He did not want to distract from her story and so did not pursue the theme. But he believed that what made memorable first times so special was that most of them happened to us in youth. What made us sad when we later recalled them was that we were no longer young. Then again, he thought he might be chasing his tail.
Arturo Villasenor was a good man and Sofi loved him for his goodness, but not until their wedding night did she realize how much she had been missing the enjoyments of the bed. And because Arturo was more experienced than Melchor while no less passionate, her conjugal enjoyments were keener than ever. They lived in his top-floor apartment in a six-story building only three blocks from La Rosa Mariposa. Their son, Francisco, was born in December. Maria Palomina was jubilant to be a grandmother, and though less effusive, Samuel Thomas too was pleased by his grandson.
Arturo was overwhelmed by his own joy in fatherhood. More, my dearest treasure, he said to Sofi, we must make more of these amazing creatures! We must make dozens! She was dazed with happiness and eager to give him all the children he wished. But three months later and two days after their first anniversary, she had not yet conceived again when Arturo tried to break up a street fight on his beat and one of the combatants stabbed him in the heart. The murderer got away, and while Sofi hoped he would be caught and punished, she could not muster the energy for a righteous vengeance. Whatever became of his killer, Arturo would still be dead.
For the next two months she hardly spoke except to coo endearments to baby Francisco as she tended him. But for the baby, she might have passed her days in bed and staring at the ceiling. Maria Palomina brought meals every day and gave the apartment a quick cleaning and made sure the child was not being neglected. Then Arturo’s long-widowed mother, Eufemia, arrived from Guadalajara to stay with Sofi for a time and help with the baby and the housekeeping. By late summer, six months after Arturo’s death, Sofi was doing well, even smiling on occasion, and Eufemia made plans to return home at the end of September.
The sixteenth of that month was the nation’s Independence Day, when Mexico City became a cacophony of marching bands and skiffle bands and street dancing and church bells and firecrackers and military rifle volleys of tribute, a daylong celebration culminating after dark with firework exhibitions all over town. That evening, Eufemia sat in a rear bedroom, holding the baby and crooning to him to allay his fears of the blasts in the outer dark, while at the other end of the apartment Sofi stood out on the balcony and watched the fireworks lighting up the sky. The nearest show was taking place in the open ground of a park but two blocks away. It featured Catherine wheels and sun wheels, Roman candles and pastilles, elaborate displays of every sort—and of course skyrockets, some of them four feet long and as big around as a man’s arm, one after another arcing up into the night in a streak of fire and detonating into a dazzling spray of colors high over the city. The air was hazed and acrid with powdersmoke.
Sofi thought she would watch one more rocket and then go back inside and close the balcony doors against the noise in hope that the baby could get to sleep. But the next rocket did not fire off like the others, did not zoom off the ground in a streaking blaze but rose in a struggling, sluggish, spark-sputtering wobble as if improperly fused. It had barely cleared the rooftops when it stopped rising and for a second simply hung suspended and shedding sparks. And then, just as it tilted and started to fall, its tail flared and the rocket whipped around in a quick bright- yellow circle and came streaking directly toward Sofi where she stood seized. Before she could think to move, the rocket shot by within inches of her, singeing her hair and scorching her cheek, and blazed down the hall and into the bedroom and found the embraced grandmother and child and blew them asunder, bespattering the walls and setting the bedclothes afire.
Who could explain such a thing? Terrible firework accidents were commonplace and firework deaths no rarity, but a fatality in this manner gave new dimension to the idea of freak misfortune. The disaster was publicized in the most purple prose and the most lurid illustrations of the city’s penny broadsides. But nothing in those newssheets was as outrageous to Sofi as the witless blather of the priest at the funeral mass, his pious pronouncements about God’s mysterious ways and our need to accept them on faith and so on. Had she not got up and walked out of the church midway through the service—wholly indifferent to the stares and whispers she provoked—she might have thrown her shoe at the man and cursed him for a shithead fool.
She again returned to La Rosa Mariposa. And this time did take to her bed and stare at the ceiling. She could not rid herself of the idea that the rocket had sought out Eufemia and Francisco, but she shared this thought with no one, fearing she would be thought insane. It came as a dull surprise to her that she could not abide her inertness for more than a week before getting cleaned up and assisting in the operation of the cafe. Maria Palomina and Samuel Thomas were relieved to see her at work so soon after the catastrophe and thought it only natural that for weeks to come she would yet seem remote and have little to say. The loss of two husbands in a span of two years and three months, followed hard upon by the death of her only child, was a sizable downpour of misery by any measure and especially so for someone only nineteen. Still, she knew as well as anyone that there was nothing to be done about it but to bear it, and she bore it well. And bore well too her father’s rabid death less than two years after the loss of baby Francisco.
Samuel Thomas had been dead a year, and Bruno Tomas had since returned from the army to help Maria Palomina manage the cafe, when Sofi married Jorge Cabaza. He was twenty-five, only three years her senior, and worked in his father’s bakery, from which La Rosa Mariposa bought its bread. Jorge was plain and, as Sofi found out on their wedding night, lacked imagination as a lover. But he worshipped her and he was industrious and wanted to have many children, and it was of no small importance to her that a baker was far removed from the mortal risks faced by soldiers and policemen. And because he would do whatever she asked of him, she was able to teach him —gradually and in a spirit of shy curiosity, lest he think her wanton—a number of her favorite things in bed. And so did this marriage, too, come to provide her dearest pleasure.
Jorge’s only remaining family was his father, Pieto, who had taught him the baker’s trade and who adored Sofi from the moment they met, and she reciprocated his affection. The three of them lived in quarters at the rear of the bakery, which was on a street fronting a canal and near enough to La Rosa Mariposa that Sofi and her mother were able to visit each other often.
Pieto had been a widower for seventeen years. Before his wife was taken by a typhoid epidemic she had borne six children, but only Jorge had survived to adulthood, and Pieto’s great wish was for a grandson to keep alive the family line. When Sofi gave birth to a husky boy whom she and Jorge called Pieto Tomas, the elder Pieto’s tearful joy was compounded by his namesake honor. The year after that, Samuel Palomino was born, as lusty of health as his brother, and it was Maria Palomina’s turn to feel honored in addition to her elation at another grandson. We are truly blessed, Jorge said in his half-drunk happiness during the celebration party attended by everyone in the neighborhood. His father, no less happy and no less drunk, raised his glass high and said, A man cannot have better luck than mine. The dispute that ensued between father and son over which of them was the luckier man was about to come to blows when a woman’s plea for somebody to
Neither child had ever evinced any sign of illness until Pieto Tomas was eighteen months old and his forehead one morning seemed a little warm to Prudencia’s palm. She feared he might be taking fever. The child did not feel feverish to Sofi’s touch but old Pieto had seen enough of his children die of illness and he would not abide even the smallest risk to his grandsons. He insisted that Jorge take the child to the doctor and take six-month-old Samuel Palomino to be looked at too, just in case. Prudencia held the well-bundled babies securely against her as Jorge hupped the mule forward and the wagon went rumbling away over the wooden canal bridge.
Sofi would later learn that the doctor had found both boys to be in perfect health. She would imagine Jorge’s relief on hearing this and his eagerness to share it with her as he headed back home. Of the various eyewitnesses, several would agree that he had been smiling and saying something to Prudencia as the wagon drew near to home, that the maid had been smiling also, that the babies in her embrace had been waving their arms for the sheer pleasure such action gives to children of that age. Then the wagon turned onto the bridge and its weight bore upon a piling that must have been rotting for many years without any sign of its weakening until that moment, when it gave a loud groan and abruptly buckled. There was an enormous cracking and twisting of planks as that end of the bridge gave way in a sudden tilt and the wagon turned over as it fell, taking the shrieking mule with it. It crashed into the brown water upside down and on top of all four occupants and sank from sight to settle into the silty bottom ten feet down. There was a great rush of bubbles to the agitated surface and then only the diminishing ripples.
