Country of the Bad Wolfes

HIS MOTHER SAID

that his father was a very rich man, richer even than Don Máximo. Look here, she said, right here, her fingertip tapping the map. The hacienda is there. That is where we were born, I and then you. Where we were born. Our home. The home we were banished from. Remember it. . . .

that his father had other sons. Your brothers, she said. White brothers born of a white mother. He was married to that one and he loved her and loved them. But he was not married to me and I was not white and he did not love me and so he does not love you. That he does not love you for such a reason is unjust. Unjust! Never forget it. . . .

that she had no right to anything from his father. But you do, she said. You have as much right as the other ones to a place in his house. You have the same right by blood. By blood, do you understand? You have as much of his blood in your veins as the white ones have in theirs. Remember that, Juanito. You have his blood. Remember. . . .

that he had no reason to feel shame about himself. His father was the shameful one. A father who turns away his son, who sends his son away from his true home, who refuses to grant his son what is his right by blood, is a dishonorable father. He has spit on you. He is worthy only of your hate. It pains me to speak of him to you this way, my son, but it is the truth. It is important that you know the truth about him. He is an unjust man and a coward in his heart. Do not forget that. . . .

that the world was full of injustice, and more so for the poor of course. But anyone, rich or poor, who was a victim of injustice and then had a chance to right that injustice should do so. It is a matter of honor that he do so, she said. A poor man can have as much honor as one who is rich. Never forget, my son, never. . . .

His mother said all this and more about his father, reiterating it through his boyhood like a catechesis.

Feeding him of her own bitter creed.

They had always been outlanders on this hacienda, among these Poblanos, these people of Puebla state, whom all the rest of Mexico knew to be the most duplicitous and treacherous people in the country. By the age of fifteen he had been in many fights because of her. Because of the things other boys said about the shameless Veracruzana widow who pleasured the patrón under his own roof even as Doña Alicia was at mass. About the whore whose son’s obvious gringo blood testified to a bastardy doubly disgraceful. He fought like a berserker and broke the bones of some and bit the nose off one and beat another to stuttering imbecility. Some said his lunatic temper made him a menace and he should be locked away. Even older boys who were too big for him to defeat with his fists did not come out of the fights undamaged, and when word went around that he now carried a knife, even the bigger ones grew careful with their talk in his presence.

It was said that Doña Alicia had feigned ignorance of the Veracruzana’s bewitchment of her husband for as long as she could, until the day the maids heard her voice through the heavy bedchamber door, shouting at Don Máximo that if the whore ever set foot in her house again she would have her killed.

After that, the patrón came to her, to their house in the workers’ quarter. The boy would hear him arrive late in the night and hear his mother admit him. Then hear them in her adjoining room, sounding as if in struggle. Then hear him leave before dawn. On the mornings after those nights he would refuse to meet her eyes. One day she made him look at her and said he should not think of her what he was thinking or be disturbed by what others might think. You are old enough now to understand, she said. I do what I do by my choice. No one forces me to do anything. I am only a laundress, yes, but I am nobody’s plaything against my will. It is I who decided this thing. Not Don Máximo. I. Do you understand?

He saw that she believed what she was saying and that she felt no shame in it. And so he ceased to feel shame for her and said yes he understood. He became so familiar with the sounds of the don’s visits that after a time he did not wake to them anymore.

Then came the night he was roused by her shrieks. He leaped out of bed with the knife in his hand and ran to her door and crashed through it to find not the patrón but the patrón’s son crouched over her, twenty-year-old Vicente, wild-eyed and pantsless and erect, her shift ripped open and breasts exposed, her blurred face bloody. Vicente was strong and bigger than the boy but the boy was strong too and very quick with the knife, and when Vicente fell with a number of wounds the boy continued to attack him, oblivious to his mother’s screams. Then the room was full of shouting men and he was subdued.

That he lived to stand trial in a Puebla courtroom was testament to the fairness of Don Máximo, who even in his grief would not violate his principles of justice. He would not yield to Doña Alicia’s mad cries for the blood of her son’s assassin, nor capitulate to the impassioned exhortations of his son’s many friends that he hang the son of a whore in the hacienda’s main square. Nor to the woman’s pleas to him to let her son escape in the night. You know they will kill him, she said, no matter the truth. Don Máximo had seen for himself her torn nightclothes and the bruises on her face, her broken nose, her lacerated mouth. He believed her account of what happened. That Vicente had entered her house with such stealth she did not waken until he touched her. That he had refused to leave and attempted to have her by force. That she resisted and he began hitting her and she cried out and the boy came running.

Many believed she was lying to save her son’s life. They believed she had invited Vicente to her bed and that the son discovered them together and flew into a fiendish rage. He had slashed Vicente’s face beyond even Doña Alicia’s recognition and severed his private parts. Then beat his mother for being a whore. Then saw that Vicente was not yet dead and resumed his mutilations of him, so insane in his fury he might still be at it had he not been stopped. The whore mother, they said, was the cause of it all and should be hanged alongside the murderer son.

But Don Máximo had known that Vicente wanted the woman. Like everyone else, Vicente had heard the talk of the father’s relations with her, and as father and son had always been frank with each other Vicente had told him he thought the woman was very beautiful and he envied him. And instead of telling Vicente never again to speak of her that way and never to go near her, Don Máximo had only smiled. I was a fool, he said in the courtroom, an old man gloating over his son’s jealousy of him for his mistress. Now my son is dead for my stupidity.

Because Don Máximo had the courage to make such public testament—to admit his relations with the woman and reveal his son’s lust for her and profess his certainty that Vicente had tried to violate her—the boy was spared a death sentence. And Doña Alicia would never speak to her husband again.

However, said the judge. Although the defendant was justified in protecting his mother, he was not justified in killing Don Vicente once the don was too severely wounded to be a threat or even to defend himself. For the defendant to have given Don Vicente forty-one distinct wounds—forty-one!—was to go far beyond a defense of his mother to an act of arrant savagery. Considering also the extensive testimony regarding the defendant’s violent nature since childhood, it was the judge’s opinion that the boy presented a great danger to the public and should be removed from it. He sentenced fifteen-year-old Juan Lobo Ávila to the Puebla penitentiary for fifty years.

He had been in prison only two months when he was informed of her death. Someone who either sneaked into her house or was there by invitation had throttled her. He could imagine the hands at her throat. Whose hands? There were so many who hated her and wanted her dead. And him too. The only thing he knew for sure was that the agent of their misfortunes was the man who had made use of her but had not loved her because she was not white and therefore had not loved the son she bore him. The man who banished them, mother and child, from their patria chica and to a place where they would be detested strangers. Where she would be strangled and he locked away.

He might have hanged himself rather than grow old and rot to death in that prison—and to deprive them of the pleasure of keeping him caged—but his hatred would not permit it. His hatred was the very sustenance of his continued existence. It burned in his heart like a fire in a cave that was each day murkier with smoke, its rock walls each day blacker. Day after day and year after year in that cage of iron and stone he reveled in the waking dream of his hands at the man’s throat. His father’s throat. And then, each in his turn, at the throats of the man’s other sons. The loved sons. His white brothers. Two of them twins who from the day they took their first steps had walked like they owned the earth. So his mother said.