They named him Felipillo Holandés, because they thought he was from Holland on account of his hair and the fact they didn’t understand a word he was saying; they thought he was a survivor of the recently shipwrecked Soembing. In actuality, it’s unclear whether his mother was the Indian Polca, who was famous for searching among the battle dead for the body of her husband, Milco, or Lucoija, a beautiful warrior.
Felipillo understood Spanish though, and realized they thought he was from the shipwreck; he intuited that this misapprehension was a good thing, and he never spoke another word of Karankawa again.
To this day he understands that he must never reveal his true identity, he must masquerade as another; he has no idea that Holandés means “Dutch.”
Everything and everyone frightens him, except birds, especially one called Copete; small and brown, he has a colored crest and Felipillo comes every morning to see Copete flit between the flowers in the climbing vines. Felipillo is drawn to him because he’s the most nervous of the birds, so fearful he never alights on the bougainvillea where he can be seen, but only out of sight.
Felipillo would like to be like Copete, attending to his needs in seclusion.
He understands, though he can’t articulate it, that for “his” new family he is like one of the pieces of broken china he used to collect on the beach. A curiosity from far-off shores.
If they only knew the truth.
Felipillo Holandés knows Nepomuceno welclass="underline" he is a heartless man who, along with his ragged band of followers, murdered Felipillo’s kin.
Felipillo Holandés recognized him in Matasánchez, soon after he was rescued. He recognized his voice coming out of church one day. He heard people call him “Don Nepomuceno, a man of courage who protects us from the savages.” At the time the boy wasn’t beset by the melancholy that plagues him today with images of slaughter. Nepomuceno is a mirror that reflects amputated limbs, running blood, and spilled brains.
The last of the Karankawa has his ancestors etched in his memory, though they’re nothing more than fragments. Folks from Matasánchez see a beautiful little boy, but he is a walking chopping block. His Karankawa feelings run so deep that even they can be traced back through his ancestors. Felipillo Holandés is pale-skinned because his grandmother came from the other side of the ocean — another piece of broken china. She was traded for a canoe full of skins and ten pounds of dried fish (she was broken, but useful; hard-headed, with her wrinkly pale skin, she became the chief’s favorite wife, “not that it means much,” it didn’t afford her a life of “dignity.” She was one of the savage’s four or five wives, she spent long days cleaning, curing, and dyeing hides with foul-smelling liquids that ate through her fingernails; yet she always knew things could have turned out worse).
He especially remembers (in his bones) his mother and his older brother — a mean-spirited and unhappy boy who thought he ruled the world, but that’s another story. His older brother was the son of a woman who fell out of favor with the Karankawa paterfamilias and grew into a bitter young man without talent or brains who, to avenge himself, sexually abused his younger sisters. He was an ugly and lazy good-for-nothing.
Felipillo has a recurring nightmare: he arrives at the beach where the Karankawas left him like Moses (there’s nothing new under the sun). He walks away from the water. Nepomuceno and his men appear, screaming and shouting on that terrible day. He knows he’s been saved by a miracle once, and that it won’t happen again. He bawls, anticipating death. Then he awakens, sometimes with “mama” Maria Elena at his side, shushing him.
Today he’s exploding with grief, but he doesn’t show it.
Laura, his neighbor, is the one who can’t stop crying and sniveling. She was captured by the Chicasaw and Nepomuceno rescued her. He’s her hero, her saint: “How could they do such a thing to my savior?”
The truth is there was nothing heroic about her rescue. If you don’t want to be scalped in the Far North, you need fearlessness, imagination, courage, bravery, and a little heroism, but under the circumstances none of these were necessary. It was pretty straightforward, but we should explain what the girls were doing there:
Some idiot decided to build his ranch (called El Bonito) north of old Castaño, thinking it would be a cinch. He brought along two pretty little fillies (his wife and his sister-in-law) to look after his needs night and day, as well as some servants to do the work. He thought things were going well, but in actual fact the women didn’t even know how to crack an egg. But that’s not the reason he was unprepared to defend them when the Indians attacked. He didn’t have the faintest clue about anything out there: not that the Americans were driving the tribes into Indian Territory, not that the buffalo were dying out due to the planting of grasslands for cattle and because of all the buffalo hunters, nor that their lands had become barren. Why on earth would they let him set up house in the same place they wanted to settle?
They burnt both husband and wife to a crisp inside their home. Him for being in the way, and her for belonging to him. The servants were scalped because they worked for him. The housekeeper had her throat slit, who knows why (she had always been a little ornery, if they had taken the time to look at her they might have thought she was his mother). They took what little livestock there was (the fool was clueless about animals, too), along with Lucia and her niece, Laura, who was just two years old.
When Nepomuceno recognized Lucia in the Chickasaw camp and offered to ransom her, she refused. She couldn’t return to Matasánchez with the half-breed baby she had borne them, it would bring shame on her parents, especially her mother. And she wasn’t about to leave the baby behind. She asked Nepomuceno to take her niece, but not in so many words. She simply removed the kerchief that was covering her head.
“Look, Nepomuceno.”
The beautiful head of curly, fair hair that he had once admired was gone, her locks shorn. This hit Nepomuceno hard. He recalled their walks around the bandstand in Matasánchez while the band played when, boldly, he took her arm. His first wife had just died. Lucia awakened him from his reverie:
“I’m talking to you! Wake up, follow me.”
She took him to Chief Buffalo Hump, her husband, and pointed openly to his long hair — her hair — matted and stinking.
When the chief saw they were looking at him, he stroked his fake hair with pride.
Then they retreated to where they were out of earshot.
“Now you’ve seen what he did to me. He cuts the hair of all his women and weaves it into his own. And there’s more.”
She told him all about the savages’ sexual habits. From the herbs they smoked to help them see the world differently to how they loaned each other their women “to use them, all the males of his family, along with his friends, have used me.” She had once spoken like a young lady, now she described these orgies with specific details about all kinds of penetration. “There’s something else I can’t tell you, Nepomuceno.” What could it be, after everything she had already told him? This really did hit him hard. That’s when she begged him, “Take the girl home to my mother, her name is Laura, she was born on El Bonito Ranch.”
The printer, Juan Prensa, steps on the pedal of his press and pulls the lever of the ink roller. He arose before dawn, intending to finish printing the full run of posters for the circus’ upcoming visit before lunch. This is his second job for Mr. Ellis Producer, and he’s hoping for more.
The previous day he had set the type (large wooden letters that read TRIUMPHANT WORLD TOUR) and he had printed all the posters with the image of a red elephant, which would not be appearing in this pitiful circus. There would be other animals but no elephant; he had just finished the proof of the letters in blue ink.