Part 2

"It's getting chilly," Angelina said. "Let me go in and get my scarf."

"No. Let's go inside. How about a game of pool?" He questioned the wisdom of his own suggestion, wondering how this gesture could make up for his shortcomings. He cleared his throat, expecting a refusal.

"We haven't played for a long time. Let's. I'll get my scarf."

In the doorway of the poolroom, Raul lit his pipe while Angelina went for her scarf and Manuel Boaz brought lighted candles for their game. Manuel was a burly fellow--almost sixty, part Negro. He had been with the Medinas since childhood. His mother had died in a remote mountain hut on the hacienda. Some said she had been insane. Manuel had the speech of a southerner because a Oaxacan had raised him. He lit candles on wall brackets and leaned in the doorway as Raul and Angelina chalked their cues. Tall, almost gray-skinned, his Negroid face took on a mask of shadows and pale half-lights as he leaned against the doorframe. He wore the customary white of the hacienda peasant and was barefooted. Unlike the Indians, he had to shave, but he had neglected his beard for several days and its stubble crinkled in the light from the candles.

"Angelina--you shoot first."

Manuel stepped away. He knew his place.

Raul grinned as Angelina's cue spun balls wickedly across the felt. She had a knack for pool. She and Caterina and Vincente played frequently. If he let himself be absent-minded, she would beat him. The game went pleasantly enough. Manuel brought _copitas_ of brandy and set bottle and tray on the low armoire. Raul used his cue as a staff while Angelina played the nine.

This was his favorite room and its familiarity relaxed him. He took in the thick, unpainted ceiling beams, the carved cedar armoire (stained and discolored), the huge roll-top desk with a deer head and a tiger skin above it. The skin was nailed to the wall with silver horseshoe nails. Between the grilled windows of the opposite side of the room, windows that led to the garden, hung a painting of their horse, El Pobre. Who had named the horse--his father, in some fit of anger? El Pobre had been anything but poor. He had outrun and outjumped all hacienda rivals. And when old and spoiled, Uncle Roberto had given him a set of horseshoes with silver nails--a gift typical of Roberto's city humor. French prints, some fencing swords, a piece of Sèvres ware, a gold crucifix, a rack of guns and cues--for Raul it was a perfect room.

He wished Lucienne had such a room at her hacienda. Palma Sola had a plainness about it, except for Lucienne's plants and flowers and the nearness of the sea.

"You're not thinking of what you're doing," Angelina said, pushing back her hair. "You shouldn't have missed that shot."

"I guess I wasn't thinking," Raul said.

c"You'll get beaten," she said.

"You just watch this play," he said, and sent a ball into a pocket with skilled English.

"That was luck, just luck," she said, and her glance took him in nervously. She was a little afraid of him at times. She felt inferior, disliked, shunned. His mind could spread itself over so much. His feeling for life made her hands turn cold. She could not follow his plans. His idea of taking over Petaca--that was idiotic. Better the old ways. What could one man do with seventeen hundred people? What if they were underfed, sick, poor! They had always been that way. He couldn't get anywhere with new-fangled ideas. Those arguments between Raul and his father were pointless. Let the old man have his say ... lying there, in his room, he was still _hacendado_ with whip and gun, unafraid to take and destroy.

Outside, in the garden, a man began to sing: Delgado, the gardener. His watering can clinked on the edge of the stone-walled pool. He was singing a Coliman song, pitched rather high; Delgado was seventy and his old throat added a special tremolo to every word. A bird took up his song. "Ave María, ave María, mi corazón es tuya ... ave María." The song floated around a corner of the house, as Delgado walked away.

Raul won the game, and they sat down by the armoire. Her pale blue scarf loose over her arm, Angelina poured them another brandy and handed him his with an absent smile. She was thinking now of their children, of the fun they had had today, at the mill.

"Salud," she said, raising her glass.

He raised his glass, but glanced away.

"I'm taking grain to the huts at Sector 15," he said. "Father has cut off the corn supply from that sector."

"It must have been necessary to punish someone," she said. There was a pause. He did not bother to correct her assumption. "Do you think we can drive to Colima this week? I'd love to buy some things--it would be nice to go to town; we haven't been to town together for several weeks."

"I'll try," he said. "I think we can go."

A bat skittered close to the ceiling and then flew round and round the room, keeping near the walls. They watched it silently. It seemed such a small brown spot, in such haste, dipping between the candles on the armoire.

"What an ugly thing!" Angelina said.

"Manuel," Raul called.

When Manuel appeared, Raul pointed to the bat and said, "Drive it out."

Manuel brought his wide-brimmed hat, waved it, and chased the bat outdoors. He said nothing, but the way he moved expressed acceptance and pleasure. He had the grace of an old cat.

After Manuel went out, Raul said: "I've been thinking about Manuel, how he and I used to fly kites. He would take the kite on top of the house, where the roof's flat. We'd let out balls of string. He must have been thirty years old then. I remember his face--so full of smiles. He was patient with me. He knew the things a boy wanted to do. Horses. Hunting." His voice trailed off. He lit his pipe.

"He'd do anything for you," Angelina said, and rose abruptly. "Let's blow out the candles. You and Manuel have been true to each other. That's a fine thing." Then in a high voice, she added: "A fine thing."

He tried to disregard the inference. He puffed out a candle and watched her bend over another atop the armoire. The ivory light flared across her polished features. Sadness stabbed him: their marriage should have worked. Who had made the first mistake? Gradually, like a candlelit picture, Lucienne's face appeared, hazel eyes serious.

2

The hacienda of Petaca dated from 1619. The deed--signed in Colima--lay in a cedar jewel box in the living room. The Jesuit paper (some lawyer had gotten hold of ecclesiastical stationery) bore the cross-and-crown watermark. Flowery signatures in brown ink were fading into the foxed sheets that had frayed and chipped edges.

Petaca stretched over 1,580,000 acres: sugarcane fields, corn land, wheat land, cattle country, hills, valleys, rivers, lava beds, half a volcano, a lagoon, a pre-Columbian pyramid, villages with their gardens and orchards. The main house was thirty miles from Colima, the capital of the state. Peasants of the neighboring haciendas had dubbed Petaca the "Hacienda of the Clarín." Their ironical name referred to Raul's father, not the mockingbirds in the grove behind the residence. He had made many a man "sing." The nickname, said with a ttck of the tongue, conveyed their condemnation.

Fernando Medina, the Clarín, lay in bed, propped on pillows. His bed faced a tall grilled window, its wooden shutters flung back. As he lay against his pillows, one hand twitched nervously. He was seventy-nine, white-headed, ashen and scrawny, part Coro, part Spanish. Bowled over by a stroke, he still had a patriarchal air. His eyes could still explode. The white eyebrows, though thin, arched imperially. Decaying and absent teeth had crumpled his mouth; only when he was angry could it regain its forcefulness; at all other times it mocked the man. Don Fernando had been rebellious. As a young fellow, he had quarreled with his father over a trivial matter and shot and killed him. This was the venom of his life. No law had punished Fernando.

As he lay against his pillow, his hand trembling, he coughed and moaned. He hated inactivity; he hated being alone; he hated his room; lifting a small copper bell from the bed table, he clanged it erratically. As his hand quivered more violently, he plunged it under the sheet and pinned it down.

"Did you ring, Don Fernando?"

"Of course I rang. Bring me a cigarette and light it, Chavela."

"But Dr. Velasco asked me not to ... you..."

"Get a cigarette and be quick about it! Don't tell me what Dr. Velasco said, and don't run to him with your prattles."

"Sí, Don Fernando," she said, cringing a little.

As he waited for the cigarette (she had to go to the kitchen for a light), he eyed the grilled window. The bronze bars had a chunk of landscape wedged between them: a strap of corn land with giant chirimoya trees beyond. The chirimoyas had green limbs, and their mat of branches formed an umbrella cap of foliage. Don Fernando's sight was weak and branches did not exist for him. The umbrella seemed to float in mid-air. The effect annoyed him. He clanged his bell.

Chavela, a fat Tarascan peasant in her twenties, hurried back, a cigarette in one hand and a charcoal ember in the other. Pincher-wise she gripped the glowing ember between splints of wood, tongs she had improvised.

"Light my cigarette, you fool, before the charcoal falls on the bed! Did you have to bring it here? Don't you ever think for yourself?"

Chavela's broad chocolate face looked troubled; her big steady hands seemed to lift on strings as she brought the ember to the tip of her cigarette and puffed violently, close to Fernando's bed. Smoke corkscrewed from her nose and mouth, and she frowned and coughed, and then grinned. Carefully, she placed the cigarette between his lips.

"There," she said. For a second, her eyes narrowed; she turned away, repelled, and as she turned, the ember dropped alongside the bed.

"You could have burned me!" wailed Fernando. "Where's Angelina? ... get her!"

"She's outdoors, playing with the children."

"Playing with the children: doesn't she do anything else? Doesn't anybody do anything here?"

A heavy tread outside Fernando's room made Chavela glance toward the door; a spur dragged its wheel over tiles; it was Jorge Farias, the corn-production manager, a hungry-looking man, half Spanish, half Tarascan. He removed his wide-brimmed straw hat as he halted in the bedroom doorway; the rough brim scraped across his trousers.

"Farias wants to see you," said Chavela, and went out.

"May I come in?" asked Farias.

Don Fernando motioned him inside with childish gesture. As Farias entered, the old man spat on the floor.

Farias was dressed in soiled brown trousers and a white shirt designed like a four-pocketed jacket, he had on black riding boots spurred with star-shaped rowels, polished from use. He stood stiffly erect. He disliked the old man. Nearly fifty, he felt that his years of service, doled out to the Clarín, had been largely wasted; yet he liked his job and was proud of any help he could render his own people whenever Fernando's vigilance slackened.

"Can't you bear to look at me?" said Fernando.

"I'm at your service," said Farias.

"Sit down ... sit down!"

The spurs dragged. The chair by the window squeaked. Farias supposed he would be told to check the crops along the boundary line of the Santa Cruz del Valle hacienda, where it adjoined Petaca. He dreaded the journey through the mountains, but remembered he could take his son along, unless the Clarín had another job for Luis. But the Clarín's mind was slipping. Last week, he had ordered Felipe locked in the pillory; Felipe had not been guilty of stealing; it had been Carlos Vasconcales who had robbed the corn bins; nothing Farias could say had altered the Clarín's decision. Farias studied a crack in the red tiles; the crack wandered like a river toward the old man's bed. Farias found himself staring at Don Fernando. Cigarette smoke hooded his face--a falcon's hood of gray.

"I want you to leave here early tomorrow. Check the crops along Santa Cruz del Valle. Go armed."

"Yes, sir."

"There's something else. Check the stone fences along our property; take time to fix them if they're down; we can't have cattle foraging on our corn. Understand?"

"Yes, sir. I'll check thoroughly. Anything else?"

"Expect trouble.... You may go."

Fernando attempted to see Farias walk to the door, but his eyes had shifted out of focus; he saw a brownish blur; he shook himself and waited. The click of spurs faded. He raised his cigarette and inhaled deeply. Slowly, his sight cleared. The window and its barred landscape returned. He welcomed the sight now, thinking of death with a throb of panic: death would remove all landscapes, however blurred. His shaky hand carried the cigarette to his mouth and then let it fall. He slept.

He dreamed of a fracas over the impounding of a stream on the lower slope of the volcano; that quarrel had taken place thirty or more years ago; yet now, in the dream, the angry voices of workers rose; his _administrador_ drew a revolver; a peasant yanked away the gun....

Waking, Fernando clattered his copper bell, and this time his son appeared.

"Yes, Father," said Raul, near the bed.

"A drink of water."

"Yes."

Raul poured a glass of water from a bed-table water bottle; a great green fly buzzed about the mouth of the bottle; his father reached for the glass; the hand shook and drops spilled.

The room had been papered in egg-white paper with brown aviaries triangled on it; from every aviary a flock of birds--all resembling swallows--cascaded. A black wooden wardrobe that weighed half a ton filled one wall. Its double doors, sides, and corners were ornamented with carved eagles and brass gewgaws. Some of the eagles had conch-shell eyes. The eyes peered into a full-length mirror, framed in carved wood. Above a washstand hung a Swiss etching of the Matterhorn, a sketchy rendering. Fernando's bed was four-posted and canopied with a dingy white cloth.

Raul glimpsed himself in the mirror as he held his father's glass, and the reflection startled him. Catching the resemblance, he set down the glass with a jerk and began to walk out of the room.

"Raul," said his father.

"What is it, Father?" said Raul, compelling himself to speak politely.

"I sent Farias to check the corn fences."

"He'll check them carefully," said Raul.

"Will Velasco come this afternoon?"

"He'll come unless he has a sick person to take care of."

"I feel bad. I feel as if ... Raul, it's bad."

"But you've felt that way before."

"Yes, I have. Still, I feel...." He said no more.

"Velasco usually comes about seven."

"Very well," said Fernando.

Raul waited, and as he waited, standing in the door, his father dozed. He called Chavela and instructed her to check from time to time. Stepping into the patio, he paused to take in the warm sun; he felt more like himself as he assimilated the light and air, heard laughter in the kitchen, and listened to the twittering and jabbering of parrots, thrushes and doves in their wall cages, cages that decorated all sides of the patio. A stone fountain centered the patio. Many years ago, the pink stones had been brought by oxcart from a prehistoric pyramid in Sector 9. Carved snakes wound from stone block to stone block, to vanish, with reptilian grace, over the rim. Raul sat on the curb, under the cypress. A dragonfly rode a lily pad. Where bougainvillaea climbed the wall a white butterfly, as big as a woman's cupped hands, descended: it seemed to be coming down an aerial stairway a step at a time. Raul shut his eyes, wanting to forget his problems, the ugly face of his father, the threat of dissolving traditions.

Presently, he went to the stable where Chico stood, brushed and saddled, tail switching. Manuel was polishing the cantle, chatting with other men; hens and roosters scratched in the floor straw; the air boomed with flies.

"The sacks are on," said Manuel, punching a corn sack behind Chico's saddle.

"Let's go, then," said Raul. "Are you ready?"

"I'm all set," said Manuel.

The palomino's beauty was obvious in many ways: bone structure, slant of ears, line of hocks, texture of mane and tail. Chico swung his head to watch Raul mount; his teeth ground his bit slightly. Lagoon and volcano came alive as the men rode side by side, Manuel on an Arabian bay. Each rider had a western saddle ornamented with silver, tasseled with red. They left the hacienda by the main road, lined on both sides with eucalyptus trees, four and five feet in diameter and fifty to sixty feet tall. The fragrant foliage sweetened the air; birds sang; dust puffs fitted like leggings around the horse's hoofs. Manuel's Arabian carried the heaviest sack of corn, but did not seem to mind. Raul packed a revolver in a new holster. Manuel had two pistols slung on a full cartridge belt. Both were dressed in white and wore straw hats with quail feathers under the bands.

Again volcano and lagoon swung with the riders; at a curve in the road, with the shore line close, ducks swam across the volcano's reflection. The double line of eucalyptus rambled on, but at the end of the lane, where a road intersected, they spread into a grove. Close to the grove, a white wooden cross pegged a hill. A tall man was looping dried marigold strands on an arm of the cross, his back toward Raul and Manuel. When he heard the horses, he faced about, his face luxuriously bearded with curly white hair. Picking up his hat out of the weeds, he walked toward the road.

"It's Alberto, the musician," said Raul, pleased.

"Ah, so it is. I hear he's been very sick," said Manuel.

"Good morning," said Alberto, smiling, bowing a little, big hat dangling in front of his stomach, gripped by both hands. His immaculate whites must have been ironed that morning.

"Good morning, Alberto," said Raul. "Sorry to hear you've been sick. I didn't know. How are you feeling?"

"Ai, patrón, I feel better, thank God. My legs troubled me. I'm old ... it is nothing. It will pass."

"When are you coming again to play for us?"

"Soon--God willing."

"Here's something for you."

Alberto limped close to Chico and patted his mane. The horse shied and blew through his nose, clicking his bit.

"Steady now, Chico," Raul said, and handed a few coins to Alberto. The old man accepted the money graciously, jingling it before pocketing it. For Raul, there was Christ in Alberto's face, the Christ of his own hacienda, of many haciendas. A few thorns, he thought, a few drops of blood ... He remembered Alberto at a fiesta years before: a drunk had struck him in the mouth. Alberto had toppled. Yet he had not complained. The jingle of coins in the open air, the cross on the hill, made Raul taste betrayal--he was offering the vinegar sop to his people. He hadn't the guts to free them! He jerked Chico's bit angrily, the horse reared, and Raul went on down the road.

Disturbed, Manuel eyed his friend doubtfully as they jogged along. Huts lay around another bend, and they rode slowly, over badly placed cobbles. The area was semi-arid, the soil rocky and alkaline. A few stone huts pimpled the ground among maguey and tangles of prickly pear and candelabra. Each hut resembled a cairn topped by a straw wig. The unmortared walls were made of lava, rough, porous, grayish-lavender. Big and suckling pigs slumped in front of a wooden watering trough that had a leak at one end; chickens fed here and there; dogs yapped at the horsemen.

Raul dismounted in front of a doorless hut, and began to pull off his corn sack, tugging at the leather thongs and henequen cords. A deep voice said, "Bueno," and Raul looked into the face of Salvador, the head man of the hutment, a three-hundred-pound fellow, with a paunch, a stevedore's shoulders, grinning jowl and swooping mustache.

"Let me take the sack, patrón."

"I heard you had no corn here," Raul said, backing away.

"No corn for three days."

"You should have come to me."

"Sometimes it's better to wait. We have our chickens and pigs. We're not starving."

"You can't make tortillas out of chickens and pigs," said Raul.

Salvador laughed soundlessly, and the upper part of his body shook. He untied the corn sack and shouldered its weight easily. Barefooted, standing there, legs spread, one hand balancing the burlap, he faced Raul, the sun streaming over his whites.

"Will you go inside and wait for me?" Salvador asked.

"I want to talk to you," said Raul.

He entered the low hut and sat on the packed earth floor and took a cigarette paper from his pocket. Presently, Salvador came in and sat against the wall opposite Raul, across the hut. Their feet almost touched. A broken candle lay on a termite-riddled chest that had been patched with a triangle of pine from which dangled a rusty padlock. Clothes and a folded hammock hung on pegs. There were no other furnishings. Outside, women gabbled over the corn sacks and children dashed about crying: "We've got corn.... Come, see the corn!"

Salvador fished out paper and tobacco and paper and tobacco became a cigarette with magical dexterity. The two smoked silently. They had met in this hut quite a few times through the years. Last September they had weathered a hurricane's tail behind these walls. As Raul smoked, he kept seeing the musician's face and sensing his own obligations.

"I want you to move to the house in a few days," Raul said. "I need your help, Salvador. I want you to turn out several carts; that means wheels, frames, and yokes."

"But Don Fernando doesn't want them," said Salvador, and his lip pulled away from his cigarette with a scrap of paper clinging to it. What was Don Raul thinking? What kind of quarrel would come of this?

"You do the job for me. I'm not waiting any longer. I've made up my mind to take over Petaca. We can't go on waiting and waiting. My father's day is over."

Raul felt his voice was trembling, and tried to distract himself with the ash of his cigarette.

"There will be a lot of trouble," said Salvador, skeptical of such a decision. "People will take sides. We'll have our hands full."

"Are you afraid?" scoffed Raul.

"Of course not, patrón."

"Our people are hungry and sick," said Raul, staring at a stone embedded in the wall.

"I'll do my part," said Salvador humbly, picking the shred of paper from his lip. "I know that we need new carts, that carts need repairing.... There's a lot that needs doing."

"When you come to the house, bring Teresa. She can help us."

"I'm glad to move, but I must continue to look after these people, too. They're my friends." A hunch of his shoulder indicated those who lived in the surrounding huts.

"You can do both jobs," said Raul, and glanced at Salvador confidently.

As Raul smoked, tasting the cigarette, liking the cool, rocky interior, a leghorn hen scratched, found a grub and beaked it in the sunlight.

Raul felt easier in his mind. The new responsibility was a challenge; he had no doubt as to his administrative ability. Back against the rocks, he smoked in silence. He was on the side of freedom.

As they headed for the hacienda house, Manuel rode in front.

Raul called him: "Ride beside me, Manuel."

Manuel checked his horse and gave his cartridge belt a yank.

A buzzard circled above them.

"I've made up my mind," Raul said, and his face brightened. "I've told Salvador that I will manage the hacienda from now on."

Manuel's fingers tightened with pleasure on the rein, his eyes became slits, and a slow grin began. He glanced at Raul and nodded, and then glanced away.

"I told Salvador to move to Petaca and make us new carts and repair old ones. We must begin to improve things."