And that is how the governor’s festive visit in Pueblo de los Angeles came to be crowned with the wedding of the captain and the mysterious lady-in-waiting to Eulalia de Callis. Padre Mendoza, who had let his hair grow to his shoulders to mask the horrible scar left by his severed ear, performed the ceremony, even though he tried up to the last moment to talk the captain out of marrying. He was not overly concerned that the bride was a mestiza many Spaniards married Indian girls it was the suspicion that beneath Regina’s perfect European lady’s looks lurked Toypurnia, Daughter-of-Wolf. Pedro Fages personally escorted the bride to the altar; he was convinced that she had saved his marriage, for in Eulalia’s eagerness to educate the girl, her nature had sweetened slightly, and she had stopped tormenting her husband with her fits. Considering that he also owed his wife’s life to Alejandro de la Vega, if the gossip was to be believed, he decided that this was a good occasion to be generous. With a flourish of his pen he signed over the title for a ranch and several thousand head of cattle to the brand-new couple, since it was in his power to distribute land among the colonists. He drew the perimeters on a map, following the caprice of the pencil, and later, when the real borders of the ranch were verified, it turned out that they enclosed a vast territory of pasture lands hills, forests, rivers, and beach. It took several days to ride across the property on horseback: it was the largest and best-located spread in the region. Without having solicited it, Alejandro de la Vega found himself a wealthy man. Some weeks later, when people began to call him Don Alejandro, he resigned from the king’s army in order to devote himself entirely to prospering in this new land. One year later, he was elected alcalde of Pueblo de los Angeles.
De la Vega built a large, solid, and unpretentious home of adobe, with a red tile roof and floors of rough clay tiles. He decorated his house with heavy furniture built by a Galician carpenter in the town, with no consideration for aesthetics, only for durability. The location of the house was enviable: close to the beach and a short distance from both Pueblo de los Angeles and the mission of San Gabriel. The large Mexican hacienda-style house stood on a hill, and its orientation offered a panoramic view of coast and sea. Nearby were the sinister natural tar deposits where no one came willingly because the souls of the dead trapped in the pitch wandered there. Between the beach and the hacienda lay a labyrinth of caves, a sacred place to the Indians, as feared as the tar pits. Indians did not go there, out of respect for their ancestors, nor did the Spanish because of frequent landslides, and because it was easy to get lost in that maze.
Alejandro de la Vega installed several Indian families and mestizo vaqueros on his property, branded his herd, and began to raise purebred horses, using breeding stock he had imported from Mexico. In his spare time he set up a small soap factory and devoted himself to experiments in the kitchen, trying to find the perfect formula for smoking meat seasoned with chili peppers. He was trying to produce a dry but savory meat that would last months without going bad. This experiment consumed all his time and filled the sky with volcanic smoke the wind carried far out to sea, altering the behavior of the whales. He calculated that if he found the precise balance between flavor and resistance to spoiling, he could sell the product to the army and to the ships. He felt that it was a tremendous waste to strip the hide and fat off the cattle and lose mountains of good meat. While her husband multiplied the number of cattle, sheep, and horses on the ranch, directed the politics of the town, and did business with the merchant ships, Regina busied herself by looking after the Indians on the hacienda. She had no interest at all in the social life of the colony, and with Olympian indifference ignored the gossip circulating about her. Behind her back, everyone commented on her unsociable and arrogant nature, her more than doubtful origins, her escapades on horseback, her naked bathing in the sea. However, since she had arrived as a protegee of the Fages, the minuscule social set of Pueblo de los Angeles was at first pre pared to take her to their collective bosom without asking questions, but Regina herself bowed out. Soon the dresses that had been made for her under Eulalia de Callis’s guidance hung abandoned in the armoires, devoured by moths. She felt more comfortable going barefoot and wearing the rough clothing of the neophytes. And so her day went by. In the evening, when she anticipated that Alejandro would soon be home, she bathed, coiled her hair into a casual bun, and put on a simple dress that gave her the innocent appearance of a novitiate. Her husband, blind with love and occupied in his business affairs, shrugged off the betraying signs of Regina’s state of mind. He wanted to see her happy and never asked her if she was, for fear that she would tell him the truth. He attributed his wife’s strange behavior to inexperience in life as a newlywed, and to her closed nature. He preferred not to think that the well-behaved lady sitting with him at the dinner table was the same ferociously painted warrior who had attacked the San Gabriel mission several years before. He believed that motherhood would cure his wife of her last bad habits, but despite the long, frequent tumbles in the four-pillared bed they shared, the wished-for child did not arrive until 1795.
During the months of her pregnancy, Regina became even more silent and untamed. Using the pretext of comfort, she stopped dressing and combing her hair in the European style. She went down to the ocean to swim with the dolphins that came long distances to mate near the beach, accompanied by a sweet neophyte named Ana, whom Padre Mendoza had sent from the mission. She, too, was pregnant, but she had no husband and had tenaciously refused to confess the identity of the man who had seduced her. The missionary did not want to keep this bad example among his neophytes, but neither could he find it in his heart to banish her from the mission, so he ended up sending her to be a servant in the de la Vega family. It turned out to be a good idea; a quiet complicity between Regina and Ana blossomed immediately, something good for them both, for the former gained a companion and the second won protection. It had been Ana’s idea to swim with the dolphins, sacred creatures that swim in circles to keep the world safe and in good order. Those huge, velvety mammals knew that the two women were pregnant, and lightly brushed past them to give them strength and courage at the moment of giving birth.
In the third week of May, Ana and Regina had their babies. The births coincided with the famous week of the fires, recorded in the annals of Pueblo de los Angeles as the most catastrophic since the founding of the city. Every summer the residents had to resign themselves to watching some of the forest go up in flames because a spark had touched off dry pastureland, but they had never seen anything like the fires that May. Normally the fires were welcome, because they cleared out debris and created space for tender growth the following spring, but that year, according to Padre Mendoza, they were God’s punishment for so much unrepentant sin in the colony. The flames burned down several ranches as they passed, destroying both dwellings and cattle that had nowhere to escape to. On Sunday the winds changed and the fire stopped one mile away from the de la Vega hacienda, which was interpreted by the Indians as an excellent augury for the two newborns in the house.