Free Years With Laura Diaz, The by Carlos Fuentes Page B

second?”
    He pinched her cheek, and they laughed again, but they returned home in silence. Their parents didn’t have the nerve to say anything because for Fernando it was evil to assume sin where there is none, the way the priest Elzevir did in Catemaco, who succeeded only in ruining people with imagined guilt, and because for Leticia—I know I don’t really know my son, for me that boy is a mystery, but you do know everything about Laura and trust her, isn’t that so?
    He walked her back to that same spot on the docks the next Saturday, and told her to look at the rails, at the freight cars that came right up here loaded with bodies—the Rio Blanco workers murdered by order of Don Porfirio for going on strike and sticking to it so bravely, brought right here and tossed into the sea, the dictator stays in power only by means of blood, the rebel Yaqui Indians shackled and taken out to sea near Sonora and thrown overboard, the Cananea miners shot on his orders in a place called the National Valley, hundreds of workers enslaved right here in Veracruz, the liberals locked up in the Ulúa fort, followers of Madero and the Flores Magón brothers, anarcho-syndicalists like the Spanish relatives of my mother, who came from the Canary Islands, Laura, revolutionaries. Laura, revolutionaries are people who are asking for something very simple for Mexico, democracy, elections, land, education, jobs, no reelection of the incumbent president. Don Porfirio Díaz has been in power for thirty years.
    “I apologize, Laura. I can’t even spare a twelve-year-old girl my speeches.”
    Revolutionaries. That night the word echoed in Laura Díaz’s head,
and again the next, and the night after that. She’d never heard it, and when she went back to the coffee plantation on a visit with her mother, she asked her grandfather what it meant and the aged face of the socialist Felipe Kelsen clouded over for an instant. What is a revolutionary?
    “It’s an illusion people should give up at the age of thirty.”
    “Hmm. Santiago is only now turning twenty.”
    “That’s just it. Tell your brother to hurry up.”
    Don Felipe was playing chess in the patio of the country house with an Englishman wearing filthy white gloves. His granddaughter’s question caused him to lose a bishop and be castled. The old German said nothing more on the subject, but the Englishman persevered. “Another revolution? Why? Surely they’re all dead.”
    “As long as you’re at it, Sir Richard, you might wish for no more wars, because if one should come, you’re going to see more dead.” Don Felipe was trying to shift Laura’s attention to the Englishman in gloves and to distract him from the game.
    “And besides, with you a German and me British, well, what is there to say? Fraternal enemies!”
    At that, as Don Felipe protested he was no longer German but Mexican, he allowed his king to be cornered. The Englishman shouted checkmate. Just four years later, Don Felipe and Don Ricardo stopped speaking. Each, deprived of his chess partner, died of boredom and sadness. The cannons at Ypres blasted away, and the trenches witnessed the slaughter of young English and German soldiers. Only then did Grandfather Felipe reveal something to his daughters and his granddaughter.
    “An incredible thing. He wore those white gloves because he had cut off the tips of his own fingers to purge himself of guilt. In India, the English cut off the fingertips of cotton weavers so as to keep them from competing with the cotton factories in Manchester. There are no people crueler than the English.”
    “La pérfida Albión,” Aunt Virginia said in Spanish, then insisting, “Perfidious Albion.”
    “And what about the Germans, Grandfather?”

    “Well, my dear. There are no people more savage than Europeans. Wait and see. All of them.”
    “Über alles,” Virginia sang under her breath, breaking her father’s rule.
    Laura would see nothing. Nothing more than the body of her