Zorro

by Isabel Allende

  Pedro Fages pierced him with a steely glance, trying to make out his intentions. He was up to date on what people were saying about this handsome captain and his wife; he wasn’t deaf. No one could understand, he least of all, why it should take Dona Eulalia six months to reach Monterey when the trip could be made in much less time. It was said that the journey was drawn out on purpose because the two wanted to be together. Added to that was the exaggerated version of an assault by bandits in which supposedly de la Vega had risked his life to save hers. That was not the real story, but Pedro Fages never learned that. The attackers were a half dozen Indians, fired up by alcohol, who went tearing off the moment they heard the first shots; nothing more. And as far as the injury to de la Vega’s leg went, that had not come about in defending Dona Eulalia de Callis, as rumor had it, but from a minor goring from a wild cow. Pedro Fages prided himself on being a good judge of human nature he had not been exercising power for many years for nothing and after studying Alejandro de la Vega, he decided that it was pointless to waste suspicions on this man; he was sure that the captain had delivered his wife to him with her virtue intact. He knew his wife very well. If those two had really fallen in love, no human or divine power would have persuaded Eulalia to leave her lover and go back to her husband.

  Perhaps there had been a kind of platonic affinity between them, but nothing that would cause him to lose sleep, the governor concluded.

  In the meantime, the uproar of servants running through the corridors, doors slamming, and shouting continued. Alejandro de la Vega, like the whole world, knew of the couple’s fights, as epic as their reconciliations. He had heard that in their fits the Fages threw crockery at each other’s heads, and that on more than one occasion Don Pedro had drawn his sword against her, but also that afterward they locked themselves in their room for several days to make love. The robust governor thumped the table, making the cups dance, and confessed to his guest that Eulalia had been in her room for five days in a white-hot rage.

  “She misses the refinement she is used to,” he said, just as a maniacal howl shook the walls.

  “Perhaps she feels a little lonely, Excellency,” muttered de la Vega, just to fill the awkward silence.

  “I have promised her that in three years we will return to either Mexico City or Spain, but she doesn’t want to hear that. My patience has run out, Captain de la Vega. I am going to send her to the nearest mission so the friars can put her to work with the Indians. We’ll see then whether she learns to respect me!” Fages roared.

  “Will you allow me to have a few words with your lady, Excellency?” the captain inquired.

  During those five stormy days the governor’s wife had refused to see anyone, including her three-year-old son. The teary-eyed child was sniveling, curled up on the floor outside her door, so frightened that he wet himself every time his father beat on the door with his cane.

  The only person allowed to cross the threshold was the Indian girl who carried in food and carried out the chamber pot. However, when Eulalia learned that Alejandro de la Vega had come to visit and wanted to see her, her hysteria disappeared in a minute. She washed her face, put up her long braid, and dressed in a mauve-colored gown, with all her pearls. Pedro Fages watched her enter, as splendid and smiling as on her best days, and he entertained a hope for a steamy reconciliation, even though he was not ready to forgive her too quickly; the woman deserved some punishment. That night during the austere dinner, in a dining room as gloomy as the hall of weapons, Eulalia de Callis and Pedro Fages, casting their guest in the role of witness, threw recriminations in each other’s faces that would curdle the soul.

  Alejandro de la Vega took refuge in an uncomfortable silence until the moment dessert was served. By then the wine had taken effect, and the wrath of husband and wife was beginning to cool, so the captain set forth the reason for his visit. He explained that Toypurnia had Spanish blood. He described her bravery and intelligence, although he avoided mention of her beauty, and he begged the governor to be indulgent, praising his reputation for being compassionate and asking for clemency in the name of their mutual friendship. Pedro Fages did not need further pleading; the rosy glow of Eulalia’s decolletage had begun to distract him, and he consented to change the death penalty to a sentence of twenty years in prison.

  “In prison that woman will become a martyr for the Indians,” Eulalia interrupted. “Simply saying her name will be enough to cause them to rebel again. I have a better solution. First of all, she must be baptized, as God wills. Then you bring her to me and I will take charge of the problem. I wager that in a year’s time I will have converted this Toypurnia, Daughter-of-Wolf, wild Indian, into a Christian Spanish lady. In that way we will destroy her influence over the Indians once and for all.”

  “And in doing so, you will have something to do, and someone to keep you company,” her husband added good-naturedly.

  And so it was done. It was left to Alejandro de la Vega himself to go to San Gabriel to collect the prisoner and bring her back to Monterey to the relief of Padre Mendoza, who could not be rid of her too quickly. She was a volcano waiting to explode in the mission, where the neophytes still had not recovered from the tumult of war. Toypurnia was baptized under the name of Regina Maria de la Inmac-ulada Conception, but she immediately forgot most of it and went only by Regina. Padre Mendoza dressed her in the rough cloth robe the neophytes wore, strung a medal of the Virgin around her neck, helped her onto her horse, since her hands were tied, and gave her his blessing. As soon as they had left the low buildings of the mission behind, Captain de la Vega untied the captive’s hands and, with a sweeping gesture indicating the immensity of the horizon, invited her to escape. Regina thought it over for a few minutes, and must have calculated that if she were captured a second time there would be no mercy, for she shook her head no. Or perhaps it was not merely fear but the same burning emotion that clouded the mind of the Spaniard. In any case, without a trace of rebellion, she followed him throughout the trip, which he strung out as long as possible because he imagined he would never see her again. Alejandro de la Vega savored every step they took along the Camino Real, every night they slept under the stars without touching, every time that they waded together in the ocean, all the while waging stubborn combat against desire and imagination. He knew that a de la Vega, an hidalgo, a man of honor and lineage, could never dream of living his life with a mestiza woman. If he had hoped that those days on horseback with Regina, traveling through the solitudes of California, would cool his ardor, he was in for a disappointment; when, inevitably, they reached the Presidio at Monterey, he was as wildly in love as a teenager. He had to call upon his long discipline as a soldier to be able to say goodbye to the woman, and silently swear by all that was holy that he would never try to communicate with her again.

  Three years later, Pedro Fages kept the promise he had made to his wife and resigned his post as governor of Alta California so that he could return to civilization. At heart, he was happy with that decision because exercising power had always seemed a thankless task. The couple loaded up mule teams and ox carts with their trunks, gathered together their small court, and began the march to Mexico City, where Eulalia de Callis had furnished a baroque palace with all the grandeur befitting her rank. Of necessity, they stopped at every town and mission along the road to rest and to be feted by the colonists.

  Despite their mercurial natures, the Fages were loved, because he had governed with justice and she had a reputation for being wildly generous. In Pueblo de los Angeles, the Spanish colonists pooled their resources with those of the nearby San Gabriel mission, the most prosperous in the province and only a few leagues from the town, and gave the travelers a reception worthy of their station. The town, built in the style of colonial Spanish cities, was a large square with a central plaza, well planned for growth and prosperity, although at that moment it had only four principal streets and a hundred or so houses of cane and mud. There was also a tavern its back room served as a
general store a church, a jail, and a half dozen adobe, stone, and tile-roofed buildings where the authorities lived. Despite the small number of inhabitants and the scarcity of ready cash, the colonists were famous for their hospitality and for the continuous cycle of parties they offered throughout the year. Guitars, trumpets, violins, and pianos enlivened the nights on Saturdays, and every Sunday they gathered to dance the fandango. The visit of the governor and his wife was the best excuse to celebrate they’d had since the town was founded.

  They placed arches covered with flags and paper flowers around the plaza, they set long tables with white cloths, and everyone capable of playing an instrument was recruited for the soiree, including a couple of prisoners who were freed from the stocks when it was learned that they could strum a guitar. Padre Mendoza brought his neophytes, several casks of his best wine, two cows, and an assortment of pigs, hens, and ducks to be sacrificed for the occasion. The preparations took several months, and during that time people talked about nothing else. The women stitched gowns for the gala, the men polished their silver buttons and buckles, the musicians practiced the dance music in vogue in Mexico City, the cooks worked like slaves to prepare the most sumptuous banquet ever seen in their town.

  Captain Alejandro de la Vega had been put in charge of public order and safety during the visitors’ stay. From the moment he learned they would be coming, the image of Regina tormented him day and night. He wondered what had become of her during those three centuries of separation, how she had survived in the dark Presidio in Monterey, and whether she would remember him. His doubts evaporated the night of the fiesta, when amid the light of the torches and sound of the orchestra he saw a dazzling girl dressed and coiffed in the European mode, and instantly recognized those burnt-sugar-colored eyes. She picked him out of the crowd and without missing a beat walked toward him, stopping before him with the most serious expression in the world. The captain, his heart within an ace of shattering, intended to hold out his hand to invite her to dance. Instead, out gushed a proposal of marriage. It was not an impromptu impulse; he had been thinking about her for three years and had reached the conclusion that a stain on his impeccable lineage would be far better than living without her. He realized that he would never be able to present her to his family or to society in Spain, but he didn’t care. For her, he was ready to put down roots in California and never leave the New World. Regina accepted him; she had loved him secretly since those days when he nursed her back to life in Padre Mendoza’s wine cellar.

  And that is how the governor’s festive visit in Pueblo de los Angeles came to be crowned with the wedding of the captain and the mysterious lady-in-waiting to Eulalia de Callis. Padre Mendoza, who had let his hair grow to his shoulders to mask the horrible scar left by his severed ear, performed the ceremony, even though he tried up to the last moment to talk the captain out of marrying. He was not overly concerned that the bride was a mestiza many Spaniards married Indian girls it was the suspicion that beneath Regina’s perfect European lady’s looks lurked Toypurnia, Daughter-of-Wolf. Pedro Fages personally escorted the bride to the altar; he was convinced that she had saved his marriage, for in Eulalia’s eagerness to educate the girl, her nature had sweetened slightly, and she had stopped tormenting her husband with her fits. Considering that he also owed his wife’s life to Alejandro de la Vega, if the gossip was to be believed, he decided that this was a good occasion to be generous. With a flourish of his pen he signed over the title for a ranch and several thousand head of cattle to the brand-new couple, since it was in his power to distribute land among the colonists. He drew the perimeters on a map, following the caprice of the pencil, and later, when the real borders of the ranch were verified, it turned out that they enclosed a vast territory of pasture lands hills, forests, rivers, and beach. It took several days to ride across the property on horseback: it was the largest and best-located spread in the region. Without having solicited it, Alejandro de la Vega found himself a wealthy man. Some weeks later, when people began to call him Don Alejandro, he resigned from the king’s army in order to devote himself entirely to prospering in this new land. One year later, he was elected alcalde of Pueblo de los Angeles.

  De la Vega built a large, solid, and unpretentious home of adobe, with a red tile roof and floors of rough clay tiles. He decorated his house with heavy furniture built by a Galician carpenter in the town, with no consideration for aesthetics, only for durability. The location of the house was enviable: close to the beach and a short distance from both Pueblo de los Angeles and the mission of San Gabriel. The large Mexican hacienda-style house stood on a hill, and its orientation offered a panoramic view of coast and sea. Nearby were the sinister natural tar deposits where no one came willingly because the souls of the dead trapped in the pitch wandered there. Between the beach and the hacienda lay a labyrinth of caves, a sacred place to the Indians, as feared as the tar pits. Indians did not go there, out of respect for their ancestors, nor did the Spanish because of frequent landslides, and because it was easy to get lost in that maze.

  Alejandro de la Vega installed several Indian families and mestizo vaqueros on his property, branded his herd, and began to raise purebred horses, using breeding stock he had imported from Mexico. In his spare time he set up a small soap factory and devoted himself to experiments in the kitchen, trying to find the perfect formula for smoking meat seasoned with chili peppers. He was trying to produce a dry but savory meat that would last months without going bad. This experiment consumed all his time and filled the sky with volcanic smoke the wind carried far out to sea, altering the behavior of the whales. He calculated that if he found the precise balance between flavor and resistance to spoiling, he could sell the product to the army and to the ships. He felt that it was a tremendous waste to strip the hide and fat off the cattle and lose mountains of good meat. While her husband multiplied the number of cattle, sheep, and horses on the ranch, directed the politics of the town, and did business with the merchant ships, Regina busied herself by looking after the Indians on the hacienda. She had no interest at all in the social life of the colony, and with Olympian indifference ignored the gossip circulating about her. Behind her back, everyone commented on her unsociable and arrogant nature, her more than doubtful origins, her escapades on horseback, her naked bathing in the sea. However, since she had arrived as a protegee of the Fages, the minuscule social set of Pueblo de los Angeles was at first pre pared to take her to their collective bosom without asking questions, but Regina herself bowed out. Soon the dresses that had been made for her under Eulalia de Callis’s guidance hung abandoned in the armoires, devoured by moths. She felt more comfortable going barefoot and wearing the rough clothing of the neophytes. And so her day went by. In the evening, when she anticipated that Alejandro would soon be home, she bathed, coiled her hair into a casual bun, and put on a simple dress that gave her the innocent appearance of a novitiate. Her husband, blind with love and occupied in his business affairs, shrugged off the betraying signs of Regina’s state of mind. He wanted to see her happy and never asked her if she was, for fear that she would tell him the truth. He attributed his wife’s strange behavior to inexperience in life as a newlywed, and to her closed nature. He preferred not to think that the well-behaved lady sitting with him at the dinner table was the same ferociously painted warrior who had attacked the San Gabriel mission several years before. He believed that motherhood would cure his wife of her last bad habits, but despite the long, frequent tumbles in the four-pillared bed they shared, the wished-for child did not arrive until 1795.

  During the months of her pregnancy, Regina became even more silent and untamed. Using the pretext of comfort, she stopped dressing and combing her hair in the European style. She went down to the ocean to swim with the dolphins that came long distances to mate near the beach, accompanied by a sweet neophyte named Ana, whom Padre Mendoza had sent from the mission. She, too, was pregnant, but she had no husband and had tenaciously refused to confess the identity of the man
who had seduced her. The missionary did not want to keep this bad example among his neophytes, but neither could he find it in his heart to banish her from the mission, so he ended up sending her to be a servant in the de la Vega family. It turned out to be a good idea; a quiet complicity between Regina and Ana blossomed immediately, something good for them both, for the former gained a companion and the second won protection. It had been Ana’s idea to swim with the dolphins, sacred creatures that swim in circles to keep the world safe and in good order. Those huge, velvety mammals knew that the two women were pregnant, and lightly brushed past them to give them strength and courage at the moment of giving birth.

  In the third week of May, Ana and Regina had their babies. The births coincided with the famous week of the fires, recorded in the annals of Pueblo de los Angeles as the most catastrophic since the founding of the city. Every summer the residents had to resign themselves to watching some of the forest go up in flames because a spark had touched off dry pastureland, but they had never seen anything like the fires that May. Normally the fires were welcome, because they cleared out debris and created space for tender growth the following spring, but that year, according to Padre Mendoza, they were God’s punishment for so much unrepentant sin in the colony. The flames burned down several ranches as they passed, destroying both dwellings and cattle that had nowhere to escape to. On Sunday the winds changed and the fire stopped one mile away from the de la Vega hacienda, which was interpreted by the Indians as an excellent augury for the two newborns in the house.

  The spirit of the dolphins helped Ana during her delivery, but not Regina. While the former had her baby in four hours, kneeling on the ground and with a young kitchen girl as her only help, Regina was in labor for fifty hours, a torment that she bore stoically as she clamped down on the stick between her teeth. Alejandro de la Vega, desperate, summoned the one midwife in Pueblo de los Angeles, but she admitted defeat when she realized that the baby was crosswise in the womb and that Regina lacked the strength to keep fighting. So Alejandro called for Padre Mendoza, the closest thing to a doctor around. The missionary started all the servants praying the rosary, sprinkled Regina with holy water, and prepared to extract the baby. Thanks to pure determination, he succeeded in grasping its feet; he tugged it toward the light, worried only that time was running out. The cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck, and he was turning blue, but with prayers and well-delivered slaps Padre Mendoza forced him to breathe.