the sadness of her own gaze. “Go out with your girlfriends. Have fun. You’re only twenty-one.”
“What you mean, Mutti, is that I’m
“Have they stopped coming to see you? Because of everything that’s happened?”
“No, Mutti, I’m the one who’s been avoiding them.”
As if responding to a warning of an incomprehensible change, vibrating like late-summer leaves, the girls Laura would visit, younger than she, had all decided to prolong their childhood, even if they made coquettish concessions to an adulthood they, disconcerted, did not wish. They called themselves “the chubbies” and played practical jokes inappropriate to their eighteen years. They jumped rope in the park so they’d have color in their cheeks before going on the seductive evening stroll; they would take long siestas before tennis at Los Berros; they would innocently mock their costumed boyfriends during Carnival:
“Are you a circus clown?”
“Don’t insult me. Can’t you see I’m a prince?”
They would skate in Juarez Park to lose the pounds they put on eating “devils,” cakes filled with chocolate and covered with marzipan, the delight of sweet-tooths in this city that smelled like a bakery. They volunteered to be in the tableaux vivants at the end of the term in the Misses Ramos’ academy, the only time when one could see that the teachers really were two different people, since one presided over the tableaux while the other worked behind the scenes.
“Something awful happened to me, Laura. I was playing the part of the Virgin, when I suddenly had to go. I had to make terrible faces so Miss Ramos would close the curtain. I ran to make wee-wee and came back to be the Virgin again.”
“In my house, they’ve gotten bored with my comedies and costumes, Laura. My parents have hired only one spectator to admire me. What do you think of that?”
“You must be happy, Margarita.”
“The thing is, I’ve decided to become an actress.”
Then they all rushed madly to the balcony to see the cadets from the Preparatoria march by, rifles on their shoulders, wearing their French kepis, their uniforms with gold buttons, and their very taut flies.
The bank informed them they’d have to give up the house in September, after the Casino ball. Don Fernando would get a pension, but the new bank director would, as is natural, be coming to live in the house. There would also be a ceremony up in the attic, the unveiling of a plaque in honor of Dona Armonia Aznar. The Mexican trade unions had decided to honor the valiant comrade who had donated money, had delivered mail to the Red Battalions and the House of the Workers of the World during the Revolution, and had even sheltered union men on the run right here, in the house of the bank director.
“Did you know that, Mutti?”
“No, Laura. And what about you, sister?”
“Not a clue!”
“It’s better not to know everything, isn’t that so?”
None of the three dared to think that a man as honorable as Don Fernando would knowingly have tolerated a conspiracy under his own roof, especially with Santiago’s having been shot on November 21, 1910. When she thought about it, Laura imagined that Orlando Ximenez knew the truth, that he was the intermediary between the attic and Dona Armonia’s anarcho-syndicalists. Then she discarded that suspicion; Orlando. the frivolous… or perhaps for that very reason was he the likeliest suspect? Laura laughed heartily. She’d just read Baroness d’Orczy’s
No novel prepared Laura for the next episode of her life. Leticia and Maria de la O set about looking for a comfortable house that they could afford under Fernando’s pension. The half sister thought that given the circumstances, Hilda and Virginia should sell the Catemaco coffee plantation and use the money to buy a house in Xalapa where they could all live together and save on expenses.
“And why shouldn’t we all go back to Catemaco? After all, we did live there… and we were happy,” said Leticia, without sighing like her self-absorbed mother.
Her question became superfluous as soon as the unmarried sisters Hilda and Virginia appeared at the Xalapa house, loaded with packages, boxes of books, steamer chests, seamstress dummies, cages filled with parrots, and even the Steinway piano.
People gathered in Lerdo Street to observe the arrival of such curious baggage, for the two sisters’ belongings filled a mule cart to overflowing. Covered with dust, the sisters themselves looked like refugees from a battle lost many years ago, with huge straw hats tied under their chins and gauze veils that protected their faces from flies, the sun, and the highway filth.
Theirs was a brief story. The Veracruz farm workers had armed themselves and quickly occupied the Kelsen hacienda and all the other properties in the area, declared them agrarian cooperatives, and run the owners off the land.
“There was no way to warn you,” said Aunt Virginia. “Here we are.”
They hadn’t known that the Xalapa house would no longer be theirs in September, after the Casino ball in August. Now, with her sisters added to her burden, her husband an invalid, and Laura having no marriage on the horizon, Leticia finally gave in and burst into tears. The expropriated sisters exchanged perplexed glances. Leticia begged their pardon, drying her tears on her apron, and invited them to make themselves at home. That night, Aunt Maria de la O came to Laura’s bedroom, sat down next to her, and caressed the girl’s head.
“Don’t be discouraged, child. Just look at me. Sometimes you must have thought that life’s been difficult for me, especially when I lived alone with my mother. But you know something? Being born is a joy even if you were conceived in sadness and misery. I mean inner sadness and misery, more than outer. You come into the world, and your origin is erased, being born is always a party, and I’ve done nothing but celebrate my going through life, not caring two cents where I came from, what happened at the beginning, how and where my mother gave birth to me, how my father behaved… Know something? Your grandmother Cosima redeemed everything, but even without her, without all I owe your grandmother and how much I adore her, I celebrate the world, I know I came to the world to celebrate life, through thick and thin, child, and I’m going to go on celebrating, damn it to hell. And excuse me for talking like someone from Alvarado, but that’s where I grew up…”
Maria de la O drew her hand away from Laura’s head for a moment and gave her niece a radiant smile, as if the little aunt always brought warmth and joy on her lips and in her eyes.
“And something else, Laurita, to complete the picture. Your grandfather brought me to live with you, and that saved me, I can’t say it often enough. But your grandmother did not concern herself any more with my mother, as if it were enough to save me and Old Nick himself could take her. The one who did concern himself was your father, Fernando. I don’t know what would have become of my mother if Fernando hadn’t looked out for her, helped her, given her money, and allowed her to grow old with dignity. Pardon me for being blunt, but there’s nothing sadder than an old whore. What I want to say is just this: the important thing is being alive and where you’re alive. We’re going to save this home and the people in it, Laura. Maria de la O swears it, the aunt you more than anyone else have respected. I never forget!”
She was getting fat, and it was rather hard for her to move about. Whenever she went for a walk with Fernando in his wheelchair, people would look away, not wanting to feel sorry for the two, the invalid man and the ashen mulatta with fat ankles who insisted on being out and around, ruining things for young, healthy people. Maria de la O’s will was greater than any obstacle, and the four sisters, the day after Hilda and Virginia arrived, decided not only to find a house for the family but to turn it into a guest house, contribute to its maintenance, each one would give her part, and take care of Fernando.
“And as for you, Laura, I beg you not to worry,” said Aunt Hilda.
“You will lack for nothing,” added Aunt Virginia.
… and I wasn’t worried, dear aunts, Mutti, I wasn’t worried, I know I’ll lack for nothing, I’m the little girl of the house, I’m not twenty-one, I’m still seven, defenseless but protected as before the first death, before the first grief, before the first passion, before the first rage, all that I’ve already experienced, already managed, already mastered, and by now I let myself be mastered by everything that has happened, by now I know how to live with grief, passion, rage, and death, I think I know how to live with them. But what I can’t live with is with the diminution of
