Country of the Bad Wolfes (43 page)

Jorge's only remaining family was his father, Pieto, who had taught him the baker's trade and who adored Sófi from the moment they met, and she reciprocated his affection. The three of them lived in quarters at the rear of the bakery, which was on a street fronting a canal and near enough to La Rosa Mariposa that Sófi and her mother were able to visit each other often.

Pieto had been a widower for seventeen years. Before his wife was taken by a typhoid epidemic she had borne six children, but only Jorge had survived to adulthood, and Pieto's great wish was for a grandson to keep alive the family line. When Sófi gave birth to a husky boy whom she and Jorge called Pieto Tomás, the elder Pieto's tearful joy was compounded by his namesake honor. The year after that, Samuel Palomino was born, as lusty of health as his brother, and it was María Palomina's turn to feel honored in addition to her elation at another grandson. We are truly blessed, Jorge said in his half-drunk happiness during the celebration party
attended by everyone in the neighborhood. His father, no less happy and no less drunk, raised his glass high and said, A man cannot have better luck than mine. The dispute that ensued between father and son over which of them was the luckier man was about to come to blows when a woman's plea for somebody to
do
something was followed by a loud and prolonged fart and the room erupted with laughter. Later that evening while dancing with Sófi, Pieto tripped over his own feet and fell and broke his arm, and so the following day they hired a neighborhood girl named Prudencia to care for the babies during working hours while Sófi tended to Pieto's duties in the bakery until he could resume them. Under his instruction she learned the work quickly and well, and even after Pieto was able to work again she kept working too, and the bakery increased both its output and profits.

Neither child had ever evinced any sign of illness until Pieto Tomás was eighteen months old and his forehead one morning seemed a little warm to Prudencia's palm. She feared he might be taking fever. The child did not feel feverish to Sófi's touch but old Pieto had seen enough of his children die of illness and he would not abide even the smallest risk to his grandsons. He insisted that Jorge take the child to the doctor and take six-month-old Samuel Palomino to be looked at too, just in case. Prudencia held the well-bundled babies securely against her as Jorge hupped the mule forward and the wagon went rumbling away over the wooden canal bridge.

Sófi would later learn that the doctor had found both boys to be in perfect health. She would imagine Jorge's relief on hearing this and his eagerness to share it with her as he headed back home. Of the various eyewitnesses, several would agree that he had been smiling and saying something to Prudencia as the wagon drew near to home, that the maid had been smiling also, that the babies in her embrace had been waving their arms for the sheer pleasure such action gives to children of that age. Then the wagon turned onto the bridge and its weight bore upon a piling that must have been rotting for many years without any sign of its weakening until that moment, when it gave a loud groan and abruptly buckled. There was an enormous cracking and twisting of planks as that end of the bridge gave way in a sudden tilt and the wagon turned over as it fell, taking the shrieking mule with it. It crashed into the brown water upside down and on top of all four occupants and sank from sight to settle into the silty bottom ten feet down. There was a great rush of bubbles to the agitated surface and then only the diminishing ripples.

Sófi and Pieto were in the rear of the store, working at the ovens, and so didn't know of the accident until a neighbor rushed in to tell them. They ran out to the collapsed bridge where a large crowd had gathered, and several men had to restrain old Pieto by force to keep him from jumping in. A work crew had been summoned and was quick to arrive but it took them several dives to free the wagon of the mule carcass and then several dives more to lash lines to the wagon so that a winch could pull it over on its side and the bodies retrieved. Pieto was half crazy with grief and keening like a dog. Sófi stood on the bank the whole while with her arms crossed
and a hand to her mouth, staring down at the dirty water with no thought that she would later remember. The first bodies recovered were of Jorge and Prudencia, sodden and muddy and lank in that unreal way that only the dead can be. Finally a diver came bursting to the surface, gasping for air, and handed up to workers on the bank the two small and ill-formed effigies of mud that had been her children. She nearly screamed. Nearly vomited. Nearly fainted. Nearly turned her face up to heaven to bellow maledictions. Nearly threw herself into the water to inhale a great fatal draught of it. Nearly did all of those things but finally only put her face in her hands and wept.

Late that night, as she lay sleepless, she heard Pieto pacing in the other room and then after a while heard him go out the front door. In the morning his body was in the canal, floating facedown. That afternoon she moved back to La Rosa Mariposa.

This time there was no lying in bed for two weeks and staring at the ceiling. She simply put an apron on over her black dress and set to work. Her mother and brother did not know what to say to her, how to conduct themselves around her. It was hard enough to express an adequate condolence to someone who had all at once lost her husband and two children, but what could you say to someone for whom such a catastrophe was only one more in a series of disastrous losses?

Sófi could hardly bear their solicitude. Their strenuous efforts at casual conversation in her company only made her as self-conscious and tense as they were. She stood it for two weeks before telling them to stop treating her as if she were made of glass. She was heartbroken, yes, and so what that she was? She would sooner or later get over it. She always sooner or later got over it. What else was there to do except sooner or later get over it, what else? What that old fool Pieto did? Yes,
fool
! Only a fool could have lived so long and not known that there is nothing you cannot sooner or later get over.

Maybe he did know that, María Palomina said softly, but could not endure the wait. Sófi stared at her mother. Then went back to work.

For weeks her eyes were red and dark circled, and her lean frame contracted to the skeletal for her lack of interest in eating. But the weeks did pass, and she did, as she knew she would, get over it. Did regain an interest in her meals and the table talk of her mother and brother and the news of the neighborhood and sometimes even that of the larger world.

It was during that period of getting over it that she began to wonder if perhaps she were cursed. She had always prided herself on her rational mind and had disdained superstitions of all stripes, but the sum of her misfortunes by the age of twenty-four defied rational understanding. But even when, solely for the purpose of self-argument, she allowed for the possibility she was cursed, she could not think why she should be, neither by God nor witch nor someone of the Evil Eye. Had she transgressed against any such agent of fortune, she felt sure she would have known
it, and hence would know whose forgiveness to ask, what penance to perform, what atonement she must make. She refused to believe she could be cursed and not know why or by whom, and so was left with no explanation for her misfortunes except random bad luck. Bad luck could befall anybody anytime anywhere for no particular reason, just as good luck could. Everybody knew that too. Her bad luck, she told herself, was only bad luck, no matter its tenacity, no matter its accumulated heft. The idea was devoid of self-pity, an emotion she had abhorred since childhood and would recoil from whenever she sensed its encroachment. She told herself that her bad luck would change, as luck always did, bad or good, and there was nothing to do about it except hope for the change to come sooner rather than later.

She was five years into her third widowhood when Diego Guzmán proposed to her in October of 1882. He was a shoemaker without any family, his shop just two streets from La Rosa Mariposa. A handsome, courtly, well-spoken man of thirty-eight whose hair and mustaches had early gone white. Better than anyone else, he understood Sófi's sad history, himself having lost two wives, one to the cholera and one to the unbelievable failure of her twenty-year-old heart as they were dancing at a fiesta. Both marriages had produced a child, a son each one, but the first died of some mysterious illness a few days after his first birthday, and the second somehow got tangled in the bedclothes and smothered at the age of five months. Diego had been wifeless for more than eight years when he began courting Sofía Reina.

Until they met each other they had both been sure they would not marry again, unwilling to risk having to bury yet another spouse, or worse, another child. But now Diego mocked himself for having been so fearful. It was easy to say never again when I was forlorn and had no one to love, he said. But now I am in love with you, my dearest Sófi, and now I know that love is stronger than fear. Let us be brave, Sófi! Let us be brave and marry.

She found it hard to share his bravado. She consulted with her mother, who said, I understand your worry, Sofita, but you mustn't let it rule the rest of your life. I agree with Diego. Love is worth the risk. Besides, be reasonable. It is not very likely, is it, that the two of you together would have more of the same bad luck each of you has had so much of in the past?

Sófi wasn't so sure about that, either. She thought very hard about it. But the more she thought, the more her focus sidled away from the risks involved and toward visions of herself and Diego in bed. Oh, how she missed
that
benefit of marriage! He was tall and lean, Diego was, and had long beautiful fingers. The thought of those fingers on her naked flesh deepened her breath and made her blush at her shameless reveries.

They were married in February in the little church of their neighborhood, the ceremony attended by their few friends who afterward joined in a party at La Rosa Mariposa that carried on until late in the evening. And when the last of the guests had left, the bride and groom went upstairs to Sófi's room, which María Palomina had
adorned with vases of fresh flowers and whose sheets she had sprinkled with perfume. The room was softly lighted with aromatic candles of all colors, and on a small table was an iced bucket of champagne and a platter of treats—spiced crackers, stuffed olives, shelled nuts—so the newlyweds wouldn't lack for sustenance in the night.

Diego poured two glasses of the sparkling wine and said, To us, my darling, and all the life ahead.

They drank to their happy future. Then she made him sit in the armchair beside the refreshments and told him to stay put and just watch.

He sat back and sipped champagne and popped stuffed olives into his mouth, watching with bright eyes as she slowly began to undress. When she was down to her filmy underthings, she turned her back to him and slowly peeled off her undershirt—and smiled to hear his sudden gasp. She tossed the garment over her shoulder without a backward glance and then in a slow, teasing writhe began pushing down her underpants. She giggled as he began grunting and snorting like some aroused beast, thumping the floor with his feet. Oooh, she said in a small voice, I think I hear a big bad bull behind me. Is the big bad bull going to get me?

She turned and saw him slumped in the armchair with his hands at his throat and his face gone dark, eyes huge and bloodshot, mouth open and working with a soft gagging, legs atwitch. She was speechless with cold horror as she thought that this could not be happening and that of course this was happening. Of course. Then his gagging ceased and his feet went still and his hands slid away from his throat. He lay in an awkward slump, his wide eyes suggesting great surprise that all the sudden losses of his loved ones in the past had not in the least prepared him for his own abrupt end.

An hour later the summoned doctor held up for them to see—Sófi and María Palomina and Bruno Tomás—the stuffed olive he had dislodged from Diego's windpipe.

I had been crying and crying, Sófi told John Roger, but when he held up that olive, well, you might not believe this, dear uncle, but I nearly laughed. I just barely caught myself. For a moment I was aghast. I was ashamed of myself for such a disrespectful impulse. And then in the next moment I was petrified. Because I realized the urge was insane and I knew that if I started to laugh I would never be able to stop, I would go forever crazy. It took all my will to keep from laughing.

You are too hard on yourself, John Roger said. The loss of a loved one can cause great emotional confusion. I think the impulse to laugh at such times is not so unusual as one might think.

And
I
think, she said, I was this close—she held up her hand, thumb and forefinger almost touching—to losing my mind. And I was
very
aware, Uncle John, that my mind was the only thing I had left to lose. So I refused to laugh. Otherwise, you would have known me only as your pitiful little niece in the crazyhouse.