The exploit of the bear, exaggerated and embellished to the point of impossibility, spread by word of mouth; with time, it crossed the Bering Strait, carried by traders in otter skins, and circulated as far away as Russia. Diego, Bernardo, and Garcia were not excused from the whipping administered by their parents, but no one could contest their fame as champions. They were very careful, oh yes, very careful not to mention White Owl’s sleeping potion. Their trophy was exhibited in a corral for several days, exposed to the jeers and rocks of the curious, while promoters looked for a bull worthy of fighting it, but Diego and Bernardo took pity on the captive and the night before the fight set it free.
In October, when the town was still talking about nothing else, they were attacked by pirates. They had sailed along the coast by night and at dawn they came ashore without warning, with the experience of many years of marauding. Their ship was a brigantine armed with fourteen light cannons; it had made the voyage from South America by swinging around Hawaii to take advantage of the prevailing winds that blew toward Alta California. They were on the prowl for ships laden with treasures from America destined for the royal coffers in Spain. These buccaneers rarely attacked on dry land the important cities could defend themselves, and the others were too poor but they had been at sea for an eternity without any luck, and the crew needed to take on fresh water and release a little energy. The captain decided to put in at Pueblo de los Angeles, although he didn’t expect to find anything interesting there, only basic supplies, liquor, and a little diversion for the lads. They were counting on not meeting any resistance, preceded as they were by the reputation they themselves made sure was well known, spine-chilling tales of blood and ashes, of how they chopped men into little pieces, gutted pregnant women, and strung children on grappling hooks and hung them from the masts like trophies.
They liked being thought of as barbaric. When they struck, all they had to do was announce their presence by firing off a few cannons, or come howling onto the scene, and the whole town would desert, leaving the pirates to sack the place without the inconvenience of a fight.
They dropped anchor near Pueblo de los Angeles and readied their assault. In this case, the brigantine’s cannons were useless; the shot would not reach that target. They disembarked in launches, knives between their teeth and swords in hand, like a horde of demons. Halfway to town they came across the de la Vega hacienda. The large adobe house, with its red roof tiles and purple bougainvillea creeping up the walls, its orange grove, its unmistakable air of prosperity and peace, was irresistible to those rough sailors, who for months had seen nothing but mossy water, wormy biscuits, and smelly dried beef. In vain their captain bawled that their objective was the town; his men rushed toward the hacienda, kicking aside dogs and shooting point-blank a pair of Indian gardeners who had the bad luck to get in their way.
Alejandro de la Vega was in Mexico City at the time, buying furniture more graceful than the crude pieces in his home, gold velvet for drapes, heavy silver for the table, place settings of English china, and crystal glasses from Austria. He hoped to impress Regina with these queenly gifts, to see whether she would give up her Indian ways and return to the European refinement he wanted for his family. His business affairs were thriving, and for the first time he could treat himself to living in the way a man of his breeding deserved. He had no way to suspect that as he was bargaining over the price of Turkish rugs, thirty-six soulless pirates were invading his home.
Regina was awakened by the furor of the dogs’ barking. Her room was in a small tower, the only bold feature in the low profile of the house.
Through her window, which had neither drapes nor shutters, she could see the timid light of early morning streaking the sky with orange. She threw a shawl around her shoulders and went out on the balcony in her bare feet to see what was disturbing the dogs, just as the first marauders forced open the wooden gate of the garden. It never occurred to her that they were pirates she had never seen one in the flesh but she didn’t stop to identify them. Diego, who at ten still shared his mother’s bed when his father wasn’t there, saw her race by in her nightgown. As she flew past,
Regina seized a well-kept sword and a dagger that had been hanging on the wall since her husband left his military career behind, and ran down the stairway yelling for the servants. Diego leaped out of bed and followed her. The doors of the house were oak, and in the absence of Alejandro de la Vega they had been bolted from the inside with an iron bar. The pirates’ rush was stopped by that invulnerable obstacle, and that gave Regina time to hand out the firearms stored in big chests and prepare a defense. Diego, still not completely awake, found himself watching a woman who looked only vaguely familiar to him. In seconds, his mother had been transformed into Daughter-of-Wolf. Her hair was standing on end and the ferocious gleam in her eyes gave her the look of a woman possessed; her jaw was set and her lips drawn back, and she was foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. Toypurnia barked orders to the servants in the Indian tongue, and was brandishing a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other when the shutters that protected the windows on the main floor gave way and the first pirates spilled into the house. Even over the clamor of the assault, Diego heard a cry, more jubilation than terror, issue from the earth, course through his mother’s body, and shake the walls of the house. The sight of that woman barely covered by the thin cloth of a nightgown rushing to meet them and wielding two weapons with a strength impossible in someone her size shocked the pirates for a second or two. In that time, the servants fired their weapons. Two pillagers fell face forward, and a third staggered, but there was no time to reload; another dozen were already swarming through the windows. Diego picked up a heavy iron candlestick and ran to his mother’s defense as she retreated toward the big hall. She had lost the sword and was holding the dagger in both hands, swinging blindly against the vandals closing in on her. Diego thrust the candlestick between the legs of one man, throwing him to the floor, but before he could club him, a brutal kick to his chest slammed him against the wall. He never knew how long he lay there, befuddled, because later versions of the attack were contradictory. Some said it lasted for hours, but others said that within a few minutes the pirates had killed or wounded everyone in their path, destroyed what they couldn’t carry, and before they continued on to Los Angeles set fire to the furniture.
When Diego regained consciousness, the ruffians were still running through the house looking for loot, and smoke from the fire was drifting into the room. Despite the tremendous pain in his chest, which left him gasping for breath, Diego got to his feet and stumbled forward, coughing and calling his mother. He found her beneath the large table in the great hall, with her batiste gown soaked in blood, but lucid and with open eyes. “Hide, son!” she ordered in a strong voice, and promptly fainted. Diego took her arms and with a superhuman effort, considering the broken ribs, tugged her to the fireplace. He managed to open the secret door that only he and Bernardo knew existed, and dragged her into the tunnel. He closed the false door from the other side and sat there in the dark with his mother’s head in his lap, whispering, “Mama, Mama,” and weeping and praying to God and the spirits of her tribe not to let her die.
Bernardo, too, was in bed when the pirates attacked. He slept in his mother’s room in the servants’ quarters at the opposite end of the hacienda. Their space was larger than the windowless cells of the other domestic workers because it was also used as the ironing room, a task that Ana never delegated. Alejandro de la Vega demanded that his tucked shirt fronts be perfect, and she took pride in ironing them personally. Aside from the narrow bed with its straw mattress, and a battered chest in which they kept their few belongings, the room was furnished with a long worktable and a metal container for the coals that heated the irons, along with a pair of enormous baskets of clean wash that Ana planned to iron the next day. The floor was dirt; a wool serape served as a door; light and air entered through two small windows. Bernardo had not been awakened by the yells of the pirates or by the shots on the far side of the house, only when Ana shook him. He thought the earth was quaking, as it had before, but his mother gave him no time to speculate; she grabbed his arm, swept him up with the strength of a tornado, and in one stride was across the room. With a brutal shove she stuffed him inside one of the large baskets. “Whatever happens, don’t move. You hear me?” Ana’s tone was so forbidding that it seemed to Bernardo that she was speaking to him with a hidden loathing. He had never seen her agitated. His mother’s sweet nature was legend; she was always quiet and content, even though she had few reasons to be happy. She devoted herself exclusively to the task of adoring her son and serving her patrones, in line with her humble existence and with no resentment in her heart. In that moment, however, the last she would ever share with Bernardo, she was hard as ice. She took a handful of clothing and covered the boy, pushing him down in the basket. From there, wrapped in the white shadows of the clothing, choked with terror and the smell of starch, Bernardo heard the cries, cursing, and loud laughter of the men who surged into the room where Ana was waiting with death already inscribed upon her forehead, ready to distract the men for as long it took to keep them from finding her son.
The pirates were in a rush, and one look around told them that there was nothing of value in that servant’s room. Maybe they would just have glanced in and turned away, but there stood that brown-skinned woman, arms akimbo, defying them with suicidal determination: round Indian face, midnight black mantle of hair, generous hips, and firm breasts. For a year and four months they had been roving the seas without the consolation of even looking at a woman. For an instant they thought they were seeing a mirage, like so many that had tormented them on the high seas, but then Ana’s sweet scent enveloped them and they forgot their hurry. They tore off the rough penitent’s gown that covered her body and threw themselves on her. Ana did not struggle.
She bore in dead silence everything they wanted to do to her. When she fell, her head was so close to Bernardo’s basket that he could count, one by one, his mother’s faint sighs eclipsed by the brutish panting of her assaulters.
At no moment did the boy move beneath the pile of clothes that covered him; there, paralyzed with horror, he lived the torture of his mother.
He was curled up in the basket, his mind a blank, sweating bile, shaken with nausea. After an eternity, he became aware of a deathly silence and the smell of smoke. He waited until he couldn’t wait any longer because he was choking, then quietly called Ana. No answer. He called a couple of times more; still nothing. Finally he dared peek out.
Clouds of smoke were billowing through the doorway, but as yet there was no fire. Numb from tension and immobility, Bernardo had to struggle to climb out of the basket. He saw his mother where the men had forced her to the floor, naked, her long black hair spread out like a fan on the ground and her neck slit from ear to ear. The boy sat down beside her and took her hand, calm, and silent. He would not speak again for many years.
That was how they found him, mute and stained with his mother’s blood, hours later when the pirates were already back at sea. The town of Pueblo de los Angeles was putting out fires and counting its dead. No one thought of going to see what had happened at the de la Vega hacienda until Padre Mendoza, struck by a premonition so vivid that he could not ignore it, went with half a dozen neophytes to take charge.
Flames had burned the furniture and licked some of the beams, but the house was sound, and by the time he arrived the fire was burning itself out. The assault left a balance of several wounded and five dead, including Ana, whom they found just as her murderers had left her.
“God help us!” Padre Mendoza exclaimed when he came upon that tragedy.
He covered Ana’s body with a blanket and picked Bernardo up in his strong arms. The child was petrified, his eyes staring and his face frozen in a spasm that locked his jaws. “Where are Regina and Diego?” the missionary asked, but Bernardo gave no sign of hearing. The priest left the boy in the hands of an Indian servant, who cuddled him in her lap, rocking him like a baby as she sang a mournful song in her native tongue, while Padre Mendoza went through the house, searching for the missing.
Time passed without change in the tunnel; because there was no daylight, it was impossible to judge time in that eternal darkness.
Diego could not tell what was going on in the house because he couldn’t hear sounds or smell the smoke of the fire. He waited without knowing what he was waiting for, while Regina slipped in and out of consciousness, drained. Inconsolable, fearing he would disturb his mother, the boy sat motionless despite the nearly unbearable prickling in his legs and the dagger like stab in his chest every time he drew a breath. From time to time he would be overcome by fatigue, but he would immediately awaken, sunk in darkness and dizzy with pain. He felt as if he were freezing, and several times he tried to flex his arms, but he would sink back into a hopeless languor and start to nod again, floating in a cottony fog. This semiconscious state lasted most of the day, until finally Regina moaned and moved. That startled him awake. Knowing that his mother was alive gave him new life; a wave of happiness swept over him, and he bent to cover her face with delirious kisses. With infinite care, Diego lifted her head, which had turned to marble, and lowered it gently to the ground. After several minutes of trying to move his legs, he was able to crawl off and look for the candles that he and Bernardo had stored in their ongoing quest for okahue. He heard his grandmother’s voice asking in her Indian tongue what the five essential virtues were, but the only one he could remember was courage.