Country of the Bad Wolfes (42 page)

They had a fine time, John Roger and the Blancos, getting to know each other during those days of working together to make the new house a home. In the evenings after dinner they sat in the parlor with glasses of wine and conversed until a late hour. The Blancos wanted to know everything about the childhood he had shared with Samuel Thomas. He told them about Portsmouth and their mother and their Grandfather John Parham. They were not surprised to hear of Samuel Thomas's propensity for fighting with his fists, but they had not known of his love for sailing, or that he had hoped to make his life at sea, or that he had been a superior student and could have excelled as a scholar if he'd but had the inclination. For reasons of decorum John Roger refrained from telling some things about his brother, such as his larks in the Blue Mermaid tavern. Nor did he reveal to the Blancos—as he had not revealed to anyone save the late Margarita Damascos—the fact of their father's piracy. A secret he was now sure that Sammy had kept from them.

In answering their questions about himself, he tried to be self-effacing and perfunctory, but the facts were the facts, and the Blancos were impressed by his university education, his legal profession in New England, his management of the Trade Wind Company. They of course wanted to know how he'd lost his arm, and were enthralled by his account of the duel with Montenegro, and deeply moved by Elizabeth Anne's action in saving his life. They could not hear enough about Elizabeth Anne and asserted that she seemed “muy simpática,” a characterization John Roger had heard from every Mexican who ever met her. He showed them her photograph set into the inner lid of his pocketwatch, and they cooed in admiration of her beauty. Then became tearful when he told the details of her death. Then smiled again on learning that the younger two of his three sons were identical twins.

Not until then did it occur to John Roger that he had not told any of them that he and Sammy were twins. He thought to say so now, but decided against it. What difference did it make? They had not been physical twins since Sammy's disfigurement by the army, which occurred before María Palomina met him. He supposed they might like to know that he was a good approximation of what Sammy would have looked like but for the war. But still he did not tell them. He wanted to keep something of Sammy for himself alone.

I have always thought it would be wonderful to be the mother of twins, María
Palomina said. Now I can only hope to have twin grandchildren. Imagine how fabulous it would be to have a set of twins in every generation! She gestured toward Bruno Tomás and said, Maybe this one will father twins someday, if he should ever find some fool of a woman to marry him.

Bruno grinned. Don't lose hope, Mother. I've heard there are plenty of foolish women in this world.

Only Sófi did not join in the chortling. She tended to reticence on the subject of children, and John Roger had come to know why. She was thirty-one years old, a decade older than he'd thought when he'd first seen her, a fact the more startling in light of a history of marriage and motherhood that struck him as nothing less than tragic. No less awesome to him than Sófi's chronicle itself was the matter-of-fact manner in which she had related it to him. He had long suspected that the female heart was stronger than the male's in almost every way, and her account left him doubtless.

She had just turned sixteen when she wed Melchor Cervantes, two years after her sister Gloria had married and gone. Melchor was twenty years old and newly graduated from military college. María Palomina had warned both daughters since their early childhood never to fall in love with a soldier, especially a young officer with dreams of glory, and how many young officers did not have such dreams? Few young men of that sort lived to be old men, she told the girls, and told them too of her own passionate betrothal when she was seventeen to just such a young soldier who was killed before they could marry. She anyhow thought Sófi too young to marry anyone. She pleaded with her and Melchor to wait at least another year, but she was arguing with a wildfire. Forbid them, she beseeched Samuel Thomas, make them wait. But he would not. They would only run away, he said, and you would regret that even more. María Palomina was in tight-lipped vexation for three days before she finally admitted defeat, and Sófi and Melchor were married three weeks later.

They lived in a little house next to the army post, just outside the city. He was permitted to come home on most nights and they were very happy. They had been married almost four months when his battalion was sent to quell an insurgency in the hills near Pachuca, some fifty miles from Mexico City. Rebels. There were always rebels. Melchor was eager for his first combat and promised Sófi he would earn a medal of bravery in her honor. He rode off like a prince of war in his pristine lancer uniform, his high boots gleaming, his shako affixed with a proud black plume. The following week he was killed in an ambush. His comrade and best friend later told Sófi that Melchor had been shot in the head by a ragged and shoeless boy barely big enough to hold the antique musket. For lack of proper ammunition the boy used a stone for a bullet. The friend wanted to tell her what they did to the captured boy but she did not want to hear it. She lit a candle for Melchor's soul three times
a day and prayed to the Blessed Mother to please, please let his seed from their last lovemaking take root in her womb. Then awoke one morning to the death of that hope, its blood staining her bed sheet. She thought she would never stop crying. But of course did.

She went back to live with her mother and father. She dressed in black for a year and wore her hair loose in the mourning mode and passed her days working in the café. She grew to understand that you can mourn someone for a long time, even for the rest of your life, but you cannot grieve forever. Besides, she dearly wanted children.

Almost as soon as she put away her black dress she began to be courted by Arturo Villaseñor, a thirty-three-year-old city policeman whose beat took him past La Rosa Mariposa three times a day and where he often stopped in for a cup of coffee. Arturo had known many women and received much pleasure from them, but he had never wanted to be married until he met Sófi. She let him woo her for three months before she said yes to his proposal, and they married the month after that. She was yet only seventeen.

They say you can never love anyone else as much as you love the first, Sófi had told John Roger, but I disagree. I think you can love somebody else as much or even more than the first one. What you cannot do again is be in love for the first time. The sadness of that knowledge is why the first one seems so special.

But there is only one first time for anything we do in life, John Roger said, from birth to death.

Exactly so, Sofía Reina said.

He did not want to distract from her story and so did not pursue the theme. But he believed that what made memorable first times so special was that most of them happened to us in youth. What made us sad when we later recalled them was that we were no longer young. Then again, he thought he might be chasing his tail.

Arturo Villaseñor was a good man and Sófi loved him for his goodness, but not until their wedding night did she realize how much she had been missing the enjoyments of the bed. And because Arturo was more experienced than Melchor while no less passionate, her conjugal enjoyments were keener than ever. They lived in his top-floor apartment in a six-story building only three blocks from La Rosa Mariposa. Their son, Francisco, was born in December. María Palomina was jubilant to be a grandmother, and though less effusive, Samuel Thomas too was pleased by his grandson.

Arturo was overwhelmed by his own joy in fatherhood. More, my dearest treasure, he said to Sófi, we must make more of these amazing creatures! We must make dozens! She was dazed with happiness and eager to give him all the children he wished. But three months later and two days after their first anniversary, she had not yet conceived again when Arturo tried to break up a street fight on his beat and one of the combatants stabbed him in the heart. The murderer got away, and while
Sófi hoped he would be caught and punished, she could not muster the energy for a righteous vengeance. Whatever became of his killer, Arturo would still be dead.

For the next two months she hardly spoke except to coo endearments to baby Francisco as she tended him. But for the baby, she might have passed her days in bed and staring at the ceiling. María Palomina brought meals every day and gave the apartment a quick cleaning and made sure the child was not being neglected. Then Arturo's long-widowed mother, Eufemia, arrived from Guadalajara to stay with Sófi for a time and help with the baby and the housekeeping. By late summer, six months after Arturo's death, Sófi was doing well, even smiling on occasion, and Eufemia made plans to return home at the end of September.

The sixteenth of that month was the nation's Independence Day, when Mexico City became a cacophony of marching bands and skiffle bands and street dancing and church bells and firecrackers and military rifle volleys of tribute, a daylong celebration culminating after dark with firework exhibitions all over town. That evening, Eufemia sat in a rear bedroom, holding the baby and crooning to him to allay his fears of the blasts in the outer dark, while at the other end of the apartment Sófi stood out on the balcony and watched the fireworks lighting up the sky. The nearest show was taking place in the open ground of a park but two blocks away. It featured Catherine wheels and sun wheels, Roman candles and pastilles, elaborate displays of every sort—and of course skyrockets, some of them four feet long and as big around as a man's arm, one after another arcing up into the night in a streak of fire and detonating into a dazzling spray of colors high over the city. The air was hazed and acrid with powdersmoke.

Sófi thought she would watch one more rocket and then go back inside and close the balcony doors against the noise in hope that the baby could get to sleep. But the next rocket did not fire off like the others, did not zoom off the ground in a streaking blaze but rose in a struggling, sluggish, spark-sputtering wobble as if improperly fused. It had barely cleared the rooftops when it stopped rising and for a second simply hung suspended and shedding sparks. And then, just as it tilted and started to fall, its tail flared and the rocket whipped around in a quick bright-yellow circle and came streaking directly toward Sófi where she stood seized. Before she could think to move, the rocket shot by within inches of her, singeing her hair and scorching her cheek, and blazed down the hall and into the bedroom and found the embraced grandmother and child and blew them asunder, bespattering the walls and setting the bedclothes afire.

Who could explain such a thing? Terrible firework accidents were commonplace and firework deaths no rarity, but a fatality in this manner gave new dimension to the idea of freak misfortune. The disaster was publicized in the most purple prose and the most lurid illustrations of the city's penny broadsides. But nothing in those newssheets was as outrageous to Sófi as the witless blather of the priest at the funeral mass, his pious pronouncements about God's mysterious ways
and our need to accept them on faith and so on. Had she not got up and walked out of the church midway through the service—wholly indifferent to the stares and whispers she provoked—she might have thrown her shoe at the man and cursed him for a shithead fool.

She again returned to La Rosa Mariposa. And this time did take to her bed and stare at the ceiling. She could not rid herself of the idea that the rocket had sought out Eufemia and Francisco, but she shared this thought with no one, fearing she would be thought insane. It came as a dull surprise to her that she could not abide her inertness for more than a week before getting cleaned up and assisting in the operation of the café. María Palomina and Samuel Thomas were relieved to see her at work so soon after the catastrophe and thought it only natural that for weeks to come she would yet seem remote and have little to say. The loss of two husbands in a span of two years and three months, followed hard upon by the death of her only child, was a sizable downpour of misery by any measure and especially so for someone only nineteen. Still, she knew as well as anyone that there was nothing to be done about it but to bear it, and she bore it well. And bore well too her father's rabid death less than two years after the loss of baby Francisco.

Samuel Thomas had been dead a year, and Bruno Tomás had since returned from the army to help María Palomina manage the café, when Sófi married Jorge Cabaza. He was twenty-five, only three years her senior, and worked in his father's bakery, from which La Rosa Mariposa bought its bread. Jorge was plain and, as Sófi found out on their wedding night, lacked imagination as a lover. But he worshipped her and he was industrious and wanted to have many children, and it was of no small importance to her that a baker was far removed from the mortal risks faced by soldiers and policemen. And because he would do whatever she asked of him, she was able to teach him—gradually and in a spirit of shy curiosity, lest he think her wanton—a number of her favorite things in bed. And so did this marriage, too, come to provide her dearest pleasure.