“Go and drink your chocolate, Óscar, you’re talking nonsense.”
Óscar (his face shining, his eyes wide) walks back to the kitchen, toward the oven he built with his own hands, the hands of a baker. His head is full of images, of black horses, one-of-a-kind, extraordinary to behold, like pearls. He says to himself, “No matter how you look at it, we’re guilty of the same kind of hubris as the gringos; although we don’t have slaves, we call ourselves owners of horses, and of land and water, too …” He takes a deep breath. He regards his oven, its round dome rising to his full height. He thinks, “It’s true, I must be losing my mind …”
That same morning Sombra, the donkey, arrives in Laguna del Diablo. Her load is making noise, shouting. To clarify: Sombra is being pulled along by a filthy old man, with a woman wrapped from head to foot in a heavy blanket on her back. She needs help to get off the donkey because she’s tied to it like a sack of rice, not a creature with her own two legs. The old man who guided the donkey is half-blind, he can’t untie the knots or help the lady himself. “The animal saved me,” she says as soon as she’s untied, “I don’t know how to ride.” The filthy old man has neither speech nor memory, his tongue has been tied by old age.
The woman, whose face is covered by a veil, repeats the same phrase, “I don’t know how to ride,” without anyone understanding what she’s talking about (she wants to tell them how, in Matasánchez, her elderly servants tied her to the donkey and entrusted her to this old mule-driver).
Her stupefaction doesn’t last long. Soon she composes herself, “I need to see Don Nepomuceno, I’m bringing him something he needs.” Since she’s a woman, and since, judging by her bearing, her hair, and the voice beneath her veil she seems to be an attractive, young woman of 22 or 23, they take her to him. From that moment she was known among Nepomuceno’s men as La Desconocida: “The Stranger.”
“My husband nearly killed me with his last beating, but now I’m here.” She removes her veil. She places a bag of gold coins in Nepomuceno’s hand, taking care not to touch him. “Make me a colonel or a cook, whatever you need — but I’m warning you, I don’t know how to cook — and I’ll help you fight for respect; I have more money, my savings are buried deep in the earth at home.”
“What do you want in return?”
“For you to help me get to the other side of the Bravo, and have someone guide me through Indian Territory, to where the husband I had the bad fortune to marry won’t be able to lay a finger on me.”
What Nepomuceno likes most is her looks, plus the fact that she’s direct and looks him straight in the eye. Moreover, he thinks, “This woman seems like a virgin. She will be mine.” How foolish men are, foolish men … because she too, has her desires, though they’re entirely different.
Nepomuceno gives orders that La Desconocida should be well looked after. To treat her like a queen. He also begins calling her by her nickname, it fits her, “La Desconocida.” It doesn’t occur to him to ask her real name. It’s Magdalena, the lovely girl from Puebla, the one Gutierrez bought to be his wife.
Nepomuceno gives orders to install La Desconocida in one of the lean-tos they’ve erected with fresh, scented wooden poles.
As soon as she walks away — what a view! — Nepomuceno dons his spurs. His servant who breaks the horses is in charge of the corral. Nepomuceno takes the lasso. He reins in the filly. He saddles her up and mounts her.
The herd stirs.
Lázaro sings:
The poor feller spends his life
runnin’ away from the law.
But he doesn’t like something about this song, he sets his violin down. “I’m just a useless old man,” he says aloud when he sees Nepomuceno trot past on lovely Pinta.
“Hogwash!” Nepomuceno shouts to Lázaro. “There’s nothing useless about you, your only problem is that you’re like a colt who’s lost its mother …”
Nicolaso receives a message via pigeon: “You can’t trust ’em as far as you can throw ’em.”
Pedro and Pablo — Two Eights — come and go along the riverbank, in camp they’re called the “mermen.” Their job in camp is to help build and maintain the tents — they’re skilled with sticks and cloth — their life on the barge trained them well for this.
Other boys and children have joined them. The young folk organize themselves well.
The vaqueros do what they know best — caring for the herd — and a few other things, too: they get their hands on arms and munitions. There’s Ludovico (who thinks of Moonbeam daily), Silvestre, Patronio, Ismael, Fausto, El Güero, and others.
In Bruneville, the Eagles have become even more secretive. They don’t even meet in the Café Ronsard to play cards.
You might say they’re underground or underwater Eagles. Or that they’re crazy. Because when they meet in the course of their daily routines, selling beans or cattle or bundles of cotton or cloth, instead of their usual conversations they list crimes to one another, adding to the litany we overheard at the Café Ronsard — Josefa Segovia and Frederick Cannon, 333 and Busy Bucks, the apples and the seven lemons, the infamous wheel at Rancho Barreta, Platita Poblana, and others — injustices racking up faster than a greyhound’s laps on the racetrack. The Eagles repeat these names in broad daylight, as if they were discussing prices or delivery dates.
The quality of the milk from a certain cow, a horse’s teeth, the origin of imported cloth, how fresh or good the seed is — they don’t talk about any of this, not even “How’s your mama doing?” or “Has the kid been born yet?” No small talk. They’re compiling a long list of abuses down in the Rio Grande Valley.
They pass messages along quickly. In passing, they utter phrases to balconies that appear to be empty. In the confessionals, they confess sins that aren’t sins, and their confessors aren’t priests. The barber repeats them in the middle of conversations, like non sequiturs. Lovers say things that aren’t at all loving. Whores open their mouths more than their legs when Nepomuceno’s men are around. The children continue to gather in their favorite spot, Mesnur, and messengers give them phrases they don’t understand to pass along — they memorize them and deliver them home. Farewell kites, farewell dragonflies in flight.
Another messenger pigeon: “Three tons of beans … the stampede is on its way …” Nepomuceno sends a message to Don Jacinto, the saddler: “Make me a saddle for a woman who doesn’t know how to ride, so that she looks like a queen; I need it as soon as possible.”
Jacinto thinks it over. He’s just invented one that, to this day, is called the Mexican Saddle. It’s like a raised throne, there’s no way you can fall off a horse sitting in it.
To make it as fast as possible, he gets help from Situ, the artisan who decorates belts and other leather goods. This infuriates Trapper Cruz. “Too bad,” Jacinto says, “he’ll have to get over it; this is for Nepomuceno, it has to be the best.”
There’s a death in El Iluminado’s procession: the grandmother of Laura, the girl who was kidnapped by the Indians. The old woman didn’t even receive Holy Unction. The burial on the open plains is like a party, with singing and swearing and Nepomuceno’s supporters shouting slogans. They lose a day and a half to this. The inches they advance take hours and hours. Even turtles would have arrived sooner.