by James Blake
And flinched at the explosion of renewed laughter.
GLORIA LITTLE
Gloria kept her promise to write to Sófi, but her letters were infrequent and most of them brief. In the first seventeen years of her marriage she wrote only eleven letters to her sister, the first of them not until almost a year after her wedding, by which time Bruno Tomás was in the army and Sófi had given up hope of ever hearing from her. Sófi wrote back right away, eight pages, front and back. She would write two more letters to Gloria in the eight months before receiving a second one from her. Such would be the pattern of their correspondence for the rest of Gloria’s life—Sófi writing two or three letters for each one she got from her sister, who would sometimes let more than a year go by between writing one letter and writing the next, and at one point three years would pass without her sending Sófi a line. Even when Sofía sent the news of each of her marriages, of the bereaving loss of each husband, of the wonderful births of her children and of the unbearable deaths of them, there was no telling how long it would be before Gloria wrote back. But respond she always sooner or later did, with buoyant good wishes for each marriage, with high joy at the birth of each child, with deep commiseration at the death of every husband, and, in the two most wrenching letters Sófi ever received in her life, with such keening anguish over the deaths of her infant nephews—whom she never even had a chance to see, to hold in her arms—that Sófi was both times reduced to sobs of renewed grief for her children even as she felt a great swell of love for her sister.
Gloria never wrote to her parents and they never wrote to her, but Sófi always relayed regards between the parties, even when, as was always the case, no actual regards had been tendered.
While infrequent and brief, Gloria’s letters to Sofía Reina provided a sketchy chronicle of her life with Louis Little. For the first four of those years, she and Louis—as well as Raquel and Edward Little—lived at La Noria, a hacienda Díaz received as a gift from his home state of Oaxaca, whose governor happened to be his brother, Félix. Having fallen out with Juárez after the defeat of the French and then losing to him in the presidential election, Díaz had resigned his commission and repaired to La Noria, taking with him thirty hand-picked men of his most formidable cavalry company. Juárez may be the president of Mexico, Díaz would say, but in Oaxaca I am the law. Félix Díaz would grin at this and say it was true. I am the governor, yes, he said, but he is my big brother and our mother always told me I must do as my big brother says. Gloria described Félix to Sófi as shorter and darker than Porfirio, but as handsome, though in a more menacing mode. Félix is as full of shadows, Gloria wrote, as the strange mountains of this place.
Edward and Louis—the younger Little’s Spanish having much improved—were part of Díaz’s small cadre of personal guards that accompanied him whenever he left La Noria, which was usually to Mexico City and sometimes for as long as several weeks. Unlike Díaz’s military guards, who were uniformed and always stayed close to him, the Littles dressed like ranch hands with big sombreros to shadow their faces and with ponchos to hide the pair of revolvers each of them wore on his belt, and they worked at a distance from Díaz, melding into the throngs and moving along the fringes of wherever he might be. Díaz himself sometimes would not know where they were but Edward and Louis always knew where he was and never let him out of sight of both of them at the same time.
In private Díaz had told his military guards that as much as he liked the Littles and found their bilingualism useful to him, he preferred his nearest protectors to be fellow Mexicans. The soldiers had smiled to hear it. But the fact of the matter, as Díaz confided to the Littles, was that he did not trust his army guards, and he wanted Edward and Louis in a position to keep an eye on them as well as on everybody else. It is a sad truth about my countrymen, Díaz told the Littles, that not one in ten would hesitate to kill his best friend for two pesos, though you can be sure he would attend the funeral and shed the loudest and most heartfelt tears. It is the natural perfidy of their Indian blood. I tell you, my friends, the Aztecs were conquered not by Cortéz but by the treachery of the other Indians.
Between themselves, the Littles remarked on Díaz’s increasing penchant for speaking of Indians and mixed-bloods as if he himself were not of them. “I expect the day’s coming when Pórfi will be talking about his daddy the Spanish grandee,” Edward Little said to Louis, who grinned along with him.
The four years at La Noria were rife with joyful births and piteous early deaths. Gloria’s son, Luis Charón, was born in the tenth month of her marriage, the only child she would ever have. He had his father’s dark blue eyes and his mother’s ebony hair. She had liked the name Charón on having heard it only once, from a boy calling to a friend in the street. Louis liked it too because of its similarity to his mother’s name of Sharon.
In the fall of the following year Raquel gave birth to a robust son as dusky as herself whom Edward named Zachary Jackson Little. Porfirio and Delfina were the most fecund of the couples, producing two sons and a daughter. But shortly after the birth of the second son both boys were taken by typhoid, and the parents were still grieving for them when the baby girl died in her sleep for no knowable reason.
There came a spring day in their fourth year at La Noria when Díaz and the Littles left their families at the hacienda and went to live in Mexico City in preparation for that summer’s presidential election, in which Díaz once again ran against Juárez. And once again lost. This time Díaz had no doubt that the government had engaged in electoral fraud and that Juárez was absolutely set on perpetuating himself in office for life by any crooked means necessary. In public Díaz said that no law was more vital to Mexico’s future than one to prohibit presidential reelection. In private he said, I won’t lose to that fucking Indian dwarf again. Then went back to La Noria to plan his revolt.
The Littles told their wives to pack for a long trip, that they and the children would be going to the border along with Delfina Díaz to be well removed from danger during the coming trouble. Gloria asked Louis how long they would have to be gone and he said he didn’t know.
On a morning of drizzling rain the women and children boarded a coach guarded by a detachment of Díaz’s cavalry and set off on a journey that was supposed to take ten days but because of bad weather and battered roads took seventeen. The trip was especially hard on Raquel, who was midway through another pregnancy. They were met in Matamoros by friends of Díaz and then ferried across the Río Bravo to Brownsville, where they would be safer still. They took residence in a rented two-story house at the west end of Elizabeth Street.
In January, Raquel delivered John Louis Little, the only American in their party. His complexion caramel as her own but his auburn hair and green eyes would remind Edward Little of his own mother’s. They hired a young maid named Silvania to help with the housework and the care of the children. Díaz’s rebellion was then in its fourth month and faring badly. Much of the support he had counted on had failed to muster, and his forces were no match for Juárez’s federals. Not Delfina nor either Little wife had heard from her husband since the uprising or knew if he was dead or alive. Their fears grew greater with every report from Mexico of another federal victory.
It was not until spring, when a dapper man named Ramos came to them with a note written in Díaz’s recognizable though barely legible hand that they learned all three men were still alive. The note did not say where they were, only that they were in hiding from the Juaristas but would soon begin making their way to the border.
There followed another two months without any word from their husbands before Ramos reappeared early one morning with another terse note from Díaz. It instructed the women to pack up and go with Ramos. He had brought a team and wagon and the women helped him to load it. That afternoon they ferried across to Matamoros and then began heading southwestward. Their husbands, Ramos told them, were awaiting them at a ranch about ten miles away.
Their route took them through an en
campment of a few hundred haggard insurgents where the air was smoky with cookfires and stank of shit. The soldiers smiled at the women, and a few of the officers hailed Ramos in recognition. Then they were on the ranch and rattling past a herd of bony cattle gnawing at the ragged pasture and then a herd of bleating goats thriving on the same spare feed. And then the ranch house came into view.
Their husbands had seen them coming and were waiting on the gallery when Ramos halted the wagon at the front steps. Díaz’s head was bandaged and he had a splint on one hand, Edward carried an arm in a sling, and Louis was hobbling on a cane. Leaving the children to Silvania the maid, the women scrambled down from the wagon and ran up to the porch and threw themselves on the men, who protested the rough treatment of their wounds by such happy affections but could not quit their own grins at the women’s happiness to see them. Through most of that night there were small yelps and sweet moanings from all the bedrooms except the one at the rear of the house, where amid children sleeping like the deaf, Silvania the maid lay awake on her little cot, smiling at the sounds of the happy couplings and feeling so left out she wanted to cry.
Not until after breakfast the next morning did the women find out that Félix Díaz was dead. He had been killed in a little village called Juchitán. Murdered by Oaxacans, Díaz said. His own people. Treacherous bastards. Díaz gave no details, but that night, in the privacy of their bed, Louis told Gloria the story they’d heard from the witness who brought the bad news. Díaz had rewarded the man with a purse of silver for bringing the details—and then shot him in the foot for not having tried to defend Félix, no matter that the man would have been killed too had he tried.
What happened was that Félix had gone to Juchitán to give its men hell for not having joined Porfirio in his fight against Juárez. It was a typically rash thing for Félix to do. Not long before, while he was governor, he’d personally led a troop of militia to Juchitán and hanged five of its residents because of a rumor that they belonged to a local bandit gang. The villagers had all sworn to him the men weren’t bandits but he executed them anyway, saying it was better to be safe than sorry. Then this time Félix went there alone and apparently without a thought to the bitterness he had created on his previous visit. When they saw him ride in alone the Juchitanos could scarcely believe it. They swarmed into the street and pulled him off his horse and punched and clawed him bloody. They gouged out one of his eyes and knocked out his teeth and fried his tongue with a hot iron to put an end to his cursing of them. They sliced off the soles of his feet and paraded him through the village at the end of a rope noosed round his neck, children trotting alongside him and hitting him with sticks and laughing at each other’s mimicry of his seared tongue’s cries of agony. They slung the rope over a tree limb and repeatedly hauled him up off the ground and let him drop and in this way broke both his legs and other bones. As is the way with mobs, the more they did to him the more they wanted to do, became frenzied to do, until they finally lost all control and tore him apart as a dog pack does a hare. Then gathered his remains in a bean sack and buried them.
“Porfirio cried like a child when he heard what they did to Félix,” Louis said. “I’d say that little town’s got a real bad day in its future.”
It did for a fact. Four years hence would come a summer morning when a party of twenty armed riders led by a man the surviving women and children would be able to describe only as having the devil’s own hideous face would descend on Juchitán and drag the mayor from his house without heed of his sworn protests that he had not been the mayor four years ago and they would make him dig up the sack containing Félix’s disjointed and discolored bones and broken skull and then take the mayor to the public square and there behead him and quarter his corpse and hang the five segments of him each from a different tree and then shoot every male who looked above the age of fifteen and shoot too all the livestock and set fire to every hut and cornfield and then ride out again a bare hour after they rode in. Taking with them Félix’s desiccated remnants to receive a respectful interment in a lush Mexico City cemetery.
The three men were not yet fully recovered from their wounds when they got the news of Juárez’s death and Lerdo’s succession to the presidency. Then came word of Lerdo’s proclamation of amnesty to all rebels who would quit the fight. Díaz suspected a ruse. Over the next weeks, he made inquiries via couriers until he was finally convinced Lerdo was sincere. Then notified Lerdo of his acceptance of the amnesty, and the insurrection was formally ended.
The women were very happy to be going home. In the year since they had left La Noria, Gloria had written to Sófi twice—about three months after Raquel gave birth to John Louis and just before they left the Matamoros ranch to go back to La Noria. In the first letter she complained at length about Brownsville as a dirty, smelly town infested with mosquitoes and overrun with the mangiest dogs and least civilized men on earth. The distance between heaven and hell, Gloria wrote, was not so great as that between Brownsville, Texas, and Mexico City. Sófi smiled at her sister’s propensity for dramatic exaggeration. Gloria missed the high country and its fresher, drier air. Brownsville’s humidity pasted your clothes to your skin and your skin to the bedsheets and it bred mold everywhere. Thank God for the trees that made a shady refuge of the rear patio where one could spend an almost pleasant hour or two with a good book. The four months at the Matamoros ranch had been no better. They had gone into town a few times and she found it to be even worse than Brownsville. A town of pelados and rateros and every sort of border trash you could imagine. The gringos liked to joke about its name and said that you didn’t have to be a Moor to get killed there, that the town ought to be called Matatodos. More and more, Gloria felt like she was imprisoned at the very edge of the world, and her fear of suddenly falling off the earth was sometimes so great she could barely resist the impulse to clutch tight to a tree. As you can see, she wrote, this place has abused my sanity no less than my flesh. We are going back home none too soon.
When they got back to La Noria it was not there anymore. Only black ruin and a landscape strewn with the carcasses of stock shot dead and fed on by scavengers and decayed to bone and withered hide. Nothing remained of the buildings but sooted stone walls. The cane fields had been burned and sown with salt for good measure. All the wells were poisoned.
This grim report came to Sófi in Gloria’s first letter since departing Brownsville more than a year before. It was written at a sugar plantation called La Candelaria, in the south of Veracruz state, where Díaz and the Littles were residing as guests of yet another friend of Don Porfirio. Gloria was thankful to be back in Mexico—the borderland around Matamoros was neither truly Mexican nor American, she said, but a bastard offspring of both countries. But she had expected to return to the Oaxacan highlands, not be brought to this steamy plantation with cane fields on every side and nothing but jungle beyond them. She lived for the day Porfirio took over the country and they could again live in Mexico City, a day she believed would not be long in coming. Many mysterious visitors had been coming and going in recent weeks, Porfirio receiving them in private, and it was her feeling that he was planning another revolt and this time taking much greater care in his preparations. When he wasn’t busy with his plans and secret conferences, he was often doting on his newborn son, Deodato, whom everyone called Porfirito. The child was healthy and strong as a colt, and they felt certain that, unlike the unfortunate siblings who preceded him, he would survive infancy.
When Sófi sent Gloria the news of their father’s death, she told her only that he had died of illness, wanting to spare her the awful detail of the rabies. But in her reply of months later, all Gloria said about Samuel Thomas’s passing was that she could not feel very much about the death of someone she had hardly known, who had kept himself a stranger to his own children. Sófi was appalled by her sister’s attitude toward their father and would not hurt their mother with it. She told María Palomina that Gloria had sent condolences. And her mother smiled
and nodded as though she believed it.
The year after Samuel Thomas died, Graciela María was born to Edward and Raquel Little. Edward said he felt himself a lucky man to have a daughter. But later in that same year the region was struck by yet another rage of yellow fever and both Raquel and Graci contracted the disease. The mother died a day after the child.
Edward dug their grave himself in a stifling heat and a haze of mosquitoes, laboring shirtless and hatless, a black bandanna capping his head. The low snifflings of Gloria and Delfina mingled with his huffing and the sound of his spade. Besides the two women and the priest Delfina had summoned, the only ones present were Díaz and Louis Little, and Edward had refused their offers of help with the digging.
None of them knew that Raquel and Graci were not the first beloveds he had buried in this country. None knew he’d had a younger sister and an older brother and when he was sixteen the three had been separated by fell straits in their homeland American South. Two years later during the war with Mexico he had by chance met with both of them again, each in turn, and in both instances had soon after had to bury them. First interring young Maggie in the plains of Tamaulipas, where he discovered her among a wagonload of American whores chasing after General Taylor’s army and where she died of the nameless disease that had been killing her for weeks. And then some months later burying nineteen-year-old John in the sierras north of Mexico City after cutting him down from the tavern rafters from which he’d been hanged by American soldiers who found him out for an escaped San Patricio. Edward had sat beside John’s grave and bawled his desolation into the wilderness and had been certain of nothing on earth save that he could never in his remaining life know a greater sorrow. He had persisted in that belief for almost thirty years, until at work digging these newer graves he finally comprehended that the sole impossibility regarding human sorrow is to arrive at some unsurpassable limit to it. There was no such thing as sorrow that could not be exceeded. With every spadeful of dirt he flung from the deepening grave he raged the more at his stupidity for ever having believed otherwise.