handsome in spite of his dusky mestizo hide, his face hard but smooth-featured, his eyes black as open graves and untouched by his mustached smile. Don Cesar stared hard into those eyes and waited for the blast to end his misery. But then the brute laughed and took the gun from his head.
You’re not afraid, the man said. You’re only miserable. You
The man put a hand on Don Cesar’s shoulder and leaned close to him in the fashion of a commiserating intimate. They tell me you were a comandante of rurales, patron. Is that how your leg came to be maimed? Ay, what a hard life that must have been, the rurales. Tell me, patron, has life been
Some among the mob of onlooking peons snickered and some laughed outright and some called out to El Carnicero to shoot the gachupin son of a bitch. They who an hour before would have cowered in Don Cesar’s presence, who would have obeyed his every command without hesitation and were ever in fear of displeasing him, they now laughed at him oh so bravely. How they had hastened to show their whip and branding scars—as if they hadn’t deserved them!—to this murderer, this notorious executioner and infamous right hand of Pancho Villa the bandit, Villa the mad dog, the king of all half-caste whoresons. Yet some few of the spectators wept in their witness of Don Cesar’s ordeal.
Yes, you have suffered much, patron, El Carnicero said, holstering the revolver. He slid his hand behind Don Cesar’s neck and held him gently and smiled at him. Then the hand clamped tight and Don Cesar saw but an instant’s gleam of the knife before all in a single motion its point pierced the corner of his eye and the blade slid around the curve of the socket to core the eyeball from its mooring.
Don Cesar screamed and clapped a hand to the emptied socket and flexed into a half-crouch of agony, biting his lip hard against further outcry. His remaining eye saw blood pocking the dust at his feet and staining his boots. Some in the mob laughed, some cried out, some blessed themselves and turned away.
El Carnicero grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up to face him. He had the bloody eye in his palm and held it for Don Cesar to see. This thing, the man said, bobbing his palm as if assaying the worth of what it contained, has always been blind to justice, to the truth. He dropped the eye to the ground and made Don Cesar look down at it and then ground it under his bootheel.
Maybe the other eye will now serve you better, El Carnicero said. If it does not, I will come back and remove it too.
He told the mob not to kill Don Cesar, that killing would be too swift a punishment and kinder than he deserved. Then he wished Don Cesar a long remaining life full of unpleasant memories and rode away with his gang of devils.
Still more thieves and scavengers fell upon the hacienda over the following years. Sometimes they came almost on each other’s heels, sometimes there were no raiders for months, but always they had come, pack after pack, each finding less remaining to pillage on Las Cadenas. But each had heard the story of how the patron—the former rurales comandante—had come to wear the eyepatch. They had all heard of El Carnicero and knew better than to kill a man he had deigned to leave alive. What if the Butcher should come back to pleasure himself further with this gachupin once more and learn that someone had killed him? What if he should learn who had done it?
And so Don Cesar lived and endured. It might be that the man who cut out his eye never knew that he had protected the patron of Las Cadenas from other rebel bands, or that he had given Don Cesar a reason to live. Don Cesar withstood the remaining years of the Revolution in anticipation of the deaths of his tormentors—and of rebuilding the hacienda as best he could, if for no other purpose than to show that it could not be destroyed by such rabble as his tormentors.
Two years after the loss of his eye, he received word of El Carnicero’s death. The man had drowned in a horseback crossing of a lake in northern Chihuahua. Don Cesar sang at the news, he did a little dance. But his celebrant joy was checked by the knowledge that Pancho Villa—the man who had unloosed El Carnicero on Mexican civilization—was yet alive. And the bastard managed to stay alive all through the Revolution. In 1920, when the government made its separate peace with Villa and granted him a hacienda, Don Cesar’s rage was apoplectic. Then three years later came the news of Villa’s assassination by persons unknown—and Don Cesar declared a three-day fiesta to commemorate the grand occasion.
Every year since then, he had made an annual hundred-mile trip to Hidalgo de Parral, the town where Villa had been killed and was buried, and there Don Cesar had pissed on the monster’s grave. Three years after Villa’s death, unknown persons broke into his tomb and made away with his head, and Don Cesar had been torn in his emotions—elated by the desecration to Villa’s remains, but dismayed not to have thought to commit the act himself. He fancied he would have used the skull as a dish to feed his dog. The headless cadaver had been reburied and the grave fortified, but even a concrete grave can be pissed upon, and so Don Cesar continued to make his yearly visits to Parral.
The Revolution had reduced the breadth of his patronage and robbed the estate of an opulence it would never recover—not to speak of the caches of money the bastards had rooted out. Yet the hacienda had survived. Unlike his father’s estate, whose ownership had been usurped by a decree of the revolutionary government, Las Cadenas remained Don Cesar’s property by prevailing legal title. The casa grande stood intact, and most of its outbuildings. Nor had all of Don Cesar’s hidden strongboxes been discovered.
For all their plundering, the savages had been unable to thieve the beauty of the land nor drive away all of the hacienda’s peon population, who after all had nowhere else to go. Even many of those who had fled the estate during the years of greatest violence had begun to come back to Las Cadenas’ guardian walls, their hats in their hands, to ask Don Cesar if they might serve him as before. And he had taken them back. And if some among them had returned with errant notions that the strict discipline of Las Cadenas had been ameliorated by the riot called the Revolution, well, his whips and branding irons were at hand to prove them wrong, and he again made routine use of those instruments of moral and political instruction. Occasionally he invented punishment on the moment, as when he unleashed one of his hunting dogs on a twelve-year-old boy who had flung a pebble at the beast for barking at him. The boy’s face was horribly disfigured and his left arm forever crippled, and well into his adulthood mothers would point him out to their children as an example of the consequence of transgression against Don Cesar, or El Comandante, as he was commonly known among the peons.
His surviving gold and silver amounted to a fraction of his former wealth but it was sumptuous in comparison with what remained to so many of his caste. Many had seen their great houses reduced to rubble, their estates razed to charred earth. Many had lost every peso. Many had lost their lives. With his remnant money Don Cesar was able to restore Las Cadenas to a semblance of its former splendor. He repaired the casa grande, re-tiled its roofs, re-landscaped its patios, refurbished its rooms. He put his peons to work on the estate’s damaged earth until portions of the fields again began to produce maize. He acquired some few horses of passable worth and the herd slowly grew to respectable size.
But without his family to inhabit it, the casa grande, for all its revived beauty, was like an empty husk, and his sense of isolation increased over the years. His sleep was ever fitful, visited nightly by frightful dreams. He was consumed by horrid spells of melancholy. His loneliness swelled to smothering size. Vaguely insidious yearnings stirred in him like a nest of vipers. He of course had his pick of the prettiest mestizo girls on the estate, but their gratifications were strictly of the flesh and left him in progressively greater despond for reasons he could not name. His heart itself felt like a house abandoned, a dwelling for none but creatures of the dark.
And then one day of the preceding summer, when he was on the Gulf Coast on business, he caught sight of the girl for the first time.
He saw her as she dashed across the beach road, the blue skirt of her school uniform swirling around her brown legs. He could not take his eyes off her as she strode down the streets of the city, a straw bag over her shoulder, her black hair wet from her swim and swinging to her hips. Men turned and stared as she passed them by.
Don Cesar directed his driver to follow her. She made her way deep into an increasingly squalid neighborhood of stinks and strident voices and at last entered a courtyard containing two tiers of hovels. She vanished through the doorway of one on the lower floor.
He ordered his men to make discreet but thorough inquiries. By the following evening he knew that she was sixteen years old and lived in that dismal place with her mother and father and was their only surviving child. The
