Texas

by James A. Michener

He was also inordinately pleased that he had, like his grandfather in Spain, sired seven sons in a row without, as he boasted, ‘the contaminating intrusion of a single daughter.’ The humorous honorific, Hidalgo de Bragueta, Sir Knight of the Codpiece, was not customarily used in Mexico, but Don Ramón liked to apply it to himself.

  His third and chief pride in these declining years of a long frontier life was his granddaughter Trinidad, thirteen years old and as charming a child as could be found in the northern provinces. Petite and dark-haired, she was a lively young lady with a wonderfully free and outgoing nature better suited to a canter over the mesquite range than to an afternoon of sipping hot chocolate with the mission friars, and although she was not a vain girl, preferring at this stage in her life a good horse to a pretty dress, she did like to look trim and paid attention to her appearance.

  The thing that strangers noticed most about Trinidad was her curious face, for although it was beautiful, with a flawless light complexion bespeaking her unsullied Spanish blood, her mouth was strangely tilted, creating the impression of a timeless smile. Her lower teeth had grown in most unevenly, preventing her jaws from meeting naturally, and this made the left corner of her mouth dip down while the right turned up. Had her other features been less than perfect, this defect might have marred her looks; instead, it created a kind of additional interest, for when she came up ready to curtsy to a stranger, her unusual mouth seemed to be smiling inquisitively as if to say ‘Hello, what have we here?’ And when she did speak, a very slight lisp, or unevenness, added to her air of mystery and to her attractiveness.

  She was a clever child; her doting grandfather had taught her to read Cervantes, stories from the Bible, and even the less salacious of the romances being published in Mexico City; and a French cleric who had served some years earlier in one of Béjar’s five missions had taught her his native language. She also had a marked talent for drawing, and so skillful were her rough sketches of people in the town that everyone who saw them could recognize this pompous priest or that officious occupant of the governor’s residence. She was at her best, however, on horseback, for she was at that age when young girls are almost reluctant to face maidenhood and an interest in boys, and seek intuitively to cling to girlhood, lavishing their considerable affection on horses. In Trinidad de Saldaña’s case it was one particular horse, a spirited brown gelding called Relampaguito, Little Lightningbolt. She would allow no one to abbreviate this rather long proper name or to give her horse a nickname; he was Relampaguito, a horse of importance, and she cared for him as if he were a much-loved younger brother.

  It was Don Ramón’s pleasure to ride forth in the early morning with Trinidad at his side, leave the town of Béjar where the Saldañas had their town house, and ride toward the Misión Santa Teresa. From the presidio he would pick up an armed guard and continue on to the edges of his ranch, whose new pastures, acquired from one of the Canary Island families, now reached eastward to those belonging to the mission.

  Grandfather and granddaughter rode easily, side by side, admiring the good work begun by Uncle Damián in building this mission and later reveling in the splendid ranch the family had acquired through the energy and the agility of the Saldaña brothers. At such times Trinidad liked to ride on ahead, act as if she were a military scout and call back ‘I see Apache!’ Then both grandfather and granddaughter would race their horses toward some spot on the horizon and rein in as if they saw Apache campfires, although once in a while Don Ramón would warn: ‘You must never joke about the Apache. At a place like that down there my uncle Damián was martyred and your father killed,’ and then the past became painfully real for the little girl.

  The great tragedy of Don Ramón’s life was that although he had sired seven sons, all had died during his own lifetime: four in service to the king—two in Spain, two in Mexico; one of cholera, which swept the northern provinces periodically; and two tortured and scalped by the Apache. All were dead, and Don Ramón sometimes recalled bitterly the words of that wise ancient who said: ‘In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons.’ In Tejas it had always been war, threat of war against the French, real war against the Apache, comic war against the pirates who tried to infiltrate from the Caribbean, unending war against nature itself. And what made the slaughter of his sons so difficult to accept was that often the wars in which they engaged were later proved to have been unjustified. His fourth son, Bartolomé, had been slain during a skirmish with the Austrians, and shortly thereafter a solid peace with Austria came into effect. Same with the French. From his earliest days Don Ramón had been taught to fear them, but now all the territories along the Mississippi River which had once been French were Spanish, and to make things even more bewildering, just a few years ago a Paris-born Frenchman living in Natchitoches, had he but lived a little while longer, would actually have served as governor of Tejas.

  All his sons dead! Don Ramón, more than most, had witnessed the fearful price paid by those Spaniards who had sought to bring civilization to Tejas: the loneliness of the first missions, the years of unrewarded drudgery in the presidios, the martyrs among the friars, the slain heroes like his sons, the anguish of the governors who tried to rule without funds or adequate police facilities, and the backbreaking efforts of the good women like his late wife who supported their men, making each new house just a little more civilized, just slightly more removed from the roughness of the frontier.

  Once when his sorrows seemed almost unbearable, he clasped his granddaughter to him and cried: ‘Trinidad, if this forsaken place ever becomes habitable, remember your fathers and your mothers who strove to make it so.’ She was ten at the time, and said: ‘I have only one mother. I had only one father.’ And he swept his arms grandly over the entire town and cried with passion: ‘All the good Spaniards here are your fathers and mothers. They have all lived so that you might live. And you shall live so that those who come after … when this is a great city …’ He kissed her head. ‘They will all be your children, Trinidad, yours and mine and Fray Damián’s.’

  ‘Even the Canary Islanders?’ she asked, for relations with those proud and arrogant people had never been good.

  ‘Today even they are my brothers,’ Don Ramón said, but he had not really intended going that far.

  Don Ramón, his granddaughter Trinidad and her mother Engracia, widow of Agustín de Saldaña slain by the Apache, lived in a beautiful rambling adobe-walled house facing the Military Plaza that stretched westward from the still-unfinished church of San Fernando. Passers-by were charmed by the Saldaña home: ‘Its walls are always so neatly whitewashed, and the seven wooden beams which jut out from the front wall are always hung with pots of flowers or with golden gourds or strings of corn and chilies drying in the sun. Don Ramón’s house looks as if happy people live inside.’

  Behind this inviting wall hid a nest of eleven interconnected small rooms forming a large horseshoe, the center of which was a lovely patio opening onto an even more beautiful garden where stone benches faced a fountain that gushed cool water whenever Indian servants worked the foot pumps. No one who stepped inside this house or into the garden for even two minutes could deceive himself into thinking that it was a French house or English, and certainly it wasn’t German. This was an evocation of Spain set down in the wilderness of New Spain, and as such it epitomized the ancient Spanish preoccupation with protecting families; stout walls safeguarded them from outside terrors, and a tiny chapel enabled them to hold private religious services. And just as the house protected the family, so the family jealously guarded its prerogatives, prepared to do almost anything, including murder, to defend them. The Saldaña family was fighting to avoid submersion in a sea of mestizo and Indian faces, determined to resist intruders coming down El Camino Real from the new Spanish possession of Louisiana or from the uncivilized Yankee lands farther east and north.

  And therein lay the second tragedy in Don Ramón’s life, festering, causing him nagging grief: his blood was pur
e Spanish, nobody could challenge that, but it was of diminished quality because he had not been born in Spain. He was a criollo, not a peninsular; that honored name was reserved for those actually born in the Iberian peninsula. Criollos could have pride; peninsulares had glory.

  Since the only chance the Saldañas of Béjar had to reestablish their honor was to marry Trinidad to some gentleman of Spain, this became almost an obsession with Don Ramón, and one afternoon in 1788 he said to Engracia: ‘Each day our little girl looks more like a woman. Please tell me how we can find her a suitable husband … a real Spaniard … from Spain.’

  Engracia Sarmiento de Saldaña, having been born in central Spain to a minor branch of the notable Sarmiento family and brought to Mexico, where her father served as governor of a province to the south, appreciated the wisdom of getting the Mexican Saldañas back into the mainstream of Spanish life: ‘I never forget, Don Ramón, that your father Alvaro and your saintly uncle Damián, may God bless his soul in heaven, were true-born Spaniards. You, unfortunately, were not, through no fault of your own or your father’s.’

  Don Ramón took no offense at this sharp reminder of his deficiency; he was always ready to lament, even in public, that he was not a peninsular, and he had witnessed too many instances in which families of distinction from the best parts of Spain had slowly deteriorated in Mexico: ‘You’ve seen what happens, Engracia. They come here as proud peninsulares, and first they allow their sons and daughters to marry locals. Good families and all that, but born like me here in Mexico. With that relaxation to begin with, it isn’t long before someone marries a mestizo. I’ve seen it a dozen times. Beautiful girls. Some sing like angels, sew well, keep a good house, tend their babies. But they are half Indian. And look what happens to their children. Look at young Alenón. He finally did it, married an Indian girl.’ He sighed at the incalculable loss. ‘The famous Alençón blood, lost in a desert of Indian adobes.’

  ‘Is there any way we could send Trinidad to Spain?’ her mother asked.

  ‘If Ignacio or Lorenzo had survived when they went to Spain … but they died. I suppose we have family, somewhere. How about the Sarmientos?’

  ‘My family would be very contemptuous of any girl born in Mexico …’ She said this without rancor or self-pity, but the manner in which her voice trailed off betrayed the enormous damage she had incurred by marrying a criollo.

  ‘I knew our former governor. Not well, but I did know him.’

  ‘You know what he said when he sailed home. “May the Indian dust of this forsaken land never dirty my boots again.” I doubt that he would welcome her.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Engracia, that perhaps you and I ought to travel down to Mexico City. If we started next year in February, Trinidad would be fourteen. She’s an extremely attractive girl, you know that. Her quizzical little smile, it tears my heart, and there must be many young officers from Spain …’

  ‘I would travel a great distance, Father, to find my daughter a proper husband.’

  ‘Let me speak to Veramendi about it.’

  And so the serious discussions started, with Don Ramón walking sedately the three blocks that separated the Béjar residences of these two leading families.

  On Calle Soledad, for many years the only real street in town, the Béjar branch of the powerful Veramendis of Saltillo owned two elegant many-roomed houses, facing a common patio which was itself a work of art: seven old trees for shade and graveled walks graced with statues carved by Indian workmen who had copied Italian engravings of religious figures. Half a dozen niches in the adobe walls contained flowerpots holding vines whose creeping ends flowed down across the wall, forming beautiful patterns when the sun shone through them.

  In the larger house lived the head of the local Veramendis, an austere man who kept to himself, supervising the education of his many children. His very able son Juan Martín, now ten, could already speak three languages—Spanish, French and English—because the wise old man could foresee that these latter tongues were bound to become important in Tejas.

  Don Ramón did not go to the big house, but to the smaller one in which lived his good friend Don Lázaro Veramendi, of the lesser branch, who had granddaughters of his own and therefore the same problems as the Saldañas.

  ‘Good day, dear friend!’ Don Ramón called out as he entered the patio and saw Veramendi reading under one of the gnarled trees. ‘I remember the day that tree was planted … how many years ago?’

  The two men, each approaching seventy, discussed the origin of this garden and agreed that it must have been planted either just before or just after the arrival of the Canary Islanders, sixty years earlier. ‘Those were exciting days,’ Don Lázaro said.

  ‘And so are these. Do you feel the changes that overtake us?’

  ‘I do.’ He was about to specify what changes concerned him when two of his granddaughters, girls of eleven and fourteen, ran onto the patio from one door of their home, past the flower beds and through a door of the larger house. As they ran the two old men studied their untrammeled movement.

  ‘It’s them I’ve been thinking of,’ Don Ramón said, and when Veramendi looked up in surprise, Saldaña added: ‘I mean all the girls of our families. Our Trinidad especially. Where will she find a husband?’ Before Don Lázaro could respond, he clarified his remark: ‘I mean, of course, a respectable Spanish husband? Where?’

  Veramendi, proud of his family’s distinctions, astonished his friend by saying judiciously: ‘I no longer worry about that, Don Ramón. We’re Spanish, yes, and proud to be, but neither you nor I was born in Spain, and we do well in Béjar. I think our children will do the same.’

  ‘But maintaining the Spanish blood, things Spanish, a sense of Castile and Aragon—how can we ensure that if our grandaughters …’

  ‘They’ll marry as events dictate, and do you know one thing, Don Ramón? I doubt if any of them will ever see Spain. This is the new land. This is our homeland now.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you prefer …? How many granddaughters have you—four, five?’

  ‘I have six, thanks to God’s bounty,’ Veramendi said, ‘and five of them will need husbands. María’s to be a nun, by the grace of the Virgin, so we need only five young men.’

  ‘And you’ll be just as happy if they’ve been born in Mexico?’

  ‘I was born in Mexico and I yield to no man …’

  ‘I mean, wouldn’t you be just a bit prouder—more secure, I mean—if your girls were married to men born in Spain? Men with honest Spanish roots?’

  Don Lázaro clapped his hands and laughed at his friend: ‘You have roots in Spain—the town of Saldaña, if my memory serves me. And what the devil good has it ever done you?’

  Don Ramón pondered this difficult question a long time, his brow deeply wrinkled. But then a benign smile appeared: ‘I often think of those dark centuries when Spain writhed under the heel of Muhammadanism. There was every reason for my ancestors to marry with the infidels. Power, money, an appointment at the Moorish court. But they protected their Spanish blood with their lives. No Moors in our family. No Jews. We starved, lived in caves, and in the end we triumphed.’

  ‘Do you feel about mestizos the way your ancestors felt about Moors?’

  ‘I do. To be the carrier of pure Spanish blood fortifies the spirit. On that awful day when messengers galloped in to inform my father that his brother, Fray Damián, had been tortured to death by the Apache, our family found courage in the fact that we were Spaniards, untouched by Mexico, and that as Spaniards we had to behave in a certain way … to preserve our honor.’

  ‘So what did your Spanish father do?’

  ‘He handed me a gun, although I was barely fifteen, called for volunteers, and set forth to punish the Apache. We killed sixty-seven.’

  ‘And what did that prove? Forty years later the Lipan Apache were still there, and they killed two of your sons not ten miles from where they killed your uncle.’

  ‘Finally we drove them back. In the
end, Spain always conquers.’

  ‘So in their place we got the Comanche, and they’re worse.’

  Don Ramón fell silent, put his left thumbnail against his teeth and studied this amazing Veramendi, who had from boyhood been so willing to accept Béjar as it was, never cursing the Indians, never brawling with the Canary Islanders, never arguing with the friars about the allocation of river water to the irrigation ditches. He had always whistled a lot, and now he whistled easily as if any problems really worth serious worry lay far in the distance.

  ‘Don Lázaro, I don’t think you’d worry even if one of your granddaughters married a mestizo!’

  Veramendi pondered this, and said: ‘It seems highly likely, what with the dilution of our Spanish blood, that two or three of my girls might have to find their husbands among the locals.’ When Saldaña gasped, Veramendi added an interesting speculation: ‘Let’s be perfectly reasonable, Don Ramón. The Spanish army doesn’t send many peninsulares to Mexico any more, only a scattering of officers now and then, and damned few of them ever get north to this little town. We don’t even get any peninsular priests any more. Saltillo’s no better. I looked last time I was down there. And in Mexico City the grand families pick off the young Spaniards as soon as they arrive from Vera Cruz. So true Spaniards are gone. No hope at all.

  ‘That leaves young men like you and me as we were half a century ago. Spanish, but born in Mexico. And there’s a limited number of us, believe me. I saw it in Saltillo. So what does that leave our granddaughters, yours and mine? It leaves a crop of fine young men half Spanish, half Indian, and you have some of the best on your own ranch.’

  Saldaña was shocked: ‘Would you allow a mestizo ranch hand to marry one of your granddaughters?’

  Veramendi, not willing to confess that he had been preparing himself for just such an eventuality, changed the conversation dramatically: ‘Do you want to know what I really think, old friend?’ When Don Ramón said: ‘I’m afraid to listen, the way you’ve been raving,’ the old man said firmly: ‘I suspect that you and I are looking in the wrong direction. Right now we face south, looking always at Mexico City, from where God in His merciful bounty sends us all the good things we enjoy. Right now we look south along El Camino Real as our blessed lifeline. Dear friend, let’s face realities. Let’s change our position and look north. The good things of this life henceforth will not come up El Camino Real, they will come down it—from Louisiana, or from los Estados Unidos.’