“This man, Francisco Sentmanat, married one of the sisters of my grandmother, the eldest one, to be precise. Poor thing, what a life she had to lead! It was a love match, not a marriage of convenience, though by the time they did marry, more than one person assumed it was ambition that was leading her down the aisle, because at that period Sentmanat was the owner of Tabasco. Nobody said no to him; he always had the last word on everything. I think that he had genuine feelings for my aunt Dorita. Otherwise, how can you explain it, eh? He had his pick of so many girls, so why was he going to tie himself to a girl who was less wealthy than he was and who, they say, wasn’t really all that pretty. I don’t say she was ugly, because none of my mother’s sisters was ugly, but Dorita, well, there’s no denying it, she was the least gifted, shall we say, people didn’t rave about her eyes the way they did about Sara’s or about the china-doll complexion my grandmother had, or about the hourglass waist of little Nena …
“Anyway, it turns out that this Sentmanat did just what he pleased till his excesses exhausted everybody’s patience and they threw him out of Tabasco. He was a tyrant, there’s no denying it. I have to admit it, even though we’re related. On the good side he declared the independence of Tabasco, saying that this was what we needed, and why not? But on the bad side, he was a cheap and nasty sort, forever pulling a fast one wherever he could, though where he thought he got the right to do so, I can’t say, but he was full of caprices and ambitions and because of his character he had people assassinated for no real reason or stuck in jail, regardless of who they were. As well, even though he was genuinely fond of Aunt Dorita, he grabbed any woman he fancied, as if all the women in Tabasco were Indians and he could have a tumble with them in a cane field or coffee plantation and never face the consequences. He raised taxes outrageously, transferred other people’s property into his name, whether it was an established farm or not. Oh, his government became intolerable, so bad that even our family, the Ulloas, who were related to him, turned against him. Ages before, the government in Mexico City had declared his position illegal, but what the devil did he care? Back then, they were so far away, as I said. It would have been more to the point if Havana or Mérida had declared war on us, but that didn’t happen. Sentmanat was the close friend of the governor of the Yucatán and did an incredible amount of business with the Cubans and the Spaniards in Cuba. But the upshot was that the Ulloas and the other Tabasco families finally kicked him out, because without help from anybody, he’d earned his expulsion, thanks to all his wild ways and crazy messes there’s no point in even mentioning.
“He went off to live in New Orleans, with my poor aunt Dorita and all. They say he had a very nice house there. In fact they built three like it in St. John the Baptist, one of them belonging to my aunt Nena, Dorita’s sister. Her husband had made it his personal business to get rid of Sentmanat as governor, and it wasn’t as if Aunt Nena’s husband was especially envious or liked to pick a fight, but Sentmanat brought it upon himself. Not content with being the big boss over everything in Tabasco, and with always having the last word in everything, and with being the representative of law and order, he declared the family’s properties solely his own, and, worse still, confiscated land from people who weren’t even related to him, if there was a single rubber tree growing on it. He was friendly with some Germans who had come to collect rubber, when they’d scented there were going to be big profits in it, because back in Europe they were using it to make all sorts of things like combs, shoes, billiard balls, buttons, buckets, electrical insulators, boxes, knife handles, and such. Sentmanat did the arithmetic and figured out there was a fortune in rubber, so he confiscated any property where rubber trees grew.
“Anyway, he did go off to New Orleans and he built a fabulous house there. And we all thought that we’d seen the last of him in Tabasco. But we’d underestimated him. The fact that the whole of Tabasco had turned against him didn’t crush his spirit at all. So believe it or not, he organized a pirate expedition. On the Mississippi he fitted out two ships with guns and sailed across the Gulf of Mexico and came in via Paraíso, where he joined up with his German allies and reached St. John the Baptist and captured it in a surprise attack! It wasn’t that he was a strategic genius.
He was just impulsive and whimsical. He never thought twice before doing anything. His blood was constantly on the boil, his brain worked overtime, but to think a thing over, to plan an act intelligently — that simply went against his grain. His victory was short-lived. I mean, he caught us off guard, because while he was away in New Orleans building his house and arming his pirate ships, we’d been decimated by an epidemic of yellow fever, a terrible business, really horrible to get, with lots of people dying, but even so, how could the state capital remain in the hands of pirates? At the start, you were just feverish, you know, it was like a mild cold with stomachaches thrown in, and an awful stuffiness, but then if it didn’t go away, you got really sick, with your eyes all bright and unable to bear the light, and if it went beyond that, you were in for the worst of all endings, because you’d get an anxiety attack, then start vomiting up black stuff, as black as coffee grounds, and get delirious. It didn’t matter how much morphine you took to stop the stomach pains or how many preparations of adrenaline you used to control the bleeding, there was nothing that worked to stop the convulsions or the hemorrhaging. Death was inevitable. They say that the corpses — well, so my uncle Juan told me, he was studying to be a doctor at the time — they had lesions in the duodenum and ulcerations in the heart. If they looked bad on the outside, they were even worse on the inside.
“So, because the epidemic of yellow fever had cut a swath through young and old, sparing only the very old and the very young, it was left to the kids to take up arms against Sentmanat. It was an army of youngsters who beat him and dragged him away to have him shot at Talpa without waiting around for any sort of trial. He arrived there with his body in shreds because they had literally dragged him there, like a load on a rope, bouncing around, more dead than alive, so they had to shoot him lying down, as there was no way they could keep him on his feet. They say that they considered tying him to a cross but immediately rejected the idea because it was a sort of blasphemy with his being an out-and-out rascal and the cross recalling memories of Christ. When a letter arrived at St. John the Baptist from Mr. MacIntosh — the man who came up with the idea of spreading rubber between two layers of cloth, the millionaire inventor of waterproof raincoats — he also had factories for making rubber sponges and was a buddy of Sentmanat in various enterprises and a personal friend of presidents and one of the richest men in the world — anyway, when his letter arrived, begging clemency for Sentmanat, it was too late. The deadly deed had been done. They say that once all the hullabaloo over Sentmanat’s death had died down, the sisters of my grandmother and my aunt Dorita sailed off in the same schooners that had brought the pirates and headed for New Orleans, going straight to my aunt’s house, and there they looted it, each one of them carrying off whatever she fancied, dresses, furniture, jewelry, paintings or sculptures, while Dorita wept buckets and asked them for mercy, reminding them that she was their sister, and Sara answered, ‘Whose sister? If you didn’t have the guts to stand up for my kids when your husband was leaving them without a square yard of land to their name, I don’t know whose sister you reckon you are, you’re certainly not mine. I’ve only come to collect what belongs to me, what you and your husband stole from my lands in his business deals with the Germans. This stuff is what you bought with the cakes of rubber your husband and his cronies went to sell in Europe in those English ships.’