Alejandro de la Vega took enormous satisfaction from the fact that his son, whom he had thought to be hopelessly irresponsible, was finally turning into the heir he had dreamed of from the day the boy was born.
He renewed his plans to educate him to be a gentleman, plans that had been postponed during the whirlwind of restoring the hacienda. He had considered sending his son to a Catholic school in Mexico City, since the situation in Europe was still unstable now thanks to Napoleon Bonaparte but Regina stirred up such a fuss at the idea of being separated from Diego that Alejandro did not bring the subject up again for two years. In the meantime he involved his son in running the hacienda, and found that he was much cleverer than his performance in school would suggest. Not only did he untangle the jumble of notes and numbers in the account books, he increased the family income by perfecting his father’s formula for soap and the recipe for smoking meat that he had produced only after countless attempts. Diego cut back on the lye in the soap and added milk, and suggested that they give samples to the ladies of the colony, who acquired such luxuries from the American sailors, violating the ban on commerce that Spain had imposed on her colonies. It didn’t matter that the soap was smuggled, everyone looked the other way; the inconvenience came from having to wait so long for the boats. The milk soaps were a great success, and the same was true of the smoked meat once Diego was able to dilute the odor of mule sweat. Alejandro de la Vega began to treat his son with respect, and to consult him on certain matters.
During that period, Bernardo told Diego in their private sign language, and with notes on the slate, that one of the ranchers, Juan Alcazar, Carlos’s father, had expanded his boundaries beyond what was shown on paper. The Spaniard had herded his cattle into the mountains where one of the many tribes displaced by the colonists had taken refuge. Diego rode out there with his brother, and they got there in time to see the trail bosses, backed by a detachment of soldiers, burn the Indians’ huts. Nothing was left of the village but ashes. Despite their terror at having witnessed such a scene, Diego and Bernardo ran to intervene.
Without consulting one another, as if of one will, they placed themselves between the horses of the aggressors and their Indian victims. They would have been trampled unmercifully had one of the riders not recognized the son of Alejandro de la Vega. Even so, they drove them out of their way with their whips. From a short distance, the two boys watched, horrified, as the few Indians who stood firm were beaten down. The chief, an old man, was hanged from a tree as a warning to the others. The attackers rounded up the men capable of working in the fields or serving in the army and led them away, roped together like animals. The elders, the women, and the children were driven off to wander through the forests, hungry and desperate. Nothing of this was new; it happened more and more frequently, and no one dared intervene except Padre Mendoza, but his charges fell on the deaf ears of the creaking and remote bureaucracy in Spain. Documents that took years by sea were lost on the dusty desks of judges who had never set foot in America and were entangled in the flimflam of petty lawyers, and in the end, even if the magistrates ruled in favor of the Indians, there was no one on the other side of the ocean to carry out justice.
In Monterey, the governor ignored complaints because Indians were not his priority. The officials in charge of the garrison were part of the problem, as they lent the services of their soldiers to the white settlers. They did not doubt the moral superiority of the whites who, like them, had come from far away with the sole intention of civilizing and Christianizing that savage land. Diego went to talk with his father. He found him, as always in the late afternoon, studying long-ago battles in his huge books, the one remnant of the military ambitions of his youth. He liked to set up his armies of lead soldiers on a long table according to the descriptions in the books, a passion he had never been able to interest Diego in. The boy blurted out what he had seen with Bernardo, but Alejandro de la Vega’s indifference quickly deflated him.
“What do you propose that I do, son?”
“But, senor, you are the alcalde.”
“The division of land is not in my jurisdiction, Diego, and I do not have any authority to control the soldiers.”
“But el’s-senor Alcazar killed and kidnapped Indians!” Diego stuttered, choked with emotion. “Forgive my insistence, senor, but how can you permit such abuses?”
“I will speak with Don Juan Alcazar, but I doubt that he will listen.”
Alejandro replied, moving a line of his soldiers.
Alejandro de la Vega kept his promise. He did more than speak with the rancher; he took his complaint to the garrison, where he wrote a report to the governor and sent the accusation to Spain. At every step he kept his son informed, since he was doing it only because of him.
Alejandro knew the class system too well to harbor any hope of righting the wrong. Pressed by Diego, he tried to help the victims, who had been turned into miserable vagabonds, by offering them protection on his own hacienda. Just as he expected, it was all in vain. Juan Alcazar annexed the Indians’ lands, the tribe disappeared without a trace, and the matter was never mentioned again. Diego de la Vega never forgot that lesson; the bad taste of justice denied would remain forever in the deepest part of his memory, and would emerge again and again, determining the course of his life.
The celebration of Diego’s fifteenth birthday was cause for the first party held in the big house of the hacienda. Regina, who had always been opposed to opening her doors, decided that this was the perfect occasion to make all the mean-spirited people who had scorned her for so many years bite their tongues. She not only agreed that her husband should invite anyone he pleased but herself took the responsibility of organizing the festivities. For the first time in her life she visited the smuggler’s boats to stock up on necessities, and she set a dozen women to sewing and embroidering. It did not escape Diego that it was also Bernardo’s birthday. Alejandro de la Vega pointed out that although the mute boy was like a member of the family, he could not offend their guests by seating them with an Indian. For once, he said, Bernardo would have to take his place among the servants. They never had to discuss the matter further because Bernardo eliminated the problem by writing on his slate that he planned to visit White Owl’s village. Diego did not try to change his mind; he knew that his brother wanted to see Light-in-the-Night, and he also knew that he should not push his father, who had already agreed to let Bernardo travel to Spain with him.
Plans to send Diego to school in Mexico City had changed with the arrival of a letter from Tomas de Romeu, Alejandro de la Vega’s oldest friend in the world. When they were young, they had fought together in the war in Italy, and for more than twenty years they had kept in touch through sporadic letters. While Alejandro was fulfilling his destiny in America, Tomas had married a Catalan heiress and had devoted himself to the good life, until she died in childbirth, at which point he had no alternative but to come to his senses and take charge of his two daughters and what little remained of his wife’s fortune. In his letter, Tomas de Romeu commented that Barcelona was still the most interesting city in Spain, and that it offered the best possible education for a young man, because they were living in fascinating times. In 1808 Napoleon had invaded Spain with a hundred and fifty thousand men; he forced the king to abdicate in favor of his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, all of which had seemed outrageous to Alejandro de la Vega until he received his friend’s letter. Tomas explained that only the primitive patriotism of ignorant masses stirred up by minor clergy and a few fanatics could oppose the liberal ideas of the French, who wanted to bring an end to feudalism and religious oppression. Their influence, he said, was a fresh, renewing wind that was sweeping away medieval institutions like the Inquisition and the privileges of nobles and military. In his letter, Tomas de Romeu offered Diego the hospitality of his home, where he would be looked after and loved like a son. He could complete his education in the School of Humanities, which although religious in orientation-and he was no friend of the cassock had an excellent reputation. He added, as the final enticement, that the boy could study with the famed fencing master Manuel Escalante, who had settled in Barcelona after traveling through Europe, teaching his art. That last carrot was all Diego needed to keep begging his father so insistently to let him go to Spain that in the end Alejandro relented, but his surrender was more the result of exhaustion than conviction, since his friend Tomas could not offer any argument that lessened his dismay at knowing that his country was invaded by foreigners. Father and son were very careful not to tell Regina that, worse yet, Spain was overrun by guerrilla fighters a bloody form of warfare devised by the people to combat Napoleon’s troops. Though not effective in recapturing territory, the guerillas could dart out and sting the enemy like wasps, exhausting their resources and their patience.
The birthday sarao began with a mass conducted by Padre Mendoza horse races, and a bullfight, in which Diego himself made several passes with the cape before the professional torero entered the ring. Those events were followed by a performance of itinerant acrobats, and the festivities ended with artificial fireworks and a ball. Meals were served to five hundred guests for three days in accordance to social class: pure-blooded Spanish, comfortably shaded beneath a grape-laden arbor, at the main tables set with tablecloths embroidered in Tenerife;
“decent people” dressed in their Sunday best at tables to the side but still in the shade; Indians in full sun on the patios where the meat was roasted, the tortillas toasted, and pots of chili and mole simmered all day. The guests came from the four cardinal points, and for the first time in history there was congested carriage traffic along the Camino Real. Not one girl from a respectable family missed the party; every mother had an eye on the only heir of Alejandro de la Vega even though he had one-quarter Indian blood. Among the candidates was Lolita Pulido, the niece of Don Juan Alcazar, a gentle, coquettish fourteen, very different from her cousin Carlos. Even though Alejandro de la Vega detested Juan Alcazar because of the incident with the Indians, he had to invite him and all his family because he was one of the important men of the town. Diego did not speak to the rancher or his son Carlos, but he was attentive to Lolita. He did not see any reason that the girl should be punished for the sins of her uncle. Besides, she had been sending him love notes for a year through her chaperone, which he had not answered, partly out of shyness but also because he had wanted to stay as far away as possible from any member of the Alcazar family, even a niece.
The mothers of marriageable girls were greatly disappointed when they realized that Diego was not even remotely ready to think about a sweetheart; he was much younger than one might expect of a fifteen-year-old. At a time when other sons of dons were growing mustaches and serenading, Diego still had not started shaving, and he swallowed his tongue when he had to talk to a girl.
The governor came from Monterey, bringing with him a Count Orloff, a relative of the czarina of Russia and the man she had put in charge of the Alaska territory. He was nearly seven feet tall, with impossibly blue eyes, and he was decked out in the colorful uniform of the Hussars: all in scarlet, a short, white-fur-trimmed jacket over his shoulder, his chest adorned with ornamental gold cord, and a plumed bicorne in his hand. He was quite the handsomest man ever seen in that part of the world. In Moscow Orloff had heard the story of a pair of white bears that Diego de la Vega had trapped alive and dressed in women’s clothing when he was only eight years old. Diego saw no reason to relieve him of his error, but Alejandro, with his overzealous love of precision, hastened to explain that it wasn’t two bears, but one, and one with dark far at that there was no other kind in California; that Diego had not captured it alone, but with the help of two friends; that he had pasted the hat on with tar; and that he had been ten, not eight, as the story went. Carlos Alcazar and his gang, by then infamous bullies, passed almost unnoticed in the mass of guests, but not Garcia, who had had a few too many drinks and was publicly wailing over Diego’s leaving. At that time, the tavern owner’s son was the size of a buffalo, but he was still the same frightened little boy, and he still admired Diego with the same bedazzled allegiance. The presence of the splendid Russian nobleman and the enormous expense of the party had temporarily silenced the evil tongues in the colony.
Regina took pleasure in seeing the same snobs who had always disdained her bow and kiss her hand. Alejandro de la Vega, completely alien to such pettiness, walked among his guests with pride in his social position, his hacienda, his son, and for once, his wife, who appeared at the ball dressed like a duchess in a blue velvet dress and a lace mantilla from Brussels.
Bernardo had galloped two days up into the mountains to his tribe’s village to say good-bye to Light-in-the-Night. She was waiting for him; the Indians’ “mail” had spread the news of his coming trip throughout the province. She took his hand and led him to the river to ask what lay beyond the sea and when he thought to return. He sketched a rough map on the ground with a stick but he could not help her understand the enormous distances that separated her village from that mythic land of Spain, because he himself could not imagine them. Padre Mendoza had showed him a globe of the world, but that painted sphere had no connection with reality. As for when he would return, he signed to her that he wasn’t sure, but that it would be many years. “In that case, I want you to take something of me to remember,” said Light-in-the-Night. With eyes gleaming with ageless wisdom, the girl took off her necklaces of seeds and feathers, the red sash around her waist, her rabbit-skin boots, and her kidskin tunic, and stood naked in the golden light filtering through the leaves of the trees. Bernardo felt that his blood was turning to molasses, that amazement and gratitude were strangling him, that his soul was escaping in sighs. He did not know what to do, standing before that extraordinary creature, so different from him, so absolutely beautiful, and offering herself like the most extraordinary gift. Light-in-the-Night took one of his hands and placed it on her breast. She took the other hand and slipped it behind her waist, then she lifted her arms and began to undo her hair, which fell like a cascade of crow feathers across her shoulders.