He’d had no other choice; he had to nip that mutual attraction in the bud before it destroyed both of them.
On Barataria, Juliana lay on her bed, sunk in a morass of humiliation and wild love. Lafitte had wakened a diabolical flame in her, and now she had to fight with all her will against the temptation to woo him away from Catherine Villars. The only solution that occurred to her was to enter the Convent of the Ursulines and end her days tending smallpox patients in New Orleans; at least that way she could breathe the same air her man breathed. She could never face anyone again. She was confused, embarrassed, restless, as if a million ants were crawling under her skin; she sat down, she paced, she lay on the bed, she twisted and turned beneath the sheets. She thought of the baby, little Pierre, and wept some more. “There’s nothing so bad it lasts a hundred years, my child; this madness will have to pass. No one in her right mind falls in love with a pirate,” Nuria consoled her. Madame Odilia arrived to ask about the senorita, with a tray of sherry and cookies.
Juliana welcomed this as her one opportunity to get details, and so, swallowing her pride and her tears, she asked her first question.
“Can you tell me, madame, is Catherine a slave?”
“My daughter is free, as I am. My mother was a queen in Sene gal, and there I would have been a queen also. My father, and the father of my children, were white, owners of sugar plantations in Santo Domingo. We had to escape during the revolt of the slaves,” Madame Odilia replied proudly.
“I understand that whites cannot marry people of color,” Juliana insisted.
“White men marry white women, but we are their real wives. We do not need the blessing of a priest; love is enough. Jean and Catherine love one another.”
Juliana burst into tears again. Nuria pinched her to signal that she should control herself, but that only added to the girl’s misery. She asked Madame Odilia if she could see Catherine, thinking that if she did, she would have reason to resist the assault of love.
“That is not possible. Drink your sherry, senorita, it will do you good.” And with that she turned and left.
Juliana, burning with thirst, drank down the sherry in four gulps.
Moments later she fell onto the bed and slept thirty-six hours without moving. The drugged wine did not cure her passion, but as Madame Odilia had expected, it gave her courage to face the future. She awoke with aching bones, but her mind was clear, and she was resolved to renounce Lafitte.
The privateer had similarly decided to tear Juliana from his heart, and to look for somewhere other than his home for the sisters to stay, somewhere her nearness could not torment him. Juliana avoided him; she did not come to meals but he could sense her through the walls. He thought he saw her silhouette in a corridor, heard her voice on the terrace, smelled her scent, but it was only a shadow, a bird, an aroma on the sea breeze. Like a caged animal, his senses were always raw, seeking her. The Convent of the Ursulines, which Diego had suggested, was a bad idea. It would be the same as condemning her to prison. He knew several Creole women in New Orleans who could put her up, but there was always the danger that her situation as a hostage would come out. If that reached the ears of the American authorities, he would be in serious trouble. He could bribe a judge, but not the governor; a slip on his part and there would be a price on his head again. He contemplated the possibility of forgetting the ransom and shipping his captives to California immediately; that would get him out of the mess he was in, but to do that he needed his brother Pierre’s consent, as well as that of other captains and all the pirates; that was the drawback of a democracy. He thought of Juliana, comparing her to the sweet and submissive Catherine, the girl who had been his wife since she was fourteen, and now was the mother of his son. Catherine deserved his unconditional love. He missed her. Only their prolonged separation could explain his enchantment with Juliana; if he were sleeping in his wife’s arms this would never have happened. After the birth of the boy, Catherine had wasted away. Madame Odilia had left her in the care of some African healers in New Orleans. Lafitte had not opposed it because her physicians had given her up for lost. A week after the birth, when Catherine was burning with fever, Madame Odilia insisted that her daughter was under the spell of the evil eye cast by a jealous rival, and that the only remedy was magic. Madame and Jean had taken Catherine, who was not strong enough to stand, to consult Marie Laveau, a high priestess of voodoo. They traveled deep into the woods, far from the sugar plantations of the whites, threading between small islands and through swamps, to the place where drums conjured up the spirits. By the light of bonfires and torches, officiants danced wearing animal and demon masks, their bodies painted with the blood of roosters. The powerful drums throbbed, stirring the forest and heating the blood of the slaves. A prodigious energy connected humans with the gods and with nature; the participants fused into a single being; no one escaped the bewitchment. In the center of a circle, upon a box containing a sacred serpent, danced Marie Laveau, proud, beautiful, covered with sweat, nearly naked and nine months pregnant, about to give birth. When she fell into a trance her limbs jerked uncontrollably, she twisted, her belly swinging from side to side, and she uttered a stream of words in languages no one remembered.
The chant rose and fell like gigantic waves, while vessels containing the blood of sacrificed animals passed from hand to hand, so everyone could drink. The drums picked up tempo; men and women, convulsing, fell to the ground transformed into animals; they ate grass, they bit and clawed, and some fell unconscious, while others ran off in pairs toward the forest. Madame Odilia explained that in the voodoo religion, which came to the New World in the heart of slaves from Dahomey and Yoruba, there were three connected zones: the living, the dead, and the unborn. The ceremonies honored the ancestors, summoned the gods, cried out for freedom. Priestesses like Marie Laveau cast spells, stuck pins in dolls to bring on sickness, and used gris-gris, magic powders, to cure many ills. But nothing worked with Catherine.
Even though he was a prisoner and Lafitte’s rival for Juliana, Diego could not help but admire the man. As a privateer he was unscrupulous and without mercy, but when he posed as a caballero no one could surpass him in good manners, culture, and charm. That double personality fascinated Diego; it echoed his own relationship with Zorro. And besides, Lafitte was one of the finest swordsmen he had ever known. Only Manuel Escalante was on the same level. Diego felt honored when his captor invited him to practice with him. In recent weeks the young man had seen democracy in action, something that until then had been only an abstract concept. In the United States, democracy was controlled by white men; on Barataria it worked for everyone except women, of course. Lafitte’s peculiar ideas seemed worthy of consideration. He maintained that the powerful invented laws to preserve their privileges and to control the poor and discontented; therefore it would be stupid to obey them. For example, taxes, which in the end the poor paid while the rich found ways to avoid it. He believed that no one, least of all the government, could claim a slice of what was his. Diego pointed out certain contradictions to him.
Lafitte punished theft among his men with a lashing, but his financial empire rested on piracy, a higher form of theft. The privateer replied that he never took from the poor, only the powerful. To strip the imperial ships of what they had stolen by blood and whip in the colonies was not a sin but a virtue. He had appropriated the weapons that Captain Santiago de Leon was carrying to royalist troops in Mexico in order to sell them at a reasonable price to the insurgents of the same country.
Lafitte took Diego to New Orleans, a city made to the privateer’s measure, proud of its decadent, adventurous, pleasure-loving, capricious, and tempestuous character. It had survived wars with the English and the Indians, hurricanes, floods, fires, and epidemics, but nothing could squelch its courtly arrogance. It was one of the principal ports of the United States, through which tobacco, indigo, and sugar were exported and every manner of merchandise imported. The cosmopolitan population coexisted with no concern
for the heat, mosquitoes, swamps, or especially the law. Music, alcohol, brothels, gambling houses… there was a little of everything in those streets where life began with the setting sun. Diego found a bench in the Plaza de Armas where he could observe the crowd: blacks with baskets of oranges and bananas, women telling fortunes and selling voodoo fetishes, puppet shows, dancers, musicians. Candy vendors wearing turbans and blue aprons carried trays of ginger, honey, and nut sweets.
At food stands one could buy beer, fresh oysters, and plates of shrimp.
There was always some drunk raising a ruckus, side by side with well-dressed caballeros, plantation owners, merchants, and officials.
Nuns and priests crossed paths with prostitutes, soldiers, bandits, and slaves. The celebrated quadroons strolled about the plaza, receiving compliments from the caballeros and hostile glances from their rivals.
They did not wear jewels or hats those adornments had been forbidden to satisfy the white women who could not compete with them but they had no need of them. They had the reputation of being the most beautiful women in the world: golden skin, fine features, large liquid eyes, wavy hair. They were always accompanied by mothers or chaperones, who never took their eyes off them. Catherine Villars was one of these Creole beauties. Lafitte met her at one of the balls the mothers offered to present their daughters to wealthy men, another of the many ways to get around absurd laws, as the corsair explained to Diego. There were few white women and many women of color; it did not take a mathematician to see the solution to the dilemma. However, mixed marriages were forbidden by law. In that way the social order was preserved, the power of the whites guaranteed, and people of color kept subjugated, none of which prevented whites from having Creole concubines. The quadroons found a convenient solution for everyone. They trained their daughters in domestic skills and arts of seduction that no white woman even suspected existed, to create the rare combination of mistress of the house and courtesan. The mothers dressed their daughters opulently but also taught them to make their gowns. They were elegant and hardworking. The mothers used the balls, which only wealthy white men attended, to place their daughters with a man capable of providing well for them. To maintain one of those beautiful girls was considered a mark of distinction for a caballero; celibacy and abstinence were not virtues except among the Puritans, but there were few of those in New Orleans. The quadroons lived in modest houses, but in comfort and style; they had slaves, educated their children in the best schools, and dressed like queens in private, although they were discreet in public. Those arrangements were carried out in accord with unspoken rules, with decorum and etiquette.
“To sum it up, mothers offer their daughters to men,” Diego protested, scandalized.
“Is that not always so? Marriage is an arrangement by which a woman lends her services and gives sons to the man who supports her. Here a white woman has less freedom to choose than a Creole,” Lafitte replied.
“But the Creole loses her protection when her lover decides to marry or replace her with another concubine.”
“The man leaves her with a house and a pension, and also pays the expenses of his children. The woman sometimes forms another family with a Creole man. Many of those Creoles, children of other quadroons, are professionals educated in France.”
“And you, Captain Lafitte, would you have two families?” Diego asked, thinking of Juliana and Catherine.
“Life is complicated anything can happen,” the pirate rejoined.
Lafitte took Diego to the best restaurants, the theater, the opera, and introduced him among his acquaintances as his “friend from California.”
Most were people of color: artisans, merchants, artists, and professionals. He knew a few Americans, who lived apart from the Creole and French population, separated by an imaginary line that divided the city. Lafitte preferred not to cross that boundary, because on the other side there was a moralistic atmosphere that did not sit well with him. He took Diego to several gaming houses, as the latter had requested. It seemed suspicious to him that the youth had such certainty about winning, and he warned him to be careful; in New Orleans cheating was punished with a knife between the ribs.
Diego paid no attention to Lafitte’s counsel; the bad feeling he had had for several days had only grown worse. He needed money. He could not hear Bernardo with the usual clarity, but he felt his milk brother was calling him. He had to go back to California, not only to save Juliana from falling into Lafitte’s hands, but also because he was sure that something had happened there that required his presence. Using the medallion as his initial capital, he gambled in several different houses so as not to raise suspicions with his exceptional winnings. It was very easy for him, trained in tricks of illusion, to replace one card for another, or to make one disappear. In addition, he had a good memory and a talent for numbers; minutes into a game, he could guess his opponents’ cards. As a result, he did not lose the medallion but was filling his money pouch; at that rate he would soon have the eight thousand American dollars of the ransom. He knew how to pace his game.
He began to lose, to give the other players confidence, then set a time to end the game and began winning. He never went too far. As soon as other players got uneasy, he went on to the next place. One day, however, his luck was so good that he didn’t want to quit, and he continued betting. His fellow players had drunk a lot and could barely focus on the cards, but they were still sharp enough to realize that Diego had to be cheating. The game erupted into a squabble that ended in the street, after Diego was pushed and shoved outside with the justifiable intention of beating him up. Diego could barely make himself heard above the shouting, but he challenged his attackers with an original proposition. “One moment, senores! I am prepared to return his money, which I have won honestly, to the man who can split open that door by butting it with his head,” he announced, pointing to the thick wood, metal-studded door of the Presbytery, a colonial building that stood beside the cathedral.
That idea immediately captured the drunks’ attention. They were discussing the terms of the competition when a sergeant appeared and instead of breaking up the wrangle stood aside to watch the action.
Asked to act as judge, he happily accepted. Musicians came out of several locales and began playing lively tunes; in a few minutes the plaza was filled with curious onlookers. It was beginning to get dark, and the sergeant lighted several lamps. Other men who were just passing by and wanted to participate in this new sport gathered around the card players; the idea of splitting open a door with your cranium seemed highly entertaining. Diego decided that the hard heads should pay five dollars each to enter. The sergeant collected forty-five dollars from the contestants in a flash and then made them get in line.
The musicians improvised a drum roll, and the first subject rushed toward the door of the Presbytery with a sash wrapped around his head.
The impact cold-cocked him. A burst of applause, whistles, and laughter greeted his performance. Two beautiful Creoles ran up to comfort the fallen man with a glass of barley water, while the second seized his opportunity to crack his head open, with no better results than the first. Some participants repented at the last moment but did not get their five dollars back. In the end, no one was able to put even a crack in the door, and Diego was left with the money he had won at the gaming table, plus thirty-five dollars from the contest. The sergeant received ten for his trouble, and everyone was happy.
The slaves came to Lafitte’s property by night. The traders beached their boats silently and unloaded, then locked the Blacks in a woodshed: five young men and two older ones, as well as two young girls and a woman with a six-year-old child clinging to her legs and one in her arms. Isabel had gone outside to get a breath of air on the terrace, and in the light of torches saw silhouettes moving through the night. Unable to contain her curiosity, she walked toward the line of pathetic humans in rags. The girls were crying but the mother walked in silence, her eyes straight ahead, like a zombie; all of them dragged th
eir feet, bone-weary and hungry. They were guarded by several pirates under the command of Pierre Lafitte, who left the “merchandise” in the shed and then went to report to his brother Jean, while Isabel ran to tell Diego, Juliana, and Nuria what she had seen. Diego had seen posters in the town, so he knew that a slave auction was scheduled at the Temple within a couple of days.
On Barataria the friends had more than enough time to learn about slavery. Bringing slaves from Africa was illegal, but nevertheless they were sold and “raised” in America. Diego’s first impulse was to try to set them free, but the girls pointed out that even if they could get into the shed, break the chains, and convince the Blacks to run, they had nowhere to go. They would be hunted down with dogs. Their one hope would be to get to Canada, but they could never do it alone.
Diego decided to at least see for himself the conditions in which the prisoners were held. Without saying what he meant to do, he told the girls he would be back, put on his Zorro disguise, and, taking advantage of the darkness, went out. The Lafitte brothers were on the terrace. Pierre had a drink in his hand and Jean was smoking, but Diego could not get close enough to hear them without running the risk of being discovered, so he continued on to the shed. A single torch illuminated a pirate standing guard with his musket over his shoulder.
Zorro approached with the idea of taking him by surprise, but he was the one surprised when another man suddenly spoke at his shoulder.
“Good evening, boss,” he said.
Diego half turned to face him, ready to fight, but the man was relaxed and friendly. He realized that in the shadow the man had taken him for Jean Lafitte, who always dressed in black. The first pirate came over, too.
“We fed them, and they’re resting, boss. Tomorrow we will clean them up and get them clothes. They’re in good shape, except for the baby. It has a fever, and I don’t think it will last long.”
“Open the door,” said Diego in French, imitating the corsair’s tone. “I want to see them.”