Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  Mestiza, goddess of the orient;

  mestiza, queen of the sun,

  so that you look decent,

  remove that piece of bean

  which covers your whole tooth!

  and two as yet unknown other villains sang along. For all the neighbors ever learned, he said, that slut simply ran off from her husband, a townsman infamous for his own paramours; hence Rodrigo got rid of her for nothing, unlike Salvador, who stood before the tribunal, weighted with chains, grinning down his capital sentence; when they led him away he gazed back at Agustín unbearably. Having heard in church that submission is the best way to avoid getting lost in fiery tortures; and, moreover, remaining yet capable of joys not unlike the shining white pores of fresh watermelon slices, the boy determined to make the best of his confinement; after all, there would be food—besides, his new friends were such jokers; they’d speed the years away! This Rodrigo, for instance, was a cheerful, hopeful sort of fellow, who began to uplift Agustín’s soul with treasure-talk.

  The food now came, in a common bowl. It was nothing but slabber-sauce,* and moldy bread-crusts with which to grub it up. But there was plenty of it, and his new friends promised it would come twice every day.

  Just as rich men dream of becoming good, so poor men imagine getting rich. And everyone knew that riches still shone here and there in Mexico—for the contrary would have been unthinkable. The Franciscans once longed to build on this soil a Kingdom of the Gospels, whose citizens would become gentler than the pigeon-armies which strut along the island of white-limed palms in the zócalo; no less hopeful were the dreamers of Cortés’s stripe, who if they could not torture treasure out of Indians would squeeze a quotidian surplus out of their own kind. Then there were the convicts, who craved to hunt down Amazons, and revenge themselves upon all wealth and pleasure—all the more so since they lacked means even to hire the jailer’s dice. A few of Agustín’s cellmates denounced certain nobles and churchmen for their dark greed, but the rest dreamed of victories, not over their century but merely over this or that moment. From ambush they might have shot down an Archbishop standing beneath the gold-and-purple pallium, could they have sold his vestments for fifty reales; but they would far rather have raped a woman of the town; better still, they listened for the footsteps of the two guards bringing the food trough. They grieved over the friars’ decision to destroy the Mexican temples, even down to their lovely furnishings; but New Spain goes on and on, like that stony-floored recession of arches at San Juan de Ulúa; surely other temples remained; thus eagerly they devoured each other’s lies. As Rodrigo liked to sing,

  Stretch out your arms, negrita,

  and raise me to your castle in the clouds!

  Open your legs, negrita,

  and show me your coral casket!

  What astonished Agustín, whose character (he having been a worrier from his earliest age) was practical nearly unto bleakness, was their silence on the subject of escape. In fact the sharks and sentries kept the place so well that the commandant slept late, as he had always wished to do when he was younger. On the ramparts stood a file of fresh troops—less in order, perhaps, than the wide black shoulders of those vultures which had lined up on the wall for Salvador’s execution; for it was summer, and so the yellow fever was ripening again in men.

  Once upon a time the beautiful witch Mulata de Córdoba, who, so they say, was the fortress’s only female prisoner, did get out of San Juan de Ulúa, simply by begging a piece of charcoal from the guards, who must themselves have hungered for something unearthly to transpire, for after advising her to act like a good woman they provided what she had wished for, and with it she drew a ship upon the wall of her cell. Came a midnight thunderclap, and in that ship she sailed away with the Devil! But no other prisoner possessed her advantages. Several generations after Agustín’s confinement, that upright, colorless liberator Benito Juárez, whose administration would put Emperor Maximilian to death, lay in one of these cells. His best aphorism: I know that the rich and the powerful do not feel or try to alleviate the miseries of the poor. He expected nothing in prison, and got nothing. As for Agustín’s new friends, precisely because their expectations had ebbed, they craved dreamy prizes all the more—and not one of them wisely fearful of his own conscience. For the boy’s part, the bitter impossibility of escape was not to be admitted all at once; after all, he had years in which to make that accommodation; so wouldn’t it be more inspiring to fondle imaginary silver? And since he was new here, and preferred to get by without trouble, by all means let them guide the conversation! That Indian with the cropped-off ears, when would he say something, and how unpleasant would it be? That tall negro with the inflamed eyes, that wiry quadroon who kept grinning back and forth, as if his temper required constant watching; that pallid, vague fellow with the hands of a locksmith (he’d burned the granary of some miserly hacendado who hoarded corn in drought years); that broad-shouldered mulatto who’d laid his arm against Agustín’s, and smiled because Agustín’s was darker . . . well, they were his neighbors now. What he would have preferred to do was remember a certain turning he had glimpsed when they were marching him to this cell, and a certain narrow stone staircase worn perilously smooth, and above it, dark blotches on the island’s dim rock, and vast L-shaped corridors between whose flagstones the grass grew in square outlines; because already his recollections were drawing inward, like blotches of wetness on laundry hanging in the sun; soon, as the guards intended, he would be lost at San Juan de Ulúa even in his memories, and his chances for flight still further reduced. That narrow staircase, could he ever find it again, he’d clamber from it into the rock’s footholds, and then leap down onto a passing soldier, but only at night; already he had forgotten whether it lay left or right of the main corridor; and his fine friend Rodrigo, the one with the crow-black hands, kept going on about treasures. And why not? On those bygone nights when the two brothers still dwelled together (they used to sleep in this or that tree overlooking the beach, so that crocodiles could not eat them; but it turned out that instead of crocodiles it was soldiers who rousted them out, after which they hid in the sailmaker’s shed), they too loved to dispose of imaginary wealth.— Reader, may you be warned by their example never to forget what wields greatest power over our immortal souls!— Agustín, then five or six years old, proposed to fill his belly with meat and cake; thus far went a hungry boy’s dreams. Salvador promised there would be other pleasures. Someday, God willing, they’d pass for honorable grandees, with the power of death over a dozen slaves, and nothing to do but ride about the city in a coach enriched with cloth of gold. Indeed, at the trial, Agustín, like the procurador, envisioned himself between the thighs of his brother’s light-of-love, Herlinda—for how fetching she had been, and how well she had fed both brothers! Lying close against the boy, Rodrigo, who wished for an encomendero of his own, with Indian labor forever, now swore that in Moquí Province (so a mulatto swineherd had whispered to him the night before being garroted) there ran a snowy Blue Range renowned for its central peak, a silver mountain ringed round by quicksilver lakes; and that beyond that, in a direction which was certain, on the island of Ziñogava, in a palace of jade, there dwelled an Amazonian queen most deserving of pillage, because her vassals served her on plates and platters of pure white silver—and by the way, Rodrigo informed him, Amazons are whiter than all other women on earth, and weep tears of unalloyed silver, which makes them doubly worth raping and tormenting. Concerning the existence of these females Agustín stayed skeptical, since Salvador, who had always been eager for such knowledge, had been definitively informed by Fray de Castro that no trusty witness ever saw one, no, not from the Conquest until now, although once upon a time, allowed Fray de Castro, the Tarascans most faithfully promised Gonzalo de Sandoval that an Island of Amazons lay but ten days’ sail from Colima, and even Cortés hoped and believed. In truth the idea of tormenting a beautiful woman gave Agustín something new to dream o
f, although he would rather have loved and married her (for he was not yet as lost to goodness as some Saracen); and Rodrigo proposed to swear an oath upon the sacred Host, should he ever obtain it, which appeared improbable, that there were Amazons, not merely somewhere in this world, but right here in Mexico! Agustín wondered aloud how they might find Ziñogava or even the Blue Range. Pressing against his back was a certain Bernardo Villalobos, with whom Rodrigo appeared to be very tender; he had been lucky to draw a mere nineteen years for bigamy and incest. To encourage the boy, and initiate him into their fraternity of treasure-seekers, he now told the tale of the skeleton hand: A sea-captain out of Barcelona, having entered into illicit relations with his sister, sat sorrowing at her deathbed, when she commanded him, as her final wish, to cut off her hand and keep it with him, since the magnetic sympathy between them had been so greatly magnified by their physical love that this one piece of her, so adept at caressing and gesturing, might be able to do him a good turn. Being a sentimentalist, he kept this relic on red velvet in a glass box. As he soon learned, the skeleton hand was better than a compass-needle. Were he unsure where to sail, he would closet himself with the hand, utter a few endearments (the same sort which he practiced on women of the town) and confess his uncertainty, at which point it would swivel around upon its velvet bed, and then the forefinger would point out the direction where he ought to go. Greatly interested (for he had sometimes thought to become a sailor), Agustín asked Bernardo whether he might perhaps know that sea-captain personally, which he coyly disdained to answer. The main thing, he said, caressing the boy, was that this hand, could he but find it (and as a matter of fact he suspected where to steal it), would guide them quite infallibly to Ziñogava, and Agustín would be welcome to be one of their company. Bernardo said that the hand sometimes liked to tickle people, especially young boys, and sometime, perhaps even tonight, it might pay the new arrival a visit.— But can the hand get us out of here? the boy demanded.— Salvador had taught him how to pick pockets on those afternoons when the musicians, dancers and lovely singers performed high up on the wooden platform and happy people pressed carelessly around. He could march his fingers like spiders quite well. So when Rodrigo and Bernardo did just this, he fell back on his guard, but being so lonely and so weak, he could not forbear all the same to hope that they would be to him like brothers, and perhaps even someday, when they were all free, help him find an Amazon to love.— Rodrigo laughed at his question, but Bernardo, who must be worth listening to, since he had formerly done well for himself as an Indian-whipper for the Franciscans, claimed to know how the narrow stairs ascended through a deep arch of pastel stone, going up past a certain barred window to the parapet, which in places was broad enough for three horsemen to ride abreast, but whenever his words had carried the other prisoners that far he invariably hesitated, his plots never finishing or even becoming symmetrical, in which respect they took after the prison’s open-roofed many-arched islands of stone. And so everyone stared down into the dark latrine-crypt whose hole opened over the shining green water. The sun now drowned itself. There came the faraway slam of a door. Bernardo tried to kiss him, but the boy rolled away. At this, Rodrigo clapped his hands. Four villains held the boy down. Perhaps he should have appealed to that divine protector of the weak and innocent, the King of Spain.

  3

  Could we become so great and strong as to survive the malodorous embrace of those who love us beyond death, we would not need their ghostly services. And the man who scarcely fears at all when his dead brother, instead of answering him, draws rotted hands about his throat, is nearly insusceptible to blackmail. Agustín had already learned how to be despised as poor, dark and criminal. The day they cut off his brother’s head something sickened in him. The night he became a catamite he felt as blindly bewildered as the corpse which wonders whether it has been buried alive or is truly dead. But the foul breaths of his new friends, the fungus on their skin, never mind the stink of algae and sewage from that hole in the floor; the grand and lonely hatreds he already wore; and the sunrises glowing in the latrine hole where the sea lightened into turquoise and small fry swam mindlessly round and round; all these improved him into a befitting instrument; then came the pestilences which could not kill him, although they carried off seven others in that cell. Now, for a fact, he grew “realistic.” The second time was not so bad as the first; by the fifth he knew better than to struggle; the best way was to give them satisfaction so that it would be quickly over. Juan and Rafael generally hurt him the most; Leopoldo was the kindest. Agustín would never come into his growth, it seemed; he had no more power to defend himself than a little girl. Salvador would have protected him, even with his life; indeed, in a sense he had—the very reason he was gone forever. That fatal quarrel with Fray de Castro had been occasioned by the victim’s refusal either to accept Agustín as an apprentice or to allow Salvador a half day’s leave in hopes of finding some master for the boy; the priest remarked, not without reason, that Herlinda had already siphoned off enough of Salvador’s labor; it was when he called her a succubus that the shovel struck him. So the boy drew himself ever more apart, not only from the other inmates of that crowded sweltering vault, but even from himself; and his appointed stripes no longer prevented him from meditating on the idea that the remains of some relative—her skeleton hand, for instance—might retain some virtue which could aid the living. Furthermore, he thought on the grand mountain of silver, and the regal Amazon of Ziñogava who wept silver tears. Once he more completely forgot the stepped Indian walls assembled from round river stones, the Spanish flag over the Baluarte, the smoke rising from the old Indian pyramid, the cruelty of canon law and the chittering and thudding of birds and lizards in the tree of yellow berries, the fishing nets on the wall by Boca del Río and the way Herlinda used to smile when she brushed her long hair away from her face, reality bled out of the world; and he dreamed about silver, which might for all its silverness keep a bluish or golden-brown tint, and which although it seems to reflect pinkness remains white in its deepest grooves.

  His neighbors were gambling with lousy rag-scraps. The winner got to strike the loser. Agustín dreamed out his impossible escape: The iron door would screech open, the guards would fall dead, and somehow he would ascend the wall, which resembled the skin of a piebald albino.

  In that cell lay a certain Indian whose ears had been lopped off for some offense against the Holy Sacraments; since he never in all those years broke silence, his cellmates jested that the executioner must also have cut out his tongue, as could easily have been the case. He was the only one who had not incurred Agustín’s hatred, not that he had ever defended the boy—who took him as a model. Staring at the wall, those two said no word. Agustín heard his cellmates reckoning up the days as well as they were able; they decided that this might be the first of May, at which he closed his eyes, remembering the Ribbon Dance which is performed on that date; once when he was small his brother sat him on his shoulders so that he could see across the thousand-headed crowd in the zócalo, and enjoy the dancers; there were certain nuns who could sing and play the guitar, and although he was too young to understand the words, the melodies tickled him; and afterward his brother gave him a slice of cake. Closing his eyes, he saw the arches of San Juan de Ulúa receding and receding; he had seen them only that once, and it seemed that if he could but count them accurately he might save himself; therefore as he lay in the sticky whitestained cell, his bitterness growing upward like one of the stalagmites around him, he tabulated arch-shadows on the grey-pebbled pavement which he had so briefly trodden: one, two, three, and then the fourth shadow-bar was darker and wider, after which came the fifth, beyond which he could not certainly see any shadows, but noted two more sharp-edged archways, although it might have been three, and the blotched pallor after those might or might not have been a wall.

  Sometimes Rodrigo picked over the legend of Chucho el Rojo, the thieves’ hero, whose cellmate La Changa paid off a gu
ard to get him a ship, from which he swam away, oiled against sharks, and then travelled overland to Mexico, where he was received by his lovely mistress, Matilde de Frizac. What La Changa got out of it no one mentioned. Rodrigo and Bernardo were going to get themselves younger, lighter-skinned mistresses than Matilde; they would rob great ships of cocoa, vanilla and silver. This dream was as a breezeblown palmhead waving behind one of San Juan de Ulúa’s moldy stone walls. As for Agustín, he pretended that the bootsteps of soldiers on the low many-arched bridges, or the faraway hoofsteps of horses on those blocks of out-fanning coral, were somehow conveying him away from here. In summer Fray de Castro used to keep his dark cloak clasped only at the throat, falling away to his ankles and showing the dirty-pale robe beneath. To live is to live in dirt, it seems. What did he care about Matilde de Frizac, especially if Rodrigo liked her? In six more years he’d be twenty-five—still young, perhaps, but how nitrous by then his heart! He no longer fever-dreamed of kissing any pretty blackamoor wench who wore earbobs of jade and a fine silver necklace. What he wished for most of all was revenge—on these fine villains here to whose mercy he must pretend to feel beholden, on the uniformed rogue who had whipped him, on all the guards, soldiers, officials, mariners and architects connected with San Juan de Ulúa, and on the men who had executed his brother. If only he could trample down that damned judge, and make off with the procurador’s head! By the fiftieth time the others used him, it seemed ordinary. The falconets and brass lombards were booming out to honor some admiral in the harbor. To his cellmates he continued peaceful and obedient, having no hope of making his way here were he anything else. (Had he come more quickly into his growth he could have looked them in the face, and known their menace and their dingy monotonous malice, their self-hating corruption, which pleased itself only by blighting others and then but for an instant.) He never spoke of his own accord, and answered others as seldom as possible. Feeling insulted, they treated him with increasing cruelty. Just as Dorantes de Carranza used to amuse his guests by arranging bullfighting matches against crocodiles whose jaws had been tied shut, so Bernardo or Rodrigo liked to organize a certain game, played four or five prisoners at a time, of sitting on Agustín’s arms and legs, then tormenting and goading him. While they used him, they called him slave, whore, and, worst of all, woman. Sometimes when he crept toward the food trough they liked to shove his face in it until he choked. On a certain night when they commenced to threaten and insult him, he attacked Juan Hernández, who had too often bragged of having once discovered a golden frog ornament in the ground; and because he injured this Juan in his ribs, they punished him with a broken nose and several other tokens of their comradeship, followed by the usual outcome. But Agustín found himself less afraid than before, or perhaps simply more indifferent, as if the steamy, moldy years in San Juan de Ulúa had rotted away some of his heart. And although his indifference enraged them, it might also have saved him at times, since they shared it. Once they had satisfied themselves, and left him facedown on the floor, he kept still until they slept, then hit back, biting and kicking. Again they subdued him, slamming his head against the wall until his hair was wet with blood. They left him to live or die, and he laughed. An hour later, when they had forgotten him sufficiently to again memorialize all the women they had defended or attacked with their daggers, he sprang on Bernardo and thumbed out one of his eyes. Whether they would murder him was a question, to be sure, but he did not care, as they well perceived. When they let him alone, which was easiest, he did the same for them.— He’s not afraid! he heard them say, and then he knew that he was correct. He informed Bernardo that next time he would kill him, and Bernardo said nothing. Thus his life got simplified through hatred. No better than a slave before, he was no worse now.— Sometimes in the winter they could hear the nortes blow around their prison, and sometimes they could even hear rain. They heard the cannon; once in awhile they heard voices.— In the summer of his third year, nauseously grinding his forehead against the nitrous walls in quest of any coolness which might exude from this earth, he swooned into the searing well of his sickness, surrendering to nightmares, or at least enduring them, since he could do nothing else; when he awoke, he seemed to spy a greyish-white bird departing from his face. Gazing down into that latrine-hole beneath which the water flowed as bright and green as the jade ornaments on Chalchihuitlicue’s skirt, he longed for light more fiercely than ever. He seemed to hear faraway people chanting in church like slaves pulling a rope. Again and again he dreamed of his brother rising back out of earth, whole again—but it is seldom we realize our dreams entirely. By then he was stronger and uglier, like his wishes; and from time to time, as inmates died, the guards threw in fresh young boys more gratifying than he to his companions’ tastes. Just as Aztecs used to torture children, to ensure that they would weep before getting sacrificed to Tlaloc the rain god—for who would deny that tears are similar to rain, and therefore might bring it?—thus these cruel men, being diseased by rage, made sure that their pretty objects shrieked out in pain and shame, while Agustín, who was commencing to achieve a sinister reputation, lay in the darkest corner, turning over and over everything he had ever heard of necromancy, in order to call back his elder brother from the dead. Silently he worked his arms and legs hour by hour, in order to strengthen them, and perhaps someday to accomplish his deliverance. (Salvador had been terribly strong—all the more so when anger overtook him.) Each grief, humiliation and injury was now as precious to him as the thorn from Christ’s crown which we keep in our cathedral here in Veracruz; because each one strengthened his righteousness. Yet all the while he felt indifferent. None of his emotions were real to him. His self-pride grew as glorious as the silver cross on the Inquisition’s crimson banner. Perhaps he would kill each man in this cell, one by one. He knew he’d get Rodrigo at least. Even that nonentity of an earless Indian maddened him now, but he’d rise beyond all that; he’d wear a pleated doublet of scarlet or emerald, sashed tightly round his narrow waist. He’d sin with as many women as possible, preferably without their consent. Sometimes he could hear the calls of the leather and sugar vendors on the beach, but then a white mist rose up out of the latrine-hole and wrapped him soundlessly in himself. He drowsed. Meanwhile his companions preyed upon a new convict named Luís, who had been imprisoned for defaulting on his alcabala tax, and next morning they all meditated on the strange expression of peace on the suicided boy’s face, his skin so smooth, his dark eyes sleepily half-closed, his lips parted on the right side and shut on the left, so that as he lay there his mouth appeared to be a sweet fruit which excited the villains no end, so that they began to sing: