SIX
WHAT DOES A woman admire most in a man? Gentleness? Kindness? ¡Ay! Those are the traits of priests. Wealth? A woman may desire riches, but it is not what she most admires. No, she covets most his virility: the power of his loins in the bedroom and his dominance over other men in the saddle and, when necessary, on the field of honor. Knowing this, when I entered the paseo, I sat tall in the saddle. Even Tempest flaunted his machismo, prancing and snorting at the mares.
I spoke to a few of the caballeros, merely nodded to others, ignored those whom I considered too far beneath me socially to command even a flick of my eye or head. I usually rode alone, while other caballeros went about in groups of two or three or more. In truth, I did not count many men as my friends. I was known as a loner, one who stayed mainly to himself. Most men my age were fools, and the young caballeros I competed with at night across the gaming tables were no exceptions. While my uncle referred to them as my amigos, they were acquaintances rather than friends. They bored me less when we were playing cards, and only the gaming table and a succession of upturned brandy bottles could provoke me to socialize with them at the inn in the evenings. I preferred the company of my horse and long rides into the wilderness, hunting or just exploring. Isabella says I am like a jaguar, the great jungle cat that hunts alone.
There she was, by the grace of God, the most beautiful woman in Guanajuato! Her carriage was surrounded by criollo caballeros, all begging for attention. I had Tempest prance by her carriage, ignoring her and the mob of admirers begging for attention. She eventually waved me over, laughing. She was as lovely as a goddess, regally attired in a gown of royal purple, embroidered in gold. Her eyebrows were blackened with burnt cork, giving her a wanton air that stirred my sin-black soul.
“Ah, Don Juan, so nice to see you. How were you able to free yourself from your tedious excursions in the wilds and honor us with you presence here on the paseo with the other caballeros?”
“Having observed the ways of your caballeros,” I spoke loud enough for several of them to hear, “I prefer the company of horses.”
Isabella laughed, that tinkling sound that thrilled my heart. But there was no doubt she deplored my wilderness treks. She continually scolded me for the time I spent with my horses rather than socializing. She especially detested the rides I enjoyed with the vaqueros on my hacienda and the bow hunting I indulged in. Such activities callused my hands and hardened my muscles, neither of which the dandies who vied for her attention favored. Isabella’s diversions were carriage rides, lavish balls, flirting, shopping, and dancing, activities I found maddeningly dull.
I rode alongside as her carriage rolled down the dirt path that circled the park. A female friend rode beside her in the open coach. Her friend flirted with another rider while I quietly conversed with Isabella. She covered her mouth with her silk fan to keep her voice from carrying.
“Did you speak to your uncle about purchasing a title?” she asked.
“Yes, everything goes well,” I lied. “And your father, did you speak to him about a marriage to me?”
Her fan fluttered. “He wants me to marry a count or marqués.”
“Then I will purchase a dukedom.”
Her laugh again tinkled like a bell. Dukedoms were not for sale. A marqués was lower than a duke and higher than a count, but any noble title would thrill her.
“My father has his eye on a particular marqués. I would nonetheless favor you, even if I married him.” She allowed me a flirtatious smile and batted her eyes coyly. “I would keep you as my lover if you promise never to marry and worship only me.”
My chest swelled with macho vanity. “Señorita, you will never marry anyone but me because I will kill any man who tries to marry you.”
“Then you will be very busy I’m afraid, señor, since all the men in Guanajuato desire me.”
“Only the blind would not desire you.”
She pointed toward an oncoming rider. “Isn’t that your servant, the one who cares for your horses?” Isabella asked.
Pablo, my vaquero, hurried to us on his mule.
“Señor, your uncle is very ill.”
SEVEN
DID I NOT foretell this would be a bad day?
The vultures had gathered at the house by the time I returned with Pablo. A pack of demanding cousins who had come over from Spain and continually entreated us for handouts hovered about. I ignored them, as I always did. I didn’t grow up with any of them and shared no family resemblance, experiences, or common interests with them.
The doctor came out of the room when my presence was announced. He blocked the door so I could not enter my uncle’s room.
“You must not go in,” he said. “You uncle is very ill, I would say near death.”
“Then I should see him.”
He avoided my eyes. “He does not wish to see you.”
“What?”
“He has asked for his priest.”
I did not know what to say. I left the room and went down to the stable to check my horses. My uncle was dying and did not wish to see me? True, we were not close, but other than that grasping pack of importuning cousins, I had no other family in the colony. Were there to be no last words between my uncle and me?
His sudden illness puzzled me. I had never known him to be sick. I went back upstairs after the priest arrived and waited in the anteroom outside my uncle’s bedroom. After a while the priest came out. I thought for a moment he would speak. He stood in front of me, wide-eyed, his jaw moving, then fled the house. I stood at the window and watched him rushing up the street. Eh, he too had hellhounds at his heels. Where was he rushing to? Was it not the duty of the priest to be at my uncle’s bedside when he gave up the ghost?
The doctor came out of the bedroom, saw me sitting in the anteroom, and ducked back into the bedroom, slamming the door.
Dios mío, what had happened to the world? Had the earth stopped revolving around the sun? Was the sky about to fall? Nothing would surprise me.
I went back down to the stable to talk to my horses, taking a jug of wine with me.
When Pablo informed me that Luis de Ville, the alcalde, had arrived, I only shrugged. That the mayor of the city had rushed to my uncle’s bedside was unexpected, but then everything that had happened that day had been muy loco.
Minutes later, Pablo informed me that the corregidor had come.
The mayor and now the chief officer of justice. To my uncle’s deathbed?
Yet they failed to summon me, Juan de Zavala, who was both my uncle’s heir and his employer. I was the imposing, important personage, not Uncle Bruto. Nothing would happen after his death except I would bury him and find someone else to manage my affairs.
I decided to remind the offensive fools that I was both gachupine and a man of substantial means.
The entire group—doctor, priest, mayor, and officer of justice—was in the anteroom when I came in. They turned and stared at me as if I were the one who was about to give up the ghost.
“Bruto de Zavala is dead,” Señor Luis de Ville, the alcalde, said. “He is in the hands of God.”
Or El Diablo, I thought.
The alcalde grabbed my arm and rushed out of the room. “Come with me,” he said.
I followed him into the kitchen. He turned and stared at me, at my face, intensely.
“Juan, I have known you since you were a child.”
“True,” I said.
“Bruto spoke to all of us before he passed. He told us something.”
“Yes. Is it bad news?” I asked. “He has mismanaged my estate, is that what he told you? How bad is it? How much do I have left?”
“Juan . . .” The man looked away.
“Alcalde, what is it? What are you trying to tell me?”
“You are not Juan de Zavala.”
EIGHT
I LAUGHED AT the nonsensical statement. “Of course I’m not Juan de Zavala. And you’re not Don Luis de Ville, the alcalde of Guanajuato.”
 
; “You don’t understand.” His voice rose to a shout. “You’re not who you think you are.”
I shook my head. “I am who I am. Have you gone loco?”
“No, no, no—you’re not a Zavala. Bruto confessed his sin to the priest, then had us hear his deathbed confession.”
“What confession?”
“Over twenty years ago, Antonio de Zavala and his wife—”
“My mother and father.”
“The brother and sister-in-law of Bruto, landed in Veracruz with their child, Juan. Bruto was with them. Before they reached Jalapa, all three suffered yellow fever, the deadly vomito negro. They died.”
“My parents died.”
“Antonio de Zavala, his wife, María, and son died.”
“What nonsense is this? I’m the son of Antonio and María. Are you saying there’s another?”
“They had only one child. Juan de Zavala died at the age of one year, along with his parents.”
“Then who am I?” I shouted.
He stared me for a long moment. When he spoke, the words punched me in the face.
“You are an hijo de puta.”
Son of a whore.
NINE
I WALKED THE streets of Guanajuato aimlessly, going nowhere, not even aware of where my feet took me. Night was falling. I walked in a daze, the alcalde’s words playing over and over in my mind.
“A changeling,” the alcalde told me.
Un niño cambiado por otro. A child changed for another.
Bruto had come across an ocean, not just accompanying the man and woman I was told were my parents, but relying upon their royal license for the wealth he himself intended to also gather.
Bruto told the alcalde that when his brother and brother’s family died, the legal right to the license would die with it and revert back to the royal treasury. To keep the license in the name of his brother’s family, he bought an infant about the same age as the year-old Juan and passed him off as his nephew.
The child of a whore.
I was not Juan de Zavala, Bruto told them.
I was not a gachupine—not a caballero born in Spain, a wearer of spurs—but an Aztec whore’s child, lower than lépero street trash.
“Bruto didn’t know what race your father was.”
It made no sense. I was Juan de Zavala. That is the only name, the only identity I knew. I wasn’t someone else just because a dying man claimed it.
“It’s revenge,” I shouted at the night.
That’s what it had to be. Bruto was angry because I was dismissing him, menacing his livelihood.
How could they take the word of a dying man against my own?
“The portrait speaks the truth,” the alcalde had told me.
Bruto had hidden in his quarters a portrait painted weeks before Antonio and María de Zavala boarded a ship for the New World with their child. Antonio and Bruto both had light hair and eyes. María had golden locks and green eyes, as did the child in the portrait.
Did I mention that my eyes and hair are dark brown? My skin light olive?
As I left the house, more Zavala family vultures were arriving, those beggar-bastards both Bruto and I hated. They came to squabble over their shares of my house, my possessions, my money.
I left with the clothes on my back. I went to the stable to have Pablo saddle Tempest, and the vultures followed me with a constable who escorted me to the front gate without the horse. When I turned to say something, the gate was slammed in my face.
“Peon!” I heard a cousin shout from the other side of the gate. A few hours earlier, I would have drawn my sword and split him down the middle, but I was too numb, too mentally paralyzed to defend my pureza de sangre, too dead inside to be horrified. It made no sense. My feet moved me away from the house, my mind reeling, my eyes filled with panic but seeing nothing.
If Bruto was right, if I wasn’t Juan de Zavala, what was my name? How could a few words take away my name, my entire persona? It was stealing my soul.
“I know who I am!”
A dark chill settled over me. I found myself in front of the inn I usually came to at night to drink and gamble with other young caballeros. My feet had instinctively brought me there.
I went inside, suddenly relieved. I knew men here, a friendly innkeeper. I would be able to talk about this insanity, clear the fog and confusion that was keeping me from thinking, from reasoning out what I had to do.
They were there, three caballeros at a table, my chair empty. I went right to the table and sat down, shaking my head.
“I have a tale to tell you all,” I said, “one you will not believe.”
No one said anything. When I looked at Alano across from me, he turned his head. The others turned their heads as I tried to catch their eyes.
All three of them got up and moved to another table, leaving me sitting by myself. There was not a sound in the inn. I sat frozen, unable to get my mind or my legs to work.
The innkeeper came up, wiping his hands on his apron. He, too, did not meet my eye. “Perhaps you should leave, Señor. This is not the right place for you.”
Not the right place.
It took a moment for his words to register, for me to understand why it was not the right place. Spaniards frequented the inn. He was telling me to go to an inn where peons gathered.
I rose in anger.
“Do you think me not so white as yourselves?”
TEN
BACK ON THE street, my anger evaporated, leaving me drained. Dazed and confused, I couldn’t maintain even simple rage. The fight had run out of me. I walked aimlessly, going nowhere, letting my feet guide me again. I didn’t know what to do, where to turn. Where was I to sleep? Eat? I would need a change of clothes. Already I was becoming cold. I needed a warm cloak, a fireplace, food in my stomach, brandy to heat my blood.
An inn was across the street, one had I had never been in before. I crossed and entered. The smells of sweat, pulque, and greasy food—smells that would have offended me hours ago—filled the tavern. I sat down at a table, weary.
The inn keeper came over immediately.
“Señor?”
“Brandy, your best.”
“We don’t have brandy, señor.”
“Then wine, Spanish wine, none of your vinegar. Give me good wine.”
“Of course, señor, we have fine wines.”
He had recognized me as a gentleman from the cut of my clothes. I glanced around. I had come to an inn that was a step or two above a common pulquería. A pulquería was the bottom of the barrel, serving pulque, the cheap, smelly Aztec “beer” peons got drunk on. This place was more respectable, a place perhaps where indios and mestizos who held actual jobs as clerks and shop assistants came. Pulque was still served but so was cheap wine, too bitter for Spain and consigned to our colony. Forbidden to grow grapes and produce wine, New Spain had to take whatever Spain sent.
As soon as he set a jug and goblet down, I poured and drank. It was not good wine, but I needed a drink too badly to complain. “Bring me a good slice of beef, none of your gristle, mind you, the best in the city. Potatoes and—”
“I’m sorry, señor, we only have beans and tortillas and peppers.”
“Beans and tortillas? That’s garbage for the poor.”
He said nothing, but his mouth tightened.
I just shrugged, puzzled at his reaction. “If that’s all you have, bring it to me.”
After he walked away, I realized I had insulted him. I had never insulted a peon before, not knowingly. How can one insult a peon? my card-playing compañeros would have asked.
The goblet shook in my hand. ¡Ay! Bruto had said I was of the lower classes.
No! It’s not true.
The alcalde was wrong: I was a Spaniard. The pieces to the mystery suddenly fell into place. My cousins had schemed this fraud to steal my property, to cheat me of my rightful—
But what about Bruto? Bastardo! I should have put a knife to his throat, cut out his tongue before
he spoke such lies.
I took a silver case from my belt and took out a cigarro. Using a piece of the bundle of straw sitting by the fireplace, I lit the tobacco and returned to my table, wishing I had put Bruto’s feet to the fire and tortured the truth out of him.
The innkeeper brought me my food: a plate of corn tortillas, a bowl of beans, some peppers, and, from somewhere, he had drudged up a bone with a fatty chunk of beef on it. Garbage! I wouldn’t feed the swill to pigs.
I struck the tray with my arm, sending it flying off the table. It hit the floor, breaking the clay bowls and splattering on the pants of the innkeeper.
He looked down at the mess on the floor and on his pants and stared up at me, his mouth agape.
My stomach was in knots. My mind felt as if it had been twisted and wrung out by strong hands. I started to walk out but was stopped by the innkeeper.
“You haven’t paid.”
I stared at him stupidly. I never paid for anything. Innkeepers sent the bills to my uncle. I felt my pockets. I had no pesos, which was not unusual, I rarely carried money. “I have no money.”
He stared at me as if I had just told him I’d raped his mother.
“Send the bill—” It suddenly struck me that there was no place to send the bill.
“You must pay.”
He grabbed my arm as I started around him. I hit him, and he staggered back, banging into a table and knocking its plates and goblets onto the floor. For a moment the room was silent. Then two dozen men stood and faced me. I was ready to take on every one of them.
Daggers appeared in a dozen hands. Some had machetes as long as my arm. One had a rusty ball-and-cap pistol.
I saw something in the corner of my eye. I started to duck as I realized a piece of iron pipe in the innkeeper’s hand was coming at my head. My reactions were too dulled. A light exploded behind my eyes, burst into a hundred fiery fragments, which in turn detonated into smaller slivers and shards that smoked, sizzled, and faded.