little niece in the crazyhouse.
What she had not told John Roger was that she could not regard Diego’s death as one more instance of bad luck by chance. However randomly bad luck might strike, she could no longer believe that it would by accident strike the same person again and again to such degree as it had struck her. The death of Diego not only revived her suspicion she was cursed, it convinced her she was. Once she accepted that explanation for her cumulative misfortunes, she felt the relief that comes from an end to perplexity. But she still could think of no reason for any supernatural force to place the curse on her, and hence had to believe its cause was in herself, that some dark personal fault was the source of her sorrowful calamities. Something in her blood. And when she thought of her father’s ordeals and those of her Uncle John, she had to wonder if maybe the curse was in the blood of the whole damned family.
On their last night together in Mexico City, they were joined for dinner by Amos Bentley. Sofi prepared chicken enchiladas with her special sauce seasoned with roasted garlic and minced green chile, and Amos was effusive in his praise of the meal. Maria Palomina complimented Amos on his Spanish and said that he and John Roger spoke the language better than most Mexicans she knew. Samuel Thomas had also spoken it well, she said, but with an accent all his own. She mimicked her husband’s enunciations, pretending to be him lauding Sofi for her enchiladas and asking for a second helping, and they all laughed, Bruno Tomas saying, That’s him! That’s exactly how he talked!
None laughed at his brother’s accent so hard as John Roger. He laughed until he was gasping, aware that the laughter was his first full-bellied guffawing since Elizabeth Anne was alive. And the others laughed with him, happy for him, understanding why his enjoyment was so great and why it came with tears. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose and said, Well now, that felt better than a thorn in the butt. And set off another round of laughter.
The following morning, he and Bruno Tomas took breakfast with the Blanco women and assured them they would return for a visit before long. The women promised in turn they would soon visit Buenaventura. There was much hugging and kissing at the front gate and then the men boarded a hack for the train station and the women cast kisses after them until they rounded the corner and were gone.
TWO WEDDINGS
Unlike her sister Sofia Reina, Gloria Tomasina had married only once, a marriage that was into its seventeenth year at the time John Roger heard about it from the Blancos in Mexico City. But it was a marriage more inconceivable in its making than any of Sofia Reina’s. It was but one extraordinary aspect of it that the man Gloria had been engaged to for five months when she awoke on the morning of July thirteenth, 1867, was not the man she married that night.
The fiance of five months was a cavalry officer named Julian Salgado. Maria Palomina disliked him for a preening peacock but would have been displeased regardless by Gloria’s betrothal to a soldier. Sofi shared her mother’s dislike of Julian’s haughtiness but could not deny that he cut a handsome figure. She secretly believed that her sister—who well knew how much their parents detested all things military—had accepted the lieutenant’s proposal less out of love for him than for the dual satisfactions of spiting them and getting out from under their roof.
Gloria had always been an unpredictable puzzle to her family. She was always at odds with her parents, and if she rarely quarreled with her brother it was only because they were content to ignore each other. Only with Sofi did Gloria ever converse or join in genuine laughter, share a confidence or a pleasurable opinion. When she was fourteen she had refused to speak to her father for almost three months because he had not permitted a man nearly ten years her senior to escort her to a dance. Samuel Thomas was protecting a virginity the girl cheerfully granted a few months later to a shy army recruit headed for a post in distant Sonora. By sixteen she’d known three other lovers. Her mother, who had been to bed with but two men in her life, dared not share with Samuel Thomas her suspicion that their daughter was not only no longer a maiden but was not even chaste.
Gloria had just turned seventeen when she announced her intention to marry Lieutenant Salgado, who had been courting her for three months. Knowing that to argue against the marriage would only reinforce the girl’s determination to go through with it, and hoping Gloria would change her mind of her own accord, Maria Palomina told her that if she truly wanted to marry the lieutenant, well then, she wished her the best. But Gloria had long been able to perceive her mother’s true feelings in any situation, and her smirk at the counterfeit good wishes made Maria Palomina want to snatch her by the hair and shake some proper respect into her. Samuel Thomas was a different matter, as Gloria had never been able to read her father’s mutilated face very well, and so when Julian made formal request for her hand and Samuel Thomas granted it with a smile and handshake and hearty congratulations, Gloria’s satisfaction derived entirely from her conviction that he did not mean a word of it. But Samuel Thomas’s blessing was sincere. As he confided to Maria Palomina, his dislike of Gloria’s marriage to a soldier was much outweighed by his relief that their daughter would soon be her husband’s problem and no longer theirs. The wedding was scheduled for the first Saturday in August.
It so happened that Raquel Aguilera, Gloria’s friend since childhood, was to be married three weeks before then, on the second Saturday in July. Gloria would serve as her maid of honor, and Sofi, who was almost fourteen and had also known Raquel most of her life, would be a bridesmaid—though she would be unescorted, as the boy who was to go with her would be taken ill at the last moment. Because of his refusal to venture farther than a few blocks from home, Samuel Thomas would not attend Raquel’s wedding, which would take place in a neighborhood at the far end of Avenida Reforma. The truth, as everyone in the family knew, was that he had never liked Raquel Aguilera and would probably not have attended her wedding if it had been held in the next room. But because Samuel Thomas did not go, Maria Palomina did not go either. And so, when Gloria left for the church on Raquel’s wedding day—on the arm of Julian Salgado and with Sofi in tow—it was the last time in their lives her parents ever saw her.
Raquel was marrying an American she had met at the end of the war against Maximilian and had known less than a month. She was working as a nurse in the central hospital when the Yankee was brought in with a chest wound he’d received a week earlier and which had become badly infected. His arrival caused a stir because he was accompanied by the military hero, General Porfirio Diaz, who made it clear to the hospital administrators that the American was a dear friend and ordered that he be attended by the best surgeons in the place. It was said the two men were of the same age and had saved each other’s lives, but nobody knew any of the details. It was a friendship even more unusual than anyone could have guessed, given how few true friends either man had or ever would. In the gringo’s case, only a brother already dead, his own first son, and a great-granddaughter not yet born. And while Diaz had called many men his friend and would so call many more—often with a patent irony that would chill them to the bone—the truth was that he had never had a true friend in his life, not even his own brother, save this gringo.
Raquel Aguilera was one of the nurses assigned to the American, who spoke fluent Spanish, and she told Gloria and Sofi of Diaz’s daily visits to him. The gringo’s only other visitor was his grown son, Louis, who understood Spanish much better than he spoke it. A rough-looking but handsome young man with a short blond beard and long hair to his shoulders in the fashion of American frontiersmen.
It was toward the end of the gringo’s stay in the hospital that he proposed marriage to Raquel and she accepted, even though she had known him so briefly and though he was more than twice her age. And even though, as everyone who saw him would attest, he was a man of grisly aspect. After seeing him at the wedding, Sofi would describe him as having a face scarred even worse than her father’s. The gringo had also lost an ear but hid the nub of it under long side hair. Worst of all, he had sometime in his youth been scalped by Indians—or so it was said. After seeing the tight black skullcap the man wore at his wedding, Sofi was sure it was true. She could tell that he was hairless under the cap and it made her shudder to imagine what the crown of his head must look like. Raquel Aguilera herself had never seen him without the cap.
That Raquel would marry a man she hardly knew, a foreigner—a gringo!—a man so physically repellent and
