Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  Rodrigo used to say—

  He’s been broiling nicely ever since your brother did for him. Yes, I’m the Mulata de Córdoba, and all this time have been waiting on purpose to rescue you.

  Just as far-off white roofs glow orange and red when the birds of Veracruz fly loud and crazy at the afternoon’s end, so the distant whorls of his heart began to illuminate themselves with hope.

  Agustín asked her: How can I become happy? What should I wish for? I’m afraid of becoming more evil than I already am.

  Good or evil has no bearing on happiness, said La Mulata. If happiness is all you want, I believe I can help you.

  And gratefully he accepted.

  She finished drawing her ship of chalk, then offered him her hand. They embarked in a twinkling, two-dimensionally, rushing between walls and stones like cockroaches, with clay skulls in their wake as they sailed through the night-black dirt, until they came back out into the light of Veracruz, sailing through rows of young banana trees with the hands of yellow fruit already reaching down, and double-tailed fishes leaping, and ghosts all around them like nosing, trotting dogs.

  La Mulata transformed herself into his dead brother’s sweetheart Herlinda, who was as black and feline as a jaguar and whom alone of all women he loved. Oh, how happy he was! And they dwelled in a white house with a tiny palm in the courtyard, just downwind from the slaughterhouse, living in easy concubinage, with a protective mist around their doings so that the Inquisitors could not arrest them.

  At times he feared that he might come to hate her as much as he had María Platina, but whenever he began to feel resentment she would speak to him of Salvador, and how noble he had been. So Agustín for a time remained as bright-eyed and bold as a crow. Perhaps he could purify himself. The question of who La Mulata actually was, whether she ought to be rated true or false, sometimes distressed his understanding, but then he would remind himself that he had never comprehended his brother, either. They lived together through lovely mornings of orange juice and prickly pear juice, with many vultures to keep them company on the sandy streets. They shared a pillow when the moon took on a tarnished gold like the handguard of an old soldier’s saber, and tall-masted ships went out sailing hard past San Juan de Ulúa, avid for the ebbing tide. They ate peanuts together from a blue dish which resembled a two-headed dove. For a marriage portion their father below gave them gold bars like glittering greenish-yellow cigarillos, golden necklace-beads with eagle heads and serpent heads, and turtleheaded golden beads; so presently Agustín nearly began to believe in happiness’s staying power. Everyone in Veracruz repelled him; they were all dwellers in the dark and mold of prison; but he persevered, striving not to be offended by life, and whenever they promenaded on the beach the cavalry made way for them. La Mulata would always smile and take Agustín’s hand when he gazed across the harbor at San Juan de Ulúa. Although he had told her never to touch him without permission, this one lapse he tolerated. Come the trade fairs, when the merchants set up their tents in the sand and offered leather, sugar, silver and hardtack, La Mulata liked to look, for people and personalities were her meat, whereas Agustín, who owned more riches than he could digest, stood glaring and fanning himself. He would gladly have built a sugar concern, or slain more monsters for the True Faith; he would fulfill himself; that was as likely as getting shipwrecked in a north wind.

  At home they kept a silver mirror, but he avoided looking into it, for his wooden face saddened him. At least his wife never got impatient with him. (How could she? They had a bargain.) Soon she had given him four children, who all feared his temper, and they even had a carriage and slaves.

  A Spaniard in a wide lace collar held two naked Indian children upside down by their ankles, one child in each hand, so that his dogs could rip them to death, and more golden beads fell out of their intestines; then the cathedral bells called everyone to Mass. A cotton plantation fell into Agustín’s hands, after which he set some negroes to curing tobacco. He arranged to have frequent carnal access to the black proprietress of a certain shop which sold bread and wine. So you can see that he had a good life, but he could never imagine his future; and presently, out of boredom, he began to quarrel with La Mulata. One night, seeking to entertain her, he recited the three boisterous jokes which the flying head had taught him in Ziñogava, but she said: Everybody in hell has heard those.— Insulted, he struck her.

  At once he entered into the time when our Lord will thresh out the grain. La Mulata, the slaves and the children all disappeared, in separate stink-puffs, and there he was, back in the prison of hell, with that gigantic wall-face grinning and winking like the parish priest who rapes his female penitents.— You see, said Satan, happiness was never what you wanted. Your brother gave it to you in Ziñogava, and you destroyed it. I restored it to you to prove that it’s no good to you. What next?

  Lord, I never knew what to wish for.

  Speak up now.

  Lord, may it please you, I’d like to do evil with my brother, until we’re punished.

  A noble plan, said the Devil. Now that it’s too late, I’ll tell you what you should have asked for.

  Yes, Lord?

  Grief.

  The mirrorlike sword of Ziñogava rushed back into his hand. Back out of the great mouth flew the grinning head, which seemed perhaps more desiccated or even singed than before, and it said: Congratulations, brother. Now we can both be good.

  Brother, asked Agustín, am I alive or dead?

  Don’t think too much. Now let’s go pay back our old friends!

  13

  Although Doctor de los Ríos was served by proficient torturers, neither Church nor Crown had ever thought fit to protect him against the visit of a decapitated head, and so he now got to find out whether Paradise is truly as wide and flat as Extremadura, where so many conquistadors hail from.

  As for the real Herlinda, by now she had found herself a new amor, the lightskinned free mulatto Gaspar de la Cruz, who under pretense of carrying sacks of sugar smuggled French textiles from the port up as far as Xalapa, where he sold them at a respectable rate of return, although too much of his profits went for bribes and fees, in obedience to that fine Mexican custom called engordar el cochino, to fatten the pig. Herlinda was tired of being Melchor Marín’s slave, for his breath stank, his wife was incontinent, and he never left her alone at night. Her very compliance bore sure relevance to his retreat from that half-promise, uttered so long ago, of conditional manumission for her, someday, if she continued to be his good girl. Now that she had gotten into the habit, she sometimes serviced the master’s friends in exchange for a piece of leather or a fine roast fish. Truth to tell, Salvador González Rodríguez was the only man she had felt much for, but Herlinda, who could not hope to be considered a fly in milk for many years longer, faked affection in order to burnish her so-called future; indeed, she branched out to friends of friends, none of whom had yet infected her untreatably. Meanwhile, although Doctor de los Ríos once seemed to enjoy her looks, she had already appeared before him a second time, when he warned her, as she knew all too well, that the punishment of concubinage is to be led through the street on a donkey, with the neighbors jeering and threatening, and the usual rope of criminality around one’s neck, and then to be stripped to the waist beneath the official pillar and there, in the stink of malefactors’ decapitated heads, to be treated to a hearty hundred lashes. So Gaspar chivalrously proposed to steal the girl from Señor Marín and take her over byroads to Mexico City, where no one would know them if they changed their names. But first he wanted to get a good lot of Lyonnaise cloth, because from what he had heard they could make double or triple once they reached the capital. He was a dashing sort, who liked to wear a mushroom-shaped cap in imitation of the conquistadors. Herlinda, who had the most to lose, pointed out that it was a long way to go; for all they knew, they might be called upon to fatten dozens of pigs, and she had no ambition to be poor.
(In fact, although she trusted her paramour well enough, in her girdle she had hidden five silver pesos to pay off a padrino who might gain pardon from her master if she chose to come back, because who can predict which surprises may come flying out of the night air?) Gaspar told her to leave it all to him. Perhaps she shouldn’t have listened, but in truth she had to do so much for the Maríns that it felt very nice to be taken care of for once. Moreover, her children had recently been sold, which was convenient.

  While they perfected their plans, something came flying through the evening sky. At first she thought it was a bat. Then it drew closer. Her face turned as yellow as a penitent’s frock. Before it killed her, it sang:

  Sad is my heart, negrita;

  I know not why—

  sad for an illusion,

  sad for what I dreamed.

  Agustín said to himself: Salvador is evil, and I am his knight who is unclean in his heart.— And this brought him a kind of comfort, to know where the truth lay. With his Amazonian sword he swiped off Gaspar’s head. Then the two kings went rushing through the city like a plague-breeze, lopping heads and splitting guts all night.

  What about the witnesses who had served the authorities against the two brothers? First Herlinda’s master and mistress, and then the innkeeper Jaime Esposito (whose greatest pride was that he was the bastard descendant of Don Diego Fernández de Córdova), all became medicine for the thirsty head. Of these, Señor Marín perished the most abjectly. Agustín remembered watching him beat Salvador, in the days when Salvador was more than a head; Agustín would begin to pray silently as soon as his brother, having received the command, knelt down on the floor and clasped his hands while the master cudgeled his skull; and Herlinda, her earbobs sparkling crazily, would be kneeling beside him, grimacing and weeping, praying for mercy on her lover’s account, until she irritated the master sufficiently to receive a whack or two on the forehead.

  Neyda Duarte, who had testified against Herlinda, was already dead from the white sickness, so the two brothers could not punish her, at least not in this world. Infuriated, the head went rushing over the city, breathing out hell-breath, and by dawn people had begun to die of yellow fever. The next day Agustín began to vomit. The head flew sweetly round and round his face, to keep the flies off. When he expired, the head sank back down underground. Demons marched up like a file of Jaguar Soldiers, and seized them both to be burned forever. And if you ever come to Veracruz, put your ear to the grass outside the irregular septagonal parapet of the Baluarte de Santiago, and among the other screams coming up from hell (which is not far underground), you may hear Agustín weeping endlessly over his failure to live, while the head goes on laughing.

  14

  I myself have never seen a ghost, let alone a flying head, so I cannot swear to you that every detail of this story is true. But when I visited San Juan de Ulúa, which the Indians used to call Chalchiuhcuecan, a guard with the crossed anchors of the Navy on his cap assured me: If you come here at night expecting to see a ghost, you definitely will.— He himself once saw a man in a raincoat supposedly standing guard, but all the guards were inside, so what could that have been but a ghost? On another occasion he was pissing and saw a dark faceless figure glide by. And so there you have it, straight from a uniformed member of the Armada de Mexico.

  THE WHITE-ARMED LADY

  For the white-armed lady he waited long.

  “Volundarkvitha,” ca. 9th cent.

  1

  Inside the tiny white house, he sat at the head of the table, listening to the seagulls, his stare fettered from below by the white lace tablecloth, whose flower-whorled spiderweb knew how to trap his eyes, and occluded by the low-hanging lamp, whose candle never guttered within that scalloped breast of glass. Unblinkingly he peered through the windows curtained with white lace, and across the narrow lane at the other white houses. Again it began to rain. Silver drops clung to the windows.

  He could hear somebody cutting wood.

  In nearly every window of each of the other white houses he could see a potted plant beneath the white curtains. All of the pots were white. One window presented a narrow-necked green vase and a green watering can. He liked that window the best without knowing why.

  Up the street came a man, who stopped, shoved his hands in the pockets of his heavy coat, and gazed right into the window. The one at the table wondered how deeply he could see, and when he would go away.

  The man went away.

  There was a white-haired old woman in white, bent over her walking stick, who used to pass by twice each day, first going left, then going right. She never raised her head. He grew fond of her, and then one morning she passed to the left and never returned again.

  Closing his eyes, he heard rain splashing on the cobblestones. He looked up. Now the other white houses were going grey; the windy day was fading.

  At night the rain prickled and pulsed down on the roofs of those little white houses, spattering loudly on the cobblestones, shining on the windows between the greenish-white curtains; now it sounded like marbles on the roof, and over the table the lamp began to twitch. The trees shone almost day-green in the streetlights; the windows of the other white houses were black. He sat at the table staring.

  2

  At the center of the tablecloth’s lace spiderweb lived the white spider named Hungry, who also waited; whenever the man tired and lowered his head, or found himself allured by one of the lovely white links of spider-chain, then, no matter how fiercely he struggled, bit by bit Hungry pulled his gaze inward. To a heartless stranger their contest might have appeared playful, for the man’s head spiralled round and round. When Hungry had finally dragged him to the center, so that he must look upon his enemy, the battle was done; and the great spider, which had disguised itself as a many-whorled lace flower, rose up, leaped upon the man’s face, and sucked all the life out of his eyes. Hungry was greedy, but not impatient, so it took longer than one might imagine before the last desiccated sinew of hand or foot had been reeled in through the eyesockets of the miserable skeleton that sat there. Even then, Hungry hesitated to go away, for his victim’s brain endured within. But against the skull’s forehead a magic jewel had been strapped—the gift of the woman called White Arms. Hungry could drink; any flesh he could suck until it liquefied, and retracted into his star-shaped mouth; and he could sting, but he could not bite, and so the jewel and the leather circlet which held it, being grooved into the bone itself, remained impervious to him. Thus after awhile Hungry grew sleepy, returned to the center of the tablecloth, and closed his red eyes. Then, slowly and wearily, stalks of nerve, meat and vein began to grow down from the man’s brain, until he was whole again. As soon as he was able, he jerked his head up from the tablecloth. Hungry still slept, and therefore could not keep him. Because his heart regenerated last, the man was spared from his anguish until he sat upright. But even when he could not feel, he remained condemned to think. He thought considerably about Hungry, as one might imagine; and doubtless Hungry thought about him. They were neighbors, like those two women whom every day he saw chatting with a white picket fence between them.

  3

  A redhaired woman opened the white picket-gate, reached up, dreamily caressed a leaf from the maple at the side of her house, strode into her back garden where he could no longer see her, then presently emerged, lowering her head against the wind as she unlatched her picket-gate. Suddenly she raised her head and peeped into his window, the instant enduring more than long enough for him to read the horror on her face. To her, he was a skeleton hedged with fire. She strode quickly away, down the cobblestoned lane toward the harbor and the seagulls which he could never see. He owned one window at the lefthand edge of his vision, whose curtain’s lace flowers and diamonds dulled down the white light. Waiting, sitting, he hoped that in the instant of framing herself there she would look back at him, even in horror. She did not, and never returned home.

 
Humiliated, he told himself: I hate the others who are not as I.

  4

  Sitting in the darkness, the hanging lamp now resembling a polished tuber or a skull in chains, he inhaled the ancient smell of the house, although his chest never moved, and he gazed out through the windows into the sloping, streetlit lane called Bergsmauet, whose cobblestones he could see only by day and only through the righthand window, his room leaking darkness through the triangular wounds between curtains; there the greenish light held its own. He studied the faint shining of streetlight and moonlight on the tablecloth. Just inward of the wave-patterned edge ran a zone of doubled columns adorned with berries and connected to each other by many thin cross-lacings; then came the girdle of wheel-flowers beyond which it was not safe to look; when he tired, and his head began to sink, he counted the horizontal stitches between the double columns; there were sixteen, and when he obtained a different number he knew that he was worn out, and then Hungry might get him. Heartsick, he sat among pallid self-assertions of the unlit candles, the lampshade, the well-mated borders of old prints in their dark frames on the wall, and the scaly, glistening anomaly of the one lace curtain which received the most streetlight; he awaited his lady with the white arms.