“Except the love of my little girl,” wept the black woman.
“Not even you believe that,” said the brand-new Frau Kelsen, speaking to her familiarly, having quickly learned local customs and habits. One day, when she’d become an old lady, she reminded her husband of that event, not knowing that little Laura was listening from behind a potted fern.
Maria de la O Kelsen was the way Cosima would introduce the beautiful little mulatta, and that was how Don Felipe accepted her. The lady of the house didn’t even have to beg her husband to be faithful to the humanitarian principles of his youth. Cosima took charge and began to go to Mass, first with the mulatta girl and a missal held in both hands; later, with three more daughters and the missal in one hand, proud of her four-sided maternity, indifferent to whispers, shock, or curses, even when evil tongues said that the Hunk of Papantla was the real father-with the difficulty that the bandit was Creole, Dona Cosima German, and Maria de la O, in that case, explicable only as a racial throwback.
Seven years older than the eldest of her sisters, Hilda, eight years older than Virginia, and ten than Leticia, Maria de la O was a mulatta with charming features, a quick smile, and an upright gait: Cosima had found her bent over and groveling, like a beaten, cornered little animal, her black eyes filled with even blacker visions; and not wasting a moment, the child’s new mother by will and right, Cosima Reiter de Kelsen, taught Maria de la O to walk properly, even forcing her: “Put that dictionary on your head and walk toward me without letting it fall. Careful.”
She taught her table manners, how to be neat; she dressed her in the most beautiful starched white dresses because they contrasted dramatically with her dark skin. She made her wear a white silk bow in her hair, which wasn’t stiff like her mother’s but relaxed like her father Philip’s.
“Now you I’d bring back with me to Germany,” Cosima said proudly. “You would certainly attract attention.”
She went to church and told Father Morales, I’m going to have a baby and then at least two more. “I don’t want any of my children to be ashamed of their sister. I want the Kelsens yet to be born to enter the world and find a Kelsen who is different but also better than they.”
She rested a hand on Maria de la O’s chignon. “Have her baptized, confirmed, rain blessings on her, and for the love of God, pray for her honesty.”
He hesitated an instant and replied: “Let’s hope she doesn’t turn out to be a whore.”
The good thing was that the priest from Veracruz, Don Jesus Morales, was a good-natured man without being servile, and everything in him-his public sermons, his private chats, the confessions he heard in secrecy-protected and exalted the Christian behavior of Dona Cosima Reiter de Kelsen, by now very much a convert to Roman Catholicism.
“Ladies, don’t waste the triumphs of either faith or charity on me. All of you in good order now, dammit.”
The priest Jesus Morales loved his flock. The substitute priest, Elzevir Almonte, wanted to reform it. The fingers Grandmother Cosima was missing seemed to have sprouted on the new priest, and he used them to admonish, censure, condemn… His sermons brought to the tropics the air of the high plateau, rarefied, suffocating, intolerable and intolerant. His parishioners began to count the prohibitions hurled at them from the pulpit by the dark young priest Almonte: no more of these loose camisoles that reveal the female form, especially when it rains and they soak through; from now on, modest undergarments and umbrellas in hand; no more of these foulmouthed Veracruz expressions and actions; though I’m not a magistrate or a justice of the peace, I declare that anyone who curses may not receive the holy body of our savior in his sacrilegious mouth-that much I can do; no more serenades, a pretext for nocturnal excitation that hinders Christian repose; brothels are forthwith closed, taverns are forthwith closed, and under pain of mortal sin a curfew is declared beginning at 9 p.m. whether or not the authorities approve-and if you think I’m joking, just wait and see; you will say from now on “that which I walk on,” not “legs,” just as you will say “that which I sit on” instead of…
All these things the new priest from Puebla proclaimed with an elaborate waving of hands, ridiculous and insolent, as if he wanted to give sculptural form in the air to his categorical prohibitions. The brothels migrated to Santiago Tuxtla, the taverns went to San Andres, the harpists and guitar players marched to Roca del Rio, and amid the desolation now fallen on the local merchants like a plague, Father Almonte reached the apex of authoritarianism with his techniques in the confessional.
“My child, do you look at yourself nude in the mirror?”
Felipe did not reproach Cosima for her new faith. He simply looked her straight in the eye when she came home from Mass on Sundays, and it was she who for the first time averted her haughty gaze.
“Do you touch yourself in secret, my child?”
Laura looked at herself naked and was not surprised to see what she always saw: she thought the priest might have planted something strange in her body, a flower in her navel or a spider between her legs, like the one her aunts had when they bathed on a deserted beach of the lake, where they never returned once Father Almonte began to cast suspicion everywhere.
“Would you like to see your father’s sexual organ, my child?”
To see if something would happen, Laura repeated in front of the mirror the priest’s strange movements and even more extraordinary words. She also imitated his voice, making it even more bombastic:
“A woman is a temple built over a sewer.”
“Have you ever seen your father naked?”
Laura almost never saw her father, Fernando Diaz, dressed or naked. He was a bookkeeper in a bank, lived in Veracruz with a fifteen-year-old son, the product of an earlier marriage. After his first wife, Elisa Obregon, died in childbirth, Fernando fell in love with the young Leticia Kelsen during a visit to the festivals of Tlacotalpan. Leticia fell in love with this strange bird from the port, who always wore jacket, vest, tie, and tiepin, and whose only concession to the heat was a round straw hat-what the English called a boater, as Aunt Virginia noted, striking a resonant chord in her sister’s Anglophile suitor. The Kelsens, married by mail, did not impede this “love match,” as Mr. Diaz insisted on calling it; he was a man of English readings and influences, which Felipe Kelsen thought was good for helping to erase the German influence. Leticia herself accepted the arrangement of living apart, and when little Laura came into the world, Felipe, now a grandfather, roundly congratulated himself because his daughter and granddaughter lived under his protection in the country and not far away in the noisy port, which was, perhaps, as sinful-he said to Cosima-as some gossiping tongues said it was. She gave him an ironic look. Small towns, big hells.
Fernando Diaz had asked of his new family (Leticia first and then Laura, when she came exactly nine months later) one thing: “I can’t give you what you deserve. Live a good life in Don Felipe’s house. In Catemaco, I’d never be anything but a bookkeeper. In Veracruz, I can rise, and then I’ll have you brought to join me. I don’t want charity from your father or compassion from your sisters. I’m not a hanger-on.”
Discomfort and being hangers-on were, in point of fact, the components of the young couple’s initial situation in the Kelsen house in Catemaco, so everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Fernando Diaz made his decision.
“Why doesn’t your son Santiago ever come to see us?” the maiden aunts asked.
“He’s studying,” Fernando would answer dryly.
Laura Diaz was dying to learn more: how had her parents met, how did they get married, who was the mysterious older half brother who had the right to live with her father at the port? When would they all get together? Was it right that her mother was so hardworking, as if taking care of two houses at the same time, that of her father present here and that of her husband absent there, as if cooking for both those who were there and those who weren’t?… It was true. The solitude of mother and daughter spread more and more to the rest of the house, to the three spinsters, Hilda playing the piano, Virginia writing and reading, Maria de la O knitting wool shawls for the cold, when the north wind blew…
“We won’t get married, Leticia, until you move in with your husband, as things should be,” Hilda and Virginia would say, almost in a chorus.
“He’s doing it for you and for the girl. It won’t be long now, I’m sure,” Maria de la O would add.
“Well, he should hurry up, or the three of us will die unmarried,” Virginia, alone, would laugh. “I hope the gentleman,
But Grandmother Dona Cosima incarnated the true solitude. “I’ve done everything I had to do in life, Felipe. Now respect my silence.”
“And your memories? What about them?”
“Not a one is mine. I share them all with you. All.”
