Last Stories and Other Stories

JUNE EIGHTEENTH

If you appreciate the way that the double-headed Austrian eagle manages to bear both sword and orb in its claws, then you may well be an adorer of the fleet, like Massimiliano, whose bedroom resembled a ship’s cabin. How he loved to sail around Istria! Archduke and Admiral, lepidopterist and orange-gardener, he might have lived contented, had not his wife persuaded him otherwise. Indeed, he used to say that all he wanted out of life was a castle and garden by the sea. Instead, he entered a story told on tin-coated iron. (He was not unlike the Holy Child of Atocha, who was carried to Mexico by the Dominicans.) Once more he gazed back into the pale blue harbor, with Trieste glowing white on the underside of that blue peninsula. Then the Novara carried him away. He became Maximilian. Charlotte stood beside him on the foredeck, excited to finally become Carlota. To this day some Italians remain proud of him, at least to an extent. In Trieste his verdigrised statue stands high upon a cylindrical and octagonal bronze plinth studded with high-breasted angels, and there is even a bare-chested youth whom I first took for an Egyptian in a quasi-Pharaonic headdress, although now I wonder whether he could be one of the Emperor’s grateful Mexican subjects?

A soldier from the Confederate States of America once observed: Owing to some radical defect in the Mexican character unfitting them for self government the country has been cursed by one of republican form…

Fortunately, Maximilian now prepared to govern for them. He made it understood that his measures would have an entirely friendly character.

We remember him for many good qualities, not least his china blue eyes and beautiful teeth.

Matters ran on pretty well for the first two years, wrote an Englishman in his service. French bayonets kept the country quiet, and the roads open. But presently certain Mexicans began to fall short of their Emperor’s hopes. I cannot tell you whether the blue and red of Maximilian’s army were inappropriate colors for those latitudes, or whether his desire to lead the natives out of anarchy exceeded their benighted comprehension. He assured them: No Mexican has such warm feelings for his country and its progress as I. I wish you could have seen him with his blank white forehead and his nautical side-whiskers and his squinting eyes, whose gaze was outglittered by the watch-chain peeping out of his dark vest. Beside him, Carlota in her white wedding-cake dress smiled nervously upon the world. He determined to keep only Mexicans in his government, wore white, abolished inherited debt, enacted ten-year serfdom for negroes, but only under certain conditions and with the best intentions; imported pianos, upheld the nationalization of Church property, established a minimum wage and collected butterflies. Soon the Empress was writing to France: We see nothing to respect in this country, and shall act in such a way as to change it. He restored the Palacio Nacional. His soldiers dug ever more convoluted earthworks isolated by ditches; established outlying piquets whose sentries lay ready to fire upon silence; rigged up abatis of prickly pears; marched out battalions of jet-black Turcos in Zouave dress; levied any number of ablebodied natives to serve in his Guardia Rural, while Carlota, twenty-five years old, clasped her lovely long-fingered hands, assuring her acquaintances in Belgium: If necessary, I can lead an army. Do not laugh at me. Meanwhile her husband, who was already going bald, signed the October Decree, which saved the inconvenience of trying guerrillas before executing them. But no matter how valiantly he led, anarchy marched along at his heels. Indeed, so singular is Mexican gratitude that he was practically alone even before the French troops sailed home; then he found himself defeated, surrounded, betrayed at Querétaro, and imprisoned in that half-devoured city, brought to trial at the Iturbide Theater (in absentia, since they had courteously granted him a certificate of illness) and duly condemned to be shot on the nineteenth of June, 1867, along with his generals Mejía and Miramón.

As might have been expected, at dusk on the eighteenth he saw small hope of sleeping. This displeased him, for he wished to meet his executioners with that calm and decisive courtesy which demands a certain cast of face; it should not be said of the Emperor of Mexico that he appeared hollow-eyed at the end. In fact he had been unhealthy for years, but the valets who shaved and dressed this man had preserved him from his mirror-image. Like many of us, he believed himself somewhat younger than he was. His narrow pink face, whose eyelids were a trifle sleepy and whose chin hung too close beneath the mouth, had been widened by blond side-whiskers, and the matching beard extended his chin to normal length. Thus Maximilian at thirty; and if in truth he was closer to thirty-five, he remained as facile as ever on a horse, and nearly as attractive to women. He retained the confidence of a fresh and handsome man. It was this that he aspired to keep until the end. Insomnia could never undermine his dignity, but two or three hours of repose would increase the luster with which he smiled upon the executioners.

If the word “noblehearted” brings a smile to any reader nowadays, so much the better, for Maximilian possessed precisely this old-fashioned quality, which was precious in its time, no matter that disuse has rendered it ludicrous. Turning over his feelings, he found, as he would have expected, no anger toward the seven soldiers who would shoot him, and he thanked God for that. Tomorrow he would forgive them, ask forgiveness in return and bestow a gold ounce on each man. As for the two who must die at his side, he compassionated them more than himself. That afternoon he had penned a telegram to his triumphant enemy Juárez, requesting that they be spared; let their punishment be upon him alone. No answer came. Well, so it must be. He was never to know that the kind and loyal Mejía could have saved himself, but chose his Emperor over his own desperate wife, who next morning would pursue the carriage, screaming and raising up her baby, until the soldiers thrust her down with their bayonets. Another thing he never learned, thanks to his abstention from the trial, was that two years ago Miramón had proposed to come over to Juárez. At any rate, on that eighteenth of June all three were good friends. — Although she had tearfully entreated his life at the knees of Juárez, who in his usual colorless way replied that he could do nothing for her, Miramón’s wife was more composed than Mejía’s; indeed, her resolution had brought the Emperor to tears a day or two before. Miramón must have been moved in his own way, for, kissing her hand, he remarked: I am here because I would not listen to this woman’s advice, to which Maximilian bitterly replied: Feel no remorse; I am here because I did listen to my wife.

Yes, he sorrowed for them, but they would pull through; and of course he believed so deeply in that other antique thing called “renown” that the prospect of monuments comprised the supreme consolation; it would hardly have occurred to the Emperor that they might feel differently.

He had prepared his will, although one of the witnesses’ signatures was lacking. Doctor Basch was to convey his rosary and wedding ring to the adoring mother who had advised him to stick it out in Mexico, and his gold medal from the Empress Eugénie to the old Empress of Brazil, the mother of his truest love. His corpse would be embalmed, so that his mother could see it.

For his mother he felt extremely sorry. Of course she would manage to rule herself. As for Carlota (whom he still called Charlotte), he would have dreaded the prospect of somebody’s bringing sad news within the ken of her wide yet small eyes, for ever since Napoleon and the Pope had declined her personal entreaties to maintain the Empire, insanity infested her peculiarly flat-topped head, and her long white hands sometimes tore at the air. Fortunately, Maximilian imagined her to be at peace; for Mejía comforted him with the fable that she had died at Miramar.

Sitting on the camp bed, he stared wearily at the ivory crucifix, which offered so little and so much, until his eyes closed for an instant. In the adjacent cell, Miramón was coughing, while the moon rose, and Austrian warships waited uselessly at Veracruz. It was half-past eight-o’-clock.

He had thought himself to be past bitterness, but presently, like mosquitoes singing round his head, bad memories rose up: the trial’s thirteen indictments, each an insult; the horribly gentle eyes of Fray Soria, who had accompanied the lawyers when they brought the verdict to his cell, while in the corridor the eavesdropping general and three colonels held their gloating breaths; and then Curtopassi, having weighed fidelity against expediency, coolly scissoring away his signature from that compromising bill of change through which the three of them had hoped to purchase their escape (Mejía jaguar-eyed as he thrust a single curse between the departing coward’s shoulderblades); Charlotte’s humiliated whispers to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who, so her women had pityingly assured her, could fructify any womb, should the heart but truly believe; and Charlotte pulling out her first grey hair, and Charlotte with her head down on her writing-desk (which once had belonged Marie Antoinette), silently weeping for hatred of Miramar; and the first time she withdrew her hand from his to walk alone at Chapultepec; and Fray Soria’s clumsy attempt to comfort him there in the chapel below the cells, directing him to that absurd votive scene, painted as if by a young child, with the caption On the 7th day of July in 1864, I, Ambrosio Alonso, having been captured and held as a guerrilla, was led out of jail to be killed although nothing had been completely proved against me, so I called upon the Lord of Wonders, who granted me this favor, so they released me, and I have commissioned this retablo,* giving thanks for the miracle—good God, their literalist idols! These people were all primitives, as even Mejía continued to prove in his sad thirst for images of the Holy Child of Atocha, who, so it is said, used to slip between the bars of Moorish prisons to bring inexhaustible supplies of bread and water to Christian captives, and now sometimes liberated the oppressed; well, it might be so, and in any case religion must never be mocked. Fray Soria brought him another retablo to handle. It was childishly done, of course. But for the benefit of self-discipline he pretended to admire this likeness of the roundfaced, smallmouthed, smiling Child. Sunshine glowed around the tiny sombrero which floated on His reddish-brown curls as if upon the water; white ruffles encircled His throat and the plump baby-hands which peeked from the sleeves of His crimson robe. One hand held the basket of loaves which resembled flowers, and the other a water-gourd on a stick, as He sat on his diminutive throne, old and young, sweet and knowing and unapproachable, more patient than ingratiating. I petitioned the Holy Child, and… The Emperor turned over the tin sheet, and in the matte darkness of the japanned iron saw his reflection as if in black water. Back came bad memories: his myriad brave soldiers who had been compelled to feed the earth with their own bloody hearts, Marshal Bazaine’s perpetual yet ever-altering machinations, now recapitulated, ever since Bazaine together with his troops had abandoned the Empire, by the bustling night-vermin on that crusted bandage around Miramón’s temples; not to mention the hangdog conferences, which all participants knew to be useless, regarding the interest, never mind the fiendish principal, on those infamous Jecker bonds (for which, to tell the truth, Miramón was to blame), Bazaine’s bald head gleaming still more hatefully than his smile when he said: Unfortunately, Your Majesty, you must meet your obligations to France! — and the antlike, inimical, invincible vitality of Juárez, whom he had once thought to welcome into his cabinet (never mind the fact that in every respect he resembled a servant), and whose orders had put to death a hundred captured Legionnaires at San Jacinto; the sadistic self-importance of the unshaven mestizo general and the three ragged colonels now sitting outside his cell, and none of their pistols clean; and that evening at Puebla on Charlotte’s twenty-fifth birthday, when their well-meaning host, an elderly hidalgo who had served Emperor Iturbide, thought to put Their Majesties in one bedroom, and the nearly imperceptible twitching at the corners of Charlotte’s mouth when the valet commenced to set matters right; the deciphered telegram with the word APPOMATTOX (had Lee defeated Grant, the United States could never have rescued Juárez), followed in due time by that letter on the familiar stationery of Louis Napoleon, who had lured him into this adventure, and promised never to abandon him, explaining that in France it was no longer permissible to be mistaken; the embarrassing vulgarities of that former Texas circus-dancer Princess Salm-Salm, who had just now tried to save him by offering herself to Colonel Palacio Villanueva; that vile farewell kiss from his brother, who had smoothly encouraged him to fall in with Napoleon’s designs, then, when it was too late to withdraw without loss of honor, compelled him to renounce his Austrian claims; the treachery of López, who had received so many preferments at his hands; the moment when he understood from an indiscretion of the physician that Charlotte had gone mad in Rome; the silence that long ago morning in their stateroom on the S.S. Elisabeth (in those years they still slept together) when Charlotte realized that he had lost interest in her seasickness, and her dull gaze when he packed her off to Madeira, while he continued on to Brazil, counting her tears through an ivory telescope, listening to her sobs through a curtain at Chapultepec, watching from between the curtains of his palace window as a young woman in a dark blue reboso, kneeling on the cobblestones, supported in her lap the naked, bleeding corpse of a boy, probably a son or younger brother, stroking the dead face, gazing steadily up at him, as if she knew he were there; while a semicircle of poor people began to cohere behind her, all of them staring at his window, until a whistle sounded, his French troops leveled their bayonets, and he turned away — and by no means had he forgotten Concha Miramón, freshly married, who kept watching him with gentle dark-eyed hatred, as if he were the reason her husband must die; nor did he decline to recall his first jailer in this place, the cruel peasant whose narrow speckled face resembled a jaguar’s; he had locked Maximilian into the Capuchin crypt, sneering: You must stay here for the night, so that you realize that your end is near.

But then he smiled a trifle; for his recollected joys now came to comfort him, most of them surely for the last time. Of course he would remember Charlotte again and again, right up to the end, but so very many images of her did he possess that few could return at all, let alone more than once. How pretty she appeared in Lombard dress! He had loved to watch her planting flowers in the Alameda; at first she had been so much happier in Mexico than at Miramar, where he preferred not to remember her. So he flew there all alone, hovering like a fly or miniature ghost over the gold and purple bindings in his library, the busts of Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and Homer, the quill pen over the four-bezeled folio and the inlays of his writing-desk. If only he could always have been a fly! Smiling, he caressed the two silver candlesticks which Fray Soria had lent him. His guards gave him all the tapers he could burn. Once upon a time, he and Charlotte had lit ever so many candles at Miramar. He used to deck four Christmas trees with gifts for the poor children of Trieste, and watch shyly from the window. The flickering flames reminded him of tropical butterflies. He could almost hear the twitterings of his aviary. Now he remembered how he had stood away from the Mexican deputation there on the parquet floor of Miramar; he would have sent them out and returned to the orange seedlings he was propagating in his glasshouse, had it not been for unhappy Charlotte in her snow-white crinolines, and Charlotte in her yellow silk, with the Order of San Carlos glowing on her breast, descending the ballroom stairs in Mexico, even the Liberals applauding her (Miramón still wore epaulettes and a tapering dark vest embroidered with golden ivywork); Charlotte undoing her hair at Cuernavaca — oh, yes, Cuernavaca, with his orchids and birds, and that rose-grown old house, Charlotte weeping again in Cuernavaca, among the fountains and orange trees, and the door in the garden wall through which glided the gardener’s daughter Concepción, with her long blue-black hair outspread on her naked shoulders, while Charlotte signed decrees for him in Chapultepec. Smiling, Concepción pulled her shift over her head. She opened her arms. He was riding beautiful Mexican horses one after the other; he was commanding the Novara, with Trieste’s lovely pastel edifices beneath summer rain-clouds off to starboard, coming home to Miramar, mooring between stone sphinxes at the landing, where even the Italians cheered him and Charlotte awaited, dressed in white, smiling adoringly, gazing down into the clear green sea. Soon they would be in their separate rooms, gazing down the steep mane of treetops at Miramar. He and she, Their Mexican Majesties, were riding in through the arch to accept the fruits of Mexican gratitude. Her white fingers were curling round his elbow as they descended the staircase, he appropriately overtowering her, she comprising a tiny-headed cone of many skirts. But perhaps he had never been so happy as when he had gone botanizing and insect-collecting in Brazil, wearing a white suit and a green-veiled hat. He remembered the butterflies he had captured there, and the trophy-bulbs and saplings he had collected for his gardens at Miramar. What if he had followed his inclinations then, and trekked forever deeper into the Matto Grosso? Charlotte would have been sad, of course. Besides, the oxhide slave-whips employed upon the blacks were abominable; he had prohibited those in his own Empire. For the last time he was welcomed by his hordes of loyal Indians dressed in white, waving fern-garlands; yes, he abolished peonage throughout the Empire; once more Miramón was decorating him with a bronze medal on behalf of the Mexican Army; the Pope received him; Trieste glowed after a summer rain; Concepción opened her thighs; he became Admiral of the Austrian Navy; and in the rising sun he rode down from Chapultepec in his sombrero and grey charro outfit, and on the edge of the road petitioners were humbly waiting; often some young mother with a child in her arms begged him to spare a son or husband from the firing squad, and he was rarely as joyful as when he could oblige her (Bazaine got furious, of course) — but this memory likewise had some present pain attached to it; before its claws could catch him he fled to that time when he was young and voyaged through King Otto’s Greece; there were slave-wenches exposed for auction in the market at Smyrna; that was the first time he had seen so many undressed females in one place, and realized the unbearable attractiveness, actually quite bearable, of sin (it provided particular pleasure to remember it here, because a well-bred Mexicana hides all but her eyes behind her reboso); then he visited Maria Amalia de Gloria, his first and truest love, who had died of consumption during their engagement; but tomorrow’s rifle-barrels were staring at him, round and shining like a jaguar’s eyes. Quickly he remembered the silent golden clocks with blue enamel numbers, the pretty clocks at Miramar; and again and yet again he remembered Concepción in Cuernavaca, eighteen years old, with the blue-black hair.

Again he stared miserably at the ivory crucifix, longing to slow down or reverse time, or, if that were impossible, for everything to be over. Whatever agony awaited him in the morning would not, he hoped, last long — although he had heard of cases when the first or second volley failed to kill.

Mejía had informed him that Juárez would renounce the Jecker bonds. This staggered him. If Juárez could do it, why had he failed to do the same? (The answer: Marshal Bazaine.) Freed of debt-weight, he might have been able to spend a decent fraction of his revenues on the people, and what if they had then come to love him?

The fear in his belly, which would most likely receive some of their bullets, he defeated with the certainty that however cruel the faces of the firing squad might be, he would regard them as if he were staring into a dark mirror. So he calmed himself. Then, upon the well-bred tranquillity of his courage, there grew a stain, not unlike the image of Christ’s exhausted, bloody face which appeared on Saint Veronica’s veil. It too was a face, but stone, wide-eyed and cruel. He could not say where he had met it before. Presently this apparition likewise faded, allowing him liberty to reconsider the cramp in his belly, which had spread to his chest. He smiled, understanding and accepting that until June nineteenth these feelings would come and go, in much the same way that in the mornings the longtailed crows descend on the zócalo of Veracruz, vanish in the afternoon and come swooping back at evening.

He would have liked to stroll in the cloister once more. It lay immediately outside, and they sometimes led him there for exercise. Whenever he entered its garden of orange and lemon trees, he remembered Cuernavaca. At any rate, he preferred to ask nothing of these people.

The general must have gone to the latrine; his pistol made a special noise whenever he laid it on the table. Two of the colonels were chuckling over something. It must be very dark outside. He wished he could have seen the sunset. At this time of year in Trieste there comes a certain quarter-hour when a long stripe of setting sun reddens the middle of a row of cypresses whose crowns are golden and whose lower trunks silhouette themselves. Not far below, Miramar overlooks the sea. The Emperor remembered this.

He remembered an orange-slice floating on the silver sparkling water in one of those fluted glasses the servants used to bring at Miramar. Italian oranges were delicious but Mexican ones were better. Keeping their taste and fragrance in his mind, he set out sincerely to yearn for death, to sink into the fragrance of the flowery death.

So a kind of grace came to him. He felt the sweetness of time, which customarily smudges, corrodes, effaces our joys bit by bit; in Maximilian’s case the moments themselves could scarcely harm him, death being near and known: practically speaking, he would age no more, nor meet disappointment; the pulse in his wrist was satisfyingly eternal; he loved his memories, and even his cell, which was ten paces long, three paces wide, with its two tiny tables and five chairs, one of which was an armchair; mostly he sat on the camp bed. There was even a cupboard where he kept his clothes. Well, well; he would need but one suit more. The most dislikeable feature of the cell was its window, which allowed anyone standing in the corridor to look in on him; it showed some consideration on the part of the general and three colonels that they sat at a low table out of view. He did not care to peer out the window like a caged creature; nor did he like to sit with his back to them, so that they could spy on him without his knowing; hence he gave them his profile, living out his moments there on the camp bed. He remembered Cuernavaca, and lime-green Brazilian insects. His life grew as lovely and white as Trieste overseen from the karst foothills. Without a doubt he was far better off than the wives of Mejía and Miramón kneeling by Fray Soria in the chapel, both women clinging to the railing while they prayed and wept, with gaudy retablos all around them on the wall.

Presently the cigarillo girl who supplied his jailers came quietly upstairs. He recognized her step.

The general and all three colonels smoked like devils, the way Mexicans so often do. He had never overcome his distaste for the habit, although he hid it as poor Charlotte never could. This girl made a brisk trade with the jailers every day; her face had grown familiar to him.

She knocked gently on his door.

Enter, please, he called out.

The general, who had been muttering to one of the colonels, fell silent.

The woman came in. She was small, dirty and dark, with tobacco-stained hands. He thought her about twenty-five — nearly Charlotte’s age. Perceiving her pitying gaze, he turned away.

He did not rise; after all, until tomorrow he was still the Emperor. Nor did she appear to expect it. In a low shy voice she murmured: Cigarillos, sir? The general said you were to have as many as you wanted.

No, thank you, said Maximilian.

He expected her then to curtsey and depart. Instead, she drew nearer, and even leaned forward. On her bosom she wore a tarnished little mirror on a chain, and in it he now saw his own exhausted marble face and sunken eyes, his beard and moustache awry. This shocked him, but he smiled steadily, so that she would not suppose him to be distressed about anything. Suddenly his heart began to race, and he believed that one of his friends had sent her here to save him from death. From Fray Soria he had heard more than enough of the Holy Child of Atocha. Sometimes, as the retablos testified, locks opened at His touch. Why then shouldn’t the Empire be saved? Of course he would not consent to escape unless Mejía and Miramón could both accompany him.

The woman must have read the hope in his eyes, for she flushed, which made her very ugly, and quickly murmured: Sir, I have something if you wish to sleep. For dreams. In the morning your mind will be clear.

His heart fell, but he succeeded in keeping his tin face. From her sack of tobacco she withdrew a dark green pill, evidently rolled out of some plant material. With her dirty fingers she picked away tobacco shreds, then offered it to him, meaning to be kind.

Although she smelled a trifle stale, at least she was a woman, perhaps the last with whom he would ever have occasion to flirt, not that it should go any further with those four soldiers in the corridor, doubtless listening; and so, a trifle mechanically, he touched her hand, and smiled up into her brown eyes, which were surprisingly pretty, only to discover that she was in silent distress, evidently on his account. Of course he would rather not be comforting still another person just now, but there it was. — Pleasantly he said: What’s your name, girl?

Dominga.

Don’t weep. God wishes this. How old are you?

Fourteen.

You’re quite goodhearted. Set it on the table. Now here’s a present for you.

His feeble desire for her departed; he rose, and presented her with a gold ounce engraved with his profile. There was plenty left over for the firing squad. At first she grew as round-eyed as Tlaloc, their cruel god of rain. Then she burst into tears in earnest, and refused to take it, so he smilingly wrapped her fingers around the coin and said: Thank you, Dominga. I’d better sleep now.

Goodnight, sir. I’ll pray for you, both tonight and tomorrow.

Goodnight, my girl.

He had never felt so tired. The instant she departed, he took the pill in his hands, sniffed it (it smelled fresh and resinous) and swallowed it down. What did he care if it were poison?

It was a quarter past nine-o’-clock. Next door, Mejía and Fray Soria were praying to the Holy Child for comfort in bondage. He could hear Fray Soria’s deep voice. By nine-thirty he had begun to feel refreshed by a warm lassitude. The guards were arguing in the corridor. He read a few pages more of Cantù’s History of Italy. Miramón had lent him his own favorite volume, the Imitation of Christ, which he found too fervent, like his smallheaded, wide-skirted bride. He preferred history.

At ten-o’-clock, deliciously drowsy, he blew out both candles. At midnight General Escobedo came to say goodbye to him. During the two hours in between he slept deeply. And this is what he dreamed.

He seemed to see the double doors of a casket fly open — and his own corpse, popeyed and powdered horribly white, stared straight up at him, with buttons shining from the throat and down most of the abdomen. His head had grown astonishingly round and the collar of his suit was buttoned so tight under the chin that he seemed to lack any neck. Perhaps a bullet had mutilated him there, or, as might be, the embalmer had needed to draw something out through his throat. Shiny black boots rose all the way up to his torso. No part of him appeared real, except for his chalk-white hands. His bifurcated moustache, greatly impoverished from its living state, could have been painted on in two long ink-strokes. As for that round white head of his, it was the crudest effigy of clay or plaster (perhaps the embalmer had unfleshed his skull), while the rest of him lay preposterously long and shapeless. From the thing’s very confinement, meagerness, hardness and rigidity he somehow knew it to be himself. This was what he had come to, in death as in life.

At least it appeared that, as he had requested for his mother’s sake, the executioners had left his face unmarred.

Presently he became accustomed to what he was. And once he said to himself: Very well, let me be a corpse, he felt easier, and the casket-doors closed. Now he was permitted to rise away from himself. The sun resembled the halo around the head of Our Lady of Refuge, and he gazed down on the casket when Juárez arrived, and two soldiers opened it. The President, small and dark, was the sort of man who should have been a servant at two and a half reales per day. He looked at the corpse’s face in silence, then turned away. Maximilian observed him pityingly.

Now the envoy from Vienna had disembarked, and Juárez made any number of difficulties, in order to teach the Habsburgs their place; but at last the casket began to ride away in a black-curtained caratella* over mountain roads and past great stone heads half sunken in the earth, until it reached the coast, where the Novara lay at anchor. Their Mexican Majesties had departed Miramar on this very ship; and there had been a hundred-gun salute. Now came the return voyage in the black-draped salon of the Novara, back to Istria; here by Ragusa lay the isle of Lacroma, whose ruined monastery he would have rebuilt had he not fallen so deeply into debt for Miramar; hearing this, darling Charlotte had bought the island for him as a surprise. And so his corpse came home, to pigeons and white sea-light, while he watched above, and the black-creped hearse waited in Trieste to receive it. He had become Massimiliano again. A weeping peasant woman raised up the little child in her arms, so that he could outstretch his chubby hand toward the casket. People in black stood bowing and crossing themselves; among the younger and poorer he seemed to recognize some who in childhood had found gifts beneath one of those four Christmas trees at Miramar. Had they finally forgiven him for being Austrian? His brother’s secret police feared him no longer. Nowadays they even guarded his monument, which read: MASSIMILIANO, IMPERATORE DEL MESSICO. He felt great joy and comfort to see them looking after him in this way. Here he had embarked on his first long sea voyage — seventeen years ago! In the fleet they still respected his innovations; he had retrofitted ships and enacted the great dockyard at Pula. The flags flew at half-mast everywhere in Trieste, except of course at Miramar, where Charlotte was not to be told. For the first time he wondered whether she might remain alive. To abdicate the Empire, having already signed away his Austrian rights, and be confined here with her, year after year — and if she were truly mad…

She used to say: Anything is better than to sit contemplating the sea at Miramar, with nothing to do but watch the years go by.

He fancied he could almost see her in the Oriental Salon, looking through the tall narrow casements into the sea.

With great relief he saw that he, at least, was still dead. Ever so gently they carried him into the black-decked car of the special train. The cathedral bell tolled; the train began to move. Overhead he followed, smiling down on the Friulian vineyards. The grapevine, they say, lives sixty or seventy years, like one of us. He could not tell why this pleased him. His sensations resembled the sweetness of visiting Maria Amalia’s grave in Madeira (Charlotte, of course, had not been pleased). Just as when upon first disembarking from the S.S. Elisabeth in his snow-white suit and stepping into the Brazilian jungle he had nearly shouted for joy, because all the butterflies his wealth and labor had gathered into his cabinet at Miramar seemed to rise up into rainbows about him, and the exotic botanical curiosities in his glasshouse unfurled into towering fullness overhead, their flowery vininesses as seductive as the way that Charlotte used to part her hair when she was nineteen, so as the special train sighed onward his true self expanded and blossomed, drinking the incense of freedom; it was the moment when the book gains life and the dream grows real at last. Just before his Empire ended he had sent to Miramar for two thousand nightingales; they were en route when he was captured. Now all these birds were rising and singing around him. Slowly, slowly they journeyed, with the bells tolling in each place they passed, so that at last he felt loved. And ever more slowly they rolled into Vienna, where again the casket was opened, his brother standing stiff and straight with fists clenched at his sides, while his mother bent forward to kiss his forehead. Why couldn’t she have done that before? The heaviness of her bowing reminded him of the drooping of Christ’s head upon the cross, and she kissed his whitish-yellow forehead. Then he was carried to the Habsburg crypt, and with a golden key they locked him safely into a tomb of pure marble.

Next he dreamed that after the Mexicans had called upon him to be Emperor they took him in hand and crowned him with a quetzal-feather headdress whose semicirclet of long and close-packed jade tendrils was underlined by soft red arcs of blood-red and sky-blue, dyed by their artisans in the great city where he reigned amidst cool night winds. They presented him with a palace of onyx, whose windows overlooked jungle branches against a rainy sky. There they taught him to play many flutes most delightfully and to inhale the perfumes of flowers as would a nobleman of the highest degree. One of his flutes was fashioned of jade, changeably green like Charlotte’s eyes; and its mouthpiece was the semblance of a lizard’s head. Another flute was of fragrant wood, and a third of bone inlaid with silver and gold; there were as many others as he desired; and they all belonged to him. But what he enjoyed even more than playing his beautiful flutes was sniffing the fresh flowers which the Mexicans presented to him. This brought him great joy; and even in the dream he faintly remembered the vanilla-scents and orange-blossoms of Cuernavaca. They pierced his ears and hung golden rings from them, which pleased him still more than when every member of his suite had been personally decorated by Napoleon. They gave him golden bat-pendants and jade lip-plugs for his own; whenever he liked, he drank triple-refined pulque from a jaguar-legged bowl, and he could not imagine any greater contentment. They bestowed upon him a mirror of black obsidian. Then they led to him his first love Maria Amalia de Gloria, and she was naked but for a headdress of flowers. Next they gave him Charlotte, who had become seventeen again, nearly as huge-eyed and delicate as when she was that child in the portrait by Winterhalter, with her white, white arms and white throat, and she too was naked, but she bore an ear of corn in her hand; and she and Maria Amalia greeted one another without embarrassment. When they presented her to him, he sensed that within his love for her grew something secret, beautiful, yet painful; it could have been a many-fingered jade-blue fern guarded by orchids; whether it was something intrinsic to her or to their marriage, or whether it might be inimical and extrinsic was better uninvestigated. But by then they were bringing to him Concepción, the gardener’s daughter with the long blue-black hair, whom he had left pregnant with his child, and she too was naked, and entered with shy little steps, carrying water in an apple-jade cup; she had always reminded him of the dove which in so many votive images rests upon the clasped hands of Our Lady of the Incarnation. Finally they presented him with the cigarillo girl Dominga who had brought this treasure of sleep to him, and she was lovelier than he had realized now that he saw her undressed among the others; it turned out that her brown skin was as smooth as Charlotte’s; and she held salt in the palm of her left hand; the other women rushed to kiss her, just as the cherubs come winging to crown Our Lady of Light. These four now became his wives, loving him and one another, so that he never had to choose between them. So again he felt as he had upon entering the Brazilian jungle, with all his greenhoused and cabineted joys blooming up to veil the entire world in reality’s fragrant mist. Concepción opened her arms to him, while Dominga danced with Maria Amalia, their jade ornaments clattering, and Charlotte reclined on the terrace, playing with the pearls of her necklace, slowly loosening her hold on her painted fan, another brilliant sunset spent. And it seemed that for a very long time he reigned in easy ecstasy, never ageing, with nothing to do but play the flute, embrace his women, discover himself in the obsidian mirror, and sniff the fragrances of flowers, which he came to distinguish with such expert knowledge that he seemed the wisest being in the world. Charlotte fed him of her tender corn-flesh, her small head nodding on that long pale neck. He drank from the body of Concepción, and ate salt from Dominga’s skin while she tilted her head, watching him like a mother at her son’s marriage, a lover memorizing her sweetheart’s face or a wife leaving her husband forever. He crowned Maria Amalia with a wreath like unto the ruby roses and turquoise roses which retablo painters so often place around the brow of Our Lady of the Incarnation; and wherever she touched it, up grew a jade stem with many green pricklepods of gems, rising and glittering, until it budded into a flower as pink as her vulva.

Then one day (it had been but a year) they led him and his wives to a boat, whose fittings were plainer than he would have expected, and carried him across a lake toward a volcanic desert, while his wives sang him songs which he had never heard. He began to feel desolate. When they reached the other shore, the Mexicans stripped him of his headdress and his mantle of butterflies and flowers, took his dark mirror, and ripped away his earbobs, pendants and lip-plugs, so that all that remained to him were his sandals, his loincloth and his incomparable flutes. He felt much as he had upon learning that Bazaine had destroyed all the munitions which could not be embarked from Veracruz. When it rains in Trieste, the pinks and peaches of the edifices go grey; and so it now seemed to go with the moments of his life, which muted more with each removal. His four wives said farewell to him one by one, calmly and without sadness. Concepción had pulled her shift back on, and Charlotte was once again well laced up, while Dominga, already in her grubby skirts, was throwing on her black-and-white linen reboso, one end of which dangled in front, the other behind her head; while Maria Amalia had once more become a marble effigy. He entreated them not to abandon him (which of course in waking life he would have been too proud to do), but they regarded him like empty-eyed stone goddesses, and the boatmen rowed them away, leaving him alone on that lava jetty.

Perhaps they would now give him some lesser wife with naked jade breasts and a black slit between her gleaming jade thighs, and black eye-holes and nostrils, and an oval black mouth-hole; perhaps they would recompense him with a spiderweb hung with turquoise beads; already he felt unfitted for the greater treasures of his brief epitome. His heart was as tobacco-stained as a Mexicana’s hand. Threading his way between overgrown wells and courts, past broken waist-high columns, between broken walls and great stone heads half-sunken in the earth, he saw a barren stone breast, cracked, wide and grey, touching the low evening clouds, and sunshine silvering the edges of its dark steps. In the second year of his reign he had left Charlotte to administer the Empire while he climbed the Temple of the Sun — a grimly glorious experience. This pyramid was hardly so grand; on the contrary, it seemed to have been deliberately neglected. For a moment he could hope that he had been likewise dismissed. He looked around him. There was Tlaloc’s wife Chalchiutlicue the water goddess, carved out of a tall block of stone, with her great flat headdress, wide eyes, and tiny indrawn arms. Bazaine’s great bald head, fashioned out of lava, lay half-buried in the cindery dirt. On the faraway ridgetops right and left he spied columns of silhouetted waters. So be it. Blowing a melody on his turquoise flute, he climbed the first stair. As yet the grief of leavetaking remained moderate. If the summit of the temple were abandoned, then he would go his own way, living out his life in grateful inconspicuousness. Essaying to dream of his white suit and green-veiled hat, in hope that his valets would presently appear to dress him, misery meanwhile aching in his chest, he completed that melody, which seemed to him the loveliest he had ever played. Then, as he began to ascend the uneven stone steps whose variegations made them resemble snake-scales, he saw the terrifying priests waiting above. At least he had never had to be one of those people who carries his own cross. So in resignation he climbed the steps, breaking his beautiful flutes one by one. Gazing back down across the lawn of weeds and ruins to the jetty and the lake, he searched for the boat, but it was gone. Across the lake he seemed to see Miramar’s white tower with an orange light shining from one window, as if Charlotte were still alive and awaiting him. He thought he heard the general and three colonels singing the song about the wounded rider who goes through the world, bravely seeking death. He remembered once at Chapultepec glimpsing in the file of guerrilleros being led off to execution still another strange boy whose long eyelashes were drooping and whose mouth was half open as if with astonishment and exhaustion even while his chin somehow preserved a manly squareness; he intended to be as that boy had been. His grief had scarcely yet increased. Up those steep, dark and grubby stairs he continued bravely, breaking his last flute and throwing it behind him. When he neared the crowning platform, the priests drew back a little, as if to encourage him; the instant he set foot on it, they seized him, dragged him to the stone basin, which was painted red and blue, and uplifted their obsidian knives. He smiled at them, although he could not understand why he must die. The sky was already filling with vultures.

General Escobedo now awoke him, speaking exactly the right words of valor and chivalry, so that his heart was comforted; and for a moment more they reminisced, as if they had campaigned side by side, instead of fighting one against the other. Both had experienced San Blas’s red gnats, whose sting induces days of blindness; and both had been many times bemused by the vultures in Veracruz’s sandy streets. The Emperor shook the general’s hand. He heard Fray Soria murmuring in Miramón’s cell. Presently he knelt before the crucifix, and prayed again for his mother, Charlotte, his brother and himself. The reek of cigarillo smoke increased in the corridor. He heard more footsteps than usual echoing downstairs. The last time he had ever seen her, Charlotte’s lovely white oval face had been framed by the dark reboso as she gazed out scared and stiff. Thank goodness she was at peace! He prayed for Concepción and her baby. He prayed for Juárez. He wondered whether he ought to pray for the people of Mexico. He washed his face. As he was dressing he heard one of the colonels spitting on the floor. In good time the first cock crowed, and he rose, ready for a sunrise which would resemble oil paint on a cheap sheet of tin.

He made a good end, of course. Blond-bearded, he comforted his weeping confessor, Fray Soria, while the sombrero’d guards stood waiting at the door of his cell. The sun ascended, ready to drink his blood. Against his will he remembered the gleam of Bazaine’s head and that daily homily: Your Majesty, you fail to understand that Mexico is not Algeria. — In the streets, Mexicanas stood smoking cigarillos and watched him being led out. The smell of tortillas reminded him that he had received no breakfast. He found himself peering around for Dominga, that interesting damsel with her bag of fine-cut tobacco, but she was nowhere in evidence. An old woman spat at his feet. His escort indicated the cart in which he was to ride. The colonel inquired whether he had any complaints. — The Emperor told him: Never complain, for it is a sign of weakness.

When they stood him against the wall there on the Hill of Bells, picking their teeth and wiping their foreheads, so inferior to his own troops, who had sparkled in their new caps and uniforms as they formed ranks in hope of immortality, neither he nor the spectators blinked. After all, they were people for whom it was nothing to see a gaunt white corpse strewn with bullet-wounds as if with roses.

He wondered what would become of his two thousand nightingales.

They shot him first. According to some accounts, his last words were: Vive Mexico! Next went jadehearted Miramón, then Mejía, who was so weak from typhus that he could barely stand. Both of them shouted: God bless the Emperor!

As for the Empress, she outlived the spidery cactus behind the half-wrecked wall of long adobe bricks where the three were executed. (Pitying romantics erected a shrine there in 1901.) Peering out the window of her madhouse palace, she glimpsed World War I and said: One sees red. One supposes there is something going on because one is not gay. The frontier is black, very black. — Before she knew it, she was old, fumbling and weeping.

Why did she suffer so long? This question finds a Mexican answer. When we choose a young man to incarnate Tezcatlipoca, the obsidian-mirrored god of kingliness, we kill him after a year of every good thing, so that our other young men will remain strong. — And in the month of Ochpaniztli falls the feast for Teteoinan, goddess of the ripe corn. Because weeping causes rain, which would be harmful at this season, we clothe her incarnator in gorgeous stuffs and lead her to believe that she will soon be brought into a great man’s bed, so that she laughs for pleasure and pride. Presently we mount her on another woman’s back. Then we decapitate her at once, and flay her, after which an outstanding man puts on her skin. This is what happened first to Maria Amalia and later to Concepción; for both got carried off young. — * But when a woman is chosen to be Ilamatecuhtli, the Old Princess, we must not permit her to be happy; for this is in Tititl, the seventeenth month, when we languish for rain. Only tears will bring that. So before we kill her, she must weep and weep, while she dances alone.

When he had lain in doubt as to whether or not to accept the Mexican crown, she told him: Well, you have your butterflies. For my part, Max, I prefer a full and active life, with duties and responsibilities — and even difficulties if you will — to an idle existence spent in contemplating the sea from the top of a rock until the age of seventy. — But the rain which is our life required more of her than that; not until her eighty-seventh year could she escape. They say she died surrounded by the wide-eyed flabby smiles of ever so many amateurishly painted votive images.

THE CEMETERY OF THE WORLD

Veracruz used to be called the cemetery of the world on account of the plagues within its unsanitary walls. The following tale, whose heroine is even older than faded epaulettes, muted ribbons and those enameled decorations whose rows of narrow colored rectangles have long since been dusted down into pastels, may excite your doubt; but its setting’s pestilential virulence shines undeniable through the centuries, like the humid sunlight of that coast. The victims failed almost infallibly, first swelling until their rings cut deep into their fingers and their faces bulged with pus, so that at the moment of decease they often wore the fleshy-lipped grimace of an Olmec head. Three chroniclers date the worst outbreak of the disease to 1646, when the city refashioned its slaughterhouse into lodging for infantry companies. In sternly understated accents, a certain Fray Domínguez reasons out the effects of that miasma, contained within greasy dungstained walls and concentrated by tropic swelter, upon demoralized, unhygienic conscripts whose main diversion was drunken congress with the harlots of the port. But in the most ancient volume of the Archives of the Ayuntamiento de Veracruz, a ledger whose pages have broken loose from their grimy leather shell and whose inner knotted cords lie exposed, an unknown official not long after 1608 offered the proposition, unlike the apparent arguments which are lately proffered so commonly, that because the city (founded in 1519 by Cortés himself, who called it Villarica de la Veracruz, or Bera Cruz), occupied the site of the indigenous town of Quiahuyiztlaín, which the conquistadors had so brutally erased, a curse exhaled itself undyingly from the bloody soil. And in confirmation of the same I do here avow and swear upon my faith that in the hour after Vespers the figure of a veiled woman hath oftimes been seen, who upon unwrapping her face, which is said to be that of a low caste Indian or mestiza, breathes forth her diseased breath, whereupon people rapidly sicken, excepting only some scant few persons whom God hath spared, in order that they might make known to us these facts. Her dress is green, like unto a serpent’s hue, and she has been known to… in her left hand. For which reason… the jade fever. And then much writing is missing, thanks to layer upon layer of wormtracks which long ago riddled these pages into cunning paper cutouts of ice-floes and islands; following which a different hand informs us: It may be recorded that on the twenty-fifth of last January the Civil Fiscal consulted me as follows… — a round seal enclosing a crown upon a quartered circle. I myself give any curse small credit, since in 1599 Veracruz was relocated a trifle east of Villarica, and the plagues continued. At any rate, herewith:

Once upon a time, a plague ship came sailing home, with a cargo of munitions, chains, armor and icons for the Duque of Albuquerque, and all on board were either sick or dead, excepting only one. It was mid-morning, the winter sea a chalky bluish-grey, the warm clouds a trifle darker shade of that same hue; and the helmsman, whose name was Miguel Minjárez, began to hope that the Virgin had heard his prayers, and would continue to hold her hand over his head. But as they approached the harbor, dodging the familiar sandy isles, jade fever settled also on him, and the long piers seemed to pulse; Veracruz was welcoming him, rhythmically opening her arms like a woman measuring lengths of thread. Her palm trees bent toward him; her waters sparkled mockingly over the ribs of wrecked ships. Just as when a young woman’s hair has been so tightly bobbed away from the back of her neck that along the borderline between flesh and hair each strand glows against the skin like a lacquered shadow, while the tiny hairs on her arms shine white in the sun, so the edges of Miguel’s eyelashes seemed to illuminate the great woman who gathered him in: Veracruz, our Sweet Lady of Contagion; Veracruz, who smothers her lovers, breathing on them ever so adoringly with her green and filthy mouth. He wanted her now, and would do anything to come to her, but not yet here like those barnacled skeletons on either side; he preferred to sink into the ground. Death inflamed the corners of his vision, like the red-leaved almond trees of Veracruz. On the ramparts of San Juan de Ulúa, which ordinarily bristled with as many silhouetted sentries as a centipede’s legs, he glimpsed but a single soldier, sitting with his head in his hands. A black cloud of vultures overhung that island. Miguel steered away. As the city walls rose up ahead, he grew weaker; his way became as steep as the steps of a Totonacan pyramid. He prayed: Help me to kiss you, Lady Veracruz! — Remembering to overlay the tower of the Church of San Francisco upon the cathedral tower, no matter how they both contracted and swelled, he kept on course, sweating and nauseous, and so presently brought the vessel safely to anchor.

Pestilence must have outraced them to the port, or else the Indians had risen up again; because neither inspector nor guard arrived. The Isabela, lately in from a slave-and-sugar voyage, swung in her chains like a derelict. Both infantry companies were gone. Freeing the anchor, whose chains rushed down like the guts of a belly-slit heretic, Miguel cast rope-loops over the wharfposts and drew them tight. Then he passed ashore, into the power of the lady whom he loved. He would have summoned help for his comrades, even from the Marqués del Valle, who rarely forgave the disturbers of his leisure; but even that lord had departed from his tower, along with both sentries. The barracks was silent, the door ajar, and on the threshold lay the ripe green cadaver of an officer in his wheel-breasted armor, with vultures eating him. Miguel in his loneliness, confusion and fear commenced to pray to Our Lady of Remedies; but now his fever flared up irresistibly. In Veracruz, fathers wrap their baby daughters tight when the wind blows warm instead of hot; and so the roasting, steaming sensations which enwrapped Miguel were not utterly unpleasant; indeed, they seemed better known to him than the nearest islands, as if he might be going home. So he tottered dizzily across the zócalo where a few years since a temple’s stone arms had comforted the sacrificed, while today María Elena the pretty banana vendeuse who used to flirt with him was lying on her back with her arms outspread, dark fluid staining her swollen face and ants busy in her hair; the vultures rose off her as he neared; and he went on seeking the lady he loved: Veracruz, whose bosom was as lovely as the cemetery hill in Cempoala from which one can see the ocean, and whose eyes were as gentle as the wormholes shining like silver ice-crusts through the fine conservation paper in the Archives of the Ayuntamiento de Veracruz. Sickness fouled his liver, cramping it up tight against his ribs. Obediently he opened his mouth and vomited.

Veracruz was wearing a greenish-blue cloak and a translucent veil. Smiling at him over her shoulder, she beckoned with her little finger. Miguel followed joyously. She led him into the doorway of a house on the street now called Avenida Nicolás Bravo, and if you wish I had furnished more complete explanations, please blame the silvery wormtrails between those twinned layers of translucent conservation paper, whose texture is as fine as a finger-whorl’s, because otherwise we would not have been robbed of what might have been the most significant trailings of brownish ink, written in those intuitive horizontals, with wide margins of the conservation paper on either side, the verso showing through like an inverted ghost; and on every page a spring coil of ink, which must be the verifier’s mark. Sometimes marginalia tantalize our researches in smaller but still neat characters.

From caja twelve, volume twelve, bound in acidic cardboard by some impoverished or benighted twentieth-century functionary, and accordingly embrittled, I now extract the eighteenth-century story of the deformed boy Jesús Sánchez, who, in despair because he could not find a girl to love him, somehow escaped his parents (who kept him chained to a mango tree, in order to protect him from the consequences of his own hideous appearance), shambled out of ken, and in three days, thanks to the kind offices of vultures and rats, was found naked in an abandoned establishment on Avenida Nicolás Bravo, the parts of him which had not been eaten being fruited with green pustules of the bigness of those galls on oak trees, from which ink is made, for which reason, with the concurrence of those who deserved to be consulted, and appropriate disregard for all others, the authorities thought best to burn the house; accordingly, as testified in neat script faded to orange, overlaying a jagged grey pillar of nineteenth-century water damage, the aforesaid cleansing was carried out, and the corpse buried decently in the cemetery — an unpleasant task even for quadroons, since its semiskeletonized arms remained outstretched as if to embrace the invisible. Between wormholes the following words taunt our researches: of jade in his mouth, which the prudent Fathers… Whatever these may have signified, within the next week two dozen families in the vicinity of the cathedral showed signs of yellow fever, which was duly cured with exorcism, prayer, but not before most of them had died. And if you disbelieve any of this, I refer you to that concluding guarantee of veracity: Escrito por la parte de la Policía.

Just before the Spaniards withdrew from Mexico, much the same befell a certain hacendado with gold and silver embroidery on his felted hat, whose double rows of silver buttons on his black jacket had not been able to buy true affection, and who was robbed of nothing after death, not even the silver spurs on his feet.

And two months after the French landed at Veracruz, two of Maximilian’s soldiers disappeared, and because the plague city showed her occupiers such a sullen face, the French contra-guerrillero expert Dupin felt at first inclined to carry out some exemplary hangings, but then the missing were found, one in a dilapidated house on Callejón California and the other, of course, in that ruin on Avenida Nicolás Bravo. Dupin suspected that they had been decoyed by prostitutes to be strangled by robbers, but he could not explain the apple-green ovoids of polished jade in their mouths. The insurgents he hunted would never have been so obscure. Moreover, it came to light that the dead men’s valuables were in the possession of the very Mexicans who had discovered and reported them. They had pilfered the corpses, yes, but they were innocent of worse acts. Dupin contented himself with terrifying the relevant families. Then he set out on more consequential business, raiding deeper into the fever country.

By now the ledgers of the Ayuntamiento were scarcely being kept up, while newspapers remained rudimentary except in Mexico City; so how often such murders (if such they were) took place cannot be known, and perhaps the censors passed them over in any event. The wavy hunks of decaying paper, with their faint smell of mildew, the stencilled wormtracks and the dark brown letters offset in orange mirror-writing, or sometimes corroding themselves through like stencils, do present themselves most picturesquely, and nobody with any claim to aesthetic sense can be unimpressed by the way that numerously lovely wormtracks at the top of some snow-white sheet make it resemble wedding lace. But what facts can be discovered? The researcher might just as well be driving across the freeway bridge and along the petrol-perfumed double highway, which is lined with grubby white-limed trees and wanders drearily past fences and concrete walls.

In my time there lived a sad young man named Ricardo Ramírez who once loved most unfortunately in the city of Guadalajara. He happened to be a doctoral candidate in the patriotic but unremunerative department of folklore. Wishing at all hazards to avoid glimpsing his former sweetheart’s beautiful, treacherous face, he wrote his favorite aunt, who lived in Veracruz, and asked whether he could board with her awhile. Since his dissertation, in setting out to identify the “autonomous” and “universal” elements of Mexican legends, laid its snares conveniently wide, anywhere he cared to go would serve; all he required were stories, the stranger the better. Hence the bony night-wanderer who bites that lady who foolishly fell asleep with her window open, the murder-carcass whose wristbones sway toward and away from its neck-stump as it begs in the only way it can: Make me whole! the flaming ghost of the young bride whose jealous mother-in-law burned her to death once upon a time, these and other macabre jewels Ricardo strung on wires of theory, and however he arranged them, they appeared as shiny as cars in the rain. A cocky sailor of archives, prone especially to planting his standard on the most ancient islands of colonial writing (which nowadays keep shrinking evermore within the rectangular oceans of silvery conservation paper), he knew what he sought, and found exactly that, the fascicles dwindling like melting ice-shards, verso words showing through, blots spreading and darkening, so that our hero could interpolate whatever he liked. If his method lacked rigor, so much the better for Ricardo and his easygoing professors. Even before Adela broke his heart, the grotesque, lurid and erotic had faithfully distracted him from counterpart aspects of his own half-lived life. Turning pages of worm-lace, the signatures splitting apart where there once had been a binding, he quarried legends from the reign of Carolus III (whose second seal used to get affixed for a fee of twelve reales), explicated a broken stone jaguar head, collected old cabinet cards of Maximilian in uniform and visited the Temple of the Moon, which turned out to be another dark old pyramid in the center of town, with a fence around it. Had Adela remained faithful, Ricardo might have dreamed out his life in his harmless, feeble fashion, turning dust into paper so that it could become dust again. It is not for me to say that he neglected her. But so she told the taxi driver who seduced her. As might have been expected, Ricardo now collected folktales about traitorous women.

Although he could not go so far as to claim a uniquely Mexican provenance for that topic (since prior to Adela he had been jilted by a buxom exchange student from Madrid), Ricardo followed the line that the nation’s founding legend could only be the oft-told parable of La Malinche, the indigenous mistress of Cortés — because, you see, she interpreted for the conqueror with politic eloquence, embellishing his false promises and magnifying his threats, even assisting at the torture-interrogations of caciques who might have known the whereabouts of more crocodile-textured golden bracelets studded with silver flower-petaled knobs and spiral-bellied monkey figures (most such treasures, it turned out, had already been lost or melted down by the time Mexico fell); worst of all, Malinche betrayed all plots against the Spaniards, so that through her, all too many would-be liberators met destruction, while more forsook their hopes. Therefore, Ricardo hated Malinche! The records indicate that she kept house for Cortés, and bore him a son. He then married her off to a drunk. Upon meeting her Mayan relations, who had originally enslaved her, she proudly or desperately informed them that she would rather serve her husband and Cortés than anything else in the world. For that service she was rewarded about as well as any other Mexican — which Ricardo, of course, found exquisitely fitting; yes, he was bitter, although, being delicately handsome, with skin the color of creamy coffee, he might yet love and be loved again, and then why wouldn’t he think better of the world? As for Malinche, her emotions are lost to us. Once she died, her ghost became known as La Llorona, the longhaired one who weeps over her lost children. Ricardo grew polemical on this subject. (Do not blame him too much for his cruelty; his nights and days were death.) At that time Malinche had new defenders, the feminist syncretists, who argued that whatever harm she did her own kind was the fault of compulsion, that she was an instrument of progress — without her, the authorities might still be cutting people’s hearts out with obsidian knives, instead of working them to death in the silver mines — and, most importantly, that her docile or ambitious miscegenations helped found the modern Mexican race. To this, Ricardo asserted, in fiery counterparagraphs, that La Malinche was, in fact, evil to the bone, her suffering therefore justified, her very name a byword for the dirtiest whoredom. Just as certain young women in church know how to pray to good advantage, kneeling with their arms outstretched on the prie-dieu which seems to draw in their hourglass waists still narrower, so Malinche, at least in Ricardo’s opinion, made effective show of her submission, as a result of which, again in his opinion, she acquired culpability. Adela had been just that way. Whenever Ricardo took her on a holiday, she did just as he said — but then it became his fault when it rained. Eventually her whole life was his fault. Likewise, Malinche ruined Mexico. — While Ricardo was engrossed in excoriating the dead woman in such terms as gave him sadistic gratification, he received a reply from his aunt, welcoming his speedy arrival in Veracruz. Knowing somewhat of his field of inquiry, the old lady reminded him of what she was sure that he already knew, that in Veracruz could be heard any number of tales about La Llorona. So he fled to that city where almond trees come up out of the sidewalk and yellow-green coconuts cluster in the armpits of palms.

Aunt Bertha had prepared his favorite dish: chicken with green sauce. — You look unwell, she said.

That’s Adela’s fault.

So I’ve heard. That stinking little puta! I’ve been praying for you.

Thank you, aunt. And how’s your health?

Oh, the same. I know some fine girls your age. Would you like me to introduce you?

Never mind, aunt. I’m busy with my research.

I know a young girl who’s quite interested in La Llorona. An extremely pretty young girl, although her blondeness does come out of a bottle. Her mama says she’s never had a boyfriend, which is practically a miracle, Ricardo; nowadays you wouldn’t believe the sluts in this neighborhood. There are exceptions, thank the saints! The one I’m talking about keeps her skirt clean. I think you’d like her, because she watches paranormal episodes on the television. And she lives right around the corner.

Thank you, aunt. Maybe when I feel better. I think I’ll lie down now.

Of course you’ve had a very long trip. How many hours was it?

Well, fourteen, more or less. Thank you for dinner, aunt.

You’re sure you won’t have any more? No? Then you must be unwell! I’ll pray for you. By the way, do you remember that bruja I go to, Doña Esperanza? She always asks after you. I informed her about Adela, of course, and she said she was going to do something about her. She promised me that within a month, or six months at the most, that bitch’s womb is going to dry up.

Thank you, aunt. I’ll see you in the morning.

At dawn, anxious to escape his dear aunt’s ministrations, the young man took a bus to the river, and from there a taxi to the root-wrapped arches of the Casa de Cortés, where everything was the same tan, the open chamber half strangled by roots which flowed across the floor like a great lady’s dress. For some reason this reminded him of traitorous Adela, and he ground his fingernails into his palms. Ricardo had last come here while his mother was still alive. He had half forgotten the place, and found himself now strangely impressed by the long drapings of that crepe dress of roots which flowed down the broken walls from the green-leafed sky, white light shining in between them like unearthly pleats. In one coral-studded corner hung shards of pale blue plaster which the taxi driver said was only twelve years old and the tour guide proudly asserted to be original. There was folklore for you! Through this narrow-bricked arch, Malinche must have passed with her lord. Ricardo touched it. He gazed up into a great tree-branch. Slowly he wandered through Cortés’s roofless house, passing the arch whose curve was outlined with many narrow bricks stood on end. He approached another corner which was grown with roots as flat and wide as the abandoned clothes of pollos* crushed into the dirt. The shade of these ceiba trees refreshed him, but the slow strangulation which their roots were accomplishing horrified him.

Strange to say, although he had always thrived in this climate, the humidity now wearied Ricardo, and before noon he decided to return to Aunt Bertha’s to lie down. He caught a taxi to the bus. Perhaps he was getting ill. Gazing dully out the bus window, he saw from behind a narrow-waisted woman with a white ribbon in her long black hair, walking down the road, her skirt darkly slit just above the ankle. In spite of his rage against women, he felt desire. Resolutely he closed his eyes, only to be afflicted by an afterimage of roots and flagstones both the color of the reddish dirt.

All the way back to Veracruz, Adela haunted him. How could he make that she-devil weep with remorse? Someday she would come groveling to him, and he would say: Malinche. No doubt he ought to apply to the university for a travel grant; it would profit his dissertation to visit that house in Coyoacán where Malinche once lived with Cortés, in company with the three daughters of the murdered Moctezuma; there she gave birth to the conqueror’s son Martín just before the arrival of his Spanish wife, who soon died in that house with black bruises around her throat. Had Cortés done that, or someone else? Ricardo would have liked to see Malinche’s face on the night the wife appeared! That way he could imagine Adela’s expression in that same situation. Better yet, if he could drink in Malinche’s pain on that afternoon when, somewhere near Orizaba, Cortés married her off to Juan Xaramillo de Salvatierra, who as I have said was intoxicated while uttering his vows, then history would finally serve his purpose! His headache was getting worse. He longed to kill Adela, but only if he wouldn’t get caught. He could not decide whether his forehead was hot or cold.

Before they had returned to Veracruz, Malinche was delivered of her new husband’s offspring, a daughter named María, who at age sixteen would be kidnapped and forcibly married by the Viceroy’s nephew. Cortés had long since carried away Martín to Spain, to legitimize him at court. No one knows whether Malinche died of plague, or heartbreak, or whether Juan Xaramillo had her put out of the way, in order to get himself a fresher wife. In any case, Malinche, the so-called Mexican Eve, whom the Tlaxcalans identified with a jade-skirted volcano goddess; and who also apparently incarnated or represented Malinalxochitl, Wild Grass Flower, the woman who founded the city of Malinalco and became a deity, was now charged with being Adela as well; and Ricardo most definitely had business with that female; he would recall her to punishment, just as a domineering little boy pulls his mother back by her pink apronstring.

When he had implored Adela to have hope for them both and to believe that they could live together, she paused, then evenly informed him that she was considering and reconsidering; and when he inquired how long it might take her to reconsider, she informed him that she had no idea and therefore declined to discuss the matter, a proceeding which, she easily admitted, might not be entirely fair, but she happened to be annoyed by other worries, such as how to pay for her car. Ricardo proposed to hope and assume that he and Adela would love each other always, to which she indifferently assented, after which, since she said no more, he began to feel ever more anxious and sick; and the longer she avoided the subject, the more hurt he became. Adela presently explained that of course she loved him; the reasons for her coolness had nothing to do with love. — How true! he bitterly thought. Nothing to do with love! — It was not until she left him three months later that he began to hate her.

Aunt Bertha was in her room snoring. Ricardo opened one of his Veracruzan books of legends. In the engraving, a pair of Spaniards scourged an Indian tied to a post. Closing his tired eyes, he seemed to see the narrow-waisted woman walking down the road again, but this time she was dressed in dark green. What had she actually been wearing? It had not been green. Her long hair was as black as the zócalo’s palm trees at night, when the white bell tower rises and narrows into the purple sky. What made her memory so alluring? When he closed his eyes, seeking to remember Adela, he could see her turning toward him, commencing her half-smile, but then she faded away.

Ignoring his headache, he sat in the back yard beneath a palm tree, footnoting various known correspondences between Malinche and the Woman-Serpent called Cihuacoatal, whose naked, decapitated, cast down and violated stone semblance appears in many ancient tableaux; she is the original one who weeps for her children by night, and La Llorona may well be the same entity, renamed by the people in order to gain toleration from the Church. So he drew his analogies tight, and began to hope that the university would award him high honors. But presently, although he strove to fight it off by means of rage, he began to feel still more unwell, his desires and other feelings now insinuating themselves like those new tree-arms slowly cracking apart the threshold of the Casa de Cortés. The pressure at his temples and in the small of his back felt ambiguous; he could not decide whether a woman’s fingers were massaging him, pushing the flesh inward, or whether he might simply be bloating. Fluid would soon burst out of his skin, or else the bone would fall away beneath the woman’s fingers; either way, it might not be so unpleasant because he felt warm and almost still, as if he were riding that single wide breaker on the wide sea, that wave a trifle redder and greener than ultramarine, toward that hill called the Indian’s Headdress where there used to be many palms; a man bought it and cut some of them down when his mother was still alive; and Ricardo stared bewildered along the avenida of body shops, automobile glass, yellow walls, laundromats, strip malls, trucks and bricks and gratings, sunshine, concrete, and the shaded military zone; while in his eyes the blood vessels glowed as brightly as the doorway of that pharmacy with ever so many colored packages on the shelves.

He lay down. When he woke up, his face was covered with mosquitoes. He crushed the creatures and sat up with a groan. Then he summarized his six conclusions about the Malinche Dance. This would punish Adela. His hateful memories of her resembled arches standing all alone in a plain of hot mud and dust.

Aunt Bertha was making tortillas. He thanked her. Presently it was night, and he could lie down again.

When he awoke, with his dream still alive in his mind, like a fresh-plucked flower in a vase, he was astonished at how happy he felt. He would have wished to describe his feelings to his aunt, but, like so many young men, he imagined that opening his heart to an old woman who had known him as a child might be humiliating. So he kept to himself. In his notebook he wrote: Malinche — syncretism. Imperialism of the vampire. Treachery of the feminine.

His aunt had another girl for him, a pious virgin whose skirts were so clean they squeaked, so he fled to the municipal archives, sailing over pages of writing which were as shallow and wide-spaced as sea-waves. By the time he reached the fourth signature seal, his forehead began to ache. Excellent Señor: In cavilda celebration on the twenty-third of the present month, being present in the office of the Lord Governor, in which you were pleased to approve for the third and fourth deputies of this… innumerable unfortunate wretches who… my task will be to go within five or six months to distribute salt, the smell of dust and mildew strengthening, until he began to cough. When would he cease to hate Adela? The figure of a veiled woman hath oftimes been seen, and that long tall dress of greenish-grey tree-roots with its train of dusty tendrils, what did it mean? Her dress is green, like unto a serpent’s hue. More syncretism, so it seemed. This serpent-woman sounded quite repulsive. If she turned out to be an old avatar of Malinche’s, that would serve Adela right. Ricardo wondered whether his aunt knew this legend, which seemed to have blotted a century and more of narrow, wavering shards of yellow-brown paper in which dark chocolate script seemed immersed just below the surface. The said four thousand pesos within the date of this writing… Before me the aforesaid witness and scribe deposited the following… jade in his mouth. Since the swearings and reasons in this writing are the most efficacious and certain, I record the place, in hopes of saving others from being devoured by that she-demon who… This tribunal which God hath opened for our benefit… the helmsman Miguel Minjárez, whose corpse hath been proven as the nucleus of this latest plague, for three green serpents issued from his mouth when he was burned. The ill-omened residence in which these young men are invariably discovered… Oferta de 4,000. Pesos hecha por Don José Gil de Partearroyo para libertarse de cargos cobcejiles… jade… to punish the English pirates… a mulata clad in green.

Insinuating his fingers between the ancient pages which were melting together, Ricardo found loose brittle sheets, their edges all rough, their clotted old mucilage shining like wax; and on the second of these, above a signature which resembled two sliced apples separated by a violin, was a crude map of the so-called cursed house and its environs. Ricardo recognized Avenida Nicolás Bravo. Returning the old ledger, he went out for ice cream, watched girls, returned to Aunt Bertha’s, then, being informed that the pious virgin and her mother had been invited for supper, rushed down by the zócalo, wishing murder to Adela; so there sat our slender young man with his elbows on his wide-apart knees, reading legends about La Llorona on the steps outside the doorway of the cybercafé where the crucifix guarded the dusty computer and the digital print of Jesus curled on the wall. Skipping supper, for which he would surely do penance (he loved his aunt), he set out for Avenida Nicolás Bravo, just in case it might be ghostly, and then, not knowing what else to do, he sat down in the playground, watching a little girl in a rainbow dress toddling very cautiously to her father who pretended to be a monster. The child screamed, then giggled. Remembering that he had begged Adela to have a child with him, Ricardo felt sick with grief and rage. Just then an old mestiza beggar humbled herself before his feet. For pity he gave her a hundred pesos. Studying him like some shrewd procuress, she asked: Señor, are you looking for someone?

He hesitated. But then he found that although he could not confide in his aunt, it came easy to describe the green-clad lady to this stranger, all the more readily since he disbelieved in her. Anything for folklore’s sake!

My God, señor, do you mean to kill yourself? Please be careful; that’s La Llorona!

Tolerantly Ricardo said: Please tell me what you know.

The woman said: There’s a story…

Yes, please do tell me.

Señor, in that building she… I know a way in. When I need to go to the toilet.

Oh, yes, he said. That way. Thank you; I see.

But the most evil house is like a castle, she explained. Over there on Hidalgo and Callejón California, where she comes out.

Now Ricardo began to feel quite happy and interested. Perhaps he might even get a chapter out of this.

As soon as the old woman left him alone he approached the rectangular ancient building there on Avenida Nicolás Bravo, not the castle but the place whose railingstone had blackened with grime and mold, while the casements gaped blackly open, the ancient shutters being caught in a fossilized tremble; and he saw trees growing inside, while outside a serene cherubic face, doubly winged, remarked him blandly from above one arch; the other arches were missing. How old were those wooden doors? Rocks and boards blocked the doorway, and behind them a rotten railing from the head of a vast old bed. Ricardo peered in, and a moth brushed his cheek with the hem of its tiny skirt. The stench of mildew rushed out. He looked over his shoulder; nobody was in sight. So he pushed open a window, and a lizard-shaped patch of darkness greeted him. Locking his palms upon the windowsill, he leaped and pulled himself up into the ruin.

The first thing he spied was considerably farther within: a dead dark doorway with a wooden grating over it. The floor was nicely tiled but almost impossible to distinguish. He decided to return with a flashlight.

The place was more sad than eerie at first, but it offered him an intriguing strangeness, as if the scent of copal were half-hiding the vulgar odor of death. It was so quiet that he could almost hear the mold growing on the walls.

His aunt was waiting up for him. — Chasing girls again? she roguishly inquired.

Adela used to say: I feel your desperation, and it scares me. — She was never happy, and her voice was flat. But, oh, those tender little lips of hers, he couldn’t get enough of them! They were like fresh new leaves. He remembered how he used to lie next to her at night and wait for her to touch him, because he no longer dared to touch her.

The next time he came to the ghost houses, on a hot Sunday afternoon beneath a crescent moon, there was an old woman selling flowers, with long white hair around her face and behind her the cheerful glow of the toy skulls she peddled to children. She reminded him of someone.

Just as some of these abandoned houses’ shutters bore shards of faded paint, so his explorations contained older motive-markings which he could not read. Pulling himself up into another high-floored ruin, one wall of which had been broken open long ago, he encountered rubbish, the stench of excrement, scrap wood and darkness. Of course the city’s homeless fugitives would have grubbed away any jade beads lying here. A succulent, well rooted in the rotten wood, had grown out through the window and rose up higher than he could see. In another house, fig trees had nuzzled their way through the roof. Choking on dust and mildew, he began to feel a special secret warmth upon his forehead, as if a beautiful woman were lovingly urinating on him. It descended the back of his neck and enriched the backs of his hands. For a long time he could not understand what it was. Then his ears began to ring, and he remembered that he was febrile.

Staggering out of there, he next investigated the so-called “castle” on Hidalgo and Callejón California. It was an archway full of sky.

In the morning the bright red shards of brick and the scraps of blue-grey tile gave the castle a mellow appearance in contradistinction to evening when the sky was so yellow and clean over its flat-toothed parapet. The walls were cheerfully graffiti’d in red and yellow, and broken casements leaned up against the partially bricked doorways. Standing on the street, Ricardo, moderately feverish, looked around him, and once again found himself safely alone, aside from the pregnant woman who was dancing to music on the street corner, clutching a small child who lay sleeping across her belly-bulge. Behind the wide curling railing of stone, an open room invited him, so he clambered in, and found lanky dark vines growing down from the high ceiling as at Cortés’s house. The ceiling was ribbed with what seemed to be narrow struts of iron. The wall bore faded patches of blue like the Tang Dynasty tombs. There was a yellow motor oil bottle and a foul smell. It would have felt perfect to close his eyes, but Ricardo proceeded into the next room, which was fresh with pure blue sky in its broken skylight, and floral frescoes on the wall, partially overpainted with graffiti. The deeper in he went, the better he forgot Adela and the more he longed to unite himself with the genius of this place. He entered the third room, and found the burned skeleton of a sofa grinning with all its springs. Beyond this lay a bathroom whose tub was full of ashes. Ricardo sank his arms into this, and immediately found a jade bead carved in the semblance of a grinning woman.

In a niche at the far end of the room stood a toilet like a low altar. The wall behind it had been torn open, and from the wall of the adjacent alley, water trickled down into the toilet bowl, never filling it. He thought to himself: If she came into my arms…

Then the trickling sound became a giggle, and the woman in green appeared, as he had hoped that she would, this perfect woman for him to love, as slender and radiant as when she had stood at Cortés’s right hand. Although she must have been someone from the south, the blue direction, realm of vegetable matter, her lips were cochineal-red like an Aztec prostitute’s teeth. His sudden lust resembled the brass band whose roarings and blarings prevent anyone within two blocks of the zócalo from sleeping before dawn.

She regarded him with much the same unwinking interest as does a lizard the shiny brown beetle which gambols in reach of its jaws; and Ricardo, precisely because he blamed women for his failures, was susceptible under such circumstances as these to even the most impersonal feminine attention. As he approached her, she began to lick her dark lips. Her unwholesome breath played coolly over his face. Unable to control his desire, he thrust the jade bead into her mouth, and at once she became a dead object, with her eyes closed and her mouth an ovoid cave of darkness, her breasts hard and yellow, and a great clay headdress on her forehead, with many vines or serpents rising out of it. Her earrings were the size of cartwheels, and the knurled stone collar around her neck could have moored the largest ship.

Jade beads began to spew from her vulva. He filled up his pockets, then fled.

You’ve grown lucky, said his Aunt Bertha in satisfaction. Which girl gave you those, or is it a secret?

It’s no secret, aunt. I’ve met La Llorona.

Child, that’s very dangerous.

Tell me, aunt. How can I get a woman to love me? — And because he asked her this with desperate sincerity, he felt no embarrassment.

My boy, how could a woman not love you? I see girls turning their eyes on you when you go down the street, and you reject them all; you deny that it happened—

What do they want to do?

To take care of you, my child! To cook for you and comfort you in their arms.

But I’m not just a child! Maybe you see them that way because that’s how you see me. But I’m not, I’m not!

Before she left him absolutely, Adela, who was herself as grave and lovely as Doña Marina, still used to make love with him on unexpected occasions, and whenever this happened Ricardo would whisper: I’m so grateful, in an ever more feeble and passive voice, and Adela, riding on top of him, would stop and raise her eyebrows. Ricardo said: You can do anything you want to me, even cut me into pieces; what I want for you to do is to cut me into pieces! — Then Adela grew angry and disgusted. But this was truly what the young man wished for; that way he escaped the lonely agony of being the one she no longer cared for. Everything was up to her now; that was best; he would accept anything.

After she left him, of course, he rejected everything, despising her; he became as active as a rat.

The next time he pulled himself into the “castle,” early on a cloud-pearled morning, just as the cars began to honk, encouraging the birds to further exertions according to their various aptitudes and interests, while men mopped the café-alleys, and the sweetly sulphurous sea-smell of Veracruz illumined him with fever or happiness, she was absent, so Ricardo returned to the ghost house on Avenida Nicolás Bravo, and beyond the dark, wooden-gratinged doorway found a heap of broken clay heads, whose thick clay lips the dead potter had rolled on around their oval mouths. Suddenly the impulse to count them overcame him, he could not have said why; but before he had half finished he felt the icy prickle of creepiness between his shoulderblades, and when he turned around, there was La Llorona, paler than he remembered, close enough to touch, with her long hair scarcely darker than her green lips. At once he thrilled into glorious desperation and asked her: Do you love me?

Of course. And after you, the next one and the next.

In his confusion he could not determine whether she was the one who would help him, and cut him into little pieces, or the one who should be weeping with remorse for helping the wicked Cortés. Presently she opened her arms. On fire with fever, he knelt down before her on those shards of clay, and slowly, slowly in the mildewed darkness her cold fingers began to play with his hair. He expected to be devoured like the men before him — all the more so, since he had run away with her jade. But once they had satisfied each other three times she sent him silently away, and when he descended back into the sunlight this very young man who thought to have hardened himself against women longed to worship all the girls in red high-heeled boots whom he passed on the way home to his Aunt Bertha’s house. And that night when he lay down to rest he remembered what until now he had not even perceived seeing on that bus ride from Guadalajara: a young woman, her ripe buttocks practically bursting out of her shorts, walking slowly down the side of the jungle road, half-smiling in the drizzle, gazing for an eyeblink at him. At this recollection he masturbated furiously.

In contradistinction to the chronicles of her time, legend made out Malinche to be a promiscuous slut; and some said, Ricardo maliciously among them, that for this very cause Cortés married her off to Juan Xaramillo de Salvatierra; but now that Ricardo could no longer hate women, excepting of course Adela, whom he proposed to stop remembering if only she could be buried deep, instinctual passion enthralled him, for La Llorona, being immortal, was still fresher than the fringed arches of banana leaves: never satisfied, therefore everloving. The myriads whom she had devoured, their own preciousness extracted and then disregarded, rotted for very joy, a doom which Ricardo yearned to endure. Only the earth prevented him from pressing his groin against hers — for he was not yet dead, belonging but incompletely to her. Sometimes when he lay awake at his aunt’s house, he whispered to himself: Why won’t she cut me into pieces?

But while he remained alive with her in that mildewed old house on Avenida Nicolás Bravo, he was happier than he had ever been; rightly or wrongly he believed that because he had become conscious of love and of himself (grand certainties for which we should excuse him), he pleased her more than at least some of her other victims. Sometimes he vomited and frequently he felt dizzy, but whatever disease possessed him declined to devour him just then. So happily addicted to her green vulva, and therefore, as he would have said, in love with her, he daily strode ever handsomer and bolder to his aunt, who remarked that life was finally bestowing on him what he deserved; you may be sure that she had done everything required to forget that this sweetheart was La Llorona, to whom some Veracruzanos attribute a ghastly horse’s head, and whose kiss all say is fatal. Indeed, one day he entered her foul old house only to find some previously unsuspected other lover lying on his side with his head hidden behind his elbows while vultures minced through the puddle of vomit and blood and cadaveric fluid around his torso. La Llorona squatted over him, carefully inserting a jade bead between his teeth.

Although he said nothing, Ricardo felt jealous. Why wouldn’t she consummate their marriage? For some days afterward they met in the “castle,” until the authorities had removed his rival’s corpse. He began to understand that were she to spare him, she must feed on others in the meantime. They altered the time of their rendezvous to dusk, because it was easier for her to lure in others by day. Thinking about her, he pined away every afternoon and sometimes began weeping; then as evening drew near he would rise up out of bed and look happier. His aunt began to wonder whether he might be bewitched, perhaps even by Adela, who must have turned away the bruja’s spell, but since he was not wasting away, and since, moreover, he had become kinder and more patient, even listening to her long stories about his mother, Aunt Bertha continued to hope that all was well. In truth he found it heavenly to give himself to La Llorona. Unlike Adela, she never turned away from his need. The next time that sweet fever redescended from the ceiling of his aunt’s house to whistle in his ears like a harbor wind, warming his forehead and the backs of his hands, he found himself thinking: I’m doing it all for her, so that I can be her and she can be me; I’ll heal her and make her happy. — But what this meant was obscure even to him, and he sank deeper and deeper into his bed, listening to a single mosquito. His aunt beseeched him to eat more; he was studying too hard, she said, reminding him, as she frequently did, of the ominous career of his great-uncle’s great-great-grandfather Don Roberto, who while preparing his illustrated dictionary of trabucos, percussion guns, blunderbusses and other weapons of the conquistadors had strained his mind so perilously in the mildewed reading room of those selfsame Archives of the Ayuntamiento de Veracruz (in particular, he grew fixated on the question of why some words remain untouched, others become outlined in dark brown, and the rest vanish away) that he commenced to be haunted by a gaunt brown manuscript demon whom only the thrice-uttered name of Saint Santiago would keep at bay, until finally not even this availed, and the poor man was found dead one night with his face resembling a royal seal poxed by worms; but at this juncture, kissing her sweet old hand and thanking her for her consideration, her nephew now hurried out to drink an unaccustomed cocktail at the zócalo, watching the double rows of dark green soldiers flipping their scarlet drums, clashing their drumsticks and blowing their trumpets, while passersby lifted up their children; then came the Mexican national anthem as a half-dozen of Veracruz’s bravest carried the long limp flag to bed, while Ricardo sat playing with the engagement ring in his pocket.

La Llorona stood with her hands on her hips, turning her pale face toward him, while in a puddle of dark fluid her latest lover lay glossy and swollen like a roasted chicken, ants all over him, a great leaf on his face, his knees drawn partway in, his fists closed like a baby’s. She began to laugh. — And seeing this, you hope to marry me?

Come what may, he replied.

Drawing near, she breathed her cool foul breath on his face, and he bowed his head.

She inquired: Do you imagine that you don’t deserve to live?

After you devour me, will you remember me?

Not at all. Neither will you.

Do you remember anything at all?

I was born at Painalla. Before that I blossomed and fell, blossomed and fell.

Please, Malintzin,* let’s make a child!

No one ever asked me for a baby before!

Will you?

Why don’t you ask a woman?

What are you?

A goddess.

I did, but she—

Very well, then we’ll marry.

That very day she came home with him, to be introduced to Aunt Bertha, who thought her marvelous, although it did seem peculiar that she declined to live with them. Ricardo and La Llorona had agreed to keep their marriage secret, to avoid explanations. Of course Aunt Bertha noticed that she was wearing a ring, and the instant that the girl’s belly began to swell, that too she perceived, with the sort of hungry titillation which so often breaks out like mold in such circumstances. The next time the ghost lady visited them, Aunt Bertha said: I may be mistaken, my dear, but is there something you haven’t told me yet?

Oh, you’re not at all mistaken about that, replied La Llorona, who was standing at the kitchen counter, grinding corn in a lava metate.

Well, then, darling, if it’s not too delicate a subject, have you and my nephew made any plans?

That depends on him.

If you’d like, I can speak with him, because he shouldn’t leave you unprovided for.

Don’t trouble yourself, aunt. I’ve provided for myself for a good while now.

But, well, excuse me for keeping on with this—

You see, said the lovely woman (whose greatest drawback, in Aunt Bertha’s opinion, was the fact that she sometimes smelled a trifle unclean), when we discuss this subject, your nephew always says that he’s not sure how long he’ll live.

My God, Malintzin! What do you mean? And if Ricardo’s unwell, which is not news to me, wouldn’t that be all the more reason to unite yourselves, in case there are any children?

But just then Ricardo emerged from his room, looking more joyous than ever. He had lately been making great progress with his dissertation, which seemed to be more brilliant and clear than before, as if someone had been rewriting the manuscript for him. Later that very night, after he posted a letter to Adela, asking her forgiveness and wishing her all good things, he was sitting in the back yard waiting for La Llorona to descend into him when he first thought to hear his pen scratching against the paper; and peering through the keyhole into his room, he seemed to see many green leaves blossoming and he smelled a perfume as of vanilla and copal. Of late he had showed still more gratitude to his aunt. And the more he deferred to and relied on her, the more his hard heart melted away. Everyone exclaimed over him, especially the unmarried girls at church. As for La Llorona, she did not seem to be a bit jealous.

On the following night the young couple strolled hand in hand all the way to the lower reaches of the white-limed palms in the zócalo, where children played hide and seek around the wide-bellied plinth, booths of cheap necklaces shone as if they were precious, an angry boy kicked a soccer ball all by himself, and a man in a red shirt and cap slowly swept old paper cups and tortilla scraps into his dustpan.

Now you must decide, said La Llorona. You can raise our child alone, or I can take him away, or I can kill you.

Will you come home tonight?

No, darling, I’m hungry.

He went home and considered what to do. His aunt pinched him laughingly and said: Another quarrel? You’re the man. Just force her to live with you. It’s high time for the priest!

He said: Aunt, should a baby stay with his mother or his father?

Well, both, of course, but if it must be one, then the mother.

Thank you, he said. That’s right, of course.

So La Llorona kept little Manuel, who was quite fetching except for the fact that his face resembled a death’s-head. The loving couple must now go their separate ways, unless Ricardo were to be devoured. And he wanted to be, but as to that, La Llorona told him: No, I won’t eat you, because you won’t surrender yourself to women, and, besides, you’re the father of my child.

In the third room of the old house on Avenida Nicolás Bravo, behind the sofa’s burned skeleton, La Llorona stood beside him, gesturing with all her delicate fingers, the tropical light of Veracruz gilding her naked shoulders and her eye-whites brighter than sea-waves, her hair lusher than sea-foam as she turned toward him, gesturing at the light of the farthest room without looking at it, and he suddenly realized with a thrill of joy that he was naked, ready to give himself to be devoured; he was taller yet somehow smaller, open to her without shame and therefore without hatred, not ever again; how grateful he felt to belong to her! Manuel sat on the toilet, playing with a man’s thighbone, while La Llorona disrobed and opened her legs to Ricardo for the last time. How he loved her! He would have done anything to keep her, anything!

I’ll walk you out, she said, kissing his forehead, which burned and stung with fever. Manuel sat alone watching them as they dressed. He was seven days old.

In the harbor of battleships and other steel fishes of the Mexican Armada, a pelican nearly as tall as Aunt Bertha swallowed fish and worked the red-orange leather hinge below its throat. Ricardo could not bear to watch the shimmering and waving of the water very long; it made him queasy. His fever was a nice tickly feeling, as if his thighs were being massaged by a thousand cockroaches. Of course he felt on the verge of tears.

Ricardo, listen to me, said La Llorona. Adela left you because she would not love you. I’m leaving you to keep you alive.

Please eat me; please drink my blood; I don’t want to start over anymore—

Do you love me?

I—

You’re just like me, silly! You’d love anybody!

When I die will I see you again?

The dead see nothing.

Are you dead?

No, darling. Not me. That’s why you’ll never see me again.

Turning wide-eyed toward him, with the sun on her gorgeous shoulders, she gave him a little golden turtle with three golden bells hanging from it, to help him when he married, and for his aunt a lovely golden bracelet studded and beaded, sun-rayed and devil-pricked, and for his as yet unknown wife a necklace of little golden eagle-horsemen who extruded their forked golden tongues, and a pendant of three golden bells with feathers and jade beads.

She gave him a magic leaf and told him to make a tea out of it and drink it. Then life would go differently for him. His emotions writhed like the dying fingers of a severed hand. She kissed him coolly on the cheek; then they parted. In a way he was relieved; he no longer had to fear that in his company she might slay some decent person.

Then, blindly solitary, he crept back to Aunt Bertha’s, and when his hostess saw his face she knew at once what had happened (more or less). Pale and despondent, the many-times rejected young man lay down, struggling to hate La Llorona, but no hatred came to him. Next he tried to imagine how he must live, since he could not die. If the purpose of life was indeed erotic or romantic satisfaction, perhaps his aunt could save him; didn’t she know any number of likely young girls? But why shouldn’t he rush back to Avenida Nicolás Bravo, for instance tonight, and open his veins before La Llorona? So he set out. But when his former sweetheart appeared before him, she was nothing if not furious and monstrous. — Where had she come from, by the way? Was it from under the rotten floor? Where did she actually keep herself? This he had never asked himself, or her. Well, too late now! Warning him in icy tones not to try her further (behind her he spied gruesome Manuel, already half-grown, with blood running down his lips), she then approached him, breathed on him with her foul breath until he trembled, slapped his face once, then closed the interview as follows: If I choose, I can infect any part of you with necrosis, and even so you will not die without my permission. How would you like to drag out the years half-rotten? Now go, Ricardo, and never come back.

I never trusted her, said his Aunt Bertha. What you need is a girl whose purpose in life is love. There’s someone I’m already thinking of… But tell me this. What’s become of your child?

She took him away—

Horrible, horrible woman! Ricardo, you need to relax. Drink with me.

So he did. His fever still troubled him, and a foul smell haunted his nostrils.

Aunt, this bracelet is for you.

From her? It’s not real, is it? Oh, Ricardo, close the shutters! How beautiful!

Returning to the municipal archives, he sought even now to cling to her by means of discovering facts. For the said Viceroy incited the orders in this writing and… in his mouth… and then wormtracks. At once he seemed to see his hateful son. By the hand of a man who newly and with certain foundation… burned both corpses, with many prayers, after which the said Lord Bishop… jade, which to these idolators is considered more precious than gold. The aforesaid mestiza, who is said to be a familiar of the Devil… exorcism, all of which was reported to His Majesty, may God guard him many years and continue to concede to him such a title, and then tiny waterstained islands of ink. We simply sign this in our city of Veracruz, Ciudad de la Vera Cruz y Puerto, some signatures resembling geometrical shapes, others like string figures, crossing lines and squares. Ecstasy on his face, although his belly had been utterly devoured. The ledger’s back flap fell open like the wing of a dead bird, folded inward and tied shut with crosses of rawhide. Within he found a tiny oval of apple-green jade, and on the back of a yellow sheet reading Certificación que acredita a notice in a feminine hand: Ricardo, since you persist in disobeying me, I now afflict you with gangrene.

After the amputation of his left foot, Ricardo found time to become acquainted with all his aunt’s neighbors. Across the street there lived an old widower who was very lonely. He touched the old man with the magic leaf, and at once the man rose up full of hope again that he might find some woman who would love him, and although he had not left his bed for many years he managed to get downstairs and even came into the street; stretched out his hand to a passing housewife, then fell down dead with a smile on his face. So this was a good thing that Ricardo had done.

His fever now seemed to become an ovoid jade bead, polished very smooth and inserted into his skull, where it ached deliciously and hilariously. He longed to die; oh, how he loved La Llorona! He prepared to become spiteful and hateful as usual. What an evil example woman sets! Consider for instance the way that a woman casts her smile toward a man, even when she keeps her knees together…

He made the leaf into tea and drank it. After that he was never sick for the rest of his life. Moreover, he suddenly loved women — all of them. Not long after that, he completed his dissertation, for which he received highest honors, and a publishing contract with a feminist press.

After Ricardo’s aunt died, he finally discovered his vocation as artistic director of the provincial folklore troupe, where numbers of ambitious yet unwary young women depended on pleasing him. They waited at auditions as silently as handmade Indian dresses hang within their wheeled, roof-topped stands, ready to be sold and animated, their indigo stripes darker than the night. Ricardo rarely took advantage, for he loved them. No one seemed to mind his prosthetic foot, in part because long ago, when he sold that golden turtle with three golden bells, he had become his own master. Even the doctor didn’t take all his money. Before he knew it, he had regained the fatuous self-love which is our birthright. A certain pretty, chubby dancer from one of the Tuxtlas, I forget which, put on more weight, and after a notice in the newspaper which unfavorably singled her out (for by then the poor girl had grown outright obese), Ricardo, first consulting with the producer, made up his mind to fire her, a doom from which she saved herself by seducing him and declaring pregnancy. She was, as I have said, quite a big girl, with thighs like watermelons, and moreover extremely needy, loyal and weepy — an ideal combination for Ricardo, whose true love-type was thus revealed to be what are so unfairly referred to as “smothering women.” Riding the craze for self-consciously syncretic dance which now infected Veracruz, Ricardo’s troupe, who daringly and defiantly called themselves “The Malinchistas,” performed Totonaco dances reenvisioned as fandangos, put on a well-regarded play about the Emperor Maximilian, and even turned supernatural tales into ballets. In all these enterprises, I am happy to say, Ricardo’s new wife, María Guadalupe, proved helpful, not least in calming his nerves, for he tended to worry on opening night; and sometimes the producer talked down to him, asserting that he, Ricardo, had no understanding about money, a misapprehension which María Guadalupe corrected as often as needed, since the producer was terrified of her. She loved nothing better than to take Ricardo into her arms and roll on top of him. Sometimes she would fit her lips over his lips and blow in hot moist breaths until he grew intoxicated. Even La Llorona had never taken him so far. He felt ecstatic to love this woman who was literally so much greater than himself. Moreover, on account of her expert dependence and insecurity, Ricardo learned to apologize for his wife, and even to take the blame for her lapses, a practice which rendered him, in time, tolerant and even warm. Thanks to her and the children, Ricardo lived a happier life than any of his early acquaintances could have predicted, among them, of course, the hated Adela, who attended several of the troupe’s performances and once wrote him a postcard, which he thought best not to answer. By the time that María Guadalupe had grown as vastly squarish as the Convento de los Betlehemitas, Ricardo choreographed the great masterpiece of his career. It was a wordless performance entitled “Salvation.”

The curtain rose on a maze whose high-walled pasteboard corridors turned always at right angles, their destination the wall at stage rear. And the dance, if one can call it that, was performed by a dozen young men in white hats and white suits, wandering blindly toward that blind wall. From time to time a tall skeleton, all black and white except for his red eyes, popped out of a niche or ambushed a man who turned a corner. To tell the truth, he looked not unlike Ricardo and La Llorona’s son Manuel. Whomever he touched fell motionless. And this was all that happened. A man would meet death and die, or he would wander toward the blind wall. If his corridor ended without the skeleton having found him, he turned back and took another turning, because what else could there be for him to do? His only prize was the dreary delay and return for more seeking of nothing. And all the young men got killed one by one. Just as a taxista lacking business might slowly lower himself in the driver’s seat until only his half-open eyes appear above the gasketed sill of the driver’s-side window, so Death sometimes sank nearly all the way behind a partition, so that only the audience could see the hateful shining of his skull, while the victim strayed toward him. Finally only one man remained. He wandered helpless from corner to corridor to wall and back again, and presently, Death, having devoured the others, came in search of him. And so he was nearly at the blind wall, and Death was two turnings behind him, already stretching his bony arm, when suddenly a door opened in the blind wall, and out came a lovely death’s-head woman in a jade-green skirt. The young man flew delightedly into her arms, and she enfolded him just in time to spare him from her rival.

So Ricardo became famous. The children all married and never came back. He outlived María Guadalupe, who was buried in her necklace of golden eagle-horsemen; then he retired and wedded an old widow not entirely unlike Aunt Bertha. I have seen the two of them at the zócalo, among the old couples slowly dancing hand to hand or arm to neck. Some of the women who are merely middle-aged whirl about in shining silver-white satin skirts, while the more ancient ones, like the aforesaid Juanita Ramírez, show themselves in faded floral dresses and pink slacks. She and Ricardo looked sweet together. He was wearing a white suit and a white hat. His prosthesis did not hinder him. Turtling his grey head, he gripped her wrists, staring down at her knees through his dark sunglasses. He swayed, bewildered, and gently Juanita held him up. One morning I introduced myself and mentioned my curiosity about La Llorona. — Young man, he replied, I don’t know anything about that.

Now I will tell you what I was doing there. Not long after the birth of our second child, my wife announced that she had never loved me. I am American, and she was a Mexican national who married me, so she now explained, solely to gain citizenship. Although she had opened her mind, as she put it, to the possibility that I might become worthy of her efforts, I remained crass. My punishment dawned. Carmen and her lawyer calculated that alimony and child support for the three-person household which she now intended to found would keep her in sufficient style, as indeed it proved. I signed every paper without amendment. I gave away the house, and everything in it but my clothes. The last time we ever saw each other was in court. When the judge dismissed us, I walked outside with her and said: Carmen, I want your advice.

If it doesn’t take too long, she said.

Well, it’s like this. From what you say, you know me better than I know myself. I certainly didn’t know you as well as I thought—

No recriminations, please. What do you want?

Since you know me, and since I’m feeling lost, please tell me: What kind of woman should I look for? Who do you think could love me?

None of my friends can stand you, and that’s the truth. They never could. I deserve a medal for putting up with you for so long. I can tell you what’s most hateful about you. There are actually seven things. First—

Sorry to interrupt you, Carmen, but since you’re in a hurry, could you just tell me who—

Look, she said. No woman could tolerate you. Your soul is utterly diseased. A prostitute might pretend to like you until your money runs out, but I’ve just made sure you’ll never have much of that. Your only hope is to find a saint or a vampire. Now remember: Don’t contact us in any way. You lost your visitation rights for a reason. The children are trying to forget you. That’s it. Goodbye.

Thanking her for this suggestion, I travelled to Veracruz, because she once lived there.

I was too timid to seek out La Llorona for my bride, but I did once visit the house on Avenida Nicolás Bravo. Within lay a dead man, perhaps homeless. Sometimes when forgotten corpses mummify, and their arms are outspread (perhaps because the dying men flung them open when their hearts drank in those nourishing bullets, or perhaps because the executioners crucified them), their tendons come to resemble the roots and woody creepers which clothe the arches of Cortés’s old house near Veracruz; to enter one of those archways is almost to shelter in a mummy’s armpit, and to discover any such hard hollow carcass is to be reminded of a ceiba tree. The mouth was open, with a jade bead inside.

Then I went to worship at the Climax’s titanic effigy of a naked blonde between whose legs any one of us may lean. The girls were nice; they took my money. None of them gave me a fever. I ate at Tacos “Mary”; I took in freight trains and dusty flat roofs with laundry hanging from them. Seeking to lose myself, I traversed the rolling hills of reddish grass and green palms. Wide orange-grassed canyons impelled me through the jungle, into thickets of prickly pear. Hoping to see heaven, I gazed upward and found the flash of white on an eagle’s wingtip.

Once upon a time, on the coast of the country known to the indigenes as Woman with the Green Jade Dress, there used to be a sandy place called Tecpan; and here, on 24 June 1518, Capitán Juan de Grijalva landed, soon after which this land was snatched from the Devil, and reclaimed for the Kingdom of God, not without certain necessary tortures and executions. How could the savages in their simplicity have imagined that their primitive rites at Tecpan would be prohibited and forgotten? As for the conquistadors, why shouldn’t their empire of righteousness have endured forever? And Malinche, wasn’t she secure in her lord’s love? (Where she once embraced him in the Casa de Cortés, there grows a palm tree’s snake-roots whose scales are chain mail.) The matador in blue and gold, not yet realizing that he is ready for the grave, feels kindred confidence; likewise the ancient mestiza who trusts that her tomb-robbed, staring jade figurine with the jade lizard-woman in his lap will find a buyer, right here on Avenida Díaz Mirón, maybe even today, after which she will get abundant food, perhaps even meat. And won’t my sweetheart cherish me until life ends?

Just as in the old records a word will be broken up wherever the page ends, after the style of a Roman inscription or a child’s letter, so it is with our loves and lives, everywhere we find ourselves, but most of all in Veracruz, the cemetery of the world.

TWO KINGS IN ZIÑOGAVA

When the mulatto gravedigger Salvador González Rodríguez rebelled against our Mother Church, and martyred a priest by means of a shovel-edge, he was, of course, brought to trial with punctilious regard for the formalities, then gibbeted in chains, following which his head was exposed as a warning to evildoers. One question remained to annoy the authorities: What should they do with the murderer’s younger brother Agustín? He was thirteen — an age sufficient for culpability, should any act be proved against him, although the case did not appear that way, since the innkeeper Jaime Esposito, being duly sworn, testified that on the morning of the crime this curlyhaired boy, who now sat between two soldiers, bowing his head and swallowing saliva, had been peddling sugarcane in a doorway across the street from his establishment; so that, as the procurador indeed proposed, there might exist grounds for admitting him to the house of mercy lately established for poor beggars here in Veracruz, for he was a bona fide orphan, his father having met the black vomit some three years after his mother got raped to death by French pirates. Next to be summoned forward was the peanut vendor’s slave Herlinda Encinas, a fullblooded Congolese damsel of about nineteen years of age who appeared so deliciously ebony in her pure white dress that the procurador, a tolerant man whose work had educated him about crimes of venery, winkingly referred to her as a fly in milk. She must have thought this court like unto a Mass! Her master, a free negro named Melchor Marín, aged fifty-seven, and a fair Christian, who took oath that he had been baptized, as seemed likely since he could say his Paternoster without great trouble, evidently feared to lose her services should she be convicted of anything, for he kept thanking God for this diligent chattel, without whose laughing, winning manners people would surely desert his stand, which from what he told the court was generally unfolded just outside the Baluarte, that square transshipment fort, already old, whose cannons pointed outwards at palm trees; moreover, the aforesaid Marín depended on Herlinda to feed and dress his children, his wife unfortunately being so infirm as to be good for nothing; indeed she longed for the hour of her death — at which inessential and certainly impious juncture the judge, Doctor de los Ríos, closed up the sluices of that old man’s mouth, and commanded the aforesaid Herlinda to speak, in order to inform the court as to whether she had in fact been — in the words of the three witnesses Cristóbal Pérez, free mulatto, Neyda Duarte, black slave, and Verdugo Acosta, free mulatto — a former paramour of the late detested evildoer Salvador González Rodríguez; to which the fly in milk immediately confessed, with more demureness than shame. Aware (to his sorrow, be it said) that the people’s turpitude throughout this New Spain of ours, and most certainly here in Veracruz, had grown so ubiquitous that such errors as yonder benighted woman’s fornications must be overlooked, at least for today, in the interest of rooting out the more dangerous offenses of bigamy, sacrilege, blasphemy, sedition, witchcraft, Judaism, treason and murder, Doctor de los Ríos, after admonishing the slave wench, who bit her lip and hung her head, satisfied himself by asking whether there had been any engagement or understanding between her and the detested Salvador, at which she shook her head, although whether in negation or confusion none could tell. Therefore, Doctor de los Ríos repeated his question, in a grimmer tone of voice. It came out that the detested Salvador had sworn himself to marry the girl, and even (or so he had told her) applied to the archdiocese for forgiveness of their illicit relations, by requesting a formal dispensation from his victim, the sainted Fray de Castro, who might for all anyone knew have been struck down for refusing to provide it. Doctor de los Ríos now interrogated Herlinda as to why she had desired to wed this evildoer, to which she replied, not without sense, that since they had already fornicated, it seemed best to repair their sin by entering into the sacramental state. When the question arose of whether she had submitted to intercourse before or after receiving a promise of marriage, the girl could utter no intelligible answer. Doctor de los Ríos accordingly demanded to know whether she had or had not been a virgin prior to lying with the detested Salvador, to which she abashedly replied that she had already granted carnal knowledge of her person to four men. — And had she confessed these sins? — Oh, yes, she said — to Fray de Castro, who was now in no position to contradict her. — Calling upon the aforesaid Melchor Marín to stand, which he tremulously did, Doctor de los Ríos reminded him of his responsibility toward this negro woman as her owner and therefore in a sense her father. Then the aforesaid Melchor Marín did lower his head, after the fashion of his own negress, and asseverate and say that to his certain knowledge, Herlinda and the detested Salvador used to sleep together in one bed, or more precisely on the dirt floor, which he, the said Melchor, and his spouse Ofelia both considered scandalous, not to mention a sad reflection upon our distance from Jesus Christ; but since the detested Salvador had often helped Herlinda by carrying great sacks of peanuts upon his shoulders, as if he were her loving husband (although whether those two had indeed betrothed themselves to each other the said Melchor could not swear; they had kept him in darkness, he tremulously said, because they must have feared that he, Herlinda’s owner, might resent their expectation of future enjoyment of any so-called conjugal rights at the very times when he or his children had need of her), and since the selfsame detested Salvador visited her either at home or on the street whenever his victim the sainted Fray de Castro permitted, Melchor and Ofelia had seen reason to hope and pray that those two would in time be married by the hand of a cleric — all of which was corroborated by the aforesaid Herlinda Encinas, who, it quickly came out, was a blithe and accomplished tattler, at least so long as the investigation appeared to concern someone other than herself. When commanded to explain why in her view the murder had occurred, she freely informed the court that in her presence the detested Salvador had complained with unseemly resentment about certain floggings regularly administered for his own good. Calling upon her to look into his eyes, Doctor de los Ríos now required and demanded to know without equivocation whether the concubinage in which she had so disgustingly engaged with the detested Salvador ever caused the latter to be delinquent in his duties to his employer, to which in a feeble voice she replied that it had not. Next, Doctor de los Ríos asked her owner the same question. Gripping the railing, the old black man said that to the best of his information the late Fray de Castro had considered Herlinda a good influence upon the detested Salvador, who was known to be moody and even turbulent, and that he might very well have preferred to see those two persons married, not that he, Melchor, had ever raised this issue with the Father, for fear of encouraging the matter to go forward. — That’s as may be, said Doctor de los Ríos, but can you deny that the visits of your slave woman’s paramour benefited your business at the diocese’s expense? From what I’ve gathered, in the times when he was hauling peanut-bags to her, she wasn’t exactly digging graves for him! — at which the court chamber blossomed with smiles and titters, and the old man staggered. — Now then, Herlinda, continued the judge, not displeased with the success of his jest, have you fully discharged your conscience here before me? I call on you now, in the presence of God, Who is most certainly listening, to give oath, for the sake of justice and in the interest of your own soul, to state, speak fully, and say whether you felt inconvenienced by the late Fray de Castro’s legitimate demands upon your detested paramour, whose memory I curse with every word of execration, and accordingly conspired with him to commit this damnable crime — at which the black woman, sobbing loudly, as if she had just now come to comprehend her peril, and would never again be permitted to see the cathedral’s cupola-faces now almost the color of the sweetly humid air, nor the palms growing invisibly, silently and vainly away from earth, nor those two fat ladies with the baskets of biscuits and crackers on their shoulders (one of whom, Neyda Duarte, had testified against her), reiterated, as was indeed known to be the case, that upon perceiving the murderer approach her in the market, marked, as if with the brand of Cain, with red eyes and red hands, she had screamed and fled him, as a result of which the baser sort of negroes and Indians had stolen nearly two pesos’ worth of peanuts; moreover, her owner, the aforesaid Melchor Marín, had already sworn by the Mother of God that this girl was innocent, which Doctor de los Ríos himself believed; but there are times when justice finds it politic to put on a frowning face. Now that she had been reduced to the proper state, one would hope that in order to spare herself she would denounce any error or failing of the aforesaid Agustín González Rodríguez, who, since he remained so far short of his twenty-fifth year, when a boy becomes a man, was compassionately represented by the procurador, whose name was Ángel Enríquez and who felt considerably less interested in him than in that aforesaid fly in milk with the dark brown eyes and the small breasts; if you have ever seen some pretty young negro penitent standing barefoot in the Inquisition’s chapel, shivering with dread, naked to the waist, bowing until her hair sweeps the flagstones, then setting off her breasts to still better advantage when she raises high the tall green taper of contrition, you will comprehend the daydreams of Ángel Enríquez, whose wife was a long-suffering old hag from Cádiz. Now, regarding this Agustín who so perplexed the court in that humid hour (the birds nearly asleep in the late-morning sun), nothing could be proved, and Herlinda’s owner, that aforesaid tottering Melchor Marín, testified on his behalf; but poor Doctor de los Ríos, who thanks to his profession could never get the reek of moral latrines out of his nose, suspected that the old negro might feel beholden to his slave, either (as he had already stated) because he survived upon her labor, or because he enjoyed occasional carnal connection with her, or both; here then was no unprejudiced witness. For this reason Doctor de los Ríos had been more swayed by the innkeeper Jaime Esposito, who like Ángel Enríquez’s wife happened to be of pure Spanish stock and who considered Agustín to be neither more nor less than a nuisance — in other words, possessed no interest in him. So far as Señor Esposito could make out, there was no great evil in the boy, whom he considered sullenly abject rather than malicious. Doctor de los Ríos had once found occasion to investigate the said Señor’s inn, which some busybody suspected of being a brothel, but nothing could be proved, although illicit intercourse had certainly taken place there. Señor Esposito’s noble indifference to the affairs of others, except insofar as they affected his revenues, rendered him the perfect witness, and the tribunal had already sent him home. Doctor de los Ríos now inquired of the negress Herlinda how often the boy Agustín had been present when they trysted, to which she replied that her owner disliked to see him, since children of his age would rather eat than work. From this answer it was apparent that Agustín had in fact come around in the master’s absence, doubtless to stuff his mouth with stolen peanuts; therefore the judge pursued the matter, demanding to know whether the late detested Salvador’s ungodly spite and resentment ever expressed itself to Agustín in the slave girl’s presence, to which she answered (for which he could not fault her, knowing the inferior capacity of these negroes for reason) that she could not remember. So the boy was called to stand, which he did, and commanded to state his opinion of his brother. He seemed amazed and ignorant concerning what he ought to say. Doctor de los Ríos asked whether he comprehended that his brother was a murderer. The boy said yes. He was dark, dirty and ill-favored. Furthermore, he stank like someone who has been in bad places. Although he appeared small, especially in comparison to his brother, whose toes had nearly touched the ground when they hanged him, he projected a woeful skulking look, in the manner of those half-starved dogs which feed on refuse in the streets, and grow up to be vicious. The priests said there must be bad blood in him. Upon demand he produced his papel proving church attendance. Gently the procurador inquired whether he was a Christian, to which this Agustín replied that no one had ever taught him anything. After due thought, Doctor de los Ríos now released the aforesaid Herlinda Encinas, upon whom any exhortations to chastity would presumably be wasted unless accompanied by flogging and disgrace, back into the corridor between two soldiers, and out into the wide courtyard whose walls were Naples yellow and whose square planters contained narrow-trunked wide-branched almond trees, and back into the sweetness of Veracruz, where until she died or got sold she would presumably continue her close friendship with that metal cage with sacks of peanuts and sometimes even mangoes hanging from it. Next, after further questioning, together with a reminder of the penalty for adultery, and a word of helpful advice on managing one’s dependents (for instance, one could borrow money, if need be, to purchase a sturdy young negro fit to keep one’s negress from wandering) he dismissed the negress’s owner, Melchor Marín, who crept gratefully back to his sins. Finally he rang his tiny bell, summoning the guards, who returned the boy Agustín to the secret underground cells. Everyone agreed that nothing could be indicted against him, but no one approved of his manner. In a bored voice the procurador proposed placing him in that new house of mercy for unfortunates, but when Doctor de los Ríos drew attention to the boy’s apparent potential for corrupting the souls of others, no one dissented. Within the week they set him at liberty, but being homeless and without a trade, he haunted the house of Melchor Marín until the latter drove him away definitively, then fell into thievery. Although they exhorted him in reasoned kindness, and punished him with only twenty stripes, in consideration of his youth, for their charity they got requited with sorrow — a tale all too frequently heard here in Veracruz, where sins have become as commonplace as negroes in shackles. It was the lacemaker’s wife who saw this Agustín interring some bundle in the dungheap between her house and the cemetery wall; thus they recovered Señor Castellano’s miniature aventurine cask, which corresponded in important particulars to the description given by its outraged owner, the tap being decorated with blue enamel and two pretty chains. Señor Castellano swore that he had paid twenty pesos for it, although the procurador opined that its worth was closer to eighteen. Brought into the light, Agustín readily admitted his guilt — forthrightness being the only good remaining in him. When they inquired how he had it in him to expose his evil doings, he replied that his brother had taught him that a true man behaves so. He was now fourteen. Sorrowing over his misdeeds, and fearing that he had become of disobedient or malevolent character, they flogged him with fifty crimson stripes — a seemly and edifying entertainment for our common people, who are easily tempted into comparable offenses — then sent him to San Juan de Ulúa for a term of nine years.

Looking down from the yellowing ramparts into the shallow water, which stinks of algae and sewage, one can see the bottom, and sometimes spy the outlines of preying sharks, who guard this hateful prison-island at no expense to the Crown, excepting that incidental loss of labor when a local fisherman loses a leg or worse. They patrol the harbor like bluish-grey shadows. Never mind that the shore lies no great distance away! At church I learned that their voracious grins are set around their snouts for the express benefit of the King of Spain and his laws. All the same, the authorities of Veracruz keep other sentinels, whose swords and guns terrify the prisoners as effectively as sharks’ teeth. It was these who marched that batch of chained prisoners up the steep steps from the landing-place and across the broad low terrace of coral-stone blocks where everything was asymmetrical. The boy looked up. He saw a many-slitted phallic guard tower. The column continued to move, and so he stumbled. A soldier split open his back with two blows of the whip.

Before the commandant’s palace, which was the one square building in that considerable courtyard whose balconies shielded themselves with heavy wooden railings carved out in leaf-shapes and whose windows were latticed with drooping iron ribs, the criminals now got registered and divided up like scoops of grease flicked into so many bubbling pots, the pots being the cells. Wondering whether he might pass the remainder of his life without light, Agustín dared to look up a second time, and saw someone high above him, wearing shiny boots and a scarlet-velveted brigandine with the rivets glittering all down his chest. He wondered how he would feel to become this man, who appeared nearly as small as a seagull on the cathedral’s roof, or at least to look down from this parapet and watch the tiny figures marching through the courtyard. Before he had thought this for very long, they kicked and flogged him, in his string of six, down a long tunnel of arches, whose floor was round stones, and across the stone bridge over the brownish-green water to the polygon-island of huge dank-domed cells, where he left the light indeed. The chamber where they intended him to pass his next nine years had two narrow slits for windows, up high so that a man could not put his face to them. The interior resembled a crocodile’s toothy mouth, for it bore yellow-white stalactites and stalagmites of salt. Stinking rotting half-toothless men lay one upon the other, wheezing, spitting and cursing. The ones who could now sat up, scanning him as thoroughly as our priests will a marriage witness. That was how he was studied and then accepted by his new friend Rodrigo de la Concepción, octaroon, who had already served three years of an eighteen-year term for stealing an infantryman’s helmet. Soon they became very easy together, for in San Juan de Ulúa, as in any prison, life grows jollier and safer for wretches who double up to share secrets. For much the same reason that in Veracruz the birds flock more wildly at twilight than at noon, so in San Juan de Ulúa the convicts commence to crawl all over one another the moment that the sun descends beneath the sea. Accordingly, at dusk Rodrigo got to business. The fingers of his hand, now laid upon the boy’s belly, were as elegant as a crow’s black talons, shining as softly as if they were gloved in patent leather. He liked Agustín even better upon learning that he was a murderer’s brother; thus it came out that in addition to the affair of the infantryman’s helmet, Rodrigo deserved the credit of fitting his hands around a certain woman’s throat, for a cause that any man of style could understand:

Mestiza, goddess of the orient;

mestiza, queen of the sun,

so that you look decent,

remove that piece of bean

which covers your whole tooth!

and two as yet unknown other villains sang along. For all the neighbors ever learned, he said, that slut simply ran off from her husband, a townsman infamous for his own paramours; hence Rodrigo got rid of her for nothing, unlike Salvador, who stood before the tribunal, weighted with chains, grinning down his capital sentence; when they led him away he gazed back at Agustín unbearably. Having heard in church that submission is the best way to avoid getting lost in fiery tortures; and, moreover, remaining yet capable of joys not unlike the shining white pores of fresh watermelon slices, the boy determined to make the best of his confinement; after all, there would be food — besides, his new friends were such jokers; they’d speed the years away! This Rodrigo, for instance, was a cheerful, hopeful sort of fellow, who began to uplift Agustín’s soul with treasure-talk.

The food now came, in a common bowl. It was nothing but slabber-sauce,* and moldy bread-crusts with which to grub it up. But there was plenty of it, and his new friends promised it would come twice every day.

Just as rich men dream of becoming good, so poor men imagine getting rich. And everyone knew that riches still shone here and there in Mexico — for the contrary would have been unthinkable. The Franciscans once longed to build on this soil a Kingdom of the Gospels, whose citizens would become gentler than the pigeon-armies which strut along the island of white-limed palms in the zócalo; no less hopeful were the dreamers of Cortés’s stripe, who if they could not torture treasure out of Indians would squeeze a quotidian surplus out of their own kind. Then there were the convicts, who craved to hunt down Amazons, and revenge themselves upon all wealth and pleasure — all the more so since they lacked means even to hire the jailer’s dice. A few of Agustín’s cellmates denounced certain nobles and churchmen for their dark greed, but the rest dreamed of victories, not over their century but merely over this or that moment. From ambush they might have shot down an Archbishop standing beneath the gold-and-purple pallium, could they have sold his vestments for fifty reales; but they would far rather have raped a woman of the town; better still, they listened for the footsteps of the two guards bringing the food trough. They grieved over the friars’ decision to destroy the Mexican temples, even down to their lovely furnishings; but New Spain goes on and on, like that stony-floored recession of arches at San Juan de Ulúa; surely other temples remained; thus eagerly they devoured each other’s lies. As Rodrigo liked to sing,

Stretch out your arms, negrita,

and raise me to your castle in the clouds!

Open your legs, negrita,

and show me your coral casket!

What astonished Agustín, whose character (he having been a worrier from his earliest age) was practical nearly unto bleakness, was their silence on the subject of escape. In fact the sharks and sentries kept the place so well that the commandant slept late, as he had always wished to do when he was younger. On the ramparts stood a file of fresh troops — less in order, perhaps, than the wide black shoulders of those vultures which had lined up on the wall for Salvador’s execution; for it was summer, and so the yellow fever was ripening again in men.

Once upon a time the beautiful witch Mulata de Córdoba, who, so they say, was the fortress’s only female prisoner, did get out of San Juan de Ulúa, simply by begging a piece of charcoal from the guards, who must themselves have hungered for something unearthly to transpire, for after advising her to act like a good woman they provided what she had wished for, and with it she drew a ship upon the wall of her cell. Came a midnight thunderclap, and in that ship she sailed away with the Devil! But no other prisoner possessed her advantages. Several generations after Agustín’s confinement, that upright, colorless liberator Benito Juárez, whose administration would put Emperor Maximilian to death, lay in one of these cells. His best aphorism: I know that the rich and the powerful do not feel or try to alleviate the miseries of the poor. He expected nothing in prison, and got nothing. As for Agustín’s new friends, precisely because their expectations had ebbed, they craved dreamy prizes all the more — and not one of them wisely fearful of his own conscience. For the boy’s part, the bitter impossibility of escape was not to be admitted all at once; after all, he had years in which to make that accommodation; so wouldn’t it be more inspiring to fondle imaginary silver? And since he was new here, and preferred to get by without trouble, by all means let them guide the conversation! That Indian with the cropped-off ears, when would he say something, and how unpleasant would it be? That tall negro with the inflamed eyes, that wiry quadroon who kept grinning back and forth, as if his temper required constant watching; that pallid, vague fellow with the hands of a locksmith (he’d burned the granary of some miserly hacendado who hoarded corn in drought years); that broad-shouldered mulatto who’d laid his arm against Agustín’s, and smiled because Agustín’s was darker… well, they were his neighbors now. What he would have preferred to do was remember a certain turning he had glimpsed when they were marching him to this cell, and a certain narrow stone staircase worn perilously smooth, and above it, dark blotches on the island’s dim rock, and vast L-shaped corridors between whose flagstones the grass grew in square outlines; because already his recollections were drawing inward, like blotches of wetness on laundry hanging in the sun; soon, as the guards intended, he would be lost at San Juan de Ulúa even in his memories, and his chances for flight still further reduced. That narrow staircase, could he ever find it again, he’d clamber from it into the rock’s footholds, and then leap down onto a passing soldier, but only at night; already he had forgotten whether it lay left or right of the main corridor; and his fine friend Rodrigo, the one with the crow-black hands, kept going on about treasures. And why not? On those bygone nights when the two brothers still dwelled together (they used to sleep in this or that tree overlooking the beach, so that crocodiles could not eat them; but it turned out that instead of crocodiles it was soldiers who rousted them out, after which they hid in the sailmaker’s shed), they too loved to dispose of imaginary wealth. — Reader, may you be warned by their example never to forget what wields greatest power over our immortal souls! — Agustín, then five or six years old, proposed to fill his belly with meat and cake; thus far went a hungry boy’s dreams. Salvador promised there would be other pleasures. Someday, God willing, they’d pass for honorable grandees, with the power of death over a dozen slaves, and nothing to do but ride about the city in a coach enriched with cloth of gold. Indeed, at the trial, Agustín, like the procurador, envisioned himself between the thighs of his brother’s light-of-love, Herlinda — for how fetching she had been, and how well she had fed both brothers! Lying close against the boy, Rodrigo, who wished for an encomendero of his own, with Indian labor forever, now swore that in Moquí Province (so a mulatto swineherd had whispered to him the night before being garroted) there ran a snowy Blue Range renowned for its central peak, a silver mountain ringed round by quicksilver lakes; and that beyond that, in a direction which was certain, on the island of Ziñogava, in a palace of jade, there dwelled an Amazonian queen most deserving of pillage, because her vassals served her on plates and platters of pure white silver — and by the way, Rodrigo informed him, Amazons are whiter than all other women on earth, and weep tears of unalloyed silver, which makes them doubly worth raping and tormenting. Concerning the existence of these females Agustín stayed skeptical, since Salvador, who had always been eager for such knowledge, had been definitively informed by Fray de Castro that no trusty witness ever saw one, no, not from the Conquest until now, although once upon a time, allowed Fray de Castro, the Tarascans most faithfully promised Gonzalo de Sandoval that an Island of Amazons lay but ten days’ sail from Colima, and even Cortés hoped and believed. In truth the idea of tormenting a beautiful woman gave Agustín something new to dream of, although he would rather have loved and married her (for he was not yet as lost to goodness as some Saracen); and Rodrigo proposed to swear an oath upon the sacred Host, should he ever obtain it, which appeared improbable, that there were Amazons, not merely somewhere in this world, but right here in Mexico! Agustín wondered aloud how they might find Ziñogava or even the Blue Range. Pressing against his back was a certain Bernardo Villalobos, with whom Rodrigo appeared to be very tender; he had been lucky to draw a mere nineteen years for bigamy and incest. To encourage the boy, and initiate him into their fraternity of treasure-seekers, he now told the tale of the skeleton hand: A sea-captain out of Barcelona, having entered into illicit relations with his sister, sat sorrowing at her deathbed, when she commanded him, as her final wish, to cut off her hand and keep it with him, since the magnetic sympathy between them had been so greatly magnified by their physical love that this one piece of her, so adept at caressing and gesturing, might be able to do him a good turn. Being a sentimentalist, he kept this relic on red velvet in a glass box. As he soon learned, the skeleton hand was better than a compass-needle. Were he unsure where to sail, he would closet himself with the hand, utter a few endearments (the same sort which he practiced on women of the town) and confess his uncertainty, at which point it would swivel around upon its velvet bed, and then the forefinger would point out the direction where he ought to go. Greatly interested (for he had sometimes thought to become a sailor), Agustín asked Bernardo whether he might perhaps know that sea-captain personally, which he coyly disdained to answer. The main thing, he said, caressing the boy, was that this hand, could he but find it (and as a matter of fact he suspected where to steal it), would guide them quite infallibly to Ziñogava, and Agustín would be welcome to be one of their company. Bernardo said that the hand sometimes liked to tickle people, especially young boys, and sometime, perhaps even tonight, it might pay the new arrival a visit. — But can the hand get us out of here? the boy demanded. — Salvador had taught him how to pick pockets on those afternoons when the musicians, dancers and lovely singers performed high up on the wooden platform and happy people pressed carelessly around. He could march his fingers like spiders quite well. So when Rodrigo and Bernardo did just this, he fell back on his guard, but being so lonely and so weak, he could not forbear all the same to hope that they would be to him like brothers, and perhaps even someday, when they were all free, help him find an Amazon to love. — Rodrigo laughed at his question, but Bernardo, who must be worth listening to, since he had formerly done well for himself as an Indian-whipper for the Franciscans, claimed to know how the narrow stairs ascended through a deep arch of pastel stone, going up past a certain barred window to the parapet, which in places was broad enough for three horsemen to ride abreast, but whenever his words had carried the other prisoners that far he invariably hesitated, his plots never finishing or even becoming symmetrical, in which respect they took after the prison’s open-roofed many-arched islands of stone. And so everyone stared down into the dark latrine-crypt whose hole opened over the shining green water. The sun now drowned itself. There came the faraway slam of a door. Bernardo tried to kiss him, but the boy rolled away. At this, Rodrigo clapped his hands. Four villains held the boy down. Perhaps he should have appealed to that divine protector of the weak and innocent, the King of Spain.

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.

Kill him, brother! — because Agustín now held that Indian’s silence against him; all these years he had resembled some great lord who hides his grain.

So the head murdered him also. That was when the rapier of something cut through Agustín’s hate-ringed heart, and he got pricked by the love shown by this hateful head which had flown so far from hell to help him.

Well, it said, that was a nice drink of blood. I’m feeling much restored, thanks to those gentlemen.

None of them had suffered as they deserved, although of course the ones who awaited their turns paid a higher penalty than those who died first. The flying head was terrifying, without a doubt, but by now Agustín had seen worse.

He felt exalted. He wished to impress everyone in Mexico just as he had done in this cell: to kill the people who had testified against his brother, together with their children; to harry meek penitents who knelt with ropes around their necks; to open the throats of men he’d never met; to burn a rich lord’s granary for a lark — dreams as old as the accounting-books in the archives.

The head told him: Brother, you’ve become foul.

And you?

I as well, the head replied, even as I decayed into a skull, and all the more when a soldier pulled me off the spike and cast me into the harbor to be crabs’ prey, because there was nothing left to me but a ruined fragment of my body, and all got worse and worse. Then I heard about you, because when they pronounced your sentence a bell tolled under the sea, and I remembered you, knowing that you have no one but me. But who was I? When I was a child I was no murderer; when I was alive I was not dead; when I was dead I was not whole. Still in all those times I remained myself. So I began to take myself back out of the mud and away from the crabs, and now I feel myself becoming good. Don’t you wish for the same?

Brother, said Agustín, what I wish for is to get out of here.

That’s easy, chuckled the head, and bit right through the bars, devouring each one in two places, while the young man lifted each broken length of iron aside, as quietly as he could.

Don’t worry, brother. I’ve dulled their ears. Have you said goodbye to your friends?

For answer, Agustín kicked the dead Indian in the chest.

Rolling its eyes with whirring sounds, the head flew out of the cell, and its brother followed. — Now hold me against your heart, with both hands. Grip my hair tight, because if you let go, you’ll be killed. Don’t worry; you can’t hurt me.

So they rose up into the air. The fortress began to unfurl around them. Within the half-barrel arches, salt coated the walls like ribs of frost. Because he had counted and recounted the corridor of arches, Agustín grew momentarily furious not to go that way; but this he overcame. His brother’s head was squishy-rotten and its hair wriggled with worms, but the young man would have done anything to preserve his life. Moreover, the head was his destiny. As silently as mosquitoes they cleared the parapet of the squat yellow island, which was not entirely unlike a Totonacan pyramid in its wide and stolid massiveness, brooding utterly alone, never mind its connecting bridges, over its barely untrue reflection in the still dark water where offal floated among the reflections of palm-tops. Halfway up the steep narrow stairs of the far corner stood a sentry, shaking with fever and occasionally groaning. Unlike the convicts he knew the misery of parade on the broad pale terraces of the fortress, the sun beating down on burned and infected hands, the commandant’s rages, and the hallucination of a certain longhaired fever-woman in a jade dress, who outstretched her arms to him from the precious mildewed shade of towers and archways. He had not yet begun to vomit. At first he stared right through Agustín, neither comprehending nor believing, so that before he knew it, the head had torn away his throat, and Agustín changed clothes with the corpse. Again the head flew up near his heart, and he gripped it around both cheeks; again they were flying silently a hand’s breadth above the hot foul water, down within which some long and finny thing accompanied them, and cautiously rounding the corners of steep-walled promontories and bridge-joined islets which make up San Juan de Ulúa’s immense and complex hatefulness. Agustín could spy the myriad glowings of skulls at the bottom of the harbor.

And so he escaped from San Juan de Ulúa, where Cortés first came on Holy Thursday, 1519, in the days when dreams of silver and Amazons still travelled in fleets like our high-castled galleons; yes, he returned into the day at last, and the sun shone nearly as brightly as the face of the Mother of God.

They descended to the beach, easily avoiding a file of night soldiers with leaf-bladed lances, and then the head whirred out of his hands. So he was back among the happy people.

Eight years it had been since he and Salvador used to conceal themselves here, gleefully devouring stolen food. Several palm trees had fallen; the sailmaker had patched his hut. Once when he was very young — their mother must have died not long before — his brother had stolen a dirty breadcrust to share with him, and as they sat in the sand eating it, some Spaniards came to punish them. While they started on Salvador with their sticks, Agustín ran into this very thicket, where an Indian prostitute hid him in her sweaty cloak. Now he felt equally enveloped and protected by the flying head, which loved him more than anyone ever had or would; only he wished that instead of being so much smaller than he was, the head would enlarge.

The head asked if he were satisfied, and he said that he was. Indeed, it seemed at first that his ingenuous hopefulness had been regained, as if it were again so early in life’s day that the sky was pearly and a solitary grey pigeon seemed almost black; watchmen’s torches still glowed like egg yolks, and the yellow-pink fissure which would prove itself to be the sun barely announced itself through the clouds. He hoped never to make another mistake. Knowing that everyone but the head was against him made life easy. The cavalry were all asleep, and the vultures had not yet come down from the trees.

Well? the head demanded, with the round gold ring-eyes of a crow. Is this where time stops?

Because the head had done for him what he never could have done for himself, Agustín felt timid and dependent, all the more so since liberty was blinding and dangerous, but he considered himself a man, and meant to become a rich lord. Should no Amazons make themselves available to be conquered right away, he might apprentice himself to a leather merchant, then kill his master and sell off the stock in Xalapa. Then he could buy weapons and set out into the jungle, where he might find, if not Amazons, then at least some feeble Indians with gold in their ears. Or he could lease that old sugarmill in San Andrés Tuxtla and live off the labor of his negroes. For a fact, after all his sufferings he deserved never to work like other people! But relying on his own notions just now might cause his recapture. Settling, therefore, for patient opportunism, he did not answer the head’s question directly, but pried an old sack out of the sand and invited the head to fly into it. This conveyance, if it may be called that, he tied around his belt. Then he strode into Veracruz. The yellow flecks behind the silver clouds coagulated into a new sun. Suddenly pigeons flocked to the ledges of the municipal edifice. Men such as his brother had once been were already sweeping last night’s offal from the steps of palaces. In the doorway where Salvador sometimes used to meet Herlinda, two prostitutes were quarrelling. A few sailors lounged around the plinth, only one with his cap on. They eyed him like crows, ready to challenge him, since he was, for all they could tell, alone. This train of thought reminded him that the alarm gun would sound any moment now; it was surprising they had not yet discovered the dead guard and prisoners. But three mulata housewives were walking side by side around the bell tower, their dark hair shinily wet. Seven years since he had seen a woman! Were trouble on its way, the head would surely save him. So he stood leering at the women, who hastened on; he had forgotten that the uniform could scarcely compensate for his face, which was more unshaven than any beggar’s, nor for the seven years of filth on his body. How could he remember? He had freed himself from time, abandoning the gloomy years to molder in those locked vaults while he, transplanted into a lovely tale, could play with beauties and treasures, steered through ever purer adventures by the head, his general and prophet.

Then he spied a squad of infantry filing up from the beach, and his heart sank. He seemed to see again the gory throats and bulging eyes of his late comrades. If he somehow escaped hanging, burning or decapitation, they would send him to sort stones in the mines. The sack at his belt buzzed as if a wasp nest were in it. As rapidly as discretion allowed, he turned a corner, then ducked into a palm thicket where he and Salvador used to conceal themselves.

What now? asked the head.

We need to fly away!

They’re nothing to us, brother. Have you considered your future?

I’d like to be rich, said Agustín.

The infantrymen were level with them now, but they seemed unable to see or hear anything. Trying to be brave and live up to the head’s expectations, Agustín treated his enemies as if they did not exist, and continued the conversation, saying: Can you get me a mountain of silver?

Would you rather have that, or a jade palace?

Which would you advise?

Now the infantrymen were all past, and the head, pleased to have been asked, chuckled: Both.

At once his mind’s harbor was overwhelmed by chained galleons of treasure-dreams, so that he grew weak and nauseous with silver-sickness, and said: Brother, I’ll trust in you for the best. There’s an Amazon—

Who told you about that?

Rodrigo, one of those who you killed.

Oh, I know him. Just now he’s at Satan’s right hand.

What about you, brother?

You’d wish to marry her, I suppose? You know that Amazons have but one breast.

I don’t care about that.

All right, then. Her name is María Platina. You’ll court her, and punish her enemies. She’ll marry you. And when you’re ready, brother, when you’re tired of everything, we’ll go under the earth.

What if I’m never ready?

That’s as Christ disposes, replied the pious head.

So the head whirled him west and west, which is the red direction, and hence the realm of women; long before the alarm gun ever sounded, he found himself passing from one country to the next, like a white-clad blind musician creeping along with his hand on his colleague’s shoulder; and the brothers flew through sunset, night, and a morning as moist and hot as a new tortilla; then after traversing a day as red as blood and a night as pink as coral, they arrived at Ziñogava Island, where silvery jungle hills rise up in the rain, and every ill can be healed.

Now what? the head demanded.

Truth to tell, Agustín had grown happier the farther away from prison they travelled; but once they alighted he felt no better off than before. For one thing, he feared his brother, or at least worried that his brother might get angry at him over something, and then bite him. The new country was pretty enough — nearly as lovely as Veracruz’s trees of white flowers and trees of red berries — but somehow he nearly felt himself to be once again within the long shade of prison walls, and he could almost smell the foul water of the latrine-hole. — Impatiently the head nibbled at his wrist, and he said: Shall we take her by force?

No. Do exactly as I say.

But if she—

Thanks to God, brother, she is as good as ours.

Again it was night. Ready to pounce on his happiness, Agustín ascended a wide road, toward the distant glowing of the jade palace, with a cool sea breeze ever at his back; and the head flew before him, lighting the way with its blood-red eyes. They came to a river, and the head made him wash himself. With its teeth it trimmed his hair and beard. Once more he put on the prison sentry’s clothes, and the head shrank itself down into a golden pendant of ghastly design, on a copper chain for him to wear around his neck.

So they arrived at the palace. Just as the windblown sands seek ever to smother the streets of Veracruz, so an unnamable tainted emotion began to sweep over Agustín; the grandeur he saw, instead of inciting him, confused him; he stared down at his feet. — Hurry forward! hissed the head. Eyes up, chest out! — So in they came.

Here stood Amazons yet more numerous than the vultures in the sandy streets of Veracruz. For instance, they met Laura, Lidia, Lucrecia, Luísa, Magdalena and Margarita; and all of them tall, handsome and one-breasted. Now, what the head actually understood and foresaw I who merely tell this tale have never been able to make out; but it is certain that Agustín felt more lonely and inferior before these lovely women than he had even before the tribunal of worthies who condemned his brother; perhaps they were too silvery for him; if he only could have seen the sweet face of his brother’s concubine Herlinda I am sure he would have pricked up his courage; as it was, he felt numb enough to face the thing out, and unwilling to go against the flying head — which, after all, had brought him to the place he wished to go. Somehow the head must have dazzled the Amazons; for what had Agustín with which to impress them? He had fallen out of the habit of looking into people’s eyes. Since his cellmates used to take him from behind, he never had to stare into their gaunt yellow faces when he was making them happy. When the Amazons inspected him he prepared for the worst.

Make yourself happy, whispered the head.

But, brother, I don’t feel so.

Put on a good face! — And the head murmured into his ear three boisterous jokes, which he deployed to best advantage, so that the Amazons laughed and began to love him.

The Queen of Ziñogava now entered the hall, wearing an ankle-length sleeveless robe of silver and gold, and at once the day grew as bright as the scrutiny of our merciful Church. She was young, slender and high-breasted — but, as usual, one breast was missing. Her golden hair was roached high above her forehead; then it spilled down her neck. Her eyeballs could have been green stones. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were silver, and her lips were garnet-red. Her coral-pink arms were perfectly smooth. Her hands were graceful, her fingers long, with their nails, of course, painted in that mineral-green shade called amazonite. Agustín felt no desire, but told himself that he did. For a fact, she was nearly as beautiful as our Lady the Virgin Santa María.

She is ours, whispered the head, smiling a little sadly.

What is that pendant you have on? asked the Queen.

Slipping the chain over his head, the young man bowed, and presented her with the toy.

How very real it is! she laughed. And are those rubies in its eyes?

Yes, Majesty.

She closed her eyes as if in pain (really she was thinking of something), and the tendons stood out on her long pink neck. Since he felt like a very little boy, he could not help but wonder how it all might turn out.

She presented him with a decorated box of blue crystal, filled with round beads of pure silver. What was he supposed to do with it? He bowed to the floor and was dismissed. Creeping into the jungle, he ascended a fig tree, gorged himself and slept in the crotch, while Salvador’s head hovered faithfully until dawn, keeping watch for snakes and jaguars. Meanwhile Agustín dreamed that he was walking down a long prison corridor toward a faraway curtain of rotten hide whose edges let in white light. It was a dream which had often settled on him of late, and he feared it without knowing why. He awoke in a sweat, and there was the head hanging in the darkness, a hand’s breadth away from his face, with its red eyes glowing like flames and its rotten black lips smiling at him.

On the following night he returned as the head commanded him to do, although, truth to tell, he would much rather have gone home to Veracruz if he could have kept his liberty there. When he entered the presence of the Queen she said: Someone stole the pendant you gave me.

What did you do, Majesty?

I had two of my maidservants put to death.

This made him respect her. Certainly God would be well pleased with a lady who thus enforced her rights.

Señor Agustín, what do you carry in the sack at your belt?

My brother’s relics, Majesty.

Very loving of you.

The head whispered: Tell them that you are the best knight in the world! — So he did. Then he offered to serve her according to his power, and she clapped her hands for pleasure, because her eastern dominions were currently oppressed by all sorts of monsters. And the Amazons said to him: God has sent you.

The Queen of Ziñogava gave him a mirrorlike sword and chain mail nearly as silky as a woman’s hair. Then she called him back to bestow more treasures on him, so that before she was done she had armed him with shield, spear, sword, silver armor and golden crossbow. So he sallied forth, with the aid of God and His Glorious Mother (not to mention the flying head).

His battles lay eastward, in the yellow direction. You may be sure that in his path were monsters indeed: namely, the extra ecclesiam who dwell outside of Christian grace. Although of course he had never been there, he seemed to recognize certain vistas from his childhood: papayas, almonds, coconut palms, vast spreading mangoes whose tops were in a fire of yellow flowers. Loudly invoking Saint Santiago, as he had seen actors do in battle-pageants, almost forgetting how afraid he used to be in those days, he did exactly as the head instructed him. Had he been alone he would have pondered, worried and planned, so rigorous had been his education; but when one’s brother is a flying decapitated head, there is not much to do but throw oneself into each campaign, trusting in magic all the more since Salvador used to be a lucky gambler.

First came the dog with the eagle’s face. The flying head worried its throat to pieces; meanwhile Agustín lanced it through the breast. He cut out its jeweled eyes for souvenirs, and for that instant felt pride, but the head sternly told him: Never say that we mean justice, or care for the right. We do not forget; there is nothing to be made whole.

How can that be, brother? We’re killing the bad, so aren’t we becoming good?

Keep wondering, said the head. That’s the first step.

Then there was the three-headed ogre. Vowing to have him dead, and all his minions delivered up unto her who ruled Ziñogava, Agustín rushed upon him with unexampled hatred and courage. — Kill the center head first, said Salvador. — In the end Agustín accounted for two heads, while his brother finished up. The third head was small, high-foreheaded and sad. Agustín picked it up and stared into its eyes. Then he threw it away, at which the flying head sang a cheerful song.

Although they made a great cry and entreated his kindness, he put all the ogre’s children to death, male and female, and his joy rose up like smoke to see their suffering. As for the monster’s slaves and servitors, Agustín dispatched them back to Ziñogava, enchained in terror by the flying head. Not daring to step right or left from the straightest path, nor even to upraise their eyes, they shuffled into the Queen’s presence, bearing her necklaces of gold beads and shells. The Amazons all agreed that he was succeeding even better than the pirate Lorencillo. And the Queen began to desire him.

He halfway expected to meet enemy spirits or even flying heads. What if the earless Indian’s ghost were as powerful as his brother? But thanks to Our Lady he never did meet one.

Next to fall were the winged crocodile, the Laughing Bird Lady and the giant whose armor proved less infallible than he had expected. — The head kept saying: Don’t hesitate. God will help us. — When the giant first turned an eye on him, Agustín seemed to see once more in the base of the guard-tower at San Juan de Ulúa that long tunnel which seems to penetrate impossibly beyond the diameter of the tower itself, at which he felt weirdly quelled and quenched, as if he were helpless, but at once the head flew round and round his face, buzzing angrily, until he came to his senses and realized that this enemy reckoned for as little as the others. So he slew him, beating in his head with his sword.

Thanks to the flying head, all Agustín’s battles taken together were no more frightening than one of the cane games which our horsemen play in honor of Corpus Christi. The Snake Twins proved difficult, but since the head could not be killed, they bit at it as much as they pleased, while Agustín took advantage. So the Snake Twins perished; their clay skeletons quickly turned to dust. Thus the two brothers continued to deal with the wicked and rebellious as they deserved; indeed, Holy Writ has proved that for unlawful villains there never could be any escape. Both brothers enjoyed to see a severed head bite dirt in its dying rage. They exterminated the Bee People; they reduced escaped negroes to reason. Seeing this, even the Devilfish Tribe surrendered. Approaching his mercy, blowing animal-headed whistles and flutes, they knelt to await what would happen; he and the head slew them all, sending back trophies to the Queen of Ziñogava.

There was a certain evildoer named Dzum; he was wider than the cathedral at Veracruz and his flesh was harder than steel. Agustín felt daunted, but the head buzzed round his ear, saying: Remember those Inquisitors who condemned us! and at once rage empowered him into leaping forward like a picador about to thrust the lance over his horse’s head and gore the bull again. And even Dzum could not withstand those two brothers. When he fell, Agustín kicked his teeth in, wondering whether this might be happiness. — Back in Veracruz, when Señora Marín was still able to walk, she and her husband used to cudgel Herlinda and Salvador for their own good, sometimes kicking their heads a few times, and if they caught Agustín miserably eavesdropping they would command him to come in, which of course he was not required to do, not being their slave; but for Salvador’s sake he always marched stonily in, bowing his head and never crying out when they began to beat his head, which in truth they did but moderately, since he had barely entered the years of reason; and this proved to be a valuable education for the boy, who as he grew found ever less pity within himself. This memory increased the zeal with which he finished off the giant. Suddenly he remembered his brother’s execution, and sobbed. By then the head was out of sight, swooping about its business, most likely devouring birds and insects, for it sometimes grew so thirsty that even a battle wasn’t enough. Agustín gave thanks that it had not observed his tears. By the time it returned, he had recovered himself, and was cutting away Dzum’s leather armor in hope of discovering something precious.

There remained the Poison King, whose touch was death. — That’s nothing! crowed the head. Have you forgotten the night when you were weeping for hunger, and I burgled the glovers’ guild?

Yes, brother. A pretty loaf of bread you got me—

And meat. Don’t you remember that?

I remember that bread—

And I got myself Herlinda. She loves money far more than you do.

She’s still alive?

Never mind.

And now I’ll have María Platina for my wife.

Yes you will, brother. Perhaps then you’ll begin to grow good.

Thus conversing, they slew the Poison King safely from a distance, Agustín shooting him with arrows while the head hovered dropping stones from its jaws.

These were but a few of Agustín’s battles. Although many monsters fought against him with courage, his deeds kept passing as straight and useless as do the sentries through the endless colonnade of San Juan de Ulúa, the head weaving noble treacheries for him, as industrious as a skilled clothmaker at eight reales a day. Thus they felled all those miscreants, or Turks as they are often called in New Spain. I consider our two heroes nearly the equal of those great lords in New Spain who find time to go a-hawking.

When all the evildoers were dead, the two brothers flew home to Ziñogava, and María Platina gazed at him as if he were taller than Seville’s highest churchtower.

I am yours more than mine, she whispered.

Reader, here is the story’s happiest turn — that by virtue of marrying her, he instantly led her and her entire realm to the True Faith.

It was a very fine wedding, with musicians, singers and dancers, and a thousand Amazons looking on; Agustín taught them how to dance the Jarocho fandango. The head flew in, gripping a hogshead of Andalusian wine. Agustín prayed aloud for the perpetual glory and security of Ziñogava. As soon as he had been crowned, he enslaved all the Amazons, and under pain of death set them to working the silver mines.

She was very rich of person; even her single breast was as high-silvered as Mexican pesos. No one could deny her purity of blood. He took her maidenhead, together with all that is referred to in that measure and demarcation. At once she lost her powers. She was very learned, and sometimes composed chamber music in the musical notation which is aped by certain slave brands. She was meant to be his earthly bliss. He ruled her like some cunning pork-farmer who buys up all the grain for his pigs, so that the townspeople go hungry.

For him, the joy, so he had supposed, was to be witnessing the sunlight on the buttocks of María Platina, Queen of Ziñogava. For her, it was to continue supposing his soul to be as white-coraled as the Island of Sacrifices. And indeed, he sought sincerely to inhabit goodness, like an Aztec warrior crawling inside his captive’s flayed skin.

But once he had possessed her, he felt like an unwanted child sucking from a sour-breasted nurse, and of course he always hated to be touched. Every night he dreamed most weirdly or sorrowfully. Sometimes he struggled to breathe. Bitterness rose up out of him in bad vapor from his heart, and he wondered why he could not get his happiness even when María Platina remained as pliable as a slave of the correct blood. Perhaps he would rather have had his brother’s former novia Herlinda. But wasn’t he supposed to love life here in Ziñogava? What should he say to anyone? All he had wished for was to rule a kingdom; but the misery haunted him like the mosquitoes of Veracruz; he could not decide whether he had become foul, as his co-ruler said, or whether the judges had spoken true in asserting that he had always been filthy and malicious, perhaps on account of the color of his skin — or might it be that he needed but to pursue one thing of which he had not yet conceived, a thing perhaps even easy to get, and then he would be happy?

He caused a special fortress to be built after the fashion of San Juan de Ulúa, and here raised a tower where his silver ingots were locked away; to this stronghold he alone kept the key, although his wife looked surprised and sad, as if she were seeking something to say to him. Upon pain of death he required the architect to copy everything which could be remembered about the prison-island, right down to the low outer parapet with its iron ship-rings within each of which two people could have embraced. Once the place was constructed and dedicated, he never went there.

Brother, he said, I’m feeling almost murderous.

Yes, brother. Then shall we go forever under the earth?

No, not yet.

Then go to your wife. And when you have a moment, get that servant to fetch me another bowl of fresh dog’s blood.

His wife said: I am struggling to understand you.

She said: I shall not be rid of this feeling until I regain what you have taken from me.

Presently she said: I beg you now to let me go my own way and entrust me to God.

Divorce is a sin, replied Agustín, seeing his angry face reflected in each of her silver tears.

At first his rage was so often soothed by the gentle shining of silver. His Empress, who meant only to please him, gave him everything, but still he could not contain his rage, because he had lost the ability to be happy. Her gentle entreaties made as much headway against his heart as did the sea against the white-flecked black walls of Baluarte de Santiago. Now that they had been reduced to reason, the Amazons crept around below the palace on their allotted labors, in proof of that canticle in Isaiah, they are dead; they will not live; they are shades; they will not arise—which did please him in a way, of course, because thus ought all such stories to end. The way that silver can be at times both warm and cold, infinitely indefinable, ought to have contented him more than it did, but his sufferings had been, as would now be his excuses, too painful, too deep. Although he reminded himself that he had never been happier than this, he had not been sadder, either. He ruled his wife of silver, although she might not have been a human being; beneath their bed he also kept a great sack of silver plate, in case he should suddenly decamp. Why shouldn’t he have been satisfied? In fact the more readily she obeyed him the worse he hated her, especially when she tried to caress him. (Of course she could not resist his punishments, for here in New Spain the woman remains always a legal dependent.) Woe to her silver belly, lovelier than the moon; woe to her bewildered silver eyes! If she were only an enemy, like one of those trolls and ogres he had killed! Then he would have known what to do. Thus he began to beat her. The servants learned to withdraw when they heard certain sounds. So came the morning when, peering back once more into the great sunny bedchamber, he saw her lying there with her hands outstretched, her eyes squinted shut and her mouth screaming darkness. A thick stone cap weighed down her forehead.

Brother, you’re not yet good, sighed the flying head.

Agustín cared nothing for that. Everywhere in the world he would be famous.

Perhaps he had been a trifle cruel. But he made up for this by undoing all their unchristian customs; for instance, he forbade the Amazons to lie together anymore, under pain of death, and required them to marry with men, whom he and the head provided them, flying here and there to bring them lords and masters of his choosing — brigands, villains, pirates, soldiers and murderers all; for those were the fellows he knew. So the Amazons lost their virginity forever. He made them slaves to their children as well as to their husbands; thus they became what women should be. And he also made it prohibited for them to mutilate their breasts as they had done before. Hearing this, many of them wept for the first time; but Agustín showed no pity.

Remembering Bernardo’s story, he had cut off and embalmed his wife’s right arm, in case it might point him in the direction where he ought to go, but even though his craftsmen impaled it on a pivot in a red-lined crystal box, it never moved.

Well, brother, what did you truly expect? laughed the head. Were you good to her? Did she love you as I do?

Agustín withdrew into his palace and looked out over the sea. It was getting dark. From his deepest mines he heard the Amazons chanting feebly: Let us die then; let us die. The head, its eyes sunken as low, wide and deep as the arches of San Juan de Ulúa, demanded his silence. It said: You rule alone now, brother.

But you rule with me, brother! We’re two kings in Ziñogava.

Then the head flew up and kissed him with its bloody lips. Agustín had spoken truly, for how long would his reign have endured without that head, the cunningest killer in all the world?

Knowing what the head desired, he said: Brother, teach me to become good.

Then bring in priests.

Like the one you killed, brother? Can you make his head fly as busily as yours?

Not him. He’s too good for us. But import priests of our stripe, who can chant the Ave Maria and teach the Seven Mortal Sins.

We can teach those ourselves, brother!

And a curate, to be the keeper of their baptismal book…

Where did you learn all that?

Oh, they instructed me before they cut off my head, so that I would come to understanding. That’s what we need to do here, as virtuous kings.

As you like. Ziñogava is ours together.

And so they ruled for seven more years, our visible king and his familiar, and perhaps no government in the world was ever more feared and hated than theirs. Agustín was homesick for the cathedral of Veracruz, and for the peanuts Herlinda used to feed into his mouth, and even for the mosquitoes in the street-puddles. But what was he supposed to do? He and the head had long since buried María Platina in secret; their subjects were not so reckless as to mention her.

The two kings promoted justice sincerely, and they both agreed that there was nothing as delightful as beheading a young woman, although late at night in their palace they sometimes enjoyed stabbing a child in her sexual organs.

Perhaps he should have offered up the head on the altar of God. But then he would have been alone as if in a prison. He once asked it for book-wisdom, but it did not know any riddles; it grew ashamed and excused itself for being so uneducated. For this he loved it more.

He said: Brother, do you remember when the hurricane hit the peak of Orizaba and the three rivers came raining down? And then the rich men ran away from Veracruz with their families so that they would not drown, and Herlinda let us into that granary so that we could eat all we wanted? And then—

And then, said the head, I began to grow good. And now I’ve made you a great man.

Brother, at your execution did you see how they pushed me into the front row?

Well, they made me good. I’m as good as they are.

Agustín turned away. By now he dressed only in robes of silver, and the head most often resembled a grimacing, wide-eyed Aztec turquoise mask. Whenever they wondered how to do this or that, they imitated the example of their home, Veracruz. Thus they replicated that familiar post where murderers such as Salvador are put to death, and ever so many naked Indians get whipped into reason, their wrists stretched upward and tied tight against the pillar, their stinking bodies flowering with scarlet wounds. This proved increasingly convenient to the two kings. Remembering how much they used to love such music in their youth, they imported black slaves to play the marimba at festivals. They set a price of six reales for a marriage, and twelve for burial rites. They tithed foreigners ten percent, which helped to soothe the dull grievance Agustín had always felt against them without knowing why. And so whenever they gazed out the palace window, their subjects appeared as docile and diminutive as the Indian slaves creeping round a great corregidor’s table.

Well, brother, are you satisfied yet? asked the head.

No, brother. What am I lacking to be happy?

Another wife. Don’t you want a two-breasted one?

But ever since they pent me up in prison, I dislike sharing a room with anyone — except you, of course. I think that’s why I—

Well, you certainly don’t lack for silver! Shall we go back to the wars?

No, brother, I’m tired. I don’t know what’s the matter with me.

Then ask a priest. Why not that Fray Costa who burned the recreant Amazons last week?

So Agustín went to Fray Costa, and inquired how to become happier. The priest replied: My son, you’ve already laid up heavenly treasures for yourself. Thanks to you, Ziñogava has become a Christian province of New Spain. Take joy in what you’ve done; keep on the straight path, and you’ll die a good death. Does any sin press on your conscience?

Murder, Father, although it was not I who did it, but my brother—

Remember the words of Cain. Am I my brother’s keeper? Kneel down before me, now, and say a Paternoster.

Agustín was beginning to get old. His years lay caught somewhere in the rows of half-barrel arches; he could not get them out. What was he supposed to care about? Sometimes he dreamed inconsequentially about the earless Indian. He and the head brought in the Dominicans who control Indian labor at Chalco, and ore flew out of the mines like angels returning to heaven! At night they sometimes heard Amazons whisper-praying to the Goddess of the Dead Women. These miscreants soon learned the significance of a penitent’s green taper.

Once the two kings had enough silver, Agustín made his subjects build him a fleet of galleons, which he then loaded with treasure. And he commanded them to set forth for Spain, where he intended to establish himself as a great lord; and for captains he appointed his strictest slave-drivers. And so the ships cast off and departed from the Americas. Once they were out of sight, Agustín threw his wife’s hand out the window.

And after this the head carried him all around the world. Together they viewed Huasteca’s two secret fountains, the one with the red fish and the other with the black. For a thrill they flew three times around San Juan de Ulúa, and Agustín felt happy to see his old cell from the outside. Then off they went to Peru, just for an instant, after which they dipped quicksilver from the base of that silver mountain in the Blue Range. They visited the magic mountain by which runs a river which can petrify fallen leaves. And they agreed that no place in the world was especially worth seeing.

Brother, asked the head, are you ready now to fly to Spain? The King and Queen are anxious to receive you.

Brother, replied Agustín, something stays wrong in my mind, or maybe in my heart.

Your ships arrive tomorrow. You’ll be Captain General of New Spain if you play the right cards.

My ships? They’re your ships, too.

Only because you love me, which will help you to become good. Brother, will you allow all your treasure to fall into the hands of the King’s agents? You’ll be poor and ignominious again.

Our treasure’s not for them! Please, brother, don’t let them get any of it!

Laughing, the head sped across the waves and bit holes in the ships, so that they all sank, and every man with them. When it told Agustín what it had done, he sat down with his head in his hands.

Well, brother, was that wrong? We can be kings in Ziñogava again, and make our slaves dig out just as much and more.

Never.

At the head’s behest, they flew back to Ziñogava incognito, just in time to see the public burning of an Indian sorcerer. Juan the Rapist had become Regent. The Amazons were nearly all exterminated, and the province was very highly spoken of.

What do you say? asked the head.

I care not.

For Agustín sickened ever more with that melancholy which had crept over him without his knowing the reason. Perhaps it had something to do with María Platina, for when he thought of her lying sad and naked on their bed, with the marks of his hands around her throat, he nearly longed to quit his errors. So he cast his mirrorlike sword into the sea.

Brother, the head remarked, the trouble is this. Never have you sincerely asked me which deeds are good.

Are you so good, then? Teach me how to be good.

Yes, brother. Well, the thing is, you must have a cause.

A cause for what?

For anything.

Teach me more, brother.

But at this the poor head began to sweat, and flies descended on it.

Brother, he said, I’m becoming lonely.

But the head remained silent.

In the hottest localities of Veracruz, there grows a shrub called hueloxóchitl, whose seeds have sometimes availed against Saint Vitus’s dance. Salvador sometimes used to suffer from headache, and then Agustín would gather these seeds, and Herlinda would boil and strain a decoction from it. So by night (although no one would have recognized him in his kingly attire) they returned to Veracruz, where on the beach, unchallenged by the cavalry on account of his royal clothes, the younger brother again collected hueloxóchitl seeds, boiling them himself, in hopes of curing the head, but it told him: Although I have no tomb for you to pray at, brother, please pray for my soul.

Don’t abandon me, brother! I have no one but you!

Then I’ll keep you company awhile longer. But since you feel sick, I too have sickened.

What do you need, brother?

I need to drink blood.

And so they withdrew a league or two, and commenced to prey on travellers by night, until the head was restored to the sort of vigor it had. And Agustín, not knowing what to aim for anymore, himself tried drinking blood, but it failed to agree with him. Finally he said: Brother, should I try to be good in your way?

By asking that, you’ve taken the second step.

Why won’t you tell me what to do?

Will you go under the earth with me?

Brother, I’ve been there! You rescued me—

That’s where you became foul.

And you?

I was always good, the head assured him.

Well disguised in his silver Ziñogavan cloak, with the head pretending to be a jade effigy bead on the golden necklace he wore, by night he wandered into Veracruz, where in the zócalo there was a harp dance about an evil little kiss, a malicious little kiss, and he almost smiled at the sweetness of those dancers in white, the women flashing their long sleeves and foamy dresses like butterflies, but he knew that if one of them were to smile at him he would hate her, and should she lie down with him he would need to murder her. But he could not understand why. From a doorway, an old man in immaculate white gazed at him, spitting carefully onto the sidewalk

Brother, he said, have you done everything you can for me?

Asking that question was the third step.

How many more steps are there?

Only one.

Brother, can you bring back the dead?

That’s a trifle, said the head. Shall I fetch your wife?

Oh, no! I couldn’t bear to have her look at me—

A little squeamish there, brother. Well, did you have Mother or Father in mind?

Where are they?

Mother’s in hell, because the pirates took her chastity. Father’s in heaven, because he died saying Ave Maria.

Have you met them?

They’re ashamed of me, the head admitted. But when I sink my teeth into anyone’s ear he has to come, like it or not.

If they’re ashamed of you, I reject them. It was you who helped me—

Because I love you, brother.

Brother, please bring me that silent Indian we killed.

Do you need all of him or just his head? I prefer it when they’re my size.

As you wish, brother.

So the head dived down into hell, and soon rushed back up with the grinning cranium of Agustín’s Indian cellmate who had never done him either good or harm, and its dome was as lovely as the slices of fan coral and fossilized shell fitted together at San Juan de Ulúa, while its eyesockets were as prison arches.

Agustín said: I forgive you for not defending me, because you didn’t know me and we were two against many. And I beg your pardon for taking your life.

The Indian’s skull, of course, said nothing, which entertained the flying head.

But now the head began to sicken again, and this time it wept. — Brother, it said, I can’t keep you company much longer, unless you come down to hell with me. You asked if I’ve done everything I can for you. It’s for you to answer that question.

Brother, tell me once and for all how I can become good.

Whom would you follow, if not me?

Brother, should I follow you?

Would you like to fly as I do?

That won’t make me happy, I fear. Please, brother, tell me what to do. I’m unwise, and don’t know my own happiness.

So at last the head brought him down into hell, where they were greeted by demons dressed in French livery in imitation of the pirate Lorencillo. The head flew before him down that same long weird corridor he sometimes used to dream of, with the curtain of rotten hide at the end and white light all around the edges. It lifted the curtain in its teeth, and Agustín saw green water in which fire-colored sharks swam round and round. Utterly at sea, with no way forward but to follow the head, he descended steep steps from the squat stone island straight down to the water, where he gripped the head against his chest, and was flown to another polyhedral island of this prison or palace; jutting from an embrasure were two corroded fangs of iron which must have once formed part of a grate or something to hold a cannon; then the fangs moved; the narrow windows above them winked, and Agustín realized that he was gazing at Satan’s face, which was not entirely unlike the coarse lava-flesh of a decapitated Olmec statue.

The mouth opened. The flying head, which had led him through so many of his days, darted tenderly to Agustín and kissed him on the lips, evidently for the last time. — Goodbye, brother, it said. — Before he could answer, it rushed into the Devil’s maw; and Agustín, who could never have imagined turning away from the head which had been so kind to him, was alone again, for the mouth had closed.

My son, said Satan then, it’s high time you’ve come home to me. Thanks to your brother, you’re becoming better by the moment, and soon you’ll be ready to receive magic powers.

Should I promise you my soul?

You’re already mine.

Please, Lord, I’m not happy yet. And now my brother has gone—

Perhaps you need to ask others for help.

Lord, can you help me?

Of course. Go over there now, and all my best love to you.

So Agustín crossed water again, treading the wreckage of Cortés’s old drawbridge, whose wood was partially broken off and whose fat hinges were the color of beetle shell. Confused by the mélange of shells, fanning corals and bricks above the narrow arches, he now descended within a round tower, grieving anew for his brother; and he completed another flight of stairs, remembering that there had been a silver key on a chain around María Platina’s neck about which he had never asked her; perhaps it would have saved him; and he completed another circuit down into the purple-red light of hell and entered a blind chamber in which, standing at this wall, naked, with her back to him and her brown hair falling all the way to her splendid buttocks, was the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen. She was chalking a picture of a ship on the wall. Now she turned and smiled at him, saying: Do you know who I am?

Rodrigo used to say—

He’s been broiling nicely ever since your brother did for him. Yes, I’m the Mulata de Córdoba, and all this time have been waiting on purpose to rescue you.

Just as far-off white roofs glow orange and red when the birds of Veracruz fly loud and crazy at the afternoon’s end, so the distant whorls of his heart began to illuminate themselves with hope.

Agustín asked her: How can I become happy? What should I wish for? I’m afraid of becoming more evil than I already am.

Good or evil has no bearing on happiness, said La Mulata. If happiness is all you want, I believe I can help you.

And gratefully he accepted.

She finished drawing her ship of chalk, then offered him her hand. They embarked in a twinkling, two-dimensionally, rushing between walls and stones like cockroaches, with clay skulls in their wake as they sailed through the night-black dirt, until they came back out into the light of Veracruz, sailing through rows of young banana trees with the hands of yellow fruit already reaching down, and double-tailed fishes leaping, and ghosts all around them like nosing, trotting dogs.

La Mulata transformed herself into his dead brother’s sweetheart Herlinda, who was as black and feline as a jaguar and whom alone of all women he loved. Oh, how happy he was! And they dwelled in a white house with a tiny palm in the courtyard, just downwind from the slaughterhouse, living in easy concubinage, with a protective mist around their doings so that the Inquisitors could not arrest them.

At times he feared that he might come to hate her as much as he had María Platina, but whenever he began to feel resentment she would speak to him of Salvador, and how noble he had been. So Agustín for a time remained as bright-eyed and bold as a crow. Perhaps he could purify himself. The question of who La Mulata actually was, whether she ought to be rated true or false, sometimes distressed his understanding, but then he would remind himself that he had never comprehended his brother, either. They lived together through lovely mornings of orange juice and prickly pear juice, with many vultures to keep them company on the sandy streets. They shared a pillow when the moon took on a tarnished gold like the handguard of an old soldier’s saber, and tall-masted ships went out sailing hard past San Juan de Ulúa, avid for the ebbing tide. They ate peanuts together from a blue dish which resembled a two-headed dove. For a marriage portion their father below gave them gold bars like glittering greenish-yellow cigarillos, golden necklace-beads with eagle heads and serpent heads, and turtleheaded golden beads; so presently Agustín nearly began to believe in happiness’s staying power. Everyone in Veracruz repelled him; they were all dwellers in the dark and mold of prison; but he persevered, striving not to be offended by life, and whenever they promenaded on the beach the cavalry made way for them. La Mulata would always smile and take Agustín’s hand when he gazed across the harbor at San Juan de Ulúa. Although he had told her never to touch him without permission, this one lapse he tolerated. Come the trade fairs, when the merchants set up their tents in the sand and offered leather, sugar, silver and hardtack, La Mulata liked to look, for people and personalities were her meat, whereas Agustín, who owned more riches than he could digest, stood glaring and fanning himself. He would gladly have built a sugar concern, or slain more monsters for the True Faith; he would fulfill himself; that was as likely as getting shipwrecked in a north wind.

At home they kept a silver mirror, but he avoided looking into it, for his wooden face saddened him. At least his wife never got impatient with him. (How could she? They had a bargain.) Soon she had given him four children, who all feared his temper, and they even had a carriage and slaves.

A Spaniard in a wide lace collar held two naked Indian children upside down by their ankles, one child in each hand, so that his dogs could rip them to death, and more golden beads fell out of their intestines; then the cathedral bells called everyone to Mass. A cotton plantation fell into Agustín’s hands, after which he set some negroes to curing tobacco. He arranged to have frequent carnal access to the black proprietress of a certain shop which sold bread and wine. So you can see that he had a good life, but he could never imagine his future; and presently, out of boredom, he began to quarrel with La Mulata. One night, seeking to entertain her, he recited the three boisterous jokes which the flying head had taught him in Ziñogava, but she said: Everybody in hell has heard those. — Insulted, he struck her.

At once he entered into the time when our Lord will thresh out the grain. La Mulata, the slaves and the children all disappeared, in separate stink-puffs, and there he was, back in the prison of hell, with that gigantic wall-face grinning and winking like the parish priest who rapes his female penitents. — You see, said Satan, happiness was never what you wanted. Your brother gave it to you in Ziñogava, and you destroyed it. I restored it to you to prove that it’s no good to you. What next?

Lord, I never knew what to wish for.

Speak up now.

Lord, may it please you, I’d like to do evil with my brother, until we’re punished.

A noble plan, said the Devil. Now that it’s too late, I’ll tell you what you should have asked for.

Yes, Lord?

Grief.

The mirrorlike sword of Ziñogava rushed back into his hand. Back out of the great mouth flew the grinning head, which seemed perhaps more desiccated or even singed than before, and it said: Congratulations, brother. Now we can both be good.

Brother, asked Agustín, am I alive or dead?

Don’t think too much. Now let’s go pay back our old friends!

Although Doctor de los Ríos was served by proficient torturers, neither Church nor Crown had ever thought fit to protect him against the visit of a decapitated head, and so he now got to find out whether Paradise is truly as wide and flat as Extremadura, where so many conquistadors hail from.

As for the real Herlinda, by now she had found herself a new amor, the lightskinned free mulatto Gaspar de la Cruz, who under pretense of carrying sacks of sugar smuggled French textiles from the port up as far as Xalapa, where he sold them at a respectable rate of return, although too much of his profits went for bribes and fees, in obedience to that fine Mexican custom called engordar el cochino, to fatten the pig. Herlinda was tired of being Melchor Marín’s slave, for his breath stank, his wife was incontinent, and he never left her alone at night. Her very compliance bore sure relevance to his retreat from that half-promise, uttered so long ago, of conditional manumission for her, someday, if she continued to be his good girl. Now that she had gotten into the habit, she sometimes serviced the master’s friends in exchange for a piece of leather or a fine roast fish. Truth to tell, Salvador González Rodríguez was the only man she had felt much for, but Herlinda, who could not hope to be considered a fly in milk for many years longer, faked affection in order to burnish her so-called future; indeed, she branched out to friends of friends, none of whom had yet infected her untreatably. Meanwhile, although Doctor de los Ríos once seemed to enjoy her looks, she had already appeared before him a second time, when he warned her, as she knew all too well, that the punishment of concubinage is to be led through the street on a donkey, with the neighbors jeering and threatening, and the usual rope of criminality around one’s neck, and then to be stripped to the waist beneath the official pillar and there, in the stink of malefactors’ decapitated heads, to be treated to a hearty hundred lashes. So Gaspar chivalrously proposed to steal the girl from Señor Marín and take her over byroads to Mexico City, where no one would know them if they changed their names. But first he wanted to get a good lot of Lyonnaise cloth, because from what he had heard they could make double or triple once they reached the capital. He was a dashing sort, who liked to wear a mushroom-shaped cap in imitation of the conquistadors. Herlinda, who had the most to lose, pointed out that it was a long way to go; for all they knew, they might be called upon to fatten dozens of pigs, and she had no ambition to be poor. (In fact, although she trusted her paramour well enough, in her girdle she had hidden five silver pesos to pay off a padrino who might gain pardon from her master if she chose to come back, because who can predict which surprises may come flying out of the night air?) Gaspar told her to leave it all to him. Perhaps she shouldn’t have listened, but in truth she had to do so much for the Maríns that it felt very nice to be taken care of for once. Moreover, her children had recently been sold, which was convenient.

While they perfected their plans, something came flying through the evening sky. At first she thought it was a bat. Then it drew closer. Her face turned as yellow as a penitent’s frock. Before it killed her, it sang:

Sad is my heart, negrita;

I know not why—

sad for an illusion,

sad for what I dreamed.

Agustín said to himself: Salvador is evil, and I am his knight who is unclean in his heart. — And this brought him a kind of comfort, to know where the truth lay. With his Amazonian sword he swiped off Gaspar’s head. Then the two kings went rushing through the city like a plague-breeze, lopping heads and splitting guts all night.

What about the witnesses who had served the authorities against the two brothers? First Herlinda’s master and mistress, and then the innkeeper Jaime Esposito (whose greatest pride was that he was the bastard descendant of Don Diego Fernández de Córdova), all became medicine for the thirsty head. Of these, Señor Marín perished the most abjectly. Agustín remembered watching him beat Salvador, in the days when Salvador was more than a head; Agustín would begin to pray silently as soon as his brother, having received the command, knelt down on the floor and clasped his hands while the master cudgeled his skull; and Herlinda, her earbobs sparkling crazily, would be kneeling beside him, grimacing and weeping, praying for mercy on her lover’s account, until she irritated the master sufficiently to receive a whack or two on the forehead.

Neyda Duarte, who had testified against Herlinda, was already dead from the white sickness, so the two brothers could not punish her, at least not in this world. Infuriated, the head went rushing over the city, breathing out hell-breath, and by dawn people had begun to die of yellow fever. The next day Agustín began to vomit. The head flew sweetly round and round his face, to keep the flies off. When he expired, the head sank back down underground. Demons marched up like a file of Jaguar Soldiers, and seized them both to be burned forever. And if you ever come to Veracruz, put your ear to the grass outside the irregular septagonal parapet of the Baluarte de Santiago, and among the other screams coming up from hell (which is not far underground), you may hear Agustín weeping endlessly over his failure to live, while the head goes on laughing.

I myself have never seen a ghost, let alone a flying head, so I cannot swear to you that every detail of this story is true. But when I visited San Juan de Ulúa, which the Indians used to call Chalchiuhcuecan, a guard with the crossed anchors of the Navy on his cap assured me: If you come here at night expecting to see a ghost, you definitely will. — He himself once saw a man in a raincoat supposedly standing guard, but all the guards were inside, so what could that have been but a ghost? On another occasion he was pissing and saw a dark faceless figure glide by. And so there you have it, straight from a uniformed member of the Armada de Mexico.