San Carla had seemed the jewel of cities to their young, goggling, peon eyes. The sun-baked buildings of board and dusty stucco were two, three, even four stories high. The narrow streets spilled their traffic into a broad plaza where pigeons flew from a towering stone monument and a man of great authority in a brown cotton uniform could make the cars stop by blowing his whistle.
Now, memories of the time before that first day came like a burro’s kick, in sharp pictures. The mud-brick adobe on the rocky farm far back in the hills where one coaxed the straggly corn with a tireless hoe and water carried into the fields. A dung fire burning on the hearth. The pat-pat-pat of mama’s hands making tortillas. The ill-tempered old goat with one broken horn. The treasured red hen that laid eggs with two yolks. The corn-husk doll Lista had played with about the time he and Jose were born...
Juliano went rigid in the lean-to doorway as a weak, gasping outcry came out of the night. A similar note of torment was surely what had awakened him.
He’d taken only a few jerky steps when he saw her, a slender, twisted form on the ground beyond the corner of the barn. He ran, and fell on his knees beside her. His mind whipped away from what his eyes saw. For a second he was about to faint.
“Lista! My sister! Por Dios!”
The soft oval of her face was hot and wet with pain. The cascade of lustrous black hair was tangled about her cheeks and forehead. Her large dark eyes were sunken and filled with the sight of death.
Her full red lips parted. Her beautiful teeth gleamed. “Juliano... I knew I would reach you. Help me, Juliano, help me!”
She was trying to rise to an elbow, her other slender arm reaching toward him. He couldn’t move, held by the sight of so much blood. It stained the cotton dress that clung to her slender, once-vibrant and youthful form. It had run glistening down her calves to dye the edges of the guarachas on her feet.
“Lista...” he said in a disembodied voice. “Lista...” Then he was gathering up the loose lightness of her, staggering toward the lean-to doorway, his hoarse shouts rustling the horses in their stalls and the great dark bulls in the pen. “Jose! Quickly! Wake up, you burro, and help me! Our sister, she is dying!”
Dr. Diego Sorolla de Luz stepped onto the front porch of the long, low, mud-brick building that housed the free clinic for the poor in San Carla. He closed the screen door, squinting as he turned into the glare of the early morning sun.
He was a lean, swarthy man dressed in white ducks, smock, surgical cap. He looked for a moment at the backs of the two boys sitting on the farther end of the porch, their legs dangling. He drew a heavily reluctant breath and started toward them.
Juliano and Jose turned their heads toward the sounds of tired footsteps on gritty planking. They read the pity and sympathy in the doctor’s face. Juliano paled a little. Otherwise, they reacted outwardly to their sister’s death with the stoicism of their ancestors.
“I am sorry to be a doctor whose best was not good enough,” he said.
“Gracias, Señor Doctor,” both boys said. Juliano added, “We shall pay you when...”
“It is all paid, my young friend.”
“How? Muno Figero hasn’t been here, and no one else would bother.”
The doctor wedged himself down between them, Jose on his right, Juliano on his left. “Muno Figero? The young torero? Was he the prospective father?”
Juliano nodded. Jose leaned and spoke across the doctor’s chest. “Shhh, Juliano! Lista asked us not to tell.”
“Your sister mentioned her troubles?” the doctor asked.
“Lista and I were very close,” Juliano said. “She always turned to me when the trouble was bad — even at the end. Not to mama, or papa, or Muno, who she loved. But to me...”
“Juliano,” Jose said.
Juliano looked at his brother. “What does it matter now? It is right for the doctor to know.” Juliano lifted his eyes to the man’s. “She was not really a bad woman, Señor Doctor, even though she lived with a man not her husband.”
“I’m sure of that. She was the loveliest of young women. I want you always to remember her that way.”
“I shall remember her grief,” Juliano said. “She was to have a baby, which Muno didn’t want.”
De Luz’s hawkish face with its beaked nose became almost saturnine for an instant, the dark eyes angry and hooded. “I’m sure our torero will be in the clear.” He didn’t say the rest of it, the part that experience and medical knowledge had taught him. The girl, undoubtedly on her lover’s insistence, had crept to some dark hole where some dirty-fingered old woman had used a sharpened stick or filthy hatpin to start the flow again, to abort the living thing in a womb. Then, when things had gone wrong, the old woman, thinking only of her own safety, had abandoned the girl. And the pain-wracked girl had somehow dragged herself to the one person on earth she believed in.
The doctor laid his hand on Juliano’s shoulder, feeling the bony, wiry strength of it. “Don’t brood, my young friend. It won’t help — and she wouldn’t want it.”
“I try to tell him so,” Jose said, “but he thinks of little else for two, three days, since Lista came and told us.”
“Burro,” Juliano said, “she needed to tell someone. Can’t you understand?”
“Did she tell you she was planning an abortion?” the doctor asked.
“Abortion, Señor Doctor?”
“A way of doing away with the thing before it became a baby.”
“She mentioned it.”
“Did she say who, where, or how she planned to go about it?”
“She said Muno knew of such things. I begged her not to do it.”
“I see.” De Luz got up heavily. “The matter will of course be reported to the police, but I doubt that anything will come of it. The young man involved will doubtless exhibit a great shock, and one might as well try to run down an individual rat in the garbage heaps of San Carla as to hope to nail the dirty-fingered old woman. Half the crones in town would take the assignment, for a price.”
Juliano stood up on the edge of the porch. “Well, it will soon be forgotten. We are but peons.”
The doctor looked at him quickly and started to say something, obviously in denial of the boy’s wisdom-hard statement. Instead, he said, “There are details. Your papa will have to be notified. The funeral arrangement must be made. I will see to it.”
“You are most kind,” Juliano said.
Noontime came and went, and Juliano continued to sit in a dark silence on the bench in the city square. Jose grew increasingly alarmed at the change in his brother.
“Juliano, I’m hungry...”
“Then go and eat!”
“But you, Juliano...”
“Shut up, Jose,” Juliano said. Papa and Mama, he thought, I meant for nothing like this to happen when I brought together Lista and Muno. I only meant good... Was it I who ignorantly started it all? Or was it a tale written by a finger in the sky?
They had squandered the twenty centavos, he and Jose, the first day in San Carla, on cakes of brown sugar candy sold by sidewalk vendors from fly-specked glass showcases.
Their third day in the city, Juliano and Jose had met three others like themselves. The belly cramps were now urgent, and the others were wise in the ways of urban life.
The five spotted a well-dressed man staggering from a cantina. They followed him, invisible shadows on the dark street, and when the moment was right, they sprang on him, beat him down, and ripped the wallet from his pocket. They divided the fortune, forty-three pesos, in the sanctuary of an alley.
Later, bedded for the night in a culvert, Jose patted his comfortably rumbling stomach. “This is a good thing, I think.”