The Years with Laura Diaz

baguette as the bread of fashion, though in Mexico, where diminutives are used as a sign of tenderness for both things and people, baguette became bolillo, and telera were pieces of bread about the size of a hand. Mexico’s traditional sweets were not abandoned-the sugar cookies and the cemita, covered with caraway seeds, as well as the wonderful sweet breads shaped like conch shells-and the tastiest gift of Spanish bakeries, churros, long strips of fried batter cakes covered with sugar and eaten after dipping them in hot chocolate.

Leticia did not completely give up on the octopus and the crabs of the coast, but she stopped missing them because, without thinking about it much, she adapted naturally to life, especially when life gave her, as it did in this new house, an impressive kitchen with a huge oven and a round fireplace.

The one-story house had only one attic space, way back above the rear entrance, the coach gate, which Laura wanted to claim for herself, intuitively, as an homage to Santiago. This was because, in some mute place in her head, the girl believed she was going to fulfill her life, the life of Laura D az, in Santiago’s name; or perhaps it was Santiago who would go on fulfilling, from death, a life that Laura would incarnate in his name. In any case she associated the promise of her brother with her own space, a high, isolated place where he would have written and she, mysteriously, would find her own vocation, in homage to her dead brother.

“What are you going to be when you grow up?” asked Elizabeth Garc a, the girl who sat next to her in the school run by the Misses Ramos. She had no idea what to say. How could she speak what was secret, incomprehensible for others: I’d like to fulfill the life of my brother Santiago by locking myself away in the attic.

“No,” her mother told her. “I’m sorry, but that’s where Armon a Aznar lives.”

“And who is she? Why does she have any right to the attic?”

“I don’t know. Ask your father. It seems she’s always lived there, and one condition when we took the house was that we accept her, that no one bother her, or better still, that no one pay any attention to her.”

“Is she crazy?”

“Don’t be foolish, Laura.”

“No,” Don Fernando repeated, “Mrs. Aznar is there because in a certain sense she’s the owner of the house. She’s a Spaniard, or anyway the daughter of Spanish anarcho-syndicalists-many of them came to Mexico when Benito Ju arez defeated the Emperor Maximilian. They thought the future of freedom was here. Then, when Porfirio Diaz came to power, they were disillusioned. A lot of them went back to Barcelona, where there was probably more freedom there in the turnstile governments that Sagasta and Ca novas had arranged than here with Don Porfirio. Others just tossed out their ideals and became businessmen, farmers, and bankers.”

“And just what does all that have to do with this lady who lives in the attic?”

“The house belongs to her.”

“Our house?”

“We don’t own this house, child. We live where the bank tells us to live. When the bank decided to buy this house, Dona Armon a didn’t want to sell because she doesn’t believe in private property. Understand it as you please, and understand it if you can. The bank offered to let her stay in the attic in exchange for the use of the house.”

“But how does she live, how does she eat?”

“The bank gives her everything she needs, telling her the money comes from her comrades in Barcelona.”

“Is she crazy?”

“No, just stubborn. She thinks her dreams are realities.”

Laura disliked Dona Armon a because, without knowing it, she became a rival for Santiago: she was depriving the young man of a place in the new house.

Armon a Aznar-no one ever saw her-disappeared from Laura’s mind when she went to the Misses Ramos’ school. These cultured but impoverished young women ran the best private school in Xalapa, the first, besides, to be open to both sexes. Although they weren’t twins, the Misses Ramos dressed, wore their hair, spoke, and moved in exactly the same way, so everyone thought they were twins.

“Why would anyone believe that, when all you have to do is look at them to see how different they are?” Laura asked her deskmate Elizabeth Garcia.

“Because they want us to see them that way,” answered the radiant blond girl, who always wore white and who, in Laura’s eyes, was either very stupid or very clever. It was impossible to know for certain if she pretended to be a fool because she was secretive or if she pretended to be intelligent to hide her stupidity. “Just figure it out. Between the two of them they know more than either one alone. But when you put them together, the one who knows music also turns out to be a mathematician, and the one who recites poetry can also describe heart murmurs. Laura, just think: poets talk about the heart this and the heart that, and it turns out the heart is nothing more than a rather unreliable muscle.”

Laura decided she would devise a way to tell the Misses Ramos apart, seeing as how one was one and the other was the opposite, but when it came time to make the distinctions Laura got confused and became mute, wondering: Suppose they truly are one and the same, and both know everything, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica Papa has in his library?

Suppose they say they are the misses but they’re actually just one miss? insisted Elizabeth another day, with a perverse smile. Laura said that then it was a mystery like the Holy Trinity. You simply had to believe in it without knowing anything more. Similarly the Misses Ramos were one who was two who was one, and that was that.

It was hard for Laura to resign herself to this faith, and she wondered if Santiago would have accepted the fiction of the duplicated and united teachers or if, daringly, he would have turned up at night at their house to catch them by surprise in their nightgowns and ascertain that there were two of them. Because at school they both took care never to appear together at the same time. This was the source-intentional or accidental, who knows?-of the mystery. And Santiago would also have climbed the creaking stairs to the attic over the coach house or, as people were now beginning to say, the garage. Yet in Xalapa, even at this late date, no one had yet seen a horseless carriage, an “auto-mobile.” Besides, the colonial roads wouldn’t have allowed motor traffic. The train and the horse were enough to traverse the earth, in the opinion of the writer, Dona Virginia, and if it was the sea, then a ship of war, as that song the rebels sang had it…

“And the stagecoach, when Grandmother’s fingers were cut off.”

The horses and trains of the Revolution had passed though Xalapa but almost without noticing. Those bands of men had the port as their goal, and the Veracruz customs house. It was there they could control the flow of money as well as feed and clothe the troops, not to mention the symbolic value of owning the alternate capital of the country, the place where rebel or constitutional powers established themselves to challenge the government in Mexico City: me, not you. Veracruz had been occupied by the United States Marine Corps in April 1914 in order to put pressure on the dictator, Victoriano Huerta, the murderer of the democrat Madero, for whom young Santiago had given his life. “What fools these Yankees are,” said Don Fernando the Anglophile. “Instead of bringing down Huerta, they transform him into the knight of national independence against the gringos. Who would dare fight against a Latin American dictator, no matter how sinister, when the United States is attacking him? Huerta has used the occupation of Veracruz as a pretext to intensify his conscription of troops, saying his pelones, his ‘bald boys,’ are going to Veracruz to go up against the Yankees, when in fact he’s sending them north to fight Pancho Villa and south against Zapata.”

The young students of the Xalapa Preparatory School mustered in their French kepis and their navy blue uniforms with gold buttons and marched off with their rifles toward Veracruz to fight the gringos. They didn’t get there on time. Huerta fell, and the gringos withdrew; Villa and Zapata battled Carranza, the Maximum Leader of Mexico’s revolution, and occupied Mexico City; Carranza took refuge in Veracruz until the fearsome General Alvaro