Borderlands

by James Carlos Blake

  He paused to light a cigar and regarded me over the flame. “I am told,” he said, “that she is spirited and quick of wit. Somewhat saucy. Occasionally even impertinent. Such qualities in any woman can be amusing, sometimes charming. It is natural to desire a beautiful woman, but if she also possesses charm and a proper wit, well, then love is certainly possible.”

  He stood at the window and stared for a long moment at the distant San Antonios. “But listen, my son,” he said with sudden gravity. “Of all the misfortunes a man might meet in life, none is more terrible than to become subservient to a woman. That is a perversion of the natural order. Yet it can happen when a man loves a woman with more passion than he can control. Passion is like a powerful stallion champing at its bit. We must keep a tight rein or risk losing control of the beast. A man on a runaway horse, Sebastián, is both a dangerous fool and an object of ridicule, a thing of scorn in every man’s eyes—and to all women. Such a man’s own wife will look on him with contempt. If she is a worthy woman, she will curse the day fate married her to a weak, unworthy man.”

  He had leaned closer to me as he spoke and now was gripping my forearm hard. “Passion, Sebastián, is like fine brandy—a joy, a great pleasure to the man who knows how to drink. But it is an infernal cruse to the fool who gulps without restraint. This you must remember.”

  He was suddenly aware of his own intensity and stepped back, smiling awkwardly, and then busied himself refilling our cups. Without looking at me, he said, “Never give her reason to question even in her own mind who is master and who is maid.”

  I respected my father above all men, but I was not as guarded as he, as suspicious, as—let us speak bluntly—as fearful of the heart’s strong passions. I had the arrogant confidence of youth. Unlike him, I was absolutely sure of my self-control, utterly confident that my love for Delgadina would never prove a weakness. Indeed, even as he counseled me in his study, he did not know that I was already in love with my bride-to-be. I had been since the first time I’d seen her, a little more than two years before, when she was yet fourteen and I five years older.

  It was at my cousin Marco’s wedding reception. I was in the main patio with another cousin, Roberto Luis, a handsome but salacious fellow who would be killed in a duel a year later in consequence of publicly insulting the daughter of a don. He asked if I knew that my betrothed was in attendance, and then laughed at my look of surprise. “Over there,” he said, pointing to a group of girls standing in the shade of a willow at the far end of the patio, protected from male encroachment by a clutch of sharp-faced dueñas. “The sleek thing in the green dress. You lucky prick! A little skinny, maybe, but look at the melons on her!”

  She was laughing with the others at some amusement, then turned in a sudden swirl of copper hair and caught me staring at her across the crowd. She smiled boldly and held my gaze—and I felt the breath sucked out of my heart. One of the crones spotted the look between us, and in the next instant the dueñas hastily herded them all into a side patio and out of sight.

  We were formally introduced on the morning of her quinceañera—the ritual occasion of her fifteenth birthday, which marked her coming-of-age. I was appointed her escort for the day’s festivities. She was even more beautiful than I recalled from my glimpse of her at Marco’s wedding. She delighted in banter and laughed with ease, her eyes at once impish and full of warm promise. Our betrothal was made public two months later.

  We were officially engaged for a year. A few weeks before the wedding, as we were walking in the garden one late summer afternoon (and trailed closely, of course, by the ubiquitous flock of chattering dueñas), she told me that even before Roberto Luis had shown me who she was, I had been pointed out to her. Had she not known I was the man she was promised to, she said, she would never have regarded me with such open audacity at Marco’s wedding. “My God,” she whispered in mock horror, “you must have thought me wanton!”

  And so we were married. But although I loved her dearly—and rejoiced in the beauty of her flesh—I never abandoned myself to my passion for her, not fully, not even in the most ardent moments of our conjugal intimacies. Understand: I relished the affection she lavished upon me and the way she so much enjoyed receiving it in return. We were tenderly solicitous of each other—and avidly amorous mates. Indeed, the fervor of her lovemaking sometimes shocked me, even as it thrilled. Yet I always held a portion of my passion at a distance from my love for her, posting it like a marshal at a fiesta who is forbidden from enjoying himself but must keep a watchful eye on the proceedings and prevent things from getting out of hand. That restraint was the source of my confident self-possession. And as I was first and foremost Cabrillo don—and the next patrón of La Luna Plata—self-possession was imperative. Hardness was everything.

  And she? She deferred to my wishes in all matters, of course—though not always without some feigned expression of rebellion: an exaggerated pout that presented her lower lip like a succulent wedge of fruit; a quick, saucy show of her tongue, followed instantly by the giggling smile she could never suppress; a sassy toss of her hair and an impudent sidewise look. Such gestures endeared her to me all the more. I kept no quirt on the bedroom wall.

  Our first three children were girls. My father joked about it, but in his eyes I saw the same desperation that was gnawing at me. Then came Hernán—and the fiesta celebrating his birth roared for a week. We hoped for still more sons, but Delgadina inexplicably turned barren and our efforts over the next two years were fruitless. My disappointment was huge, but she gently impressed upon me that I should not permit greed to rule my soul.

  “We have a beautiful and manly son, Sebastián,” she said, softly stroking my beard. “Are we not truly blessed?”

  Each day brought me some new or deeper comprehension of her beauty, a beauty that transcended the exquisite configuration of her flesh, that went beyond the artistry of her eyes and breasts and hair. Her morning smile, her laughter, her regal serenity and sometimes mysterious gaze, her whispered endearments and touches in the night—everything about her brightened my soul like spring sunlight.

  My father was now confined to a rolling chair, both legs ruined under a fallen horse. His hair and mustache had gone white and his hands were palsied, but his eyes were yet dark and hard and sharp. One afternoon, as we took a private glass of wine in the garden, he said, “The first time I saw you look at her, I knew you would never be able to lift your hand to her in reprimand, no matter how strongly she might provoke you. I feared for you. Now I see I had no cause to worry. She loves you dearly, and she seems determined never to give you cause to regret your benevolent nature toward her.”

  He raised his glass in a trembling hand. “I salute you, my son, you and your remarkably good fortune.”

  Had he lived two years more, he would have changed his opinion of my fortune. But within a few weeks of my mother’s mortal collapse at the church altar one morning as she was receiving Communion, he caught a severe illness of the lungs after sitting outside in the patio during a rare rainstorm while I was away in Nogales on business. He had refused to be rolled under the shelter of the veranda while the cold rain and rough wind lashed him, and he cursed the servants for wanting to treat him like a piece of sugar candy to be guarded against a little rain. He was bedridden the last nine days of his life. I was at his bedside the night he expelled his final breath, a rasping exhalation that sounded like … “hard.”

  A few weeks after his funeral, I faced the first public test of my fitness as the new patrón of La Luna Plata. Captain Reynaldo Ochoa and his local troop of rurales brought before me a man charged with stealing horses from one of my herds. I conducted the trial in the main plaza of the hacienda, as my father always had, in the shade of the hanging tree. It was a sultry morning smelling of dust and hot stone, and the women in the crowd were all fluttering fans against the heat.

  As Ochoa presented the details of the case against the man, I scanned the faces of the spectators. They were watching me
even more closely than they looked at the accused, their eyes bright with eager curiosity. I knew they were wondering if the customary character of Cabrillo justice—swift, fitting, and unsparing—would obtain at La Luna Plata under the new, young patrón. Everyone knows that sometimes the son is but a short shadow of the father.

  The rurales had intercepted the thief near the northern boundary of the hacienda as he was heading toward the border with eight horses bearing the brand of La Luna Plata—probably, as Ochoa surmised, intent on selling them to North American buyers. Throughout Ochoa’s presentation of the charges and evidence against him, the thief stood slouched over the hitching post he was tied to, spitting idly and smiling like a man at an entertainment. He was precisely the sort of arrogant vermin my father had hated above all other kinds. “They make it a pleasure to pass sentence on them,” he once told me. But then had quickly added: “But never let your pleasure show. No man is so feared—and therefore so respected—as he who dispenses punishment with no show of emotion.”

  I asked the defendant if he had anything to say on his own behalf. He leaned back against the post and shrugged with his palms turned up in a theatrical gesture of befuddlement. “Hey, patrón,” he said, “I found those horses. Anybody could see they were lost horses. I’m a stranger here, so I didn’t know whose brand they had. I thought I should take those lost horses to the next town and try to find the owner, maybe get a nice reward for returning them, you know? I was only trying to do a good thing, and these hardworking officials”—he gestured at the rurales—”they didn’t understand.” He looked at me and saw my smile. “Hey, patrón, do I look like a goddamn horse thief?”

  In that moment, I had an inspired vision of his punishment. I condemned him to hang, naturally, but not from the tree in the plaza.

  “Any man who steals from La Luna Plata must be properly punished,” I said, speaking loudly enough to be heard by everyone present. “But punishment should serve a higher purpose than mere retribution. It should serve as moral instruction, as well.” I smiled at the thief. “Through you, I will show many others in Sonora the consequences of stealing from me. Of course, you yourself will learn little from your punishment other than the difficulty of drawing a breath while hanging by the neck from a rope.” There was a chorus of merry laughter from the spectators.

  I decreed that the instrument of his execution would be a gallows erected on a stout flatbed wagon hitched to a strong team of mules. He would hang on that mobile gallows all the way from the hacienda to the border, fattening the crows as he went. In every village along the road from here to Nogales, people would see what happened to horse thieves on La Luna Plata. “At the border,” I said, “my boys will cut down what’s left of you and feed it to the eels in the Río Alisos.”

  The crowd was impressed. There was much nodding and murmuring of approval. The thief himself grinned broadly and shook his head slowly and muttered, “God damn.”

  On the following day, as soon as the wheeled gallows was ready, he was hanged. Then an escort of a half-dozen men took him away, the corpse jouncing and swaying at the end of the rope with every jolt of the wagon.

  Ten days later a mail rider from the north arrived with the news that the six men I’d sent with the gallows were all dead. They had been attacked by a gang of bandits a few miles north of Laguna Seca. According to what the mail rider had heard in a local cantina, their bodies had been stripped and left in the desert, but the hanged man’s corpse was gone. The name of Juan Rojas was mentioned repeatedly in the cantina talk, and it was generally supposed that the hanged man had been a member of his bandit gang, although no one could say why they had bothered to take away the body. The Rojas Gang were not known to care about the niceties of proper burials, not even for one of their own men.

  “Rojas!” my chief foreman said. “That son of a bitch is harder to kill than a cockroach.” A year earlier it had been rumored that Texas Rangers had killed Juan Rojas near El Paso, but then Rojas and his boys raided a ranch in eastern Sonora and made off with a herd of cattle. A few months later it was said that Rojas had been hanged in Fronteras, but once again the report of his death was proved wrong when he robbed a mining company of its payroll near Santa Teresa.

  I sent a detail to retrieve the bodies from Laguna Seca and ordered a requiem service for them all. As for Rojas, my boys made inquiries everywhere, but no one had seen a sign of him, and after a few weeks we had to assume he was no longer in Sonora.

  So then. Time passed and life was good. Delgadina’s attentions to me were distracted only once—by the death of her father, Don Antonio. He retired to his bedroom early one evening, complaining that he did not feel well, and in the morning he was as cold and stiff as the brass bedposts. He had sired three sons and three daughters, but the first two boys died in infancy, as did one of the girls, and at age fifteen the surviving son was taken by the black fever. Then Delgadina’s remaining sister, her elder, rejected the marriage Don Antonio had arranged for her and instead eloped with a man he regarded as beneath her station. Don Antonio never spoke her name again. He bequeathed all his property to Delgadina (and thereby to La Luna Plata), with the exception of a tiny hundred-acre parcel called La Querencia, which he left to his wife. She had him buried there, behind the house overlooking the Río Magdalena.

  Delgadina had loved her father dearly, and for several weeks after his death she dressed in black and went about the house in silent red-eyed grief. She spent hours in the church every day, lighting candles and praying for his soul’s salvation. Then at last she dried her eyes and put away the mourning dress and came to me in the night, her hair loose and gleaming redly in the moonlight, her nipples hard as stones, her tongue greedy in my mouth, on my flesh. She gasped at my touches and panted hotly with her brute pleasure. She sighed in enveloping contentment. In the morning she awoke smiling. “You are my life,” she whispered in my ear. And though I did not say it, she was mine.

  For eight unsurpassable years I was married to Delgadina Consuelo Fernández de Cabrillo, and, as with superior wine and high art, our union improved with age. But now … now I pace from the barred window to the bolted door and back again, going to and fro in my cell and walking up and down in it, damned to the memory of all that followed.…

  A few days before his fourth birthday, little Hernán drowned in the river. What do the details matter now? What did they matter one instant after he was dead? Of course I demanded details then. He had been playing with some other children near the trees and well away from the riverbank. Then he went out of sight for a moment while his nanny chatted with her friends, and then someone was crying out that a child was in the water and swirling downstream. Horsemen sped downriver with ropes. And then they had him and pulled him out of the river and he was dead.

  Those were the details his young nanny was able to tell us through her stuttering, choking sobs before my fist shattered the side of her face. My boot stove her ribs. Then Delgadina was atop her, shielding her, saving the bitch’s worthless life.

  I rode into the desert and galloped in great circles, shrieking at the mountains, howling at the moon. I rode the roan stallion to death. The next day a search rider found me walking over the cracked earth. I yanked him out of the saddle and rode back to the hacienda, then locked myself in the candlelit room with the boy in his open coffin. The windows were hung with black drapes, and a chill draft shook the candle flames so that the shadows wriggled like snakes on the walls. I howled curses at God till the candles burned out, till my voice broke to a rasp and finally gave out completely, till the finality of my son’s death filled the room with its stench.

  When I at last opened the door, she stood there, waiting to embrace me. The agony in her eyes stunned me with the realization that mine was not the only sorrow keening under our roof. Her quiet grief helped to placate somewhat the fury of my own, but although she pleaded with me over the following months to make apology to God for having cursed Him, I would not do it, not even in the face of her argum
ent that if I asked His forgiveness He might yet permit her to conceive another son.

  “Damn Him!” I thundered. If hope for another son depended on deference to a God who would so blithely take from me my only man-child, then I spat on all hope. Hardness! Hardness was all!

  No. I lie. I am a damnable liar and I confess it. Hardness was not all. Delgadina’s love had become no less vital to me, no less a shield against life’s brute possibilities, than my own hard will—though I could never have admitted it, not then, not even to myself, for fear of admitting weakness. But in a life full of uncertainties—even the uncertainty of preceding your son to the grave—her love for me was as certain and abiding as the sierras, and I wore it like an iron skin against the world.

  And then, early in winter, Delgadina conceived. When she told me, I refused to believe it. If she proved wrong, I was afraid the disappointment would make me insane. I simply nodded and said, “We will see if it’s so.”

  Her smile was as softly radiant as a sunrise. “It’s so, Sebastián,” she said, placing her fingers against my lips. “It’s so.”

  I waited two months more before believing that it was so, and then my exultation soared. We would name him Alvaro, in honor of my father. Four months later her belly was beautifully rounding and she was lovelier than ever.

  As in the past, her mother had planned to come to La Luna Plata to assist with the birth, but then the old woman’s health took a bad turn and she was unable to travel. Delgadina asked my permission to go to her mother’s house at La Querencia to have the baby.

  “Mamá has been so alone there,” she said. “The memory of a grandchild’s birth under her roof will comfort her for the rest of her days.”

  She knew I had spring brandings to oversee and dozens of stock buyers to receive in the coming weeks, but she assured me she felt strong and quite able to make the rugged three-day journey to La Querencia without me. I was loath to grant permission. The road to La Querencia traversed a portion of the most desolate region of La Luna Plata, and there was but a single rude waystation on the route.