"…and loves me and admires my beauty…"
The Indian laughed soundlessly, fingered the brim of his tattered hat, and looked toward the terrace with its tile-covered roof, where that beautiful woman was sitting in her rocking chair.
"…my passion…"
Ventura remembered her from years back, always sitting that way, sometimes with her stomach round and huge, at other times thin and silent, always detached from the hustle and bustle of the carts filled with grain, the bawling of the branded bulls, the dry splat of the plums that in summer fell in the orchard planted by the new master around the hacienda's main house. "…what I am…"
She watched the two men the way a rabbit would measure the distance between itself and a pair of wolves. Don Gamaliel's death left her naked, bereft of the proud defenses she had had during their first months together: her father represented continuity, the old order, hierarchy. Her first pregnancy justified her modesty, her aloofness, her warnings to herself.
"My God, way can't I be the same at night as I am during the day?"
And he, as his eyes turned to follow the Indian's eyes, found his wife's immobile face and thought that during those first years he had been indifferent to her coldness. He himself lacked the will to pay close attention to that secondary world which could not manage to integrate itself, assume its proper form, find its name, feel itself before saying its name.
"…at night as I am during the day?"
Another Indian, speaking with even more urgency, sought him out.
("The government don't care nothing for us, Mr. Artemio, sir, so we come to ask you please to lend us a hand."
"Boys, you came to the right man. You're going to have your road, I swear it to you, but on just one condition: that you don't bring your corn to Don Cástrulo Pizarro's mill anymore. Can't you see that the old man refused to give up even an inch of land for reform? Why do him any favors? Bring everything to my mill, and let me market it for you."
"We know you're right, sir, but the problem is that Don Pizarro'll kill us if we do what you say."
"Ventura: give these boys some rifles so they can learn to protect themselves.")
She rocked slowly back and forth. She remembered, counted days, often months, when she never spoke to him. "He's never reproached me for my coldness to him during the day."
Everything seemed to be moving without her taking part in it, and the strong man who got off his horse, his fingers callused, his forehead streaked with dust and sweat, gave her a wide berth as he walked by, whip in hand, to collapse in bed so that he could wake again before dawn and set out, as he did every day, on the long route of fatigue around the land that had to produce, yield, consciously be his pedestal.
"The passion I receive him with at night seems to satisfy him."
Corn-producing land, in the narrow river valley that included the remains of the old Bernal, Labastida, Pizarro haciendas; land that grows the maguey that yields the pulque, the place where the dry sod begins again.
("Hear any complaints, Ventura?"
"Not to my face, boss, because, as bad as things are, these people are better off now than before. But they realize that you gave them land only good for dry-farming and kept the watered land for yourself."
"What else do they say?"
"That you go on charging interest on the loans you made them, just like Don Gamaliel did before."
"Look, Ventura. Go and explain to them that I'm charging the big landowners like Pizarro and the shop-owners really high interest. But if they feel my loans are hurting them, we can stop doing business right now. I thought I was doing them a favor…"
"No, they don't want that…"
"Tell them that in a little while I'm going to foreclose on Pizarro's mortgages, and then I'll give them the bottomland I take from the old man. Tell them to hang on and have faith in me, they'll see.")
He was a man.
"But that fatigue, that worry kept him apart. I never asked for that hasty love he gave me every once in a while."
Don Gamaliel, enamored of the city of Puebla, its society, its comforts, and its plazas, forgot the farmhouse and let his son-in-law take care of everything as he saw fit.
"I accepted, just as he wanted me to. He asked me to set aside all my doubts and arguments. My father. I was bought and had to stay here…"
As long as her father was alive, she would make the trip to Puebla every two weeks and spend some time with him, fill his cupboards with his favorite sweets and cheeses, go to Mass with him at the Church of San Francisco, kneel before the mummified body of the Blessed Sebastián de Aparicio, scour the Parián market with him, stroll around the main plaza, cross herself at the great holy-water fonts in front of the cathedral built in Herrera's style, or simply watch her father putter around in the patio library…
"Oh yes, of course, he protected me, he has my support."
…the arguments in favor of a better life were not totally lost on her, and the world she was used to and loved, her childhood years, had sufficient reality to allow her to return to the country, to her husband, without grief.
"With no voice in the matter, with no point of view, bought, just a mute witness to what he did."
She could imagine herself a casual visitor in that alien world, plucked out of the mud by her husband.
Her real world was in the shady Puebla plaza, in the pleasures of cool linen spread over a mahogany table, the feel of hand-painted china, the silverware, the aroma.
"…of sliced pears, quince, peach preserves…"
("I know you ruined Don León Labastida. Those three buildings of his in Puebla are worth a fortune."
"Look at it from my point of view, Pizarro. All Labastida does is ask for one loan after another, never taking the interest into account. I gave him the rope, but he hung himself."
"You must get some pleasure, seeing all this ancient pride tumble down. But you won't pull the same trick on me. I'm not a Puebla dandy like Labastida."
"You always pay on time and you never borrow beyond what you can reasonably pay back."
"Nobody's going to break me, Cruz. I swear it to you.")
Don Gamaliel felt the proximity of death, and he himself arranged his funeral in every detail and with every luxury. His son-in-law could not refuse him the thousand-pesos cash he demanded. His chronic cough worsened, became like a boiling glass bubble set out in the sun, and soon his chest tightened and his lungs could bring in only a thin, cold breath of air that managed to wend its way through the cracks in that mass of phlegm, irritation, and blood.
"Oh yes, the object of his occasional pleasure."
The old man ordered a coach decorated with silver, covered with a canopy of black velvet, and pulled by eight horses with silver fittings and black plumes. He ordered that he be brought in a wheelchair to the window where he could see the coach and the caparisoned horses pass by, back and forth, before his feverish eyes.
"A mother? What birth takes place without joy and pain?"
He told the young bride to take the four large gold candelabra out of the cabinet and polish them: they were to be set around him both at the wake and at the Mass. He asked her to shave him, because the beard went on growing for several hours after death: only his throat and cheeks, and a few snips with the scissors on his beard and mustache. He should be wearing his starched shirt and his frock coat, and they should poison his mastiff.
"Immobile and mute; out of pride."
He left his land to his daughter and named his son-in-law usufructuary and administrator. It was only in the will that he mentioned him. Her he treated, more than ever, as the little girl who grew up at his side and never once spoke of the death of his son or of his son-in-law's first visit. Death seemed an opportunity piously to set aside all those things and, in a final act, restore the lost world.
"Do I have the right to destroy his love, if his love is true?"