self-defense. And with but one arm.
John Samuel also saw the aftermath. He was working on some ledgers in his office when the sudden screams of the horse got his attention and then came the gunshots. He hurried from the office and across the hall into a room facing the plaza and from the window saw his father assisted to his feet and then stand over a fallen soldier as a throng gathered about them. There was a great deal of blood. It took John Samuel a moment to comprehend that the soldier was dead, that his father had shot him, and he fought down the impulse to be sick. He stood unmoving until his father started toward the house, then he went to the main stairway and there waited until he heard him enter the main room. Then went down to him, saying, “Father! My God! Are you all right?”
John Roger saw his son’s pale fright and assured him that he was unhurt. They went into the main office and John Roger poured drinks. John Samuel asked what happened, and John Roger said the attacker was a soldier married to a woman who’d once been a maid in the house. It seemed somebody of malicious intent lied to the soldier that the patron had been taking advantage of his wife. “As I’m sure you know,” John Roger said, “there are many false rumors about every patron of every hacienda. It’s unfortunate that sometimes the wrong men believe them.”
John Samuel heard the tight timbre in his father’s voice and knew it for the sound of a lie, the first he was ever aware of hearing from him. The lie saddened him even as the reason for it filled him with disgust. He had an urge to weep. How could you have been so weak, he thought. So unfaithful to your wife? To
“I’m just . . . relieved that you’re all right, Father.”
John Roger was moved by the shimmer in John Samuel’s eyes. He went to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Everything’s fine, son.”
The next morning he telegraphed an account of Alfonso’s death to the colonel in command of the Orizaba garrison. He explained that he had been obliged to shoot the soldier in self-defense when the man tried to kill him in a drunken fury and the mistaken conviction that he had violated his wife. The colonel wired back that the problem of drunken peon soldiers and their violent petty jealousies was nothing new to him and that he well understood what happened. Moreover, Private Avila had always been a troublemaker. He thanked John Roger for the report and said he would greatly appreciate it if the don would see to the disposal of the remains. Alfonso was buried that afternoon.
Six weeks later he took Katrina and the baby to the train station in Veracruz, having arranged employment for her at a hacienda in Puebla. The rail line connecting Veracruz to Mexico City, with stations at towns in between, had been completed three years earlier, and shortly after its opening John Roger had commissioned his own rail track from Buenaventura to Veracruz for the transport of his coffee. The hacienda now had a depot with several side tracks and its own locomotive and freight cars, plus a passenger car by which John Roger had since made all his trips to Veracruz.
On their way there he asked Katrina if she had yet named her child. That was how he said it—“tu nino.” The attribution did not escape her and she gave him a sharp look that made him curse himself for a stooge and wish he had said “el nino.”
“Juan Lobo,” she said. He said it was not amusing. She said it was not meant to be.
At the Veracruz station he escorted her to the platform for the Puebla train, together with the maid assigned to assist her on the trip and the armed man charged with protecting them. At the coach steps he gave her yet more money and entreated her to be careful and to take good care of the child.
You should be more careful too, Don Juan, she said.
He waited on the platform until the train at last lurched into motion with great reverberant clankings. Then raised his hand to wave goodbye, but she had already turned her face from the window.
ACCOUNT TO
THE COURTESAN
For a long time after the killing of Alfonso Avila, John Roger was sick at soul. He was sworn not to father another child nor chance another gulling by a married woman or the wrath of another husband. He tried to work himself to a tiredness too great for much reflection. When he wasn’t at the coffee farm he was at the horse ranch John Samuel had started on Buenaventura and named Rancho Isabela.
But there was no ignoring the crave of the flesh. He knew Josefina had been correct about the way to avoid such risks, but he had not forgotten his boyhood vow to abstain from prostitutes forevermore. A man was only as worthy as his word and no pledge he made was more important than one made to himself. A man who broke his word to himself would break it to anybody. Still, the more he thought about it, the more he began to construe his vow as a gesture of callow youth, as lacking the sanction of experience. In this fashion did his yearning grapple with his principles, off and on, for almost four years before he finally concluded that a grown man should not be ruled by an oath made as a boy. Besides, in a world of such fickle turnings, it seemed senseless to ever say never again.
He made his first visit to El Castillo de las Princesas on a starry November evening. A mansion that had once been the residence of a state governor, it was the most extravagant brothel on the Mexican gulf coast, an exclusive establishment whose members were all men of means and social station. It had a ballroom with a glass ceiling and a parquet floor. Every room was furnished with its own porcelain bathtub and canopied feather bed. All the girls of the house were young Creoles, none less than lovely, none without education or social poise. And all of them outcasts from landed families, disowned for one or another unforgivable transgression against the family honor, the details in each case known only—if known at all—to the madam and perhaps to some person who had guided the girl to her.
Ever a man of routine, John Roger began patronizing El Castillo on the first and third Tuesdays of every month. He chose a different girl on each of his first five visits, and the first four of them would have agreed that he seemed to take no true pleasure in the act but went about it in the way of a man who drinks only to be drunk. The fifth time, he chose a new girl, Margarita, who had come to El Castillo only the week before. She was pretty of course, but he could see she was older than the others. The others were girls, while she was a woman. She had claimed, with a wink, to be twenty-two, but even at that age would have been older than the next oldest girl in the house by three years. The general guess was that she was not younger than twenty-five and likely closer to thirty. She liked to joke about being the house senior. As she and John Roger ascended the stairs together, she said she was getting so old that before long she’d have to be carried up to the room.
After their coupling, they were lying side by side and gazing at the crescent moon framed in the black rectangle of the window when a shooting star described a bright streak just below the moon and was gone.
Quick, Margarita said, make a wish.
She shut her eyes to make her own wish. Then felt him sit up and looked to see him staring at the window.
What is it? she said, and put a hand on his arm. And he broke into tears.
“Ay, querido! Que te pasa?” She sat up and put her arms around him and drew him to her. He heaved with sobs and she felt his breath hot against her neck, his tears on her shoulder. She rocked him as she would a frightened child. “Ya, mijo, ya. Todo sera bien, mijito, ya lo veras.” She rocked him and crooned to him and petted him, and after a time his sobs began to ease to a softer gasping.
She lay back, hugging him down alongside her, cradling his head in her arms, his cheek to her bosom. His nose was running and he snorted for breath, and she plucked her chemise from the bedpost and put it to his nostrils and said Blow, and he did, and she said Again, and he did. She wiped his nose and put the chemise aside, and again held him close. She felt his respiration begin to slow, the tension slackening in his muscles. “Dime, mi amor,” she said. Whatever it is. You can tell me.
