His two men in the seats ahead of them never said a word and never turned around.
They landed at Torreón, where his car was waiting, and late that night arrived at the casa grande. He spoke with the head housemaid and then told the girl to go with her, that she would be fed and bathed and shown to her bedchamber. The girl trailed after the maid, casting looks everywhere as she went.
The following day he had a team of seamstresses from Torreón fit her for a silk wedding gown and a silver crown inlaid with three small rubies. A priest was fetched and that early evening they were wed in the garden alongside the casa grande. Some hours later, following a celebration party in the patio, the maids brought her to his open chamber door and knocked timidly. The girl wore a satin nightgown the color of pearl. Her unpinned black hair shone in the candlelight. Her eyes were uncertain. He dismissed the maids and beckoned the girl. From the pocket of his dressing gown he took out a necklace, a fine gold chain holding a small diamond pendant. He gestured for her to turn around and told her to raise the hair off her neck. She was facing a full-length wall mirror and their eyes met as he clasped the necklace at her nape and then tenderly kissed her bare shoulder. Her eyes widened and her lips parted, and whether she was looking at the diamond at her throat or his lips on her neck he could not have said. He held her breasts from behind, their nipples hard against his palms.
He turned her around and kissed her. He slid the straps of the gown from her shoulders and the garment streamed to a pale puddle at her feet. Whatever she might have been feeling, shame in her nakedness was no part of it. She was more beautiful than he had imagined. Lean, sleek, brown. He took her hand and led her to the bed. She was eager for it. Her mouth received his with a hunger the more arousing to him for its obvious lack of practice, her touches more exciting for their tentativeness. She was virgin—the bloodspot on the sheets would testify to it. Had she not been, he was prepared to annul the marriage in the morning. She cried at his entry but then was soon gasping from effect other than pain, writhing unartfully but urgently beneath him, digging her fingers into his back, inspiring him to heroic effort.
They made love on each of the first few nights of the marriage before he flagged utterly. He had not risen to such occasion with such frequency since his youth, and his expended vigor was slow to recoup. Thereafter he rarely visited her bedchamber more often than once a week. He desired her constantly in his imagination and the sight of her naked body never failed to excite his lust, but his aged flesh was recalcitrant and he was deeply humiliated by his frequent failures as a lover. He had secretly hoped that she might bear him a son, a successor to Las Cadenas—but if she were never to conceive he knew the fault would more likely lie in his old and sapless seed than within her young womb. Still, he believed he could endure the disappointment of a barren marriage as long as he could touch her.
But by the time they had been together two months she was wearying of the accounts of his youthful adventures and of his ordeals under the Revolution. She had grown bored with his talk of people she did not know, many of them long dead. For his part, he could but feign interest in her redundant schoolgirl memories and descriptions of the beach where she always went swimming and tales of the times when she went to sea with her uncle the fisherman. Unlike her, he had no interest in books other than ledgers. But he didn’t care. He derived unremitting pleasure from simply staring at her, from the knowledge that she was there and would still be there the next day and the day after that.
He lavished her with gifts, with everything he thought might please her—jewelry, clothes, a beautiful black stallion and custom-made saddle, the newest model phonograph, affectionate pet dogs, a parrot that spoke her name. He sent a man to Jiménez to buy whatever recordings she asked for. He filled the house with her favorite flowers. He replanted the patio garden to suit her tastes.
She told him she missed the sea and asked if they might go to the coast for a holiday so she could swim. He said he could not leave the hacienda, that there were many duties he must personally attend to, that he never traveled except when he absolutely must on essential business. The truth was that he was afraid she might desert him if they went to a town—any town, but especially one on the seacoast. He did not know how to swim, and he had never told anyone of his recurrent bad dream in which they were at the seashore and she fled him by swimming away. He built a spacious pool for her in the west-side patio and for a time she took pleasure in it. She tried to teach him to swim but his efforts had been comically inept and she had laughed at him. He came close to losing his temper but was able to restrain it. He would not, however, enter the pool again. She swam in it every day—and made daily complaint that it was not the same thing as the sea.
The months passed. He was aware of her increased discontent. She turned moody. She rarely laughed anymore and never with him. He felt hopeless in his attempts to please her. One evening he caught her staring at him across the length of the dinner table and could see that she was beholding him as an old man. He was more deeply pained than he could say.
And then barely three weeks ago she asked if she might ride her stallion beyond the walled confines of the casa grande grounds. She was bored with the round-and-round of the riding track and with the horsetrail through the mesquite thickets at the rear portion of the compound. He refused. He said the countryside was too dangerous for a woman alone. He could send a rider with her, she said, one of his pistoleros, if he was so concerned for her safety. No, he said—and knew instantly that she had perceived his mistrust of her, his fear that she might cuckold him with a younger and more virile man. You could send two of them, she said, to keep an eye on each other as well as on me. She retreated to her bedchamber and remained there the rest of the day.
When he went to her door that evening he found it bolted and she refused to admit him. He might have walked away except he caught sight of a housemaid passing at the end of the hall and glancing at him. How many of the staff, he suddenly wondered, had heard him pleading with her like a whining boy? He tore the drapery off the hall window and piled it at the foot of her door and set it afire. In minutes the door was ablaze. There was no other door to the room and her windows were forty feet above the patio but she made no call for help or cry of fear. Servants appeared at the end of the hall and went racing away again, yelling at each other to bring buckets of water. When the door was a sheet of crackling flames he kicked at it until a portion fell away in a shower of sparks and then he covered his head with his arms and crashed through the burning wood and into the room. He slapped away smoking cinders from his clothes and hair, saw her staring huge-eyed at him. He took off his thick leather belt and doubled it and threw her facedown across the bed and stripped away her robe and pinned her with a knee between her shoulders. She was strong and kicking wildly but he was furiously determined and tore off her silk underpants and whipped her bare buttocks with the belt. He was elated by her shrieks and the servants’ arrival at the door to fling hissing bucketfuls of water on the fire and witness his punishment of her. She managed to break free after he’d laid on a dozen strokes. Her bottom was striped with red welts and she was crying in pain and outrage. She called him a bullying old bastard, she shouted that she hated him. He warned her that if she ever again bolted a door against him he would tie her to a tree in the patio and strip her naked to the waist and use a horse quirt on her back while everyone of the hacienda looked on. But he feared her will to resist and told the carpenter that the new door to her chamber should have no bolt.