Once upon a time, a plague ship came sailing home, with a cargo of munitions, chains, armor and icons for the Duque of Albuquerque, and all on board were either sick or dead, excepting only one. It was mid-morning, the winter sea a chalky bluish-grey, the warm clouds a trifle darker shade of that same hue; and the helmsman, whose name was Miguel Minjárez, began to hope that the Virgin had heard his prayers, and would continue to hold her hand over his head. But as they approached the harbor, dodging the familiar sandy isles, jade fever settled also on him, and the long piers seemed to pulse; Veracruz was welcoming him, rhythmically opening her arms like a woman measuring lengths of thread. Her palm trees bent toward him; her waters sparkled mockingly over the ribs of wrecked ships. Just as when a young woman’s hair has been so tightly bobbed away from the back of her neck that along the borderline between flesh and hair each strand glows against the skin like a lacquered shadow, while the tiny hairs on her arms shine white in the sun, so the edges of Miguel’s eyelashes seemed to illuminate the great woman who gathered him in: Veracruz, our Sweet Lady of Contagion; Veracruz, who smothers her lovers, breathing on them ever so adoringly with her green and filthy mouth. He wanted her now, and would do anything to come to her, but not yet here like those barnacled skeletons on either side; he preferred to sink into the ground. Death inflamed the corners of his vision, like the red-leaved almond trees of Veracruz. On the ramparts of San Juan de Ulúa, which ordinarily bristled with as many silhouetted sentries as a centipede’s legs, he glimpsed but a single soldier, sitting with his head in his hands. A black cloud of vultures overhung that island. Miguel steered away. As the city walls rose up ahead, he grew weaker; his way became as steep as the steps of a Totonacan pyramid. He prayed: Help me to kiss you, Lady Veracruz! — Remembering to overlay the tower of the Church of San Francisco upon the cathedral tower, no matter how they both contracted and swelled, he kept on course, sweating and nauseous, and so presently brought the vessel safely to anchor.
Pestilence must have outraced them to the port, or else the Indians had risen up again; because neither inspector nor guard arrived. The Isabela, lately in from a slave-and-sugar voyage, swung in her chains like a derelict. Both infantry companies were gone. Freeing the anchor, whose chains rushed down like the guts of a belly-slit heretic, Miguel cast rope-loops over the wharfposts and drew them tight. Then he passed ashore, into the power of the lady whom he loved. He would have summoned help for his comrades, even from the Marqués del Valle, who rarely forgave the disturbers of his leisure; but even that lord had departed from his tower, along with both sentries. The barracks was silent, the door ajar, and on the threshold lay the ripe green cadaver of an officer in his wheel-breasted armor, with vultures eating him. Miguel in his loneliness, confusion and fear commenced to pray to Our Lady of Remedies; but now his fever flared up irresistibly. In Veracruz, fathers wrap their baby daughters tight when the wind blows warm instead of hot; and so the roasting, steaming sensations which enwrapped Miguel were not utterly unpleasant; indeed, they seemed better known to him than the nearest islands, as if he might be going home. So he tottered dizzily across the zócalo where a few years since a temple’s stone arms had comforted the sacrificed, while today María Elena the pretty banana vendeuse who used to flirt with him was lying on her back with her arms outspread, dark fluid staining her swollen face and ants busy in her hair; the vultures rose off her as he neared; and he went on seeking the lady he loved: Veracruz, whose bosom was as lovely as the cemetery hill in Cempoala from which one can see the ocean, and whose eyes were as gentle as the wormholes shining like silver ice-crusts through the fine conservation paper in the Archives of the Ayuntamiento de Veracruz. Sickness fouled his liver, cramping it up tight against his ribs. Obediently he opened his mouth and vomited.
Veracruz was wearing a greenish-blue cloak and a translucent veil. Smiling at him over her shoulder, she beckoned with her little finger. Miguel followed joyously. She led him into the doorway of a house on the street now called Avenida Nicolás Bravo, and if you wish I had furnished more complete explanations, please blame the silvery wormtrails between those twinned layers of translucent conservation paper, whose texture is as fine as a finger-whorl’s, because otherwise we would not have been robbed of what might have been the most significant trailings of brownish ink, written in those intuitive horizontals, with wide margins of the conservation paper on either side, the verso showing through like an inverted ghost; and on every page a spring coil of ink, which must be the verifier’s mark. Sometimes marginalia tantalize our researches in smaller but still neat characters.
From caja twelve, volume twelve, bound in acidic cardboard by some impoverished or benighted twentieth-century functionary, and accordingly embrittled, I now extract the eighteenth-century story of the deformed boy Jesús Sánchez, who, in despair because he could not find a girl to love him, somehow escaped his parents (who kept him chained to a mango tree, in order to protect him from the consequences of his own hideous appearance), shambled out of ken, and in three days, thanks to the kind offices of vultures and rats, was found naked in an abandoned establishment on Avenida Nicolás Bravo, the parts of him which had not been eaten being fruited with green pustules of the bigness of those galls on oak trees, from which ink is made, for which reason, with the concurrence of those who deserved to be consulted, and appropriate disregard for all others, the authorities thought best to burn the house; accordingly, as testified in neat script faded to orange, overlaying a jagged grey pillar of nineteenth-century water damage, the aforesaid cleansing was carried out, and the corpse buried decently in the cemetery — an unpleasant task even for quadroons, since its semiskeletonized arms remained outstretched as if to embrace the invisible. Between wormholes the following words taunt our researches: of jade in his mouth, which the prudent Fathers… Whatever these may have signified, within the next week two dozen families in the vicinity of the cathedral showed signs of yellow fever, which was duly cured with exorcism, prayer, but not before most of them had died. And if you disbelieve any of this, I refer you to that concluding guarantee of veracity: Escrito por la parte de la Policía.
Just before the Spaniards withdrew from Mexico, much the same befell a certain hacendado with gold and silver embroidery on his felted hat, whose double rows of silver buttons on his black jacket had not been able to buy true affection, and who was robbed of nothing after death, not even the silver spurs on his feet.