Country of the Bad Wolfes (28 page)

Josefina commended their astuteness. It is a saying as old as Mexico, she said. Tell me how you died and I will tell you who you were.

Their first view of their mother was a framed daguerreotype portrait that Josefina kept on the wall of her little room. Elizabeth Anne had seen her admiring it one day on its parlor shelf and had presented it to her. The photograph had been made in Concord (“
Cone
-core,” Josefina pronounced it) when Elizabeth Anne was seventeen years old and only a few weeks before her wedding.

The twins thought she was beautiful. Josefina told them she was even more so in the flesh, that no picture could ever show how beautiful she truly was. When she told them of their mother shooting the younger Montenegro to save their father's life, their eyes shone. And they studied her picture all the more.

Of all that she knew about their parents, Josefina would withhold from the twins only the fact of their father's two bastard children—bastards in that he sired them by women he was not married to, though the children were officially legitimate in being born to married women. Both of those births, and the dire aftermath to one of them, had occurred before the twins were seven years old, and Josefina saw no need to burden them with the shameful fact of their illegitimate siblings.

But they were always better informed than she knew. They had the ears of cats and missed little of anything even whispered in their proximity, and from earliest childhood they were skilled eavesdroppers and peepers. They were nine when they discovered the cracks in the patio shutters through which they could spy on the maids at their bath—and coincidentally overhear much bathing room gossip. By age eleven they knew all about their baseborn kin but let no one know that they did, and they would soon enough dismiss them as trivial effects of their father's sporting, of which they were also aware and regarded as insignificant.

T
he first child had preceded the second by a year and was born to Alma Rodríguez, an unmarried eighteen-year-old resident maid in the casa grande. John Roger had been having relations with her for three months when she told him of her condition. He remedied the problem in quick order by finding her a suitable husband, choosing a Veracruz police clerk named Pedro Altamonte, who'd been vouched for by Comandante Mendoza himself. Pedro was an intelligent and good-natured young man, but a birthmark that covered half his face like a brushstroke of purple paint had always made him self-conscious and timorous with women. John Roger had a talk with him, then bought him a new suit to wear and took him to Buenaventura to meet Alma. The clerk's eyes brightened at his first sight of her, in her best white dress and with a silver ribbon in her indigo hair. The three of them sat in a drawing room and had a frank discussion, and the couple agreed to the marriage. As John Roger had anticipated, knowing Alma for a sensible girl, she was appreciative of Pedro's manners and admired his education and bureaucratic position. She made light of the birthmark and said she would sew shirts for him of a color to match. Pedro was happy to gain such a pretty and congenial wife for the simple price of granting his name to the child she carried and swearing to cherish it as his own. He had been told whose it was and he felt honored. John Roger bought them a house for a wedding present.

Their marriage would be a good one and they would both live to a contented old age. In addition to the first child—a daughter they would name Juana Merced and whose actual father they would always keep secret from her—they would have three more children, all of them girls. They would all survive to adulthood and would be educated at the excellent school of the Sisters of Divine Mercy. After
graduation Juana Merced would work for the school as its registrar. She would one day fall in love with a visiting director of a female academy in Barcelona, they would marry in Veracruz, and five months after their arrival in Spain she would give birth to the first of their seven children.

The matter of the second child was not so free of tribulation. The mother of this one was Katrina Llosa de Ávila. She was also a maid in the casa grande but did not reside in it. Like most of the household help, she lived in one of the little row-houses in the compound's residential quarter. She was without debate the prettiest woman on the casa grande staff—some, herself among them, would have said on the entire hacienda. The other women resented her for her vanity and because she had always been a flagrant flirt and had stolen the boyfriend of more than one girl. Since childhood she had entertained fantasies of being the wife of a hacendado and living a luxurious life in the manner of Doña Isabel, and she had long admired Don Juan from afar. But even after she had been working in the casa grande for six months, John Roger did not know she existed, as she was assigned to a lower-floor section of the house where he never had cause to go. Not until after the head maid reassigned Katrina to the bedrooms on the upper floors did John Roger take notice of her. On her third day of upstairs duty, he met her in a hallway as she was passing by with a large armload of fresh linen and towels. A pretty girl and a strong one, he said, and asked her name. “Katrina, mi patrón,” she said, and gave him her best smile.

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.