by Maria Duenas
“And each will refine his own mineral however he chooses to.”
It wasn’t long before a seedy opportunistic investor, a two-bit cardsharp, took a gamble on his venture, if indeed the waterlogged hole in which Larrea had placed all his hopes could be called that. However, the miner’s instinct told him that if they dug to the west they might strike it lucky. And so he named the new mine after his dead wife, whose face had all but faded from his memory, and set to work.
That was how he set up the operation in La Elvira, proceeding the way the old-timers said his countrymen, the Spanish miners of the colony, had in bygone days. By trial and error. He determined the shafts guided solely by instinct, the way a dog follows its nose. Based upon sheer guesswork rather than halfway logical calculations, and without any scientific rigor whatsoever. He blundered about recklessly, sustained only by his stubborn determination, rugged physique, and the two other mouths he had to feed.
It was during his next venture, La Santa Clara, that Tadeo Carrús entered his life. Two projects, three years, and many setbacks later, Larrea managed to get free of the moneylender and make his own way. Despite Carrús’s threats and underhanded attempts to bring him down, there was no stopping him. And although during that time he suffered further disappointments, took foolish risks, even exposed himself to danger through being too hasty, the geological goddess of fortune was on his side, placing veins of silver among the folds of the earth upon which he trod. In La Buenaventura, fate smiled upon him threefold; in La Prosperidad he learned that when an excavation became dangerous, beating a timely retreat was best. The silver he extracted from La Abundancia was of such quality that even some independent refiners from other areas went there to buy from him.
But he was not the only one to shine. After decades of inactivity, the region of Real de Catorce was once again pounded with the sound of debris flying, drilling, and detonations as it had during the days of Spanish rule. It was a chaotic, savage, tumultuous place where notions of peace and order were a pipe dream. The money that flowed from the resurgence of silver in that rich subsoil inevitably gave rise to myriad conflicts: fierce tensions and ambitions, constant outbreaks of violence, knifes carried openly, stabbings between partners. Until one Saturday evening, as he dismounted in high spirits after selling a consignment of silver to a German dealer, he was greeted by an unholy row from inside his house, accompanied by Mariana’s screams and Nico’s howls.
After his first successes, Larrea had bought a halfway decent house on the outskirts of the town, hiring an old cook, who went home to her family in the evenings, and a maid. That night the maid was off dancing at a fandango party and a young Otomí Indian girl with lustrous black hair named Delfina was left in charge of his children, although they had already learned to look after for themselves. But what he heard as he arrived home made him realize that they needed far more protection than this gentle girl could offer.
He leapt up the stairs, dreading what he would find when he saw the furniture upturned, the curtains torn from the rails, and an oil lamp burning on the floor. The actual scene was far worse than he had feared. On his own bed, a man with his trousers down was thrusting like an animal atop the inert body of the young Delfina. Meanwhile, trapped in her room, Mariana, her nightdress torn open, a bloody scratch on her neck, was jabbing a poker furiously at a clearly drunken second intruder. Nicolás, half-hidden behind a woolen mattress his sister had propped up in the corner as a defensive wall, was wailing and howling as though possessed.
With unbridled strength and rage, Mauro Larrea seized the assailant by the scruff of his neck and repeatedly slammed his face into the wall. Again and again, with dull but resounding thuds, and then yet again, while his children looked on in a daze. Eventually, he let the man slide to the floor, and a trickle of blood, dark as the night seeping in through the balcony, oozed onto the innocent floral wallpaper of Mariana’s bedroom. Having swiftly ascertained that his children had no other injuries, he hastened into the adjacent room and seized Delfina’s attacker, who was still panting and writhing on top of the terrified girl. The procedure was the same, with a similar outcome: the assailant’s face was smashed in, his skull crushed and thick blood flowing from his nose and mouth. It all happened so fast that he didn’t know or even care whether those two animals were dead or just unconscious.
He didn’t wait to find out but promptly took hold of his children and, clasping the sobbing Delfina to him protectively, abandoned the house with the intention of leaving them in the care of a neighbor. Alarmed by the noise, a crowd of onlookers had gathered outside. Among them was a long-haired Indian who had been working in his shafts for a couple of months; a smart, reserved youth, he was doubtless on his way home from a local dance on his evening off. Larrea couldn’t remember his name, but recognized him when he stepped forward resolutely.
“At your service, patrón, if I can be of any help.”
With a jerk of his chin he gestured to the youth to wait a moment. Then he found a couple of women to take care of the three youngsters before concocting a story for the benefit of those present about how the miscreants had escaped through a window. Once he was sure that the crowd had begun to disperse, he looked for the youth in the darkness.
“Two men are inside—I don’t know if they’re alive or dead. Take them out through the backyard and deal with them.”
“How about I just leave them to rest in peace outside the cemetery wall?”
“Don’t lose another minute; jump to it.”
This was how Santos Huesos Quevedo Calderón came into his life; from that moment on he ceased to toil belowground and became Larrea’s shadow.
While the youth was completing his first task on that sinister dawn, Mauro Larrea rode off to see the man who by then was in charge of his accounts and his workforce. Rousing Elias Andrade from sleep, he charged him with two tasks: to return Delfina to her parents with a bag of silver as useless recompense for her defiled virtue, and to take his children away from the town that same night, never to return.
“But surely Nicolás and Teresita’s nuptial agreement still stands?”
Years later, the same Mariana who had clambered onto a cart, bruised and grubby in her nightdress, was now wearing a dress of embroidered silk over her swollen belly, plucking a cigarette out of her mother-of-pearl case.
Around them, the sounds of the house being dismantled continued: shouts and commotion, hurrying back and forth between the magnolias and garden fountains. Andrade was directing the servants: “Take everything out, pack it up, and get it ready. Lift your feet, you lazy oafs, put those cabinets on a different cart, and for the love of God be careful with those alabaster stands!” Even the pots and pans were removed. To be hocked or hawked—whatever it took to obtain enough quick money to start plugging the holes. As Andrade fired off orders, father and daughter went on conversing beneath the pale light filtering through the vines covering the pergola. She sat on a chair someone had rescued from the move, hands resting on her rounded belly. He stood.
“Alas, the engagement can be broken off by either party. Especially if there’s a good reason.”
Mariana was nurturing a life in her belly that was nigh on seven months old. The same length of time Nicolás had spent gestating before he was born prematurely in that country, Spain, to which they had never returned. The village in the north of Old Castile, and the dazzling smile of the young woman who had abandoned them, writhing on a straw pallet drenched with blood and sweat; the iron cross driven into the cemetery earth one fog-bound morning. The shock, bewilderment, and grief: fragments of memory that were seldom revisited.
Mexico City eventually became Mauro Larrea’s universe, the place of his day-to-day existence, an anchor for all three of them. And Nico had changed from a skinny tadpole into a lively, impetuous youth—a born seducer whose ability to charm was equaled only by his recklessness and errors of judgment. As a result, his father had ship
ped him off to Europe to prevent him getting into any further scrapes before his marriage to one of the city’s most eligible young ladies.
“I bumped into Teresita and her mother the other day at a stall near the Porta Coeli,” Mariana went on. “They were purchasing Genoese velvet and Mechlin lace. It seems they’ve started preparing the wedding trousseau.”
Nico’s fiancée, Teresa Gorostiza Fagoaga, was descended from two aristocratic families dating back to the viceroyalty. She wasn’t particularly pretty or charming, but she was extremely pleasant. And sensible. And head over heels in love. In Mauro Larrea’s opinion, exactly what his wayward son needed: a commitment that would give him the security to settle down, while at the same time reaffirming his family’s privileged place in society, which he himself had won through his hard effort. The vast new wealth of an affluent Spanish miner united with a reputed Creole family stretching back generations: What better alliance? Except that this auspicious plan had just been derailed: while the Gorostiza family had pedigree to spare, the vagaries of a distant war had caused the Larrea family’s fortune to go up in smoke.
And, without any money to his name, or an account at the best tailor in Calle Cordobanes—with no satin upholstered carriage in which to arrive at the salons, parties, and dance halls; no spirited horse on which to show off in front of the young ladies; and lacking his father’s tenacious character—Nicolás Larrea would be finished. A handsome, affable young man without profession or income: a dandy, a fop. The son of a bankrupt miner who had come and gone.
“The Gorostizas mustn’t find out,” muttered Larrea, gazing off into the distance. “Nor must your husband’s family. This remains strictly between you and me. And Elias, naturally.”
Ever since Elias Andrade whisked them away from Real de Catorce that dreadful night, the man who had been their father’s accountant became the closest thing to family that Mariana and Nicolás had known. It was his idea to take them to Mexico City, to the place he hailed from, whose codes and customs he knew well. He proposed that Mariana attend El Colegio de las Vizcaínas while installing Nicolás in Calle de los Donceles with a relative, one of the last members of the illustrious Andrade family, whose former glory had crumbled to dust.
Oblivious to their conversation, the agent continued to reel off an unending list of commands: “Pack those Talavera plates properly in linen so they don’t break. I want the mattresses rolled up; can’t you see that rocking chair is about to fall over, idiots!” The servants, cowed by Don Elias’s rage that morning when nothing was as normal, ran to and fro, trying to comply with his orders, until the house and gardens of what had once been a splendid country retreat looked more like a besieged garrison.
Mariana arched forward, clasping her back to relieve the discomfort caused by her heavily pregnant belly.
“Perhaps you should have been less ambitious. We might have been happier with less, with a simpler life.”
He shook his head in disagreement. He had never wanted to emulate those celebrated miners from colonial times, determined to secure their position among the nobility by means of bribes and kickbacks to greedy viceroys and corrupt officials. The purchase of titles and conspicuous displays of wealth were common at that time. But Mauro Larrea belonged to a different era. He was made of sterner stuff and his ambition was simply to succeed on his own terms.
“By the time I was thirty I had triumphed in the silver business. And yet I hadn’t toiled to accumulate all that wealth only to remain an unscrupulous, ignorant brute. I had no desire to live surrounded by savages in a luxurious mansion I only returned to for sleep, or to strut around bordellos in front of whores and braggarts, ignorant of how to behave or of world events. You and Nico were living in Mexico City by that time, and I didn’t want you to be ashamed of me.”
“But we never—”
“For years I suffered from nightmares. I never managed to rid myself completely of that dark dread that lingers in the soul when one has stared death in the face. Perhaps that’s what drove me to seek retribution, to defy that mine that showed me its fangs, and almost left you and Nico orphans.”
He inhaled the clean, dry air that had made Tacubaya a favorite retreat for the city’s elites. They both knew they would never return to the splendid estate, where they had enjoyed so many wonderful moments: her debut in society, raucous gatherings of friends, conversations on cool evenings amid weeping willows, honeysuckle, and lime trees while people in the city were shriveling up from the heat. Just then they heard artillery fire, from which direction they couldn’t tell, and yet no one gave a start; they had become accustomed to the sound during the tumultuous period of the Reform War. Seemingly oblivious to everything, Andrade was firing off another volley of cries: “Clear the main entrance, get out of the way! On the count of three, pick up that chest!”
Mauro Larrea finally emerged from beneath the shelter of the pergola and walked the short distance to the balustrade along the terrace. Mariana followed close behind, and together they contemplated the valley with its imposing volcanoes. She linked her arm through his, resting her head on his shoulder as if to say, I’m with you no matter what.
“It isn’t easy, you know, to watch things from a distance after so many years spent struggling. The body craves other challenges, other adventures. You become ambitious, you don’t want to stop.”
“But this time it slipped through your fingers.”
His daughter’s voice contained no hint of reproach, only calm, honest reflection.
“That’s what this game is all about, Mariana. I didn’t make the rules. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And the higher the stakes, the bigger the fall.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Mauro Larrea wasn’t a man given to public displays of affection, neither with his children nor the women who happened to pass through his life. And yet that afternoon, upon their return to the city, he couldn’t stop himself. After helping his daughter out of the carriage, he clasped her shoulders and planted a kiss on her forehead. Then he embraced her. Perhaps because seeing Mariana pregnant was something that he still couldn’t get used to. Or because he was aware that their time together was running out.
Unlike on other occasions, he left his daughter’s palatial residence on Calle Capuchinas without greeting her mother-in-law. Not because he wished to avoid the Countess of Colima, with her musty title and her tempestuous character, but simply because he had more pressing matters to attend to. It was urgent that he regroup; that he find a solution that would bolster him should news of his ruin leak out. So that he would not be left naked if his pitiful truth became common knowledge, the source of endless gossip. And no doubt celebrated by some, as was usually the case when others failed. The allotted time Tadeo Carrús had given him was already ticking by.
His next port of call was Café del Progreso, in the early evening. It was at its busiest then, before everyone left to dine with friends or family, and before it filled with nocturnal revelers who hadn’t been invited anywhere better. The Café del Progreso was the fashionable place to be, patronized by important people such as himself, the wealthy and powerful. Except that the majority were still solvent.
He had not arranged to meet with anyone, although he was fairly certain about who he wanted to find there and who he preferred to avoid. His idea was to listen and to gather information. Possibly let slip the odd morsel himself, if the opportunity arose.
The city’s most affluent men sat about on sofas and brocade armchairs, smoking and drinking black coffee as if their lives depended on it. They browsed newspapers, engaged in heated political debates, discussed business and Mexico’s constant state of bankruptcy, world events, the laws that constantly changed depending on which of the nation’s dignitaries was in power. Even love affairs, infighting, and society rumors, if they were considered of sufficient interest.
As Mauro Larrea entered, he sized up the situation with a swift glance around t
he room. The majority were regular customers, people he knew. He was relieved to see that his son’s future father-in-law, Ernesto Gorostiza, was apparently not among them. So much the better, at least for now. In contrast, he was vexed not to see Eliseo Samper. Nobody knew more about current governmental policy on finance and loans than him, so sounding him out might have been a good option. Nor could he spot Aurelio Palencia, another prominent person, well versed in the intricacies of the banking system and its tentacles. On the other hand, he did make out the formidable figure of Mariano Asencio. Let’s start with him, he thought.
With seeming nonchalance, he sauntered over to the table where Asencio was sitting, greeting others on the way, pausing from time to time, and ordering a coffee when approached by a waiter. Until he reached his objective.
“Larrea, old man!” boomed Asencio, his cigar still in his mouth. “Where have you been hiding?”
Since his return, the former Mexican ambassador to Washington had been involved in various business deals with his neighbors from the north, as well as anyone else who crossed his path. This, together with the fact that he was married to an American half his size, meant he was better placed than most to keep abreast of events across the border. As it happened, the civil war there was the subject of their current conversation.
“The South is fighting on its own territory, which gives them a huge advantage,” someone at one end of the table declared when the discussion resumed. “They say their soldiers are fearless fighters and that morale among the troops is excellent.”
“But they are far fewer in number,” another offered.
“True. And they say that the Union can triple its recruits at the drop of a hat.”