Years With Laura Diaz, The Read Free Page A

have to cut them off me.”
    Which is exactly what the fearsome former imperial officer did without missing a beat, as if both knew the protocol of honor: one stroke of his machete and he cut off the four exposed fingers of young Grandmother Cosima Kelsen’s right hand. She didn’t even wince. The savage officer took off the red scarf he was wearing on his head in the old chinaco- bandit style and offered it to Cosima to bandage her hand. He dropped the four fingers into his hat and stood there like a haughty beggar, with the fingers of the beautiful German woman taking the place of
alms. When he put his hat back on, blood ran down his face. For him, that red bath seemed as natural as diving into a lake would be for other people.
    “Thank you,” said the beautiful young Cosima, looking at him for the first and only time. “Will you be requiring anything else?”
    The Hunk of Papantla’s only answer was to lash the rump of the nearest horse, and the coach spun away down the slope toward the hot land of Veracruz, its destination beyond the mountain mists.
    “No one is to touch that lady ever again,” said the chief to his crew, who all understood that disobedience would cost them their lives and that their leader, for an instant and perhaps forever, had fallen in love.
    “But if he fell in love with Grandmama, why didn’t he give her back the rings?” asked Laura Díaz when she was old enough to think things through.
    “Because he had no other souvenir of her,” answered Aunt Hilda, the eldest of Cosima Kelsen’s three daughters.
    “But what did he do with the fingers?”
    “That’s something we don’t talk about, child,” answered the second of the trio, the young Fräulein Virginia, energetic and irritated, dropping the book she happened to be reading of the twenty she read each month.
    “Watch out for die gypsie’,” said the hacienda cook in her greedy coastal accent that devoured s ’s. “Dey cut’ off die finger’ for to make tamale’.”
    Laura Díaz stared down at her hands—little hands—and held them out and childishly twirled her fingers as if she were playing a piano. Then quickly she hid them under her blue-checkered school apron and observed with growing terror the activity of fingers in her father’s house, as if all of them, at all hours of the day and night, did nothing but exercise what the Hunk of Papantla had taken away from the then young and beautiful and recently arrived Miss Cosima. Aunt Hilda, with a kind of hidden fever, played the Steinway piano brought from the port of Veracruz from New Orleans, a long voyage that seemed short because, as the passengers noted and then told Fräulein
Kelsen, seagulls accompanied the ship, or perhaps the piano, from Louisiana to Veracruz.
    “Mutti would have been better off going to la Nouvelle-Orléans to buy her trousseau and enjoy her nozze, ” bragged and criticized Aunt Virginia in one breath. Mixing languages was as natural for her as mixing her reading matter, and it challenged, in an irreproachable way, one of her father’s goals. New Orleans, in any case, was the civilized commercial point of reference closest to Veracruz, and the place where, exiled by the dictatorship of the peg-legged Santa Anna, the young liberal Benito Juárez had once worked rolling Cuban cigars. Would there be a commemorative plaque in New Orleans after Juárez—so ugly, such a little Indian—defeated the French and ordered the very Habsburg Maximilian—so blond, so handsome—shot?
    “The Habsburgs governed Mexico longer than anyone, don’t you forget it. Mexico is more Austrian than anything else,” said the well-read and well-written Virginia to her youngest sister, Leticia, Laura Díaz’s mother. For Leticia, this news of the empire was simply inconsequential since the only things that mattered to her were her home, her daughter, her kitchen, her diligent attention to daily life …
    At the same time, the melancholy resonance that Hilda’s