by James Blake
He forwent a coffin for the woman and child because he would have needed help to set it in the grave. He had shrouded them in a blanket, the infant enfolded in the mother’s arms, then sewn the blanket closed and lain them beside the spot where he dug. When the grave was ready he dragged them into his arms and set them at his feet. Then climbed out and picked up his spade and covered them over with the earth from which they’d come. He tamped firm the grave mound with the flat of his spade and then put on his shirt and picked up his tools and walked away without a word. Not until he was beyond earshot did the priest, who had seen the mad fury in his eyes, recite the requiem prayer.
The letter that brought the sorrowful news of Raquel and her baby was the last Sófi received from her sister for almost three years.
Díaz was in his second year as president and Lerdo was in exile in New York when she next heard from Gloria, who was then living at Patria Chica, Edward Little’s hacienda some 200 miles northwest of Mexico City.
Edward and Díaz had first seen the place during the war against Lerdo. The surrounding terrain was mostly dry and rocky but a river ran through the eastern range of the estate, and for a few miles along its length it was flanked to either side by lush pastureland. A good road spanned the fifty miles between the estate and the rail line at San Luis Potosí, the nearest town of appreciable size. Edward admired the hacienda for its rugged beauty and geographical isolation, but Díaz said, Hell, man, it’s so far into nowhere you’d go crazy out here in a month. You may not want to admit it, Lalo, but you’ve become a man of the capital like me. Edward said maybe so, but he still liked the place an awful lot.
The estate belonged to a staunch Lerdo supporter named Delacruz who had willingly let Lerdo’s federals use it as an outpost and had regularly supplied them with beef. He was put under arrest when Díaz’s troops drove the federals off. Díaz had the man brought before him and gave him the choice of deeding the hacienda to Edward Little and then leaving the country forever, or being hanged as a conspirator against the constitutional government—after which his hacienda would be confiscated as rightful reparation and then deeded to Edward Little in reward for his service to Mexico.
So you see, my fucked friend, Díaz told Delacruz, either way Mr Little will own this place. But if you sign it over to him you will save your life and you will save my soldiers the bullets they would use to kill you and you will save my clerks the extra paperwork and above all you will save Mr Little the bother of having to wait longer than he wishes to for legal ownership of the property. You will do much saving. Delacruz signed it over. Díaz said it was always a pleasure to witness a man doing the reasonable thing. There you are, Don Eduardo, he told Edward. Now you’ll have a home to go to and rest your weary bones when you retire.
The phrase “patria chica” was a common Mexican reference to one’s village or town or home province—one’s “little country”—and Edward Little thought it a perfect name for his hacienda.
But even after Díaz was elected president, Edward continued in his employ and so spent most of his time in Mexico City, where one of his perquisites was a fine residence on Bucareli Street, near the zócalo. Díaz had wanted Louis to keep working for him also, but Louis preferred a rancher’s life and was happy to manage Patria Chica in his father’s stead. His boyhood dream had been to have a ranch of his own one day, but not even in dreams had he imagined himself in charge of a place so grand as Patria Chica.
According to Gloria, Edward Little had become even more distant from everyone since the death of Raquel. From everyone except Díaz. He seemed to have no interest in anything but his work for Don Porfirio—work he never spoke about to anyone in the family. Not even Louis knew what his father’s job was. Edward didn’t visit the hacienda often, and nobody would see much of him when he did. He would spend most of his time riding by himself to the far reaches of the estate. The visits were always brief, never more than a few days, and he was away for so long between them that each time he came he was more of a stranger to his young sons Zack Jack and John Louis. Their half-brother Louis Welch was more of a father to them than Edward was, Gloria told Sófi. They called him Uncle Louis and called her Aunt Gloria, though she was in fact their sister-in-law, and they were growing up as brothers to her own Luis Charón, who was actually their nephew. Sófi smiled at her sister’s sardonic observation that the family tree had grown some very strange branches.
Gloria missed Mexico City very much, but she knew now that Louis did not care for cities and least of all for cities the size of the capital. She had given up all hope that they would ever live there or even go for a visit. This knowledge was a daily sadness. It was peculiar, she wrote, but even though she was now geographically much closer to Mexico City than she had been while in Brownsville, she felt no nearer to it, and in some ways felt even more isolated. Not that she was unhappy with life at Patria Chica, because she wasn’t, though she did wish there were more trees. Except for the cottonwoods along the river and a scattering of mesquite stands, there was no outdoor shade to be had and nothing to block the wind that sometimes raised dust storms to imprison her in the house for days. She confessed she felt silly for making these petty complaints, given the luxury of her life. “En verdad estoy encantada,” she wrote. After all, little sister, I’m the wife of a hacendado. Lady of the Manor. Doña Gloria. How could I not be happy?
EL PRESIDENTE
In that November when John Roger and the Blancos discovered each other in Mexico City, Gloria had been at Patria Chica for eight years and had known Porfirio Díaz for nine years before that—while John Roger had never even seen the man in person. And Díaz, who only two months earlier been elected to his second presidential term, was celebrating the third anniversary of his marriage to Carmen Romero, daughter to Manuel Romero Rubio, a rich and politically influential man who owned the Jockey Club, the most luxurious gambling establishment in the city and the favored gathering place of the capital’s most influential figures. Díaz’s first wife, Delfina, had died in the delivery of a stillborn child, and the following year Don Porfirio married Carmen. On the day of their wedding he was fifty-one years old and she was nineteen.
The most surprising thing about their marriage—even more so than their genuine love of each other—was the change that the young Creole bride was able to effect in her much older mestizo husband. Díaz had always exuded a charismatic authority, but even by the end of his first presidency he remained a provincial in both appearance and manner. His hair was an untamed thatch, his drooping mustache a wild thing, his collars unbuttoned more often than not. His speech was shot with profanity and slang and his grammar was egregious. He was prone to broad gestures and loud laughter, to slumping in his chair with his legs outstretched and boots crossed at the ankles. He walked in a habitual haste and took the stairs three at a time. His way with knife and fork in polite company provoked furtive smirks. There was ever a toothpick in a corner of his mouth. While Carmen’s father had been proud to see her married to such a powerful man, he had nonetheless felt an inward cringe at the mating of his aristocratic daughter with a mestizo roughneck. But Díaz was neither too proud to admit his social shortcomings nor to accept instruction from his wife, and he was a swift study. Under her tutelage he learned to comport himself with the poise of a patrician. Carmen taught him how to dress for every occasion. She directed the styling of his hair and mustache in the close-cropped military fashion of European royals. She taught him dining etiquette, taught him how to sit in a chair in gentleman fashion, even how to walk with a stateliness befitting a national leader. She improved his grammar, bettered his diction, refined his speech and gestures. She elevated his entire social demeanor. She was teaching him to speak English and instructing him in world history. Those who had seen him at the inaugural ball of his first presidency could hardly believe it was the same man at his second.
His transformation was greater than they knew. To many of Díaz’s most powerful political allies, the four-year wait for his re
turn to office had been a frustration they did not wish to go through again. As they saw it, Don Porfirio was Mexico’s best hope for raising the country into the company of the world’s great nations, and such a man should not be hindered by restrictions intended to keep lesser men from perpetuating themselves in the presidency.
Díaz was effusive in thanking his supporters for their faith in him. And although, with all due modesty, he had to agree that he was the man best-suited to lead his country to a brighter future, he reminded his stalwarts that the hallmark of a great nation was its respect for the law, and he, for one, would always respect it. The constitution is the primal law, he said, the very core of civilized progress, and we must never abuse it, never violate it in letter or spirit. He proclaimed reverence for the patriots who wrote that glorious document and for those who recognized that it must never be amended for any reason other than the noble one of doing what is best for Mexico.
His followers understood. Before the next election, the constitution would be amended—by a congress composed largely of Díaz cronies and acting under the sanction of doing what was best for Mexico—to permit a president to succeed himself once. And Díaz would easily win election to his second consecutive term. And before the end of that period, the constitution would again be amended to remove all restrictions on reelection. So would it come to pass that Porfirio Díaz, that vehement opponent of presidential reelection, would be president of Mexico for thirty years, the last twenty-six of them in uninterrupted sequence.
As in the case of all great leaders, there were many dark rumors about Don Porfirio, and early in his second presidency one of the darkest pertained to a secret police force that answered only to him and whose headquarters were said to be in Chapultepec Castle, the official presidential residence.
His supporters didn’t care if there was such a force. After all, a secret police was the most effective means for uncovering plots against the government and defending the president from assassins. Who but a fool or an enemy of Mexico could argue otherwise? Yet rumors persisted that Díaz’s secret agency was more than a means of defense against threats to his person and to the republic. There were whispers that the foremost assassins in the country were carrying federal badges. And that the head of the organization was Díaz’s mysterious Yankee friend, Edward Little.
Government officials neither affirmed nor denied the existence of a secret police force. After all, they said, how secret would it be if they admitted to it? On the other hand, even if it did not exist, to permit the suspicion that it did would help to deter subversives. The president did of course have a small corps of bodyguards. What head of state did not? It was a sad fact of life that national leaders had ever to be on guard against violent personal attack. As for the American, Mr Edward Little, yes, he was in the employ of the president, but solely as his personal translator of English.
On one of Edward Little’s visits to Patria Chica, Louis asked him outright if there really was a federal secret police.
“Secret police?” his father said with a perplexed expression.
And they burst into laughter.
PART FOUR
TALES FROM THE COVE
When they made the first of their promised visits, after six long weeks at the cove, they were brown as Indians and it seemed to John Roger they had grown noticeably taller. God, were they growing! They were stronger too. He saw it in the sinews of their hands, in the new tightness of their coats across their shoulders when they dressed for dinner. He had thought much about them during their absence. About how near they were to full manhood and the ways in which they were already more capable than most men of his acquaintance. Their “Thank you, Father” had come to mind many times since. He regretted his mistakes with them. Regretted having kept himself a stranger to them for so long, no matter they had as much kept themselves strangers to him. As the father, he had the greater obligation to wisdom and fairness, and it was neither wise nor fair—quite the contrary—to defend one’s conduct toward one’s children on the basis of tit for tat. He could not recall ever having addressed them as “sons.”
That they had honored their agreement to make the visit was far less surprising to him than the size of his gladness to see them. Victoria Clara, too, was happy to have them home. In her six years at Buenaventura she had watched them grow from precocious and cocky identical children to handsome and cocky identical young men and had become very fond of them. She had lost her mother to a disease of the throat four years before, and a year later her father to a pulmonary infection. Her two brothers, who had inherited everything, were both much older than she and had always been strangers to her. She’d had no true sense of sisterhood until she came to know the twins, and it didn’t bother her at all that she couldn’t differentiate between them. John Roger never saw her so animated as at dinnertimes in their company. Neither, to his unspoken chagrin, did John Samuel.
The greatest surprise of that first visit was their unprecedented loquacity at the dinner table, the conversation shifting at whim between English and Spanish. John Roger grinned and Vicki Clara laughed at their amusing account of journeying to the cove with the six burros that on hearing a jaguar growl in the bush went so crazy with fright and thrashed so wildly it took the twins two hours to calm them and repack the scattered pack goods. And because the stable at the cove was too small for six burros and anyway too dilapidated to afford protection, the twins had tethered the animals on the verandah every evening.
On the verandah! Vicki Clara said. Like a little hotel for donkeys!
You including a couple who walk on their hind legs? a twin said with a wry grin, and Vicki laughed with them even as she protested that she did not mean any such thing.
They told about the work they had done on the house and on the sloop, and confessed that they had devoted themselves to the full repair of the boat before they even began to work on the house. “We just couldn’t wait to start sailing her,” one said. It did not escape John Roger’s notice that they still did not refer to the Lizzie by name.
Once the sloop was seaworthy they had spent the mornings working on the house and the afternoons teaching themselves to handle the boat out on the gulf—which dazzled them with its vastness. It gave them a strange feeling of being awful small and awful free at the same time.
John Roger said he knew what they meant. “I always had that same feeling out there.” Their zest for the open sea had made him recall his own youthful passion for sailing. But it shocked him to realize he had spoken in the past tense. That he had not been aboard a boat since before they were born. He had a moment’s banal curiosity about where the years had gone.
He mentioned the inlet’s tricky passage, and they said it was tricky, all right, but that was what made it so much fun, and they had gotten pretty good at zipping through it, if they did say so themselves. Because they did not want to seem braggarts, they did not tell him they had already become expert at navigating by the stars. Or that they were keeping track of the lunar cycle so they could at any time of day or night predict the turns of the tide within a quarter hour’s accuracy. It was their objective—and they would achieve it—to be able to negotiate the inlet even on a moonless night.
Vicki Clara asked what they planned on doing out there once they finished repairing the house, and they said there would never be a problem keeping busy, as the house and boat would always be in need of some kind of upkeep. When they weren’t busy working they’d go fishing or hunting, or catch up on their reading.
John Roger admired the shrewdness of their answer. It was the truth as far as it went but it was hardly the whole truth. They had some plan in mind, some enterprise. He had sensed it when they came to him those weeks ago and he was even more certain of it now. But whatever they intended to do—were perhaps already doing—it would remain their secret until they chose to reveal it, if ever.
Vicki said it sounded like a very simple life. But I think there is one problem with it, she said.
The twin
s smiled, knowing some tease was coming. And what is that? one said.
I do not believe you will meet very many girls out there.
The twins laughed with her. “Dang it!” one said. “I knew there was something we forgot to account for.” And the other said all they could do was hope to get lucky and meet a few mermaids.
John Roger smiled at the laughter of his daughter-in-law and twin sons. He could not remember the last loud mirth at the table. Not since Lizzie was there. He wanted to contribute to it, to add to the banter by saying . . . what? . . . that the trouble with mermaids was that they were such terrible dancers? But he feared his joke would seem a lame effort and any smiles they might show would be mere politeness. He recognized the silliness of this qualm, but now the moment for the quip had passed, and he refrained from making it for fear of seeming slow witted. Good Lord, he thought, I’m thinking like an old man. Then had the melancholy apprehension that a man of fifty-six was old.
John Samuel did not join in the table conversation nor show the least interest in anything the twins had to say. He had avoided them since their arrival from the cove. They did not see each other until dinnertime, when they were all in the dining room and John Roger said to his eldest son, “Look who’s here.” John Samuel stared at them without word. The twins smiled at him, then looked at each other and made puckered faces of sourness and laughed and took their places at the table. They and John Samuel then ignored each other for the rest of the evening, as they would on all of the twins’ subsequent visits.
