Some among the mob of onlooking peons snickered and some laughed outright and some called out to El Carnicero to shoot the gachupín son of a bitch. They who an hour before would have cowered in Don César’s presence, who would have obeyed his every command without hesitation and were ever in fear of displeasing him, they now laughed at him oh so bravely. How they had hastened to show their whip and branding scars—as if they hadn’t deserved them!—to this murderer, this notorious executioner and infamous right hand of Pancho Villa the bandit, Villa the mad dog, the king of all half-caste whoresons. Yet some few of the spectators wept in their witness of Don César’s ordeal.
Yes, you have suffered much, patrón, El Carnicero said, holstering the revolver. He slid his hand behind Don César’s neck and held him gently and smiled at him. Then the hand clamped tight and Don César saw but an instant’s gleam of the knife before all in a single motion its point pierced the corner of his eye and the blade slid around the curve of the socket to core the eyeball from its mooring.
Don César screamed and clapped a hand to the emptied socket and flexed into a half-crouch of agony, biting his lip hard against further outcry. His remaining eye saw blood pocking the dust at his feet and staining his boots. Some in the mob laughed, some cried out, some blessed themselves and turned away.
El Carnicero grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up to face him. He had the bloody eye in his palm and held it for Don César to see. This thing, the man said, bobbing his palm as if assaying the worth of what it contained, has always been blind to justice, to the truth. He dropped the eye to the ground and made Don César look down at it and then ground it under his bootheel.
Maybe the other eye will now serve you better, El Carnicero said. If it does not, I will come back and remove it too.
He told the mob not to kill Don César, that killing would be too swift a punishment and kinder than he deserved. Then he wished Don César a long remaining life full of unpleasant memories and rode away with his gang of devils.
Still more thieves and scavengers fell upon the hacienda over the following years. Sometimes they came almost on each other’s heels, sometimes there were no raiders for months, but always they had come, pack after pack, each finding less remaining to pillage on Las Cadenas. But each had heard the story of how the patrón—the former rurales comandante—had come to wear the eyepatch. They had all heard of El Carnicero and knew better than to kill a man he had deigned to leave alive. What if the Butcher should come back to pleasure himself further with this gachupín once more and learn that someone had killed him? What if he should learn who had done it?
And so Don César lived and endured. It might be that the man who cut out his eye never knew that he had protected the patrón of Las Cadenas from other rebel bands, or that he had given Don César a reason to live. Don César withstood the remaining years of the Revolution in anticipation of the deaths of his tormentors—and of rebuilding the hacienda as best he could, if for no other purpose than to show that it could not be destroyed by such rabble as his tormentors.
Two years after the loss of his eye, he received word of El Carnicero’s death. The man had drowned in a horseback crossing of a lake in northern Chihuahua. Don César sang at the news, he did a little dance. But his celebrant joy was checked by the knowledge that Pancho Villa—the man who had unloosed El Carnicero on Mexican civilization—was yet alive. And the bastard managed to stay alive all through the Revolution. In 1920, when the government made its separate peace with Villa and granted him a hacienda, Don César’s rage was apoplectic. Then three years later came the news of Villa’s assassination by persons unknown—and Don César declared a three-day fiesta to commemorate the grand occasion.
Every year since then, he had made an annual hundred-mile trip to Hidalgo de Parral, the town where Villa had been killed and was buried, and there Don César had pissed on the monster’s grave. Three years after Villa’s death, unknown persons broke into his tomb and made away with his head, and Don César had been torn in his emotions—elated by the desecration to Villa’s remains, but dismayed not to have thought to commit the act himself. He fancied he would have used the skull as a dish to feed his dog. The headless cadaver had been reburied and the grave fortified, but even a concrete grave can be pissed upon, and so Don César continued to make his yearly visits to Parral.
The Revolution had reduced the breadth of his patronage and robbed the estate of an opulence it would never recover—not to speak of the caches of money the bastards had rooted out. Yet the hacienda had survived. Unlike his father’s estate, whose ownership had been usurped by a decree of the revolutionary government, Las Cadenas remained Don César’s property by prevailing legal title. The casa grande stood intact, and most of its outbuildings. Nor had all of Don César’s hidden strongboxes been discovered.
For all their plundering, the savages had been unable to thieve the beauty of the land nor drive away all of the hacienda’s peon population, who after all had nowhere else to go. Even many of those who had fled the estate during the years of greatest violence had begun to come back to Las Cadenas’ guardian walls, their hats in their hands, to ask Don César if they might serve him as before. And he had taken them back. And if some among them had returned with errant notions that the strict discipline of Las Cadenas had been ameliorated by the riot called the Revolution, well, his whips and branding irons were at hand to prove them wrong, and he again made routine use of those instruments of moral and political instruction. Occasionally he invented punishment on the moment, as when he unleashed one of his hunting dogs on a twelve-year-old boy who had flung a pebble at the beast for barking at him. The boy’s face was horribly disfigured and his left arm forever crippled, and well into his adulthood mothers would point him out to their children as an example of the consequence of transgression against Don César, or El Comandante, as he was commonly known among the peons.
His surviving gold and silver amounted to a fraction of his former wealth but it was sumptuous in comparison with what remained to so many of his caste. Many had seen their great houses reduced to rubble, their estates razed to charred earth. Many had lost every peso. Many had lost their lives. With his remnant money Don César was able to restore Las Cadenas to a semblance of its former splendor. He repaired the casa grande, re-tiled its roofs, re-landscaped its patios, refurbished its rooms. He put his peons to work on the estate’s damaged earth until portions of the fields again began to produce maize. He acquired some few horses of passable worth and the herd slowly grew to respectable size.
But without his family to inhabit it, the casa grande, for all its revived beauty, was like an empty husk, and his sense of isolation increased over the years. His sleep was ever fitful, visited nightly by frightful dreams. He was consumed by horrid spells of melancholy. His loneliness swelled to smothering size. Vaguely insidious yearnings stirred in him like a nest of vipers. He of course had his pick of the prettiest mestizo girls on the estate, but their gratifications were strictly of the flesh and left him in progressively greater despond for reasons he could not name. His heart itself felt like a house abandoned, a dwelling for none but creatures of the dark.
And then one day of the preceding summer, when he was on the Gulf Coast on business, he caught sight of the girl for the first time.
He saw her as she dashed across the beach road, the blue skirt of her school uniform swirling around her brown legs. He could not take his eyes off her as she strode down the streets of the city, a straw bag over her shoulder, her black hair wet from her swim and swinging to her hips. Men turned and stared as she passed them by.
Don César directed his driver to follow her. She made her way deep into an increasingly squalid neighborhood of stinks and strident voices and at last entered a courtyard containing two tiers of hovels. She vanished through the doorway of one on the lower floor.
He ordered his men to make discreet but thorough inquiries. By the following evening he knew that she was sixteen years old and lived in t
hat dismal place with her mother and father and was their only surviving child. The father was a street cleaner for the city and given to drink, the mother did seamstress work at home and was herself drunk every night. The couple frequently and violently quarreled, common behavior in that shabby barrio. They were the girl’s only living kin. She’d had an uncle, a fisherman, whom she had clearly favored over her parents, but he had drowned in the gulf the year before. Despite her family’s poverty, she was enrolled in an excellent Catholic academy, attending on a scholarship she had won at age twelve in a statewide essay contest. She was required to maintain superior grades in order to renew the scholarship from year to year, and so far she had done so, despite, as her school record phrased it, “unconventional attitudes,” a proclivity for asking “mischievous questions” of the faculty nuns, and a reputation for occasionally “prankish behavior.”
Don César could not sleep that night but only lay in bed with the smell of the sea carrying into his hotel room and moonlight slanting through the open balcony doors. He was enraptured—feeling more alive than he had in more than two decades. A bat swooped into the room and circled it thrice and flew out again, and he, a lifelong disparager of all superstition, took it for an omen. At dawn he rang down for coffee and was sipping his second cup on the balcony when the edge of the sun broke red as blood at the far rim of the gulf. And he was decided.
He had first thought to buy her outright—to offer the parents a sum greater than they could conjure in their dreams, and he was certain they would greedily accept it. But then, on reflection, he was not so sure. One could not trust to the practicality of primitives, could not trust them to know what was best for themselves. Never whisper to the deaf or wink at the blind—an old adage and a wise one. They might in their stupidity reject his money and thus make the matter altogether more difficult. But even if they should accept the offer, only a fool would trust in brutes to honor their side of a bargain. The word of a brute was worthless. The rabble were slaves to their emotions, notorious for sentimental shifts of mind. The parents might sooner or later choose to create complications for him by way of protest to the authorities, a turn of events that would at the least oblige him to make an additional round of payoffs to a wider circle of hands. No! Despite his inclination to be fair, to pay a just price for what he desired, he knew it was folly to expect the girl’s parents to understand even the most fundamental notions of fairness and honor.
And so, later that day, after the girl was out of school and had taken her swim in the gulf and was making her way home through the rundown back streets, they drove up alongside her and one of Don César’s men asked if she could give them directions to an address they were unable to find. As she stepped up to the Cadillac the man jumped out and clapped a hand on her mouth and pulled her into the backseat and the vehicle gunned away. In seconds the car was around the block and out of sight. Whoever might have witnessed the kidnapping could not have noted very much, the whole thing happened so swiftly.
She was terrified of course—her eyes wild above the hand that stifled her efforts to scream, curse, plead, whatever she might have done. Don César leaned against the other back door and watched her. By the time they were out of town and on the open road she had ceased to struggle, but her eyes were streaming tears and she was snorting hard for breath through her runny nose. Don César gestured for his man to unhand her. She pulled away from the man but was careful not to come into contact with either of them—sobbing hard now, her arms crossed over her breasts, her knees together, her hand wiping at her eyes and nose. Don César held his silk handkerchief to her and she glanced at it and looked away. Don César shook the hankie gently and after another moment’s hesitation she snatched it from his hand and blew her nose and wiped her eyes.
He asked if she felt better now—and her face was suddenly as tight with anger as with fear. Who was he, she demanded to know. Where was he taking her? What did he want? As if she already knew the answer to that last question, she hugged herself even more tightly and drew her pressed knees still farther from him.
Don César said everything would soon be clear to her, and asked that she not agitate herself further. He promised she would not be harmed.
She wiped at her eyes and stared down at her lap.
He could hardly believe his grand fortune—she was even more beautiful up close than she had appeared from a distance.
They arrived at an isolated landing strip just north of the city and boarded a small chartered plane. He’d been afraid she might resist going aboard and would have to be carried bodily, but her awe of the aircraft was obvious—and her excitement, it amused him to note, was sufficient to distract her from her fears. When the engine roared and the craft began to move she clutched tight to the arms of her seat. She stared out the window at the landscape speeding past and he made soothing sounds at her as he would to a skittish horse. The plane lifted off and she gasped—and then gaped at the sinking, tilting view of the gulf. And then the sea was behind them and the dark green hill country appeared below, and then the sudden mountains like enormous heaps of crushed copper gleaming in the day’s dying light. Then they were in clouds and there was nothing more to see.
He told her his name, told her where he was from, told her of his past. When he told her he’d been an officer of the Guardia Rural her eyes widened. He told her of his heroic rescue of the president’s niece some thirty-six years ago and of the wounds he had suffered, of the honors he had been given by Don Porfirio, told her of La Hacienda de Las Cadenas and described its magnificence, told her of the barbarities inflicted upon it by the Revolution. He told her—his throat going hot and tight with the recollection—of the tragic loss of his family, and told how he had lost his eye.
Through the latter portions of his narrative, her attention had begun to wane, and she several times turned to the window, perhaps checking to see if the clouds had cleared. But when he described the life she would have at Las Cadenas she listened with greater heed. At Las Cadenas, he told her, she would lead a more wonderful life than she could ever have envisioned for herself. She would live like a princess, she would have servants, beautiful clothes. She would never again know want.
He saw his words touch her, saw in her eyes a sudden spark of imagination. Though her aspect was still uncertain, he could see that she was envisioning the life he had pictured. And that the vision excited her.
She asked again what he wanted with her.
He wanted her to live with him at Las Cadenas.
As what, she wanted to know. His whore?
No. As his wife.
She stared at him for a long moment as if he were some intricate message written in a difficult scrawl. Then asked why her.
Because she was so beautiful, he said. Because she possessed a wonderful spirit. Because he loved her.
Loved her? But how, she wanted to know, could that be?
He admitted he did not know. But then who, he said, can explain love?
She blushed and covered her mouth with her hand and turned to the window and the dark clouds sweeping by.
When she looked at him again her face was changed. There was no fear or wariness in it now, only a mien of careful calculation, as if she were assessing odds at a gaming table. He could not imagine what she was thinking.
And then she accepted his proposal. She said it as if she were agreeing to some irrefutable practicality.
He laughed with a mix of delight and relief and briefly touched her hand. She smiled and said she had heard of less dramatic and somewhat more extended courtships—and this time they laughed together.
His two men in the seats ahead of them never said a word and never turned around.
They landed at Torreón, where his car was waiting, and late that night arrived at the casa grande. He spoke with the head housemaid and then told the girl to go with her, that she would be fed and bathed and shown to her bedchamber. The girl trailed after the maid, casting looks everywhere as she went.
The following day he had a team of seamstresses from Torreón fit her for a silk wedding gown and a silver crown inlaid with three small rubies. A priest was fetched and that early evening they were wed in the garden alongside the casa grande. Some hours later, following a celebration party in the patio, the maids brought her to his open chamber door and knocked timidly. The girl wore a satin nightgown the color of pearl. Her unpinned black hair shone in the candlelight. Her eyes were uncertain. He dismissed the maids and beckoned the girl. From the pocket of his dressing gown he took out a necklace, a fine gold chain holding a small diamond pendant. He gestured for her to turn around and told her to raise the hair off her neck. She was facing a full-length wall mirror and their eyes met as he clasped the necklace at her nape and then tenderly kissed her bare shoulder. Her eyes widened and her lips parted, and whether she was looking at the diamond at her throat or his lips on her neck he could not have said. He held her breasts from behind, their nipples hard against his palms.
He turned her around and kissed her. He slid the straps of the gown from her shoulders and the garment streamed to a pale puddle at her feet. Whatever she might have been feeling, shame in her nakedness was no part of it. She was more beautiful than he had imagined. Lean, sleek, brown. He took her hand and led her to the bed. She was eager for it. Her mouth received his with a hunger the more arousing to him for its obvious lack of practice, her touches more exciting for their tentativeness. She was virgin—the bloodspot on the sheets would testify to it. Had she not been, he was prepared to annul the marriage in the morning. She cried at his entry but then was soon gasping from effect other than pain, writhing unartfully but urgently beneath him, digging her fingers into his back, inspiring him to heroic effort.
They made love on each of the first few nights of the marriage before he flagged utterly. He had not risen to such occasion with such frequency since his youth, and his expended vigor was slow to recoup. Thereafter he rarely visited her bedchamber more often than once a week. He desired her constantly in his imagination and the sight of her naked body never failed to excite his lust, but his aged flesh was recalcitrant and he was deeply humiliated by his frequent failures as a lover. He had secretly hoped that she might bear him a son, a successor to Las Cadenas—but if she were never to conceive he knew the fault would more likely lie in his old and sapless seed than within her young womb. Still, he believed he could endure the disappointment of a barren marriage as long as he could touch her.
Under the Skin Page 9
