At that, as Don Felipe protested he was no longer German but Mexican, he allowed his king to be cornered. The Englishman shouted checkmate. Just four years later, Don Felipe and Don Ricardo stopped speaking. Each, deprived of his chess partner, died of boredom and sadness. The cannons at Ypres blasted away, and the trenches witnessed the slaughter of young English and German soldiers. Only then did Grandfather Felipe reveal something to his daughters and his granddaughter.
“An incredible thing. He wore those white gloves because he had cut off the tips of his own fingers to purge himself of guilt. In India, the English cut off the fingertips of cotton weavers so as to keep them from competing with the cotton factories in Manchester. There are no people crueler than the English.”
“And what about the Germans, Grandfather?”
“Well, my dear. There are no people more savage than Europeans. Wait and see. All of them.”
Laura would see nothing. Nothing more than the body of her brother Santiago Diaz, summarily executed by firing squad during November 1910 for conspiracy against the federal government and for being linked to other Veracruz plotters-liberals, syndicalists, and pro-Madero men like the brothers Carmen and Aquiles Serdan, who that same month were shot in Puebla.
It did not occur to Don Fernando Diaz, during the wake for his son, with his bullet-pierced body in the living room above the bank, that the serenity of the young man in a white suit, his face paler than usual but his features intact, and with the wounds in his chest, might be disturbed one more time by police intervention.
“This is an official building.”
“But, sir, this is my house. It’s the house of my dead son. I demand respect.”
“Wakes for rebels are held in the cemetery. All right, then, everybody out.”
“Who will help me?”
Fernando, Leticia, Zampayita the black man, the Indian maids, Laura with a flower between her incipient breasts, together they carried the coffin. But it was Laura who said, Papa, Mama, he loved the seawall, he loved the sea, he loved Veracruz, this is his grave, please, clinging to her mother’s skirt, staring imploringly at her father and the servants, and they took her advice, as if each feared that if Santiago was buried, he might be exhumed someday to be shot once more.
How long it took her brother’s white body to disappear into the grave of the sea, the body attached to the cushioned bed of death, the lid of the coffin deliberately open so everyone could see him disappear slowly on that night without waves, Santiago becoming more and more handsome, sadder and sadder, missed more and more, the scene more and more painful as he sank within the open casket, his head soon to be crowned by algae and devoured by sharks along with all the unwritten poems, his face protected by the condemned man’s last wish: “Please don’t shoot my face.”
With no children other than the sea, Santiago slowly disappeared into the sea as if in a mirror that did not distort him but only sent him farther and farther away, little by little, mysteriously, from the mirror of air where he inscribed his hours on earth. Santiago slowly separated from the horizon of the sea, from the promise of youth. Suspended in the sea, he asked those who loved him, Let me disappear by becoming the sea, I could not become forest as I told you one day, Laura, I lied only about one thing, little sister, I did have things to tell, I did have things to see, I wasn’t going to keep silent out of fear of being mediocre because I came to know you, Laura, and every night I fell asleep dreaming, to whom shall I tell everything if not to Laura? In a dream, I decided I would write for you, precious girl, even if you didn’t find out, even if we never saw each other again, everything would be for you and you would know despite everything, you would receive my words knowing they belonged to you, you would be my only reader, for you not a single word of mine would be lost, now that I’m sinking into the eternity of the sea, I expel the little air I have left in my lungs, I make a gift to you of a few bubbles, my love, it’s an intolerable pain for me to say goodbye because I don’t know to whom I’ll be able to speak from now on, I don’t…
Laura remembered that her brother had wanted to lose himself forever in the forest, to become forest. She tried to make herself into sea with him, but the only thing that came to mind was to describe the lake where she grew up, how strange, Santiago, to have grown up next to a lake and never really to have seen it, it’s true that it’s a very big lake, almost a small sea, but I remember it in little pieces, here is the place where the aunts would swim before the priest Elzevir Almonte came, over here is where the fishermen would land, over here they’d put the oars, but the lake, Santiago, to see it the way you knew how to see the ocean, that I can’t do, I’m going to have to imagine the place where I grew up, little brother, you are going to make me imagine it, the lake and everything else, right at this very minute, I’m knowing it, from now on, I’m not going to hope for things to happen, I’m not going to let them happen without paying attention to them, you are going to make me imagine the life you did not live but I swear you will live at my side, in my head, in my stories, in my fantasies, I won’t let you escape from my life, Santiago, you are the most important thing that ever happened to me, I’m going to be faithful to you by always imagining you, living in your name, doing what you did not do, I don’t know how, my handsome and young and dead Santiago, I’m going to be frank with you and I don’t know how, but I swear I’ll do it.
That was all she thought as she turned away from the remains under the waves and went home to the house next to the arcades, prepared, despite her thoughts, to be a child again, to stop being a big girl, to lose the premature maturity Santiago had momentarily given her. She asked if she could have his bullet-ridden glasses and imagined him without his spectacles, waiting for the bullets, having put them in his shirt pocket.
The next day the little black man swept the halls as if nothing had happened, singing as always:
4.
San Cayetano: 1915
“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 himself. He gave you what was left of his boyish soul. Another part he gave to his family, another to his poetry, another to politics. And passion, the passion of love, to whom did he give that?”
Dona Leticia, in silence, wanted to finish the hem of the ball gown.
“Stop fidgeting, child.”
“It’s just that I’m very nervous, Mama.”
“And for no reason, a ball is nothing extraordinary.”
“For me it is! It’s the first time, Mutti.”
“You’ll get used to these things.”
“What a shame.” Laura smiled.
“Quiet. Let me finish. This child can’t stand still!”
As soon as Laura slipped on the pale yellow dress, she ran to the mirror, but she did not see the modern ball gown her mother, as skillful in couture as in every domestic labor, had copied from the most recent issue of
Laura stared at herself, not at the gown. Her seventeen years had accentuated but not yet resolved the
