Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  Once upon a time, on the coast of the country known to the indigenes as Woman with the Green Jade Dress, there used to be a sandy place called Tecpan; and here, on 24 June 1518, Capitán Juan de Grijalva landed, soon after which this land was snatched from the Devil, and reclaimed for the Kingdom of God, not without certain necessary tortures and executions. How could the savages in their simplicity have imagined that their primitive rites at Tecpan would be prohibited and forgotten? As for the conquistadors, why shouldn’t their empire of righteousness have endured forever? And Malinche, wasn’t she secure in her lord’s love? (Where she once embraced him in the Casa de Cortés, there grows a palm tree’s snake-roots whose scales are chain mail.) The matador in blue and gold, not yet realizing that he is ready for the grave, feels kindred confidence; likewise the ancient mestiza who trusts that her tomb-robbed, staring jade figurine with the jade lizard-woman in his lap will find a buyer, right here on Avenida Díaz Mirón, maybe even today, after which she will get abundant food, perhaps even meat. And won’t my sweetheart cherish me until life ends?

  Just as in the old records a word will be broken up wherever the page ends, after the style of a Roman inscription or a child’s letter, so it is with our loves and lives, everywhere we find ourselves, but most of all in Veracruz, the cemetery of the world.

  TWO KINGS IN ZIÑOGAVA

  But what does the social order do for geniuses and passionate characters, burning for gold and pleasure, who want eagerly to devour their allotted span? They will spend their lives in prison and end them in a torture chamber.

  Jan Potocki, ca. 1812

  1

  When the mulatto gravedigger Salvador González Rodríguez rebelled against our Mother Church, and martyred a priest by means of a shovel-edge, he was, of course, brought to trial with punctilious regard for the formalities, then gibbeted in chains, following which his head was exposed as a warning to evildoers. One question remained to annoy the authorities: What should they do with the murderer’s younger brother Agustín? He was thirteen—an age sufficient for culpability, should any act be proved against him, although the case did not appear that way, since the innkeeper Jaime Esposito, being duly sworn, testified that on the morning of the crime this curlyhaired boy, who now sat between two soldiers, bowing his head and swallowing saliva, had been peddling sugarcane in a doorway across the street from his establishment; so that, as the procurador indeed proposed, there might exist grounds for admitting him to the house of mercy lately established for poor beggars here in Veracruz, for he was a bona fide orphan, his father having met the black vomit some three years after his mother got raped to death by French pirates. Next to be summoned forward was the peanut vendor’s slave Herlinda Encinas, a fullblooded Congolese damsel of about nineteen years of age who appeared so deliciously ebony in her pure white dress that the procurador, a tolerant man whose work had educated him about crimes of venery, winkingly referred to her as a fly in milk. She must have thought this court like unto a Mass! Her master, a free negro named Melchor Marín, aged fifty-seven, and a fair Christian, who took oath that he had been baptized, as seemed likely since he could say his Paternoster without great trouble, evidently feared to lose her services should she be convicted of anything, for he kept thanking God for this diligent chattel, without whose laughing, winning manners people would surely desert his stand, which from what he told the court was generally unfolded just outside the Baluarte, that square transshipment fort, already old, whose cannons pointed outwards at palm trees; moreover, the aforesaid Marín depended on Herlinda to feed and dress his children, his wife unfortunately being so infirm as to be good for nothing; indeed she longed for the hour of her death—at which inessential and certainly impious juncture the judge, Doctor de los Ríos, closed up the sluices of that old man’s mouth, and commanded the aforesaid Herlinda to speak, in order to inform the court as to whether she had in fact been—in the words of the three witnesses Cristóbal Pérez, free mulatto, Neyda Duarte, black slave, and Verdugo Acosta, free mulatto—a former paramour of the late detested evildoer Salvador González Rodríguez; to which the fly in milk immediately confessed, with more demureness than shame. Aware (to his sorrow, be it said) that the people’s turpitude throughout this New Spain of ours, and most certainly here in Veracruz, had grown so ubiquitous that such errors as yonder benighted woman’s fornications must be overlooked, at least for today, in the interest of rooting out the more dangerous offenses of bigamy, sacrilege, blasphemy, sedition, witchcraft, Judaism, treason and murder, Doctor de los Ríos, after admonishing the slave wench, who bit her lip and hung her head, satisfied himself by asking whether there had been any engagement or understanding between her and the detested Salvador, at which she shook her head, although whether in negation or confusion none could tell. Therefore, Doctor de los Ríos repeated his question, in a grimmer tone of voice. It came out that the detested Salvador had sworn himself to marry the girl, and even (or so he had told her) applied to the archdiocese for forgiveness of their illicit relations, by requesting a formal dispensation from his victim, the sainted Fray de Castro, who might for all anyone knew have been struck down for refusing to provide it. Doctor de los Ríos now interrogated Herlinda as to why she had desired to wed this evildoer, to which she replied, not without sense, that since they had already fornicated, it seemed best to repair their sin by entering into the sacramental state. When the question arose of whether she had submitted to intercourse before or after receiving a promise of marriage, the girl could utter no intelligible answer. Doctor de los Ríos accordingly demanded to know whether she had or had not been a virgin prior to lying with the detested Salvador, to which she abashedly replied that she had already granted carnal knowledge of her person to four men.— And had she confessed these sins?— Oh, yes, she said—to Fray de Castro, who was now in no position to contradict her.— Calling upon the aforesaid Melchor Marín to stand, which he tremulously did, Doctor de los Ríos reminded him of his responsibility toward this negro woman as her owner and therefore in a sense her father. Then the aforesaid Melchor Marín did lower his head, after the fashion of his own negress, and asseverate and say that to his certain knowledge, Herlinda and the detested Salvador used to sleep together in one bed, or more precisely on the dirt floor, which he, the said Melchor, and his spouse Ofelia both considered scandalous, not to mention a sad reflection upon our distance from Jesus Christ; but since the detested Salvador had often helped Herlinda by carrying great sacks of peanuts upon his shoulders, as if he were her loving husband (although whether those two had indeed betrothed themselves to each other the said Melchor could not swear; they had kept him in darkness, he tremulously said, because they must have feared that he, Herlinda’s owner, might resent their expectation of future enjoyment of any so-called conjugal rights at the very times when he or his children had need of her), and since the selfsame detested Salvador visited her either at home or on the street whenever his victim the sainted Fray de Castro permitted, Melchor and Ofelia had seen reason to hope and pray that those two would in time be married by the hand of a cleric—all of which was corroborated by the aforesaid Herlinda Encinas, who, it quickly came out, was a blithe and accomplished tattler, at least so long as the investigation appeared to concern someone other than herself. When commanded to explain why in her view the murder had occurred, she freely informed the court that in her presence the detested Salvador had complained with unseemly resentment about certain floggings regularly administered for his own good. Calling upon her to look into his eyes, Doctor de los Ríos now required and demanded to know without equivocation whether the concubinage in which she had so disgustingly engaged with the detested Salvador ever caused the latter to be delinquent in his duties to his employer, to which in a feeble voice she replied that it had not. Next, Doctor de los Ríos asked her owner the same question. Gripping the railing, the old black man said that to the best of his information the late Fray de Castro had considered Herlinda a good influence upon the detested Salv
ador, who was known to be moody and even turbulent, and that he might very well have preferred to see those two persons married, not that he, Melchor, had ever raised this issue with the Father, for fear of encouraging the matter to go forward.— That’s as may be, said Doctor de los Ríos, but can you deny that the visits of your slave woman’s paramour benefited your business at the diocese’s expense? From what I’ve gathered, in the times when he was hauling peanut-bags to her, she wasn’t exactly digging graves for him!—at which the court chamber blossomed with smiles and titters, and the old man staggered.— Now then, Herlinda, continued the judge, not displeased with the success of his jest, have you fully discharged your conscience here before me? I call on you now, in the presence of God, Who is most certainly listening, to give oath, for the sake of justice and in the interest of your own soul, to state, speak fully, and say whether you felt inconvenienced by the late Fray de Castro’s legitimate demands upon your detested paramour, whose memory I curse with every word of execration, and accordingly conspired with him to commit this damnable crime—at which the black woman, sobbing loudly, as if she had just now come to comprehend her peril, and would never again be permitted to see the cathedral’s cupola-faces now almost the color of the sweetly humid air, nor the palms growing invisibly, silently and vainly away from earth, nor those two fat ladies with the baskets of biscuits and crackers on their shoulders (one of whom, Neyda Duarte, had testified against her), reiterated, as was indeed known to be the case, that upon perceiving the murderer approach her in the market, marked, as if with the brand of Cain, with red eyes and red hands, she had screamed and fled him, as a result of which the baser sort of negroes and Indians had stolen nearly two pesos’ worth of peanuts; moreover, her owner, the aforesaid Melchor Marín, had already sworn by the Mother of God that this girl was innocent, which Doctor de los Ríos himself believed; but there are times when justice finds it politic to put on a frowning face. Now that she had been reduced to the proper state, one would hope that in order to spare herself she would denounce any error or failing of the aforesaid Agustín González Rodríguez, who, since he remained so far short of his twenty-fifth year, when a boy becomes a man, was compassionately represented by the procurador, whose name was Ángel Enríquez and who felt considerably less interested in him than in that aforesaid fly in milk with the dark brown eyes and the small breasts; if you have ever seen some pretty young negro penitent standing barefoot in the Inquisition’s chapel, shivering with dread, naked to the waist, bowing until her hair sweeps the flagstones, then setting off her breasts to still better advantage when she raises high the tall green taper of contrition, you will comprehend the daydreams of Ángel Enríquez, whose wife was a long-suffering old hag from Cádiz. Now, regarding this Agustín who so perplexed the court in that humid hour (the birds nearly asleep in the late-morning sun), nothing could be proved, and Herlinda’s owner, that aforesaid tottering Melchor Marín, testified on his behalf; but poor Doctor de los Ríos, who thanks to his profession could never get the reek of moral latrines out of his nose, suspected that the old negro might feel beholden to his slave, either (as he had already stated) because he survived upon her labor, or because he enjoyed occasional carnal connection with her, or both; here then was no unprejudiced witness. For this reason Doctor de los Ríos had been more swayed by the innkeeper Jaime Esposito, who like Ángel Enríquez’s wife happened to be of pure Spanish stock and who considered Agustín to be neither more nor less than a nuisance—in other words, possessed no interest in him. So far as Señor Esposito could make out, there was no great evil in the boy, whom he considered sullenly abject rather than malicious. Doctor de los Ríos had once found occasion to investigate the said Señor’s inn, which some busybody suspected of being a brothel, but nothing could be proved, although illicit intercourse had certainly taken place there. Señor Esposito’s noble indifference to the affairs of others, except insofar as they affected his revenues, rendered him the perfect witness, and the tribunal had already sent him home. Doctor de los Ríos now inquired of the negress Herlinda how often the boy Agustín had been present when they trysted, to which she replied that her owner disliked to see him, since children of his age would rather eat than work. From this answer it was apparent that Agustín had in fact come around in the master’s absence, doubtless to stuff his mouth with stolen peanuts; therefore the judge pursued the matter, demanding to know whether the late detested Salvador’s ungodly spite and resentment ever expressed itself to Agustín in the slave girl’s presence, to which she answered (for which he could not fault her, knowing the inferior capacity of these negroes for reason) that she could not remember. So the boy was called to stand, which he did, and commanded to state his opinion of his brother. He seemed amazed and ignorant concerning what he ought to say. Doctor de los Ríos asked whether he comprehended that his brother was a murderer. The boy said yes. He was dark, dirty and ill-favored. Furthermore, he stank like someone who has been in bad places. Although he appeared small, especially in comparison to his brother, whose toes had nearly touched the ground when they hanged him, he projected a woeful skulking look, in the manner of those half-starved dogs which feed on refuse in the streets, and grow up to be vicious. The priests said there must be bad blood in him. Upon demand he produced his papel proving church attendance. Gently the procurador inquired whether he was a Christian, to which this Agustín replied that no one had ever taught him anything. After due thought, Doctor de los Ríos now released the aforesaid Herlinda Encinas, upon whom any exhortations to chastity would presumably be wasted unless accompanied by flogging and disgrace, back into the corridor between two soldiers, and out into the wide courtyard whose walls were Naples yellow and whose square planters contained narrow-trunked wide-branched almond trees, and back into the sweetness of Veracruz, where until she died or got sold she would presumably continue her close friendship with that metal cage with sacks of peanuts and sometimes even mangoes hanging from it. Next, after further questioning, together with a reminder of the penalty for adultery, and a word of helpful advice on managing one’s dependents (for instance, one could borrow money, if need be, to purchase a sturdy young negro fit to keep one’s negress from wandering) he dismissed the negress’s owner, Melchor Marín, who crept gratefully back to his sins. Finally he rang his tiny bell, summoning the guards, who returned the boy Agustín to the secret underground cells. Everyone agreed that nothing could be indicted against him, but no one approved of his manner. In a bored voice the procurador proposed placing him in that new house of mercy for unfortunates, but when Doctor de los Ríos drew attention to the boy’s apparent potential for corrupting the souls of others, no one dissented. Within the week they set him at liberty, but being homeless and without a trade, he haunted the house of Melchor Marín until the latter drove him away definitively, then fell into thievery. Although they exhorted him in reasoned kindness, and punished him with only twenty stripes, in consideration of his youth, for their charity they got requited with sorrow—a tale all too frequently heard here in Veracruz, where sins have become as commonplace as negroes in shackles. It was the lacemaker’s wife who saw this Agustín interring some bundle in the dungheap between her house and the cemetery wall; thus they recovered Señor Castellano’s miniature aventurine cask, which corresponded in important particulars to the description given by its outraged owner, the tap being decorated with blue enamel and two pretty chains. Señor Castellano swore that he had paid twenty pesos for it, although the procurador opined that its worth was closer to eighteen. Brought into the light, Agustín readily admitted his guilt—forthrightness being the only good remaining in him. When they inquired how he had it in him to expose his evil doings, he replied that his brother had taught him that a true man behaves so. He was now fourteen. Sorrowing over his misdeeds, and fearing that he had become of disobedient or malevolent character, they flogged him with fifty crimson stripes—a seemly and edifying entertainment for our common people, who are easily tempted into comparable offenses—then sent
him to San Juan de Ulúa for a term of nine years.

  2

  Looking down from the yellowing ramparts into the shallow water, which stinks of algae and sewage, one can see the bottom, and sometimes spy the outlines of preying sharks, who guard this hateful prison-island at no expense to the Crown, excepting that incidental loss of labor when a local fisherman loses a leg or worse. They patrol the harbor like bluish-grey shadows. Never mind that the shore lies no great distance away! At church I learned that their voracious grins are set around their snouts for the express benefit of the King of Spain and his laws. All the same, the authorities of Veracruz keep other sentinels, whose swords and guns terrify the prisoners as effectively as sharks’ teeth. It was these who marched that batch of chained prisoners up the steep steps from the landing-place and across the broad low terrace of coral-stone blocks where everything was asymmetrical. The boy looked up. He saw a many-slitted phallic guard tower. The column continued to move, and so he stumbled. A soldier split open his back with two blows of the whip.

  Before the commandant’s palace, which was the one square building in that considerable courtyard whose balconies shielded themselves with heavy wooden railings carved out in leaf-shapes and whose windows were latticed with drooping iron ribs, the criminals now got registered and divided up like scoops of grease flicked into so many bubbling pots, the pots being the cells. Wondering whether he might pass the remainder of his life without light, Agustín dared to look up a second time, and saw someone high above him, wearing shiny boots and a scarlet-velveted brigandine with the rivets glittering all down his chest. He wondered how he would feel to become this man, who appeared nearly as small as a seagull on the cathedral’s roof, or at least to look down from this parapet and watch the tiny figures marching through the courtyard. Before he had thought this for very long, they kicked and flogged him, in his string of six, down a long tunnel of arches, whose floor was round stones, and across the stone bridge over the brownish-green water to the polygon-island of huge dank-domed cells, where he left the light indeed. The chamber where they intended him to pass his next nine years had two narrow slits for windows, up high so that a man could not put his face to them. The interior resembled a crocodile’s toothy mouth, for it bore yellow-white stalactites and stalagmites of salt. Stinking rotting half-toothless men lay one upon the other, wheezing, spitting and cursing. The ones who could now sat up, scanning him as thoroughly as our priests will a marriage witness. That was how he was studied and then accepted by his new friend Rodrigo de la Concepción, octaroon, who had already served three years of an eighteen-year term for stealing an infantryman’s helmet. Soon they became very easy together, for in San Juan de Ulúa, as in any prison, life grows jollier and safer for wretches who double up to share secrets. For much the same reason that in Veracruz the birds flock more wildly at twilight than at noon, so in San Juan de Ulúa the convicts commence to crawl all over one another the moment that the sun descends beneath the sea. Accordingly, at dusk Rodrigo got to business. The fingers of his hand, now laid upon the boy’s belly, were as elegant as a crow’s black talons, shining as softly as if they were gloved in patent leather. He liked Agustín even better upon learning that he was a murderer’s brother; thus it came out that in addition to the affair of the infantryman’s helmet, Rodrigo deserved the credit of fitting his hands around a certain woman’s throat, for a cause that any man of style could understand: