Years With Laura Diaz, The Read Online Free PDF Page A

consideration for history, socialism, the workers’ movement, or the Iron Chancellor.
    How much farther from the pantheon in the Jewish cemetery in Breslau where Lassalle was buried at the age of thirty-nine could the disillusioned socialist Philip Kelsen go at the age of twenty-five, than to the coasts of the New World, to Veracruz, where the Atlantic breathes its last, after a long crossing from the port of Hamburg, and then inland to Catemaco, hot, fertile, prodigal lands— supremely fertile , they were called in speeches—where nature and man could join forces and prosper, beyond the corrupt disillusion of Europe?
    Philip retained only moving memories of Lassalle, nationalism, and the love of adventure that brought him from the Rhine to the Gulf
of Mexico. But here, those attributes would be no longer German but Mexican. Old Heine in Düsseldorf applauded the decision of his rebellious son, gave him an endowment of marks, and put him on a ship for the New World. Philip Kelsen made a three-year stopover in New Orleans, working reluctantly in a cigar factory, but he was disgusted by American racism, still blazing hot amid the charred ruins of the Confederacy, so he went on to Veracruz, exploring the coast from Tuxpan in the green Huasteca to the Tuxtlas, flown over by hundreds of birds.
    Full stomach, happy heart , said the first woman he slept with in Tuxpan, a mulatta who gave him the same sensuality in bed as she did in the kitchen, alternately placing in the voracious mouth of her young German seducer her two wine-red nipples or an enormous quantity of bocoles, pemoles, and the biggest tamales in all of Mexico, stuffed with pork and chile. Not yet acclimated, Philip Kelsen again found a mulatta and snacks in Santiago Tuxtla. Like her native city, her name was Santiaga, and the dishes she served up for the repose of the recently arrived, sensual little German were Caribbean: lots of sweet potatoes, garlic, and mogo-mogo from plantains. But what seduced Philip Kelsen more than any sexual or gastronomic dish was the beauty of Catemaco, a short distance from the Tuxtlas: a lake that could have been in Switzerland or Germany—surrounded by mountains and thick vegetation, shiny as a mirror but animated by the invisible whispers of waterfalls, birds flying overhead, and colonies of tailless macaques.
    Standing on a hill overlooking the quicksilver lake, Philip Kelsen announced, in an act that reconciled all of him—his youth and his future, his romantic spirit and his financial patrimony, his idealism and his pragmatism, his sensuality and his asceticism—“I’m staying here. This is my country.”
    Only at a distance and through hearsay did little Laura begin to learn the story of her upright, disciplined, and handsome German grandfather, who spoke only Spanish, although who could tell if he went on thinking in German and who could know the language of his dreams? For the little girl, all dates were soon to come, never far off, and the passage of time was marked most vividly by her birthday, when, so no one would forget to
pay attention to her, she would charmingly skip around the patio, starting early in the morning while she was still in her nightie and sing:

    on the twelfth of May
the Virgin dressed in white
came walking into sight
with her coat so gay …

    The entire household knew the rite by heart, and on the days leading up to Laura’s birthday they would pretend to forget the celebration. If Laura knew that they knew, then she too gave no hint of it. Everyone feigned surprise, and it was prettier that way, especially this twelfth of May in the fifth year of the century, when Laura turned seven, and her grandfather gave her an extraordinary present, a Chinese doll with porcelain head, hands, and feet, its little cotton body covered by a Mandarin costume of red silk, with black edging and a dragon design embroidered in gold. For the little girl being feted, the exoticism of the costume did not detract from