Zorro (6 page)
De la Vega did not have a lot of time for his family, busy as he was with running the town, his hacienda, and business affairs, and with settling disputes, of which there seemed to be no shortage among the townspeople. Every Tuesday and Thursday, without fail, he went to Pueblo de los Angeles to fulfill his political obligations, a prestigious burden with more duties than satisfactions but one he refused to give up out of a sense of service. He was not greedy, he did not abuse power, and authority came naturally to him, but he was not a man with grand vision. He never questioned the ideas he had inherited from his ancestors, even though sometimes they were not appropriate to the reality of America. To Alejandro, everything came down to a question of honor, pride in being who he was an exemplary Catholic hidalgo and in holding his head high. He worried that Diego, too tied to his mother’s apron strings, to Bernardo, and to the Indian servants, would not assume the position that was his by birth, but he reasoned that the boy was still very young, there would be time to guide him. He told himself he would start directing his son’s manly formation as soon as possible, but that moment always got put off; there were other more urgent matters to attend to. Sometimes the desire to protect his son and make him happy moved him to tears. His love for the child perplexed him; it was like being stabbed in the heart. He outlined lofty plans for him: he would be brave, a good Christian, loyal to the king like every male de la Vega before him, and wealthier than any of his relatives had ever been: the master of vast, fertile lands with a temperate climate and abundant water, where nature was generous and life was sweet, not as it was on the barren estates of his ancestors in Spain. He would have more herds of cattle, sheep, and swine than King Solomon; he would breed the best bulls and the most elegant Arabian horses; he would become the most influential man in Alta California; he would be governor. But that would be later. First he had to grow up, go to the university or to military school in Spain.
De la Vega anticipated that by the time Diego was old enough to travel, Europe would be in better shape. Peace was too much to expect, since there never was peace on the old continent, but he could hope that level heads had prevailed. The news they were receiving was disastrous. He explained all this to Regina, but she did not share his ambitions for her son, and cared even less about problems on the other side of the ocean. She could not conceive of a world beyond limits she could travel to by horseback, say nothing of worry about events in France. Her husband had told her that in 1793, precisely the year they were married, King Louis XVI had been beheaded before a mob screaming for revenge and blood. Jose Diaz, a friend of Alejandro’s and a ship’s captain, had given him a miniature guillotine, an awesome toy he used to cut off the tips of his cigars and, in passing, illustrate how the heads of nobles had rolled in France, a terrible example that to Alejandro’s way of thinking could sink Europe into absolute chaos. That little machine seemed a tempting idea to Regina, for she speculated that if the Indians had it, whites would respect them, but she had the good sense not to share those musings with her husband. There was cause enough for bitterness between them; it wasn’t smart to add another.
She was shocked by how much she had changed. She looked at herself in the mirror and could find no trace of Toypurnia; she saw only a woman with hard eyes and clenched lips. The need to live in a world foreign to her, and to stay out of trouble, had made her cautious and underhanded; she rarely confronted her husband, she preferred to act behind his back. Alejandro de la Vega never suspected that she was talking to Diego in her own tongue, so he was unpleasantly surprised when the first words out of his son’s mouth were in the Indian language. If he had known that his wife used each of his absences to take the child to visit his mother’s tribe, he would have exerted his authority.
Whenever Regina appeared in the Indian village with Diego and Bernardo, grandmother White Owl abandoned her chores and devoted herself completely to them. The tribe had been reduced through mortal illness and by the number of braves who had been recruited by the Spanish; barely twenty families remained, more miserable every day. The grandmother filled the young boys’ heads with myths and legends of her people; she cleansed their hearts with the smoke of the sweet grass she used in her ceremonies and took them with her to pick magical plants.
As soon as they were able to stand firmly on their two feet and hold a stick, she had the braves teach them to fight. They learned to fish with sharpened wands, and to hunt. She gave each of them a whole deerskin, complete with head and horns, to wear during the hunt; that was how they would stalk a deer. They waited, motionless, until their prey wandered near, and then shot their arrows. The growing presence of the Spanish had made the Indians submissive, but when Toypurnia-Regina was around, their blood was fired with the memory of the war of honor she had led. Their awed respect for her was translated into affection for Diego and Bernardo. They treated both as their sons.
It was White Owl who took the boys to explore the caves near the de la Vega hacienda. She taught them to read the symbols carved on the walls a thousand years before, and showed them how to use them as a map. She explained that the caves were divided into seven sacred directions, a basic map for spiritual journeys, which is why in ancient times initiates had gone there to seek their own centers, which ideally should coincide with the center of the world, where life originates.
When that correspondence was reached, the grandmother informed them, a luminous flame from the bowels of the earth blazed up and danced in the air for a long while, bathing the initiate with light and warmth. She explained that the caves were natural temples, and that they were protected by a higher energy, and that was why they should enter them only with good in mind. “Whoever goes in with bad intentions will be swallowed up, and after a while the cave will spit out his bones,” she told them. She added that if you help others, as the Great Spirit commands, a space in your body opens to receive blessings; that is the only way to prepare yourself for okahue.
“Before the whites came, we went to those caves to seek harmony and find okahue, but no one goes now,” White Owl told them.
“What is okahue?” Diego asked.
“The five basic virtues: honor, justice, respect, dignity, and courage.”
“I want all those, Grandmother.”
“You must pass many tests, without crying,” White Owl replied curtly.
From that day on, Diego and Bernardo began to explore the caves on their own. Before they were able to memorize the petroglyphs to guide them, as their grandmother had told them to do, they marked their route with pebbles. They invented their own ceremonies, inspired by what they had heard and seen in the tribe, and by the stories of White Owl.
They asked the Great Spirit of the Indians, and Padre Mendoza’s God, to allow them to be granted okahue, but they never saw the flames blaze up and dance in the air, as they hoped. Their curiosity, however, did lead them to a natural passage. They had moved some rocks to lay out a medicine wheel on the ground, like the ones the grandmother traced: thirty-six stones in a circle and one in the center, out of which led four straight roads. When they moved a round stone that they had intended to set in the center of the circle, several others rolled away, uncovering a small entrance. Diego, who was slimmer and more agile, crawled inside and discovered a tunnel that quickly opened up enough for him to stand. The boys returned with candles and picks and shovels, and in the following weeks worked at widening the passageway.
One day the tip of Bernardo’s pick opened a little hole that let in a ray of light; enchanted, the boys discovered that they had come out smack in the rear of the huge fireplace in the living room of the de la Vega hacienda. A few mournful chimes from the grandfather clock welcomed them. Many years later they would learn that the site of the house had been chosen by Regina precisely because it was close to the sacred caves.
After their discovery, Diego and Bernardo set about strengthening the tunnel with boards and rocks, since the clay walls tended to crumble, and they also opened a hidden door in the bricks of the fireplace to connect the caves with the house. The hearth was so tall, wide, and deep that a cow could stand inside, a fitting dimension for the dignity of that room, which was never used to entertain guests but sometimes accommodated Alejandro de la Vega’s political meetings. The furniture, rough and uncomfortable, like that in the rest of the house, was lined up around the walls, as if they were for sale in a carpenter’s shop, accumulating dust and that rancid smell old furniture gets. The most prominent object in the room was an enormous oil of Saint Anthony ancient, bone-thin, covered with sores, and wearing rags in the act of rejecting Satan’s temptations, one of those horrors commissioned by the square unit in Spain and greatly appreciated in California. In a corner of honor, where they could be admired, were the staff and trappings of the alcalde’s office, which the owner of the house used in performing official duties. Those ranged from major matters, such as laying out streets, to trivial ones like granting permission for serenades; after all, if that were left to the wishes of smitten suitors, no one in the town would have slept. Hanging from the ceiling above a great table of cedar wood was an iron lamp the size of a cart wheel; it was set with one hundred and fifty candles that had never been lit because no one had the spirit to lower the huge contraption to light them. On the few occasions the room was opened they used oil lamps. The fireplace was never lighted either, although a fire was always laid with large logs. Diego and Bernardo got into the habit of coming back from the beach by using a shortcut through the caves, emerging like ghosts into the dark hollow of the fireplace. They had sworn, with the solemnity of children absorbed in their games, never to share that secret with anyone. They had also promised White Owl that they would enter the caves for good purposes only, and not for trivial games, but for them everything they did there was part of their training for okahue.
More or less during the same period that White Owl was nourishing the children’s indigenous roots, Alejandro de la Vega was beginning Diego’s education as an hidalgo. That was the year two trunks arrived from Europe, sent by Eulalia de Callis as gifts. Her husband, the former governor Pedro Fages, had dropped dead in Mexico City, felled by one of his rages. He collapsed like a sack at his wife’s feet during one of their fights, ruining her digestion forever because she blamed herself for having killed him. After spending a lifetime arguing with him, Eulalia sank into a deep depression when she found herself widowed; finally she realized how much she would miss her rotund husband. She knew that no one could replace such a stupendous man, a bear hunter and a great soldier, the only man she had ever known who could stand up to her. The tenderness she had never felt for him when he was alive smote her like a plague when she saw him in his coffin, and for her remaining years would continue to haunt her with memories that grew more vivid over time. Finally, weary of weeping, she followed the advice of her friends and her confessor and returned to Barcelona, where she had been born, and where she could enjoy the support of her fortune and her powerful family. From time to time she remembered Regina, whom she thought of as her protegee, and she wrote her on fine Egyptian paper imprinted with her coat of arms in gold. In one of those letters they learned that the Fages’s son had died of the plague, leaving Eulalia even more disconsolate.
The two trunks were quite battered by the time they arrived; they had left Barcelona nearly a year before and had sailed on different ships across many seas before they reached Pueblo de los Angeles. One was filled with gorgeous dresses, high-heeled shoes, plumed hats, and fripperies that Regina rarely had occasion to wear. The other, intended for Alejandro de la Vega, contained a black silk-lined cape with silver buttons from Toledo, a few bottles of the best Spanish brandy, a set of dueling pistols with mother-of-pearl handles, an Italian fencing sword, and Maestro Manuel Escalante’s Treatise on Fencing and Dueling. Just as the first page explained, this was a compendium of the “most useful instructions to ensure that one never hesitates when it is necessary to defend one’s honor with Spanish sword or epee.” Eulalia de Califs could not have sent a more appropriate present. It had been years since Alejandro de la Vega had held a sword, but thanks to the manual he was able to refresh his knowledge and teach fencing to a son who still could not blow his own nose. He ordered a child-sized epee, a quilted vest, and a mask for Diego, and from that moment formed the habit of practicing with him a couple of hours every day. Diego demonstrated the same natural talent for fencing that he had for all athletic activities, but he did not take it seriously, as his father wanted him to; for him it was just another of the many games he shared with Bernardo. That unwavering complicity between the boys worried Alejandro de la Vega. To him it seemed a weakness in his son’s character, who was by now old enough to assume the role his destiny decreed. De la Vega was fond of Bernardo, and favored him among the Indian servants after all, he had seen him born but he could not forget the differences that existed between social levels. He maintained that without those differences, set out by God for a clear purpose, chaos would reign in this world. His favorite example was France, where everything had been turned topsy-turvy by that accursed revolution. In that country no one knew any longer who was who; power was passed from hand to hand like a coin. Alejandro prayed that something like that would never happen in Spain. Even though a succession of inept monarchs was leading the empire to inevitable ruin, Alejandro had never questioned the divine legitimacy of the monarchy, just as he never questioned the hierarchical order in which he had grown up or the absolute superiority of his race, his nation, and his faith. Diego and Bernardo were different by birth; they would never be equals, and it was his opinion that the sooner they understood that, the fewer problems they would have in the future.