She compared the happy days of her childhood with this incomprehensible gallop of hard faces, ambition, fortunes that collapsed or were created from nothing, overdue mortgages, decayed fortunes, pride forced into submission.
("He has reduced us to misery. We cannot see you socially; you are part of what he is doing to us.")
It was true. This man.
"I am hopelessly in love with this man, this man who perhaps really does love me, this man to whom I don't know what to say, this man who brings me from pleasure to shame, from the most depressing shame to pleasure that is most, most…"
This man had come to destroy them: he had destroyed them already. She saved her body, but not her soul, by selling herself to him. She passed long hours at the window facing the open fields, lost in contemplation of the shaded valley, sometimes rocking the baby's cradle, waiting for her second child to come, imagining the future this adventurer could offer them. He entered the world the way he entered his wife's body-by overcoming modesty with joy and breaking the rules of decency with pleasure. He sat those men down at his own table, his overseers, peons with shining eyes, people who knew nothing about good manners. He abolished the hierarchy embodied in Don Gamaliel. He turned the house into a stable full of ruffians who talked endlessly about incomprehensible, tedious, unamusing things. He began to receive commissions from his neighbors, to hear himself described in terms of adulation. He should go to Mexico City, to the new congress. They would put him up for office. Who better to represent them? If he and his wife cared to visit the towns in the area on Sunday, they would see how much they were loved and what a shooin he would be for the congress.
Ventura bowed his head again before putting on his hat. The peon drove the coach right up to the porch; he turned his back on the Indian and walked to the rocking chair where the pregnant woman was sitting.
"Or is it may obligation to nurture the rancor I feel until the day I die?"
He offered her his hand, and she took it. The rotten fruit burst under their feet; the dogs barked, running around the carriage; and the branches of the plum trees wafted the cool dew. As he helped her into the coach, he squeezed her arm and smiled. "I don't know if I've offended you in some way, but if I have, I beg your forgiveness."
He waited for a few seconds. If only she had shown herself even slightly moved. That would have been enough: a gesture, even if evincing no affection, which would have revealed the barest weakness, the smallest sign of tenderness, of a desire for protection.
"If I could make up my mind, if only I could."
Just as he had at their first meeting, he now moved his hand toward her palm. Once again he touched flesh devoid of emotion. He took the reins; she sat down next to him, opened her blue parasol, and never looked at her husband.
"Take care of the baby."
"I've divided my live into night and day, as if to satisfy two ways of living. For God's sake, why can't I just choose one?"
He stared fixedly toward the east. The road passed by cornfields crisscrossed by lines of water the peasants channeled by hand toward the freshly seeded patches to protect the tiny mounds where the seed was hidden. Hawks soared off in the distance; the green scepters of the maguey shot up; machetes labored at cutting incisions in their trunks: sap. Only a hawk high above could make out the moist, fertile stain that marked the outline of the lands of the new master, lands that had once belonged to Bernal, Labastida, and Pizarro.
"Yes: he loves me, he must love me."
The silvery saliva of the creeks soon ran out, and the exception gave way to rule: the chalky maguey soil. As the coach passed, the workers dropped their machetes and hoes, the drivers whipped their burros; the clouds of dust rose over another kind of earth, suddenly dry. Ahead of the coach, like a black swarm of bees, walked a religious procession which they quickly caught up to.
"I should give him every reason to love me. Doesn't this passion please me? Don't his words of love, his daring, and the proof of his pleasure please me? Even now. Even now that I'm pregnant, he won't leave me alone. Yes, yes, it all pleases me."
The slow advance of the pilgrims stopped them: children dressed in white tunics with gold hems, sometimes with halos of silver paper and wire wobbling over their black heads, holding hands with the women wrapped in rebozos, with red cheekbones and glassy eyes, crossing themselves and muttering the ancient litanies-on their knees, feet bare, hands, clasped to their rosaries-who held up the man with ulcerated legs who was carrying out his vow, whipping the sinner who rejoiced to receive the lashes on his naked back, his waist cinched with a strap of thorns. The crowns of thorns opening wounds in dark foreheads; the nopal scapularies on hairless chests. The whispers in native language did not rise from the road spattered with red drops which the slow feet flattened and quickly hid: feet with hard soles, callused, accustomed to carrying a second layer of muddy skin. The carriage could not move forward.
"Why haven't I learned to accept all this without feeling a strange weight on my heart, without reservation? I want to understand it as proof that he cannot resist the attraction of my body, and I can only understand it as proof that I have triumphed over him, that I can wrench that love out of him every night and scorn him the next day with my coldness and distance. Why can't I decide? Why do I have to decide?"
The sick pressed slices of onion to their temples or allowed themselves to be stroked by the holy branches the women were carrying: hundreds, hundreds. Only an uninterrupted howl broke the silence beneath their murmuring. Even the slavering dogs with the mangy fur panted softly, running between the legs of the slow-moving crowd that waited for the pink-chalk towers to appear in the distance, the porch tiles, the cupolas with their yellow mosaics. The gourds rose to the thin lips of the penitents, and down their chins ran the thick phlegm of pulque. Sightless, wormy eyes, faces stained by ringworm; the shaved heads of sick children; noses pocked by smallpox; eyebrows obliterated by syphilis: the conquistadors' mark on the bodies of the conquered, who moved forward on their knees, crawling, on foot, toward the shrine erected in honor of the god of the god-men, the teules. Hundreds, hundreds: feet, hands, signs, sweat, lamentations, bruises, fleas, mud, lips, teeth: hundreds.
"I must decide; I have no other possibility in life than being this man's wife until the day I die. Why not accept him? Yes, it's easy to think it. But not so easy to forget the reasons for my rage. God. God, tell me if I am destroying my own happiness, tell me if I should choose him over my duty as sister and daughter…"
The carriage made its difficult way along the dusty road, amid bodies that did not know what haste was, that moved along on their knees, on foot, crawling toward the shrine. The maguey planted along the road prevented them from taking a detour, and the white woman protected herself from the sun with the parasol she held in her fingers. She was rocked softly by the shoulders of the pilgrims: her gazelle eyes, her pink earlobes, the even whiteness of her skin, the handkerchief that covered her nose and mouth, her high breasts behind the blue silk, her big belly, her small, crossed feet, and her velvet slippers.
"We have a son. My father and brother are dead. Why do things past hypnotize me? I should look ahead. I don't know how to decide. Am I going to let events, luck, things beyond my control decide for me? It's possible. God. And I'm expecting another child…"
Hands stretched out toward her: first the callused limb of an old, gray-haired Indian, then, quickly, the arms naked under the rebozos of the women; a low murmur of admiration and tenderness, a longing to touch her, high-pitched syllables: "Mamita, mamita." The coach stopped, and he jumped up, waving the horsewhip over their dark heads, shouting at them to get out of the way: tall, dressed in black, with his gold-braided hat pulled down to his eyebrows…