Years With Laura Diaz, The by Carlos Fuentes Read Free Book Online

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, María 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,” María 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, mein Herr, is aware of it!”
    But Grandmother Doña 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.”
    “Don’t worry. I know.”
    “Then take good care of them, and don’t ask me for more words. I’ve already given you them all.”
    That is what Doña Cosima said in the year 1905, when everything happened.

    Witty, wisecracking, and raucous: the people of Catemaco could be all that (when the spirit moved them) and devout, too, as the priest Morales knew very well and the priest Almonte knew not at all. More than the rich and the almost rich, it was the poor, the sowers and reapers, the net weavers, the fishermen, the oarsmen, the bricklayers, and their wives who gave the best offerings in church.
    Don Felipe and other coffee growers would give money or sacks of food; the poorest, in secret, would bring jewelry, ancient pieces passed down in their families for centuries and offered to give thanks to the Lord Our God for their own good fortune or someone else’s bad luck, both taken to be miraculous. Onyx necklaces, large silver combs, gold bracelets, unmounted emeralds: luxurious stones retrieved from who knows what hiding place, attic, or cave, from under what mat on which embankment, from what secret mine.
    Everything was enthusiastically piled up, because Father Morales was scrupulous about storing away for his flock what rightly belonged to it and would sell a valuable piece in Veracruz only when he knew that the very family who’d piously offered the jewel to the Black Christ of Otatitlan needed money.
    As in all the towns on the Gulf coast, the saints were celebrated in Catemaco with dances held on a wooden floor the better to hear the sound of stamping feet. The air would fill with harps, viols, fiddles, and guitars. It was then it happened—everyone remembers it from the year 1905: on the day of the feast of the Holy Child of Zongolica, Father Elzevir Almonte did not appear. People went looking for him, but neither the priest nor the treasure was to be found. The offering chest was empty and the priest from Puebla gone.
    “How right he was when he’d say, ‘Puebla breeding ground of saints; Veracruz fountain of crooks.’”
    That was the only comment, ironic and sufficient, made by Don . Felipe Kelsen. The people were harder on him, their mildest epithets being “little bastard” and “thief.” The four Kelsen daughters remained impassive. Life would go back to normal without the robber priest, taverns and whorehouses would operate once again, serenades would be heard on tranquil midnights, those who had gone away would come
back. Coincidentally, on that day, the self-absorbed grandmother, Cosima Reiter, began to decline, as if she’d wasted her life in a religion that didn’t deserve her and wasted her love (gossips insisted) on an honorable man instead of a romantic bandit.
    “Laura,