If it doesn’t take too long, she said.
Well, it’s like this. From what you say, you know me better than I know myself. I certainly didn’t know you as well as I thought—
No recriminations, please. What do you want?
Since you know me, and since I’m feeling lost, please tell me: What kind of woman should I look for? Who do you think could love me?
None of my friends can stand you, and that’s the truth. They never could. I deserve a medal for putting up with you for so long. I can tell you what’s most hateful about you. There are actually seven things. First—
Sorry to interrupt you, Carmen, but since you’re in a hurry, could you just tell me who—
Look, she said. No woman could tolerate you. Your soul is utterly diseased. A prostitute might pretend to like you until your money runs out, but I’ve just made sure you’ll never have much of that. Your only hope is to find a saint or a vampire. Now remember: Don’t contact us in any way. You lost your visitation rights for a reason. The children are trying to forget you. That’s it. Goodbye.
Thanking her for this suggestion, I travelled to Veracruz, because she once lived there.
I was too timid to seek out La Llorona for my bride, but I did once visit the house on Avenida Nicolás Bravo. Within lay a dead man, perhaps homeless. Sometimes when forgotten corpses mummify, and their arms are outspread (perhaps because the dying men flung them open when their hearts drank in those nourishing bullets, or perhaps because the executioners crucified them), their tendons come to resemble the roots and woody creepers which clothe the arches of Cortés’s old house near Veracruz; to enter one of those archways is almost to shelter in a mummy’s armpit, and to discover any such hard hollow carcass is to be reminded of a ceiba tree. The mouth was open, with a jade bead inside.
Then I went to worship at the Climax’s titanic effigy of a naked blonde between whose legs any one of us may lean. The girls were nice; they took my money. None of them gave me a fever. I ate at Tacos “Mary”; I took in freight trains and dusty flat roofs with laundry hanging from them. Seeking to lose myself, I traversed the rolling hills of reddish grass and green palms. Wide orange-grassed canyons impelled me through the jungle, into thickets of prickly pear. Hoping to see heaven, I gazed upward and found the flash of white on an eagle’s wingtip.
Once upon a time, on the coast of the country known to the indigenes as Woman with the Green Jade Dress, there used to be a sandy place called Tecpan; and here, on 24 June 1518, Capitán Juan de Grijalva landed, soon after which this land was snatched from the Devil, and reclaimed for the Kingdom of God, not without certain necessary tortures and executions. How could the savages in their simplicity have imagined that their primitive rites at Tecpan would be prohibited and forgotten? As for the conquistadors, why shouldn’t their empire of righteousness have endured forever? And Malinche, wasn’t she secure in her lord’s love? (Where she once embraced him in the Casa de Cortés, there grows a palm tree’s snake-roots whose scales are chain mail.) The matador in blue and gold, not yet realizing that he is ready for the grave, feels kindred confidence; likewise the ancient mestiza who trusts that her tomb-robbed, staring jade figurine with the jade lizard-woman in his lap will find a buyer, right here on Avenida Díaz Mirón, maybe even today, after which she will get abundant food, perhaps even meat. And won’t my sweetheart cherish me until life ends?
Just as in the old records a word will be broken up wherever the page ends, after the style of a Roman inscription or a child’s letter, so it is with our loves and lives, everywhere we find ourselves, but most of all in Veracruz, the cemetery of the world.
TWO KINGS IN ZIÑOGAVA
But what does the social order do for geniuses and passionate characters, burning for gold and pleasure, who want eagerly to devour their allotted span? They will spend their lives in prison and end them in a torture chamber.
When the mulatto gravedigger Salvador González Rodríguez rebelled against our Mother Church, and martyred a priest by means of a shovel-edge, he was, of course, brought to trial with punctilious regard for the formalities, then gibbeted in chains, following which his head was exposed as a warning to evildoers. One question remained to annoy the authorities: What should they do with the murderer’s younger brother Agustín? He was thirteen — an age sufficient for culpability, should any act be proved against him, although the case did not appear that way, since the innkeeper Jaime Esposito, being duly sworn, testified that on the morning of the crime this curlyhaired boy, who now sat between two soldiers, bowing his head and swallowing saliva, had been peddling sugarcane in a doorway across the street from his establishment; so that, as the
procurador indeed proposed, there might exist grounds for admitting him to the house of mercy lately established for poor beggars here in Veracruz, for he was a bona fide orphan, his father having met the black vomit some three years after his mother got raped to death by French pirates. Next to be summoned forward was the peanut vendor’s slave Herlinda Encinas, a fullblooded Congolese damsel of about nineteen years of age who appeared so deliciously ebony in her pure white dress that the procurador, a tolerant man whose work had educated him about crimes of venery, winkingly referred to her as a fly in milk. She must have thought this court like unto a Mass! Her master, a free negro named Melchor Marín, aged fifty-seven, and a fair Christian, who took oath that he had been baptized, as seemed likely since he could say his Paternoster without great trouble, evidently feared to lose her services should she be convicted of anything, for he kept thanking God for this diligent chattel, without whose laughing, winning manners people would surely desert his stand, which from what he told the court was generally unfolded just outside the Baluarte, that square transshipment fort, already old, whose cannons pointed outwards at palm trees; moreover, the aforesaid Marín depended on Herlinda to feed and dress his children, his wife unfortunately being so infirm as to be good for nothing; indeed she longed for the hour of her death — at which inessential and certainly impious juncture the judge, Doctor de los Ríos, closed up the sluices of that old man’s mouth, and commanded the aforesaid Herlinda to speak, in order to inform the court as to whether she had in fact been — in the words of the three witnesses Cristóbal Pérez, free mulatto, Neyda Duarte, black slave, and Verdugo Acosta, free mulatto — a former paramour of the late detested evildoer Salvador González Rodríguez; to which the fly in milk immediately confessed, with more demureness than shame. Aware (to his sorrow, be it said) that the people’s turpitude throughout this New Spain of ours, and most certainly here in Veracruz, had grown so ubiquitous that such errors as yonder benighted woman’s fornications must be overlooked, at least for today, in the interest of rooting out the more dangerous offenses of bigamy, sacrilege, blasphemy, sedition, witchcraft, Judaism, treason and murder, Doctor de los Ríos, after admonishing the slave wench, who bit her lip and hung her head, satisfied himself by asking whether there had been any engagement or understanding between her and the detested Salvador, at which she shook her head, although whether in negation or confusion none could tell. Therefore, Doctor de los Ríos repeated his question, in a grimmer tone of voice. It came out that the detested Salvador had sworn himself to marry the girl, and even (or so he had told her) applied to the archdiocese for forgiveness of their illicit relations, by requesting a formal dispensation from his victim, the sainted Fray de Castro, who might for all anyone knew have been struck down for refusing to provide it. Doctor de los Ríos now interrogated Herlinda as to why she had desired to wed this evildoer, to which she replied, not without sense, that since they had already fornicated, it seemed best to repair their sin by entering into the sacramental state. When the question arose of whether she had submitted to intercourse before or after receiving a promise of marriage, the girl could utter no intelligible answer. Doctor de los Ríos accordingly demanded to know whether she had or had not been a virgin prior to lying with the detested Salvador, to which she abashedly replied that she had already granted carnal knowledge of her person to four men. — And had she confessed these sins? — Oh, yes, she said — to Fray de Castro, who was now in no position to contradict her. — Calling upon the aforesaid Melchor Marín to stand, which he tremulously did, Doctor de los Ríos reminded him of his responsibility toward this negro woman as her owner and therefore in a sense her father. Then the aforesaid Melchor Marín did lower his head, after the fashion of his own negress, and asseverate and say that to his certain knowledge, Herlinda and the detested Salvador used to sleep together in one bed, or more precisely on the dirt floor, which he, the said Melchor, and his spouse Ofelia both considered scandalous, not to mention a sad reflection upon our distance from Jesus Christ; but since the detested Salvador had often helped Herlinda by carrying great sacks of peanuts upon his shoulders, as if he were her loving husband (although whether those two had indeed betrothed themselves to each other the said Melchor could not swear; they had kept him in darkness, he tremulously said, because they must have feared that he, Herlinda’s owner, might resent their expectation of future enjoyment of any so-called conjugal rights at the very times when he or his children had need of her), and since the selfsame detested Salvador visited her either at home or on the street whenever his victim the sainted Fray de Castro permitted, Melchor and Ofelia had seen reason to hope and pray that those two would in time be married by the hand of a cleric — all of which was corroborated by the aforesaid Herlinda Encinas, who, it quickly came out, was a blithe and accomplished tattler, at least so long as the investigation appeared to concern someone other than herself. When commanded to explain why in her view the murder had occurred, she freely informed the court that in her presence the detested Salvador had complained with unseemly resentment about certain floggings regularly administered for his own good. Calling upon her to look into his eyes, Doctor de los Ríos now required and demanded to know without equivocation whether the concubinage in which she had so disgustingly engaged with the detested Salvador ever caused the latter to be delinquent in his duties to his employer, to which in a feeble voice she replied that it had not. Next, Doctor de los Ríos asked her owner the same question. Gripping the railing, the old black man said that to the best of his information the late Fray de Castro had considered Herlinda a good influence upon the detested Salvador, who was known to be moody and even turbulent, and that he might very well have preferred to see those two persons married, not that he, Melchor, had ever raised this issue with the Father, for fear of encouraging the matter to go forward. — That’s as may be, said Doctor de los Ríos, but can you deny that the visits of your slave woman’s paramour benefited your business at the diocese’s expense? From what I’ve gathered, in the times when he was hauling peanut-bags to her, she wasn’t exactly digging graves for him! — at which the court chamber blossomed with smiles and titters, and the old man staggered. — Now then, Herlinda, continued the judge, not displeased with the success of his jest, have you fully discharged your conscience here before me? I call on you now, in the presence of God, Who is most certainly listening, to give oath, for the sake of justice and in the interest of your own soul, to state, speak fully, and say whether you felt inconvenienced by the late Fray de Castro’s legitimate demands upon your detested paramour, whose memory I curse with every word of execration, and accordingly conspired with him to commit this damnable crime — at which the black woman, sobbing loudly, as if she had just now come to comprehend her peril, and would never again be permitted to see the cathedral’s cupola-faces now almost the color of the sweetly humid air, nor the palms growing invisibly, silently and vainly away from earth, nor those two fat ladies with the baskets of biscuits and crackers on their shoulders (one of whom, Neyda Duarte, had testified against her), reiterated, as was indeed known to be the case, that upon perceiving the murderer approach her in the market, marked, as if with the brand of Cain, with red eyes and red hands, she had screamed and fled him, as a result of which the baser sort of negroes and Indians had stolen nearly two pesos’ worth of peanuts; moreover, her owner, the aforesaid Melchor Marín, had already sworn by the Mother of God that this girl was innocent, which Doctor de los Ríos himself believed; but there are times when justice finds it politic to put on a frowning face. Now that she had been reduced to the proper state, one would hope that in order to spare herself she would denounce any error or failing of the aforesaid Agustín González Rodríguez, who, since he remained so far short of his twenty-fifth year, when a boy becomes a man, was compassionately represented by the