brought up by the grandmother while the life of Mexico became calmer after the now distant, cruel turbulence of the Revolution, while Laura and Juan Francisco uselessly sought each other out, while Laura and Orlando put on disguises so as not to see each other and not to be seen-all of them climbers to the balcony of Mother Leticia, all except Jorge Maura, the first man independent of the Veracruz tree trunk of the mother, powerful thanks to her integrity, her care, her rigorous attention to each day’s chores, her discretion, her immense ability to offer confidence, to be there and say nothing.
Leticia was gone, and her death brought back Laura’s childhood memories. Today’s death gives presence to yesterday’s life. Even so, Laura could not remember a single word her mother had spoken. It was as if Leticia’s entire life had been one long sigh hidden by the cloud of activities she organized to make everything proceed properly in the houses in Veracruz and Xalapa. Her speech was her kitchen, her cleanliness, her starched clothing, her well-organized dressers scented with lavender, her four-footed bathtubs, her kettles of boiling water and her pitchers of cold water. Her dialogue was her eyes, her wise silence in understanding and in making others understand without offense or lies, without useless reproach. Her modesty was beloved because it let others imagine the presence of a love protected deep within her, with no need ever to show itself. She had had a hard school: the separation of the first years, when Don Fernando lived in Veracruz and she lived in Catemaco. But that distance was imposed by circumstance: hadn’t it allowed Laura, still a little girl, to join her brother Santiago at exactly the right moment, when the two of them together could be both children and adults, playing first and crying later, with no other contact that might muddy the purity of that memory, the deepest and most beautiful in Laura Diaz’s life? Not a night passes without her dreaming about the face of her young, executed brother, buried at sea, disappearing under the waves of the Gulf of Mexico.
The day of her mother’s funeral, Laura lived two lives at the same time. She carried out all the rites automatically, followed all the procedures in the wake and the burial, both very solitary. No one from the old families was left in Xalapa. The loss of fortune, fear of the new anticlerical and socialist expropriating governors, the magnetic power of Mexico City, the promise of new opportunities beyond the provincial country estates, illusion and delusion-these had scattered all the old friends and acquaintances far from Xalapa. Laura visited the San Cayetano hacienda. It was a ruin. The waltzes, laughter, the hustle and bustle of servants, the clink of glass against glass, the upright figure of Dona Genoveva Deschamps existed only in Laura’s memory…
Mutti descended into the earth, but in her daughter’s second life that day, past became present, like a history without relics, the city in the mountains appeared suddenly at the seashore, old trees revealed their roots, birds passed over like lightning bolts, rivers filled with ashes emptied into the sea, the very stars were made of dust, and the forest was a hurricane-force scream.
Night and day ceased to exist.
When the world without Leticia dawned, it was decimated.
Only the perfume of Xalapa’s eternal rain woke Laura Diaz from her reverie, so she could say to Maria de la O: “Now for certain, Auntie, now for certain you’ll have to come with us to Mexico City.”
But Maria de la O said nothing. She would never say another word. She would affirm. She would negate. With her head. Leticia’s death left her wordless, and when Laura picked up her aunt’s valise to leave the Xalapa house, the old mulatta stopped and slowly turned around and around, as if she and only she could convoke all the family ghosts, give them a place, confirm them as family members. Laura was deeply touched as she watched the last of the Kelsen sisters bid farewell to the Veracruz house, the one who’d arrived dispossessed and marked, to be redeemed by a good man, Fernando Diaz, for whom doing good was as natural as breathing.
Soon picks and shovels would demolish the Xalapa house on Bocanegra Street with its useless entry gate for useless horse drawn carriages or aged gas-guzzling Isotta-Fraschinis. The eaves that protected the house from the constant drizzle that blew in from the mountains would disappear, as would the interior patio, its huge porcelain flowerpots, encrusted with bits of glass, the kitchen with its fires of diamondlike coal and its humble stone corn grinders and palm-leaf fans, the dining room and the pictures of the rascal nipped by the dog. Maria de la O rescued only her sisters’ silver napkin rings. The picks and shovels would soon be there.
Maria de la O, last witness to the provincial past of her family line, put up no resistance when Laura led her to the station for the Interoceanic train. She went as gently as Leticia’s cadaver had gone to the Xalapa cemetery to be laid next to the body of her husband. What was she going to do except imitate her dead sister and pretend that she could go on animating her lineage in the only manner left to her: immobile and silent as a dead woman, but discreet and respectful as her unforgettable sister, she who as a girl on her birthday dressed in white and went out on the patio of the Catemaco house to sing:
Because at the moment of her death, Maria de la O’s memories of her sister Leticia and her niece Laura blended together.
3.
One day, a year earlier, Jorge Maura hastily returned from Washington, and Laura Diaz attributed his mood-the haste, the sadness-to the inevitable: On January 26, Franco’s forces took Barcelona and advanced toward Gerona; the civilian population began its diaspora through the Pyrenees.
“Barcelona,” said Laura. “That’s where Armonia Aznar came from.”
“The woman who lived in your house, whom you never saw?”
“Yes. My own brother Santiago was with the anarcho-syndicalists.”
“You’ve told me very little about him.”
“Two loves of that size won’t fit in my mouth at the same time.” She smiled. “He was a very brilliant boy, very handsome and brave. He was like the Scarlet Pimpernel”-now she laughed nervously-“posing like a glamorous fellow to cover up his political activity. He’s my saint, he gave his life for his ideas, he was shot when he was twenty.”
Jorge Maura kept a disturbing silence. For the first time, Laura saw him lower his head, and she realized he’d always held his Ibero Roman head high and proud, a touch arrogantly. She assumed it was because the two of them were entering the basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe, where Maura insisted on taking her as an homage to Dona Leticia, whom he’d never met.
“Are you a Catholic?”
“Laura, I think that in Spain and Spanish America even atheists are Catholics. Besides, I don’t want to leave Mexico without understanding why the Virgin is the symbol of Mexico’s national unity. Did you know that the Spanish royal troops would shoot the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe during the war of independence?”
“You’re leaving Mexico?” asked Laura, keeping her tone neutral. “Then the Virgin isn’t protecting me.”
He shrugged his shoulders in a way that meant: I’m always leaving and returning, why are you so surprised? They were kneeling side by side in the first pew, facing the altar of the Virgin, whose image, Laura, explained to Jorge, framed and protected by glass, was imprinted on the mantle of a humble Indian, Juan Diego, a
“How clever the Spaniards were in the sixteenth century,” said Maura, smiling. “No sooner had they carried off the military conquest than they set about the spiritual conquest. They destroy-well, we destroy-a culture and its religion, but we give the conquered people our own culture invested with Indian symbols or perhaps we give them back their own culture with European symbols.”
“That’s true. Here we call her the Dark Virgin. That’s the difference. She isn’t white. She’s the mother whom the Indian orphans needed.”
“She’s everything, can you imagine anything more ingenious? She’s a Christian and Indian Virgin, but she’s also the Virgin of Israel, the Jewish mother of the long-awaited Messiah. On top of that, she has an Arabic name,
