The Years with Laura Diaz: A Novel

1.

Detroit: 1999

I KNEW THE STORY. What I didn’t know was the truth. In a way, my very presence was a lie. I came to Detroit to begin a television documentary on the Mexican muralists in the United States. Secretly, I was more interested in capturing the decay of a great city—the first capital of the automobile, no less, the place where Henry Ford inaugurated mass production of the machine that governs our lives more than any government.

One proof of the city’s power, we’re told, is that in 1932 it invited the Mexican artist Diego Rivera to decorate the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts. And now, in 1999, I was here—officially, of course—to make a TV series on this and other Mexican murals in the United States. I would begin with Rivera in Detroit, then move on to Orozco at Dartmouth and in California, and then to a mysterious Siqueiros in Los Angeles, which I was instructed to find, as well as lost works by Rivera himself: the mural in Rockefeller Center, obliterated because Lenin and Marx appeared in it; and other large panels which had also disappeared.

This was the job I was assigned. I insisted on beginning in Detroit for one reason. I wanted to photograph the ruin of a great industrial center as a worthy epitaph for our terrible twentieth century. I wasn’t moved either by the moral in the warning or by any apocalyptic taste for misery and deformity, not even by simple humanitarianism. I’m a photographer, but I’m neither the marvelous Sebastião Salgado nor the fearsome Diane Arbus. I’d prefer, if I were a painter, the problem-free clarity of an Ingres or the interior torture of a Bacon. I tried painting. I failed. I got nothing out of it. I told myself that the camera is the paintbrush of our age, so here I am, contracted to do one thing but present—with a presentiment, maybe—to do something else very different.

I got up early to take care of my business before the film team set up in front of Diego’s murals. It was 6 a.m. in the month of February. I expected darkness. I was ready for it. But its duration sapped my energy.

If you want to do some shopping, if you want to go to a movie, the hotel limo can take you and pick you up, they told me at the reception desk.

But the center of town is only two blocks from here, I answered, both surprised and annoyed.

Then we can’t take any responsibility. The receptionist gave me a practiced smile. His face wasn’t memorable.

If the guy only knew that I was going farther, much farther, than the center of town. Though I didn’t know it yet, I was going to reach the heart of this hell of desolation. Walking quickly, I left behind the cluster of skyscrapers arranged like a constellation of mirrors—a new medieval city protected against the attacks of barbarians—and it took me only ten or twelve blocks to get lost in a dark, burned-out wasteland of vacant lots pocked with scabs of garbage.

With each step I took—blindly, because it was still dark, because the only eye I had was my camera, because I was a modern Polyphemus with my right eye glued to the Leica’s viewfinder and my left eye closed, blind, with my left hand extended forward like a police dog, groping, tripping sometimes, other times sinking into something I could smell but not see—I was penetrating into a night that was not only persisting but being reborn. In Detroit, night was born from night.

I let the camera drop onto my chest for an instant, I felt the dull blow over my diaphragm—two diaphragms, mine and the Leica’s—and the sensation was repeated. What surrounded me was not the prolonged night of a winter dawn; it wasn’t, as my imagination would have me believe, a nascent darkness, disturbed companion of the day.

It was permanent darkness, the unexpected darkness of the city, its companion, its faithful mirror. All I had to do was turn right around and see myself in the center of a flat, gray lot, adorned here and there with puddles, fugitive paths traced by fearful feet, naked trees blacker than this landscape after a battle. In the distance, I could see spectral, broken-down Victorian houses with sagging roofs, crumbling chimneys, empty windows, bare porches, dilapidated doors, and, from time to time, the tender and immodest approach of a leafless tree to a grimy skylight. A rocking chair rocked, all by itself, creaking, reminding me, vaguely, of other times barely sensed in memory …

Fields of solitude, withered hill, my schoolboy memory repeated while my hands picked up my camera and my mental hand went from snap to snap, photographing Mexico City, Buenos Aires if it weren’t for the river, Rio if it weren’t for the sea, Caracas if it weren’t a shithole, Lima the horrible, Santa Fe de Bogotá losing its faith, holy or otherwise, Santiago with no saint to cure it. I was photographing the future of our Latin American cities in the present of the most industrial city of all, capital of the automobile, cradle of mass production and the minimum wage: Detroit, Michigan. I made my way shooting all of it, old, abandoned jalopies in lots even more abandoned, sudden streets paved with broken glass, blinking lights in shops selling … selling what?

What could they be selling on the only illuminated corners in this immense black hole? I walked in, almost dazzled by the light, to buy a soda at one of those stands.

A couple almost as ashen as the day stared at me with a mix of mockery, resignation, and malign hospitality, asking me, What do you want? and answering me, We’ve got everything.

I was a little dazed, or it might have been habit, but I ordered, in Spanish, a Coke. They laughed idiotically.

Stands like this, we only sell beer and wine, said the man. No drugs.

But lottery tickets we do sell, added the woman.

I got back to the hotel by instinct, changed my shoes, which were dripping all the waste of oblivion, and was just about to take my second shower of the day when I checked my watch. The crew would be waiting for me in the lobby, and my punctuality signaled not only my prestige but also my discipline. Slipping on my jacket, I looked out at the landscape from the window. A Christian city and an Islamic city coexisted in Detroit. Light illuminated the tops of skyscrapers and mosques. The rest of the world was still sunk in darkness.

We, the whole team, reached the Institute of Arts. First we crossed the same unending wasteland, block after block of vacant lots, here and there the ruin of a Victorian mansion, and at the end of the urban desert (actually right in its heart) a structure in kitschy pompier style from the early years of the century, clean and well preserved, spacious and accessible by means of wide stone stairways and tall doors of steel and glass. It was like a memento of happiness in a trunkful of misfortunes, an old lady, erect and bejeweled, who has outlived her descendants, a Rachel without tears. The Detroit Institute of Arts.

The enormous central courtyard, protected by a high skylight, was the setting for a flower show. It was there the crowds were gathering that morning. Where’d they get the flowers? I asked a gringo in our team; he answered by shrugging his shoulders and not even glancing at the plethora of tulips, chrysanthemums, lilies, and gladiolas displayed on the four sides of the patio—which we crossed with a speed that both the team and I imposed on ourselves. Television and movies are the kind of work you want to get away from fast, as soon as quitting time comes. Unfortunately, those who live on such work can imagine nothing else to do with their lives but to go on filming one day after another after another … we’re here to work.

Here he was. Rivera, Diego, Diego María of Guanajuato, Diego María Concepción Juan Nepomuceno de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, 1886–1957.

Pardon me for laughing. It’s a good kind of laugh, an irrepressible guffaw of recognition and perhaps of nostalgia. For what? I think for lost innocence; for faith in industry; for progress, happiness, and history joining hands thanks to industrial development. To all those glories Rivera had sung praise, as you’d have to in Detroit. Like the anonymous architects, painters, and sculptors of the Middle Ages who built and decorated the great cathedrals to praise God—one, everlasting, indivisible—Rivera came to Detroit as pilgrims long ago went to Canterbury and Compostela: full of faith. I also laughed because this mural was like a color postcard of the black-and-white setting for Chaplin’s movie Modern Times. The same machines, smooth as mirrors, the perfect, implacable meshing of gears, the confidence-inspiring factories that Rivera the Marxist saw as an equally trustworthy sign of progress but that Chaplin saw as devouring jaws, swallowing machines, like iron stomachs gobbling up the worker and at the end expelling him like a piece of shit.

Not here. This was the industrial idyll, the reflection of the immensely rich city Rivera saw during the 1930s, when Detroit gave jobs and a decent life to half a million workers.

How did the Mexican painter see them?

There was something strange in this mural, with its teeming activity and spaces crowded with human figures working at shining serpentine, unending machines like the intestines of a prehistoric animal that was taking a long time to slouch back toward the present age. It also took me a long time to locate the source of my own surprise. I had a displaced and exciting sensation of creative discovery—very rare in television work. Here I am in Detroit, standing in front of a mural by Diego Rivera because I depend on my audience just as Rivera, perhaps, depended on his patrons. But he made fun of them, he planted red flags and Soviet leaders right in the very bastion of capitalism. On the other hand, I wouldn’t deserve either the censure or the scandal: the audience gives me success or failure, nothing more. Click. The idiot box turns off. There are no more patrons, and what’s more no one gives a fuck. Who remembers the first soap opera they ever saw—or, for that matter, the last?

But that sensation of surprise in front of such a well-known mural wouldn’t let me alone or let me film as I wanted. I scrutinized things. I used the pretext of wanting the best angle, the best light. Techies are patient. They respected my efforts. Until I figured it out: I’d been looking without seeing. All the American workers Diego painted have their backs to the spectator. The artist painted only working backs, except when the white workers are using goggles to protect themselves from sparks thrown by the welding torches. The American faces are anonymous. Masked. Rivera saw them the way they see us, Mexicans. With their backs turned. Anonymous. Faceless. Rivera wasn’t laughing then, he wasn’t Charlie Chaplin, he was only a Mexican who dared to say, None of you has a face. He was the Marxist who told them, Your work has neither the worker’s name nor his face, your work is not your own.

In contrast, who is looking out at the spectator?

The blacks. They do have faces. They had faces in 1932, when Rivera came to paint and Frida checked into Henry Ford Hospital, and the great scandal was a Holy Family that Diego introduced into the mural ostensibly as a provocation, although Frida was pregnant and lost the child and instead of a child gave birth to a rag doll and the baptism of the doll was attended by parrots, monkeys, doves, a cat, and a deer … Was Rivera mocking the gringos or did he fear them? Was that why he didn’t paint them facing the world?

The artist never knows what the spectator knows. We know the future, and in that mural of Rivera’s, the black faces that do dare to look outward, who did dare to look at us, had fists and not only to build Ford’s cars. Without knowing it, by pure intuition, Rivera in 1932 painted the blacks who on July 30, 1967—the date is burned into the heart of the city—set fire to Detroit, sacked it, shot it to pieces, reduced it to ashes, and delivered forty-three bodies to the morgue. Were those the only people who looked out from the mural, those forty-three, future dead men painted by Diego Rivera in 1932 and killed in 1967, ten years after the death of the painter, thirty-five years after being painted?

A mural only appears to disclose itself at a glance. Actually, its secrets require a long, patient look, an examination which does not wear itself out, not even in the space of the mural, but which extends to all those who prolong it. Inevitably, the mural’s context renders the gaze of the figures eternal, along with that of the spectator. Something strange happened to me. I had to direct my own gaze outside the mural’s perimeter in order to return violently—the way a movie camera can move like an arrow from a full shot to a brutal close-up, to the detail—to the faces of the women workers, masculinized by their short hair and overalls but, no doubt of it, feminine figures. One of them is Frida. But her companion, not Frida but the other woman in the painting—her aquiline features, consistent with her large stature, her melancholy eyes with shadows under them, her lips thin but sensual in their very thinness, as if the fugitive lines of her mouth were proclaiming a superiority that was strict, sufficient, unadorned, sober, and inexhaustible, abounding in secrets when she spoke, ate, made love …

I looked at those almost golden eyes, mestizo, between European and Mexican, I looked at them as I’d looked at them so often in a forgotten passport found in a trunk as outdated as the document itself. I’d looked at them just as I had at other photos hung up, scattered around, or put away all over the house of my young father, murdered in October 1968. Those eyes my dead memory didn’t recognize but my living memory retained in my soul decades later, now that I’m about to turn thirty and the twentieth century is about to die; trembling, I stared at those eyes with an almost sacred consternation which lasted so long that my team stopped, gathered around—was something wrong with me?

Was something wrong with me? Did I remember something? I was staring at the face of that strange beautiful woman dressed as a worker, and as I did, all the forms of recollection, memory of whatever you call those privileged instants of life, poured into my head like an ocean whose unleashed waves are always yet never the same: it’s the face of Laura Díaz I’ve just seen; the face revealed in the hurly-burly of the mural is that of one woman and one woman only, and her name is Laura Díaz.

The cameraman, Terry Hopkins, an old—even if young—friend, gave the painted wall a final illumination, filtered through blue accents, perhaps as an act of farewell (Terry is a poet), for his lighting blended in perfectly with the real sunset of the day we were living through in February 1999.

Are you crazy? he asked. You’re walking back to the hotel?

I don’t know what kind of look I gave him, but he didn’t say another word. We separated. They packed up the annoying (and expensive) film equipment. They went off in the van.

I was left alone with Detroit, a city on its knees. I started walking slowly.

Free, with the fury of a teenage onanist, I began to take pictures in all directions, of black prostitutes and young black policewomen, of black boys wearing ragged woolen caps and thin jackets, of old people huddled around a garbage can turned into a street fireplace, of abandoned houses—I felt I was getting inside all of them—the misérables with no refuge, junkies who injected themselves with pleasure and scum in corners, I photographed all of them insolently, idly, provocatively, as if I were traveling down a blind alley where the invisible man wasn’t any of them but me, I myself suddenly restored to the tenderness, nostalgia, affection of a woman whom I never in my life met but who had filled my life with all those kinds of memory that are both involuntary and voluntary, both a privilege and a danger: memories that are simultaneously expulsion from home and return to the maternal house, a fearsome encounter with the enemy and a longing for the original cave.

A man with a burning torch ran screaming through the halls of the abandoned house, setting fire to everything that would burn. I was hit on the back of my neck and fell, staring up at an upside-down, solitary skyscraper under a drunken sky. I touched the burning blood of a summer that still hadn’t come, I drank the tears that won’t wash away the darkness of someone’s skin, I listened to the noise of the morning but not its desired silence, I saw children playing among the ruins, I examined the prostrate city, offering itself for examination without modesty. My entire body was oppressed by a disaster of brick and smoke, the urban holocaust, the promise of uninhabitable cities, no man’s home in no man’s city.

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 equal 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, 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.

But the fingers of the house held her in, like the vines in the richly detailed world of the tropical forest. Aunt Hilda was playing the piano. (I get dizzy and exalted at the same time, I’m ashamed, but it gives me a secret pleasure to use my ten fingers to abandon myself, get out of myself, to feel and say to everyone that the music they’re hearing is not mine and neither am I, it’s Chopin’s, I play it, I’m the one who lets this marvelous sound pass through my hands, my fingers, in full knowledge that outside on her rocker, my mother listens to me, my mother who did not let me stay in Germany to study and become an important pianist, a real artist, and my father also listens to me, my father who has locked us up in this village with no future, and I reproach them both for the loss of my own destiny, Hilda Kelsen, the Hilda I might have been, the Hilda I’ll never be now, no matter how I try, even if some good fortune I cannot control, to which I could say: I made you, you’re mine, were to bring me luck; it wouldn’t be my luck, it would be an accident, a gift from chance: I play Chopin’s saddest Preludes and am not consoled, I only arm myself with patience and feel the intimate joy of offending my father and mother.) Aunt Virginia was writing a poem. (I live surrounded by resignation, I don’t want to resign myself, I want to escape one day, and I fear that my fondness for reading and writing is merely that, an escape and not a vocation I could just as well fulfill here as in Germany or, as I quipped one day, in China, let’s see if I don’t end up like my little niece’s doll, charming but mute, relaxing forever on a pillow.) Mutti Leticia was helping the cook prepare tamales in the coastal style. (How beautiful it is to stuff them with the smooth mix of cooked pork and chipotle chiles, then finish by wrapping each tamale tenderly in its sheet of banana leaves, like a baby in bunting, and steam them, uniting, conserving all the flavors and aromas, meat and spice, fruit and flour, what a delight for the palate, it reminds me of my husband Fernando’s kisses, but I mustn’t think about that, the arrangements are made, it’s what’s best for everyone, it’s good that the girl will grow up here in the country with me, each of us has obligations, there’s no reason to use up our pleasures while we’re young, we should postpone them for the future, we should receive pleasure as a reward and not as a privilege, gifts are used up as quickly as whims, you think you have the right to have everything and you end with nothing; I prefer to wait, patiently, after all I’m only in my twenties, my whole life ahead of me, my whole life ahead.) Grandfather Felipe put on his glasses and went over the accounts. (I can’t complain, everything has turned out fine, the plantation is prospering, the girls are growing, Hilda has her music, Virginia her books, the one who might complain most would be Leticia, living away from her husband by mutual agreement, not because of any imposition or tyranny on my part but because they want to wait for the future, not realizing that perhaps they’ve already lost it forever because you have to seize things at the moment, the way you catch birds on the wing, or they disappear forever, the way I threw myself into the socialist adventure until that wore itself out and then I threw myself at America, which apparently is something that never wears out, a bottomless continent, while we Europeans swallowed our history whole and now ruminate it, sometimes belching it up, bah, we defecate it, we are defecators of history, and here history has first to be made, without Europe’s errors, without its dreams and disillusions, starting from scratch, what a relief, what power, to start from nothing, to own our own destiny, then one can accept falls, misfortunes, errors because they are part of our own destiny and not part of a distant historical event, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lassalle, Karl Marx … they all had less freedom on their thrones and behind their pulpits than I do here, going over the accounts of a coffee plantation, Himmel und Hölle, then.) And the silent grandmother, Cosima, rocked softly in the rocking chair brought from Louisiana instead of Mexico City. (I wanted to tell Felipe that I too was of this country, that was all; as soon as I arrived and met him, I understood that I was his last concession to his German past; why he chose me, I still don’t know; why he loves me so, I hope it isn’t to make up for my unfortunate adventure on the Perote highway; he’s never made me feel he’s sorry for me—on the contrary, he’s loved me with a real man’s passion, our daughters were conceived with a shameless, foulmouthed passion that no one who knows us could imagine. He treats me like a whore, and I like it, I tell him I imagine making love with the chinaco who mutilated me and he likes it, we’re accomplices in an intense love that has no modesty or reticence, that only he and I know, and the memory of it makes all the more painful the death that’s coming closer and that says to me, to us, Now one of the two of you is going to live without the other, so how are you going to go on loving? I don’t know because I have no idea what comes after, but he’s staying here and can remember me, imagine me, prolong me, think I didn’t die, only ran off with the chinaco whom I never saw again—because if I were to meet up with him again, what would I do, kill him or run off with him? No, I’ll only think the same thing I tell people: I did it to save the other passengers. But how could I ever forget those bestial eyes, that macho stance, that tigerlike way of walking, that unsatisfied desire, mine and his, never, never, never … )

Aunt Hilda was playing the piano; Aunt Virginia was still writing with a quill pen; her mother Leticia was cooking not only because she liked to but because she had a genius for the Veracruz art of uniting rice, beans, plantain, and pork, shredding the meat and adding lemon juice for the dish called ropa vieja, old clothes, marinating octopus in its ink, and reserving for the end the meringues, the custards, the jocoques of clotted cream and the tocino del cielo—the sweetest sweet in the world, which had gone from Barcelona to Havana and from Cuba to Veracruz as if to stifle with sweetness all the bitterness of those lands of revolution, conquest, and