of European faces that began to walk toward the dining room justified the hostess. These were the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of Spaniards, French, Italians, Scots, and Germans, like Laura Daz Kelsen or her brother Santiago, descendants of immigrants from the Rhineland and the Canary Islands, who passed through the entry port of Veracruz and remained here to make their fortunes—in the port, in Xalapa, in Cordoba, in Orizaba, in coffee, in cattle, in sugar, banking, importing, the professions, even politics.
“Look at this photograph of Don Porfirio’s cabinet. He’s the only Indian. All the others are white, with light eyes and English suits,” pontificated a portly gentleman in his sixties, an importer of wines and exporter of sugar. “Look at the eyes of Limantour, Minister of the Treasury, they look like water; look at Landa y Escandon, the governor of Mexico City, with his bald pate like a Roman senator; look at the Minister of Justice, Justino Fernández, with his beard in Gothic-patrician style; or the Catalan bandit eyes of Casasús, Don Porfirio’s favorite. And it’s said about Daz that he used rice powder to whiten himself. To think he was once a liberal guerrillero, a hero of the Reform.”
“And what would you like, that we return to the times of the Aztecs?” answered one of the ladies to whom the exporter-importer had uselessly directed his words.
“Don’t make jokes about the only serious man in the history of Mexico,” interjected another gentleman with an expression of fierce nostalgia on his face. “We’re going to miss Porfirio Daz. Just you wait and see.”
“We haven’t until now,” answered the businessman. “Thanks to the war, we’re exporting more than ever and making more money than ever.”
“But thanks to the Revolution, we’re going to lose everything, right down to our underwear, begging the ladies’ pardon,” was the answer he received.
“Oh, but those Zouaves were very handsome,” Laura heard the lady who was angry with the Aztecs say. She missed the rest of the guests’ conversation as they slowly advanced toward the tables piled high with galantines, pates, slices of ham, roast beef …
A very pale, almost yellow hand offered Laura an already prepared plate. She noted a gold ring with the initials OX and the starched cuff of a dress shirt, cuff links of black onyx, good-quality cloth. Something kept Laura from raising her eyes and meeting those of this person.
“Do you think you knew Santiago well?” said the naturally grave but deliberately high-pitched voice; it was obvious that his attenuated words emanated from baritone vocal cords. Why was Laura refusing to look at his face? He himself raised her chin and said to her, The terrace has three sides, on the right we can be alone.
He took her by the arm, and she, with her hands around her plate, felt at her side a svelte masculine figure, lightly perfumed with English cologne, who guided her without a pause, at a normal speed, to the farthest terrace, left of the bandstand, where the musicians had deposited their instrument cases. He helped her avoid these obstacles, but she awkwardly dropped the plate, and it smashed on the marble floor, scattering the pate and roast beef.
“I’ll get another,” said the unexpected gallant in a suddenly deep voice.
“No, it doesn’t matter. I’m not really hungry.”
“Just as you like.”
There was little light in that corner. Laura first saw a backlit profile, perfectly outlined, and a straight nose with no bridge that stopped at the edge of the upper lip, slightly withdrawn with respect to the lower lip and the prominent jaw, like those of the Habsburg monarchs who appeared in her history textbook.
The young man did not release Laura’s arm. She was shocked, even fearful because of his next statement: “Orlando Ximénez. You don’t know me, but I do know you. Very well. Santiago talked about you with great tenderness. I think you were his favorite virgin.” Orlando burst into a silent giggle, throwing his head back.
When the moonlight fell on it, Laura discovered a head of blond curls and a strange, yellowish face with Western aspects but decidedly Asian eyes. His skin was like that of the Chinese workers on the Veracruz docks.
“You speak as if we knew each other.”
“Speak familiarly please, or I’ll be offended. Or perhaps your’d rather I left you in peace?”
“I don’t understand, Mr … . Orlando … I don’t know what you’re saying to me.”
Orlando took Laura’s hand and kissed her soap-perfumed knuckles.
“I’m talking to you about Santiago.”
“Did you know him? I never met any of his friends.”
“Et pour cause.” Orlando’s noiseless laugh made Laura nervous. “You think your brother gave you everything, only you?”
“No, why would I believe that?” stammered the girl.
“Yes, that’s what you think. Everyone who knew Santiago thinks that. He took it upon himself to convince each one of us that we were unique, irreplaceable. C’était son charme. He had that talent: I’m only yours.”
“Yes, he was a very good man.”
“Laura, Laura, ‘good’ c’est pas le mot! If someone had called him ‘good,’ Santiago wouldn’t have slapped him, he’d have snubbed him. That was his cruelest weapon.”
“He wasn’t cruel. You’re wrong. You just want to get me angry, that’s all.” Laura moved as if to leave.
Orlando stopped her with a strong and delicate hand whose gesture contained, surprisingly, a caress. “Do
n’t leave.”
“You’re annoying me.”
“It doesn’t suit you. Are you going to complain?”
“No, I just want to go.”
“Good, I hope at least I’ve upset you.”
“I loved my brother. You didn’t.”
“Laura, I loved your brother much more than you did. But also I must admit I envy you. You knew the angelic part of Santiago. I … well, I must admit I envy you. How many times he said to me … ‘What a shame Laura’s a little girl! I hope she grows up soon. I confess I desire her madly.’ Madly. He never said that to me. With me he was more severe … Think I should call him that instead of cruel? Santiago the Severe instead of Santiago the Cruel, or better, pourquoi pas, Santiago the Promiscuous, the man who wanted to be loved by everyone, men and women, boys and girls, poor and rich. And do you know why he wanted to be loved? So he wouldn’t have to reciprocate the love. What passion, Laura, what hunger for life, in insatiable Santiago the Apostle! As if he knew he was going to die young. That he did know. That’s why he gobbled down everything life offered him. Yet still, he was selective. Don’t believe he was just anything for anyone. Il savait choisir. That’s why he chose you and me, Laura.”
Laura had no idea what to say to this immodest, insolent, handsome young man. But the more she listened to him, the richer her feelings for Santiago became.
She began by rejecting this guest (lounge lizard, fop, dandy: Orlando smiled again, as if he’d guessed Laura’s thoughts, searching for the epithets that others repeatedly attached to him) and ended by feeling attracted to him despite herself, listening to him speak, giving her more than she knew about Santiago; her initial rejection of Orlando was going to be overwhelmed by an appetite, a need to know more about Santiago. Laura struggled between those two impulses, and Orlando guessed it, stopped speaking, and invited her to dance.
“Listen. They’ve gone hack to Strauss. I can’t stand modern dances.”
He took her by the waist and by the hand, stared deeply at her with his Asian eyes, right into the depths of her eyes of shifting light, looked at her as no one had ever looked at her, and she, dancing the waltz with Orlando, had the startling sensation that beneath their evening clothes the two of them were naked, as naked as the priest Elzevir might imagine them, and that the distance between their bodies, imposed by the rhythm of the waltz, was fictitious: they were naked, and they were embracing.
Laura awoke from her trance the instant she averted her eyes from Orlando’s, and she saw that all the others were observing them, standing hack from them, pausing in their dance to watch Laura Daz. and Orlando Ximénez dance.
This was interrupted by a gaggle of children in nightclothes who hadn’t been able to fall asleep and now burst in with a racket, carrying huge hats filled with oranges stolen from the garden.
“Well, well. You were the sensation of the ball,” Elizabeth Garcia told her schoolmate as they traveled back to Xalapa.
“That boy’s got a very bad reputation,” Elizabeth’s mother added quickly.
“In that case, I wish he’d asked me to dance,” whispered Elizabeth. “He paid me not the slightest attention.”
“But you wanted to dance with Eduardo Caraza, he was your dream,” said Laura, astonished.
“He didn’t even talk to me. He’s rude. He dances without speaking.”
“You’ll have other chances, sweetie.”
“No, Mama, I’m disillusioned and will be for the rest of my life.” And the girl dressed in rose burst into tears in her mother’s arms.
Instead of consoling her directly, Mrs. Garca-Dupont preferred to go off on a tangent, warning Laura: “I feel I must tell your mother everything.”
“There’s no need for a fuss, ma’am. I’ll never see that boy again.”
“You’re better off for it. Bad company, you know …”
Zampaya opened the main entrance, and the Garca-Duponts, mother and daughter, took out their handkerchiefs—the mother’s dry, Elizabeth’s soaked with tears—to say goodbye to Laura.
“How cold it is here, miss,” complained the black man. “When are we going back to Veracruz?” He did a little dance step, but Laura didn’t look at him. She had eyes only for the attic occupied by the Catalan lady, Armona Aznar.
They had to leave very early, in the landau, for Catemaco: Grandfather was going, announced Aunt María de la O. Laura stared sadly at the tropical countryside she loved so much as it was reborn under her tender gaze, already foreseeing the sadness of saying goodbye to Grandfather Felipe.
He was in his bedroom, his for so many years, first when he was a bachelor, then with his beloved wife, Cosima Reiter, and now, once again alone, with no company except for his three daughters, who used him, he knew, as a pretext for continuing to be unmarried, obliged by their widower father …
“Let’s see if you get married now, girls,” said Felipe Kelsen sarcastically from his sickbed.
The entryway to the Catemaco house seemed different to Laura, as if absence made everything smaller but at the same time longer and narrower. Returning to the past meant entering an empty, interminable corridor where one could no longer find the usual things or people one wanted to see again. As if they were playing with both our memory and our imagination, the people and things of the past challenged us to situate them in the present, not forgetting they had a past and would have a future although that future would be, precisely, only that of memory, again, in the present.
But when it is a matter of accompanying death, what is the valid time for life? That was why it took Laura so long to reach her grandfather’s bedroom, as if to get there she’d had to traverse the old man’s very life, from a German childhood of which she knew nothing, to a youth impassioned by the poetry of Musset and the politics of Lassalle, to political disenchantment and emigration to Mexico, to starting the work and establishing the wealth of the Catemaco coffee plantation, the love by correspondence with his bride-to-be, Cosima, the terrible incident on the highway with the bandit from Papantla, the embrace of the bastard daughter, the birth of the three daughters, the marriage of Leticia and Fernando, the birth of Laura—a passage of a time that in youth is slow and impatient and in old age our patience can’t manage to slow down, which is both mocking and tragic. That is why it took Laura so long to reach her grandfather’s bedroom. Reaching the dying man’s bed required her to touch each and every one of the days of his existence, to remember, imagine, perhaps invent what never happened and even what wasn’t imaginable, and to do so by the mere presence of a beloved being who represented everything that wasn’t, that was, that could be, and that never could take place.
Now, on this exact day, near her grandfather, holding his hand with its thick veins and old freckles, caressing that skin worn transparent over time, Laura Díaz again had the sensation that she was living for others; her existence had no other meaning except that of completing unfinished destinies. How could she think that, as she caressed the hand of a dying seventy-five-year old man, a complete man with a finished life?
Santiago had been an unfulfilled promise. Was that what Grandfather was, too, despite his age? Was there any really finished life, a single life that wasn’t also a truncated promise, a latent possibility, even more … ? It isn’t the past that dies with each of us. The future dies as well.
Laura stared as deeply as she could into her grandfather’s light and dreaming eyes, still alive behind the constant deathly blinking. She asked him the same question she was asking herself. Felipe Kelsen smiled painfully.
“Didn’t I tell you, child? One day all my ailments came together, and here I am … but before I go I want to tell you that you were right. Yes, there is a statue of a woman, covered with jewels, in the middle of the forest. I misled you on purpose. I didn’t want you to fall into superstition and witchcraft. I took you to see a ceiba so that you would learn to live with reason, not with the fantasy and enthusiasms that cost me so dearly when I was young. Be careful with everything. The ceiba w
as covered with spines as sharp as daggers, remember?”
“Of course, Grandfather.”
Abruptly, as if he had no time left for other words, not caring to whom he said them or even if no one heard them, the old man whispered: “I’m a young socialist. I live in Darmstadt, and I shall die here. I need the nearness of my river and my streets and my squares. I need the yellow smell of the chemical factories. I need to believe in something. This is my life, and I wouldn’t trade it for any other. For any other …” His mouth filled with mustard-colored bubbles and remained open forever.
When the dance was over, Orlando had brought his lips—fleshy like those of a little girl—close to Laura’s ear.
“Let’s separate. We’re attracting attention. I’ll wait for you in the attic of your house.”
Laura was left suspended amid the noise of the party, the curious scrutiny of the guests, and Orlando’s astounding proposition.
“But Señora Aznar lives there.”
“No more. She wanted to go to Barcelona to die. I paid her passage. Now the attic is mine.”
“But my parents …”
“No one knows. Only you. I’ll wait for you there. Come when you want.” And he removed his lips from Laura’s ear. “I want to give you the same thing I gave to Santiago. Don’t disappoint me now. He liked it.”
When she returned from her grandfather’s funeral, Laura lived for several days with Orlando’s words echoing like a howl in her head: You think you knew Santiago well, you think your brother gave everything to you? How little you know of a man so complex; he gave you only a part of his existence; and passion, the passion of love, to whom did he give that?
She glanced constantly toward the attic. Nothing had changed. Only she had. She did not understand very well what the change consisted of. Perhaps it was the announcement that would become fact only if she cautiously climbed the stairs to the attic, taking care that no one saw her her father, her mother, Aunt María de la O, Zampaya, the Indian maids. She wouldn’t have to knock at the door, because Orlando would leave it ajar. Orlando was waiting for her. Orlando was handsome, strange, ambiguous in the moonlight. But perhaps Orlando was ugly, common, lying by daylight. Laura’s entire body cried out to be near Orlando’s body—for him, for her, for the unexpected romantic encounter at the hacienda ball, but also for Santiago, because loving Orlando was the indirect but sanctioned way of loving her brother. Could Orlando’s insinuations be true? If they were lies, could she love Orlando for himself, without the specter of Santiago? Or might she come to hate both Orlando and Santiago? Hate Santiago because of Orlando? She had the chilling suspicion that it might all be a huge farce, a huge lie orchestrated by the young seducer. Laura did not need the diabolical admonitions of the priest Elzevir Almonte to shun all sexual pleasure or ease; she only needed to look at herself naked in the mirror when she was seven years old, and to see there none of the horrors the priest proclaimed, in order not to fall into the temptations that seemed, thanks to an early and radical intuition, useless if not shared with a loved one.