by James Blake
He made his first visit to El Castillo de las Princesas on a starry November evening. A mansion that had once been the residence of a state governor, it was the most extravagant brothel on the Mexican gulf coast, an exclusive establishment whose members were all men of means and social station. It had a ballroom with a glass ceiling and a parquet floor. Every room was furnished with its own porcelain bathtub and canopied feather bed. All the girls of the house were young Creoles, none less than lovely, none without education or social poise. And all of them outcasts from landed families, disowned for one or another unforgivable transgression against the family honor, the details in each case known only—if known at all—to the madam and perhaps to some person who had guided the girl to her.
Ever a man of routine, John Roger began patronizing El Castillo on the first and third Tuesdays of every month. He chose a different girl on each of his first five visits, and the first four of them would have agreed that he seemed to take no true pleasure in the act but went about it in the way of a man who drinks only to be drunk. The fifth time, he chose a new girl, Margarita, who had come to El Castillo only the week before. She was pretty of course, but he could see she was older than the others. The others were girls, while she was a woman. She had claimed, with a wink, to be twenty-two, but even at that age would have been older than the next oldest girl in the house by three years. The general guess was that she was not younger than twenty-five and likely closer to thirty. She liked to joke about being the house senior. As she and John Roger ascended the stairs together, she said she was getting so old that before long she’d have to be carried up to the room.
After their coupling, they were lying side by side and gazing at the crescent moon framed in the black rectangle of the window when a shooting star described a bright streak just below the moon and was gone.
Quick, Margarita said, make a wish.
She shut her eyes to make her own wish. Then felt him sit up and looked to see him staring at the window.
What is it? she said, and put a hand on his arm. And he broke into tears.
“Ay, querido! Qué te pasa?” She sat up and put her arms around him and drew him to her. He heaved with sobs and she felt his breath hot against her neck, his tears on her shoulder. She rocked him as she would a frightened child. “Ya, mijo, ya. Todo será bien, mijito, ya lo verás.” She rocked him and crooned to him and petted him, and after a time his sobs began to ease to a softer gasping.
She lay back, hugging him down alongside her, cradling his head in her arms, his cheek to her bosom. His nose was running and he snorted for breath, and she plucked her chemise from the bedpost and put it to his nostrils and said Blow, and he did, and she said Again, and he did. She wiped his nose and put the chemise aside, and again held him close. She felt his respiration begin to slow, the tension slackening in his muscles. “Dime, mi amor,” she said. Whatever it is. You can tell me.
And he did. Beginning with Elizabeth Anne, of course, who had always made a wish at the sight of a falling star. Of whom he had spoken to no one since she had been taken from him. Nearly eleven years now and still there were moments of emotional ambush when he missed her so much he would forget to breathe. He told Margarita of their meeting and marriage and moving to Mexico. Told her of their first child, who was quiet and studious and dearly loved horses. Told of their two later ones, the identical twins she died giving birth to.
“Ay, pobrecita,” Margarita said. “Que terrible. Que triste.”
Yes, he said. And fell asleep in her arms.
From then on he wanted none of the other girls, only Margarita. He kept his account paid for months in advance to ensure her availability to him for the entire evening on his two Tuesdays every month. Each time he came to see her, they would first make love and then talk. Or rather he would talk, for the most part, and she would listen. She was a good listener, her interest unfeigned, and she did not hesitate to say so when he was unclear in anything he told. He would then try to clarify what he meant, realizing she hadn’t understood because he hadn’t been sure what he was trying to say. In this way did she help him to better understand himself. Sometimes he would pause in his discourse and stare at the ceiling or out the window and she would wait in silence for as long as he needed to ponder before he resumed, though sometimes he would first have to ask Where was I? and she would remind him.
He spoke to her of things he had kept to himself in a hard and solitary confinement for these eleven years. He was still troubled that he could not remember the last thing Elizabeth Anne had said to him. She had said something to him a minute or two before that but he had never been able to recall what it was. Josefina told him la doña had said that the pink sky in the window was lovely, that she wished she knew what kind of bird was singing in the patio, that her backside itched. Doña Isabel said many things before you left the room, Josefina told him, and whether she was saying them to you or to somebody else and which was the very last thing, well, who knows? You know she loved you, that is all that is important. Let her last words be whatever you would like them to be. He told the crone such reasoning was self-deluding and called her an old fool. She said it was even more foolish to put so much importance on memory, which was the greatest deluder of all.
He had tried every night for a week after Lizzie’s funeral before he was able to compose a coherent letter to her parents and notify them of her death. The response was written by her father, the first letter he had ever posted to Mexico, and was terse and to the point. It advised John Roger that Mrs Bartlett was nearly mad with grief and excoriated him for his utter lack of judgment in having taken Lizzie to “that filthy, wretched place with its dearth of proper medical facility,” a lack that had no doubt contributed to his daughter’s death as much as had her husband’s own recklessness. Mr Bartlett demanded that her body be shipped home for burial in the family plot and that her children be sent to Concord as well, so they could receive “a proper upbringing.” John Roger wrote back to say Elizabeth Anne was already buried in her family’s plot and that their children would receive “a proper enough upbringing, I assure you, right here at home.”
Mr Bartlett’s next letter began with “Damn you” and closed with “Should you ever again show yourself in Concord, I swear by the Eternal I shall pummel you in the street.” In an accompanying note of two lines, Jimmy Bartlett, now a full partner in the firm, warned John Roger that if he did not ship Lizzie’s body to New Hampshire “I will go there myself to retrieve my Dear Sister’s bones by whatever means necessary.” John Roger did not answer either missive, and no Bartlett wrote to him again. And Jimmy did not come to Mexico.
He took to drink, though he had enough force of will to do it only in the evenings, when he would shut himself in his room with a bottle of mescal and linger over her photographs. As always, each picture revived not only the occasion of its making but a rush of other memories as well. Random recollections of her in radiant animation. Working the sails of their sloop and grinning under her sombrero. Gesturing for emphasis as she told him of yet another superstition or ghost story she had recently heard from the maids or old Josefina. Savoring a mango, its juice dripping from her chin. Swimming with dolphin grace in the shimmering cove. Smiling at him in the vanity mirror while she brushed her hair and he watched from the bed. A chain of memory after memory.
His mornings were glazed with hangover, yet he never failed to make his daily meeting with Reynaldo the mayordomo or to oversee the business of the coffee farm or to preside over the hacienda’s Saturday court, fulfilling his duties with a mechanical competence. As the days passed in rote sequence he told himself to cease his self-pity, that he was not the only man who had ever lost a wife. And each time would rebut himself that no, he was not, he was just the only one who ever lost her. Every visit to her grave in the enclave cemetery was a keener despair. Each day was a raw new regret.
The self-pity nearly undid him. She had been gone four months on the evening he once again spread her pictures on the deskt
op, but this time, sitting in the low light of the desk lamp, he lingered on his mental image of her standing at the balcony with the smoking Dragoon in her hands—and thought how simple it would be to end his pain. He finished the mescal bottle and opened a drawer and took out her Colt.
He sat for a time, cocking and uncocking the big revolver, watching the turns of the fully loaded cylinder. Take out all but one bullet and it was Russian Roulette. In Mexican Roulette, as he’d heard it defined, you took out only one. In Drunk Mexican Roulette you didn’t take out any. He envisioned the muzzle at his temple. Imagined a white blaze in his brain and his obliterated memories a scarlet mess on the wall. He could not imagine the nothingness to follow. He cocked the Colt again.
Where was best? Surest? He touched the muzzle to his forehead. His temple. Placed it in his mouth. The taste of the oiled metal was a novel fright. You would not want to fail, to achieve no more than a bad wound. Or worse by far, end up crippled. Paralyzed. Mind-damaged. Imagine the talk.
His gaze fell on a portrait photograph of her taken in a Boston studio on their second day of marriage. As she smiled for the camera she suddenly puckered her lips and smacked a kiss at him where he stood behind the photographer, who implored, “Madam, please! You must be still.” She’d made a contrite face toward the camera, then smiled again and looked at John Roger and winked—“Maaadam!”—and his breath had caught at the absolute wonder of her. An hour afterward they were eating oysters on the half shell at a window table overlooking the harbor. He recalled the briny savor of the oysters, the clean tartness of the wine. Recalled that same smile beaming at him as they touched glasses across the table and she said, “To you, Mr Wolfe. Till death do us part. Love’s dearest pledge.” So had they toasted, but he did not dwell on the remark, not until all those years later when he sat at the desk with her loaded gun cocked in his hand, staring at the picture of her taken on that day.
Love’s dearest pledge. Till death did them part. And he had thought death had done so. But as he stared at her picture he saw the truth. They were not parted. Not yet. Not while he remembered her. While he lived, she lived too—in the selfsame memories that tormented him for the lack of her living presence. Till death did them part. The pledge implied a fealty to life, an understood promise to hold to the memory of the other and damn the pain of it. To end the pain by such means as Drunk Mexican Roulette was a brute betrayal of that promise. He was not unaware of the banal cast of his argument but its effect was no less persuasive for that. And he put up the gun. He did not tell Margarita how many times since then he’d wondered if he simply lacked the courage to pull the trigger.
Margarita’s eyes were wide. I know, she said. The temptation of it. I know.
He asked how she knew, but she shook her head and looked away.
For more than four years after the loss of Elizabeth Anne he did not make love to another woman. But there were occasional late nights when a sudden remembrance of her without clothes—in her bath, swimming in the cove, lying beside him in the hammock of the moonlit verandah—would incite him to a frenzied masturbation that each time climaxed with him in tears. The more he recalled their pleasure in each other’s flesh, the more he wanted to yowl with the loneliness of his loss, his great aching yearn for the feel of her, the touch. That was when he began taking Alma Rodríguez to his bed. And though the trysts with Alma mauled his heart with the knowledge that the flesh he was relishing was not Lizzie’s and never never never again would be, he could not stop himself from returning to it again and again.
Then Alma got pregnant and he married her off. And then, fool that he was—selfish, stupid, self-deceptive fool who even after his experience with Alma would not yet face the truth that he was as much in thrall to the desires of his own damnable flesh as to the memory of his beloved—he bedded Katrina and she conceived too. And this time his selfish indulgence not only produced another bastard but provoked a man to try to kill him, and so made of the mother a widow as well. In consequence of which there followed another four years of maddening celibacy before his arrival at El Castillo de las Princesas.
His recounts to Margarita followed no order of chronology. Now he might speak of a thing that happened last month, now of a thing that took place when he was ten years old. But no matter the sequence, he told her many things he had never told anyone else. Told of his boyhood in Portsmouth and of his mother and his grandfather Thomas. Told her even of his pirate father. He told of his own twin brother Samuel Thomas and of the last time he’d seen him and of his mysterious disappearance and how the realization that Sammy was dead had almost killed him too. And told how—fool that he was, fool!—he thought he’d never again know such heartache as the loss of his brother. He told of his college days among an elite society of well-bred classmates and of keeping secret from them the truth about his father. When he said he had kept that truth even from Elizabeth Anne because he was afraid to jeopardize her love, Margarita sighed and her gaze on him was one of great pity.
She asked to know how he’d lost his arm and he told her, though he could no longer vouch for the truth of the particulars. It seemed to him he was describing something he had not done but dreamt. His memory of it was mostly an amalgam of blurry images and roiled sensations, of heavy sabers and ringing of steel, an antic play of torchlight shadows, a hardness of cobblestones under knees and hand. The indescribable feel of driving a sword blade through a man.
He told her of Richard Davison. Of Amos Bentley, that resourceful young fellow who had married into a rich and politically powerful Mexican family. Of his dear friend Charley Patterson, who had continued to make visits to the hacienda for years after Elizabeth Anne’s death. But Charley had known her so well that John Roger could not bear to talk to him about her, so they conversed mostly about the national upheavals of the day. They spoke often of Porfirio Díaz, who had become an avowed anti-reelectionist, and the little Texan had predicted that if Díaz were to lose to Juárez again in the next election he would rebel against him—which was what happened. John Roger had then accepted Charley’s wager of one dollar that Díaz’s rebellion would fail. And lost the bet when the federals scattered the rebel forces and Díaz went into hiding, no one was sure where, though some said he’d gone all the way to Texas. When Juárez dropped dead of a heart attack—a death the more shocking to most Mexicans in that the attack on his heart did not involve a bullet or a knife—neither John Roger nor Charley had known what historical turn to bet on next until Juárez’s successor, Sebastián Lerdo, offered amnesty to all rebels who would lay down their arms, and Patterson bet another dollar that Díaz would accept it. John Roger took the bet and lost again. Díaz’s public proclamation of his retirement from politics in order to devote himself to growing sugar cane on the gulf coast produced no bet between them because neither one believed him. They were sure Díaz was planning another revolt and were proved right when he pronounced against Lerdo in the spring. This time Díaz was triumphant. He took Mexico City in November of 1876 and only a few weeks later was duly elected president. One of his first official acts was to push through a constitutional amendment to prohibit reelection, and Patterson bet John Roger that Don Porfirio would in some way or other circumvent his own law when the time came. But Charley died during Díaz’s second year in office and so never knew the outcome of their bet. He had last been seen alive as he departed a malecón café where he had eaten a late supper and had a lot to drink. In the morning his body was floating facedown in the harbor. He bore no mark of violence and still had money in his pockets. It was assumed he had fallen in by accident and drowned.
He was old and tired and I suppose a lot lonelier than anybody knew, John Roger said. Except for Lizzie and my brother he was about the best friend I ever had. I wish I had let him know it.
My mother used to say that if wishes were horses no one would walk. It was the first reference Margarita had made in any way to her own past, a subject he had a few times before tried to broach and which she always artfully si
destepped. He asked what else her mother used to say.
She smiled at this attempt to steer the conversation toward herself. I think maybe your friend Charley knew how much you cared for him, she said. I bet he was laughing up in heaven because he did not have to pay the dollar.
John Roger said he wasn’t so sure about the heaven part but she was probably right about the laughing. At the end of his four-year term Díaz had honored his own law against reelection and did not run again. But everyone knew that the newly elected president, Manuel González, was an old friend of Díaz’s and would be his puppet until the next election, when Díaz would again be eligible to run.
They had known each other four months when Margarita asked to know more about his sons, to whom he had made only cursory mention in earlier visits. So he told of 26-year-old John Samuel, who had proved to have John Roger’s own gift for numbers and had been helping him with the hacienda’s bookwork since he was sixteen. He was a decorous man, John Samuel, with a keen mind for business, but he tended to keep his own counsel and rarely expressed his opinion on any matter that did not bear upon hacienda operations. John Roger sometimes wondered if even John Samuel’s wife knew him very well. Next week would be the third anniversary of his marriage to Victoria Clara Márquez, whose family raised the finest horses in the neighboring state of Hidalgo. They’d met when John Samuel went to her family’s hacienda near Pachuca to buy a Justin Morgan colt from her father, a fine man named Sotero Márquez. John Samuel had always been somewhat shy around women, but sweet-natured Vicki Clara was not only fluent in English and his intellectual equal, having been schooled by Jesuits, but she loved horses too, and so they had a shared enthusiasm. Sotero Márquez had been as pleased by the match as John Roger.
