breath, Diego got to his feet and stumbled forward, coughing and calling his mother. He found her beneath the large table in the great hall, with her batiste gown soaked in blood, but lucid and with open eyes. “Hide, son!” she ordered in a strong voice, and promptly fainted. Diego took her arms and with a superhuman effort, considering the broken ribs, tugged her to the fireplace. He managed to open the secret door that only he and Bernardo knew existed, and dragged her into the tunnel. He closed the false door from the other side and sat there in the dark with his mother’s head in his lap, whispering, “Mama, Mama,” and weeping and praying to God and the spirits of her tribe not to let her die.
Bernardo, too, was in bed when the pirates attacked. He slept in his mother’s room in the servants’ quarters at the opposite end of the hacienda. Their space was larger than the windowless cells of the other domestic workers because it was also used as the ironing room, a task that Ana never delegated. Alejandro de la Vega demanded that his tucked shirt fronts be perfect, and she took pride in ironing them personally. Aside from the narrow bed with its straw mattress, and a battered chest in which they kept their few belongings, the room was furnished with a long worktable and a metal container for the coals that heated the irons, along with a pair of enormous baskets of clean wash that Ana planned to iron the next day. The floor was dirt; a wool serape served as a door; light and air entered through two small windows. Bernardo had not been awakened by the yells of the pirates or by the shots on the far side of the house, only when Ana shook him. He thought the earth was quaking, as it had before, but his mother gave him no time to speculate; she grabbed his arm, swept him up with the strength of a tornado, and in one stride was across the room. With a brutal shove she stuffed him inside one of the large baskets. “Whatever happens, don’t move. You hear me?” Ana’s tone was so forbidding that it seemed to Bernardo that she was speaking to him with a hidden loathing. He had never seen her agitated. His mother’s sweet nature was legend; she was always quiet and content, even though she had few reasons to be happy. She devoted herself exclusively to the task of adoring her son and serving her patrones, in line with her humble existence and with no resentment in her heart. In that moment, however, the last she would ever share with Bernardo, she was hard as ice. She took a handful of clothing and covered the boy, pushing him down in the basket. From there, wrapped in the white shadows of the clothing, choked with terror and the smell of starch, Bernardo heard the cries, cursing, and loud laughter of the men who surged into the room where Ana was waiting with death already inscribed upon her forehead, ready to distract the men for as long it took to keep them from finding her son.
The pirates were in a rush, and one look around told them that there was nothing of value in that servant’s room. Maybe they would just have glanced in and turned away, but there stood that brown-skinned woman, arms akimbo, defying them with suicidal determination: round Indian face, midnight black mantle of hair, generous hips, and firm breasts. For a year and four months they had been roving the seas without the consolation of even looking at a woman. For an instant they thought they were seeing a mirage, like so many that had tormented them on the high seas, but then Ana’s sweet scent enveloped them and they forgot their hurry. They tore off the rough penitent’s gown that covered her body and threw themselves on her. Ana did not struggle.
She bore in dead silence everything they wanted to do to her. When she fell, her head was so close to Bernardo’s basket that he could count, one by one, his mother’s faint sighs eclipsed by the brutish panting of her assaulters.
At no moment did the boy move beneath the pile of clothes that covered him; there, paralyzed with horror, he lived the torture of his mother.
He was curled up in the basket, his mind a blank, sweating bile, shaken with nausea. After an eternity, he became aware of a deathly silence and the smell of smoke. He waited until he couldn’t wait any longer because he was choking, then quietly called Ana. No answer. He called a couple of times more; still nothing. Finally he dared peek out.
Clouds of smoke were billowing through the doorway, but as yet there was no fire. Numb from tension and immobility, Bernardo had to struggle to climb out of the basket. He saw his mother where the men had forced her to the floor, naked, her long black hair spread out like a fan on the ground and her neck slit from ear to ear. The boy sat down beside her and took her hand, calm, and silent. He would not speak again for many years.
That was how they found him, mute and stained with his mother’s blood, hours later when the pirates were already back at sea. The town of Pueblo de los Angeles was putting out fires and counting its dead. No one thought of going to see what had happened at the de la Vega hacienda until Padre Mendoza, struck by a premonition so vivid that he could not ignore it, went with half a dozen neophytes to take charge.
Flames had burned the furniture and licked some of the beams, but the house was sound, and by the time he arrived the fire was burning itself out. The assault left a balance of several wounded and five dead, including Ana, whom they found just as her murderers had left her.
“God help us!” Padre Mendoza exclaimed when he came upon that tragedy.
He covered Ana’s body with a blanket and picked Bernardo up in his strong arms. The child was petrified, his eyes staring and his face frozen in a spasm that locked his jaws. “Where are Regina and Diego?” the missionary asked, but Bernardo gave no sign of hearing. The priest left the boy in the hands of an Indian servant, who cuddled him in her lap, rocking him like a baby as she sang a mournful song in her native tongue, while Padre Mendoza went through the house, searching for the missing.
Time passed without change in the tunnel; because there was no daylight, it was impossible to judge time in that eternal darkness.
Diego could not tell what was going on in the house because he couldn’t hear sounds or smell the smoke of the fire. He waited without knowing what he was waiting for, while Regina slipped in and out of consciousness, drained. Inconsolable, fearing he would disturb his mother, the boy sat motionless despite the nearly unbearable prickling in his legs and the dagger like stab in his chest every time he drew a breath. From time to time he would be overcome by fatigue, but he would immediately awaken, sunk in darkness and dizzy with pain. He felt as if he were freezing, and several times he tried to flex his arms, but he would sink back into a hopeless languor and start to nod again, floating in a cottony fog. This semiconscious state lasted most of the day, until finally Regina moaned and moved. That startled him awake. Knowing that his mother was alive gave him new life; a wave of happiness swept over him, and he bent to cover her face with delirious kisses. With infinite care, Diego lifted her head, which had turned to marble, and lowered it gently to the ground. After several minutes of trying to move his legs, he was able to crawl off and look for the candles that he and Bernardo had stored in their ongoing quest for okahue. He heard his grandmother’s voice asking in her Indian tongue what the five essential virtues were, but the only one he could remember was courage.
Regina opened her eyes to the light of a candle, and found herself in a cave with her son. She didn’t have the strength to ask what had happened, or to console him with lies; she merely indicated that he should rip her gown and use it to bandage the wound in her chest. With trembling fingers, Diego did as she directed, and found that his mother had a deep knife wound below the collarbone. Not knowing what else to do, he simply waited.
“My life is draining away, Diego, you must go for help,” Regina murmured after a while.
The boy estimated that if he went through the caves to the beach, from there he could run for help without being seen, but it would take time.
On an impulse, he decided that it was worth the risk to peek through the door in the fireplace and see what the situation was in the house.
The opening was well disguised behind the high stack of logs in the fireplace and he could look out without being seen, even if someone was in the great room.
The first thing that greeted him when he cracked open the false door was a blast of smoke and the acrid odor of scorched wood. At first it drove him back, but then he realized that the smoke would hide him.
Silent as a cat, he slipped through the secret door and crouched behind the logs. The rug and several chairs were smoking, the oil of Saint Anthony was completely destroyed, and the walls and ceiling beams were blackened, but the flames had died down. There was an abnormal quiet in the house, and he assumed that no one was there, which gave him the courage to come out. Cautiously he felt his way along the walls, eyes tearing from the smoke, and, one by one, went through the rooms on the main floor. He had no idea what had happened, whether everyone was dead or whether they had escaped. The entry hall looked like the aftermath of a shipwreck, and he saw blood, but the bodies of the men he himself had seen fall early that morning were no longer there.
Confused by doubts, he thought he must be caught in a terrifying nightmare, one he would be awakened from by the sound of Ana’s affectionate voice calling him for breakfast. He continued exploring in the direction of the servants’ rooms, choked by the gray fog of the fire, which jumped out at him when he opened a door or turned a corner.
