Country of the Bad Wolfes

ACCOUNT TO

THE COURTESAN

For a long time after the killing of Alfonso Ávila, John Roger was sick at soul. He was sworn not to father another child nor chance another gulling by a married woman or the wrath of another husband. He tried to work himself to a tiredness too great for much reflection. When he wasn’t at the coffee farm he was at the horse ranch John Samuel had started on Buenaventura and named Rancho Isabela.

But there was no ignoring the crave of the flesh. He knew Josefina had been correct about the way to avoid such risks, but he had not forgotten his boyhood vow to abstain from prostitutes forevermore. A man was only as worthy as his word and no pledge he made was more important than one made to himself. A man who broke his word to himself would break it to anybody. Still, the more he thought about it, the more he began to construe his vow as a gesture of callow youth, as lacking the sanction of experience. In this fashion did his yearning grapple with his principles, off and on, for almost four years before he finally concluded that a grown man should not be ruled by an oath made as a boy. Besides, in a world of such fickle turnings, it seemed senseless to ever say never again.

He made his first visit to El Castillo de las Princesas on a starry November evening. A mansion that had once been the residence of a state governor, it was the most extravagant brothel on the Mexican gulf coast, an exclusive establishment whose members were all men of means and social station. It had a ballroom with a glass ceiling and a parquet floor. Every room was furnished with its own porcelain bathtub and canopied feather bed. All the girls of the house were young Creoles, none less than lovely, none without education or social poise. And all of them outcasts from landed families, disowned for one or another unforgivable transgression against the family honor, the details in each case known only—if known at all—to the madam and perhaps to some person who had guided the girl to her.

Ever a man of routine, John Roger began patronizing El Castillo on the first and third Tuesdays of every month. He chose a different girl on each of his first five visits, and the first four of them would have agreed that he seemed to take no true pleasure in the act but went about it in the way of a man who drinks only to be drunk. The fifth time, he chose a new girl, Margarita, who had come to El Castillo only the week before. She was pretty of course, but he could see she was older than the others. The others were girls, while she was a woman. She had claimed, with a wink, to be twenty-two, but even at that age would have been older than the next oldest girl in the house by three years. The general guess was that she was not younger than twenty-five and likely closer to thirty. She liked to joke about being the house senior. As she and John Roger ascended the stairs together, she said she was getting so old that before long she’d have to be carried up to the room.

After their coupling, they were lying side by side and gazing at the crescent moon framed in the black rectangle of the window when a shooting star described a bright streak just below the moon and was gone.

Quick, Margarita said, make a wish.

She shut her eyes to make her own wish. Then felt him sit up and looked to see him staring at the window.

What is it? she said, and put a hand on his arm. And he broke into tears.

“Ay, querido! Qué te pasa?” She sat up and put her arms around him and drew him to her. He heaved with sobs and she felt his breath hot against her neck, his tears on her shoulder. She rocked him as she would a frightened child. “Ya, mijo, ya. Todo será bien, mijito, ya lo verás.” She rocked him and crooned to him and petted him, and after a time his sobs began to ease to a softer gasping.

She lay back, hugging him down alongside her, cradling his head in her arms, his cheek to her bosom. His nose was running and he snorted for breath, and she plucked her chemise from the bedpost and put it to his nostrils and said Blow, and he did, and she said Again, and he did. She wiped his nose and put the chemise aside, and again held him close. She felt his respiration begin to slow, the tension slackening in his muscles. “Dime, mi amor,” she said. Whatever it is. You can tell me.

And he did. Beginning with Elizabeth Anne, of course, who had always made a wish at the sight of a falling star. Of whom he had spoken to no one since she had been taken from him. Nearly eleven years now and still there were moments of emotional ambush when he missed her so much he would forget to breathe. He told Margarita of their meeting and marriage and moving to Mexico. Told her of their first child, who was quiet and studious and dearly loved horses. Told of their two later ones, the identical twins she died giving birth to.

“Ay, pobrecita,” Margarita said. “Que terrible. Que triste.”

Yes, he said. And fell asleep in her arms.

From then on he wanted none of the other girls, only Margarita. He kept his account paid for months in advance to ensure her availability to him for the entire evening on his two Tuesdays every month. Each time he came to see her, they would first make love and then talk. Or rather he would talk, for the most part, and she would listen. She was a good listener, her interest unfeigned, and she did not hesitate to say so when he was unclear in anything he told. He would then try to clarify what he meant, realizing she hadn’t understood because he hadn’t been sure what he was trying to say. In this way did she help him to better understand himself. Sometimes he would pause in his discourse and stare at the ceiling or out the window and she would wait in silence for as long as he needed to ponder before he resumed, though sometimes he would first have to ask Where was I? and she would remind him.

He spoke to her of things he had kept to himself in a hard and solitary confinement for these eleven years. He was still troubled that he could not remember the last thing Elizabeth Anne had said to him. She had said something to him a minute or two before that but he had never been able to recall what it was. Josefina told him la doña had said that the pink sky in the window was lovely, that she wished she knew what kind of bird was singing in the patio, that her backside itched. Doña Isabel said many things before you left the room, Josefina told him, and whether she was saying them to you or to somebody else and which was the very last thing, well, who knows? You know she loved you, that is all that is important. Let her last words be whatever you would like them to be. He told the crone such reasoning was self-deluding and called her an old fool. She said it was even more foolish to put so much importance on memory, which was the greatest deluder of all.

He had tried every night for a week after Lizzie’s funeral before he was able to compose a coherent letter to her parents and notify them of her death. The response was written by her father, the first letter he had ever posted to Mexico, and was terse and to the point. It advised John Roger that Mrs Bartlett was nearly mad with grief and excoriated him for his utter lack of judgment in having taken Lizzie to “that filthy, wretched place with its dearth of proper medical facility,” a lack that had no doubt contributed to his daughter’s death as much as had her husband’s own recklessness. Mr Bartlett demanded that her body be shipped home for burial in the family plot and that her children be sent to Concord as well, so they could receive “a proper upbringing.” John Roger wrote back to say Elizabeth Anne was already buried in her family’s plot and that their children would receive “a proper enough upbringing, I assure you, right here at home.”

Mr Bartlett’s next letter began with “Damn you” and closed with “Should you ever again show yourself in Concord, I swear by the Eternal I shall pummel you in the street.” In an accompanying note of two lines, Jimmy Bartlett, now a full partner in the firm, warned John Roger that if he did not ship Lizzie’s body to New Hampshire “I will go there myself to retrieve my Dear Sister’s bones by whatever means necessary.” John Roger did not answer either missive, and no Bartlett wrote to him again. And Jimmy did not come to Mexico.

He took to drink, though he had enough force of will to do it only in the evenings, when he would shut himself in his room with a bottle of mescal and linger over her photographs. As always, each picture revived not only the occasion of its making but a rush of other memories as well. Random recollections of her in radiant animation. Working the sails of their sloop and grinning under her sombrero. Gesturing for emphasis as she told him of yet another superstition or ghost story she had recently heard from the maids or old Josefina. Savoring a mango, its juice dripping from her chin. Swimming with dolphin grace in the shimmering cove. Smiling at him in the vanity mirror while she brushed her hair and he watched from the bed. A chain of memory after memory.

His mornings were glazed with hangover, yet he never failed to make his daily meeting with Reynaldo the mayordomo or to oversee the business of the coffee farm or to preside over the hacienda’s Saturday court, fulfilling his duties with a mechanical competence. As the days passed in rote sequence he told himself to cease his self-pity, that he was not the only man who had ever lost a wife. And each time would rebut himself that no, he was not, he was just the only one who ever lost her. Every visit to her grave in the enclave cemetery was a keener despair. Each day was a raw new regret.

The self-pity nearly undid him. She had been gone four months on the evening he once again spread her pictures on the desktop, but this time, sitting in the low light of the desk lamp, he lingered on his mental image of her standing at the balcony with the smoking Dragoon in her hands—and thought how simple it would be to end his pain. He finished the mescal bottle and opened a drawer and took out her Colt.

He sat for a time, cocking and uncocking the big revolver, watching the turns of the fully loaded cylinder. Take out all but one bullet and it was Russian Roulette. In Mexican Roulette, as he’d heard it defined, you took out only one. In Drunk Mexican Roulette you didn’t take out any. He envisioned the muzzle at his temple. Imagined a white blaze in his brain and his obliterated memories a scarlet mess on the wall. He could not imagine the nothingness to follow. He cocked the Colt again.

Where was best? Surest? He touched the muzzle to his forehead. His temple. Placed it in his mouth. The taste of the oiled metal was a novel fright. You would not want to fail, to achieve no more than a bad wound. Or worse by far, end up crippled. Paralyzed. Mind-damaged. Imagine the talk.

His gaze fell on a portrait photograph of her taken in a Boston studio on their second day of marriage. As she smiled for the camera she suddenly puckered her lips and smacked a kiss at him where he stood behind the photographer, who implored, “Madam, please! You must be still.” She’d made a contrite face toward the camera, then smiled again and looked at John Roger and winked—“Maaadam!”—and his breath had caught at the absolute wonder of her. An hour afterward they were eating oysters on the half shell at a window table overlooking the harbor. He recalled the briny savor of the oysters, the clean tartness of the wine. Recalled that same smile beaming at him as they touched glasses across the table and she said, “To you, Mr Wolfe. Till death do us part. Love’s dearest pledge.” So had they toasted, but he did not dwell on the remark, not until all those years later when he sat at the desk with her loaded gun cocked in his hand, staring at the picture of her taken on that day.

Love’s dearest pledge. Till death did them part. And he had thought death had done so. But as he stared at her picture he saw the truth. They were not parted. Not yet. Not while he remembered her. While he lived, she lived too—in the selfsame memories that tormented him for the lack of her living presence. Till death did them part. The pledge implied a fealty to life, an understood promise to hold to the memory of the other and damn the pain of it. To end the pain by such means as Drunk Mexican Roulette was a brute betrayal of that promise. He was not unaware of the banal cast of his argument but its effect was no less persuasive for that. And he put up the gun. He did not tell Margarita how many times since then he’d wondered if he simply lacked the courage to pull the trigger.

Margarita’s eyes were wide. I know, she said. The temptation of it. I know.

He asked how she knew, but she shook her head and looked away.

For more than four years after the loss of Elizabeth Anne he did not make love to another woman. But there were occasional late nights when a sudden remembrance of her without clothes—in her bath, swimming in the cove, lying beside him in the hammock of the moonlit verandah—would incite him to a frenzied masturbation that each time climaxed with him in tears. The more he recalled their pleasure in each other’s flesh, the more he wanted to yowl with the loneliness of his loss, his great aching yearn for the feel of her, the touch. That was when he began taking Alma Rodríguez to his bed. And though the trysts with Alma mauled his heart with the knowledge that the flesh he was relishing was not Lizzie’s and never never never again would be, he could not stop himself from returning to it again and again.

Then Alma got pregnant and he married her off. And then, fool that he was—selfish, stupid, self-deceptive fool who even after his experience with Alma would not yet face the truth that he was as much in thrall to the desires of his own damnable flesh as to the memory of his beloved—he bedded Katrina and she conceived too. And this time his selfish indulgence not only produced another bastard but provoked a man to try to kill him, and so made of the mother a widow as well. In consequence of which there followed another four years of maddening celibacy before his arrival at El Castillo de las Princesas.

His recounts to Margarita followed no order of chronology. Now he might speak of a thing that happened last month, now of a thing that took place when he was ten years old. But no matter the sequence, he told her many things he had never told anyone else. Told of his boyhood in Portsmouth and of his mother and his grandfather Thomas. Told her even of his pirate father. He told of his own twin brother Samuel Thomas and of the last time he’d seen him and of his mysterious disappearance and how the realization that Sammy was dead had almost killed him too. And told how—fool that he was, fool!—he thought he’d never again know such heartache as the loss of his brother. He told of his college days among an elite society of well-bred classmates and of keeping secret from them the truth about his father. When he said he had kept that truth even from Elizabeth Anne because he was afraid to jeopardize her love, Margarita sighed and her gaze on him was one of great pity.

She asked to know how he’d lost his arm and he told her, though he could no longer vouch for the truth of the particulars. It seemed to him he was describing something he had not done but dreamt. His memory of it was mostly an amalgam of blurry images and roiled sensations, of heavy sabers and ringing of steel, an antic play of torchlight shadows, a hardness of cobblestones under knees and hand. The indescribable feel of driving a sword blade through a man.

He told her of Richard Davison. Of Amos Bentley, that resourceful young fellow who had married into a rich and politically powerful Mexican family. Of his dear friend Charley Patterson, who had continued to make visits to the hacienda for years after Elizabeth Anne’s death. But Charley had known her so well that John Roger could not bear to talk to him about her, so they conversed mostly about the national upheavals of the day. They spoke often of Porfirio Díaz, who had become an avowed anti-reelectionist, and the little Texan had predicted that if Díaz were to lose to Juárez again in the next election he would rebel against him—which was what happened. John Roger had then accepted Charley’s wager of one dollar that Díaz’s rebellion would fail. And lost the bet when the federals scattered the rebel forces and Díaz went into hiding, no one was sure where, though some said he’d gone all the way to Texas. When Juárez dropped dead of a heart attack—a death the more shocking to most Mexicans in that the attack on his heart did not involve a bullet or a knife—neither John Roger nor Charley had known what historical turn to bet on next until Juárez’s successor, Sebastián Lerdo, offered amnesty to all rebels who would lay down their arms, and Patterson bet another dollar that Díaz would accept it. John Roger took the bet and lost again. Díaz’s public proclamation of his retirement from politics in order to devote himself to growing sugar cane on the gulf coast produced no bet between them because neither one believed him. They were sure Díaz was planning another revolt and were proved right when he pronounced against Lerdo in the spring. This time Díaz was triumphant. He took Mexico City in November of 1876 and only a few weeks later was duly elected president. One of his first official acts was to push through a constitutional amendment to prohibit reelection, and Patterson bet John Roger that Don Porfirio would in some way or other circumvent his own law when the time came. But Charley died during Díaz’s second year in office and so never knew the outcome of their bet. He had last been seen alive as he departed a malecón café where he had eaten a late supper and had a lot to drink. In the morning his body was floating facedown in the harbor. He bore no mark of violence and still had money in his pockets. It was assumed he had fallen in by accident and drowned.

He was old and tired and I suppose a lot lonelier than anybody knew, John Roger said. Except for Lizzie and my brother he was about the best friend I ever had. I wish I had let him know it.

My mother used to say that if wishes were horses no one would walk. It was the first reference Margarita had made in any way to her own past, a subject he had a few times before tried to broach and which she always artfully sidestepped. He asked what else her mother used to say.

She smiled at this attempt to steer the conversation toward herself. I think maybe your friend Charley knew how much you cared for him, she said. I bet he was laughing up in heaven because he did not have to pay the dollar.

John Roger said he wasn’t so sure about the heaven part but she was probably right about the laughing. At the end of his four-year term Díaz had honored his own law against reelection and did not run again. But everyone knew that the newly elected president, Manuel González, was an old friend of Díaz’s and would be his puppet until the next election, when Díaz would again be eligible to run.

They had known each other four months when Margarita asked to know more about his sons, to whom he had made only cursory mention in earlier visits. So he told of 26-year-old John Samuel, who had proved to have John Roger’s own gift for numbers and had been helping him with the hacienda’s bookwork since he was sixteen. He was a decorous man, John Samuel, with a keen mind for business, but he tended to keep his own counsel and rarely expressed his opinion on any matter that did not bear upon hacienda operations. John Roger sometimes wondered if even John Samuel’s wife knew him very well. Next week would be the third anniversary of his marriage to Victoria Clara Márquez, whose family raised the finest horses in the neighboring state of Hidalgo. They’d met when John Samuel went to her family’s hacienda near Pachuca to buy a Justin Morgan colt from her father, a fine man named Sotero Márquez. John Samuel had always been somewhat shy around women, but sweet-natured Vicki Clara was not only fluent in English and his intellectual equal, having been schooled by Jesuits, but she loved horses too, and so they had a shared enthusiasm. Sotero Márquez had been as pleased by the match as John Roger.

Did John Samuel and Vicki Clara have children?

They did. Juan Sotero would be two in June and Roger Samuel was now eight months old.

Margarita smiled wider. “Pues, ya eres un abuelo, viejo.”

A sad truth, John Roger said. A grandfather. Me. How is that possible?

“Háblame de los gemelos,” she said. You speak so little of them.

He said he hardly knew the twins. It was a terrible admission for a man to make about his sons. To make it worse, he couldn’t even tell which was which. They were eleven years old and he still couldn’t do it. All twins as they grow older became distinct from each other to some degree, but not these two. Not yet, anyway. They were mirror images. Still, a father should be able to recognize his sons, for Christ’s sake, no matter how alike they look.

Nobody can tell them apart?

Well, maybe the kitchen maids. A crone named Josefina and her helper, Marina. But then nobody else had spent as much time with them. He had thought about asking them how they knew one from the other, but that would be absurd. Shameful. Asking the kitchen help how to tell his sons apart.

Margarita regarded him without expression.

I know Blake’s nickname is Blackie, I’ve overheard James call him that. The crone and Marina have picked it up. Can’t say I much care for it. Too much of the thug in it. In English, anyway.

“Blackie. A mi me gusta ese nombre.” Did Blackie have a nickname for James?

Jake. But lately it’s more often Jeck. I suppose because it’s how the maids say it.

“Jake,” Margarita said, pronouncing it with care. She liked that name too. Did they look like their big brother?

No. Johnny had his mother’s green eyes and the same reddish hair, but they—

Their hair is black and their eyes are brown with little dots of yellow, she said. Am I correct?

Well, my hair’s not that black anymore, and judging by what I see in the mirror my eyes have picked up a lot of red.

I bet they look just like you.

I think they look more like my brother.

Margarita laughed. Don Juan the twin has made a joke! “Qué milagro!” He smiled and bowed his head in acknowledgement.

Were they close, the twins and their older brother?

John Roger sighed. Not in the least. And it had always bothered him that they weren’t. He supposed it wasn’t really so strange. As twins, they would naturally be much closer to each other than to him, or to anyone else, for that matter. Plus there was a huge difference of fifteen years between them. Still, there seemed to be more to it than that, he wished he knew what. For some reason they just didn’t like each other.

But they are close to each other, the twins, no?

That, he said, was an understatement. He had thought he knew all there was to know about twinhood and had believed no brothers on earth could be closer than he and Sammy had been. But these two! They had a communion that was . . . what to call it? Mystical would not be an exaggeration.

Margarita grinned. Really? So strange as that? Tell me, are they happy, these mystical twins?

They seemed to be. They liked to laugh. That was another difference between them and Johnny. He couldn’t remember John Samuel ever laughing except for his first ride on a horse. The thing about the twins’ laughter, though, is that it usually seemed to come from some private joke between them, some joke about you. They were like that about everything. They rarely spoke in anyone else’s presence, even to each other. You might see them talking at a distance, but when you closed to within earshot they became clams. They were strange, there was no other word for it. They no sooner learned to walk than they were exploring every foot of the house and the patios and gardens. By the age of six they were climbing trees with the nimbleness of monkeys, they could scale rock walls like lizards. They were eight when they learned how to vanish within the house and not be found by the entire staff’s most thorough search. Nobody ever saw them come out of hiding, either, so you never knew where they’d been. It spooked the hell out of the maids when they disappeared like that—except for the crone and Marina, who only got irked that the twins knew the house better than they did, who had lived in it so many years more. After each such vanishing act, John Roger would reproach them for upsetting the household and demand to know where they had been, but they would only shrug, their eyes full of amusement. He would lock them in their room as punishment. Then hear them in there, wrestling, laughing, reading aloud to each other.

Margarita grinned. How does the poem go? Stone walls do not make a prison? He said he was glad she found it all so amusing. She grinned at his sarcasm.

It didn’t occur to him until a year ago that the only real punishment for them would be isolation from each other. So the next time they committed a serious infraction—he couldn’t recall what—he locked them into separate third-floor rooms without any books or toys, and congratulated himself for his cleverness when he heard no laughter from within either room. But when he checked on them after a couple of hours, the rooms were vacant. They had gone out the windows and negotiated a six-inch ledge all the way along the side of the house and around the corner and then leaped onto a tree and climbed down and made away. For three hours the staff searched the entire casa grande enclave in vain, scouring the courtyards, the patios, the gardens, the stable, even the cemetery. John Roger concluded they must have somehow slipped out into the larger compound and was about to order a wider search when one of the housemaids reported that the boys had been found in their room. When he got there they were playing cards on the floor. They looked up at him and smiled.

The next time, he locked them in the armory. It was on the ground floor of the casa grande but had only one window, ten feet above the floor and with a hinged ironwork frame secured from inside by a padlock as big as a brick. The room was without furniture and the floor was of stone and he had the lamps removed. “Let’s see how much you feel like smiling after a night in here without light or supper,” he told them. He had a moment’s qualm after locking the door but managed to suppress it. What father could permit such defiance to go unpunished? In the morning the barred window was open wide and the padlock dangling from it by its gaping shackle. The lock had been picked so deftly it didn’t show a scratch. They had taken with them a pair of caplock pistols, a pouch of black powder and one of pistol balls, and two bayonets. It was five days before they were found in a forest clearing several miles upriver. They were slathered with mud against the mosquitoes and had built a lean-to of palm fronds and were maintaining a smokeless fire. With spears cut from saplings, they had killed birds and snakes and roasted them over the coals. Snake skins were drying on the sides of the lean-to and would be made into belts. They told the search party they could have fed on venison if they’d used the pistols but there wasn’t much sport in shooting deer and the gunshots would have made it too easy for the trackers to find them. They were ten years old, for God’s sake! They had never before been in the jungle. When they were brought back and I asked how they knew so much about living in the wild, they just shrugged, John Roger said, and smiled pretty much like you’re smiling now.

Margarita laughed.

Josefina had overheard his interrogation of them, and later told him in private that the answer to his question was plain as the nose on his face. They know about the wild and all the other things they know, she said, because they have their parents’ intelligence and you gave them the education to use it to learn things. The crone had a point, though he wasn’t about to tell her so. He and Elizabeth Anne had naturally wanted their children to have the best education available, short of sending them to a boarding school, and as soon as the twins learned to talk he engaged tutors for them. It was no more than he and Lizzie had done for John Samuel, although in his case his mother had given him his earliest instruction herself. The twins’ first teachers were brought from Veracruz, and by the age of five the boys could read and write in both English and Spanish.

They were six when he hired a tutor named James Dickert, who came with superlative recommendations from several prominent families in the capital. Educated in both his native South Carolina and in Mexico City, the bilingual Master Dickert was an eloquent man with a dulcet southern accent. For the next five years, until a windfall inheritance called him home to Charleston only a month before John Roger met Margarita, Master Dickert was the twins’ sole tutor. It was an ideal match of teacher and students, and he educated them to rare degree. He every week showed John Roger the twins’ compositions so that he could see for himself that their writing in both languages was cogent and lively and grammatically meticulous. Their recitations, Master Dickert reported, were fluent, their grasp of mathematics was sound. They were skeptical of history but they liked its stories and characters. They loved geography and were absorbed by the sciences, especially by the natural world and the workings of mechanisms. They learned that there was every kind of knowledge to be found in books and were quick to acquire the techniques for seeking it out in the vast library the Widow Montenegro had left behind, thousands of volumes, many of which had belonged to the Valledolids. Josefina sometimes thumbed through the books the boys kept piled by their bedside, and although she was illiterate the illustrations made clear enough what the books were about—guns, boats, the moon and stars, land and sea navigation, animal traps, rudimentary shelters, skinning and tanning, the human body. One anatomy text dog-eared at a graphic illustration of the female form. One book was all about locks.

Education is a good thing, Josefina had said to John Roger, but too much of it can lead to trouble. We must remember Adam and Eve. God warned them not to eat from the tree of knowledge because they already knew all they needed to know to be happy. But they ate the fruit anyway and we know what happened to them.

Yes, John Roger said, they gained the knowledge that it is unwise to disobey one’s father, a lesson these two cannot seem to learn.

Maybe they have not learned that lesson, Josefina said, because of the way you have been trying to teach it to them.

And maybe, he said, you will some day learn how little interest I have in your opinion about anything outside of this kitchen.

Josefina shrugged. She told him the twins had taught Marina to read and write—in Spanish, of course. Marina is very smart, she said, but I believe the reason she learned so quickly is that they are good teachers. Some are, some are not. Then busied herself at the stove as if John Roger were no longer there.

He finished his coffee and left, keeping to himself his admiration for their tutorial achievement with a peon girl.

They had a facility for language, the twins, just as John Roger did, except that they used theirs mainly for mimicry. They sometimes spoke Spanish with the singsong cadences of the crone’s Chihuahuan inflections, at other times with the clipped diction of Marina’s lowland dialect. In English they sometimes talked like Charley Patterson, who had died when they were eight, but they had known him long enough to emulate his locutions. It irked John Roger to hear them speak like Texan ranch hands, knowing they could exercise perfect grammar when they wished, and he had once admonished them for it. “Rightly or wrongly, others judge us by our mode of speech,” he told them. “It therefore behooves a cultured man to speak in a cultured manner. Can you two understand that?” One said, “You betcha,” and the other said, “Yessiree, good lingo’s right important.” They grinned—and he’d felt a sudden impulse to laugh, but managed to check himself and look away, shaking his head in disapproval.

“Son muy inteligentes,” Margarita said. They have so many gifts.

They have so many gifts it’s damned uncanny, John Roger said. In addition to their exceptional faculty for learning things from books, they had talents they were born with. Their skill with tools was something no one taught them. For the past three weeks they’d been building a little boat with no help but a manual, and what he had seen of it was an excellent job. And then there was their marksmanship. They had asked Reynaldo the mayordomo if they could use the armory pistols, and Reynaldo said he needed to think about it, then came to him. It displeased John Roger that they would not solicit his permission personally. As he had been aware for some time, they not only never asked him for anything, they never asked him anything at all. He had no idea why they had taken such a stance, but there was no mistaking they had. He was tempted to refuse them permission to use the guns until they came to him and asked directly, but the notion struck him as childish and he told Reynaldo to let them.

But Don Juan, Margarita said, even though it irritates that they will not ask anything of you, is it not commendable that they are of such strong independence? That they are of such strong will? Forgive my presumption, but perhaps you respect them more than you realize.

That they are of such hard heads would be nearer to the truth, he said. And you are indeed presumptuous, my dear. Have I ever told you how much you sometimes sound like the crone?

Margarita cackled.

The first time they fired the pistols, he heard them at it and went out on a balcony to watch. They were shooting at bottles they had set against the side of a dirt mound. So far as he knew, they had never held a gun except during their escape from the armory, and they had not fired them then. Yet they were scoring with every shot. At age eleven they were better shots than any man he knew. And come to think of it, better swimmers. Lizzie had been the best swimmer he’d ever seen until them. And what divers! Whenever they climbed a high riverside tree to make a dive, everyone in sight of the landing would stop to watch. He had often looked on from his window. From the highest branches they would execute perfect dives, plunging into the water with hardly more splash than a coconut. Sometimes they would not resurface for so long that some in the crowd would begin to cry out that this time they had surely drowned—and then their heads would pop up some thirty or forty yards up or down the river and the crowd would go wild with cheering. They are grand entertainers, John Roger said. Very popular with the folk.

Tell me, Don Juan, have you ever said to them that they are admirable swimmers? That their boat is a fine one? That they shoot well?

What for? They know what they’re good at. And they don’t lack pride about it, believe me. You can see it in their faces.

“Ay, hombre,” she said with a reproving shake of her head.

When he first heard they were good fighters it had pleased him to know they could defend themselves. Then he heard disturbing things about one of their fights. They had seen some boys pouring lamp oil on a cat trapped in a fruit crate and they were going to set it on fire for fun. In preventing the cruelty, the twins badly beat up several of the boys, all of them bigger than the twins, according to Reynaldo. A nose was broken, a few teeth. Understandable things that could happen in a fight. But it troubled John Roger to learn that one boy had an ear ripped off, and that the twins’ punishment of them didn’t end with the beatings. They pinned the leader of the group facedown and soaked the backside of his pants with oil and set it aflame and then laughed to see him run howling for the nearest water trough with his ass on fire. Reynaldo had assured John Roger the burned boy would recover, although for the next few weeks he would eat standing up and sleep on his stomach. It bothers me, John Roger said, that they can be so vicious.

They were vicious only to punish the more vicious.

You and the crone, you just have to side with them don’t you? Vicki Clara’s the same way. I would think women had better sense.

You have a good heart, my darling, but you do not know women very well.

The simple fact was that the twins excelled at everything they took a liking to. They had begun riding at the age of six, just as John Samuel had. But while John Samuel had been obliged to train hard to make himself into the excellent horseman he now was, they could ride with an easy grace from the day they first sat a pony. They did stunts no one else on the hacienda would even attempt. They would stand up on their galloping horses, riding side by side, and switch mounts in sidewise leaps. They would ride in pursuit of a chicken and position it between them and then one or the other would hang far down the side of his mount, clinging to the saddle with one hand, and snatch up the running bird by the head. John Samuel had witnessed some of these exhibitions and had been able to mask his resentment from everyone but his father. It’s natural that he’s a little jealous of their horsemanship, John Roger said, even if he’ll never admit it. He loves horses, you see, but I think he believes the twins use them as only another way to show off.

Is that why he does not love them? Margarita asked. Because they are better horsemen? Because they are showoffs?

I didn’t say he doesn’t love them.

You did not have to.

Look, you have to understand something about John Samuel. It’s hard for him to express his feelings. He loved his mother very dearly and her loss was very hard on him. They nearly died together when he was a baby. Twice they nearly died together. She used to sing to him at night—have I told you that? She sang him to sleep every night until he was eleven or twelve. She was his first teacher. He was fifteen when she died. I don’t think anyone can know how terrible it was for him to lose her.

But the twins also lost her. That is terrible too.

It’s not the same thing. They never knew her.

Maybe that is more terrible.

How could it be? You can’t miss somebody you never knew as much as somebody you did.

“Pero que tontería, hombre!” she said. Of course you can! Even a child who never knew his mother knows what a mother is. To have no memory of her can be worse than to remember her at least a little.

He sighed. I don’t know. If Lizzie had lived, then maybe all of them . . . ah hell.

She asked if he still locked them up for punishment.

Yes, sometimes. But he had reached an accord with them about it. If he put them in the same room they would stay there for as long as he decreed. He didn’t even have to lock the door, not that a lock would have much effect. They had also come to an agreement about camping in the jungle. They could go for five days at a time but had to tell him or Josefina the direction they were going and about how far. It was an agreement made of air, since he couldn’t enforce his conditions or even stop them from going short of chaining them to the cellar walls and posting guards at every portal—and even then he wouldn’t be surprised if they escaped. And yet they had held to their end of the bargain. So far, anyway.

She wanted to hear more, but the hour was late and they were both tired, so they would have to wait until his next visit.

When he returned to El Castillo two weeks later the house mistress greeted him with a somber face and the news that Margarita was dead. Six days earlier, the afternoon post had included a letter for her, the only one she received in the four and a half months she’d been there. The house mistress recalled that the envelope bore no indication of the sender or the point of origin. She sent the letter upstairs to her, and some hours later, when Margarita still had not come down to begin her evening’s duty, the house mistress went up to her room and found her on the bed, blue-faced and rigoring. On the bedside table was a nearly empty cup of tea and next to it the little vial of poison. A saucer held the letter’s charred residue. She left no note. She was buried in the city cemetery.

The house mistress averted her eyes for a moment while John Roger regained his composure. He cleared his throat and asked if she knew why Margarita had done it. The woman shrugged. She said Margarita was not the first girl to work at El Castillo whose specific reason for being there or even her real name was known to no one in the house. She had shown up one day and said she sought employment. She gave her name as Margarita Damascos and admitted its falseness. It was obvious she was well-bred but she would reveal nothing of where she came from or even how she had learned of El Castillo de las Princesas. Then again, the house mistress said, it was not a profession that required the biographical facts of its practitioners.

John Roger wanted to know how it could possibly be that no one she had lived and worked with knew who she was. The house mistress said such a circumstance was far more common in this world more than he might think. She suggested the possibility that the person who wrote the letter was someone Margarita had never wanted to see again, almost certainly a man—a father, a husband, a lover. Someone who had somehow found out where she was and what name she was using and had written to tell her something she could not bear.

Like what? John Roger said.

Who knows? Maybe that he was coming for her.

If that were so, John Roger said, a lot of questions could be answered when that person showed up.

Possibly, the woman said. If that were so.

He went to her grave. The house mistress herself had paid to keep her remains out of the lowest ground in the cemetery—the mucky preserve of the criminal and the kinless and those without name—and had her buried in higher ground and under a simple stone tablet engraved with “Margarita Damascos” and “1880” below the name. He could not stop himself from imagining the unspeakable loneliness of the casket. The immutable darkness and silence of it. Her dead self within, so lovely and comforting and pleasurable in the warm living flesh and now but dark cold rot. He’d had similar thoughts and sensations at Elizabeth Anne’s funeral, and now as then he was appalled by his rank perversity and did not believe that anyone of sound mind could have such macabre graveside imaginings.

He began calling at El Castillo once a week to see if anyone had come looking for Margarita Damascos. And was each time told that no one had. During the first weeks of this routine, he sometimes bought the services of a girl, but none of them was a listener such as Margarita had been and he soon gave up trying to talk to them as he had talked to her. Before long even his enjoyment of their flesh waned and he ceased patronizing them altogether, much to the annoyance of the house mistress. He persisted in his weekly inquiry for six months before concluding that no one was ever going to come in search of her—and whatever unendurable disclosure the letter had brought and she had put to the match would remain her eternal secret.

He would not return to El Castillo, and knew he would not again lay with a woman. And if his sexual memories of Elizabeth Anne would sometimes become too much to ignore and compel him to a weeping self-abuse . . . well, so be it.