Zorro (5 page)

Alejandro de la Vega installed several Indian families and mestizo vaqueros on his property, branded his herd, and began to raise purebred horses, using breeding stock he had imported from Mexico. In his spare time he set up a small soap factory and devoted himself to experiments in the kitchen, trying to find the perfect formula for smoking meat seasoned with chili peppers. He was trying to produce a dry but savory meat that would last months without going bad. This experiment consumed all his time and filled the sky with volcanic smoke the wind carried far out to sea, altering the behavior of the whales. He calculated that if he found the precise balance between flavor and resistance to spoiling, he could sell the product to the army and to the ships. He felt that it was a tremendous waste to strip the hide and fat off the cattle and lose mountains of good meat. While her husband multiplied the number of cattle, sheep, and horses on the ranch, directed the politics of the town, and did business with the merchant ships, Regina busied herself by looking after the Indians on the hacienda. She had no interest at all in the social life of the colony, and with Olympian indifference ignored the gossip circulating about her. Behind her back, everyone commented on her unsociable and arrogant nature, her more than doubtful origins, her escapades on horseback, her naked bathing in the sea. However, since she had arrived as a protegee of the Fages, the minuscule social set of Pueblo de los Angeles was at first pre pared to take her to their collective bosom without asking questions, but Regina herself bowed out. Soon the dresses that had been made for her under Eulalia de Callis’s guidance hung abandoned in the armoires, devoured by moths. She felt more comfortable going barefoot and wearing the rough clothing of the neophytes. And so her day went by. In the evening, when she anticipated that Alejandro would soon be home, she bathed, coiled her hair into a casual bun, and put on a simple dress that gave her the innocent appearance of a novitiate. Her husband, blind with love and occupied in his business affairs, shrugged off the betraying signs of Regina’s state of mind. He wanted to see her happy and never asked her if she was, for fear that she would tell him the truth. He attributed his wife’s strange behavior to inexperience in life as a newlywed, and to her closed nature. He preferred not to think that the well-behaved lady sitting with him at the dinner table was the same ferociously painted warrior who had attacked the San Gabriel mission several years before. He believed that motherhood would cure his wife of her last bad habits, but despite the long, frequent tumbles in the four-pillared bed they shared, the wished-for child did not arrive until 1795.

During the months of her pregnancy, Regina became even more silent and untamed. Using the pretext of comfort, she stopped dressing and combing her hair in the European style. She went down to the ocean to swim with the dolphins that came long distances to mate near the beach, accompanied by a sweet neophyte named Ana, whom Padre Mendoza had sent from the mission. She, too, was pregnant, but she had no husband and had tenaciously refused to confess the identity of the man who had seduced her. The missionary did not want to keep this bad example among his neophytes, but neither could he find it in his heart to banish her from the mission, so he ended up sending her to be a servant in the de la Vega family. It turned out to be a good idea; a quiet complicity between Regina and Ana blossomed immediately, something good for them both, for the former gained a companion and the second won protection. It had been Ana’s idea to swim with the dolphins, sacred creatures that swim in circles to keep the world safe and in good order. Those huge, velvety mammals knew that the two women were pregnant, and lightly brushed past them to give them strength and courage at the moment of giving birth.

In the third week of May, Ana and Regina had their babies. The births coincided with the famous week of the fires, recorded in the annals of Pueblo de los Angeles as the most catastrophic since the founding of the city. Every summer the residents had to resign themselves to watching some of the forest go up in flames because a spark had touched off dry pastureland, but they had never seen anything like the fires that May. Normally the fires were welcome, because they cleared out debris and created space for tender growth the following spring, but that year, according to Padre Mendoza, they were God’s punishment for so much unrepentant sin in the colony. The flames burned down several ranches as they passed, destroying both dwellings and cattle that had nowhere to escape to. On Sunday the winds changed and the fire stopped one mile away from the de la Vega hacienda, which was interpreted by the Indians as an excellent augury for the two newborns in the house.

The spirit of the dolphins helped Ana during her delivery, but not Regina. While the former had her baby in four hours, kneeling on the ground and with a young kitchen girl as her only help, Regina was in labor for fifty hours, a torment that she bore stoically as she clamped down on the stick between her teeth. Alejandro de la Vega, desperate, summoned the one midwife in Pueblo de los Angeles, but she admitted defeat when she realized that the baby was crosswise in the womb and that Regina lacked the strength to keep fighting. So Alejandro called for Padre Mendoza, the closest thing to a doctor around. The missionary started all the servants praying the rosary, sprinkled Regina with holy water, and prepared to extract the baby. Thanks to pure determination, he succeeded in grasping its feet; he tugged it toward the light, worried only that time was running out. The cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck, and he was turning blue, but with prayers and well-delivered slaps Padre Mendoza forced him to breathe.

“What name shall we give him?” he asked when he placed the baby in his father’s arms.

“Alejandro, like me, my father, and my grandfather,” he replied.

“He will be called Diego,” Regina interrupted, drained by fever and by the steady trickle of blood soaking the sheets.

“Why Diego? No one in the de la Vega family is named Diego.”

“Because that is his name,” she replied.

Alejandro had suffered with her through the long hours of labor, and more than anything in the world he feared losing her. He saw that she was losing blood and he could not bring himself to argue with her. He concluded that if on her deathbed she had chosen that name for her firstborn, she must have good reason, so he authorized Padre Mendoza to baptize the boy on the spot; he seemed as weak as his mother and he ran the risk of ending up in limbo if he died before receiving the sacrament.

It took Regina several weeks to recover from the battering of the birth, and then it was only because her mother, White Owl, arrived, barefoot and carrying her bundle of medicinal plants over her shoulder, just as candles were being set out for Regina’s funeral. This medicine woman had not seen her daughter for seven years that is, since the day she went off into the forest to round up warriors from other tribes.

Alejandro attributed the timely appearance of his mother-in-law to the Indians’ communication system, a mystery the whites could never unravel. A message sent from the Presidio in Monterey took two weeks to reach Baja California, with horses dropping beneath their riders, but when it arrived it was already old news to the Indians, who had received it ten days before through some magical means. There was no other explanation for how that woman could have appeared out of nowhere without being summoned, just when she was needed most. White Owl took over without saying a word. She was little more than forty, tall, strong, beautiful, weathered by sun and hard work. Her young face, with honey-colored eyes like her daughter’s, was framed by an untamed mop of smoke-colored hair, to which she owed her name. She came in without asking permission, pushed Alejandro de la Vega aside when he attempted to find out who she was, walked straight through the complicated layout of the mansion, and stopped at her daughter’s bed.

She called her by her true name, Toypurnia, and spoke to her in the tongue of their ancestors, until the dying woman opened her eyes. Then from her pouch she took the medicinal herbs needed to save her, boiled them in a clay olla over the brazier that warmed the room, and gave them to her to drink. The entire house was saturated with the odor of sage.

In the meantime, Ana, with her habitual good nature, had taken Regina’s child, whimpering with hunger, to her breast; thus Diego and Bernardo, Ana’s son, began their lives with the same milk and in the same arms.

That made them milk brothers for as long as they lived.

Once White Owl found that her daughter could stand, and that she could eat without being nauseated, she put her plants and belongings back into her pouch, took one look at Diego and Bernardo, who were sleeping side by side in the same cradle without showing the least sign that she was curious about which of the two was her grandson and left without a good-bye. Alejandro de la Vega watched her go with great relief. He was grateful that she had saved Regina from certain death, but he was happier to be grateful from a distance; he felt uncomfortable under that woman’s influence, and worse, the Indians on the ranch were becoming insolent. They appeared for work in the morning with faces streaked with paint, at night they danced like sleepwalkers to the sound of mournful ocarinas, and in general they ignored his orders as if they had lost their Spanish.

Normality returned to the hacienda at the same rate that Regina recovered her health. By the following spring, everyone except Alejandro de la Vega had forgotten that Regina had had one foot in the grave. It did not require medical training to deduce that she could not have any more children. Without his realizing, this knowledge began to come between Alejandro and his wife as he turned his devotion to Diego. He had dreamed of a large family, like those of other dons in the region. One of his friends had fathered thirty-six legitimate children in addition to the bastards that he didn’t bother to count. He had twenty children from his first marriage in Mexico, and sixteen from the second, the last five born in Alta California, one per year. The fear that something bad would happen to that one irreplaceable son, as it did to so many small children who died before they learned to walk, kept de la Vega awake at night. He formed the habit of praying aloud, kneeling beside his son’s bed, crying out to heaven to watch over him.

Emotionless, arms folded across her breast, Regina observed her humbled husband from the doorway. In those moments she thought she despised him, but later, in bed, surrounded by the warmth and scents of their intimacy, they found a shortlived reconciliation. At dawn Alejandro dressed and went down to his office, where an Indian girl served him his hot chocolate, thick and bitter the way he liked it. He began the day by meeting with his foreman to give him instructions about the ranch, then turned to his multiple duties as alcalde. Husband and wife spent the day apart, in their own occupations, until sunset marked the hour to meet again. In summer they dined on the terrace of the bougainvillea, always accompanied by musicians playing their favorite songs. In winter they ate in the Sewing Room, where no one had ever sewed on so much as a button; the name came from a painting of a Dutch woman embroidering by the light of a candle. Often Alejandro stayed overnight in Pueblo de los Angeles because it grew late at a fiesta, or because he was playing cards with other dons. The round of dances, cards, musical evenings, and get-tog ethers went on every day of the year. There was nothing else to do, other than the outdoor sports that both men and women engaged in. Regina was not involved in any of it; she was a solitary soul, and except for her husband and Padre Mendoza, she distrusted anyone Spanish on principle. Neither did she have any interest in accompanying Alejandro on his trips or in the American ships that brought in contraband; she had never gone on board to negotiate with the sailors. At least once a year Alejandro went to Mexico City on business, absences that tended to last a couple of months. He returned from them laden with gifts and new ideas, but these too failed to move his wife. Regina went back to her long horseback rides, with her son in a kind of papoose basket on her back, and she lost the slight interest she’d had in the domestic chores now delegated to Ana. She fell into her old habit of visiting the Indians, even those not on their ranch, with the aim of identifying their problems and, if possible, easing them. As the colonists continued to divide up the land and subdue the tribes of the region, a system of obligatory service developed that was different from slavery only in that the Indians too were subjects of the king of Spain, and in theory had certain rights. In practice they were dirt-poor; they worked in exchange for food, liquor, tobacco, and permission to raise a few animals. In general the ranchers were benevolent patriarchs, more interested in their pleasures and passions than in the land and their peons, but occasionally a rancher came along who had a bad temper, and then the indi ada as the Indian population was called, went hungry or was pitilessly beaten. The neophytes at the mission were just as poor; they lived with their families in round huts built of sticks and straw, they worked from sunup to sunset, and they were totally dependent on the mission brothers for their livelihood. Alejandro de la Vega tried to be a good patron, as he wrote in a letter to Eulalia de Callis, but it annoyed him that Regina kept asking for more for the Indians, even after he had explained to her that they could not treat them any differently from those on other ranches because that would cause problems in the colony. Padre Mendoza and Regina, unified by the same desire to protect the Indians, had become friends. He had forgiven her for attacking the mission, and she was grateful because he had brought Diego into the world. The patrones stayed out of their way; the missionary had moral authority and she was the wife of the alcalde. On the occasions that Regina wanted to launch one of her campaigns for justice, she dressed in Spanish style, combed her hair into a severe bun, wore an amethyst cross upon her breast, and attended functions in an elegant carriage, a gift from her husband, abandoning the spirited mare she usually rode. Even so, she was coolly received, because she was not one of them. No rancher would admit to having an Indian ancestor. To a man, they claimed Spanish heritage: white skin and pure blood. That Regina did not even try to hide her origins was not something they could forgive, although that was what Padre Mendoza most admired about her. When they learned that Regina’s mother was an Indian, the Spanish colony turned its back on her, though no one dared snub her to her face, out of respect for her husband’s position and fortune. They continued to invite her to parties and balls with the tranquil assurance that they would not see her there. Her husband would come alone.