by James Blake
Until they met each other they had both been sure they would not marry again, unwilling to risk having to bury yet another spouse, or worse, another child. But now Diego mocked himself for having been so fearful. It was easy to say never again when I was forlorn and had no one to love, he said. But now I am in love with you, my dearest Sófi, and now I know that love is stronger than fear. Let us be brave, Sófi! Let us be brave and marry.
She found it hard to share his bravado. She consulted with her mother, who said, I understand your worry, Sofita, but you mustn’t let it rule the rest of your life. I agree with Diego. Love is worth the risk. Besides, be reasonable. It is not very likely, is it, that the two of you together would have more of the same bad luck each of you has had so much of in the past?
Sófi wasn’t so sure about that, either. She thought very hard about it. But the more she thought, the more her focus sidled away from the risks involved and toward visions of herself and Diego in bed. Oh, how she missed that benefit of marriage! He was tall and lean, Diego was, and had long beautiful fingers. The thought of those fingers on her naked flesh deepened her breath and made her blush at her shameless reveries.
They were married in February in the little church of their neighborhood, the ceremony attended by their few friends who afterward joined in a party at La Rosa Mariposa that carried on until late in the evening. And when the last of the guests had left, the bride and groom went upstairs to Sófi’s room, which María Palomina had adorned with vases of fresh flowers and whose sheets she had sprinkled with perfume. The room was softly lighted with aromatic candles of all colors, and on a small table was an iced bucket of champagne and a platter of treats—spiced crackers, stuffed olives, shelled nuts—so the newlyweds wouldn’t lack for sustenance in the night.
Diego poured two glasses of the sparkling wine and said, To us, my darling, and all the life ahead.
They drank to their happy future. Then she made him sit in the armchair beside the refreshments and told him to stay put and just watch.
He sat back and sipped champagne and popped stuffed olives into his mouth, watching with bright eyes as she slowly began to undress. When she was down to her filmy underthings, she turned her back to him and slowly peeled off her undershirt—and smiled to hear his sudden gasp. She tossed the garment over her shoulder without a backward glance and then in a slow, teasing writhe began pushing down her underpants. She giggled as he began grunting and snorting like some aroused beast, thumping the floor with his feet. Oooh, she said in a small voice, I think I hear a big bad bull behind me. Is the big bad bull going to get me?
She turned and saw him slumped in the armchair with his hands at his throat and his face gone dark, eyes huge and bloodshot, mouth open and working with a soft gagging, legs atwitch. She was speechless with cold horror as she thought that this could not be happening and that of course this was happening. Of course. Then his gagging ceased and his feet went still and his hands slid away from his throat. He lay in an awkward slump, his wide eyes suggesting great surprise that all the sudden losses of his loved ones in the past had not in the least prepared him for his own abrupt end.
An hour later the summoned doctor held up for them to see—Sófi and María Palomina and Bruno Tomás—the stuffed olive he had dislodged from Diego’s windpipe.
I had been crying and crying, Sófi told John Roger, but when he held up that olive, well, you might not believe this, dear uncle, but I nearly laughed. I just barely caught myself. For a moment I was aghast. I was ashamed of myself for such a disrespectful impulse. And then in the next moment I was petrified. Because I realized the urge was insane and I knew that if I started to laugh I would never be able to stop, I would go forever crazy. It took all my will to keep from laughing.
You are too hard on yourself, John Roger said. The loss of a loved one can cause great emotional confusion. I think the impulse to laugh at such times is not so unusual as one might think.
And I think, she said, I was this close—she held up her hand, thumb and forefinger almost touching—to losing my mind. And I was very aware, Uncle John, that my mind was the only thing I had left to lose. So I refused to laugh. Otherwise, you would have known me only as your pitiful little niece in the crazyhouse.
What she had not told John Roger was that she could not regard Diego’s death as one more instance of bad luck by chance. However randomly bad luck might strike, she could no longer believe that it would by accident strike the same person again and again to such degree as it had struck her. The death of Diego not only revived her suspicion she was cursed, it convinced her she was. Once she accepted that explanation for her cumulative misfortunes, she felt the relief that comes from an end to perplexity. But she still could think of no reason for any supernatural force to place the curse on her, and hence had to believe its cause was in herself, that some dark personal fault was the source of her sorrowful calamities. Something in her blood. And when she thought of her father’s ordeals and those of her Uncle John, she had to wonder if maybe the curse was in the blood of the whole damned family.
On their last night together in Mexico City, they were joined for dinner by Amos Bentley. Sófi prepared chicken enchiladas with her special sauce seasoned with roasted garlic and minced green chile, and Amos was effusive in his praise of the meal. María Palomina complimented Amos on his Spanish and said that he and John Roger spoke the language better than most Mexicans she knew. Samuel Thomas had also spoken it well, she said, but with an accent all his own. She mimicked her husband’s enunciations, pretending to be him lauding Sófi for her enchiladas and asking for a second helping, and they all laughed, Bruno Tomás saying, That’s him! That’s exactly how he talked!
None laughed at his brother’s accent so hard as John Roger. He laughed until he was gasping, aware that the laughter was his first full-bellied guffawing since Elizabeth Anne was alive. And the others laughed with him, happy for him, understanding why his enjoyment was so great and why it came with tears. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose and said, Well now, that felt better than a thorn in the butt. And set off another round of laughter.
The following morning, he and Bruno Tomás took breakfast with the Blanco women and assured them they would return for a visit before long. The women promised in turn they would soon visit Buenaventura. There was much hugging and kissing at the front gate and then the men boarded a hack for the train station and the women cast kisses after them until they rounded the corner and were gone.
TWO WEDDINGS
Unlike her sister Sofía Reina, Gloria Tomasina had married only once, a marriage that was into its seventeenth year at the time John Roger heard about it from the Blancos in Mexico City. But it was a marriage more inconceivable in its making than any of Sofía Reina’s. It was but one extraordinary aspect of it that the man Gloria had been engaged to for five months when she awoke on the morning of July thirteenth, 1867, was not the man she married that night.
The fiancé of five months was a cavalry officer named Julián Salgado. María Palomina disliked him for a preening peacock but would have been displeased regardless by Gloria’s betrothal to a soldier. Sófi shared her mother’s dislike of Julián’s haughtiness but could not deny that he cut a handsome figure. She secretly believed that her sister—who well knew how much their parents detested all things military—had accepted the lieutenant’s proposal less out of love for him than for the dual satisfactions of spiting them and getting out from under their roof.
Gloria had always been an unpredictable puzzle to her family. She was always at odds with her parents, and if she rarely quarreled with her brother it was only because they were content to ignore each other. Only with Sófi did Gloria ever converse or join in genuine laughter, share a confidence or a pleasurable opinion. When she was fourteen she had refused to speak to her father for almost three months because he had not permitted a man nearly ten years her senior to escort her to a dance. Samuel Thomas was protecting a virginity the girl cheerfully granted a few months later to
a shy army recruit headed for a post in distant Sonora. By sixteen she’d known three other lovers. Her mother, who had been to bed with but two men in her life, dared not share with Samuel Thomas her suspicion that their daughter was not only no longer a maiden but was not even chaste.
Gloria had just turned seventeen when she announced her intention to marry Lieutenant Salgado, who had been courting her for three months. Knowing that to argue against the marriage would only reinforce the girl’s determination to go through with it, and hoping Gloria would change her mind of her own accord, María Palomina told her that if she truly wanted to marry the lieutenant, well then, she wished her the best. But Gloria had long been able to perceive her mother’s true feelings in any situation, and her smirk at the counterfeit good wishes made María Palomina want to snatch her by the hair and shake some proper respect into her. Samuel Thomas was a different matter, as Gloria had never been able to read her father’s mutilated face very well, and so when Julián made formal request for her hand and Samuel Thomas granted it with a smile and handshake and hearty congratulations, Gloria’s satisfaction derived entirely from her conviction that he did not mean a word of it. But Samuel Thomas’s blessing was sincere. As he confided to María Palomina, his dislike of Gloria’s marriage to a soldier was much outweighed by his relief that their daughter would soon be her husband’s problem and no longer theirs. The wedding was scheduled for the first Saturday in August.
It so happened that Raquel Aguilera, Gloria’s friend since childhood, was to be married three weeks before then, on the second Saturday in July. Gloria would serve as her maid of honor, and Sófi, who was almost fourteen and had also known Raquel most of her life, would be a bridesmaid—though she would be unescorted, as the boy who was to go with her would be taken ill at the last moment. Because of his refusal to venture farther than a few blocks from home, Samuel Thomas would not attend Raquel’s wedding, which would take place in a neighborhood at the far end of Avenida Reforma. The truth, as everyone in the family knew, was that he had never liked Raquel Aguilera and would probably not have attended her wedding if it had been held in the next room. But because Samuel Thomas did not go, María Palomina did not go either. And so, when Gloria left for the church on Raquel’s wedding day—on the arm of Julián Salgado and with Sófi in tow—it was the last time in their lives her parents ever saw her.
Raquel was marrying an American she had met at the end of the war against Maximilian and had known less than a month. She was working as a nurse in the central hospital when the Yankee was brought in with a chest wound he’d received a week earlier and which had become badly infected. His arrival caused a stir because he was accompanied by the military hero, General Porfirio Díaz, who made it clear to the hospital administrators that the American was a dear friend and ordered that he be attended by the best surgeons in the place. It was said the two men were of the same age and had saved each other’s lives, but nobody knew any of the details. It was a friendship even more unusual than anyone could have guessed, given how few true friends either man had or ever would. In the gringo’s case, only a brother already dead, his own first son, and a great-granddaughter not yet born. And while Díaz had called many men his friend and would so call many more—often with a patent irony that would chill them to the bone—the truth was that he had never had a true friend in his life, not even his own brother, save this gringo.
Raquel Aguilera was one of the nurses assigned to the American, who spoke fluent Spanish, and she told Gloria and Sófi of Díaz’s daily visits to him. The gringo’s only other visitor was his grown son, Louis, who understood Spanish much better than he spoke it. A rough-looking but handsome young man with a short blond beard and long hair to his shoulders in the fashion of American frontiersmen.
It was toward the end of the gringo’s stay in the hospital that he proposed marriage to Raquel and she accepted, even though she had known him so briefly and though he was more than twice her age. And even though, as everyone who saw him would attest, he was a man of grisly aspect. After seeing him at the wedding, Sófi would describe him as having a face scarred even worse than her father’s. The gringo had also lost an ear but hid the nub of it under long side hair. Worst of all, he had sometime in his youth been scalped by Indians—or so it was said. After seeing the tight black skullcap the man wore at his wedding, Sófi was sure it was true. She could tell that he was hairless under the cap and it made her shudder to imagine what the crown of his head must look like. Raquel Aguilera herself had never seen him without the cap.
That Raquel would marry a man she hardly knew, a foreigner—a gringo!—a man so physically repellent and so much older than herself, was baffling to her family and friends and every young man who had ever wooed her. Some believed she was marrying the Yankee because he was a man of secret wealth and she had somehow found out. Others said she was probably attracted to his power—if only because of his closeness to Díaz, the gringo was clearly a man to reckon with, and power was an attribute many women found even more alluring than wealth. But some only shrugged and said maybe there was no reasonable explanation for Raquel’s decision to marry him, maybe she was just in love. Which was in fact the case. The man’s name was Edward Little.
The wedding was performed in a church within sight of Chapultepec Castle. Attending from the bride’s side were Raquel’s few relatives and friends, but the groom had no family other than his son, who was not present at the start of the ceremony, and no friend but Díaz, who was his best man. To give the occasion a greater size and sense of festivity, Díaz had invited three dozen army officers and their female companions, plus a handful of stags to serve as extra dance partners at the reception. The officers were in full dress uniform, including their sabers.
It was Sófi’s first look at Díaz in person and she thought him even more striking in the flesh than in the photographs she had seen. He was tall and lean, with intense black eyes, unkempt short black hair, the downturned mustache of a pirate. He radiated ready quickness. But his manners were of the field camp. He was chatting with some officers just outside the church doors as Sófi was about to enter, and she saw him turn and spit into a bush behind him. And not until he was in the church and the ceremony had begun did he think to remove the toothpick from his mouth.
Díaz himself was recently wed, married but two months to a pretty mestiza named Delfina Ortega, who was sitting in the front pew on the groom’s side of the aisle. At age twenty, she too was much younger than her husband, and hardly better versed in the ways of polite society. She was also, Sófi had heard it whispered, her husband’s niece.
The ceremony was near conclusion when Sófi saw a black-suited young gringo come down a side aisle and take a seat at the far end of the pew where Díaz and his wife sat. By his long yellow hair and short beard Sófi knew him for Louis Little. During the final minutes of the mass, she looked his way again and saw him staring at Gloria where she stood at her post as maid of honor. Just then, as if she’d felt his gaze on her, Gloria turned her head and their eyes met. And he winked at her. The indiscretion was so shocking Sófi could hardly believe it. And even more incredible was the smile Gloria gave him in return. Sófi cut a look at Julián Salgado at the far end of the adjacent pew and saw that he was staring out the nearest window, his boredom with the ceremony as obvious as his unawareness of the exchange between Gloria and the gringo.
Then the service was over and everyone—including Father Benedicto, the old priest who had performed the ceremony and was known to have an affection for tequila—set off to the reception, which was being held in a mansion only a block away and owned by a friend of Díaz. On the walk there in the fading light of early evening, Sófi looked about for Louis Little but didn’t see him anywhere. Nor did she see him in the ballroom. She kept an eye out for him even as she waltzed with one young officer or another. During respites from dancing, she sat at a table reserved for the bridesmaids and their escorts, next to the dais on which the bridal couple shared a table with General
Díaz and his wife. Sófi wanted to ask Gloria about the byplay with Louis Little in the church, but with all the other people at the table and all the coming and going between the table and the dance floor and Julián Salgado almost constantly at Gloria’s side, there was no opportunity for such private talk.
When the reception was in its second hour and there was still no sign of Louis Little, Sófi concluded that, for whatever reason, he wasn’t coming. Then an officer came to their table and told Julián there was a civilian in the parlor who wished to speak with him. Julián asked who it was but the officer said he didn’t know, he was just delivering his message. Sófi watched Julián heading toward the parlor hallway on the other side of the room, then turned to her sister, thinking she at last had a chance to talk to her—and was startled to see Louis Little standing at the table and Gloria smiling up at him. His eyes were dark blue, Sófi saw, his face sunbrowned, his smile confident. In his fractured Spanish he asked Gloria if she would honor him with a dance. She said it would be her pleasure, and he took her offered hand and escorted her onto the floor.
A few minutes later Julián was back and looked annoyed. Sófi asked what was wrong and he said there hadn’t been anyone in the parlor waiting to see him. He asked where Gloria was and Sófi pursed her lips and shrugged. He scanned the other tables. Then the dance floor. Then spied them. Talking and laughing as they waltzed round and round. He caught Sófi looking at them too and asked who the gringo was. She said she didn’t know. He sat down and poured a glass of champagne and watched them until the waltz concluded. But they remained on the floor, talking in evident earnestness, and then another number struck up and they again began to dance. Julián stood and Sófi’s heart jumped as he started toward them, sidestepping dancing couples as he went.
