Under the Skin

father was a street cleaner for the city and given to drink, the mother did seamstress work at home and was herself drunk every night. The couple frequently and violently quarreled, common behavior in that shabby barrio. They were the girl’s only living kin. She’d had an uncle, a fisherman, whom she had clearly favored over her parents, but he had drowned in the gulf the year before. Despite her family’s poverty, she was enrolled in an excellent Catholic academy, attending on a scholarship she had won at age twelve in a statewide essay contest. She was required to maintain superior grades in order to renew the scholarship from year to year, and so far she had done so, despite, as her school record phrased it, “unconventional attitudes,” a proclivity for asking “mischievous questions” of the faculty nuns, and a reputation for occasionally “prankish behavior.”

Don Cesar could not sleep that night but only lay in bed with the smell of the sea carrying into his hotel room and moonlight slanting through the open balcony doors. He was enraptured—feeling more alive than he had in more than two decades. A bat swooped into the room and circled it thrice and flew out again, and he, a lifelong disparager of all superstition, took it for an omen. At dawn he rang down for coffee and was sipping his second cup on the balcony when the edge of the sun broke red as blood at the far rim of the gulf. And he was decided.

He had first thought to buy her outright—to offer the parents a sum greater than they could conjure in their dreams, and he was certain they would greedily accept it. But then, on reflection, he was not so sure. One could not trust to the practicality of primitives, could not trust them to know what was best for themselves. Never whisper to the deaf or wink at the blind—an old adage and a wise one. They might in their stupidity reject his money and thus make the matter altogether more difficult. But even if they should accept the offer, only a fool would trust in brutes to honor their side of a bargain. The word of a brute was worthless. The rabble were slaves to their emotions, notorious for sentimental shifts of mind. The parents might sooner or later choose to create complications for him by way of protest to the authorities, a turn of events that would at the least oblige him to make an additional round of payoffs to a wider circle of hands. No! Despite his inclination to be fair, to pay a just price for what he desired, he knew it was folly to expect the girl’s parents to understand even the most fundamental notions of fairness and honor.

And so, later that day, after the girl was out of school and had taken her swim in the gulf and was making her way home through the rundown back streets, they drove up alongside her and one of Don Cesar’s men asked if she could give them directions to an address they were unable to find. As she stepped up to the Cadillac the man jumped out and clapped a hand on her mouth and pulled her into the backseat and the vehicle gunned away. In seconds the car was around the block and out of sight. Whoever might have witnessed the kidnapping could not have noted very much, the whole thing happened so swiftly.

She was terrified of course—her eyes wild above the hand that stifled her efforts to scream, curse, plead, whatever she might have done. Don Cesar leaned against the other back door and watched her. By the time they were out of town and on the open road she had ceased to struggle, but her eyes were streaming tears and she was snorting hard for breath through her runny nose. Don Cesar gestured for his man to unhand her. She pulled away from the man but was careful not to come into contact with either of them—sobbing hard now, her arms crossed over her breasts, her knees together, her hand wiping at her eyes and nose. Don Cesar held his silk handkerchief to her and she glanced at it and looked away. Don Cesar shook the hankie gently and after another moment’s hesitation she snatched it from his hand and blew her nose and wiped her eyes.

He asked if she felt better now—and her face was suddenly as tight with anger as with fear. Who was he, she demanded to know. Where was he taking her? What did he want? As if she already knew the answer to that last question, she hugged herself even more tightly and drew her pressed knees still farther from him.

Don Cesar said everything would soon be clear to her, and asked that she not agitate herself further. He promised she would not be harmed.

She wiped at her eyes and stared down at her lap.

He could hardly believe his grand fortune—she was even more beautiful up close than she had appeared from a distance.

They arrived at an isolated landing strip just north of the city and boarded a small chartered plane. He’d been afraid she might resist going aboard and would have to be carried bodily, but her awe of the aircraft was obvious— and her excitement, it amused him to note, was sufficient to distract her from her fears. When the engine roared and the craft began to move she clutched tight to the arms of her seat. She stared out the window at the landscape speeding past and he made soothing sounds at her as he would to a skittish horse. The plane lifted off and she gasped—and then gaped at the sinking, tilting view of the gulf. And then the sea was behind them and the dark green hill country appeared below, and then the sudden mountains like enormous heaps of crushed copper gleaming in the day’s dying light. Then they were in clouds and there was nothing more to see.

He told her his name, told her where he was from, told her of his past. When he told her he’d been an officer of the Guardia Rural her eyes widened. He told her of his heroic rescue of the president’s niece some thirty-six years ago and of the wounds he had suffered, of the honors he had been given by Don Porfirio, told her of La Hacienda de Las Cadenas and described its magnificence, told her of the barbarities inflicted upon it by the Revolution. He told her—his throat going hot and tight with the recollection—of the tragic loss of his family, and told how he had lost his eye.

Through the latter portions of his narrative, her attention had begun to wane, and she several times turned to the window, perhaps checking to see if the clouds had cleared. But when he described the life she would have at Las Cadenas she listened with greater heed. At Las Cadenas, he told her, she would lead a more wonderful life than she could ever have envisioned for herself. She would live like a princess, she would have servants, beautiful clothes. She would never again know want.

He saw his words touch her, saw in her eyes a sudden spark of imagination. Though her aspect was still uncertain, he could see that she was envisioning the life he had pictured. And that the vision excited her.

She asked again what he wanted with her.

He wanted her to live with him at Las Cadenas.

As what, she wanted to know. His whore?

No. As his wife.

She stared at him for a long moment as if he were some intricate message written in a difficult scrawl. Then asked why her.

Because she was so beautiful, he said. Because she possessed a wonderful spirit. Because he loved her.

Loved her? But how, she wanted to know, could that be?

He admitted he did not know. But then who, he said, can explain love?

She blushed and covered her mouth with her hand and turned to the window and the dark clouds sweeping by.

When she looked at him again her face was changed. There was no fear or wariness in it now, only a mien of careful calculation, as if she were assessing odds at a gaming table. He could not imagine what she was thinking.

And then she accepted his proposal. She said it as if she were agreeing to some irrefutable practicality.

He laughed with a mix of delight and relief and briefly touched her hand. She smiled and said she had heard of less dramatic and somewhat more extended courtships—and this time they laughed together.

His two men in the seats ahead of them never said a word and never turned around.

They landed at Torreon, where his car was waiting, and late that night arrived at the casa grande. He spoke with the head housemaid and then told the girl to go with her, that she would be fed and bathed and shown to her bedchamber. The girl trailed after the maid, casting looks everywhere as she went.

The following day he had a team of seamstresses from Torreon fit her for a silk wedding gown and a silver crown inlaid with three small rubies. A priest was fetched and that early evening they were wed in the garden alongside the casa grande. Some hours later, following a celebration party in the patio, the maids brought her to his open chamber door and knocked timidly. The girl wore a satin nightgown the color of pearl. Her unpinned black hair shone in the candlelight. Her eyes were uncertain. He dismissed the maids and beckoned the girl. From the pocket of his dressing gown he took out a necklace, a fine gold chain holding a small diamond pendant. He gestured for her to turn around and told her to raise the hair off her neck. She was facing a full-length wall mirror and their eyes met as he clasped the necklace at her nape and then tenderly kissed her bare shoulder. Her eyes widened and her lips parted, and whether she was looking at the diamond at her throat or his lips on her neck he could not have said. He