Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (47 page)

Could we become so great and strong as to survive the malodorous embrace of those who love us beyond death, we would not need their ghostly services. And the man who scarcely fears at all when his dead brother, instead of answering him, draws rotted hands about his throat, is nearly insusceptible to blackmail. Agustín had already learned how to be despised as poor, dark and criminal. The day they cut off his brother's head something sickened in him. The night he became a catamite he felt as blindly bewildered as the corpse which wonders whether it has been buried alive or is truly dead. But the foul breaths of his new friends, the fungus on their skin, never mind the stink of algae and sewage from that hole in the floor; the grand and lonely hatreds he already wore; and the sunrises glowing in the latrine hole where the sea lightened into turquoise and small fry swam mindlessly round and round; all these improved him into a befitting instrument; then came the pestilences which could not kill him, although they carried off seven others in that cell. Now, for a fact, he grew “realistic.” The second time was not so bad as the first; by the fifth he knew better than to struggle; the best way was to give them satisfaction so that it would be quickly over. Juan and Rafael generally hurt him the most; Leopoldo was the kindest. Agustín would never come into his growth, it seemed; he had no more power to defend himself than a little girl. Salvador would have protected him, even with his life; indeed, in a sense he had—the very reason he was gone forever. That fatal quarrel with Fray de Castro had been occasioned by the victim's
refusal either to accept Agustín as an apprentice or to allow Salvador a half day's leave in hopes of finding some master for the boy; the priest remarked, not without reason, that Herlinda had already siphoned off enough of Salvador's labor; it was when he called her a succubus that the shovel struck him. So the boy drew himself ever more apart, not only from the other inmates of that crowded sweltering vault, but even from himself; and his appointed stripes no longer prevented him from meditating on the idea that the remains of some relative—her skeleton hand, for instance—might retain some virtue which could aid the living. Furthermore, he thought on the grand mountain of silver, and the regal Amazon of Ziñogava who wept silver tears. Once he more completely forgot the stepped Indian walls assembled from round river stones, the Spanish flag over the Baluarte, the smoke rising from the old Indian pyramid, the cruelty of canon law and the chittering and thudding of birds and lizards in the tree of yellow berries, the fishing nets on the wall by Boca del Río and the way Herlinda used to smile when she brushed her long hair away from her face, reality bled out of the world; and he dreamed about silver, which might for all its silverness keep a bluish or golden-brown tint, and which although it seems to reflect pinkness remains white in its deepest grooves.

His neighbors were gambling with lousy rag-scraps. The winner got to strike the loser. Agustín dreamed out his impossible escape: The iron door would screech open, the guards would fall dead, and somehow he would ascend the wall, which resembled the skin of a piebald albino.

In that cell lay a certain Indian whose ears had been lopped off for some offense against the Holy Sacraments; since he never in all those years broke silence, his cellmates jested that the executioner must also have cut out his tongue, as could easily have been the case. He was the only one who had not incurred Agustín's hatred, not that he had ever defended the boy—who took him as a model. Staring at the wall, those two said no word. Agustín heard his cellmates reckoning up the days as well as they were able; they decided that this might be the first of May, at which he closed his eyes, remembering the Ribbon Dance which is performed on that date; once when he was small his brother sat him on his shoulders so that he could see across the thousand-headed crowd in the
zócalo,
and enjoy the dancers; there were certain nuns who could sing
and play the guitar, and although he was too young to understand the words, the melodies tickled him; and afterward his brother gave him a slice of cake. Closing his eyes, he saw the arches of San Juan de Ulúa receding and receding; he had seen them only that once, and it seemed that if he could but count them accurately he might save himself; therefore as he lay in the sticky whitestained cell, his bitterness growing upward like one of the stalagmites around him, he tabulated arch-shadows on the grey-pebbled pavement which he had so briefly trodden: one, two, three, and then the fourth shadow-bar was darker and wider, after which came the fifth, beyond which he could not certainly see any shadows, but noted two more sharp-edged archways, although it might have been three, and the blotched pallor after those might or might not have been a wall.

Sometimes Rodrigo picked over the legend of Chucho el Rojo, the thieves' hero, whose cellmate La Changa paid off a guard to get him a ship, from which he swam away, oiled against sharks, and then travelled overland to Mexico, where he was received by his lovely mistress, Matilde de Frizac. What La Changa got out of it no one mentioned. Rodrigo and Bernardo were going to get themselves younger, lighter-skinned mistresses than Matilde; they would rob great ships of cocoa, vanilla and silver. This dream was as a breezeblown palmhead waving behind one of San Juan de Ulúa's moldy stone walls. As for Agustín, he pretended that the bootsteps of soldiers on the low many-arched bridges, or the faraway hoofsteps of horses on those blocks of out-fanning coral, were somehow conveying him away from here. In summer Fray de Castro used to keep his dark cloak clasped only at the throat, falling away to his ankles and showing the dirty-pale robe beneath. To live is to live in dirt, it seems. What did he care about Matilde de Frizac, especially if Rodrigo liked her? In six more years he'd be twenty-five—still young, perhaps, but how nitrous by then his heart! He no longer fever-dreamed of kissing any pretty blackamoor wench who wore earbobs of jade and a fine silver necklace. What he wished for most of all was revenge—on these fine villains here to whose mercy he must pretend to feel beholden, on the uniformed rogue who had whipped him, on all the guards, soldiers, officials, mariners and architects connected with San Juan de Ulúa, and on the men who had executed his brother. If only he could trample down that
damned judge, and make off with the
procurador
's head! By the fiftieth time the others used him, it seemed ordinary. The falconets and brass lombards were booming out to honor some admiral in the harbor. To his cellmates he continued peaceful and obedient, having no hope of making his way here were he anything else. (Had he come more quickly into his growth he could have looked them in the face, and known their menace and their dingy monotonous malice, their self-hating corruption, which pleased itself only by blighting others and then but for an instant.) He never spoke of his own accord, and answered others as seldom as possible. Feeling insulted, they treated him with increasing cruelty. Just as Dorantes de Carranza used to amuse his guests by arranging bullfighting matches against crocodiles whose jaws had been tied shut, so Bernardo or Rodrigo liked to organize a certain game, played four or five prisoners at a time, of sitting on Agustín's arms and legs, then tormenting and goading him. While they used him, they called him
slave, whore,
and, worst of all,
woman
. Sometimes when he crept toward the food trough they liked to shove his face in it until he choked. On a certain night when they commenced to threaten and insult him, he attacked Juan Hernández, who had too often bragged of having once discovered a golden frog ornament in the ground; and because he injured this Juan in his ribs, they punished him with a broken nose and several other tokens of their comradeship, followed by the usual outcome. But Agustín found himself less afraid than before, or perhaps simply more indifferent, as if the steamy, moldy years in San Juan de Ulúa had rotted away some of his heart. And although his indifference enraged them, it might also have saved him at times, since they shared it. Once they had satisfied themselves, and left him facedown on the floor, he kept still until they slept, then hit back, biting and kicking. Again they subdued him, slamming his head against the wall until his hair was wet with blood. They left him to live or die, and he laughed. An hour later, when they had forgotten him sufficiently to again memorialize all the women they had defended or attacked with their daggers, he sprang on Bernardo and thumbed out one of his eyes. Whether they would murder him was a question, to be sure, but he did not care, as they well perceived. When they let him alone, which was easiest, he did the same for them.— He's not afraid! he heard them say, and then he knew that he was correct. He informed Bernardo
that next time he would kill him, and Bernardo said nothing. Thus his life got simplified through hatred. No better than a slave before, he was no worse now.— Sometimes in the winter they could hear the
nortes
blow around their prison, and sometimes they could even hear rain. They heard the cannon; once in awhile they heard voices.— In the summer of his third year, nauseously grinding his forehead against the nitrous walls in quest of any coolness which might exude from this earth, he swooned into the searing well of his sickness, surrendering to nightmares, or at least enduring them, since he could do nothing else; when he awoke, he seemed to spy a greyish-white bird departing from his face. Gazing down into that latrine-hole beneath which the water flowed as bright and green as the jade ornaments on Chalchihuitlicue's skirt, he longed for light more fiercely than ever. He seemed to hear faraway people chanting in church like slaves pulling a rope. Again and again he dreamed of his brother rising back out of earth, whole again—but it is seldom we realize our dreams entirely. By then he was stronger and uglier, like his wishes; and from time to time, as inmates died, the guards threw in fresh young boys more gratifying than he to his companions' tastes. Just as Aztecs used to torture children, to ensure that they would weep before getting sacrificed to Tlaloc the rain god—for who would deny that tears are similar to rain, and therefore might bring it?—thus these cruel men, being diseased by rage, made sure that their pretty objects shrieked out in pain and shame, while Agustín, who was commencing to achieve a sinister reputation, lay in the darkest corner, turning over and over everything he had ever heard of necromancy, in order to call back his elder brother from the dead. Silently he worked his arms and legs hour by hour, in order to strengthen them, and perhaps someday to accomplish his deliverance. (Salvador had been terribly strong—all the more so when anger overtook him.) Each grief, humiliation and injury was now as precious to him as the thorn from Christ's crown which we keep in our cathedral here in Veracruz; because each one strengthened his righteousness. Yet all the while he felt indifferent. None of his emotions were real to him. His self-pride grew as glorious as the silver cross on the Inquisition's crimson banner. Perhaps he would kill each man in this cell, one by one. He knew he'd get Rodrigo at least. Even that nonentity of an earless Indian maddened him now, but he'd
rise beyond all that; he'd wear a pleated doublet of scarlet or emerald, sashed tightly round his narrow waist. He'd sin with as many women as possible, preferably without their consent. Sometimes he could hear the calls of the leather and sugar vendors on the beach, but then a white mist rose up out of the latrine-hole and wrapped him soundlessly in himself. He drowsed. Meanwhile his companions preyed upon a new convict named Luís, who had been imprisoned for defaulting on his
alcabala
tax, and next morning they all meditated on the strange expression of peace on the suicided boy's face, his skin so smooth, his dark eyes sleepily half-closed, his lips parted on the right side and shut on the left, so that as he lay there his mouth appeared to be a sweet fruit which excited the villains no end, so that they began to sing:

Much do I care for my María;

how lovely is this woman!

Agustín lay watching, as calmly as a conquistador blowing on his matchlock fuse. The next time that Bernardo crawled to him, insinuatingly lecherous, while the others began singing “The Whores of Hermosillo,” Agustín did by him as Rodrigo had done by his light-o'-love, so that Bernardo went out of this world. When the guards came, no one would say what had happened. They all got beaten, then thrown back into the cell. Agustín was now a man. They all lay watching the white stalactites grow—a finger's width grander already since the boy's arrival.

In the seventh year of his captivity, while his good friends lay arguing over who had committed the greatest sin (Rodrigo hoped someday to sit at the Devil's right hand), Agustín prayed to Satan so successfully that his prayer passed through hell's keyhole, and at once the head flew up through the latrine-hole and landed on his shoulder.

Is the soul, as Socrates sometimes posited, a life-bearer, or is it merely the body's contingent prisoner, whose release when the flesh perishes merely brings about its own doom? And was this flying head a spirit, an animated fragment or an alien demon hiding in Salvador's semblance?— All that I can tell you is that for the first time in several years Agustín
smiled. (As for the head, of course, it never stopped grinning.) It was a pleasant enough reunion. No matter that Salvador had not preserved his old appearance; we all diminish in time, and may even sacrifice a few appendages; the main thing is to get on with our projects and not complain overmuch.

Now the other men cringed back in terror and cried out: Agustín, save us, brother!

Shall I? laughed the head.

No, said Agustín.

So the head whirred through the air and bit them one after the other, mincing their throats and necks with its long yellow teeth, and they all were dead, excepting only the silent Indian, who lay so afflicted with fever that he could barely open his eyes.

Your pleasure? asked the head.