by Mary Morris
He kissed her as he burrowed through the narrow opening that barely allowed him in. Night after night he tried to enter that hole in her gown, and each night he grew flaccid in his efforts until finally one night when he could bear it no more he untied all the strings, pulled the linen gown over her head, and then made his way up and down her body with his fingers, his mouth, and finally his member. And as she responded to his touch, as she grew more and more suppliant and aroused, he knew that he was not her first, but he would be her last. He placed his tongue on her nipples, between her thighs until she cried out, and in this way he won her over. It was a gentle love of foot massages and head rubs, followed by moments of bone-deep satisfaction—the kind that would last a lifetime.
Federico has come to believe that even if he had the scales of a reptile, which at times he wonders if he does, she wouldn’t turn him away. Still, he is so ashamed of the sores and scabs that at times cover his entire body so that he looks as if he has survived a fire. That is when he has to be covered from head to toe in the ointment of aloe and gold that his father had made for him—the father he never saw again after he sailed to the New World. When his skin is blistering like that, Federico allows no one to tend to him except Bernadine, the old cook, who worked for his wife’s family in New Spain and traveled with them when he brought Sofia north into these hills where they have made their home. Bernadine is a mestizo who was indentured to Sofia’s family and who, for all practical purposes, they owned though they never thought of her in this way.
When he was younger, there were moments when Bernadine’s touch stirred his flesh. She rubbed his wounds the way no one else could. At times when she massaged the salve into his skin in gentle swirling motions, he was tempted by her. Especially just before their last child was born when Sofia had taken to her bed for months. Federico could not bear the loneliness of his flesh. One night she came to him in her nightdress with her lush black hair hanging down and declared her love for him, but he refused. After a while they settled back into their routine, and Bernadine had remained in their service. He had always been true to his wife. And they had lived in these hills for all these years.
Sofia’s mother sobbed when he told her that they were moving north from Mexico City. She pleaded with him not to take away her only daughter, but Federico would not give in. He felt that they would be safer in the northern territories. Sofia was a New Christian after all and Federico had suspicions that he was a converted Jew as well. In the end Sofia’s mother relented. She was plagued by the memory of her nephew, Alejandro, who was burned at the stake, and her own sister, Leonora, who never emerged from the Flat House. She let Sofia bring Bernadine, her maid, with her. Bernadine had been with Sofia since she was born and her mother could not bear the thought of her not having the Mexican girl to braid her hair at night and prepare her hot chocolate in the morning. And once a year in the cool months, Federico allowed his wife and three children to travel south to visit.
Federico glances outside. It is not yet dawn. He always rises when it is still dark. In the sky there is a full moon at the horizon. It is about to slip behind the western hills. To the east he sees the thin line of purple light as the sun is rising. It is a beautiful morning. He can’t imagine why Sofia had wanted him to stay home. In a few minutes he’ll head out into the hills where he will join two of his sons who work the garbanzo fields with him and the Pueblo Indians, whom they have indentured.
Sofia is stirring. No matter how tired she is, he never leaves without her waking to see him off. Now she sits up and stretches. “You’re going?” she whispers. It is as if each morning she knows when she can open her eyes. When her husband is ready to receive her.
It is still first light and dawn is breaking in shades of violet across the high-desert terrain. At times like this Federico longs for Spain. He longs to return to his mother and father’s home, even though they left this world years ago. The memory of his childhood on that purple plain ripples through him. As he watches Sofia resting in their bed, he thinks how much he loves the soft curve of her neck, her warm breath against his cheek. He cannot imagine leaving her the way his grandfather left his grandmother. Federico aches when he imagines walking away from Sofia and their children. It is beyond his imagining.
Federico sits down beside his wife. As he strokes her back, his fingers caressing her flesh, he thinks of how she loves him. How he loves her is not a wonder, but her love for him comes to him each day as a blessing and a surprise.
Opening her sleepy eyes, Sofia looks at him. “Stay with me,” she pleads with him again.
“I will see you for supper,” he promises. He kneels in front of the cross that hangs at the small shrine in their bedroom, says his morning prayers, crosses himself in the name of the Father, and heads into the kitchen where Bernadine has prepared a strong coffee with thick cream, a fresh bun, and two poached eggs.
* * *
Federico Cordero de Torres knows that he is a fortunate man. He was still a boy when he came to the viceroyalty of New Spain with money his father gave him. Money that his father hoped would buy him as much gold as he needed to mix with his ointments. Instead he marched with Coronado in search of the Seven Cities of Gold. He was with him when they camped in these very hills. It was here that Coronado had gazed up at the thin crescent rising from between the mountains and declared this place to be Entrada de la Luna. It was also Coronado’s gateway into America.
Federico went west until he stood at the rim of a canyon that stretched as far as the eye could see and the river that roared through it far below and thought that this must be what God intended heaven to be. And he journeyed east into the region known as Kansa where a Wichita Indian, whom Coronado dubbed the Turk, led them away from the dwellings of the pueblos and brought them to Apache land. The Turk promised more gold than they had ever seen, but all they saw were a million buffalo and prairie grass and land so flat that they could see the sky between the buffalo’s legs. While Coronado had the Turk garroted for his treachery, Federico turned away from the vast plain and headed back along the Camino Real to the place where he had encamped with Coronado for a time.
He found the place where the moon had slipped between the mountains. Here Federico would make his home. Instead of buying gold as his father had commissioned him, he used his money to make a land claim and on that land he planted the bags of seeds he brought from home. Federico never saw his father again, but he knew that the distinguished doctor would be displeased that after all of his education and all of his money Federico married a converso girl whom he loved and became a grower of garbanzo beans.
But he doubted it would matter. His father was always displeased with him. Federico had never been the son his father dreamed of. It was perhaps why he agreed to make this journey in the first place. He could not bear the disappointment in his father’s eyes nor the sadness in his mother’s. His father—who insisted that everyone refer to him as Dr. Torres and his only son address him as sir—was a man of science. He was versed in all the latest theories of the universe. Messengers brought him books and papers from all over Europe. He read about how Copernicus had proven that the universe was heliocentric and how Tycho Brahe was measuring the distance between planets and stars.
Eduardo de Torres lectured him about the mysteries of the universe, but his son had no interest in the planets or the stars. He did not share his father’s fascination with the placement of the sun. Federico was interested in plants. From an early age he tended his mother’s garden. He was interested in color and shapes, not in classifications. He didn’t care for the names or species. He liked soil. He liked the feel of the earth in his hands. Just with his fingertips he could tell acidic soil from alkaline. He knew if hydrangeas would bloom pink or blue from the texture or taste of the earth. He knew instinctively how much sun a plant might need and how plants, like people, showed sadness when they were not in happy places.
But he did not want to be a botanist and no matter how much his father tried to inter
est him in the biological world, given that he could not interest him in the greater world that surrounded them, Federico did not have the curiosity of a scientist or the mind of a philosopher. What he did possess was an innate ability to make things grow. He knew how to create flowing borders with delicate blue lobelia and bright orange and yellow nasturtium, where to add jasmine and irises for a sweet and sudden scent, and how to build the backs of gardens with flowering shrubs. He knew when plants needed to be moved or cut back. He did not want to be a student of anything besides life. Books and theories and studies took him into the shadows, where his mind would drift and his sores fester. Federico shunned the important work for which his father had groomed him.
Though Eduardo de Torres and his wife produced three daughters, including one who would go on to make important contributions to the study of diseases of the blood, it was his son who mattered. It was his son who kept Eduardo de Torres up at night, smoking his pipe into the late hours, worrying over what would become of the boy whose greatest pleasure was to bring an armload of cut flowers into the house and help his mother arrange them in vases. When Eduardo de Torres called Federico into his study to show him some new papers that arrived from Italy or France in which Copernicus posed his heliocentric theories, his son broke into a sweat and began to tremble. As he lectured his son, Federico’s gaze drifted off toward the window, out into the garden and the fields and beyond. The boy had no attention span. And at last Eduardo de Torres concluded that Federico had no curiosity. And that, for Eduardo de Torres, was the greatest sin.
Then, of course, there was his skin. The hideous lesions that his father spent years tending to, searching for cures. At times Eduardo de Torres stayed up nights in his laboratory, mixing bitter potions for Federico to drink, which had him spewing out his guts for days, or burning salves to pour onto his skin, which left his son rawer than he was before. For Eduardo de Torres’s ostensible contempt for his son came from his deep love and the fury that he could not cure him or even help him. And this made him think that, despite his belief in science and reason, his son was cursed in his soul.
It was only when the lesions were the worst that his father allowed Federico to go into the fields. To Eduardo de Torres this was a defeat, but to his son it was a blessing. It seemed as if only the sun could assuage his sores. And only for a while. Then his father discovered what seemed to be a miracle cure—an ointment of aloe and gold—and when he heard that a ship with a new patron was to sail for New Spain, Eduardo de Torres made certain that his only son was on it. He gave him only two instructions upon his departure: He was to discover gold, and he was to search for his grandfather who decades ago had sailed to the New World with the explorer Columbus, never to be heard from again.
Federico was only too happy to leave. He would at last do something that made his father proud and his mother less sad. His journey across the sea took four months, in part because of strong storms that drove them back toward Spain, and Federico spent most of it above deck. While the other sailors thought they would go mad from the briny air and the constant wind, Federico welcomed it. It was the only time he was not plagued by the relentless itch and anguish of his skin, a reprieve that would end as soon as they disembarked. But in New Spain he met Coronado and found a man who did not look upon him with scorn. He did not seem to notice the sores and pustules of his skin. Years later Federico would come to feel that Coronado was the only man whom he regarded as a son should regard his father—even though the great explorer was only twenty-five years old at the time.
* * *
As he is heading to the fields, Federico glances at his grandfather’s clock. His father gave it to him when he was about to sail for the New World. It was an odd thing to give his only son who was crossing the sea. And somehow it survived the journey. It is an ancient clock without numbers, having instead strange letters that his father told him came from the Phoenicians. It has been in the family for generations. And the hands of the clock go backward. No one knows why. No clockmaker who’d ever seen it could explain, but the clock tells time just as well as those that go forward and Federico has learned to tell time in this way. He can’t even read other clocks. It is almost six a.m. Time to go to the fields. The day already feels warm. He glances once more toward their bedroom. As soon as he is gone, she’ll rise and stretch, and the business of running their house and farm will begin. By noon the heat will be unbearable, and Federico and his workers will pause from their work to eat bread and cheese and sleep in the shade of the trees. He will try to slip back to the house and lie down with Sofia for a time.
As he steps onto the porch, the air smells of dung and hay. He pauses, taking in his land, his barns, his house, and the fields beyond. The heat hits him like a furnace. He is a man accustomed to the heat and normally he does not suffer from it, but this morning he does. It is the dry heat of the high desert, and as he walks through the paddock toward the fields, he drags his feet. It is as if he is walking uphill, except he isn’t. Heaviness weighs on his chest as if water has settled there.
He has not felt this uneasy since he stepped off the ship and began his search for gold and his itinerant grandfather who disappeared so long ago. Instead he found this valley where garbanzo beans grew in abundance and from where they are shipped and sold across two continents. He has loved a woman and had three sons with her. He has claimed this land and this valley as his own.
Federico smiles even as he walks to the fields. He hardly ever thinks about his voyage across the sea, but today he does.
As he walks toward his workers who are already pruning the stalks and harvesting the ripened beans, he remembers that morning when he was boarding the ship that brought him here. There is something about this dawn that feels like a new beginning. Something in the light and the hot wind that makes him feel as if he were embarking upon another journey into yet another new world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
GROUND ZERO—1992
A tarantula scuttles across the road, and Rachel swerves to miss it. “Oh my god,” she says, “look at that.” Jeremy turns, but Davie stares straight ahead. “Did you see that, honey?” Rachel pulls off to the side of the road. “C’mon,” she says to her boys, “let’s go see it.” The tarantula is still making its way across the hot asphalt. The sun is beating down on the desert. They are two hundred miles south of Santa Fe. Rachel has brought them on an outing while Nathan is at a conference in San Francisco.
“Look at that.” She takes Jeremy by the hand and picks up Davie who really is too heavy for her to carry and they walk back to where the tarantula is. It is a large, hairy black spider but Rachel isn’t afraid of it. She knows that they aren’t really poisonous, and she thinks it might be good for Davie to try and reacquaint himself with the natural world. Jeremy is curious and bends down, but Davie squirms in her arms. He is afraid of the spider. Since his snakebite, he’s been afraid of everything.
“Isn’t that an interesting spider.” Rachel stands in her thin sneakers on the warm pavement. She’s wearing a T-shirt and shorts and she can feel the sun searing her skin. Somewhere in her bag there must be sunscreen. She should slather it on all three of them.
“I want to go home,” Davie says, crying.
“We’re going to have some fun.” Rachel kisses the top of his head. “Come on, let’s go.” She gets into the car and puts on the radio full blast. “Galveston” is playing as she gets back on the highway and drives on. They are heading to Alamogordo and White Sands National Monument. It is also near Trinity Site, the place where the first nuclear bomb was detonated in 1945. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” J. Robert Oppenheimer is said to have muttered to himself when he saw the explosion, quoting the Bhagavad Gita. Rachel read this as she planned the outing.
Rachel didn’t bother telling Nathan that she was taking the boys on a field trip. It just seemed like a good thing to do. She had heard that White Sands is like a giant mattress where you can jump up and down and slide for hundreds
of feet down the dunes. It will be good for the kids. It will be especially good for Davie. Anyway, does she really owe her husband an explanation? For months now, he’s always been late. Getting home even after she’s gone to bed. He barely sees the kids. Their phone conversations last for five minutes. Rachel can’t remember when they’d last had a meal together as a family. He is punishing her. He hasn’t forgiven her for letting their son get bitten by a snake, and perhaps he never will. But it began before this, didn’t it? Rachel tries to remember how long she’s been feeling that her marriage is in free fall.
When they approach the entrance of White Sands, the gate is closed. There is no one at the ranger station. “Shit,” she hisses under her breath. She has driven more than two hundred miles only to have come at a time when it’s closed.
“Don’t swear,” Jeremy tells her.
“I’ll swear if I want to,” she snaps at her son. She’s not sure what to do. Maybe there’s a Dairy Queen nearby. Maybe she can figure out a way to salvage this trip. As she makes her way down the highway, cursing under her breath, she notices something by the side of the road. There’s fencing all along the highway, enclosing White Sands, but at one spot three or four cars are pulled off to the side of the road. Rachel pulls over as well. She can see why they have stopped here. Along the four-foot fence the sands have drifted, and it’s easy to climb over. “C’mon, we’re going to be bandits.”