“Just imagine coming from people of two different races that had not a blamed thing in common except a love of blood in every which way,” Patterson said. “Imagine knowing your white daddy was a robber and killer just crazy with greed who raped your Indian momma who herself believed in cutting out people’s hearts to please the gods and eating what was left of the victim. Hardly any wonder the Mexies are they way they are. Sad to say, but they pretty much acquired all the worst traits of both races and little of the good. It’s an interesting subject but some of them can be a mite tender about it. Best not to bring it up in their company.”
Elizabeth Anne was not as much interested in such ethnic generalities as she was fascinated by Mexican folk culture—its ubiquitous spiritualism, its widespread belief in witchcraft and sorcery, in necromancy and ghosts, its pervasive personification of Death, so widely depicted in broadside illustrations and wall posters and murals as an amiable and amused skeletal presence in the midst of the foolish living. Of the many ghost stories she heard from the maids and the old cook—whose name was Josefina Cortéz—none so captivated her as that of La Llorona, the Crying Woman. The way Josefina told it, the Crying Woman had been a Spanish aristocrat who was forsaken by her husband for another woman, a mestiza, and the betrayal so crazed her with fury that she murdered her children in order to punish her husband. On comprehending the horror she had committed, she was consumed with grief and killed herself, but her spirit was condemned to wander through the nights in everlasting search of the little ones’ lost souls. It was a story told with variations in different parts of the country—in some she was not a Spaniard but a poor Indian, and the specific adultery that provoked her to murder the children varied from version to version. But almost every regional variation agreed that whoever had the bad fortune to come upon the Crying Woman and looked into her eyes would be afflicted with her anguish and kill themselves because of it. The young maids nodded in big-eyed accord as Josefina told Elizabeth Anne that to this day you might on some late nights hear La Llorona crying for her children in the streets— “Aaaayyy, mis hijos! Mis hiiiijos!” Sometimes her cries came from a great distance in the countryside, sometimes from just across town, sometimes from the darkness just outside one’s window. The tale prickled the fine hairs of Elizabeth Anne’s nape even as her eyes welled in sympathy for the Crying Woman.
She learned about curanderismo—the primitive and magical healing arts—and of brujería, the practice of witchcraft, both beneficent and malign. Scattered in the back streets of town were a variety of shops where one could buy secret herbs and potions to effect almost any desire of the heart and soul. There were special candles and little books of cryptic incantations to gain favor from an importuned spirit. Charms and amulets and talismans against the evil eye. A curandera could cure ailments defiant of medical science, but a bruja possessed even greater and darker powers. A bruja could invoke hexes, cast spells, instill or cure dementia of every kind. Could commune with the spirits of the dead. And as for love—a dementia so commonplace that most brujas viewed it with the same bored scorn of doctors for the head cold—there were many rituals anyone could employ without the help of a sorceress. A dead hummingbird in a man’s pocket made him irresistible to the opposite sex. A woman wishing to be loved by a particular man should wear a rooster feather next to her heart when she was in his presence, but if she wanted to be loved by many men she should carry the feather in her underwear. A man wanting to seduce a woman should put in her food the leg of a beetle or a pinch of bone dust from a human female skeleton. But he had to be very careful because too much of either ingredient would drive the woman insane past all hope of recovery. Insanity was also a risk if a woman wanting to gain dominance over her husband put an excess of jimson weed in his coffee. It was not hard to understand, Josefina told Elizabeth Anne, why there were so many crazy people in the world, especially lovers.
Elizabeth Anne could not get enough of such lore and superstition. John Roger teased her for her interest in such claptrap, as he termed it. He wondered aloud if maybe she had put a bit too much jimson weed in his coffee and then drunk it herself by mistake. She crossed her eyes and affected to babble as if mentally unhinged. Then beamed at his happy laughter.
As soon as she’d learned of her impending motherhood she had written her parents the news. They were elated—but her mother pleaded with Elizabeth Anne to come home to have the baby.
“Surely you wish the child to be born on American ground,” Mrs Bartlett wrote. “And certainly you must be even more aware than I of the hazards of giving birth in that primitive land. Come home, darling daughter, for the safety of the child as well as your own.”
John Roger saw the sadness in her eyes as she read the letter to him. Just as he was about to say that if she wanted to have the child in New Hampshire it would be all right with him, she said, “Poor Mother. She simply cannot comprehend that I am home.”
Through the offices of Charles Patterson, the Wolfes had become acquainted with a number of well-placed persons—British and American entrepreneurs, municipal officials, prominent Mexican businessmen, and several hacendados who kept a second residence in Veracruz. The city’s mayor was a friend. So too the young captain of police, Ramón Mendoza, whose small force was almost exclusively employed in keeping order in the zócalo and patrolling the neighborhoods of the affluent. Although the Wolfes adhered to the protocols of their social class and hosted their share of formal dinner parties, they as always preferred their own company, and even before Elizabeth Anne’s advancing pregnancy made it easy to beg off from party invitations, they took guilty pride in their finesse at fabricating plausible excuses.
They were, however, very curious about the hacienda world they had heard so much about, and when a hacendado friend invited them to attend his daughter’s quinceañera—the traditional celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday, marking her passage into womanhood—they happily accepted. Because of Elizabeth Anne’s pregnancy, John Roger had at first been unsure if they should make the trip, but she was only in her fourth month and she assured him she felt quite up to it.
The hacienda was named Corazón de la Virgen and lay twenty-five miles southwest of the city. There was a special mass for the girl on the morning of her birthday, then a reception and a formal dinner, then a party with four hundred guests. The gala lasted until sunrise and then everyone departed for home except for a few special guests, including the Wolfes, who were hosted for another two days, until the birthday girl was taken to the port in Veracruz to embark on a chaperoned two-month stay in Paris, her parents’ main gift to her.