by Robert Hough
And then, as if by miracle, the door of the closet was thrown open wide. The light assaulted her eyes, and she pushed herself, whimpering, to the back of the fetid space. She could hear the sound of boot steps retreating along the floorboards, along with a ragged voice yelling You got thirty seconds to get that whore outta the closet. She’s starting to stink up the place. And then two Marias were there, Maria del Alma and Maria de las Rosas, saying Madam, please, hurry. She nodded and said nothing and tried to stand and couldn’t. Each Maria took an arm, and with their help she rose to her feet, Madam so foggy-headed she was conscious only of the wooden floor moving beneath her toes. This turned to dusty, pale earth, a change coincident with the sensation of the low orange sun warming her back. Madam let herself be dragged to the first of the pup tents erected by Ramón’s men. There, two more Marias washed her with dampened cloths and dressed her in a clean, if unglamorous, smock. They gave her small bites of tortilla and spoonfuls of a tepid meatless broth. A cooling towel was placed upon her forehead.
Madam Félix fell into a deep, tormented sleep. When she finally awoke, she did something she should have done long, long ago. She wept. She wept for the hacendero, and she wept for the loss of her house, and she wept because she was barren and a long time ago a husband she could no longer picture had thrown her, wailing, into the street because she couldn’t give him a child. Mostly, she wept because that bastard Ramón wasn’t lying dead in the broiling sun, his features ornamented with a bloody third eye, smack dab in the middle of his forehead. At first her sobs were quiet, almost reverential, though when they began to build in intensity she did not attempt to muffle them in any way. Her cries drifted through the canvas of the tent and filled the yard and unnerved the Marias, who felt powerless in the face of such sorrow. This went on and on, the madam ridding herself of a poison that had infected her system for years.
It was pitch-black when she finally stopped. She felt around, her left hand coming upon the cool, glassy surface of an unlit kerosene lamp. After a little more fumbling she found a box of matches and lit the lamp, the inside of the tent erupting in a nectarine glow. She lowered the flame to a cool, soothing blue. Though she was dressed in someone else’s nightdress — she recognized it as belonging to Maria de los Sueños — her own clothes lay cleaned and folded beside her. She stood and dressed, which was difficult, given the low ceiling of the tent. Before pushing open the flaps and stepping into the arid night air, she took a few breaths to collect herself. In a moment she felt imbued with a new resolve.
The Marias were all sleeping, worn out by a day of servicing the needs of Ramón and his cutthroats. Some were in their pup tents, and others were sleeping around the twinkling embers of the fire. The first one she came to was Maria del Alma. Madam kneeled and brushed the hair off the girl’s slender forehead. Again, she had to fight against a flaring of tears. She could remember, as though it had happened yesterday, the day Maria del Alma first knocked at the door of Madam’s house: sixteen years old, thin as a sapling, as pretty as a dove, her family so poor that she and her siblings had grown up taking turns wearing each other’s clothes.
Madam smiled ruefully as she stroked Maria’s forehead. I broke my promise to you, she thought. I can no longer protect you, I can no longer feed your family. But this will not last, I promise you this, mi niña, mi linda, mi preciosa Maria.
Gently she shook the girl’s shoulders. Maria came awake silently and looked up at Madam. There was, as always, trust in her expression.
— Qué pasa? she whispered.
— Shhh, mija. Don’t say a thing. We are going. Collect your things. We are leaving Corazón.
Maria blinked, her eyes still bearing a glimmer of innocence. As Maria silently collected her things, Madam went around to all of her Marias, including Maria del Mampo, who was now well enough to travel, albeit marred by scars and disfigurements that would prevent her from ever working as a Maria again. Before waking each of her young wards, Madam silently recalled how she had met each girl, and she forced herself to remember as many pleasant moments as possible involving her and their lives in the House of Gentlemanly Pleasures. This helped, for it made her feel as though her life in Corazón hadn’t been wasted. Shhh, mija, she whispered each time, we are leaving this place, and each time the Maria would nod and begin gathering her belongings (the lone exception, of course, being Maria de la Noche, who grinned and saucily whispered A todo madre, Madam. It’s about time).
They all worked quietly, in absolute silence. Then, like the proverbial wind, they slipped away without saying goodbye to anyone in the town that had forsaken them, not even the hacendero, though Madam did stop her train of Marias in front of his battered mansion. There she forced herself to remember how safe she had felt whenever he was in her bed, scenting her pillows with brandy and tobacco. She indulged herself this way for only a minute, her Marias understanding why they had stopped behind the ramshackle old hacienda, and why Madam’s lips were trembling.
Following instinct and the light of the corona, Madam’s caravan of Marias walked east along the riverbank, where they could stop and drink whenever they felt tired. After a while the landscape was lit a natural silver and not the green of high-powered radio frequencies. This pleased them and made them feel as though their new lives had begun.
They existed like nomads, camping under the stars and dining on nopal blackened over fires. They ate soup brewed from jumil bugs and smoked cigarettes rolled from wild punche. These hardships didn’t bother them, as they were all savouring a freedom that had nothing to do with male clients and a reignited revolution. They travelled for three days, in no hurry. They admired the skies and drank milk from hacked-apart cacti. At night they huddled for warmth and said prayers in Latin. For the first time in ages, they had time to think about God, the purpose of life, and the meaning of eternity. In this way their journey felt like a gift. Some even acted upon affections that had existed for years, their first Sapphic fumblings occurring under a wash of starlight.
They finally stopped at a stretch of uninhabited desert that was strategically located across the border from Laredo, Texas. There was nothing but chaparral and prickly pear and a sympathetic view of the river, and, in the other direction, a distant sierra. They bathed in cool waters, built a fire, and erected the tents they’d wisely commandeered from Ramón. This, they all realized, was the new way in which decisions would be made: wordlessly, organically, without the issuance of commands. By nine o’clock the next morning, coffee was bubbling, by ten o’clock their stomachs were filled with griddle cakes, and by eleven o’clock an ad hoc sign had been fashioned. It read, appropriately enough, The House of Gentlemanly Pleasures II. By noon Madam’s new, makeshift brothel had its first customer, an itinerant seller of encyclopedias who often ducked into México for just such a purpose, and who was giddy with delight that there was now a brothel here, just over the border from bustling Laredo. His choice was Maria del Sol, whose gentle, fawn-like movements made the man think of things normally not associated with bordellos, including rainbows, the taste of ripe fruit, and the laughter of children. He left vowing to return.
To mark the occasion, Madam made an announcement.
— Mijas, she said to her Marias. — This place is a good one. We will live here as a family and we will prosper for years to come, and we will all grow wrinkled and rich together. But there is one thing we will do differently here.
— Sí? echoed the Marias.
Madam fought to suppress emotion. — You have all been given the name of the daughter I always wanted but, given the caprices of God, could never have. Instead, you became my daughters. You became my family. This fact has existed for years, even if none of us chose to acknowledge it. When I was locked in that infernal closet, it occurred to me that I no longer wanted to partake in this … in this charade. All visitors, clients, and callers will continue to address me as Madam. You, however, will refer to me by another term.
She paused, and looked adoringly at each one
of them.
— From now on, you will all call me Mother.
This made all of the Marias smile, including Maria de la Noche, whose left eye brimmed with the beginnings of a tear.
{ 36 }
JUST AS MARIA’S TEAR OVERCAME THE RESISTANCE of her lower eyelid, tumbling down her cheek like a child rolling down a hill, Madam’s long-time amor entered the grand room of his hacienda, a place in which his parents had once hosted luxurious affairs attended by aristocracy from all over northern México. He rarely went in there and never spent much time when he did — the ceiling bowed and the north wall had been riddled by mortar fire, giving it a riveted, undulating quality. Everything smelled like damp wool and mould, and the few pieces of furniture that remained were covered with old bedsheets. Everything else, more or less, had been sacrificed to looters.
The hacendero found this difficult to bear. He still shuddered every time he considered that his great-grandfather’s fire irons, which had borne the Garcia crest as proudly as a ship flies its flag, had probably been melted down to make rifle pellets. He still felt a painful rumble in his stomach every time he thought that the room’s immense sofa, a piece hand-created by Galician craftsmen, had no doubt been hatcheted and burned for warmth. He still felt the onset of manly tears when he imagined that his family’s china, which dated back to the Inquisition, had been purloined so that rebel cooks would have something on which to slop tripe stew and refried beans.
He sat in a huge draped chair where, it was said, a visiting Galician bishop had once sipped tea and commented on matters of the Church. Across one wall was a procession of gilt-framed paintings, each one depicting a member of the hacendero’s ancestry. They too had been desecrated during the revolution, no doubt by leftist thugs possessed by feelings of righteousness. There was his great-great-uncle, a magistrate who sat with the royal court in Madrid, his face slashed by the blade of a resentful communist. There was his grandmother, a woman whose ancestors, it was said, had helped plot the Crusades: in an act of political commentary her face had been smeared by rebel excrement. There was his father, a man who had the ear of Porfirio Díaz and the respect of all who knew him, a pair of glasses and horns drawn on his magisterial face. Finally there was the hacendero’s wife, Doña Prudencia, the outline of an erect member drawn so that it was about to enter her slightly parted mouth.
The hacendero dropped his head and felt particularly moronic. He could still remember the day she had stood before him, looking officious in her riding boots, a long tan dress with a high lace collar, and the black kid gloves she always wore when embarking on a journey. Her steamer trunk was packed and waiting on the porch.
— You’re a fool, Antonio.
Of course she was right. Every other hacienda owner in northern México had sold up and gone back to Spain, or had paid paramilitary groups for protection. He had done neither, thinking it a poor way to repay the country that had hosted him since he was a boy. The simple fact was that he loved México, and always had. He loved the sense of excitement in the air, the passion expressed so easily by its people. He loved the space, and the taste of tequila. He loved cacti and endless skies. Of course, there was one other consideration, one that he’d downplayed at the time. His heart had alighted elsewhere.
As the hacendero regarded his gallery of defaced paintings, it occurred to him that each portrait was sitting in moody judgement. For some reason he had never noticed this before. Yet it was as plain as the arrival of a new day: the slight air of condescension in their eyes, the stiffness caused by disappointment in their carriage. A barely detectable whiff of anger.
He thought I deserve your censure. I do. I have failed the Garcia name. I have done nothing less.
From far off he heard a flare-up of the fighting that had taken control of Corazón de la Fuente. He heard the ricochet of bullets and the hollers of downed men needing help and the mad scramble of those trying to get out of the way. It was a medley of sounds he heard two or three times per day, lasting each time for no more than a few minutes, only to be followed by a leaden silence. This time, however, he also heard a desperate equine scream.
The hacendero leapt from his chair and ran through the length of his house, and when he made it to the paddock, he knew exactly what had happened. Frightened by the fighting, Diamante had made a run at the wood-plank fence that the Reyes brothers had constructed to replace the wire enclosure. The poor horse now lay on his side, mouth frothing, eyes wide with fear, clearly in pain. His right foreleg was crooked and trembling and clearly shattered. His nose dripped a thin pink gelatin.
The hacendero kneeled and took the horse’s head in his hands. For the first time in weeks, the horse didn’t fight him — he merely closed his eyes and took slow, rasping breaths. The hacendero patted him gently, his fingers tracing the diamond between the animal’s glorious burnt-orange eyes. He spoke gently to his horse, describing a world where there were no such things as wire fences or bad weather or pain. Diamante, he noted sadly, seemed to be listening, and so he kept talking of a different world in a different time and all of the wonderful, pleasing things that were to be found in that world.
As he comforted Diamante, the hacendero thought about his life with horses. When he considered the time he had spent in that world, he understood that the moments in which he had felt most free, and most impassioned by the act of living, had been atop a caballo. He smiled. Images of the horses he had owned, going all the way back to a pony his father had presented to him when he was a boy of just six, flashed through his mind, a galloping procession of palominos and pintos and galiceños and mustangs.
The hacendero paused for a moment and listened to the rise and fall of his horse’s ribs. They made a soft, restful shhh that reminded him of the waves of the ocean, and he couldn’t help but think of the time he had ridden Diamante all the way to Matamoros and dipped his boot in the Golfo de México. Though they’d followed the Río Grande all the way there, the hacendero had decided to follow a canyon back through the sierras. It was a glorious decision — the air was fresh and the peaks were alive with birds and for dinner they pulled fresh fish from a stream they found halfway through the range. The next day, towards the end of morning, the canyon narrowed and they came upon an encampment of mestizos. There were dozens of them, living in itinerant poverty, their day revolving around a sooty mesquite fire. The hacendero was nervous; banditry and even murder were not unheard of in the mountains of northeastern México.
A couple of older men had approached.
— Hola.
— Hola, primos.
— That’s a nice horse.
— Gracias.
— Where are you going?
— To a small town near Piedras. It’s called Corazón de la Fuente.
Their eyes lit up. — Where they have that radio tower?
— Sí.
The men digested this information. Both had weak, watery eyes and dirty clothing.
— You still have a ways to go. Would you like to share lunch with us?
He’d sat and accepted a metal plate towering with tortillas, beans, and armadillo meat charred over the fire and then sprinkled with lime juice and salt. They were drinking a warm homemade cerveza that tasted like sweet earth and barley. It was, he thought, the most delicious meal he’d ever eaten. When he finished, a dark-skinned woman appeared and asked if he’d like more. He thanked her, and halfway through his second serving realized that there was no reason in the world why these poor Mexicanos, assaulted by poor government and bad soil, should be so solicitous and kind to a wealthy Spaniard. And yet they were. If there was a soul of México, the hacendero thought, he had found it here, around a fire of low embers, in the company of giving strangers.
Diamante chuffed with pain.
— Caballo, he whispered. — On the morning of his death, Fajardo Jimenez gave me a cache of dynamite the size of a large stove. Today I am going to use it. It is a promise I am making to you. Perhaps it will go all wrong and I will die and I
will see you soon in heaven. This could happen, and if it does, at least I will have gone down fighting.
Because of the conflict in town, the hacendero had started wearing a holster, even when sleeping in his huge, perpetually creaking bed. He withdrew his pistol and felt the wooden handle rest heavy and warm in his hand. His tears flowed with abandon, for the rules regarding manly behaviour were different when the death of a beloved animal was involved. He crossed himself and prayed, not just for his own soul and the soul of his horse but also for the soul of Madam Félix and his long-departed wife and, most of all, for this beautiful, tormented country called México. He lifted the pistol and placed it against the horse’s temple. He could tell by looking into Diamante’s eyes that the animal fully knew what was happening; he was facing his end with a courage that the hacendero doubted he himself could equal.
— I am sorry, said Antonio Garcia before he pulled the trigger.
He stood, walked back into his house, and buried the pistol in a hole in the earthen floor of his root cellar, never wanting to see the wretched thing again. Choking back tears, he walked through the ejido and emerged on Avenida Cinco de Mayo. He turned west, towards the village where he had lived for all but six of his years on this planet. Before reaching the plaza, where he ran the risk of catching a stray bullet, he cut around behind the town hall. He knew of a back door there that, once upon a time, had been used by cleaning staff; a few weeks earlier, a looter had broken the lock by striking it with a rock, and it had remained open ever since. He entered and walked up a cool, silent staircase, past families who were now camping in the hall itself. When he reached the mayor’s office, he found Miguel Orozco standing at his window, looking sadly over the plaza. The mayor turned and looked at the hacendero.