Zorro

by Isabel Allende

  Diego and his maestro wove through a labyrinth of sinuous alleyways deep into the barrio of the ancient Goths; they passed beneath hidden gateways, descended stairs worn by time, dove into underground recesses, clambered through cavernous ruins, and crossed canals where no water ran, only a dark viscous liquid that smelled of rotten fruit.

  Finally they stopped before a door marked with cabalistic signs; it opened to them after the maestro gave the password, and they walked into a room with the look of an Egyptian temple. Diego found himself in the company of twenty men wearing brightly colored tunics adorned with a variety of symbols. All were wearing medallions similar to those of Maestro Escalante and Santiago de Leon. He was in the sect’s tabernacle, the heart of La Justicia.

  The initiation ritual lasted through the night, and during those long hours Diego met all the challenges to which he was subjected, one after another. In an adjoining space, perhaps the ruin of a Roman temple, the Circle of the Master was drawn on the floor. A man stepped forward to challenge Diego, and all the rest gathered around as judges. The man introduced himself as Julius Caesar, his code name. Diego and his opponent shed shirts and shoes, stripping to their trousers. Their bout demanded precision, speed, and a cool head. They would engage one another with sharp daggers, with the apparent intention to kill, attacking as if to sink their daggers to the hilt but at the last fraction of a second holding back. The tiniest scratch on the nearly naked body of the opponent meant that the attacker was immediately eliminated. Neither could step outside the area of the design on the floor. The winner would be the one who could pin his opponent’s shoulders to the ground in the very center of the circle. Diego had trained for months, and he had great confidence in his agility and endurance, but the moment the fight began, he realized that he had no real advantage over his antagonist. Julius Caesar was forty, slimmer and shorter than Diego, but very strong. He stood with his feet planted and elbows out, neck rigid, all the muscles of his torso and arms tensed, veins swollen, dagger gleaming in his right hand, but his face was absolutely calm. He was a formidable adversary. At the order to commence, the two began to dance around the circle, seeking the best angle to attack. Diego made the first move, throwing himself forward, but Caesar gave a great leap and, as if he were flying, flipped in the air and came down behind Diego, giving him barely enough time to whirl and crouch down to avoid the weapon slashing toward him. Three or four passes later, Julius Caesar shifted the dagger to his left hand. Diego was ambidextrous himself, but he had never had to fight anyone who was, and for an instant he lost his focus. His opponent seized that moment to aim a kick at Diego’s chest that tumbled him to the ground, but Diego immediately sprang back up and using that momentum thrust his knife toward Caesar’s neck; had it been actual combat he would have sliced the older man’s throat, but Diego’s hand stopped short, as demanded, and he believed he had scored. As judges did not intervene, he assumed there had been no contact, but he had no opportunity to make sure because the man had locked him in a wrestling hold. Each defended himself from the other’s dagger while with legs and free arm he struggled to force his opponent to the ground. Diego managed to break free and again circled, readying himself for a new charge. He felt on fire; he was red in the face and streaming sweat, but his adversary was not even breathing hard and his face was as tranquil as it had been at the beginning of the match. Manuel Escalante’s words came to mind: never fight in anger. Diego drew two deep breaths, giving himself a moment to calm down, though watching Julius Caesar’s every move. As his mind cleared he realized that just as he had not expected an ambidextrous opponent, neither had his antagonist. He shifted the dagger to his other hand with the quickness he had learned for Galileo Tempesta’s magic tricks and attacked before the other man realized what had happened. Caught by surprise, Caesar stepped back, but Diego thrust a foot between his legs and pushed him off balance. As soon as he fell, Diego was on him, pressing with all his strength, his right arm across the man’s chest and his left fending off the struggling man’s dagger. For a long moment they rocked back and forth, muscles taut as steel, eyes burning into the opponent’s, teeth clenched. Diego not only had to hold his man down, he also had to drag him toward the center of the circle, a difficult task given that his opponent was scrapping with all his strength to prevent it. Out of the tail of his eye, Diego calculated the distance, which seemed enormous; never had an arm’s length seemed so long. There was only one way to do it. He rolled over. Now Caesar was on top of him, and he could not contain his grunt of triumph at having gained the advantage. But with superhuman strength Diego rolled once again, and that placed his adversary precisely on the symbol that marked the center of the circle.

  Julius Caesars calm changed to something difficult to read, but it was enough to tell Diego that he had won. With one last effort he pinned his adversary’s shoulders to the ground.

  “Well done,” said Julius Caesar with a smile, dropping his dagger.

  After that, Diego had to take on two more members with his sword. The judges tied one hand behind his back to give the advantage to his opponents, as neither of those men knew as much about fencing as he.

  Manuel Escalante’s training paid off royally, and he was able to vanquish his challengers in fewer than ten minutes. Intellectual challenges followed the physical ones. After demonstrating that he knew the history of La Justicia, he was given difficult problems for which he had to offer original solutions demanding wit, courage, and knowledge. Finally, when he had successfully overcome every obstacle, he was led to an altar. There he saw the symbols he must venerate: a loaf of bread, a scale, a sword, a chalice, and a rose. The bread symbolized the obligation to help the poor; the scale represented the determination to fight for justice; the sword represented courage; the chalice held the elixir of compassion; and the rose reminded the members of the secret society that life is not only sacrifice and labor, it is also beautiful, and for that reason alone must be defended. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Maestro Manuel Escalante, as Diego’s sponsor, placed the medallion around his neck.

  “What will your code name be?” asked the Supreme Defender of the Temple.

  “Zorro,” Diego replied without hesitation.

  He had not been thinking about it, but in that instant he had a clear vision of the red eyes of the fox he had seen during another rite of initiation many years before in the forests of California.

  “Welcome to La Justicia, Zorro,” said the Supreme Defender of the Temple, and all the members chorused his name.

  Diego de la Vega was so euphoric that he had passed the tests, so awed by the solemnity of the sect’s members, and so overwhelmed by the complex steps of the ceremony and the high-flown names of the hierarchy Caballero of the Sun, Templar of the Nile, Maestro of the Cross, Guardian of the Serpent that he could not think clearly. He agreed with the dogma of the sect and felt honored that he had been admitted.

  Only later, as he remembered the details and recounted them to Bernardo, would he judge the rite a little childish. He tried to make fun of himself for having taken it so seriously but his brother didn’t laugh. He simply pointed out how similar the principles of La Justicia were to those of the okahueoi his tribe.

  One month after being accepted by the assembly of La Justicia, Diego surprised his maestro with an outlandish idea: he planned to free a group of hostages. Every attack launched by the guerrillas immediately unleashed a barbaric reprisal from the French. Soldiers would take four times as many hostages as they had lost and hang or shoot them in a public place. This swift response did not dissuade the Spanish it merely fueled their hatred, but it broke the hearts of the unfortunate families trapped in the middle.

  “This time they’ve taken five women, two men, and an eight-year-old boy, maestro, who will pay for the death of two French soldiers. They already killed the parish priest in the doorway of his church. They are holding these prisoners in the fort and are going to shoot them Sunday, at twelve o’clock noon,” Diego explained.

/>   “I know that, Don Diego, I have seen the notices all around the city.”

  Escalante replied.

  “We have to save them, maestro.”

  “To attempt that would be madness. La Ciudadela is impregnable. And in the hypothetical case that you succeeded in your mission, the French would execute two or three times that many hostages, I assure you.”

  “What does La Justicia do in such a situation, maestro?”

  “There are times that one must resign oneself to the inevitable. Many innocents die in a war.”

  “I will remember that.”

  Diego was not inclined to resign himself; among other reasons, Amalia was one of those who had been taken, and he could not desert her.

  Through one of those blunders of fate that her cards had forgotten to warn her about, the Gypsy happened to be in the street at the time of the roundup by the French and was captured along with other persons as innocent as she. When Bernardo brought him the bad news, Diego gave no thought to the obstacles he would face, only the necessity of intervening and the irresistible thrill of adventure.

  “In view of the fact that it is impossible to get inside La Ciudadela, Bernardo, I will have to settle for the palace of Le Chevalier Duchamp. I want to have a private conversation with him. How does that seem? Ah, I see that you don’t like that idea, but I can’t think of another. I know what you are thinking: that this is some kind of schoolboy prank, like that time with the bear when we were boys. No, this is serious there are human lives to consider. We can’t allow them to shoot Amalia. She is our friend. Well, in my case, she’s something more than a friend, but that isn’t the point. Unfortunately, brother mine, I cannot count on La Justicia, so I am going to need your help. It will be dangerous, but not as much as it would appear. Here is my plan…”

  Bernardo threw his hands up in a gesture of surrender and prepared to back his brother, as he had since they were born. Occasionally, when he was especially tired and lonely, he was convinced that it was time to return to California and face the undeniable truth that their childhood was behind them; Diego did show regrettable signs of being an eternal adolescent. Bernardo wondered how they could be so different and yet love each other so much. While for him destiny was a heavy weight on his shoulders, his brother was as carefree as a lark. Amalia, who knew how to read the enigmas of the stars, had explained why they had such different personalities. She said that they were born under two different signs of the Zodiac, although in the same place and during the same week. Diego was a Gemini, and he was a Taurus, and that was what determined their temperaments. Bernardo listened to Diego’s plan with his usual patience, without showing the doubts that troubled him, because deep down he had faith in his brother’s inconceivable good luck. He knew that Diego arrived at his own conclusions, and then did something about them.

  Bernardo carried out his assignment, which was to strike up a friendship with a French soldier and get him to drink until he passed out. He then removed the man’s uniform and donned it himself: a dark blue jacket with a crimson military collar, white breeches and shirt, black leggings and tall headgear. In that uniform he was able to lead a team of horses into the palace gardens without attracting the attention of the night guards. Security around the sumptuous residence of Le Chevalier was somewhat lax because it had never occurred to anyone to attack it. At night, guards were posted with lanterns, but with the tedious passing of the hours their vigilance relaxed. Diego, dressed in his black acrobat costume, with cape and mask, the attire that he called his Zorro disguise, used the dark shadows to approach the building. With a spark of inspiration, he had pasted on a mustache he found in the costume trunk of the circus, a black tracing on his upper lip. The mask covered only the upper part of his face, and he was afraid that Le Chevalier could recognize him; the fine mustache was to distract and confuse him. Diego used his whip to pull himself up onto a balcony on the second floor; once he was inside, it was not difficult to locate the wing of the family’s private quarters, since he had been there several times with Juliana and Isabel. It was about three in the morning, an hour when no servants were around and the guards were nodding at their posts. The palace was decorated not with typical Spanish sobriety but in the French manner, with so much furniture, draperies, plants, and statues that Diego had no difficulty moving through the palace unseen. He went down countless corridors and opened twenty doors before he came to the bedchamber of Le Chevalier, which turned out to be unexpectedly simple for someone of his power and rank. Napoleon’s personal representative was sleeping on a hard soldier’s cot in a nearly bare room lighted by a candelabrum in one corner. Diego knew, from indiscreet comments Agnes Duchamp had made, that her father suffered from insomnia and took opium in order to get some rest. One hour before, his valet had helped him disrobe, brought him a glass of sherry and his opium pipe, and then installed himself in a chair in the corridor, as he always did, in case his master needed him during the night. The valet slept very lightly, but that night he never noticed when someone brushed by him. Once inside Le Chevalier’s room, Diego tried to exercise the mental control shown by the members of La Justicia; his heart was galloping, and his brow was wet. If he were caught in this room, he was as good as dead. Political prisoners were swallowed up in the dungeons of La Ciudadela forever, and better not even think of the stories of torture. Suddenly the thought of his father struck him like a blow. If Diego died, Alejandro de la Vega would never know why, only that his son was caught like a common thief in someone else’s home. He took a minute to calm himself, and when he was sure that his will, his voice, and his hand would not tremble, he went over to the cot where Duchamp was floating in the lethargy of opium. Despite the drug, the Frenchman was immediately awake, but before he could yell, Diego covered his mouth with a gloved hand.

  “Silence, or you will die like a rat, Excellency,” he whispered.

  He touched the tip of his sword to the chest of Le Chevalier, who sat up as far as the sword would allow and nodded that he had understood.

  In a whisper, Diego laid out what he wanted.

  “You give me too much credit. If I order those hostages to be released, the com andante of the plaza will take others tomorrow,” Le Chevalier answered in the same low tone.

  “It would be a pity if that should occur. Your daughter Agnes is very precious, and we do not want to hurt her, but as Your Excellency knows, many innocents die in a war,” said Diego.

  He put his hand to his silk jacket, pulled out the lace handkerchief Bernardo had retrieved, and waved it in the face of Le Chevalier; though he could not see his daughter’s embroidered name in the pale light, her father had no difficulty recognizing it from the unmistakable scent of violets.

  “I suggest that you not summon your guards, Excellency, because at this moment my men are already in your daughter’s room. If anything happens to me, you will not see her alive again. They will leave only when I give the signal,” Diego said in the most amiable tone in the world, sniffing the handkerchief and stuffing it back into his jacket.

  “You may escape with your life tonight,” Le Chevalier growled, “but we will track you down, and then you will regret you were ever born. We know where to find you.”

  “I think not, Excellency. I am not a guerrilla, and neither do I have the honor of being one of your personal enemies.” Diego smiled.

  “Who are you, then?”

  “Shhhh! Do not raise your voice. Remember that Agnes finds herself in good company… My name is Zorro, caballero. At your service.”

  Forced by his captor, the Frenchman went to his desk and scribbled a brief note on his personal stationery, ordering the release of the hostages.

  “I would be grateful if you would add your official seal, Excellency.”

  Diego indicated.

  Grumbling, Le Chevalier did as Diego directed, then called his valet, who came to the doorway. Behind the door, Diego held his sword pointed at the servant, ready to eliminate him at the first suspicious move.

>   “Send a guard to La Ciudadela with this letter,” Le Chevalier ordered.

  “And tell him he must bring it back to me immediately, signed by the officer in charge, so I can be sure I am being obeyed. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, Excellency,” the man replied, and hurried off.

  Diego suggested that Le Chevalier should return to bed and keep warm.

  It was a cold night, and they might have a long wait. He regretted, he added, that it was necessary to impose in this manner, but he would have to stay with him until the signed letter was returned. Did he have a chessboard or some cards with which they could pass the time?

  The Frenchman did not deign to reply. Furious, he slipped beneath the covers, watched by the masked man, who made himself comfortable at the foot of the bed, as if they were intimate friends. They tolerated one another in silence for more than two hours, and just when Diego had begun to fear that something had gone wrong, the valet knocked at the door and handed his master the paper signed by a Captain Fuguet.

  “Hasta la vista, Excellency.” And Zorro’s parting words were, “Please be kind enough to give my greetings to the beautiful Agnes.”

  He felt sure that Le Chevalier believed his threat and would not raise the alarm before he was safely away, but as a precaution he bound and gagged him. With the tip of his sword he traced a large letter Z on the wall, then with a mocking bow bid his host farewell and dropped from the palace wall to the ground. There he found his horse where Bernardo had hidden it, its hooves wrapped in rags to silence sound. He rode away without raising an outcry because no one was in the streets at that hour. The next day soldiers pasted notices on the walls of public buildings that as a sign of goodwill on the part of the authorities, the hostages had been pardoned. At the same time, a secret hunt was begun to find the dastardly sneak who called himself Zorro. The last thing the leaders of the guerrilla forces could understand was this sudden mercy for hostages, and they were so confused that for a week no new attempts against the French were carried out in Catalonia.