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

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.
    María 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, Doña Cosima German, and María 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, María 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 María 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 María 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 Doña 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