Years With Laura Diaz, The Read Free Page B

agile fingers gave to Chopin’s Preludes, her favorite music, augmented every particle of sadness—real, remembered, or imaginable—in the vast but simple house on the hill above the tropical lake.
    “Would we be different if we’d grown up in Germany?” asked sister Hilda nostalgically.
    “Yes,” Virginia instantly replied. “And if we’d been born in China we’d be even more different. Assez de chinoiseries, ma chère. ”
    “Don’t you feel nostalgia?” Hilda asked her youngest sister, Leticia.
    “How could I? I’ve never been there.”
    “You’re the only one who has,” Virginia berated her, interrupting, although she was looking at Leticia, Laura’s mother.
    “There’s a lot to do in the house,” concluded Leticia.
    Like all the country houses Spain left in the New World, this one,
built on one level, consisted of four whitewashed sides around a central patio onto which opened dining room, living room, and bedrooms. Light entered the sitting rooms from the patio, because the external walls were windowless; defense might someday be necessary and modesty was a permanent concern.
    “We live as if Indians, or English pirates, or rebel blacks were going to attack us,” commented young Aunt Virginia with an amused smile. “Aux armes!”
    Their modesty, on the other hand, was well served. Seasonal laborers brought in to harvest coffee were curious, impertinent, sometimes insolent, and thought themselves the equal of anyone. Virginia would answer them back with a mixture of Spanish insults and Latin quotations that would scatter them—as if the young woman with black eyes, white skin, and thin lips were just one more of the witches said to live on the far shore of the lake.
    To reach the master’s house, one had to walk through the main door, like a guest. The kitchen, to the rear, opened onto poultry yards, stables, storehouses, and fields; tanks and pipes conveyed the coffee fruits to the machines that pulped, fermented, washed, and dried them. There were few animals on the hacienda, baptized by its founder Felipe Kelsen “La Peregrina,” “The Pilgrim,” in honor of his wife, the brave but mutilated Cosima: five riding horses, fourteen mules, and fifty head of cattle. None of that interested little Laura, who would never set foot in those parts, which her grandfather governed with strict discipline, never complaining but noting constantly that the labor necessary to grow coffee was expensive because the product was so fragile and marketing it was so precarious. For that reason Don Felipe found himself forced into the ceaseless work of pruning trees, making sure the coffee bushes had the shade indispensable for their growth, cutting off the old stock, separating it from the new shoots, weeding the planted areas, and maintaining the drying sheds.
    “Coffee is not like sugar, not like wild cane that grows anywhere. Coffee requires discipline,” the master, Don Felipe, would declare, as he closely watched over the mills, wagons, stables, and famous drying
sheds, dividing his day between paying minute attention to the crop in the field and paying no less careful attention to the bills.
    Little Laura took not the slightest interest in any of this. She liked the fact that the hacienda extended out into the coffee hills and that behind them the forest and the lake continued in their seemingly forbidden encounter. She would scramble up to the roof terrace to catch sight, way in the distance, of the quicksilver mirror lake , as her reading aunt, Virginia, called it, and she didn’t wonder why the prettiest thing in the place was also the thing least close to her, the farthest away from the hand the child stretched out as if to touch, giving all the power of the world to her desire. She delivered every victory of her childhood to imagination. The lake. A line of poetry.
    From the salon arose the melancholy notes of a prelude, and Laura felt sad, but happy to share that feeling with her eldest aunt, so