Country of the Bad Wolfes

TURNS OF FORTUNE

So then. This reunited family that for almost forty years had not known it was disunited and had in the interim produced a second generation and gained a second surname—this family that on the night they discovered each other was represented by all the living Blancos save the elder daughter Gloria and by a sole Wolfe, but he the patriarch—this mutually discovered clan passed the rest of that night in a long conversation of acquaintance and revelation. John Roger and Bruno Tomás would at times lapse into English when addressing each other, and María Palomina or Sofía Reina would each time clear her throat to make them aware of it and bring them back to Spanish. It was a conversation marked by interrogations and explanations, expositions and clarifications, interspersed with tears and chuckles and sudden crescendos of everyone talking at once and sudden silences that as abruptly gave way to laughter and still more questions and more explications and more expressions of awe at their having found each other as they had. What if Bruno had not played the tune when he did or if John Roger had not been walking by and heard it when he did or even been in Mexico City when he was and so on and so forth. Only Sofía Reina was unmoved by the chain of coincidence. Everything had to happen in some way, she said, so why not the way it did? But then, as John Roger would learn, Sofía Reina had already known so many fantastic turns of fortune in her own life that nothing that happened to her or to anyone else, however improbable or even bizarre, could surprise her anymore.

By dawn they had addressed the most pressing particulars and learned much about each other that it was of greatest importance to know. They would become still better acquainted over the next few days, but on that gray dawn in that upstairs residence of that rundown café in that ramshackle neighborhood near the center of Mexico City, the only important question remaining was what they should do now.

For John Roger the answer was simple. The three Blancos should go to live at Buenaventura. The family would be united and the Blancos would be relieved of the burden of the café, which by their own admission was barely earning enough to maintain them. More to the point, they would be relieved of financial concern for the rest of their lives. There are worse fates, John Roger said with a benign smile, than to have a rich relative with a fondness for his kin.

Bruno Tomás was agog at the prospect of life at the hacienda. He felt he was being liberated from a living death, although, in deference to his mother’s feelings, he did not say so aloud. Downstairs at the bar, however, he had confided to John Roger that he hated working in the café and always had. His calling, as he had discovered in the army, was in working with horses. His father hadn’t been pleased when he enlisted. He had come to view all armies as nothing other than the powerful weapons of the greedy privileged in their contentions with each other, and he did not want his son to risk his life in the cause of such sons of bitches, as Bruno Tomás would surely have to do because there was always a war. But he also believed Bruno was old enough to decide for himself, and so did not forbid him from enlisting. And although there had in fact always been war during Bruno Tomás’s time in the ranks—one rebellion or another always breaking out in one part of the country or another—he had not had to fight in any of it. During his basic military training he and the army had found out that he had a natural talent for working with horses, and he had been made a wrangler whose main duty was to care for the cavalry mounts. He was never near enough to the fighting to have to shoot at anyone or for anyone to shoot at him. He would have been content to make a career as a breaker of horses in the army, but after his father’s death he felt honor-bound to care for his mother and help her to manage the café. “After all,” he said to John Roger, “lo primero es lo primero.” And so he came home when his enlistment expired. But he had not forgotten the great pleasure of working with horses and had clung to the hope that he might one day do so again.

John Roger told him he wouldn’t have to work at all at Buenaventura if he chose not to, but if he wished to work on Rancho Isabela—the hacienda’s horse ranch—he certainly could. His eldest son, John Samuel, had created the ranch and had always been the one to manage it. But he was spending more and more of his time helping with the operation of the hacienda and would soon need a foreman to run the ranch. If Bruno Tomás was as good with horses as he claimed, and if he could manage the other wranglers—a pretty rowdy bunch, it had to be said—John Roger thought there was a good chance John Samuel would give him the job.

Bruno Tomás was confident on both counts. He had been a sergeant in the army and was seasoned in command. But what about the guy expecting to be the next foreman? There was always a guy expecting to be the next foreman, and sometimes the guy had good reason to feel that way. “What of it?” John Roger said. “You’re my nephew. And as somebody just said, ‘lo primero es lo primero.’ Of course, if you’d rather step aside for whoever it is that expects to be the next foreman, well. . . .”

“No,” Bruno said, “I wouldn’t.”

“Didn’t think so,” John Roger said, and both of them grinned.

But María Palomina would not part from Mexico City. She told John Roger she appreciated his sense of paternal obligation toward his brother’s family and she was sure that Buenaventura was as beautiful as he described it and she thanked him very much for his generous invitation to live there, but the capital was her home. She had been born in this city and lived in it all her life and she had met Samuel Thomas here and married him here and lived with him here and buried him here, and she would not abandon it.

John Roger could not sway her. But that evening, after he’d returned to Amos’s house and relieved his friend’s worry about what had become of him—and after everyone had a much needed siesta—he took the Blancos to dine in a restaurant and during the meal was able to persuade María Palomina to at least let him sell the café for her and provide her with a house in a better neighborhood. A house with a cook and a cleaning maid and a monthly stipend to support herself and Sofía Reina, who had made it clear she would not leave her mother alone in the city.

The next morning he sent a telegram to John Samuel to let him know he would be staying in the capital a while longer but wasn’t sure yet how long that would be. He said he had a grand surprise for everyone when he got home but gave no further details. Bruno Tomás then took him to the cemetery and John Roger placed flowers on Samuel Thomas’s grave. And again wept for his dead brother, whose reasons for ending up in this plot of ground so far from New England and so foreign to it he would never know. When he had told Amos the story, Amos said, “Good Christ, John, that’s some tale. I can’t imagine the odds against finding them as you did. Say now, what other secrets have you been keeping from me, you sly man of mystery?”

Among Amos’s many friends of influence was one of the city’s most successful real estate dealers. John Roger retained the man’s services in the morning and by that evening the café was sold. The day after that, the broker showed John Roger and the Blancos an available residence he thought might be what they were looking for, a fine little red-brick house on a lush high-walled property in an upper-class neighborhood two blocks off the elegant Avenida Reforma. María Palomina loved it. Loved especially its garden in the rear. She had always wanted a garden but the café residence did not have even a patio, and her flowers had always been nurtured in window pots.

John Roger bought the house and put the deed in her name and hired a crew of movers to transport the Blanco belongings from the café. Then hired painters to repaint every room to María Palomina’s preferences, excepting Sofía Reina’s room, whose walls Sófi would have no color but purple even in the face of her mother’s objections to it as a hideous contrast with the pale yellow walls of the rest of the house.

Amos stopped by to see how things were going, and when John Roger introduced him to the Blancos, they all grinned at the blushing smile he gave Sófi. Disregarding his aversion for physical labor, Amos took off his coat and rolled his sleeves and helped John Roger and Bruno to arrange and rearrange the new furniture until it was all positioned precisely to María Palomina’s liking. The corpulent Amos was soaked with sweat when they were done but he took no offense at the others’ gentle teasing of him, and his smiles for Sófi were incessant.

They had a fine time, John Roger and the Blancos, getting to know each other during those days of working together to make the new house a home. In the evenings after dinner they sat in the parlor with glasses of wine and conversed until a late hour. The Blancos wanted to know everything about the childhood he had shared with Samuel Thomas. He told them about Portsmouth and their mother and their Grandfather John Parham. They were not surprised to hear of Samuel Thomas’s propensity for fighting with his fists, but they had not known of his love for sailing, or that he had hoped to make his life at sea, or that he had been a superior student and could have excelled as a scholar if he’d but had the inclination. For reasons of decorum John Roger refrained from telling some things about his brother, such as his larks in the Blue Mermaid tavern. Nor did he reveal to the Blancos—as he had not revealed to anyone save the late Margarita Damascos—the fact of their father’s piracy. A secret he was now sure that Sammy had kept from them.

In answering their questions about himself, he tried to be self-effacing and perfunctory, but the facts were the facts, and the Blancos were impressed by his university education, his legal profession in New England, his management of the Trade Wind Company. They of course wanted to know how he’d lost his arm, and were enthralled by his account of the duel with Montenegro, and deeply moved by Elizabeth Anne’s action in saving his life. They could not hear enough about Elizabeth Anne and asserted that she seemed “muy simpática,” a characterization John Roger had heard from every Mexican who ever met her. He showed them her photograph set into the inner lid of his pocketwatch, and they cooed in admiration of her beauty. Then became tearful when he told the details of her death. Then smiled again on learning that the younger two of his three sons were identical twins.

Not until then did it occur to John Roger that he had not told any of them that he and Sammy were twins. He thought to say so now, but decided against it. What difference did it make? They had not been physical twins since Sammy’s disfigurement by the army, which occurred before María Palomina met him. He supposed they might like to know that he was a good approximation of what Sammy would have looked like but for the war. But still he did not tell them. He wanted to keep something of Sammy for himself alone.

I have always thought it would be wonderful to be the mother of twins, María Palomina said. Now I can only hope to have twin grandchildren. Imagine how fabulous it would be to have a set of twins in every generation! She gestured toward Bruno Tomás and said, Maybe this one will father twins someday, if he should ever find some fool of a woman to marry him.

Bruno grinned. Don’t lose hope, Mother. I’ve heard there are plenty of foolish women in this world.

Only Sófi did not join in the chortling. She tended to reticence on the subject of children, and John Roger had come to know why. She was thirty-one years old, a decade older than he’d thought when he’d first seen her, a fact the more startling in light of a history of marriage and motherhood that struck him as nothing less than tragic. No less awesome to him than Sófi’s chronicle itself was the matter-of-fact manner in which she had related it to him. He had long suspected that the female heart was stronger than the male’s in almost every way, and her account left him doubtless.

She had just turned sixteen when she wed Melchor Cervantes, two years after her sister Gloria had married and gone. Melchor was twenty years old and newly graduated from military college. María Palomina had warned both daughters since their early childhood never to fall in love with a soldier, especially a young officer with dreams of glory, and how many young officers did not have such dreams? Few young men of that sort lived to be old men, she told the girls, and told them too of her own passionate betrothal when she was seventeen to just such a young soldier who was killed before they could marry. She anyhow thought Sófi too young to marry anyone. She pleaded with her and Melchor to wait at least another year, but she was arguing with a wildfire. Forbid them, she beseeched Samuel Thomas, make them wait. But he would not. They would only run away, he said, and you would regret that even more. María Palomina was in tight-lipped vexation for three days before she finally admitted defeat, and Sófi and Melchor were married three weeks later.

They lived in a little house next to the army post, just outside the city. He was permitted to come home on most nights and they were very happy. They had been married almost four months when his battalion was sent to quell an insurgency in the hills near Pachuca, some fifty miles from Mexico City. Rebels. There were always rebels. Melchor was eager for his first combat and promised Sófi he would earn a medal of bravery in her honor. He rode off like a prince of war in his pristine lancer uniform, his high boots gleaming, his shako affixed with a proud black plume. The following week he was killed in an ambush. His comrade and best friend later told Sófi that Melchor had been shot in the head by a ragged and shoeless boy barely big enough to hold the antique musket. For lack of proper ammunition the boy used a stone for a bullet. The friend wanted to tell her what they did to the captured boy but she did not want to hear it. She lit a candle for Melchor’s soul three times a day and prayed to the Blessed Mother to please, please let his seed from their last lovemaking take root in her womb. Then awoke one morning to the death of that hope, its blood staining her bed sheet. She thought she would never stop crying. But of course did.

She went back to live with her mother and father. She dressed in black for a year and wore her hair loose in the mourning mode and passed her days working in the café. She grew to understand that you can mourn someone for a long time, even for the rest of your life, but you cannot grieve forever. Besides, she dearly wanted children.

Almost as soon as she put away her black dress she began to be courted by Arturo Villaseñor, a thirty-three-year-old city policeman whose beat took him past La Rosa Mariposa three times a day and where he often stopped in for a cup of coffee. Arturo had known many women and received much pleasure from them, but he had never wanted to be married until he met Sófi. She let him woo her for three months before she said yes to his proposal, and they married the month after that. She was yet only seventeen.

They say you can never love anyone else as much as you love the first, Sófi had told John Roger, but I disagree. I think you can love somebody else as much or even more than the first one. What you cannot do again is be in love for the first time. The sadness of that knowledge is why the first one seems so special.

But there is only one first time for anything we do in life, John Roger said, from birth to death.

Exactly so, Sofía Reina said.

He did not want to distract from her story and so did not pursue the theme. But he believed that what made memorable first times so special was that most of them happened to us in youth. What made us sad when we later recalled them was that we were no longer young. Then again, he thought he might be chasing his tail.

Arturo Villaseñor was a good man and Sófi loved him for his goodness, but not until their wedding night did she realize how much she had been missing the enjoyments of the bed. And because Arturo was more experienced than Melchor while no less passionate, her conjugal enjoyments were keener than ever. They lived in his top-floor apartment in a six-story building only three blocks from La Rosa Mariposa. Their son, Francisco, was born in December. María Palomina was jubilant to be a grandmother, and though less effusive, Samuel Thomas too was pleased by his grandson.

Arturo was overwhelmed by his own joy in fatherhood. More, my dearest treasure, he said to Sófi, we must make more of these amazing creatures! We must make dozens! She was dazed with happiness and eager to give him all the children he wished. But three months later and two days after their first anniversary, she had not yet conceived again when Arturo tried to break up a street fight on his beat and one of the combatants stabbed him in the heart. The murderer got away, and while Sófi hoped he would be caught and punished, she could not muster the energy for a righteous vengeance. Whatever became of his killer, Arturo would still be dead.

For the next two months she hardly spoke except to coo endearments to baby Francisco as she tended him. But for the baby, she might have passed her days in bed and staring at the ceiling. María Palomina brought meals every day and gave the apartment a quick cleaning and made sure the child was not being neglected. Then Arturo’s long-widowed mother, Eufemia, arrived from Guadalajara to stay with Sófi for a time and help with the baby and the housekeeping. By late summer, six months after Arturo’s death, Sófi was doing well, even smiling on occasion, and Eufemia made plans to return home at the end of September.

The sixteenth of that month was the nation’s Independence Day, when Mexico City became a cacophony of marching bands and skiffle bands and street dancing and church bells and firecrackers and military rifle volleys of tribute, a daylong celebration culminating after dark with firework exhibitions all over town. That evening, Eufemia sat in a rear bedroom, holding the baby and crooning to him to allay his fears of the blasts in the outer dark, while at the other end of the apartment Sófi stood out on the balcony and watched the fireworks lighting up the sky. The nearest show was taking place in the open ground of a park but two blocks away. It featured Catherine wheels and sun wheels, Roman candles and pastilles, elaborate displays of every sort—and of course skyrockets, some of them four feet long and as big around as a man’s arm, one after another arcing up into the night in a streak of fire and detonating into a dazzling spray of colors high over the city. The air was hazed and acrid with powdersmoke.

Sófi thought she would watch one more rocket and then go back inside and close the balcony doors against the noise in hope that the baby could get to sleep. But the next rocket did not fire off like the others, did not zoom off the ground in a streaking blaze but rose in a struggling, sluggish, spark-sputtering wobble as if improperly fused. It had barely cleared the rooftops when it stopped rising and for a second simply hung suspended and shedding sparks. And then, just as it tilted and started to fall, its tail flared and the rocket whipped around in a quick bright-yellow circle and came streaking directly toward Sófi where she stood seized. Before she could think to move, the rocket shot by within inches of her, singeing her hair and scorching her cheek, and blazed down the hall and into the bedroom and found the embraced grandmother and child and blew them asunder, bespattering the walls and setting the bedclothes afire.

Who could explain such a thing? Terrible firework accidents were commonplace and firework deaths no rarity, but a fatality in this manner gave new dimension to the idea of freak misfortune. The disaster was publicized in the most purple prose and the most lurid illustrations of the city’s penny broadsides. But nothing in those newssheets was as outrageous to Sófi as the witless blather of the priest at the funeral mass, his pious pronouncements about God’s mysterious ways and our need to accept them on faith and so on. Had she not got up and walked out of the church midway through the service—wholly indifferent to the stares and whispers she provoked—she might have thrown her shoe at the man and cursed him for a shithead fool.

She again returned to La Rosa Mariposa. And this time did take to her bed and stare at the ceiling. She could not rid herself of the idea that the rocket had sought out Eufemia and Francisco, but she shared this thought with no one, fearing she would be thought insane. It came as a dull surprise to her that she could not abide her inertness for more than a week before getting cleaned up and assisting in the operation of the café. María Palomina and Samuel Thomas were relieved to see her at work so soon after the catastrophe and thought it only natural that for weeks to come she would yet seem remote and have little to say. The loss of two husbands in a span of two years and three months, followed hard upon by the death of her only child, was a sizable downpour of misery by any measure and especially so for someone only nineteen. Still, she knew as well as anyone that there was nothing to be done about it but to bear it, and she bore it well. And bore well too her father’s rabid death less than two years after the loss of baby Francisco.

Samuel Thomas had been dead a year, and Bruno Tomás had since returned from the army to help María Palomina manage the café, when Sófi married Jorge Cabaza. He was twenty-five, only three years her senior, and worked in his father’s bakery, from which La Rosa Mariposa bought its bread. Jorge was plain and, as Sófi found out on their wedding night, lacked imagination as a lover. But he worshipped her and he was industrious and wanted to have many children, and it was of no small importance to her that a baker was far removed from the mortal risks faced by soldiers and policemen. And because he would do whatever she asked of him, she was able to teach him—gradually and in a spirit of shy curiosity, lest he think her wanton—a number of her favorite things in bed. And so did this marriage, too, come to provide her dearest pleasure.

Jorge’s only remaining family was his father, Pieto, who had taught him the baker’s trade and who adored Sófi from the moment they met, and she reciprocated his affection. The three of them lived in quarters at the rear of the bakery, which was on a street fronting a canal and near enough to La Rosa Mariposa that Sófi and her mother were able to visit each other often.

Pieto had been a widower for seventeen years. Before his wife was taken by a typhoid epidemic she had borne six children, but only Jorge had survived to adulthood, and Pieto’s great wish was for a grandson to keep alive the family line. When Sófi gave birth to a husky boy whom she and Jorge called Pieto Tomás, the elder Pieto’s tearful joy was compounded by his namesake honor. The year after that, Samuel Palomino was born, as lusty of health as his brother, and it was María Palomina’s turn to feel honored in addition to her elation at another grandson. We are truly blessed, Jorge said in his half-drunk happiness during the celebration party attended by everyone in the neighborhood. His father, no less happy and no less drunk, raised his glass high and said, A man cannot have better luck than mine. The dispute that ensued between father and son over which of them was the luckier man was about to come to blows when a woman’s plea for somebody to do something was followed by a loud and prolonged fart and the room erupted with laughter. Later that evening while dancing with Sófi, Pieto tripped over his own feet and fell and broke his arm, and so the following day they hired a neighborhood girl named Prudencia to care for the babies during working hours while Sófi tended to Pieto’s duties in the bakery until he could resume them. Under his instruction she learned the work quickly and well, and even after Pieto was able to work again she kept working too, and the bakery increased both its output and profits.

Neither child had ever evinced any sign of illness until Pieto Tomás was eighteen months old and his forehead one morning seemed a little warm to Prudencia’s palm. She feared he might be taking fever. The child did not feel feverish to Sófi’s touch but old Pieto had seen enough of his children die of illness and he would not abide even the smallest risk to his grandsons. He insisted that Jorge take the child to the doctor and take six-month-old Samuel Palomino to be looked at too, just in case. Prudencia held the well-bundled babies securely against her as Jorge hupped the mule forward and the wagon went rumbling away over the wooden canal bridge.

Sófi would later learn that the doctor had found both boys to be in perfect health. She would imagine Jorge’s relief on hearing this and his eagerness to share it with her as he headed back home. Of the various eyewitnesses, several would agree that he had been smiling and saying something to Prudencia as the wagon drew near to home, that the maid had been smiling also, that the babies in her embrace had been waving their arms for the sheer pleasure such action gives to children of that age. Then the wagon turned onto the bridge and its weight bore upon a piling that must have been rotting for many years without any sign of its weakening until that moment, when it gave a loud groan and abruptly buckled. There was an enormous cracking and twisting of planks as that end of the bridge gave way in a sudden tilt and the wagon turned over as it fell, taking the shrieking mule with it. It crashed into the brown water upside down and on top of all four occupants and sank from sight to settle into the silty bottom ten feet down. There was a great rush of bubbles to the agitated surface and then only the diminishing ripples.

Sófi and Pieto were in the rear of the store, working at the ovens, and so didn’t know of the accident until a neighbor rushed in to tell them. They ran out to the collapsed bridge where a large crowd had gathered, and several men had to restrain old Pieto by force to keep him from jumping in. A work crew had been summoned and was quick to arrive but it took them several dives to free the wagon of the mule carcass and then several dives more to lash lines to the wagon so that a winch could pull it over on its side and the bodies retrieved. Pieto was half crazy with grief and keening like a dog. Sófi stood on the bank the whole while with her arms crossed and a hand to her mouth, staring down at the dirty water with no thought that she would later remember. The first bodies recovered were of Jorge and Prudencia, sodden and muddy and lank in that unreal way that only the dead can be. Finally a diver came bursting to the surface, gasping for air, and handed up to workers on the bank the two small and ill-formed effigies of mud that had been her children. She nearly screamed. Nearly vomited. Nearly fainted. Nearly turned her face up to heaven to bellow maledictions. Nearly threw herself into the water to inhale a great fatal draught of it. Nearly did all of those things but finally only put her face in her hands and wept.

Late that night, as she lay sleepless, she heard Pieto pacing in the other room and then after a while heard him go out the front door. In the morning his body was in the canal, floating facedown. That afternoon she moved back to La Rosa Mariposa.

This time there was no lying in bed for two weeks and staring at the ceiling. She simply put an apron on over her black dress and set to work. Her mother and brother did not know what to say to her, how to conduct themselves around her. It was hard enough to express an adequate condolence to someone who had all at once lost her husband and two children, but what could you say to someone for whom such a catastrophe was only one more in a series of disastrous losses?

Sófi could hardly bear their solicitude. Their strenuous efforts at casual conversation in her company only made her as self-conscious and tense as they were. She stood it for two weeks before telling them to stop treating her as if she were made of glass. She was heartbroken, yes, and so what that she was? She would sooner or later get over it. She always sooner or later got over it. What else was there to do except sooner or later get over it, what else? What that old fool Pieto did? Yes, fool! Only a fool could have lived so long and not known that there is nothing you cannot sooner or later get over.

Maybe he did know that, María Palomina said softly, but could not endure the wait. Sófi stared at her mother. Then went back to work.

For weeks her eyes were red and dark circled, and her lean frame contracted to the skeletal for her lack of interest in eating. But the weeks did pass, and she did, as she knew she would, get over it. Did regain an interest in her meals and the table talk of her mother and brother and the news of the neighborhood and sometimes even that of the larger world.

It was during that period of getting over it that she began to wonder if perhaps she were cursed. She had always prided herself on her rational mind and had disdained superstitions of all stripes, but the sum of her misfortunes by the age of twenty-four defied rational understanding. But even when, solely for the purpose of self-argument, she allowed for the possibility she was cursed, she could not think why she should be, neither by God nor witch nor someone of the Evil Eye. Had she transgressed against any such agent of fortune, she felt sure she would have known it, and hence would know whose forgiveness to ask, what penance to perform, what atonement she must make. She refused to believe she could be cursed and not know why or by whom, and so was left with no explanation for her misfortunes except random bad luck. Bad luck could befall anybody anytime anywhere for no particular reason, just as good luck could. Everybody knew that too. Her bad luck, she told herself, was only bad luck, no matter its tenacity, no matter its accumulated heft. The idea was devoid of self-pity, an emotion she had abhorred since childhood and would recoil from whenever she sensed its encroachment. She told herself that her bad luck would change, as luck always did, bad or good, and there was nothing to do about it except hope for the change to come sooner rather than later.

She was five years into her third widowhood when Diego Guzmán proposed to her in October of 1882. He was a shoemaker without any family, his shop just two streets from La Rosa Mariposa. A handsome, courtly, well-spoken man of thirty-eight whose hair and mustaches had early gone white. Better than anyone else, he understood Sófi’s sad history, himself having lost two wives, one to the cholera and one to the unbelievable failure of her twenty-year-old heart as they were dancing at a fiesta. Both marriages had produced a child, a son each one, but the first died of some mysterious illness a few days after his first birthday, and the second somehow got tangled in the bedclothes and smothered at the age of five months. Diego had been wifeless for more than eight years when he began courting Sofía Reina.

Until they met each other they had both been sure they would not marry again, unwilling to risk having to bury yet another spouse, or worse, another child. But now Diego mocked himself for having been so fearful. It was easy to say never again when I was forlorn and had no one to love, he said. But now I am in love with you, my dearest Sófi, and now I know that love is stronger than fear. Let us be brave, Sófi! Let us be brave and marry.

She found it hard to share his bravado. She consulted with her mother, who said, I understand your worry, Sofita, but you mustn’t let it rule the rest of your life. I agree with Diego. Love is worth the risk. Besides, be reasonable. It is not very likely, is it, that the two of you together would have more of the same bad luck each of you has had so much of in the past?

Sófi wasn’t so sure about that, either. She thought very hard about it. But the more she thought, the more her focus sidled away from the risks involved and toward visions of herself and Diego in bed. Oh, how she missed that benefit of marriage! He was tall and lean, Diego was, and had long beautiful fingers. The thought of those fingers on her naked flesh deepened her breath and made her blush at her shameless reveries.

They were married in February in the little church of their neighborhood, the ceremony attended by their few friends who afterward joined in a party at La Rosa Mariposa that carried on until late in the evening. And when the last of the guests had left, the bride and groom went upstairs to Sófi’s room, which María Palomina had adorned with vases of fresh flowers and whose sheets she had sprinkled with perfume. The room was softly lighted with aromatic candles of all colors, and on a small table was an iced bucket of champagne and a platter of treats—spiced crackers, stuffed olives, shelled nuts—so the newlyweds wouldn’t lack for sustenance in the night.

Diego poured two glasses of the sparkling wine and said, To us, my darling, and all the life ahead.

They drank to their happy future. Then she made him sit in the armchair beside the refreshments and told him to stay put and just watch.

He sat back and sipped champagne and popped stuffed olives into his mouth, watching with bright eyes as she slowly began to undress. When she was down to her filmy underthings, she turned her back to him and slowly peeled off her undershirt—and smiled to hear his sudden gasp. She tossed the garment over her shoulder without a backward glance and then in a slow, teasing writhe began pushing down her underpants. She giggled as he began grunting and snorting like some aroused beast, thumping the floor with his feet. Oooh, she said in a small voice, I think I hear a big bad bull behind me. Is the big bad bull going to get me?

She turned and saw him slumped in the armchair with his hands at his throat and his face gone dark, eyes huge and bloodshot, mouth open and working with a soft gagging, legs atwitch. She was speechless with cold horror as she thought that this could not be happening and that of course this was happening. Of course. Then his gagging ceased and his feet went still and his hands slid away from his throat. He lay in an awkward slump, his wide eyes suggesting great surprise that all the sudden losses of his loved ones in the past had not in the least prepared him for his own abrupt end.

An hour later the summoned doctor held up for them to see—Sófi and María Palomina and Bruno Tomás—the stuffed olive he had dislodged from Diego’s windpipe.

I had been crying and crying, Sófi told John Roger, but when he held up that olive, well, you might not believe this, dear uncle, but I nearly laughed. I just barely caught myself. For a moment I was aghast. I was ashamed of myself for such a disrespectful impulse. And then in the next moment I was petrified. Because I realized the urge was insane and I knew that if I started to laugh I would never be able to stop, I would go forever crazy. It took all my will to keep from laughing.

You are too hard on yourself, John Roger said. The loss of a loved one can cause great emotional confusion. I think the impulse to laugh at such times is not so unusual as one might think.

And I think, she said, I was this close—she held up her hand, thumb and forefinger almost touching—to losing my mind. And I was very aware, Uncle John, that my mind was the only thing I had left to lose. So I refused to laugh. Otherwise, you would have known me only as your pitiful little niece in the crazyhouse.

What she had not told John Roger was that she could not regard Diego’s death as one more instance of bad luck by chance. However randomly bad luck might strike, she could no longer believe that it would by accident strike the same person again and again to such degree as it had struck her. The death of Diego not only revived her suspicion she was cursed, it convinced her she was. Once she accepted that explanation for her cumulative misfortunes, she felt the relief that comes from an end to perplexity. But she still could think of no reason for any supernatural force to place the curse on her, and hence had to believe its cause was in herself, that some dark personal fault was the source of her sorrowful calamities. Something in her blood. And when she thought of her father’s ordeals and those of her Uncle John, she had to wonder if maybe the curse was in the blood of the whole damned family.

On their last night together in Mexico City, they were joined for dinner by Amos Bentley. Sófi prepared chicken enchiladas with her special sauce seasoned with roasted garlic and minced green chile, and Amos was effusive in his praise of the meal. María Palomina complimented Amos on his Spanish and said that he and John Roger spoke the language better than most Mexicans she knew. Samuel Thomas had also spoken it well, she said, but with an accent all his own. She mimicked her husband’s enunciations, pretending to be him lauding Sófi for her enchiladas and asking for a second helping, and they all laughed, Bruno Tomás saying, That’s him! That’s exactly how he talked!

None laughed at his brother’s accent so hard as John Roger. He laughed until he was gasping, aware that the laughter was his first full-bellied guffawing since Elizabeth Anne was alive. And the others laughed with him, happy for him, understanding why his enjoyment was so great and why it came with tears. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose and said, Well now, that felt better than a thorn in the butt. And set off another round of laughter.

The following morning, he and Bruno Tomás took breakfast with the Blanco women and assured them they would return for a visit before long. The women promised in turn they would soon visit Buenaventura. There was much hugging and kissing at the front gate and then the men boarded a hack for the train station and the women cast kisses after them until they rounded the corner and were gone.