As for the real Herlinda, by now she had found herself a new amor, the lightskinned free mulatto Gaspar de la Cruz, who under pretense of carrying sacks of sugar smuggled French textiles from the port up as far as Xalapa, where he sold them at a respectable rate of return, although too much of his profits went for bribes and fees, in obedience to that fine Mexican custom called engordar el cochino, to fatten the pig. Herlinda was tired of being Melchor Marín’s slave, for his breath stank, his wife was incontinent, and he never left her alone at night. Her very compliance bore sure relevance to his retreat from that half-promise, uttered so long ago, of conditional manumission for her, someday, if she continued to be his good girl. Now that she had gotten into the habit, she sometimes serviced the master’s friends in exchange for a piece of leather or a fine roast fish. Truth to tell, Salvador González Rodríguez was the only man she had felt much for, but Herlinda, who could not hope to be considered a fly in milk for many years longer, faked affection in order to burnish her so-called future; indeed, she branched out to friends of friends, none of whom had yet infected her untreatably. Meanwhile, although Doctor de los Ríos once seemed to enjoy her looks, she had already appeared before him a second time, when he warned her, as she knew all too well, that the punishment of concubinage is to be led through the street on a donkey, with the neighbors jeering and threatening, and the usual rope of criminality around one’s neck, and then to be stripped to the waist beneath the official pillar and there, in the stink of malefactors’ decapitated heads, to be treated to a hearty hundred lashes. So Gaspar chivalrously proposed to steal the girl from Señor Marín and take her over byroads to Mexico City, where no one would know them if they changed their names. But first he wanted to get a good lot of Lyonnaise cloth, because from what he had heard they could make double or triple once they reached the capital. He was a dashing sort, who liked to wear a mushroom-shaped cap in imitation of the conquistadors. Herlinda, who had the most to lose, pointed out that it was a long way to go; for all they knew, they might be called upon to fatten dozens of pigs, and she had no ambition to be poor. (In fact, although she trusted her paramour well enough, in her girdle she had hidden five silver pesos to pay off a padrino who might gain pardon from her master if she chose to come back, because who can predict which surprises may come flying out of the night air?) Gaspar told her to leave it all to him. Perhaps she shouldn’t have listened, but in truth she had to do so much for the Maríns that it felt very nice to be taken care of for once. Moreover, her children had recently been sold, which was convenient.
While they perfected their plans, something came flying through the evening sky. At first she thought it was a bat. Then it drew closer. Her face turned as yellow as a penitent’s frock. Before it killed her, it sang:
Sad is my heart, negrita;
I know not why—
sad for an illusion,
sad for what I dreamed.
Agustín said to himself: Salvador is evil, and I am his knight who is unclean in his heart. — And this brought him a kind of comfort, to know where the truth lay. With his Amazonian sword he swiped off Gaspar’s head. Then the two kings went rushing through the city like a plague-breeze, lopping heads and splitting guts all night.
What about the witnesses who had served the authorities against the two brothers? First Herlinda’s master and mistress, and then the innkeeper Jaime Esposito (whose greatest pride was that he was the bastard descendant of Don Diego Fernández de Córdova), all became medicine for the thirsty head. Of these, Señor Marín perished the most abjectly. Agustín remembered watching him beat Salvador, in the days when Salvador was more than a head; Agustín would begin to pray silently as soon as his brother, having received the command, knelt down on the floor and clasped his hands while the master cudgeled his skull; and Herlinda, her earbobs sparkling crazily, would be kneeling beside him, grimacing and weeping, praying for mercy on her lover’s account, until she irritated the master sufficiently to receive a whack or two on the forehead.
Neyda Duarte, who had testified against Herlinda, was already dead from the white sickness, so the two brothers could not punish her, at least not in this world. Infuriated, the head went rushing over the city, breathing out hell-breath, and by dawn people had begun to die of yellow fever. The next day Agustín began to vomit. The head flew sweetly round and round his face, to keep the flies off. When he expired, the head sank back down underground. Demons marched up like a file of Jaguar Soldiers, and seized them both to be burned forever. And if you ever come to Veracruz, put your ear to the grass outside the irregular septagonal parapet of the Baluarte de Santiago, and among the other screams coming up from hell (which is not far underground), you may hear Agustín weeping endlessly over his failure to live, while the head goes on laughing.
I myself have never seen a ghost, let alone a flying head, so I cannot swear to you that every detail of this story is true. But when I visited San Juan de Ulúa, which the Indians used to call Chalchiuhcuecan, a guard with the crossed anchors of the Navy on his cap assured me: If you come here at night expecting to see a ghost, you definitely will. — He himself once saw a man in a raincoat supposedly standing guard, but all the guards were inside, so what could that have been but a ghost? On another occasion he was pissing and saw a dark faceless figure glide by. And so there you have it, straight from a uniformed member of the Armada de Mexico.
V
THE WHITE-ARMED LADY
For the white-armed lady he waited long.
Inside the tiny white house, he sat at the head of the table, listening to the seagulls, his stare fettered from below by the white lace tablecloth, whose flower-whorled spiderweb knew how to trap his eyes, and occluded by the low-hanging lamp, whose candle never guttered within that scalloped breast of glass. Unblinkingly he peered through the windows curtained with white lace, and across the narrow lane at the other white houses. Again it began to rain. Silver drops clung to the windows.
He could hear somebody cutting wood.
In nearly every window of each of the other white houses he could see a potted plant beneath the white curtains. All of the pots were white. One window presented a narrow-necked green vase and a green watering can. He liked that window the best without knowing why.
Up the street came a man, who stopped, shoved his hands in the pockets of his heavy coat, and gazed right into the window. The one at the table wondered how deeply he could see, and when he would go away.
The man went away.
There was a white-haired old woman in white, bent over her walking stick, who used to pass by twice each day, first going left, then going right. She never raised her head. He grew fond of her, and then one morning she passed to the left and never returned again.
Closing his eyes, he heard rain splashing on the cobblestones. He looked up. Now the other white houses were going grey; the windy day was fading.
At night the rain prickled and pulsed down on the roofs of those little white houses, spattering loudly on the cobblestones, shining on the windows between the greenish-white curtains; now it sounded like marbles on the roof, and over the table the lamp began to twitch. The trees shone almost day-green in the streetlights; the windows of the other white houses were black. He sat at the table staring.