because it was Leticia who cooked, ran about, and served while Zampaya sang his songs in the patio. In the absence of conversation, a peculiar smell, a boardinghouse smell, was taking over everywhere; it was the dead smell of many solitary nights, many hasty visits, many corners where, despite Mutti’s efforts and Zampaya’s broom, dust, time, and oblivion were piling up.
Because there were no guests at the moment-although one or two a week always turned up, which, along with the help Laura sent for the boys, allowed the house to be maintained modestly-the daughter listened to her mother with growing unease, longing to be alone with her, with her mother Leticia, but also with each of the women in this house without men-to shake them out of the apathy of their eternal siesta. But thinking that was not only an offense for them, but hypocrisy on Laura’s part, who, after all, had lived on Elizabeth’s charity for two years, dividing the monthly allowance sent by Juan Francisco, deputy of the Regional Workers Confederation of Mexico, among payments to Elizabeth, her personal expenses, and a little for her sons given refuge in Xalapa-while Laura slept until noon after staying up until three in the morning, never hearing Orlando when he rose earlier to attend to his mysterious affairs. Laura had fooled herself by reading in bed, telling herself that she wasn’t wasting time, that she was educating herself, reading what she should have read as an adolescent: after discovering Carlos Pellicer, reading Pablo Neruda, Federico Garc a Lorca, and going back to read Quevedo, Garcilaso de la Vega… with Orlando she would go to the Palace of Fine Arts to listen to Carlos Chavez conducting music that was all new for her, because in her memory there only floated like some perfume the Chopin Aunt Hilda played in Catemaco, and now Bach, Beethoven, and Berlioz along with Ponce, Revueltas, and Villalobos combined into a vast musical Mass; no, she hadn’t wasted her time at Carmen Cortina’s parties, in reading books or listening to concerts; she had simultaneously allowed her most interior and deep personal thoughts to flow, with the purpose-she said to herself- of locating herself in the world, understanding the changes in her life, proposing solid goals to herself, more certain than the easy exit-as it seemed to her now, stretched out once again on her adolescent bed, again hugging Li Po-of married life with Juan Francisco or even the very pleasant bohemian life with Orlando, something more for her sons Santiago and Danton, a more mature mother, more self-assured…
Now she was back at home, and this was the best thing she could have done, return to her roots and quietly sit down to a frothy soda in Don Antonio C. Baez’s La Jalapena, where a sign assured Don Antonio’s customers: “This establishment does not use saccharine to sweeten its waters.” She could peruse the displays in the Ollivier Brothers shop where La Opera corsets were still for sale. Browsing in Don Raul Basanez’s bookshop La Moderna, she could leaf through the European illustrated magazines her father, Fernando D az, awaited with such high expectation on the docks of Veracruz. She sauntered into Wagner and Lieven, opposite Juarez Park, to buy her Aunt Hilda, music by a composer she perhaps did not know, Maurice Ravel, whose works Orlando and Laura had heard conducted by Carlos Chavez in the Palace of Fine Arts.
The older women acted as if nothing had happened. That was their strength. They would forever be living on the coffee plantation owned by Don Felipe Kelsen, born in Darmstadt in the Rhineland. At dinner, they moved their hands around as if the table service were made of silver and not tin, the plates of porcelain and not pottery, the tablecloth of linen and not cotton. There was something they hadn’t given up: each woman had her own starched linen napkin, carefully folded into a silver ring marked with her initials, V, H, MO, or L, elegantly and elaborately engraved. That was the first thing each one picked up when they sat down to table. It was their pride, their life preserver, the seal of rank. It was the mark of the Kelsens-before husbands, before confirmed celibacy, before death. The silver napkin ring was personality, tradition, memory, affirmation for each one of them and for them all.
A silver napkin ring holding a carefully folded napkin that was clean, crackling with starch. At table, they acted as if nothing had happened.
Laura began to chat with each of them, one at a time, alone, always with the feeling she was hunting them down. They were nervous, fleeing birds from two past seasons, Laura’s and their own. Virginia and Hilda resembled each other more than even they knew. From the pianist aunt, once she’d repeated for the thousandth time her complaint against their father, Felipe Kelsen-that he hadn’t allowed her to stay in Germany to study music-Laura extracted the more profound complaint, I’m a leftover old woman, Laura, a hopeless spinster, and do you know why? Because I spent my life convinced that men would prefer me if I denied them any hope. At the Candlemas party in Tlacotalpan I was besieged-it was there your parents met, remember? -and I took it upon myself, out of pure pride, to make the men who courted me understand that I was inaccessible.
“I’m sorry, Ricardo. Next Saturday, I’m returning to Germany to study the piano.”
“You’re very sweet, Heriberto, but I already have a boyfriend in Germany. We write to each other every day. Any day now, he’ll come to me or I’ll return to him.”
“It isn’t that I don’t like you, Alberto, but you’re just not in my class. You may kiss me if you like, but it will be a farewell kiss.”
And when she turned up at the next Candlemas party without a boyfriend, Ricardo made fun of her, Heriberto appeared with a local girl, and Alberto was already married. Aunt Hilda’s aquamarine eyes filled with tears that flowed from behind her thick glasses, clouded over like the foggy highway to Perote. She finished with the all too familiar adage: Laura, don’t forget the old. Being young means not being faithful and forgetting others.
Aunt Virginia forced herself to stroll around the patio-she could no longer leave the house because of the understandable fear aging people have of falling down, breaking a leg, and not getting up until the Last Judgment. She spent hours putting on powder, and only when she felt herself to be perfectly arranged would she emerge to make the rounds of the patio, reciting in an inaudible voice her own poems or others’-it was impossible to tell which.
“Shall I come with you on your walks, Aunt Virginia?”
“No, don’t come with me.”
“Why?”
“You’re only doing it out of charity. I forbid you.”
“But no. Out of tenderness.”
“Come, come, don’t get me used to your compassion. I live in fear I’ll be the last one left in this house and I’ll die here alone. If I call you when you’re in Mexico City, will you come to see me so I won’t die alone?”
“Of course, I promise.”
“Liar. That day you’ll have a commitment you can’t get out of, you’ll be far away, dancing the fox-trot, and it won’t matter a whit whether I’m dead or alive.”
“Aunt Virginia, I swear I’ll come.”
“Don’t swear in vain, it’s sacrilegious. Why did you have children if you don’t take care of them? Didn’t you promise to look after them?”
“Life is difficult, Aunt Virginia. Sometimes-”
“Nonsense. The difficult thing is loving people. Your own people, understand? Not abandoning them, not forcing anyone to beg a bit of charity before dying,
She stopped and fixed her black-diamond eyes on Laura, eyes the more notable because of the quantity of face powder around them.
“You never got Minister Vasconcelos to publish my poems. That’s how you fulfill your promises, ingrate. I’ll die without anyone’s having recited my poems but me.”
She turned her back, with a timorous movement, on her niece.
Laura recounted the conversation with Aunt Virginia to Maria de la O, who could only say, “Pity, daughter, a little pity for the old left with no love or respect from others.”
“You’re the only one who knows the truth, Auntie. Tell me what I should do.”
“Let me think it over. I don’t want to make a mistake.”
She looked down at her swollen ankles, and burst out laughing.
At night, Laura felt pain and fear, had trouble falling asleep, and, like Aunt Virginia, perambulated alone around the patio, barefoot so she wouldn’t make noise or interrupt the sobs and memory-infused cries that escaped, unknowingly, from the bedrooms where the four sisters slept.
Which would be the first to go? Which the last? Laura swore to herself that no matter where she was, she would take care of the last sister, have the survivor live with her or come to be with her here, and not let Aunt Virginia’s fear be realized: “I’m afraid of being the last and dying alone.”
