A nocturnal patio where the nightmares of the four women gathered together.
It was hard for Laura to include her mother, Leticia, in this chorus of fear. She reproached herself when she admitted that she hoped that if one of the four were left alone it would be either Mutti or Auntie. Aunts Hilda and Virginia had become insane and impossible; both, the niece was convinced, were virgins. Maria de la O was not.
“My mother made me sleep with her customers beginning when I was eleven.”
Laura had felt neither horror nor compassion when Auntie confessed this; it was years earlier, in the house on Avenida Sonora. She knew that the generous, warm-hearted mulatta was telling her so Laura would understand how much Grandfather Felipe Kelsen’s bastard daughter owed to the simple humanity of Grandmother Cosima Reiter-identical to her own despite differences of age, class, and race-and to the generosity of Laura’s father, Fernando Diaz. The niece went to embrace and kiss her aunt, but Maria de la O stopped her with an outstretched arm: she didn’t want compassion, and Laura only kissed the open palm of the admonitory hand.
Leticia was the last. Laura, back at home, desired with all her heart that Mutti would be the last to die, because she never complained, never gave up, kept the boardinghouse clean and in working order, and without her, Laura could imagine the other three castaways wandering through the corridors like souls in torment while dirty dishes piled up in the kitchen with its braziers, herbs grew unweeded in the garden, the larder emptied out and died of hunger, cats took over the house, and flies covered the sleeping faces of Virginia, Hilda, and Maria de la O with buzzing masks.
“Yes, we all face a future that has no tenderness,” Leticia said unexpectedly one afternoon while Laura was helping her wash dishes, adding, after a brief pause, that she was happy Laura was back at home.
“Mutti, I’ve felt so much nostalgia for my childhood, for the inside spaces especially. How they stay with you, even though they fade: a bedroom, a dresser, a water pitcher, that horrible pair of pictures-the brat and the dog-I have no idea why you keep them.”
“Nothing reminds me more of your father, and I don’t know why, because he wasn’t like them at all.”
“Neither a brat nor a beauty?” Laura smiled.
“That’s not it. They’re just things I associate with him. I can’t sit down to eat without seeing him at the head of the table with those pictures behind him.”
“Did you love each other a lot?”
“We love each other a lot, Laura.”
She took her daughter’s hand and asked her if she thought the past condemned us to death.
“One day you’ll see how much the past matters in order to go on living and, for those who loved each other, to go on loving each other.”
Although she managed to reestablish intimacy with her past, Laura could not establish contact with her own sons. Santiago was a perfect little gentleman, courteous and prematurely serious. Danton was a little devil who didn’t take his mother seriously or, for that matter, unseriously. It was as if she were just one more aunt in a harem with no sultan. Laura didn’t know how to talk to them, to attract them, and she felt the failure was all on her side, an emotional insufficiency that she, and not her sons, had somehow to fill.
Put another way, the younger son, at the age of ten, behaved as if he were the sultan, the prince of the house who had no need to prove anything and could act capriciously and demand (and get) the acquiescence of the four women, who looked on him rather fearfully. At the same time, they looked on the older brother with genuine tenderness. Danton seemed to take pride in the almost frightened reticence that his aunts and grandmother showed in dealing with him, although Maria de la O once muttered, What this brat needs is a good spanking. The next time he didn’t even bother to tell them he wasn’t going to be sleeping at home, Grandmother Leticia did give him a spanking, to which the child responded by saying he wouldn’t forget the insult.
“I’m not insulting you, snot-nose, I’m just giving you a spanking. I reserve insults for important people, you idiot.”
It was the only time Laura ever saw her mother be violent, and in that act all the lack of authority, all the lack that had begun to mark her own existence, became manifest, as if it were Laura who deserved the spanking for not being the one to discipline her unruly child.
Santiago viewed everything with a serious eye, and sometimes it seemed that the boy was restraining a sigh, resigned but disapproving, with regard to his younger brother.
Laura tried to bring them together to go on walks or play with her. They both stubbornly resisted. They didn’t take offense and didn’t reject her: they rejected each other and acted like rivals in opposing gangs. Laura recalled the old family discord between pro-German and pro-Allied factions during the Great War, but this was different. This was a war of character, of personality. Whom did Santiago the older resemble, whom Danton the younger? Actually, they should have been reversed, with Danton older and Santiago younger, the second Santiago. Would he be like his young uncle who’d been shot soon after his twentieth birthday? Would Danton be ambitious like his father, Juan Francisco, but would he be strong, not weak and ambitious like his father, who was happy with so little?
She had no idea how to talk to them, no idea how to attract them, and she felt that the lack was entirely hers, that it was her emotional insufficiency, not her sons’, and that she would have to fill it.
“I promise you, Mutti,” she said to Leticia as she bid them goodbye, “I’m going to put my life in order so the boys can come back to us.”
She emphasized the plural, and Leticia raised an eyebrow with feigned surprise, reproaching her daughter for that deceitful “us.” It was a wordless way of telling her that that was the difference between you two and your father and me: we put up with separation because we loved each other so much. But Laura had a sharp, undesired premonition when she repeated, “Back to us, to Juan Francisco and me.”
When she took the return train to Mexico City, she knew that she’d lied, that she was going to seek a destiny for herself and her sons without Juan Francisco, that reconciliation with her husband would be the easy way out and the worst thing for the boys’ future.
She lowered the window on the Pullman car, and saw herself and Juan Francisco seated in the Isotta-Fraschini that Xavier Icaza had given them as a wedding present, useless but elegant, and that they had given, also uselessly, to the four Kelsen sisters, who no longer left their house; the car was now in the hands of Zampaya, who could show off from time to time driving it around or taking the boys on a little excursion. She saw the four Kelsen sisters sitting there: they’d made the supreme effort to see her off along with the two boys. Danton didn’t look at her, pretending instead to drive the car and making extravagant noises with his mouth and nose. She would never forget Santiago’s gaze. He was his own ghost.
The train pulled out, and Laura felt a sudden anguish. There weren’t only four women in the Xalapa house. Li Po! She’d forgotten Li Po! Where was the Chinese doll, why didn’t she look for it or think about it? She tried to shout, to ask, but the train pulled out while handkerchiefs were waved.
“Can you imagine a leader in the workers’ movement with a luxury car imported from Europe parked in his garage? Forget about it, Laura. Give it to your mama and your aunts.”
10.
Detroit: 1932
ORLANDO’S NOTE had been waiting for her at the desk of the Hotel Regis when she returned from Xalapa. She’d been expecting it.
Laura my love, I’m not what I say I am nor what I seem to be. And I’d rather keep my secret. You’re getting too close to the mystery of your
And without mystery our love would be uninteresting. I’ll always love you…
The hotel manager had told her she needn’t check out immediately, because Mrs. Cortina had taken care of everything until the following week.
“That’s right, Dona Carmen Cortina. She pays for the room that you and your friend Mr. Ximenez occupy. Well,
