statements to the North American reporter James Creelman (“Mexico is ripe for democracy”), and Madero and the Flores Magon brothers mounted their anti-reelection campaign: all this spread disquiet in the markets, Veracruz lost ground in its competition with the Cuban sugar industry, which had been restored after the cruel war between Spain and the United States, and not even the traditional appeal of the German business community there to the German Mining Company had any effect. War in Europe was possible. The Balkans were catching fire. France and England had concluded the Entente Cordiale, and Germany, Italy, and Austria-Hungary had signed the Triple Alliance: the only thing left to do was to dig trenches and wait for the spark that would set Europe ablaze. Capital was being set aside to finance the war and raise commodity prices, not to extend credit to German-Mexican plantations.
“I have two hundred thousand coffee trees producing fifteen hundred hundredweights of beans,” added Don Felipe. “What I need is credit, what I need is money.”
Not to worry, his son-in-law Fernando Diaz told him. By now he was president of the Bank of the Republic in Veracruz, and he would see to it that credit was granted to Don Fernando and the beautiful plantation “Las Peregrina”-the name a reminder of the lovely German bride Dona Cosima. The bank would make up the amount by handing over the crop to the commercial houses in the port, taking a commission and crediting the rest back to the Kelsen plantation. And Leticia, together with her child Laura, could finally come to live with the paterfamilias Don Fernando Diaz and his son Santiago, all gathered together under the roof of the presidency of the Bank of the Republic in Veracruz.
How different it was for Laura to live in a house surrounded by streets instead of fields, to see people she didn’t know pass under the balconies all day, to live on the second floor and have the business downstairs, to lick the railing on the balcony because it tasted of salt, and to stare at the Veracruz sea-slow, leaden, heavy, shining after the storm that had just passed and while it was getting ready for the next one, giving off hot vapors instead of the coolness of the lake… and the forest presided over by the statue of the jewel-covered giant woman, which she saw, which she did not dream, which was no ceiba: Grandfather Felipe must have thought she was such a fool.
“Thick walls, the sound of running water, moving air, and lots of hot coffee: that’s the best defense against the heat,” declared Leticia, more and more self-confident now that she was mistress of her own home, free finally of paternal tutelage and rediscovering in her bus band what had delighted her when they were courting, that time they met at the Candlemas festivals in Tlacotalpan.
He was a tender man. Efficient and conscientious in his work. Determined to better himself. He read English and French, although he was more Anglophile than Francophile. But he knew that a strange void kept him from understanding the mysteries of life, secrets that are an essential part of each personality, without prejudging others to be good or evil. He read many novels to make up for the defect. Ultimately, however, for Fernando things were as they were-steady work, doing more than was expected, moderation in pleasure, and personalities (his own or others’) a mystery to be respected.
For this man, now fully formed at the age of forty-five, to inquire into the souls of others was to gossip, was the prying of old busybodies. Leticia always loved him because, at the age of twenty-eight (even if she’d married when she was sixteen, she shared these virtues and, like him, was helpless when confronted by the mystery of others. Although the only time she used that formulation-“others”-Fernando dropped the Thomas Hardy novel he was reading and said, Never say “others,” because it sounds as if they were superfluous, mere extras. “I suggest you always give people names.”
“Even if I don’t know them?”
“Make up names. Features or clothes will always tell you who a person is.”
“Mr. Cross-eyed, Mr. Ugly, Mr. Street Sweeper?” laughed Leticia, her husband joining her in the silent happiness peculiar to him.
The Hunk. From the time she was a child, Laura had heard that nickname applied to the former army officer who cut off Grandmama Cosima’s fingers, and now she wanted to
As if to give the lie to the perfection of a face that was exactly symmetrical, he wore fragile eyeglasses with scarcely visible silver frames. They deepened his gaze whenever he used them, but that didn’t make his eyes wander when he took them off. Which is why he could play with them-hide them for a moment in his jacket pocket, use them like banderillas the next, toss them into the air and casually catch them before putting them back in his pocket. Laura Diaz had never seen such a being.
“I’ve finished college. My father has given me a sabbatical.”
“What’s that?”
“A year of freedom to decide seriously about my vocation. I’m reading. As you can see.”
“Well, I really don’t see much of you, Santiago. You’re always out of sight.”
The boy laughed, hooked his walking stick on his forearm, and tousled the hair of his little sister, furious now at his condescension.
“I’m already twelve. Almost.”
“If I were only fifteen, I’d carry you off,” laughed Santiago.
Don Fernando, from the window of his office, saw his slim, elegant son pass by, and now he feared his wife would reproach him, not so much for the twelve years of separation and waiting, not so much for the shared life of father and son that had excluded mother and daughter… they, after all, had been happy to be with each other, and the separation had been agreed upon and understood as a bond of permanent, sure values that would give the family stability, when the time came, in their shared life. Indeed, Don Fernando was certain that the test to which they had subjected themselves not only was exceptional in the era they were living in, with its endless engagements, but would give a kind of retrospective halo (let’s call it, instead of test, sacrifice, anticipation, wager, or merely postponed happiness) to their marriage.
The fear was now of something else. Santiago himself.
His son was proof that all the nurturing will of a father cannot force a son to conform to the paternal mold. Fernando wondered, If I’d given him complete freedom, would he have conformed more? Did I make him different by proposing my own values to him?
The answer remained on the edge of that mystery Fernando Diaz had no idea how to pierce: the personality of others. Who was his son: what did he want, what was he doing, what was he thinking? The father had no answers. When, at the end of secondary school, Santiago asked him for a year before deciding on going on to a university, Fernando was happy to grant it to him. Everything seemed to coincide in the ordered mind of the accountant and bank president: the graduation of the son and the arrival of his second wife along with his second child, and now Santiago’s absence on “sabbatical” (Fernando told himself, somewhat shamefaced), would let the new home life take shape without problems.
“Where are you going to spend your sabbatical?”
“Right here in Veracruz, Papa. Quite clever, don’t you think? It’s something I know little about-this port, my own city. What do you think?”
He’d been so studious, such a reader, such a fine writer throughout his adolescence. He’d published in magazines for young people: poetry, art criticism, and literary criticism. The poet Salvador Diaz Miron, his teacher, praised him as a young man of promise. Who assured me, Fernando Diaz asked himself, that all this augured continuity? Peace, perhaps, but continuity in the end? Did it assure rebellion instead of conformity, the fatal exception? Fernando had imagined that his son, after finishing at the Preparatoria, when he asked for the year off would spend it traveling-his father had set aside the necessary money-and would return, having purged his young man’s curiosity, to take up his literary career again, his university studies, and then start a family. As in the English novels, he would have done his Grand Tour.
“I’m staying here, Papa, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all, my boy. This is your house. Don’t be silly.”
He had nothing to fear. Fernando Diaz’s private life was of an exemplary spotlessness. Concerning his past, it was well known that his first wife, Elisa Obregon, a descendant of immigrants from the Canary Islands, died giving birth to Santiago; that for the first seven years of the boy’s life, the now recently graduated poet lived under the
