Part 5

"I'll give it to her."

"She wouldn't take the laudanum," Raul said.

"Bring the morphine," said Fernando.

Raul's shoes rubbed slickly on the tiled floor.

"A spoon..."

"Here's a spoon."

"Caterina--a little dose, for Grandpa?"

"Yes."

"Raul, lift her head."

"Take it, child.... You'll be all right."

"Yes ... Gran'pa."

The face trusted him. She swallowed the medicine and sank back on the pillows.

"Rest now and we'll go to the castle together and I'll tell you how I found a tiny statue of the Huastecas. You haven't heard that story.... We were riding horseback through a barranca in San Luis Potosi; men had been digging a ditch for irrigation...."

Most of his life he had lacked the power of affection, except with Caterina. He bowed his head; he could say no more; he felt beaten, dried, useless. Life would have been all right had he been able to reach outside himself. Carry me downstairs; put me to bed. The fool. The old, ugly fool. Tired. Carry me.

When Don Fernando was taken away, Angelina began her vigil, she and the nun. She heard workers sawing the eucalyptus, observed the moon's climb, felt the nip of the night air, dozed fitfully in her easy chair. Awake, she prayed for her girl, a faithless prayer, since she believed Caterina fatally ill; she had seen too many children pass away with fever and dysentery to have any illusions. Doll faces--looming through a bad dream--wept and pled for Caterina. Chapel music sounded ... there was no God, not really ... only wandering....

The nun stretched on a cot and snored, her responsibility forgotten. Toward dawn, the birds began, high-flying parrots and then the garden orioles. The caged birds in the patio answered, and a strange bird, in the grove behind the house, scraped tin note against tin note.

Vicente, sleepy eyed, yawning, padded in, barefooted. He stood silently by his sister's bedside. Until now, he had shunned her room unless she asked for him. Ever since Grandpa had been confined to his bed, Vicente had feared death, and, alarmed by Caterina's white face, her stillness, he had kept away. After a glance he stole downstairs, into the kitchen, hungry, cold, uneasy.

The chapel bell clanged its stiff bell for Mass and, after Mass, Gabriel went to sit beside Caterina. She brightened, finding him there, wiping his glasses, smiling.

"Were you here all night?"

"No, I just came in."

"I thought I saw you all night ... holding a candle ... for me."

"No, my angel, that was your mother who was with you."

"I don't remember her."

"You were sleeping."

"I want to get better."

"You are better. I can see you're better today," he lied.

"Has Doctor come?"

"He'll come shortly, with new medicines. Let me call Carmela. It's time for you to eat. Then I'll come back and read to you."

"I'm not hungry."

He hoped food might strengthen her; her anguish filled him with pity and love. Such a sweet child. The small face had darkness working from within--around the eyes, inside them; their own personal magic had dimmed. Her lips moved stiffly.

What was it his mother had said? When the sight darkens, the shadow of the cross is beckoning. He shook his head, sorely troubled. His fingers drummed on his knees. He wished Dr. Velasco could arrive, by some miracle, before nightfall.

Gabriel got up, determined to help. "Carmela, Carmela," he called from the window.

"Yes."

"Can you bring the child something to eat? I think she should have something."

"Right away, Padre. I'll heat something, some atole. I'll be right along."

Sitting on the foot of her bed, he began to talk to her:

"Delgado's cleaning the pool.... You should see the jacaranda blossoms scattered on the water, flowers and leaves too. Did you hear about the eucalyptus? It blew down, the giant one beside the corral. They had to saw it into sections and drag off the pieces with oxen...." He found it difficult to concentrate on what he was saying. Perplexed by the gravity of her illness, he tried to ransack his brain for some old remedy. Carmela came with a tray and he rose and said good morning to her.

By coaxing, they got Caterina to eat some thin _atole_; but then, in a little while, she vomited, and knotted under the covers, shivering with anguish.

By the time Dr. Velasco arrived, pounding in on a weary, sweaty horse, she had been dead several hours.

The doctor slapped his forehead and turned away, his black kit on the desk, the new medicines bulging in his coat pocket. Only the nun was there, in the darkened living room, to see his despair. For a long time they sat there together, saying little.

While the nun fussed with Caterina's hair, Raul sat in the easy chair and listened to Angelina sob, her sobbing padded by the thick stone walls of her room and heavy doors. Something in her had snapped: she said it was the end: she meant, he thought, that she would never see Caterina again: as for him, he felt he would find his child someday; and yet he asked the question: Where? Just now she would not hopscotch in the patio, squeeze his hand during Mass, fill his pipe, dash to meet him after a full day in the hacienda campo, giggle at supper. Sitting stiffly, watching Carmela arrange Caterina's hair, he tried to deny weariness. He felt as if he had ridden horseback for days. He prayed to St. Catherine, remembering how lovingly they had christened the child in her honor.

Suddenly his wife ceased sobbing; the nun left the room; a door closed; the ramrod of silence jabbed him. Death was silence. Sitting erect, he observed a cinch strap of blackbirds over the stable roof where the eucalyptus had crashed. Strange they flew silently. Blackbirds were _hacendado_ birds: he had often thought of them that way: they were the black plunderers. Rapacious, yet not so rapacious as the owl.

Without glancing at Caterina, he walked out, walked down the stairs blindly, asking himself whether he had attended to civilities, telegrams to be sent from the Colima office, a notice for the Colima paper, the casket, the grave prepared. His hand on the wrought-iron railing, he sensed his own mortality....

What was life for?

6

The burial was to take place before sunset.

During the afternoon, the chapel bell had tolled intermittently and alarmed pigeons had flown about. Even the livestock had become restless. Small boys, Caterina's friends, had yanked the bell rope, their ragged shirts and trousers flapping dismally.

Manuel and Salvador carried the casket out of the chapel, following a path through the grove. The flowers on the box caught at branches and twigs, falling, littering the route. Bougainvillaea, cup-of-gold, roses, lilies, jacaranda blossoms that had survived the wind, rain and hail. As the men put the casket down by the grave, a hummingbird dived and clicked at the flowers; the men stared sadly; the ebony rapier poked; the red-green-blue feathers throbbed; then a second and third hummingbird whisked the blossoms.

At the morning chapel service, the ceremony had been touching because Vicente had raced from the room, sobbing. Gabriel had not said the right words: his mind had turned back to Italy and his reminiscences of the death of a childhood friend had indicated more than he had intended of the transience of life, the beauty of childhood. Peasants had crowded the chapel: men in white, women with blue _rebozos_ over pink and white blouses and skirts, half clad children.

Someone had heaped bougainvillaea over the altar and on top the mango-shaped glass dome that protected the jeweled virgin of Petaca. A wreath of pink and white carnations had leaned against the casket. Candles had burned on the altar and at the ends of the coffin. The virgin's jewels, her rubies and emeralds, gleamed.

Lucienne von Humboldt had come first. From her hacienda, Palma Sola, by the ocean, she had driven to Petaca in her blue and yellow victoria, scarred and bitten by sea air. The black she wore made her seem older than twenty-six, and accentuated her auburn hair and the Germanic character of her face. Her hazel eyes, glossy thick hair, and rose-colored skin impressed everyone.

Baroness Radziwill and her big family had arrived next, a wreath of evergreen on the carriage top. She had placed a gold plated candleholder for Caterina and lit it herself. A beautiful woman in her sixties, with gray hair and black eyes, she had a motherly manner with everybody.

Count de Selva had come with his fat wife and three sons. As workers gathered in the forecourt, afoot and horseback, the Count had remained in his carriage. His servant had cleaned off the mud-spattered coat of arms on the doors and had polished the blue running boards and fenders. An obese, asthmatic man, de Selva preferred to wait until the chapel ceremony began before showing himself; he had come only out of respect for the Medina family, scarcely remembering Caterina.

Lucienne removed a ring from her handbag and buried it among the flowers on top of the casket, Manuel and Salvador waiting in the shade of a palm tree. She nodded to them and said:

"I put it in there. She wanted to ... I had promised it to her." She did not care whether they understood her.

She wondered if anyone realized the courage it had taken to come here. Was Angelina defiant? Was she terribly bitter? Her face, so forlorn, had filled her with compassion. She should never have come to Petaca ... her city friends meant so much to her.

Neither man spoke; it was not for them to comment. Manuel admired Lucienne for her love of Raul and her affection for Caterina, and he appreciated the hundreds of kindnesses she had shown him through the years. They had been friends since her girlhood. Her beauty filled him with pleasure. Noticing her black dress, he recalled her recent return from Europe, the hatboxes, suitcases full of gowns and high-heeled shoes ... things she had forgotten for her garden. Anyone who appreciated plants and flowers as much as she appreciated them had a place in his heart.

Raul found Lucienne by Caterina's grave, and her black clothes startled him. They shook hands, their eyes lowered; he could not bring himself to look at her; he had merely glimpsed her at the chapel service.

"I'm sorry you lost her, Raul," she said.

"A lovely girl," he said, as if he had memorized the words.

"Such a dear child. I loved her."

"She wants you to have Mona," he said.

"Mona, her little dog?" she asked, hoping that a few words, any words, might lessen his strain. Such a sad, dark face.

Palm fronds laddered the space behind her.

"You taught her to collect plants and butterflies."

"Did I?"

"Now God has taken her...."

"I wish I thought so, Raul."

"Don't say that," he objected.

"You know how I feel, you know what I believe. I can't lie, even at this time." The gentleness of her speech took away its offense. "I wish I could believe in immortality. It would be my comfort too, you know. I need that comfort."

Raul fingered his pipe in his pocket. It was not often he resented Lucienne's Teutonic independence, her foreignness, her atheism. Glancing beyond her, he felt the sorrow of his friend Manuel, expressed in his face, stooped shoulders, and bowed head. He looked at the raw burial place, the palms with their tattered greens and browns, fronds over the headstones and markers in this family plot. A mound of vines hid his grandfather's stone, and the same vines in exuberance scrambled toward the newly upturned earth that would cover Caterina. Raul determined to have the cemetery cleaned and properly tended: by the end of the week the graves should be cleared and reornamented with shells.

Men were approaching, carrying Don Fernando, who had refused to attend chapel service but who had demanded to be brought to the grave. The men stumbled over roots; Fernando cried out; lizards fled under vines; birds soared away.

The Radziwills and de Selvas walked together and Father Gabriel and Angelina followed; then the peasants, like white ants, sifted through the grove. Vicente, ashamed of himself, had hidden in the stable.

They were a courageous-looking lot. The sunburned _hacendados_ had the bodies of people who live outdoors, for even the asthmatic Count had been a stockman. The powdered women stood out among the peasants who needed only a feather or two to put them back a thousand years. Fine faces, buck faces, pretty girls, hags with tortilla cheeks, all gazed with sympathy at the grave of the child.

A bright cloud hung over the group, its shadow twisting toward the slope of the volcano. Shadows flecked the grove, the bent heads, the casket and its wilting flowers; other shadows fled across fields where oxen grazed. Gabriel said a few words and prayed and Angelina wept, clinging to Raul's arm, hating his black, hating Lucienne. She longed to return to her room and hide her grief, to be away from Lucienne's auburn hair, her placid face. Had she never known tragedy? Why had she come? Not out of respect! No, no ... to see Raul, to bribe him away, to laugh at her sorrow ... let me go, Raul. I'll go back alone!

Slowly, everyone began to leave the grove.

Raul thought himself the only one left, and then he saw his father in his chair among the trees. A great iguana peered at him from a palm immediately behind: its iridescent greenish head and dark eyes faced the ground, the tongue licked out. Click, click, ssh, ssh, said the blackbirds.

"Shall I call the men to carry you?" asked Raul.

"No," growled Fernando. "I told them to leave me here."

A flock of parrots fanned through the wood, loros, with red on their shoulders, yellow daubs on their beaks.

"My wife's gravestone is the parrots' roosting place," said Fernando. "She gave up her fight too soon. They'll not dump their excrement on my grave any sooner than I can help it."

Raul kicked at a scrap of palm and admired his courage.

"Death is for fools," the old man spluttered.

"Then we're all due to be fools," Raul said.

"Light a cigarette for me."

Raul's wax taper flared and dropped among the fronds and and grass.

"Caterina was no fool," Fernando retracted. "But you shouldn't have buried her in her scarlet dress."

"What would you have liked?"

"That doesn't matter."

"Your men have come to carry you."

"Let them wait. I came to sit and think. I'm old enough to sit and think. Over there is Pepe. He called himself 'The Tiger.' Under that crooked palm is Mama; I was glad to see her go because she never had a well day. There's Papa--the man I murdered. He'll be glad to see me go." The old man's voice was blown by the wind. "I counted them one day last year ... quite a lot of them buried there. The jungle has us under its vines and lianas and rot...."

"I'll have this place cleaned next week."

Fernando guffawed.

"You'll have it cleaned. What for? Can you keep back the jungle? Are you thinking of Caterina? The jungle has her already. This palmera stretches all the way to the Pacific. You can't stop it, boy.... Neither can you change the hacienda."

"I can try."

"I'll stop you whenever I can. I've decided to have a special chair constructed. In my chair I can look after the hacienda."

"No, Father. Your day is past. It's my job!"

Fernando spat. "You and your radical ways. God, you can't run this place!"

"Why not?"

"Everyone will laugh at you."

In the tree behind Fernando, the iguana decided to climb higher, its head waggling, tongue forking.

"That's the least of my worries. I'm thinking about the people and their chance to live as men ought to live."

"They're not men," said Fernando, coughing over his cigarette.

"They've been called animals, many things. I think they're men."

"You'll ruin Petaca ... I could summon a lawyer and preserve my control. I suppose you could declare me physically or mentally incompetent. It would be touch and go, maybe one bribe against another. I'm not that kind of fool. We'd lose Petaca. I'm not that far gone."

"The courts are no place for us," said Raul, knowing how easy it would be to expose the Medina crime; he began to walk away, thinking of Caterina, disliking the conversation, the grizzled face of his father.

"I hadn't finished speaking," said Fernando.

"I don't want to listen."

"I've talked to Pedro."

"I told him he had to go."

"He'll stay," the old man croaked.

"Let's keep sane," said Raul, curbing his emotions, shutting down on his voice. "You must accept my way; hostility will finish Petaca. We have to settle things between us. It's time I had the administration. You've had your day. There never has been any mutual planning, so now I have to work out the problems alone."

"I tell you, you'll ruin Petaca!" Fernando exclaimed; his cigarette had died out, but he still held the stub between his fingers.

Parrots jabbered and a few of them roosted in the iguana tree.

"Get me out of here, before the parrots use me for a headstone!"

"I wish we could work together."

"That's sentiment--not sense. I've never wanted to work with you or anyone. In Europe, you picked up ideas. Hell, I know what men are. I know what life is!" He shouted for the men who had been lugging him; his voice broke and became that of an old woman. "Get me out of here," he quavered.

Raul followed a palmera path that wandered toward the ocean. He thought: I won't forget that place with the old man's talk squirming among the graves. Tomorrow I'll go back and see whether her grave has been taken care of ... maybe I'd better go back later tonight....

From a hill, the hacienda resembled a small fort, disguised among garden and trees. The volcano blocked the horizon, dragging an ugly purple scar above the green valley and dark green lagoon. Where banana trees fanned into a screen, Raul sat down, overcome with grief. The banana leaves, shaking in the wind, chopped his thoughts to fragments: he saw the open grave, Caterina in her red dress, the chapel, and Vicente running away, Angelina crying: it would have been better to have put Caterina in a buggy and taken her to Colima, as sick as she was. How stupid to have become dependent on Velasco and Hernández.

What is wrong with people? he thought. He felt more and more confused. The shaking leaves irritated him; he felt shut in, dominated by the grove. Shortly, he rose and walked through the palmera, to find the spade sticking where the workmen had left it. It was dusk now and fireflies blinked yellow and green. One of the bugs flickered about him, as he began to shovel the dirt onto her coffin. Stars were brilliant ... fronds motionless now. The spade rasped. The box sounded hollow. Raul brushed away sweat. The smell of the fresh earth choked him and he leaned on the handle, remembering that she had dashed after fireflies, shouting, bottling them, sharing them with Vicente.

Salvador found Raul leaning on the spade and, without a word, took it and went on filling the grave.

"Let me have a cigarette paper, Don Raul," he said, as Raul started off.

"Of course," said Raul, and gave him paper and tobacco.

As Raul passed the corral, Chico neighed. Head over brick wall, he called and Raul thought of a night ride and then dismissed the idea. While he stroked the horse's head, Manuel joined him and they lit cigarettes: as the match flared, they studied one another, read one another's minds, a communication without words.

Raul inhaled deeply, and said:

"I know a sculptor in Guadalajara and I'll have him make a bronze figure for Caterina's grave. The next time I go to Guadalajara, I'll visit his studio. I want the figure of a young girl carrying flowers. Our family burial plot is as cheap and ugly as the fields. It doesn't have to be."

"Caterina deserves something good," Manuel said.

Raul patted Chico's nose and distended lip, and the horse bobbed his head, snuffling.

"I must go and be with Angelina now," Raul said. "I don't know where she is: is she in her room?"

"Father Gabriel's with her. In the living room."

"I'm glad of that. I'll join them."

He felt tempted to mention the owl's cry in the night: no, that would be unwise: peering at the sky, he imagined broad, dark wings headed for the lagoon: the bird would glide low, searching for a frog in the sedges, a snake, a toad ... a child.

7

Lying in the palmera, Raul wiped his handkerchief over his face. The August heat sopped matted fronds of trees, trickled down lianas, webbed ladders of foliage. A cooked iguana revolved on the bamboo spit in front of Raul. Manuel, squatting on his heels, turned the iguana over a tiny fire. Raul sat up and removed his revolver from its holster and began reloading, cursing the border fracas that had taken them so far from Petaca. As he shoved in a greasy bullet, the earth commenced to rock, trees shook, lianas bent.

The men gaped at one another. A growl drummed underneath them, drummed at the palmera, rattled rocks and seemed, somehow, part of both earth and sky. Raul felt the sand give underneath him and sprang up, revolver in hand. The palm next to him, a tree many years old, leaned over, and then the growl passed farther away and disappeared.

"That was a bad one," Manuel said.

"The volcano," said Raul.

Another shock reached them as they ate their iguana: the sand heaved, palms waved like flags; numbness hung in the air; the sun died out; birds cried as though in pain. A full-grown _tigre_ rushed past Manuel, crazed with fear. His plunge sent up a flock of birds that cackled insanely.

"Let's get where we can see the volcano," said Raul, stuffing his mouth.

"Listen," said Manuel.

A volcanic explosion sounded like air passing through a bamboo tube.

"I'll see about the horses," cried Manuel.

They were yanking at their ropes as Manuel raced toward them, whacking foliage aside, hoping he could get to them before they broke away. He tied them to a ceiba, where they had some sort of forage.

Another explosion told Raul the volcano had let loose; he planned to push through the palmera to the closest hill and take stock of the eruption. With his hunting knife, he sliced more iguana and, putting on his hat, lunged after Manuel. Rolling their eyes and snuffing, the horses dragged at their reins and kicked. Raul grabbed Chico, and handed Manuel a chunk of meat.

"We can eat as we ride," he said. "Let's make for the nearest hill. Maybe we can see what's happened."

As Raul mounted, yellow cup-shaped primavera flowers spattered his saddle, hat, and shoulders. The tree, loaded with blossoms, had been a landmark for the last few miles. Manuel swung onto his horse, took a mouthful of iguana, checked his rifle in its scabbard, and nodded to Raul.

Here no trail cut through and both horse and rider had to worm ahead, a slow, painful ride, Chico rebelling, fighting back at fronds and lianas. Parrots sputtered and he snuffed and threw his head. When he tried to plunge through bamboo, Manuel dismounted and swung his machete.

"We'll have to do it slow. You take my horse, Raul."

A great hive of maggots, a brown clot, in the arms of a red birch, broke as Manuel swung the knife. Sweat dripped from his face and arms. He stopped to peel off his shirt and knot it around his waist. His Negroid features, streaked with dust and pocked with leaf fragments, had whitened. He worked with big long sweeps of the machete, realizing haste was futile. His eyes became slits, and he called back at Raul:

"There ought to be a place to break through soon ... soon now."

"You ride, Manuel. I'll cut."

"No ... you ride," said Manuel, wheezing as he chopped.

"I wonder what happened at Petaca?" Raul said.

"Plenty."

Raul left his saddle and slashed with the bone-handled knife and a load of ants sprayed over him. He backed away, shouting:

"Next time, I'll look, and then cut."