Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  Much do I care for my María;

  how lovely is this woman!

  Agustín lay watching, as calmly as a conquistador blowing on his matchlock fuse. The next time that Bernardo crawled to him, insinuatingly lecherous, while the others began singing “The Whores of Hermosillo,” Agustín did by him as Rodrigo had done by his light-o’-love, so that Bernardo went out of this world. When the guards came, no one would say what had happened. They all got beaten, then thrown back into the cell. Agustín was now a man. They all lay watching the white stalactites grow—a finger’s width grander already since the boy’s arrival.

  4

  In the seventh year of his captivity, while his good friends lay arguing over who had committed the greatest sin (Rodrigo hoped someday to sit at the Devil’s right hand), Agustín prayed to Satan so successfully that his prayer passed through hell’s keyhole, and at once the head flew up through the latrine-hole and landed on his shoulder.

  Is the soul, as Socrates sometimes posited, a life-bearer, or is it merely the body’s contingent prisoner, whose release when the flesh perishes merely brings about its own doom? And was this flying head a spirit, an animated fragment or an alien demon hiding in Salvador’s semblance?— All that I can tell you is that for the first time in several years Agustín smiled. (As for the head, of course, it never stopped grinning.) It was a pleasant enough reunion. No matter that Salvador had not preserved his old appearance; we all diminish in time, and may even sacrifice a few appendages; the main thing is to get on with our projects and not complain overmuch.

  Now the other men cringed back in terror and cried out: Agustín, save us, brother!

  Shall I? laughed the head.

  No, said Agustín.

  So the head whirred through the air and bit them one after the other, mincing their throats and necks with its long yellow teeth, and they all were dead, excepting only the silent Indian, who lay so afflicted with fever that he could barely open his eyes.

  Your pleasure? asked the head.

  Kill him, brother!—because Agustín now held that Indian’s silence against him; all these years he had resembled some great lord who hides his grain.

  So the head murdered him also. That was when the rapier of something cut through Agustín’s hate-ringed heart, and he got pricked by the love shown by this hateful head which had flown so far from hell to help him.

  Well, it said, that was a nice drink of blood. I’m feeling much restored, thanks to those gentlemen.

  None of them had suffered as they deserved, although of course the ones who awaited their turns paid a higher penalty than those who died first. The flying head was terrifying, without a doubt, but by now Agustín had seen worse.

  He felt exalted. He wished to impress everyone in Mexico just as he had done in this cell: to kill the people who had testified against his brother, together with their children; to harry meek penitents who knelt with ropes around their necks; to open the throats of men he’d never met; to burn a rich lord’s granary for a lark—dreams as old as the accounting-books in the archives.

  5

  The head told him: Brother, you’ve become foul.

  And you?

  I as well, the head replied, even as I decayed into a skull, and all the more when a soldier pulled me off the spike and cast me into the harbor to be crabs’ prey, because there was nothing left to me but a ruined fragment of my body, and all got worse and worse. Then I heard about you, because when they pronounced your sentence a bell tolled under the sea, and I remembered you, knowing that you have no one but me. But who was I? When I was a child I was no murderer; when I was alive I was not dead; when I was dead I was not whole. Still in all those times I remained myself. So I began to take myself back out of the mud and away from the crabs, and now I feel myself becoming good. Don’t you wish for the same?

  Brother, said Agustín, what I wish for is to get out of here.

  That’s easy, chuckled the head, and bit right through the bars, devouring each one in two places, while the young man lifted each broken length of iron aside, as quietly as he could.

  Don’t worry, brother. I’ve dulled their ears. Have you said goodbye to your friends?

  For answer, Agustín kicked the dead Indian in the chest.

  Rolling its eyes with whirring sounds, the head flew out of the cell, and its brother followed.— Now hold me against your heart, with both hands. Grip my hair tight, because if you let go, you’ll be killed. Don’t worry; you can’t hurt me.

  So they rose up into the air. The fortress began to unfurl around them. Within the half-barrel arches, salt coated the walls like ribs of frost. Because he had counted and recounted the corridor of arches, Agustín grew momentarily furious not to go that way; but this he overcame. His brother’s head was squishy-rotten and its hair wriggled with worms, but the young man would have done anything to preserve his life. Moreover, the head was his destiny. As silently as mosquitoes they cleared the parapet of the squat yellow island, which was not entirely unlike a Totonacan pyramid in its wide and stolid massiveness, brooding utterly alone, never mind its connecting bridges, over its barely untrue reflection in the still dark water where offal floated among the reflections of palm-tops. Halfway up the steep narrow stairs of the far corner stood a sentry, shaking with fever and occasionally groaning. Unlike the convicts he knew the misery of parade on the broad pale terraces of the fortress, the sun beating down on burned and infected hands, the commandant’s rages, and the hallucination of a certain longhaired fever-woman in a jade dress, who outstretched her arms to him from the precious mildewed shade of towers and archways. He had not yet begun to vomit. At first he stared right through Agustín, neither comprehending nor believing, so that before he knew it, the head had torn away his throat, and Agustín changed clothes with the corpse. Again the head flew up near his heart, and he gripped it around both cheeks; again they were flying silently a hand’s breadth above the hot foul water, down within which some long and finny thing accompanied them, and cautiously rounding the corners of steep-walled promontories and bridge-joined islets which make up San Juan de Ulúa’s immense and complex hatefulness. Agustín could spy the myriad glowings of skulls at the bottom of the harbor.

  And so he escaped from San Juan de Ulúa, where Cortés first came on Holy Thursday, 1519, in the days when dreams of silver and Amazons still travelled in fleets like our high-castled galleons; yes, he returned into the day at last, and the sun shone nearly as brightly as the face of the Mother of God.

  6

  They descended to the beach, easily avoiding a file of night soldiers with leaf-bladed lances, and then the head whirred out of his hands. So he was back among the happy people.

  Eight years it had been since he and Salvador used to conceal themselves here, gleefully devouring stolen food. Several palm trees had fallen; the sailmaker had patched his hut. Once when he was very young—their mother must have died not long before—his brother had stolen a dirty breadcrust to share with him, and as they sat in the sand eating it, some Spaniards came to punish them. While they started on Salvador with their sticks, Agustín ran into this very thicket, where an Indian prostitute hid him in her sweaty cloak. Now he felt equally enveloped and protected by the flying head, which loved him more than anyone ever had or would; only he wished that instead of being so much smaller than he was, the head would enlarge.

  The head asked if he were satisfied, and he said that he was. Indeed, it seemed at first that his ingenuous hopefulness had been regained, as if it were again so early in life’s day that the sky was pearly and a solitary grey pigeon seemed almost black; watchmen’s torches still glowed like egg yolks, and the yellow-pink fissure which would prove itself to be the sun barely announced itself through the clouds. He hoped never to make another mistake. Knowing that everyone but the head was against him made life easy. The cavalry were all asleep, and the vultures had not yet come down from the trees. />
  Well? the head demanded, with the round gold ring-eyes of a crow. Is this where time stops?

  Because the head had done for him what he never could have done for himself, Agustín felt timid and dependent, all the more so since liberty was blinding and dangerous, but he considered himself a man, and meant to become a rich lord. Should no Amazons make themselves available to be conquered right away, he might apprentice himself to a leather merchant, then kill his master and sell off the stock in Xalapa. Then he could buy weapons and set out into the jungle, where he might find, if not Amazons, then at least some feeble Indians with gold in their ears. Or he could lease that old sugarmill in San Andrés Tuxtla and live off the labor of his negroes. For a fact, after all his sufferings he deserved never to work like other people! But relying on his own notions just now might cause his recapture. Settling, therefore, for patient opportunism, he did not answer the head’s question directly, but pried an old sack out of the sand and invited the head to fly into it. This conveyance, if it may be called that, he tied around his belt. Then he strode into Veracruz. The yellow flecks behind the silver clouds coagulated into a new sun. Suddenly pigeons flocked to the ledges of the municipal edifice. Men such as his brother had once been were already sweeping last night’s offal from the steps of palaces. In the doorway where Salvador sometimes used to meet Herlinda, two prostitutes were quarrelling. A few sailors lounged around the plinth, only one with his cap on. They eyed him like crows, ready to challenge him, since he was, for all they could tell, alone. This train of thought reminded him that the alarm gun would sound any moment now; it was surprising they had not yet discovered the dead guard and prisoners. But three mulata housewives were walking side by side around the bell tower, their dark hair shinily wet. Seven years since he had seen a woman! Were trouble on its way, the head would surely save him. So he stood leering at the women, who hastened on; he had forgotten that the uniform could scarcely compensate for his face, which was more unshaven than any beggar’s, nor for the seven years of filth on his body. How could he remember? He had freed himself from time, abandoning the gloomy years to molder in those locked vaults while he, transplanted into a lovely tale, could play with beauties and treasures, steered through ever purer adventures by the head, his general and prophet.

  Then he spied a squad of infantry filing up from the beach, and his heart sank. He seemed to see again the gory throats and bulging eyes of his late comrades. If he somehow escaped hanging, burning or decapitation, they would send him to sort stones in the mines. The sack at his belt buzzed as if a wasp nest were in it. As rapidly as discretion allowed, he turned a corner, then ducked into a palm thicket where he and Salvador used to conceal themselves.

  What now? asked the head.

  We need to fly away!

  They’re nothing to us, brother. Have you considered your future?

  I’d like to be rich, said Agustín.

  The infantrymen were level with them now, but they seemed unable to see or hear anything. Trying to be brave and live up to the head’s expectations, Agustín treated his enemies as if they did not exist, and continued the conversation, saying: Can you get me a mountain of silver?

  Would you rather have that, or a jade palace?