Sometimes Rodrigo picked over the legend of Chucho el Rojo, the thieves’ hero, whose cellmate La Changa paid off a guard to get him a ship, from which he swam away, oiled against sharks, and then travelled overland to Mexico, where he was received by his lovely mistress, Matilde de Frizac. What La Changa got out of it no one mentioned. Rodrigo and Bernardo were going to get themselves younger, lighter-skinned mistresses than Matilde; they would rob great ships of cocoa, vanilla and silver. This dream was as a breezeblown palmhead waving behind one of San Juan de Ulúa’s moldy stone walls. As for Agustín, he pretended that the bootsteps of soldiers on the low many-arched bridges, or the faraway hoofsteps of horses on those blocks of out-fanning coral, were somehow conveying him away from here. In summer Fray de Castro used to keep his dark cloak clasped only at the throat, falling away to his ankles and showing the dirty-pale robe beneath. To live is to live in dirt, it seems. What did he care about Matilde de Frizac, especially if Rodrigo liked her? In six more years he’d be twenty-five — still young, perhaps, but how nitrous by then his heart! He no longer fever-dreamed of kissing any pretty blackamoor wench who wore earbobs of jade and a fine silver necklace. What he wished for most of all was revenge — on these fine villains here to whose mercy he must pretend to feel beholden, on the uniformed rogue who had whipped him, on all the guards, soldiers, officials, mariners and architects connected with San Juan de Ulúa, and on the men who had executed his brother. If only he could trample down that damned judge, and make off with the procurador’s head! By the fiftieth time the others used him, it seemed ordinary. The falconets and brass lombards were booming out to honor some admiral in the harbor. To his cellmates he continued peaceful and obedient, having no hope of making his way here were he anything else. (Had he come more quickly into his growth he could have looked them in the face, and known their menace and their dingy monotonous malice, their self-hating corruption, which pleased itself only by blighting others and then but for an instant.) He never spoke of his own accord, and answered others as seldom as possible. Feeling insulted, they treated him with increasing cruelty. Just as Dorantes de Carranza used to amuse his guests by arranging bullfighting matches against crocodiles whose jaws had been tied shut, so Bernardo or Rodrigo liked to organize a certain game, played four or five prisoners at a time, of sitting on Agustín’s arms and legs, then tormenting and goading him. While they used him, they called him slave, whore, and, worst of all, woman. Sometimes when he crept toward the food trough they liked to shove his face in it until he choked. On a certain night when they commenced to threaten and insult him, he attacked Juan Hernández, who had too often bragged of having once discovered a golden frog ornament in the ground; and because he injured this Juan in his ribs, they punished him with a broken nose and several other tokens of their comradeship, followed by the usual outcome. But Agustín found himself less afraid than before, or perhaps simply more indifferent, as if the steamy, moldy years in San Juan de Ulúa had rotted away some of his heart. And although his indifference enraged them, it might also have saved him at times, since they shared it. Once they had satisfied themselves, and left him facedown on the floor, he kept still until they slept, then hit back, biting and kicking. Again they subdued him, slamming his head against the wall until his hair was wet with blood. They left him to live or die, and he laughed. An hour later, when they had forgotten him sufficiently to again memorialize all the women they had defended or attacked with their daggers, he sprang on Bernardo and thumbed out one of his eyes. Whether they would murder him was a question, to be sure, but he did not care, as they well perceived. When they let him alone, which was easiest, he did the same for them. — He’s not afraid! he heard them say, and then he knew that he was correct. He informed Bernardo that next time he would kill him, and Bernardo said nothing. Thus his life got simplified through hatred. No better than a slave before, he was no worse now. — Sometimes in the winter they could hear the nortes blow around their prison, and sometimes they could even hear rain. They heard the cannon; once in awhile they heard voices. — In the summer of his third year, nauseously grinding his forehead against the nitrous walls in quest of any coolness which might exude from this earth, he swooned into the searing well of his sickness, surrendering to nightmares, or at least enduring them, since he could do nothing else; when he awoke, he seemed to spy a greyish-white bird departing from his face. Gazing down into that latrine-hole beneath which the water flowed as bright and green as the jade ornaments on Chalchihuitlicue’s skirt, he longed for light more fiercely than ever. He seemed to hear faraway people chanting in church like slaves pulling a rope. Again and again he dreamed of his brother rising back out of earth, whole again — but it is seldom we realize our dreams entirely. By then he was stronger and uglier, like his wishes; and from time to time, as inmates died, the guards threw in fresh young boys more gratifying than he to his companions’ tastes. Just as Aztecs used to torture children, to ensure that they would weep before getting sacrificed to Tlaloc the rain god — for who would deny that tears are similar to rain, and therefore might bring it? — thus these cruel men, being diseased by rage, made sure that their pretty objects shrieked out in pain and shame, while Agustín, who was commencing to achieve a sinister reputation, lay in the darkest corner, turning over and over everything he had ever heard of necromancy, in order to call back his elder brother from the dead. Silently he worked his arms and legs hour by hour, in order to strengthen them, and perhaps someday to accomplish his deliverance. (Salvador had been terribly strong — all the more so when anger overtook him.) Each grief, humiliation and injury was now as precious to him as the thorn from Christ’s crown which we keep in our cathedral here in Veracruz; because each one strengthened his righteousness. Yet all the while he felt indifferent. None of his emotions were real to him. His self-pride grew as glorious as the silver cross on the Inquisition’s crimson banner. Perhaps he would kill each man in this cell, one by one. He knew he’d get Rodrigo at least. Even that nonentity of an earless Indian maddened him now, but he’d rise beyond all that; he’d wear a pleated doublet of scarlet or emerald, sashed tightly round his narrow waist. He’d sin with as many women as possible, preferably without their consent. Sometimes he could hear the calls of the leather and sugar vendors on the beach, but then a white mist rose up out of the latrine-hole and wrapped him soundlessly in himself. He drowsed. Meanwhile his companions preyed upon a new convict named Luís, who had been imprisoned for defaulting on his alcabala tax, and next morning they all meditated on the strange expression of peace on the suicided boy’s face, his skin so smooth, his dark eyes sleepily half-closed, his lips parted on the right side and shut on the left, so that as he lay there his mouth appeared to be a sweet fruit which excited the villains no end, so that they began to sing: