“La Perla!”
My mother screamed and ran toward her. Almost without effort the man seemed to reverse the musket in his hand and club my mother across the head as she ran past him. She collapsed suddenly, falling across La Perla’s body with a curiously crumpled look on her face.
“Mamá!” I started to run toward her but my sister’s fingers were like vises and I couldn’t move. “Mamá!” I screamed again.
The servant girl who had been praying fainted, sprawling grotesquely out on the floor. The man came down off the last step, stepping over La Perla and my mother. He looked down for a moment at the servant, then rolled her casually out of the way with his foot. The others pushed down the steps behind him. There were eleven of them.
He noticed the candle on the barrel. “La candela,” he said, gesturing.
One of the men struck a match. Its yellow light danced eerily in the cellar. The leader looked around at us. “Ah, four pullets and a young cock.”
My sister’s voice came from behind me. It suddenly sounded older and more full bodied than I had ever heard it. “What do you want?” she asked. “Take what you will and go.”
The man stared at her for a moment. His eyes were black and they shone like coals. “This one is mine,” he said casually. “You are welcome to the others.”
The girl who had fainted came to her senses just in time to hear. She screamed and scrambled to her feet. She tried to run past the others toward the stairs but one of them caught her by her long loose black hair. He jerked her back, and she stumbled backward to her knees.
He turned her toward him, holding her head back until her face was almost turned completely up to him, her mouth open, gasping for air. With his free hand he ripped at the front of her dress but the coarse cotton was too strong. It wouldn’t tear.
With an angry curse he let her go, then his hand came up with a knife. It slashed quickly down the front of the dress. The coarse shift fell away like the husk from an ear of corn. A thin pencil-like streak, starting at her throat and running down between her breasts and across her brown Indian belly into the heavy matting of pubic hair, suddenly began to well crimson. She screamed and tried to get away, scrambling on her hands and knees, but he laughed aloud and pulled her back by her hair.
She tried to get away again. Quickly he reversed the knife in his hand and hooked the butt end viciously upward between her legs, and this time she screamed in pure agony.
She crumpled to the floor at his feet, writhing in pain. The sharp blade end of the knife reflected the crazy yellow lights from the candle as it stuck upright from between her legs. He put his heavily booted foot on her belly to hold her still and started to pull at the rope belt that held up his pantalones.
By now the others were at the other servant girls. Niella, who was my mother’s personal maid, was already stripped naked and bent backward across a wine barrel, held on either side by a bandolero as a third began to mount her. Sarah, the Indian girl La Perla had brought down from the hills to help in the kitchen, was sprawled on the floor on the other side of the cellar behind a row of wooden crates.
The leader turned. His broad body blocked the rest of the room. “Get rid of the boy,” he said quietly, “or I will kill him.”
My sister began to push me away.
I turned to look up at her face. It was dull and glazed. Her eyes seemed to have no life in them. “No! No!” I screamed.
“Go behind the boxes in the corner and do not look,” she said. It wasn’t her voice. It was a stranger’s voice, cold and distant. One I had never heard before.
“No!”
The sharp sting of her slap ran down my cheek. “Vaya! Do as I say!”
It wasn’t the pain. It was the note of authority in her voice. I began to cry.
“Go!”
Rubbing my eyes, I turned away and huddled down behind the boxes. I was still crying. Suddenly I started to wet my pants. How quickly we learn the meaning of fear.
54
It was my sister’s penetrating scream that stopped my tears. They seemed to dry up inside me as a wave of intense blinding hate coursed through me. I sucked in my breath and held it as I raised my head and peered over the boxes.
My sister’s back was to me and her naked buttocks were twisting violently as the bandolero forced her backward toward a crate. Her nails clawed at his face, leaving a red welter of scratches, but he slapped her viciously and she fell backward across the crate.
Her mouth was open and she was screaming but no sound was coming from her lips. Her eyes were wild as they stared up at me without seeing. Her little tetas were stretched flat across her chest bones and her belly was almost a concave hollow.
Suddenly I knew what he was going to do. I had seen enough bulls when the cows were led to them. I looked at the bandolero as his pantalones fell about his legs. His belly was a thick matted rug of hair from which his swollen manhood rose like the white shaft of the broom that was used to sweep the galería.
She tried to get up and away but he leaned down on one hairy elbow, resting it in the pit of her stomach, and with his open hand around her throat, he pinned her back against the crate, almost choking her. She screamed again and bucked, sliding away from him, but he cursed and increased the pressure against her throat. She bucked and writhed and angrily he swiped his hand across her face. Her head hit viciously against the side of the crate.
For a fraction of a second he was still, half suspended in the air above her, seemingly balanced on himself. Then she screamed again and shuddered. Slowly he disappeared into her as her screams faded away to a low agonized moan.
He moved again on her. Twice more he seemed to tear into her, and then a peculiar agony of his own seemed to overtake him as a curious shuddering animal-like cry escaped him.
Just at that moment he looked up and I stared straight into his face. His eyes were glazed and tortured, his mouth open and gasping for air. Then my sister screamed again and I saw the blood bubbling up from her. I felt a hatred rising inside me. I began to tremble. I wanted to kill him.
I heard something clatter to the wooden floor, and I looked down. The knife had fallen from his belt. Without thought I scrambled over the crate for it. Slowly, as if with a great effort he turned toward me.
“Bastardo!” I screamed, plunging it toward his throat with both hands.
He threw up an arm and the knife flew out of my hands, falling between us. I flung myself at him, trying to hit him with my clenched fists, and almost lazily he swung his open fist at me.
I spun back off the wall and crashed into the crates. I could no longer feel any pain. There was only hatred and a wish to kill I never before had known. I am not sure if I realized what could happen. I was only aware that nothing mattered. I had to destroy him.
My sister had twisted her head and was staring at me. Suddenly there was clarity in her eyes. “Dax!” she screamed, grabbing at his hand, the one that now held the knife.
Angrily he tried to wrench his arm free, half pulling her out from under him. “Dax! Run, por Dios!” she screamed again. “Run!”
I stood there frozen.
He lunged at me.
“Run, Dax!”
He started to lunge again, and suddenly she seemed to cross her legs, pulling her knees together. He screamed in pain.
“Dax! Run to Papá!”
This I understood. This got inside me. I whirled and began to run up the cellar stairs. I heard another scream behind me. It stopped almost in the middle, and I heard him shouting hoarsely, “El niño!”
I was up the steps and through the house. I burst out into the sunlight. For a moment I was blinded; I could not see. Then I began to run toward the cane fields where Perro had gone. “Papá! Papá!”
Some men were coming up the road. I didn’t know who they were but I ran toward them. I was out past the fence before the first of the bandoleros came out of the house. I streaked down the road screaming hysterically, and then I heard a shout come from up the
road, my father’s voice.
“Dax! Dax! Gracias a Dios!”
“Papá!” I screamed.
I leaped into his arms crying. Papá! Papá! Tengo miedo! Don’t let them hurt me!”
My father’s dark face was glistening in the midday heat. He held me closely. “Don’t be afraid,” he whispered. “No one will hurt you.”
“They hurt Mamá,” I cried hysterically, “and sister. La Perla is dead, and sister is bleeding.”
I could see my father’s face turn ashen under his dark skin. “This is your army, General?” His voice was savagely sarcastic. “They make war on women and children?”
The slim man standing next to my father stared at him, then those cold gray eyes turned to me. The mouth pressed into a thin line. “If my men have committed any wrongs they will die for them, señor.”
He started toward the house, and the bandoleros who had started after me stopped when they saw him. “El jefe!”
They shrank back against the wall as we pushed past. The general paused in the doorway and looked back at us. “Where are they?”
“En la bodega,” I said.
Suddenly my father broke into a run. With me still in his arms he hurtled past the general into the house, through the kitchen, and down the cellar steps.
He stood there for a moment staring at the havoc. Then he put me down slowly. “Dios mio!” he cried softly, sinking to his knees and raising my mother’s head to his lap. “Dios mio!”
My mother’s face was white and very still. Her head seemed to be hanging at a curious angle. I looked across the room for my sister. She still lay across the crate, her head dangling backward. I ran over to her. “It’s all right now,” I cried. “Papá is here.”
But she didn’t hear me. She would never hear me again. The knife was still caught in her larynx where the bandolero had plunged it. I stared at her, disbelieving. Then I screamed.
For the first time I realized what had happened. They were dead. They were all dead. Mamá. My sister. La Perla. All dead. I screamed and screamed and screamed.
Later, after my father had picked me up and taken me out of that place of blood up into the sunlight, we stood in the courtyard. It was late afternoon, and there were many more men than there had been earlier. There must have been more than a hundred. They were standing around watching silently.
Eleven of them were separated from the others. They were tied together, each with a rope leading to the man on either side of him. They stood silently in the bright sunlight against the wall, staring back at their compatriots.
The general was seated on a chair at the table on the galería. He looked out at them and at the other bandoleros. He spoke quietly but his thin cold voice carried to the farthest among them.
“Look. And remember. For their punishment will be yours if you, too, forget that you are liberators, not bandoleros. You fight for freedom and for your countrymen, not for your own gain or profit. You are soldiers in the service of your homeland, not looters and rapists.”
He got to his feet and turned to an aide, who placed a submachine gun in his hands. Slowly he turned to my father. He held the gun out toward him. “Señor?”
My father stared at the gun for a moment, then at the general. He took a deep breath, and turned to look at the men standing against the wall. “No, General,” he said softly. “I am a man of law, not of war. The hurt is mine but not the vengeance.”
The general nodded and walked down the steps from the galería onto the hard, sun-baked earth of the courtyard. Holding the machine gun loosely in his hand, he strolled toward the eleven men. He stopped in front of the first in the line, the man who had raped and killed my sister.
“You, García,” he said quietly, “you I made sergeant. You should have known better.”
The man didn’t speak. He stared back into the general’s eyes without fear. He knew there would be no mercy and he didn’t expect any.
A knife flashed in the general’s hand as he walked down the line. As he stepped away we could see what he had done. The rope belt holding up each man’s pantalones had been cut and they fell to the ground exposing their white lower bodies and legs. Slowly the general moved back until he was ten paces away. He started to raise the gun.
I was staring at García. The memory of him poised over my sister exploded back into my mind. I screamed and ran down from the galería. “Let me, General! Let me kill him!”
The general turned in surprise.
“Dax! Dax! Come back!” my father called after me.
But I didn’t hear. I ran to the general. “Let me!” I cried.
“Dax!” my father shouted.
The general looked back at the galería. “It is justice,” he said.
“But he’s a child!” my father replied. “What could he know of justice?”
“This day he has already learned of death,” the general said. “He has learned to hate, he has learned to fear. Let him now learn to kill or it will rankle forever like a cancer in his soul.”
My father fell silent. His dark face was somber as he slowly turned away. “It is in his blood,” he said sadly. “The cruelty of the conquistadores.”
I knew what he meant. Even then I knew. The blood that came from my mother, who could trace her family back to the Spaniards who came with Cortez.
The general knelt down. “Come here, boy.”
I walked over to him. He rested the gun across his forearm and guided my hand so that my finger was on the trigger. He held the recoil barrel in the crook of his elbow. “Now,” he said, “look down the top of the barrel. When you see it is aimed at their cojones pull the trigger. I will do the rest.”
I squinted along the blue metal barrel. I pointed the gun at García. I could see his white legs and hairy belly just below the end of the short metal barrel. I squeezed the trigger.
The noise exploded in my ears and the white body shattered into a thousand tiny bloody fragments. I felt the general sweep the gun down the line. And everywhere it pointed was white flesh dissolving into torn and bleeding flesh. I felt the trigger turn hot under my finger but there was an exultation and excitement in me and I wouldn’t have let it go even if it had burned my fingers.
Suddenly the clip ran out and the gun was silent. I looked up at the general in bewilderment.
“It is over, niño.”
I turned to stare at the eleven men. They were sprawled on the ground, their faces tortured in a last frozen agony, their eyes staring unseeingly up at the white sun.
I began to tremble. “Are they dead?” I asked.
The general nodded. “They are dead.”
I shivered now as if the day had turned into ice. Then I began to cry. I turned and ran toward my father. “Papá! Papá!” I cried. “They are dead. Now will Mamá and sister be alive again?”
55
Diogenes Alejandro Xenos. The name was too long for a little boy. At first my mother used to call me Dio. But my father became angry. He thought it was sacrilegious. Somewhere along the line it became Dax. I think it was La Perla who first called me that. The Greek sound of Diogenes was too much for her Indian tongue.
My father was born in the coastal city of Curatu, of a Greek sailor and a Negro woman who ran a small restaurant down near the wharfs where sailors used to eat when they came ashore. I remember once seeing a daguerreotype of my grandparents that my father showed to me.
Even seated, it was apparent that my grandmother was taller than my grandfather, who was standing beside and slightly behind her chair. My grandmother’s face seemed very black and she looked into the camera with a kind of poise that indicated an inner strength and purpose. My grandfather had the eyes of a dreamer and a poet, which indeed he had been before he went to sea.
My father had his mother’s complexion and his father’s gentle eyes. He had loved both his parents very much. Proudly he would tell me that his mother was descended from Bantu princes who had been brought here in slavery and how her father had indentured himself
for life after the slaves were liberated, so that she could get whatever small education was available to her.
Jaime Xenos. My father had been named after his maternal grandfather. When my grandmother became too big with child to run the small restaurant, my grandfather took over. But it wasn’t for him. Before my father was a month old the small restaurant, and all my grandmother had worked for and accumulated, was sold.
My grandfather, who wrote a beautiful script, then became a clerk to the alcalde to the wharf district, and they moved to a small house about two kilometers from the port, where they kept a few chickens and could look out at the blue Caribbean and watch the ships that came in and out of the port.
There wasn’t much money but my grandparents were very happy. My father was their only child and they had great plans for him. His father had taught him to read and write by the time he was six, and through the alcalde was able to get him into the Jesuit school the children of the officials and aristócratas attended.
In return for this honor my father had to begin his day at four thirty in the morning. His chores were to empty the slops and clean the rooms before classes began. These tasks extended some three hours after classes ended at six o’clock, plus any others the teachers or staff desired.
By the time he had reached sixteen, my father had learned all that the school had to offer. He had inherited the stature of his mother’s family, being almost six feet tall, and his father’s inquisitive mind. He was by far the brightest student in all the school.
A great conferencia was held between the Jesuit brothers who ran the school and my grandfather, at the end of which it was decided that my father should be sent to the University to read for the law. Since his father’s salary as a clerk was too meager to pay for this, it was further agreed that he would be sponsored by the Jesuits out of the school’s limited scholarship fund. But even this would not have been enough to cover the costs of tuition had not the alcalde, for whom my grandfather worked, agreed to make up the difference in return for five years’ indenture once my father finished school.
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