Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (46 page)

procurador
opined that its worth was closer to eighteen. Brought into the light, Agustín readily admitted his guilt—forthrightness being the only good remaining in him. When they inquired how he had it in him to expose his evil doings, he replied that his brother had taught him that a true man behaves so. He was now fourteen. Sorrowing over his misdeeds, and fearing that he had become of disobedient or malevolent character, they flogged him with fifty crimson stripes—a seemly and edifying entertainment for our common people, who are easily tempted into comparable offenses—then sent him to San Juan de Ulúa for a term of nine years.

Looking down from the yellowing ramparts into the shallow water, which stinks of algae and sewage, one can see the bottom, and sometimes spy the outlines of preying sharks, who guard this hateful prison-island at no expense to the Crown, excepting that incidental loss of labor when a local fisherman loses a leg or worse. They patrol the harbor like bluish-grey shadows. Never mind that the shore lies no great distance away! At church I learned that their voracious grins are set around their snouts for the express benefit of the King of Spain and his laws. All the same, the authorities of Veracruz keep other sentinels, whose swords and guns terrify the prisoners as effectively as sharks' teeth. It was these who marched that batch of chained prisoners up the steep steps from the landing-place and across the broad low terrace of coral-stone blocks
where everything was asymmetrical. The boy looked up. He saw a many-slitted phallic guard tower. The column continued to move, and so he stumbled. A soldier split open his back with two blows of the whip.

Before the commandant's palace, which was the one square building in that considerable courtyard whose balconies shielded themselves with heavy wooden railings carved out in leaf-shapes and whose windows were latticed with drooping iron ribs, the criminals now got registered and divided up like scoops of grease flicked into so many bubbling pots, the pots being the cells. Wondering whether he might pass the remainder of his life without light, Agustín dared to look up a second time, and saw someone high above him, wearing shiny boots and a scarlet-velveted brigandine with the rivets glittering all down his chest. He wondered how he would feel to become this man, who appeared nearly as small as a seagull on the cathedral's roof, or at least to look down from this parapet and watch the tiny figures marching through the courtyard. Before he had thought this for very long, they kicked and flogged him, in his string of six, down a long tunnel of arches, whose floor was round stones, and across the stone bridge over the brownish-green water to the polygon-island of huge dank-domed cells, where he left the light indeed. The chamber where they intended him to pass his next nine years had two narrow slits for windows, up high so that a man could not put his face to them. The interior resembled a crocodile's toothy mouth, for it bore yellow-white stalactites and stalagmites of salt. Stinking rotting half-toothless men lay one upon the other, wheezing, spitting and cursing. The ones who could now sat up, scanning him as thoroughly as our priests will a marriage witness. That was how he was studied and then accepted by his new friend Rodrigo de la Concepción, octaroon, who had already served three years of an eighteen-year term for stealing an infantryman's helmet. Soon they became very easy together, for in San Juan de Ulúa, as in any prison, life grows jollier and safer for wretches who double up to share secrets. For much the same reason that in Veracruz the birds flock more wildly at twilight than at noon, so in San Juan de Ulúa the convicts commence to crawl all over one another the moment that the sun descends beneath the sea. Accordingly, at dusk Rodrigo got to business. The fingers of his hand, now laid upon the boy's belly, were as elegant as a crow's black talons, shining as softly as if they were gloved in
patent leather. He liked Agustín even better upon learning that he was a murderer's brother; thus it came out that in addition to the affair of the infantryman's helmet, Rodrigo deserved the credit of fitting his hands around a certain woman's throat, for a cause that any man of style could understand:

Mestiza,
goddess of the orient;

mestiza,
queen of the sun,

so that you look decent,

remove that piece of bean

which covers your whole tooth!

and two as yet unknown other villains sang along. For all the neighbors ever learned, he said, that slut simply ran off from her husband, a townsman infamous for his own paramours; hence Rodrigo got rid of her for nothing, unlike Salvador, who stood before the tribunal, weighted with chains, grinning down his capital sentence; when they led him away he gazed back at Agustín unbearably. Having heard in church that submission is the best way to avoid getting lost in fiery tortures; and, moreover, remaining yet capable of joys not unlike the shining white pores of fresh watermelon slices, the boy determined to make the best of his confinement; after all, there would be food—besides, his new friends were such jokers; they'd speed the years away! This Rodrigo, for instance, was a cheerful, hopeful sort of fellow, who began to uplift Agustín's soul with treasure-talk.

The food now came, in a common bowl. It was nothing but slabber-sauce,
*
and moldy bread-crusts with which to grub it up. But there was plenty of it, and his new friends promised it would come twice every day.

Just as rich men dream of becoming good, so poor men imagine getting rich. And everyone knew that riches still shone here and there in Mexico—for the contrary would have been unthinkable. The Franciscans once longed to build on this soil a Kingdom of the Gospels, whose citizens would become gentler than the pigeon-armies which strut along the island of white-limed palms in the
zócalo;
no less hopeful were the
dreamers of Cortés's stripe, who if they could not torture treasure out of Indians would squeeze a quotidian surplus out of their own kind. Then there were the convicts, who craved to hunt down Amazons, and revenge themselves upon all wealth and pleasure—all the more so since they lacked means even to hire the jailer's dice. A few of Agustín's cellmates denounced certain nobles and churchmen for their dark greed, but the rest dreamed of victories, not over their century but merely over this or that moment. From ambush they might have shot down an Archbishop standing beneath the gold-and-purple pallium, could they have sold his vestments for fifty reales; but they would far rather have raped a woman of the town; better still, they listened for the footsteps of the two guards bringing the food trough. They grieved over the friars' decision to destroy the Mexican temples, even down to their lovely furnishings; but New Spain goes on and on, like that stony-floored recession of arches at San Juan de Ulúa; surely other temples remained; thus eagerly they devoured each other's lies. As Rodrigo liked to sing,

Stretch out your arms,
negrita,

and raise me to your castle in the clouds!

Open your legs,
negrita,

and show me your coral casket!

What astonished Agustín, whose character (he having been a worrier from his earliest age) was practical nearly unto bleakness, was their silence on the subject of escape. In fact the sharks and sentries kept the place so well that the commandant slept late, as he had always wished to do when he was younger. On the ramparts stood a file of fresh troops—less in order, perhaps, than the wide black shoulders of those vultures which had lined up on the wall for Salvador's execution; for it was summer, and so the yellow fever was ripening again in men.

Once upon a time the beautiful witch Mulata de Córdoba, who, so they say, was the fortress's only female prisoner, did get out of San Juan de Ulúa, simply by begging a piece of charcoal from the guards, who must themselves have hungered for something unearthly to transpire, for after advising her to act like a good woman they provided what she had wished for, and with it she drew a ship upon the wall of her cell.
Came a midnight thunderclap, and in that ship she sailed away with the Devil! But no other prisoner possessed her advantages. Several generations after Agustín's confinement, that upright, colorless liberator Benito Juárez, whose administration would put Emperor Maximilian to death, lay in one of these cells. His best aphorism:
I know that the rich and the powerful do not feel or try to alleviate the miseries of the poor.
He expected nothing in prison, and got nothing. As for Agustín's new friends, precisely because their expectations had ebbed, they craved dreamy prizes all the more—and not one of them wisely fearful of his own conscience. For the boy's part, the bitter impossibility of escape was not to be admitted all at once; after all, he had years in which to make that accommodation; so wouldn't it be more inspiring to fondle imaginary silver? And since he was new here, and preferred to get by without trouble, by all means let them guide the conversation! That Indian with the cropped-off ears, when would he say something, and how unpleasant would it be? That tall negro with the inflamed eyes, that wiry quadroon who kept grinning back and forth, as if his temper required constant watching; that pallid, vague fellow with the hands of a locksmith (he'd burned the granary of some miserly
hacendado
who hoarded corn in drought years); that broad-shouldered mulatto who'd laid his arm against Agustín's, and smiled because Agustín's was darker . . . well, they were his neighbors now. What he would have preferred to do was remember a certain turning he had glimpsed when they were marching him to this cell, and a certain narrow stone staircase worn perilously smooth, and above it, dark blotches on the island's dim rock, and vast L-shaped corridors between whose flagstones the grass grew in square outlines; because already his recollections were drawing inward, like blotches of wetness on laundry hanging in the sun; soon, as the guards intended, he would be lost at San Juan de Ulúa even in his memories, and his chances for flight still further reduced. That narrow staircase, could he ever find it again, he'd clamber from it into the rock's footholds, and then leap down onto a passing soldier, but only at night; already he had forgotten whether it lay left or right of the main corridor; and his fine friend Rodrigo, the one with the crow-black hands, kept going on about treasures. And why not? On those bygone nights when the two brothers still dwelled together (they used to sleep in this or that tree overlooking the beach, so
that crocodiles could not eat them; but it turned out that instead of crocodiles it was soldiers who rousted them out, after which they hid in the sailmaker's shed), they too loved to dispose of imaginary wealth.— Reader, may you be warned by their example never to forget what wields greatest power over our immortal souls!— Agustín, then five or six years old, proposed to fill his belly with meat and cake; thus far went a hungry boy's dreams. Salvador promised there would be other pleasures. Someday, God willing, they'd pass for honorable grandees, with the power of death over a dozen slaves, and nothing to do but ride about the city in a coach enriched with cloth of gold. Indeed, at the trial, Agustín, like the
procurador,
envisioned himself between the thighs of his brother's light-of-love, Herlinda—for how fetching she had been, and how well she had fed both brothers! Lying close against the boy, Rodrigo, who wished for an
encomendero
of his own, with Indian labor forever, now swore that in Moquí Province (so a mulatto swineherd had whispered to him the night before being garroted) there ran a snowy Blue Range renowned for its central peak, a silver mountain ringed round by quicksilver lakes; and that beyond that, in a direction which was certain, on the island of Ziñogava, in a palace of jade, there dwelled an Amazonian queen most deserving of pillage, because her vassals served her on plates and platters of pure white silver—and by the way, Rodrigo informed him, Amazons are whiter than all other women on earth, and weep tears of unalloyed silver, which makes them doubly worth raping and tormenting. Concerning the existence of these females Agustín stayed skeptical, since Salvador, who had always been eager for such knowledge, had been definitively informed by Fray de Castro that no trusty witness ever saw one, no, not from the Conquest until now, although once upon a time, allowed Fray de Castro, the Tarascans most faithfully promised Gonzalo de Sandoval that an Island of Amazons lay but ten days' sail from Colima, and even Cortés hoped and believed. In truth the idea of tormenting a beautiful woman gave Agustín something new to dream of, although he would rather have loved and married her (for he was not yet as lost to goodness as some Saracen); and Rodrigo proposed to swear an oath upon the sacred Host, should he ever obtain it, which appeared improbable, that there were Amazons, not merely somewhere in this world, but right here in Mexico! Agustín wondered aloud how they might find Ziñogava or
even the Blue Range. Pressing against his back was a certain Bernardo Villalobos, with whom Rodrigo appeared to be very tender; he had been lucky to draw a mere nineteen years for bigamy and incest. To encourage the boy, and initiate him into their fraternity of treasure-seekers, he now told the tale of the skeleton hand: A sea-captain out of Barcelona, having entered into illicit relations with his sister, sat sorrowing at her deathbed, when she commanded him, as her final wish, to cut off her hand and keep it with him, since the magnetic sympathy between them had been so greatly magnified by their physical love that this one piece of her, so adept at caressing and gesturing, might be able to do him a good turn. Being a sentimentalist, he kept this relic on red velvet in a glass box. As he soon learned, the skeleton hand was better than a compass-needle. Were he unsure where to sail, he would closet himself with the hand, utter a few endearments (the same sort which he practiced on women of the town) and confess his uncertainty, at which point it would swivel around upon its velvet bed, and then the forefinger would point out the direction where he ought to go. Greatly interested (for he had sometimes thought to become a sailor), Agustín asked Bernardo whether he might perhaps know that sea-captain personally, which he coyly disdained to answer. The main thing, he said, caressing the boy, was that this hand, could he but find it (and as a matter of fact he suspected where to steal it), would guide them quite infallibly to Ziñogava, and Agustín would be welcome to be one of their company. Bernardo said that the hand sometimes liked to tickle people, especially young boys, and sometime, perhaps even tonight, it might pay the new arrival a visit.— But can the hand get us out of here? the boy demanded.— Salvador had taught him how to pick pockets on those afternoons when the musicians, dancers and lovely singers performed high up on the wooden platform and happy people pressed carelessly around. He could march his fingers like spiders quite well. So when Rodrigo and Bernardo did just this, he fell back on his guard, but being so lonely and so weak, he could not forbear all the same to hope that they would be to him like brothers, and perhaps even someday, when they were all free, help him find an Amazon to love.— Rodrigo laughed at his question, but Bernardo, who must be worth listening to, since he had formerly done well for himself as an Indian-whipper for the Franciscans, claimed to know how the narrow stairs ascended through a
deep arch of pastel stone, going up past a certain barred window to the parapet, which in places was broad enough for three horsemen to ride abreast, but whenever his words had carried the other prisoners that far he invariably hesitated, his plots never finishing or even becoming symmetrical, in which respect they took after the prison's open-roofed many-arched islands of stone. And so everyone stared down into the dark latrine-crypt whose hole opened over the shining green water. The sun now drowned itself. There came the faraway slam of a door. Bernardo tried to kiss him, but the boy rolled away. At this, Rodrigo clapped his hands. Four villains held the boy down. Perhaps he should have appealed to that divine protector of the weak and innocent, the King of Spain.