Zorro

by Isabel Allende

  “Tell the white man that it can all be mended, except this leg; it is rotten. First I cut it, then I take care of the rest,” she announced to her grandson.

  Diego translated without taking the precaution of lowering his voice, because Padre Alvear was nearly dead anyway, but the minute he repeated his grandmother’s diagnosis, the dying man’s fiery eyes flew open.

  “Blast it! I prefer to die and get it over,” he said forcefully.

  White Owl ignored him, while Padre Mendoza forced the poor man’s mouth open, as he did the children’s who refused to drink their milk, and stuck in his famous funnel. Then they poured in two spoonfuls of a thick reddish syrup White Owl had brought in her pouch. In the time it took to wash a wood saw with lye and tear some rags for bandages, Padre Alvear had sunk into a deep sleep from which he would awake ten hours later, lucid and tranquil, some time after the stump of his leg had stopped bleeding. White Owl had treated the dozen or so injuries on his body and had packed them with spiderwebs and mysterious salves and bandaged them. For his part, Padre Mendoza had arranged for the neophytes to take turns praying, so prayer would be continuous, day and night, until the patient was healed. The method had good results.

  Against all expectations, Padre Alvear got well quickly, and seven weeks later, carried on a hand litter, he was able to take a ship back to Peru.

  Bernardo would never forget the shock of seeing Padre Alvear’s amputated leg, and Diego would never forget the incredible power of his grandmother’s potion. In the following months he went many times to her village to beg her for the secret, but she refused time and time again, arguing that a medicine so magical should not be in the hands of a mischievous boy who undoubtedly would use it for some prank. On an impulse, like so many that he later paid for with whippings, Diego stole a gourd containing the sleeping elixir, promising himself that he would not use it to amputate human limbs but only for a good purpose.

  As soon as he had the treasure in his hands, nevertheless, he began to plan ways to have fun with it. The opportunity presented itself one hot June day when he and Bernardo were coming home from swimming the one sport that Bernardo could best him in because of his staying power, his calm, and his strength. While Diego wore himself out thrashing through the waves, Bernardo maintained an unhurried rhythm for hours, breathing slowly and letting himself be carried by the mysterious currents of the sea. If the dolphins showed up, they soon clustered around Bernardo, just as horses did, including the ones no one could break. When no vaquero dared go near an enraged colt, Bernardo would walk up to it cautiously, lay his face against its ear, and whisper secret words until it calmed down. No one could break a colt as quickly, or as well, as that Indian boy.

  That sunny afternoon on their way home, the boys were stopped by the sound of Garcia’s terrified screams, once again being tormented by the bullies from school. There were five of them, led by Carlos Alcazar, the oldest and most feared of all the students. He had the intellectual capacity of a louse, but he shone in cooking up new ways to be cruel. This time they had stripped off Garcia’s clothes and tied him to a tree, and then had slathered him from head to toe with honey.

  Garcia was screeching at the top of his lungs, and now his five tormentors watched with fascination as a cloud of mosquitoes and columns of ants began to attack. Diego and Bernardo made a quick evaluation of the situation and realized that they were at a distinct disadvantage. They could not take on Carlos and his four buddies, but neither could they leave to go for help; that would be cowardly. Diego walked toward them with a smile, while just behind him, Bernardo clenched his teeth and his fists.

  “What are you doing?” Diego asked, as if it weren’t obvious.

  “Nothing that concerns you, moron that is, unless you want to end up like Garcia,” Carlos replied, backed by the guffaws of his gang “You’re right. It doesn’t concern me, except that I was planning to use this tub of lard to catch a bear. It’s a shame to waste good bait on ants.”

  Diego said indifferently.

  “Bear?” Carlos grunted.

  “I’ll trade you Garcia for a bear,” Diego proposed off-handedly, as he cleaned his fingernails with a sharpened stick.

  “Where are you going to get a bear?” the bully asked.

  “That’s my business. I plan to bring it in alive, and wearing a hat besides. I can give it to you, if you’d like, Carlos, but to do it I will need Garcia,” Diego repeated.

  The five boys consulted in whispers, as Garcia felt the trickle of icy sweat and Bernardo scratched his head, figuring that this time Diego had gone too far. The usual method for trapping the live bears they used for fighting bulls required strength, skill, and good horses.

  Several expert horsemen would lasso the animal and control it by keeping the ropes taut, while another vaquero, acting as a lure, would go ahead, teasing it. That way they would jockey it into the corral, but the diversion often cost dear, because occasionally the bear, which could run faster than any horse, managed to get free and turn on whoever was closest.

  “And who’s going to help you?” Carlos asked.

  “Bernardo.”

  “That dumb Indian?”

  “Bernardo and I can do it ourselves, as long as we have Garcia as bait,” said Diego.

  In two minutes’ time they had closed the deal and the tormentors had gone off. Diego and Bernardo untied Garcia and helped him wash off the honey and clean his snot-smeared face in the river.

  “How are we going to get a live bear?” Bernardo asked.

  “I don’t know yet, I have to think about it,” Diego answered, and his friend never doubted that he would find the solution.

  The rest of the week went by in gathering the necessary tools for the hoax they were hoping to bring off. Finding a bear was the least of their worries; as many as a dozen at a time hung around the place where the steers were slaughtered, drawn by the scent of red meat, but the boys had to be careful not to engage more than one, and especially not a female with cubs. They had to find a solitary bear, but that would not be difficult, they were everywhere in the summer. Garcia declared that he was not well, and refused to leave his house for several days, but Diego and Bernardo forced him to come with them, using the convincing argument that if he didn’t, he would end up in the hands of Carlos Alcazar and the other bullies again. Joking, Diego told him that they needed him for bait, but when he saw how Garcia’s knees were knocking, he took pity and told him the details of the plan he had worked out with Bernardo. The three boys told their mothers that they were going to spend the night at the mission, where, as he did every year, Padre Mendoza was celebrating the feast of Saint John. They left very early, armed with several lassos and riding in a cart pulled by a pair of ancient mules. Garcia was dying of fright, Bernardo was deep in thought, and Diego was whistling. As soon as they had left the house behind and turned off the main road, they headed onto the Sendero de las Astillas, the “splinter path” the Indians believed was bewitched. The age of the mule team and the rough terrain forced them to a crawl, but that gave them time to read the tracks on the ground and the slash marks on the bark of the trees. They were getting near Alejandro de la Vega’s sawmill, which provided the lumber for dwellings and for repairing ships, when the braying of the terrified mules warned them that a bear was nearby. All the workers at the sawmill had gone to the fiesta, and there was no one in sight, only abandoned saws and axes and tree trunks piled near a rustic board building. They unhitched the mules and tugged them into the shed to protect them. Then Diego and Bernardo set about rigging their trap, while Garcia watched from his refuge a short distance away. He had brought an abundant supply of food, because he got hungry when he was nervous, and had been chewing on something ever since they left that morning. From his hiding place he watched his friends, who were throwing ropes over the largest branches of two trees; they laid out the lariats as they had watched the vaqueros do, and in the center arranged some branches they covered with the deerskins they wore when they went hunting w
ith the Indians. They laid a freshly killed rabbit under the skins, along with a ball of lard soaked in the grandmother’s sleeping potion. Then they went into the shed to share Garcia’s lunch. The three conspirators were prepared to spend a couple of days, but they didn’t have to wait that long; in no time at all the same bear the mules had scented earlier came ambling up. It was a ponderous male, a quivering mass of fat and dark fur waddling from side to side with unexpected agility and grace. The boys were not deceived by the animal’s attitude of mild curiosity, they knew what it was capable of, and they prayed that the breeze would not carry their scent or that of the mules to it. If the bear charged the shed, the door would not hold. The behemoth made a couple of circuits of the area and suddenly sighted what looked like a downed deer. It rose up on its hind legs and stretched out its front paws. The boys could see it then: the whole bear, a giant several heads taller than a grown man. It roared, freezing their blood, slashed menacingly at the air, and hurled all its enormous weight upon the hide, smashing the light frame that held it. The bear was puzzled at finding itself flat on the ground, but sprang up immediately. Again it clawed at the false deer, and discovered the hidden rabbit and the lard, which it devoured in two gulps. It shredded the hide, looking for more substantial fare, and when it didn’t find anything again rose to its full height, furious. It took one step forward and tripped the ropes, activating the trap. The ropes tightened, and in the blink of an eye the bear was hanging upside down between the two trees. The boys’ celebration was shortlived, because the weight of the bear, swinging in the air, broke the branches. Frightened for their lives, Diego, Bernardo, and Garcia barricaded themselves inside the shed with the mules, looking for something to defend themselves with, while the bear, spreadeagled on the ground, was trying to kick its right hind foot free of the lasso that still bound it to one of the broken tree branches. It struggled for quite some time, getting more and more entangled and more and more infuriated; then, finding that it couldn’t get loose, it started forward, dragging the branch.

  “And now?” asked Bernardo, feigning calm.

  “Now we wait,” Diego replied.

  When Garcia felt something warm between his legs and saw the stain spreading down his pants leg, he lost his head and started sobbing at the top of his lungs. Bernardo jumped on him and clamped his hand over his mouth, but it was too late. The bear had heard. It started toward the shed, and once there it slashed at the door, shaking the fragile construction so badly that boards fell off the roof. Inside, Diego was waiting beside the door with his whip in one hand, while Bernardo was waving a crowbar he had found in the shed. To their good fortune, the beast was dazed by its fall from the tree and hampered by the heavy branch it was dragging. After one last halfhearted feint at the door, it stumbled off toward the woods, but it didn’t get far because the branch caught in some of the logs stacked near the sawmill, stopping it short. The boys couldn’t see the bear, but for a long time they heard its frustrated roars, until they subsided into resigned sighs, and finally ceased altogether.

  “And now?” Bernardo asked again.

  “Now we have to get it into the cart,” Diego announced.

  “Are you crazy? We can’t leave the shed!” yelled Garcia, whose pants by now were darkly stained and stinking.

  “I don’t know how long it will be asleep. It’s really big, and we have to suppose that my grandmother’s sleeping potion is meant for a human. We have to work fast, because if it wakes up, our hide is cooked.”

  Diego ordered.

  Bernardo followed him without asking for further explanation, as he always did, but Garcia stayed behind, miserable in the muck of his own filth and moaning with what little breath he had left. Diego and Bernardo found the bear on its back a short distance from the shed, just where it had dropped after being walloped by the drug. In Diego’s plan, the animal was to have been strung up in the trees during the time it was unconscious; that way the boys could pull the cart beneath it and drop it down. Now they would have to hoist the gargantuan animal into the cart. They prodded the bear with a pole and, as it didn’t move, felt brave enough to go right up to it. It was older than they’d thought: two claws were missing on one paw, several teeth were broken, and it was stippled with old scars. The dragon breath issuing from its open jaws struck them full in the face, but this was no time to retreat; they tied up its snout and roped its four paws together. At first they worked slowly, blocking out defense moves that would have been completely useless had the beast wakened, but once they were convinced that it was as good as dead, they moved quickly. Soon they had the bear immobilized, and went to look for the terrorized mules.

  Bernardo used his method of whispering into their ears, as he did with wild horses, and convinced them to obey. Garcia approached with caution, after being assured that the bear’s snores were legitimate, but he was shaking, and smelled so bad that they sent him to wash himself and his trousers in a nearby stream. Bernardo and Diego followed the vaquero’s method for lifting huge weights: they secured two ropes to one end of the tipped-over cart, passed them beneath the bear, pulled them back over it in the opposite direction, then tied the ends to the mules’ harness and ordered them to pull. At the second try, they succeeded in rolling the beast over, and in that way worked it into the cart. They were panting when they finished their backbreaking task, but they had achieved their goal. They hugged each other and leaped around like lunatics, prouder than they had ever been before. The proud boys hitched up the mules, and were ready to start back to town, but not before Diego had pulled out the bucket of tar he’d collected in the pits near his house and used it to paste a sombrero onto the bear’s head. The boys were exhausted, bathed in sweat, and saturated in the stench of the beast. Garcia, for his part, was a bundle of nerves; he could barely stand, he still smelled like a pigsty, and his clothes were soaking wet. Their adventure had taken most of the afternoon, but when finally they headed the mules back down the Sendero de las Astillas, they had a couple of hours of daylight left. They urged the team on, and reached the Camino Real just as it grew dark. From there on, the long-suffering mules found their way by instinct, while the bear wheezed in its prison of rope. It had woken from the lethargy brought on by White Owl’s potion, but was still muddled. When they drove into Pueblo de los Angeles, it was pitch-black night. By the light of a pair of oil lanterns they untied the animals’ rear feet, but left its front paws and snout bound. They prodded it until they got it out of the cart and onto two feet, dizzied but with every ounce of fury intact. The boys started yelling, and soon people were pouring out of their houses carrying lamps and torches. The whole town came out to see what was going on, and the street filled with people admiring the bizarre spectacle: Diego de la Vega leading a huge bear wearing a sombrero, of all things, and staggering along on its hind feet with Bernardo and Garcia poking it from the rear. Applause and cheers echoed for weeks in the ears of the three boys, and by then they’d had plenty of time to consider how foolish they had been and to recover from their well-deserved punishment. Nothing could dim the radiance of that victory. Carlos and the other bullies never bothered them again.

  The exploit of the bear, exaggerated and embellished to the point of impossibility, spread by word of mouth; with time, it crossed the Bering Strait, carried by traders in otter skins, and circulated as far away as Russia. Diego, Bernardo, and Garcia were not excused from the whipping administered by their parents, but no one could contest their fame as champions. They were very careful, oh yes, very careful not to mention White Owl’s sleeping potion. Their trophy was exhibited in a corral for several days, exposed to the jeers and rocks of the curious, while promoters looked for a bull worthy of fighting it, but Diego and Bernardo took pity on the captive and the night before the fight set it free.

  In October, when the town was still talking about nothing else, they were attacked by pirates. They had sailed along the coast by night and at dawn they came ashore without warning, with the experience of many years of mara
uding. Their ship was a brigantine armed with fourteen light cannons; it had made the voyage from South America by swinging around Hawaii to take advantage of the prevailing winds that blew toward Alta California. They were on the prowl for ships laden with treasures from America destined for the royal coffers in Spain. These buccaneers rarely attacked on dry land the important cities could defend themselves, and the others were too poor but they had been at sea for an eternity without any luck, and the crew needed to take on fresh water and release a little energy. The captain decided to put in at Pueblo de los Angeles, although he didn’t expect to find anything interesting there, only basic supplies, liquor, and a little diversion for the lads. They were counting on not meeting any resistance, preceded as they were by the reputation they themselves made sure was well known, spine-chilling tales of blood and ashes, of how they chopped men into little pieces, gutted pregnant women, and strung children on grappling hooks and hung them from the masts like trophies.

  They liked being thought of as barbaric. When they struck, all they had to do was announce their presence by firing off a few cannons, or come howling onto the scene, and the whole town would desert, leaving the pirates to sack the place without the inconvenience of a fight.