* * *
“I told you, he hasn’t got the balls I have,” laughed Nicolás Vidal when he heard what had happened.
But his guffaws turned sour the following day when he was told that Juana la Triste had hanged herself on the lamppost of the whorehouse where she had spent her life, because she could not bear the shame of having been abandoned by her son in that cage in the center of the Plaza de Armas.
“Now it’s the Judge’s turn!” swore Vidal.
His plan was to ride into town at nightfall, take the Judge by surprise, kill him in some spectacular fashion, and stuff him in the damned cage; at dawn the next day his humiliated remains would be waiting for the whole world to see. He learned, however, that the Hidalgo family had left for a spa on the coast, hoping to wash away the bad taste of defeat.
The news that a revenge-bent Vidal and his men were on their trail overtook Judge Hidalgo in mid-route at an inn where they had stopped to rest. Without a detachment of the guardia, the place could not offer sufficient protection, but the Judge and his family had several hours’ advantage and their car was faster than Vidal’s horses. He calculated that he would be able to reach the next town and get help. He ordered his wife and children into the car, pressed the pedal to the floor, and sped off down the road. He should have reached the town with an ample margin of safety, but it was written that this was the day Nicolás Vidal would meet the woman from whom he had been fleeing all his life.
Weakened by sleepless nights, by the townspeople’s hostility, by the embarrassment he had suffered, and by the tension of the race to save his family, Judge Hidalgo’s heart gave a great leap and burst without a sound. The driverless car ran off the road, bumped along the shoulder, and finally rolled to a stop. It was a minute or two before doña Casilda realized what had happened. Since her husband was practically ancient she had often thought what it would be like to be widowed, but she had never imagined that he would leave her at the mercy of his enemies. She did not pause to mull that over, however, because she knew that she must act quickly if she was to save her children. Hurriedly she looked around for help; she nearly burst into hopeless tears: in all those sun-baked, barren reaches there was no trace of human life, only the wild hills and burning white sky. At second glance, however, she spied in the distance the shadow of a cave, and it was there she ran, carrying two babies in her arms with a third clinging to her skirttails.
Three times Casilda scaled the slope to the cave, carrying her children, one by one. It was a natural cave, like many others in those hills. She searched the interior, to be sure she had not happened into the den of some animal, settled the children in the rear, and kissed them without shedding a tear.
“In a few hours the guardia will come looking for you. Until then, don’t come out for any reason, even if you hear me scream. Do you understand?” she instructed.
The tots hugged each other in terror, and with a last farewell glance the mother ran down the hill. She reached the car, closed her husband’s eyelids, brushed her clothes, straightened her hair, and sat down to wait. She did not know how many men were in Nicolás Vidal’s band, but she prayed there were many; the more there were, the more time would be spent in taking their pleasure of her. She gathered her strength, wondering how long it would take to die if she concentrated on expiring inch by inch. She wished she were voluptuous and robust, that she could bear up longer and win more time for her children.
She did not have long to wait. She soon saw a dust cloud on the horizon and heard galloping hoofs; she gritted her teeth. Confused, she watched as with drawn pistol a single rider reined in his horse a few meters from her. By the knife scar on his face she recognized Nicolás Vidal, who had decided to pursue Judge Hidalgo alone: this was a private matter to be settled between the two of them. She understood then that she must do something much more difficult than die slowly.
With one glance the bandit realized that his enemy, sleeping his death in peace, was beyond any punishment; but there was his wife, floating in the reverberating light. He leapt from his horse and strode toward her. She did not look away, or flinch, and he stopped short; for the first time in his life someone was defying him without a hint of fear. For several seconds they took each other’s measure in silence, calculating the other’s strength, estimating their own tenacity, and accepting the fact they were facing a formidable adversary. Nicolás Vidal put away his revolver, and Casilda smiled.
The Judge’s wife earned every instant of the next hours. She employed all the seductive tricks recorded since the dawn of human knowledge, and improvised others out of her need to gratify the man’s every dream. She not only played on his body like a skilled performer, strumming every chord in the pursuit of pleasure, she also called upon the wiles of her own refinement. Both realized that the stakes of this game were their lives, and that awareness lent the ultimate intensity to their encounter. Nicolás Vidal had fled from love since the day of his birth; he had never known intimacy, tenderness, secret laughter, the celebration of the senses, a lover’s joyful pleasure. With every minute the guardia were riding closer and closer, and, with them, the firing wall; but he was also closer, ever closer, to this stupendous woman, and he gladly traded guardia and wall for the gifts she was offering him. Casilda was a modest and shy woman; she had been married to an austere old man who had never seen her naked. She did not forget for one instant throughout that memorable afternoon that her objective was to gain time, but at some point she let herself go, marveling at her own sensuality, and somehow grateful to Vidal. That was why when she heard the distant sound of the troops, she begged him to flee and hide in the hills. Nicolás Vidal preferred to hold her in his arms and kiss her for the last time, thus fulfilling the prophecy that had shaped his destiny.
THE ROAD NORTH
It took Claveles Picero and her grandfather Jesús Dionisio Picero thirty-eight days to walk the seventy kilometers between their village and the capital. On foot they had traveled through lowlands where the vegetation simmered in an eternal broth of mud and sweat, climbed and descended hills past motionless iguanas and drooping palm trees, crossed coffee plantations while avoiding foremen, lizards, and snakes, and made their way beneath tobacco leaves among phosphorescent mosquitoes and sidereal butterflies. They had headed directly toward the city, following the highway, but once or twice had made long detours in order to avoid encampments of soldiers. Occasionally, truckdrivers slowed as they passed, drawn by the girl’s mestizo-queen backside and long black hair, but the look on the old man’s face immediately dissuaded them from any thought of annoying her. The grandfather and granddaughter had no money, and did not know how to beg. When their basket of provisions was exhausted, they continued on sheer courage. At night they wrapped themselves in their rebozos and slept beneath the trees, with a prayer on their lips and their mind on the boy, to avoid thinking of pumas and venomous predators. They awakened covered with blue beetles. At the first light of dawn, when the landscape was still wreathed in the last mists of dream and neither man nor beast had yet begun the day’s tasks, they started off, taking advantage of the coolness. They entered the capital city by way of the Camino de los Españoles, asking everyone they met in the street where they might find the Department of Welfare. By that time Dionisio’s bones were clicking and the colors had faded from Claveles’s dress; she wore the bewitched expression of a sleepwalker, and a century of fatigue had fallen over the splendor of her youth.
* * *
Jesús Dionisio Picero was the best-known artist in the province; in a long life he had won a fame he never boasted of because he believed that his talent was a gift in God’s service and that he was but the trustee. He had begun as a potter, and still made small clay animals, but the basis of his true renown were the wooden saints and small sculptures in bottles bought by campesinos for their home altars and by tourists in the capital. His was a slow labor, a matter of eye, time, and heart, as he would explain to the small boys who cro
wded round to watch as he worked. With long-necked tweezers he would insert a small painted stick into the bottle, with a dot of glue on the areas that needed bonding, and wait patiently for them to dry before adding the next piece. His specialty were the Calvarios, consisting of a large central cross complete with the figure of the crucified Christ, His nails, His crown of thorns, and a gold-paper aureole, and two more simple crosses for the thieves of Golgotha. On Christmas he carved crèches for the Baby Jesus, with doves representing the Holy Spirit and stars and flowers to symbolize the Glory. He did not know how to read or sign his name, because when he was a boy there had been no school, but he could copy Latin phrases from the missal to decorate the pedestals of his saints. He always said that his mother and father had taught him to respect the laws of Church and man, and that was worth more than having gone to school. He did not make enough with his carving to support his family, so he rounded out his income by breeding gamecocks. Each rooster demanded assiduous attention; he hand-fed them a pap of ground grains and fresh blood he obtained from the slaughterhouse; he groomed them for mites, ventilated their feathers, polished their spurs, and worked with them every day so they would not lack for valor when the chips were down. Sometimes he traveled to other villages to watch the birds fight, but he never bet, because in his view any money won without sweat and hard labor was the work of the devil. On Saturday nights he and his granddaughter Claveles cleaned the church for Sunday service. The priest, who made the rounds of the villages on his bicycle, did not always get there, but good Christians gathered anyway to pray and sing. Jesús Dionisio was also responsible for taking and safeguarding the collection used for the upkeep of the temple and the priest.
Picero and his wife, Amparo Medina, had thirteen children, of whom five had survived the epidemics and accidents of infancy. Just when the couple thought they were through with children, because all theirs were grown and out of the house, their youngest son returned on a military pass, carrying a ragged bundle that he placed in Amparo’s lap. When it was opened, they found a newborn baby girl, half dead from want of maternal milk and being bounced on the journey.
“Where did you get this, son?” asked Jesús Dionisio Picero.
“It seems she’s mine,” the youth replied, worrying his uniform cap with sweating fingers, not daring to meet his father’s eyes.
“And, if it is not too much to ask, where is the mother?”
“I don’t know. She left the baby at the barracks door with a piece of paper saying I’m the father. The sergeant told me to take her to the nuns; he says there’s no way to prove she’s mine. But I’d feel bad about that; I don’t want her to be an orphan . . .”
“Who ever heard of a mother leaving her baby on someone’s doorstep?”
“That’s how they do in the city.”
“So, that’s the way it is, then. And what is the little thing’s name?”
“Whatever name you give her, Papa, but if you’re asking me, I like Claveles; carnations were her mother’s favorite flower.”
Jesús Dionisio went out to find the she-goat to milk, while Amparo bathed the infant carefully with oil and prayed to the Virgin of the Grotto to give her the strength to care for another child. Once he saw that the baby was in good hands, their youngest son thanked them, said goodbye, threw his pack over his shoulder, and marched back to the barracks to serve out his sentence.
Claveles was raised by her grandparents. She was a stubborn, rebellious child impossible to discipline either with reasoning or exercise of authority, but she yielded immediately if someone played on her emotions. She got up every day at dawn and walked five miles to a shed set in the middle of some field, where a teacher assembled the local children to administer their basic schooling. Claveles helped her grandmother in the house and her grandfather in the workshop; she went to the hill to look for clay and she washed his brushes, but she was never interested in any other aspect of his art. When Claveles was nine, Amparo Medina, who had been shrinking until she was no bigger than a six-year-old, died cold in her bed, worn out by so many births and so many years of hard work. Her husband traded his best rooster for some planks and built her a coffin he decorated with Biblical scenes. Her granddaughter dressed her for her burial in the white tunic and celestial blue cord of Saint Bernadette, the one she herself had worn for First Communion and which fit perfectly her grandmother’s emaciated body. Jesús Dionisio and Claveles set out for the cemetery pulling a small cart carrying the paper-flower-decorated pine box. Along the way they were joined by friends, men and shawl-draped women who walked beside them in silence.
Then the elderly wood-carver and his granddaughter were alone in the house. As a sign of mourning they painted a large cross on the door and for years both wore a black ribbon sewed to their sleeve. The grandfather tried to replace his wife in the practical details around the house, but nothing was ever again the same. The absence of Amparo Medina pervaded him like a malignant illness; he felt that his blood was turning to water, his bones to cotton, his memories fading, his mind swimming with doubts. For the first time in his life he rebelled against fate, asking himself why Amparo had been taken without him. After her death he was unable to carve manger scenes; from his hands came only Calvarios and martyred saints, all in mourning, to which Claveles pasted legends bearing pathetic messages to Divine Providence her grandfather dictated to her. Those figures did not sell well among the city tourists, who preferred the riotous colors they erroneously attributed to the Indian temperament, nor were they popular among the campesinos, who needed to adore joyful deities, because the only consolation for the sorrows of this world was to imagine that in heaven there was eternal celebration. It became almost impossible for Jesús Dionisio Picero to sell his crafts, but he continued to carve them, because in that occupation the hours passed effortlessly, as if it were always early morning. Even so, neither his work nor the company of his granddaughter could console him, and he began to drink, secretly, so that no one would be aware of his shame. Drunk, he would call out to his wife, and sometimes he would see her beside the kitchen hearth. Without Amparo Medina’s diligent care, the house deteriorated, the hens stopped laying, he had to sell the she-goat, he neglected the garden, and soon they were the poorest family in the region. Not long thereafter, Claveles left to get a job in town. At fourteen she had reached her full growth, and as she did not have the coppery skin or prominent cheeks of the rest of the family, Jesús Dionisio Picero concluded that her mother must have been white—which would explain the inconceivable act of having left her baby at the barracks door.
A year and a half later, Claveles Picero returned home with a blemished face and prominent belly. She found her grandfather with no company but a pack of hungry dogs and a couple of bedraggled roosters in the patio. He was talking to himself, empty-eyed, and he showed signs of not having bathed for quite some time. He was surrounded by chaos. He had given up on his little bit of land and spent his days carving saints with demented haste, but with little of his former talent. His sculptures were deformed, lugubrious creatures unfit for either devotions or sale that had piled up in the corners of the house like stacks of firewood. Jesús Dionisio Picero had changed so much that he did not even favor his granddaughter with a diatribe on the evils of bringing children into the world without a father; in fact, he seemed unmindful of the signs of her pregnancy. He merely hugged her, trembling, calling her Amparo.
“Look at me, Grandfather, look carefully,” the girl said. “I am Claveles, and I’ve come home to stay, because there’s a lot to be done around here.” And she went inside to light the kitchen fire to boil some potatoes and heat water to bathe the old man.
During the course of the following months, the old man seemed to come back to life; he stopped drinking, he began working his small garden, busying himself with his gamecocks, and cleaning the church. He still talked to the shade of his wife, and sometimes confused granddaughter for grandmother, but he recovered the gift o
f laughter. The companionship of Claveles and the hope that soon there would be another living creature in the house renewed his love of color, and gradually he stopped painting his saints pitch black and arrayed them in robes more appropriate for an altar. Claveles’s baby emerged from his mother’s belly one evening at six and was received into the callused hands of his great-grandfather, who had long experience in such matters, having assisted at the birth of his thirteen children.
“We’ll call him Juan,” the makeshift midwife declared as soon as he had cut the cord and wrapped his descendant in a clean swaddling cloth.
“Why Juan? There’s no Juan in our family, Grandfather.”
“Well, because Juan was Jesus’s best friend, and this boy will be mine. And what was his father’s name?”
“You can see he doesn’t have a father.”
“Picero, then. Juan Picero.”
Two weeks after the birth of his great-grandson, Jesús Dionisio began to carve the pieces for a crèche, the first he had made since the death of Amparo Medina.
Claveles and her grandfather soon realized that the boy was not normal. He was alert, and he kicked and waved his arms like any baby, but he did not react when they spoke to him, and would lie awake for hours, not fussing. They took the infant to the hospital, and there the doctor confirmed that he was deaf and, because he was deaf, that he would also be mute. The doctor added that there was not much hope for him unless they were lucky enough to place him in an institution in the city, where he would be taught good behavior and, later, trained for a trade that would enable him to earn a decent living and not always be a burden for others.