by James Blake
In the kitchen of the casa grande, Josefina hobbles about on her cane, alternately scolding the scouring technique of the young maid laboring on that morning’s breakfast cookware and harrying a boy in the adjoining patio who is charged with keeping the water hot in a pair of large bathing tubs. The scrub maid is a pretty seventeen-year-old named Concha who was promoted to the kitchen from the laundry only days earlier.
Marina Colmillo tends the fire in the stove, then consults the small clock on the wall and extracts two handfuls of sugar lumps from a tin container and places them on the end of the wall counter in readiness for John Roger. It is his habit to go to the stable every morning and give the sugar to his horses. She then sets to work at the center counter, carving raw chickens for a stew. Most of the household will be dining on the fiesta’s offerings, but the twins will be here today and their favorite meal is her chicken-and-chiles stew and so she will have it ready for them. It has been two months since she last saw them, and she cannot stop smiling in her eagerness.
John Roger appears in the doorway between kitchen and dining room. He wears an immaculate white suit, one sleeve folded and pinned by the upstairs maid who also knots his ties. In the ten months since the loss of his grandson he looks to have aged a decade, and the suit hangs loose on his gaunt frame. His nose webbed with red veins. His hair and short beard the color of ash. His eyes dark pouched.
“Todavía no han llegado?” he says.
Not yet, Josefina says. But they will be here any minute.
They promised Doña Victoria they would be here, John Roger says. And feels foolish for saying it. For whining like a petulant child.
Don’t worry, Don Juan, Josefina says, they wouldn’t disappoint their little nephew. Their baths are hot and their suits are ready. It won’t take them a minute to clean up and be dressed.
Tell them I want them in that church, I don’t care how late they are. You understand?
She blinks at his peremptory tone. “Sí, señor, a sus ordenes. Le entiendo perfectamente.”
He is familiar with her trick of formal address and blank look whenever she takes offense at his tone. Coming from her, such formality has always suggested more of impertinence than respect. He feels his vexation on his face and is the more irritated for letting the crone see she has succeeded in riling him.
In case I don’t see them before the mass, John Roger says, I want you to tell them to see me afterwards. Immediately afterwards. In my office.
“Muy bien, señor.”
I mean it, madam. He points a finger at her. Be very sure you tell them what I said.
“Claro que sí, señor.” And adds that she is sure they will be along any minute now, but if they should be late it will be for reasons that could not be helped.
He turns and goes. Yet once again irked by her defense of them, whom she has ever and always defended against him in every case of contention, large or small, however right he might be, however wrong they. He has already left the house before Marina notices the sugar lumps still on the counter.
He had lain awake through most of the night, reviewing the decision of which he intended to apprise the three of them today. The twins would resume their monthly visits as before, and during those visits they and John Samuel would sit to dinner with the rest of the family. And if, as before, they couldn’t do it except by not saying a word to each other or even looking at each other, fine, very well, so be it. But they were going to do it for as long as he, their father, was still alive. He had by Jesus had enough of this rift. Whoever of them could not agree to the terms could leave Buenaventura—yes, leave! The family could hardly be more fractured for the departure of one or two of them than it was at present. But . . . whoever chose to leave would surrender his inheritance. That should get their attention. They all knew John Samuel would by dint of primogeniture inherit Buenaventura, but, as they would be informed today, his inheritance would not include that portion of the estate from just below the rapids all the way to the coast. He would bequeath that region to the twins. The deed to it had already been drawn and signed and needed only registration to become official. He would within the week submit it to his Veracruz legal firm, together with his will, specifying that the deed be officially registered immediately upon his death. But he wasn’t dead yet, and a will could easily enough be changed, an unregistered deed easily enough torn up. Simple as that. So would he tell the three of them in his office right after this church thing. His decision would go down hard with John Samuel, but there was no chance that he would pack his trunks, not him, to whom nothing on earth mattered more than becoming the next patrón, even of a hacienda made smaller by the bequeathal to the twins. The twins, John Roger knew, were the question. They loved Ensenada de Isabel and would of course love to own it. Yet he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t give it up rather than yield to what they might view as an ultimatum. The trick would be in the manner of his appeal. You boys want that place for yourselves? Free of your brother’s authority over it? Resume the visits. It’s no surrender, gentlemen, just a recommencement of our agreement, a matter of honoring your word. So he would say to them before sending for John Samuel. He hadn’t seen them in ten months, for Christ’s sake! Enough was enough.
Barely ten minutes after John Roger departs, Josefina’s attention turns toward the garden door and she says, “Hay están.” She calls to the boy tending the tubs that he can go now, and the boy waves and scoots away through the patio gate. Marina has to listen hard for a moment more before she too hears the boys’ faint laughter from the garden, and she smiles at Josefina. Nobody knows the old woman’s age—it is a household joke of long standing that she was the cook on Noah’s Ark—but she still has the hearing of a fox.
That the twins have chosen to come in by their garden route makes it clear they know how late they are and that they don’t want to run into their father before getting to the church. The young maid, Concha, is alight with excitement. She has never met the twins and has seen them only from a distance, but she has heard much about them from the women in the laundry, most of it scandalous and therefore enticing.
The garden door bangs open and they come stomping in, still laughing over some shared joke, charging the room with masculine energy and infusing the air with the effluvia of the sweat and blood caked on their clothes and seasoned with the smell of campfire smoke. They are hatless and their hair dusty. For the last two weeks they have been taking crocodile hides on the river, the skins now drying at the cove.
“Pues, al fin llegan estos brutos desgraciados!” Josefina says. She whacks at the boys with her cane, berating them for their lateness and their filthy stinking state and the trouble they have caused her with their father.
They laugh and fend her blows, and then Blake Cortéz snatches her to him and pins her skinny arms against her sides and kisses her full on the mouth. He says he’s damned glad a crocodile isn’t as tough as she is or they wouldn’t have collected a single hide. Marina has often marveled at the blush only the twins can raise in the brown wither of Josefina’s face.
Let go of me, Blackie, you good-for-nothing, Josefina says, trying to wriggle free. He kisses her again, then hops back from her with his fists raised like a pugilist, exhibiting a fancy footwork and feinting with lefts and rights, saying, “Come on, you old warhorse, I’m ready for you. This one’s for the championship.”
She swats at his arms with the cane and calls him a wicked child and says she’s told him a thousand times not to talk that gringo talk to her. She drives him rearward toward the patio door, ordering him to get into the bathtub this minute, they are late enough as it is.
“Oye! Pero quién es esa hermosa?” James Sebastian says, taking notice of Concha at the other end of the room.
Never mind that, Marina says. Get in those tubs and clean up, there’s no time for foolishness. As she pushes James toward the patio door, he grins and fondles her bottom and whispers in her ear that he has missed her terribly and how about sneaking into the tub with him. Mar
ina slaps his hand away and calls him a donkey and cuts a look at Josefina, whose attention is still fixed on driving Blackie toward the patio with jabs of her cane. It frets Marina that James could be so indiscreet. But she knows how he feels. When the twins entered the kitchen it had been all she could do to keep from running to them and kissing them with all her might. She had done that once, after not having seen them for six months. Had come into the kitchen and seen them standing there, just arrived, and even in Josefina’s presence she could not refrain from kissing them each in turn with all her heart until Josefina said, Enough, girl, for God’s sake, let the poor boys catch their breath. She had felt her face flush and expected Josefina to be shocked, but the old woman simply busied herself at making the boys something to eat. She and the twins have now been lovers for more than two years and she cannot believe Josefina is still unaware of it.
Her incredulity is well-founded, for Josefina has in fact been aware of her sexual relation with the twins since it began. She had at first been dismayed by the realization that Marina had accepted the boys as lovers, but the more she turned it over in her mind the less it troubled her, until at last she felt obliged to ask the Holy Mother’s forgiveness for her lack of moral affront. Where, after all, was the sin? The boys’ cheekiness with Marina was but a flimsy veil over their adoration of her, and Marina was still a fairly young woman with a young woman’s natural appetites and she loved them too and knew how to guard against conception. Who could have taught them better than she what they should know most about women? And who else has ever given her the respect and protection she deserves? Who else has ever defended her honor as they did last summer when they accompanied her to the hacienda market to carry back a side of beef and that fool of a muleskinner called out that if she would place a sack over her head he’d be willing to play with her body? He was a very large man of rough repute but no match for the two of them. They went at him from opposite flanks like a pair of boar dogs and got him down fast and began beating him in the face with a cobblestone and surely would have killed him if Marina had not managed to make them desist. Even so, they pounded the man’s face to a ruination worse than hers, fracturing it so severely he would for the rest of his life have to breathe through his mouth and have trouble making himself understood. They had already acquired a reputation as ferocious fighters but after the public maiming of the muleskinner there were few men who weren’t at least a little bit afraid of them—and they were only fifteen at the time. When their father heard about the fight he said nothing of it to them or to Marina but summoned Josefina to get the details, and she had sensed both Don Juan’s pride in their gallantry and his dismay at their viciousness. Like their father, Josefina fears for the twins’ future. Fears it because of the men they are becoming and cannot be prevented from becoming and the dangers such men seem naturally to attract and those they seem naturally to seek out. And yet she cannot but admire them for their bravery and love them the more for their devotion to Marina. In a girlhood of so long ago it seems more like some tale she once heard told than an actual part of her past, Josefina had learned that the only man of worth to a woman was one who was willing to kill for her, a truth that was proved in her own marriage to a man who was not of that sort. In her prayers to the Holy Mother she has allowed that if there is sin in the love between the twins and Marina, then she herself, Josefina María Cortéz de Quito, must be held to a share of that sin, because she cannot condemn it.
Marina is trying to shove James out the door, but he laughs and braces himself against his brother, who has also become aware of Concha and stands fast in the doorway, grinning at her. Despite herself, blushing Concha is smiling back.
Get into those baths, you little pigs! says Josefina, half their size, flailing at them with her walking stick.
The twins yip in mock pain and affect to flinch at the blows as they stumble rearward into the patio, holding to each other as if to keep from falling. They trade a grinning look—and then swiftly unbuckle their belts and drop their pants and grab their cocks and wag them at the women.
Concha squeals and whirls about with her back to them as Josefina screeches, You’ll burn in hell, both of you! You filthy evil things!
Marina slams the door shut on the boys’ wild laughter and slumps against it in a caricature of slack-jawed exhaustion.
Josefina issues a groaning sigh as she eases into a chair. “Jesucristo,” she says, “que par de bárbaros!”
Concha looks from one woman to the other, her hands at her mouth, her brown face darker yet with embarrassment.
And then all three of them break into a cackling laughter louder than the boys outside.
From the shade of the alamo tree, he keeps intent watch on the casa grande’s courtyard gate. The steeple bells in their final clangoring summons to the ceremonial mass. He is familiar with the patrón’s habits and knows that before he does anything else he will come to the horses to give them their treat. He takes the flask from his coat and uncorks it and has a drink and re-seals it and tucks it away.
His heart jumps when he sees the white-suited patrón come out the casa grande gate. Unaccompanied, as usual. Excellent. He puts his hand inside his coat and fingers the haft of the knife snug in its sheath under the heavy money belt. The derringer in his coat will have no part in this. To be done as it should, the act calls for the blade. Face to face. So the gringo will see who is doing it, and seeing who, will die knowing why.
But now the patrón stops and pats at his coat pockets, then tosses his head in irritation and looks back toward the casa grande. He takes his watch from a vest fob and checks the time, then puts away the watch and heads for the other end of the plaza and the church.
The circumstance is clear enough. The old bastard forgot the sugar. What to do? To ride after him would put him on his guard. With that damned pistol everybody knows about. A revolver with the barrel cut short for easier carry under his coat. There is nothing to do except stay put and wait until after the mass. Then he thinks, Idiot! Why will he come to the stable afterward? He will go straight back to the house is what he will do. While you stand here with your thumb up your ass.
Damn it. To kill him at the stable would have made it all so simple. No one else nearby. Ahorse and out the gate before anyone even thought to give chase. A back trail into the mountains and then a mule track he knows of, unused for years. He would be in Jalapa before sundown and on a train for Mexico City and from there a train to Durango and the protection of his brother. But now what? If you do it at the church you’ve got a lot of people around and you’re a whole lot farther from the main gate. Wait until tomorrow and do it here at the stable like you planned. Be smart. And there’ll be fewer people tomorrow.
No! Today! You’re ready today. And you don’t want fewer people. You want as many as possible to see it. To see what happens to this gringo who spat on your family’s honor!
All right, then. Take the horse over there. You can still mount up fast and get out quick. Goddammit, man, where are your balls?
He leads the horse across the plaza to the church and tethers it to a tree a few yards from the wide breadth of church steps. Then positions himself at the periphery of the crowd assembled outside the doors, hat low over his eyes. And now has only to wait for the end of the mass. Engrossed in his thoughts, he is heedless of late arrivals.
The mass is in progress when the black-suited twins ease through the crowd listening at the open doors. The people grouped at the back of the room make way so that the brothers can stand at the forefront with a clear view of the altar. As those in the rearmost pews become aware of their presence, they make gestures of offering their seats to them, but the twins decline the tenders with their own hand signals.
They see their father in the front pew, his shoulders slumped as never before. To one side of him are John Samuel and Vicki and Juanito Sotero, and next to them Bruno Tomás and his wife Felicia Flor, great with their first child, due in a few weeks. The empty space to the other side of
their father is where the twins would be sitting if they had arrived in time. Not until Juan Sotero goes to the altar to receive the communion wafer from the bishop does their father turn to look toward the back of the church and see them. His gaze is tired but reproachful at their lateness. The twins acknowledge him with respectful nods and he nods in turn. Then gives his attention back to Juan Sotero as the boy returns to the pew, hands together in a prayerful attitude contrasting with his wide smile. He sits down and Vicki Clara puts an arm around him and whispers in his ear.
Josefina has told them of their father’s directive to go to his office after the mass. They cannot guess what he wishes to see them about, but have a hunch it will entail John Samuel in some way and that he will be there too, and so the session cannot possibly be anything but unpleasant. As the mass nears its end, Blake says, “Let’s go.”
He freezes at the sight of them emerging from the throng at the doors. They had not been seen in the compound since the business with the horse—almost a year now—and he’d had no reason whatever to think they might be here today. They are walking in his direction and for a petrifying moment he thinks they have already seen him, then realizes they haven’t and he averts his face just as one looks his way. They stride past, almost close enough to touch. He feels a tremor in his fingers and stills it with his fists.
And sees the patrón come out of the church, flanked by family.