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 Dusseldorf 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 Lubeck 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 Dusseldorf, 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 Dusseldorf 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 cafes 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 Donniger, 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-
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 Dusseldorf 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.
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:
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 Dona 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 Diaz’s bedroom.
