by James Blake
The next morning, after a swim in the garden pool, he returned to his bedroom just as she was making up his bed. Her back was to him and she had one knee up on the mattress and was reaching across the bed to adjust the covers. The thin cotton skirt molded itself to her fine rump, and the raised hem exposed almost all of one lean brown leg. He made a small sound he was unaware of making and startled her. She spun about and met his eyes. And smiled. He shut the door behind him and their clothes flew. He had not had a woman since his last time with Alma, more than eight months before, and he was so becrazed with desire he did not even wonder if she were married. He anyway would have assumed that, like most of the household girls, she was not. As for Katrina, she had decided beforehand that if he should ask if she were married she would tell him the truth. But he did not ask.
In fact, everyone in the house but John Roger knew she had been married for more than a year to Alfonso Ávila. He was an army corporal posted sixty miles away at the garrison in Orizaba and had not received leave to come home in over five months. He had been a mason at the hacienda when Katrina married him on a passionate impulse when they were both seventeen. He was handsome and strong but, unlike her, illiterate. They’d been married three months when they went to Veracruz one Sunday to attend the wedding of a friend and that night Alfonso got into a drunken street fight and beat a man to permanent paralysis. He was jailed overnight and then given the choice of enlisting in the army or facing a sure conviction for maiming and several years in prison.
No sexual escapade in the casa grande could be kept secret for very long, and within hours of its occurrence the don’s dalliance with Katrina was known to the entire staff, just as they’d known of his intimacies with Alma Rodríguez. But the housemaids were proud of their trusted position, and it was a rule among them never to gossip of household affairs or of the don—except of course among themselves. They knew how much Don Juan had loved Doña Isabel and how desolate he had been since the loss of her, and they understood the respite, however illusory and short-lived, that sex could give to loneliness. They did not regard his sexual indulgence disrespectful to la doña’s memory, nor had they disapproved of Alma Rodríguez, who had been single when she comforted the don with her flesh. Katrina Ávila, on the other hand, they deemed a shameless wanton who had betrayed not only her absent husband but Don Juan as well—by withholding from him the fact that she was wed. They all knew the patrón was not one to take advantage ever of another man’s wife, regardless of her willingness. His conduct in that respect was well established and in contrast to that of many hacendados, some of whom still exercised a patrón’s ancient Right of First Night with the bride of any worker on their estate. When Josefina got word of John Roger’s cavort with Katrina, she went to him and informed him the girl was a wife. He was furious, and ashamed of his own carelessness. The next day, in the privacy of his office, he rebuked Katrina for her lie of omission and demoted her from the casa grande staff to the compound dairy.
Had anyone asked her why she’d done it—which no one did or would—Katrina would have said she didn’t know, or that it was just a foolish impulse of the moment. Had she pressed herself for a truthful answer, she might have admitted she’d done it for adventure. To enliven her dull life. But she hadn’t figured on losing her position in the casa grande—nor on a far more serious consequence when two months later she realized she was carrying Don Juan’s child. She bemoaned the wretched luck that would impregnate her on a single mating with the patrón, while all of her husband’s tenacious efforts had thus far been fruitless, much to his disappointment. She debated with herself for days before deciding she would go to the curandera of Santa Rosalba, who was said to be highly skilled at relieving this sort of difficulty. The decision of course carried risks. Some girls had died in consequence of the procedure. And even if it went well, her visit to the curandera was sure to attract the notice of nosy villagers who would speculate about its purpose. What if such talk should make its way from the village into the compound and maybe even somehow become known to Alfonso? Still, what other choice did she have?
But bad fortune was not yet done with her, and on the morning of the day she intended to go to the curandera, Corporal Alfonso Ávila came rushing through the door with a great loud laugh and snatched her up in his arms and spun her around as he told her of the ten-day leave the army had granted him and wasn’t this a wonderful surprise! He lofted her onto the bed and didn’t even fully remove his pants in his rush to make love to the wife he had not seen in so long. For the whole week he was home they mated at least thrice daily—and thus was Katrina’s course set. Maybe this time we will be lucky and make a baby, Alfonso said.
We can only hope and pray, she said.
A visit to the curandera was now out of the question. Should Alfonso learn of it, he would believe she had murdered his child. It was all she could do to wait a scant month before sending him the happy news of their baby in the making. In his response by dictated letter Alfonso proclaimed great joy but asked how she could be so sure so soon.
She wrote back that there are some things a woman just knows.
By then, some of the older women with whom she worked at the dairy had begun to suspect the truth, and their gossip reached the casa grande and Josefina’s ear. When she told John Roger that he may have seeded a child in Katrina, he put his head in his hands. I do not mean to be disrespectful, Don Juan, the old woman said, but perhaps it would be best to do it only with courtesans from now on. They do not have such accidents. That was the word she used—“cortesanas.” Her scolding sarcasm galled him, but she withstood his glare with equanimity until he looked away.
Katrina delivered a son in July, much earlier than she had claimed to expect him, and the child’s complexion and facial features told the truth of his paternity to everyone who saw him. As the news made swift circulation of the hacienda, there was little faulting of Don Juan and much malicious derision of Katrina Ávila, who was mortified. On learning from Josefina that he was without doubt the father, John Roger cursed. Then sighed. Then sent a man to Katrina with a purse of silver specie. Beyond that, he could only wish her well.
Katrina kept to her house to care for the baby and lived in terror of the day Alfonso would know the truth. She waited for more than two months before sending him the news of the baby’s birth, allowing him the assumption that it had just been born. Alfonso’s response was full of joyous declarations of love but included also a profane tirade about the goddam army, which in the past month had reduced him to the rank of private and was restricting him to the post indefinitely, all because of a little fight with another soldier who happened to lose an eye.
The baby was nearly six months old before Private Avila at last received leave to go home and see him. And as Katrina had feared, he perceived the truth at once and flew into a rage. The neighbors too had expected him to know at first sight that the child was not his and they had debated among themselves whether he would kill Katrina or merely maim her. They in any event expected a loud and impassioned entertainment and they got it. But they were disappointed by its brevity. Alfonso had hit Katrina only a few times before she was able to divert him with the purse of silver. He sat at the table and counted it twice. It was more money than he’d ever thought he might hold in his hands.
Everyone would agree it should have ended there. Like everybody else, Alfonso knew that many a man’s wife on many a hacienda had been obliged to attend a patrón’s bed. It was a common humiliation of hacienda life, one against which hacienda workers had no legal recourse, which they could only endure. But it was a rare thing for a patrón to make any sort of recompense for an act he could by right exercise with impunity. Like everybody else, Alfonso knew that too. But Katrina was his wife, goddammit! His wife. Had he known John Roger had thought she was unmarried, his pain would not have been so sharp. You could not after all blame a man for enjoying a woman he supposed to be single. But he assumed that the don had known she was married, and he never thoug
ht to ask Katrina whether that was so.
Katrina had of course been afraid he would ask that very question. She knew how much worse it would go for her if Alfonso should learn that the full extent of her perfidy included having withheld from the don the fact of her wifehood. She had thought about lying if Alfonso should ask, but she knew the lie would not stand up to the patrón’s denial, and so she determined to tell the truth. Tell it and hope to survive the consequence. But tell it only if Alfonso asked. And he didn’t.
She would later say that Alfonso had seemed resigned to the situation. He sat at the table and toyed with the silver pieces and drank from a bottle of aguardiente. He did not say anything about the patrón that could be taken as a threat. His sole reference to the don seemed directed to himself as much as to her—that at least the father wasn’t some stupid good-for-nothing. A neighbor woman looked in to see if Katrina was still alive, then took her and the baby to her house to treat the bruises on her face.
Alfonso counted the money once again, then drank the last swallow from the bottle. He was pleased about the money but felt in need of more drink to soothe his agitated soul. He could have bought another bottle in the hacienda store but he did not want to chance running into anyone he knew and having to converse, so instead decided to go to the cantina of Santa Rosalba. As he walked across the compound plaza toward the main gate, those who recognized him were surprised to see him and would later say he seemed disturbed by their smiles of welcome. Not until afterward did the possibility occur to them that he thought they were laughing at him for the horns on his head.
Earlier that day John Roger had gone out to the coffee farm, and that afternoon he happened to come riding back through the gate as Alfonso Ávila was crossing the plaza. According to witnesses, Private Ávila stopped in his tracks at the sight of the patrón on his trotting stallion. One observer would describe Alfonso as looking like he had just remembered something very important. John Roger was unaware of him but would not anyway have known who he was, never having met him. He reined up at a fruit stand and told the vendor the mangos looked delicious. As the vendor sought the best one for the patrón, Alfonso walked over to a gardener’s wagon parked at the fountain and took a machete from it.
Cries of warning drew John Roger’s attention to the soldier running at him with a machete raised to strike. He reined the horse around hard just as Alfonso swung at him and the blade sliced into the animal’s neck. The horse screamed and reared and there was a fount of blood as Alfonso yanked the machete free and fell down. John Roger tumbled from the saddle and landed on his back amid an outburst of panicked shrieks. The screaming horse bolted and Alfonso barely managed to roll out of its way. Then got up and started toward the don again. Supine and breathless, John Roger drew his revolver from under his coat and shot Alfonso twice, the first bullet hitting his shoulder and jarring him half-about and the second punching through his side and knocking him down. Alfonso struggled to get up, still gripping the machete, lung-shot and streaming blood from his mouth. He was on all fours when John Roger shot him above the ear and the bullet exited the other side of his head in a scarlet spray and ricocheted off a stone wall and smacked the haunch of a tethered burro and the animal flinched and brayed.
John Roger’s breath returned in a rush. The fruit vendor helped him up and people came out from behind the wagons and trees and walls where they had taken cover. Somewhere his horse was screaming without pause—and then a rifle shot silenced it.
He stood over the dead man and asked “Quién es?” and was told he was Alfonso Ávila. And then remembered Katrina’s husband was a soldier, and understood why the man had wanted to kill him.
The flesh, he thought. The damnable flesh.
Take him to Santoso, he said. And headed for the casa grande as Alfonso was gathered up and borne away to the coffin-maker.
The six-year-old twins had been playing in a room at the rear of the house when they heard the faint screams and the first two gunshots and then the third. They ran through a series of hallways to the forward part of the house and out onto a shaded balcony from where they could see the plaza. A crowd was flanking their father, who held a pistol and stood beside a soldier sprawled in a puddle of blood, a machete in his hand. The twins would never speak of their witness of this scene except to each other and it would be a few years yet before they came to know the particulars of it. But observing unseen from the shadow of the balcony, they understood that their father had been attacked and had in retaliation killed the attacker. They grinned at each other, proud of a sire so adept at self-defense. And with but one arm.
John Samuel also saw the aftermath. He was working on some ledgers in his office when the sudden screams of the horse got his attention and then came the gunshots. He hurried from the office and across the hall into a room facing the plaza and from the window saw his father assisted to his feet and then stand over a fallen soldier as a throng gathered about them. There was a great deal of blood. It took John Samuel a moment to comprehend that the soldier was dead, that his father had shot him, and he fought down the impulse to be sick. He stood unmoving until his father started toward the house, then he went to the main stairway and there waited until he heard him enter the main room. Then went down to him, saying, “Father! My God! Are you all right?”
John Roger saw his son’s pale fright and assured him that he was unhurt. They went into the main office and John Roger poured drinks. John Samuel asked what happened, and John Roger said the attacker was a soldier married to a woman who’d once been a maid in the house. It seemed somebody of malicious intent lied to the soldier that the patrón had been taking advantage of his wife. “As I’m sure you know,” John Roger said, “there are many false rumors about every patrón of every hacienda. It’s unfortunate that sometimes the wrong men believe them.”
John Samuel heard the tight timbre in his father’s voice and knew it for the sound of a lie, the first he was ever aware of hearing from him. The lie saddened him even as the reason for it filled him with disgust. He had an urge to weep. How could you have been so weak, he thought. So unfaithful to your wife? To my mother? So disrespectful of her? And with a housemaid!
“I’m just . . . relieved that you’re all right, Father.”
John Roger was moved by the shimmer in John Samuel’s eyes. He went to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Everything’s fine, son.”
The next morning he telegraphed an account of Alfonso’s death to the colonel in command of the Orizaba garrison. He explained that he had been obliged to shoot the soldier in self-defense when the man tried to kill him in a drunken fury and the mistaken conviction that he had violated his wife. The colonel wired back that the problem of drunken peón soldiers and their violent petty jealousies was nothing new to him and that he well understood what happened. Moreover, Private Ávila had always been a troublemaker. He thanked John Roger for the report and said he would greatly appreciate it if the don would see to the disposal of the remains. Alfonso was buried that afternoon.
Six weeks later he took Katrina and the baby to the train station in Veracruz, having arranged employment for her at a hacienda in Puebla. The rail line connecting Veracruz to Mexico City, with stations at towns in between, had been completed three years earlier, and shortly after its opening John Roger had commissioned his own rail track from Buenaventura to Veracruz for the transport of his coffee. The hacienda now had a depot with several side tracks and its own locomotive and freight cars, plus a passenger car by which John Roger had since made all his trips to Veracruz.
On their way there he asked Katrina if she had yet named her child. That was how he said it—“tu niño.” The attribution did not escape her and she gave him a sharp look that made him curse himself for a stooge and wish he had said “el niño.”
“Juan Lobo,” she said. He said it was not amusing. She said it was not meant to be.
At the Veracruz station he escorted her to the platform for the Puebla train, together with the maid assigned
to assist her on the trip and the armed man charged with protecting them. At the coach steps he gave her yet more money and entreated her to be careful and to take good care of the child.
You should be more careful too, Don Juan, she said.
He waited on the platform until the train at last lurched into motion with great reverberant clankings. Then raised his hand to wave goodbye, but she had already turned her face from the window.
ACCOUNT TO
THE COURTESAN
For a long time after the killing of Alfonso Ávila, John Roger was sick at soul. He was sworn not to father another child nor chance another gulling by a married woman or the wrath of another husband. He tried to work himself to a tiredness too great for much reflection. When he wasn’t at the coffee farm he was at the horse ranch John Samuel had started on Buenaventura and named Rancho Isabela.
But there was no ignoring the crave of the flesh. He knew Josefina had been correct about the way to avoid such risks, but he had not forgotten his boyhood vow to abstain from prostitutes forevermore. A man was only as worthy as his word and no pledge he made was more important than one made to himself. A man who broke his word to himself would break it to anybody. Still, the more he thought about it, the more he began to construe his vow as a gesture of callow youth, as lacking the sanction of experience. In this fashion did his yearning grapple with his principles, off and on, for almost four years before he finally concluded that a grown man should not be ruled by an oath made as a boy. Besides, in a world of such fickle turnings, it seemed senseless to ever say never again.
