Years With Laura Diaz, The by Carlos Fuentes

off cutting down the trees and selling them as lumber.”
    “It’s God’s will. They’ll grow again.”

3.
    Veracruz: 1910
    H E WOULD ARRIVE LATE. He would arrive early. Always, either too late or too early. He would turn up unexpectedly for dinner. Other times, he wouldn’t turn up at all.
    As soon as her husband, Fernando Díaz, had her brought to Veracruz, Leticia established—as if they were the most natural things in the world, not feeling she was imposing them on anyone—the same schedules and the same order she’d had in her previous life on the Catemaco coffee plantation. It didn’t matter how boisterous and disorderly the port was: the sun still rose at the same time whether she was next to the lake or the sea. Breakfast at six, midday meal at one, light supper at seven, or dinner, in special cases, at nine.
    Veracruz gave Leticia Kelsen its many kinds of shellfish and fish, and Laura’s mother would combine them in marvelous ways: octopus in its ink with white rice, fried plantain with beans, refried of course; white snapper from the Gulf swimming in onion, peppers, and olives; meat shredded with cilantro or congealed in dark sauces called “tablecloth stainers”; monastic desserts and worldly coffees—slowing you
down, knowing all about heat and insomnia, friend to both siestas and moons.
    Coffee could be had at any hour of the day in the celebrated Café de la Parroquia, where a wasp’s nest of waiters with white aprons and bow ties ran through the buzz of customers carrying rolls and huevos rancheros, like underpaid magicians in a carnival where performances went on around the clock, poured coffee and hot milk into glasses with astonishing simultaneity from acrobatic heights. The great silver coffeemaker, imported from Germany, presided over all this, occupying the center-rear of the café like a silver queen decorated with faucets, spigots, foam, steam, and factory seals. Lebrecht und Justus Krüger, Lübeck, 1887.
    Also from Europe came illustrated magazines and the novels for which Laura’s father, Fernando Díaz, would impatiently wait every month, when the packet boats from Southampton and Le Havre dropped anchor in Veracruz for the sole purpose, or so it seemed, of satisfying his needs. There he’d be, the accountant waiting with his boater firmly in place to protect him from a sun heavy as a wet sheet. With the suit that had made people stop and stare in Catemaco when Fernando courted and won Leticia. With his walking stick with its ivory handle in one hand. His other hand in that of Laura, his twelve-year-old daughter.
    “The magazines, Papa, first the magazines.”
    “No. First the books for your brother. Tell him they’re here.”
    “It’s better if I bring them to his room.”
    “As you please.”
    “Is it proper for a twelve-year-old girl to go into the bedroom of a boy who’s almost twenty?” asked Leticia as soon as Laura, still skipping like a child, left the room.
    “It’s more important they love and trust each other,” her husband, Fernando Díaz, would answer calmly.
    Leticia would shrug her shoulders and blush, remembering the moral lessons of the cynical, fugitive priest Elzevir Almonte. But she quickly glanced around the living room of her new house proudly. It
was on the upper floor above the Bank of the Republic, of which her husband, for just a month now, was the president.
    He had kept his word. Through hard work, just as he’d promised, he had risen from teller to accountant to president, by sacrificing, as he said to Leticia, twelve years of conjugal life, of being close to Laura, and of domestic order, since his home, if he dared call it that, had consisted of men living alone. Fernando and his son Santiago, fruit of his first marriage to the deceased Elisa Obregón—no matter how diligent the servants might be—would leave their cigars burning here or extinguished there, a book open on a bed, their socks lost under the same bed, and, finally, the bed