THE ESPINOSA LEGACY
In 1590 Carlos Mercadio Valledolid Jurado, a Spanish nobleman whose grandfather had landed in the New World with Cortez, established La Hacienda de la Sombra Verde and appointed his longtime friend Jose Maria Espinosa de la Cruz as its mayordomo. For the next 296 years every mayordomo of La Sombra Verde would be an Espinosa, each of them the oldest living son of the mayordomo he replaced. Most of them tended to longevity of service—Jose Maria himself would serve for twenty-two years—and Reynaldo, the twenty-first mayordomo, had held the post for a decade at the time that John Roger Wolfe became owner of the hacienda and changed its name to La Buenaventura de la Espada. By the summer of 1886 Reynaldo’s tenure had lasted thirty-seven years, far longer than that of the longest-serving of his predecessors. He was sixty-three years old but had all his life been blessed with good health. Except for a few weeks of the previous year when he had been incapacitated by a broken leg, he had never missed a day’s work.
Reynaldo had married at twenty-one and over the next sixteen years sired twelve children, all of them born in consecutive years but the last one, Alfredo, whose conception was something of a surprise to Reynaldo and his wife after a barren three-year period. Four of his children were girls, all strong and pretty and all of them married and gone by the age of seventeen. Of the eight boys, three died at birth and three others before they were six years old. The only two who made it to adulthood were his oldest child, Mauricio, and Alfredo. But Alfredo’s birth was a difficult one, and his mother, worn old at thirty-seven, never afterward regained her strength and died a few months later.
The following year Reynaldo married a seventeen-year-old girl for no reason but the want of more sons. The girl’s mother had borne twelve children, a fact bespeaking strong odds for the bride’s own fertility. But after a year of his efforts, the young wife had not conceived, and he was forced to accept the sad truth that his seed had lost all vitality. His spirited wife secretly rejoiced in their failure. She had no desire to share her mother’s fate as a lifelong maker of babies. When she absconded one night in the company of a theatrical troupe that had entertained at the hacienda, Reynaldo made no effort to seek after her and hoped she would fare well.
His wish for more sons was prompted by Mauricio’s lack of interest in replacing him as mayordomo. From early boyhood, Mauricio had liked to fight and yearned for adventure and to see places beyond Buenaventura and he believed the life of a soldier would satisfy all his cravings. Reynaldo had hoped the boy would outgrow this fancy and accept his calling as the next mayordomo, but whenever he spoke to him about the honor and prestige of the position, Mauricio’s boredom was obvious. Not for him the rooted and routine life of a hacienda manager. He desired to be a cavalryman. Not long after his mother died he turned seventeen and on that day enlisted in the army. Reynaldo was crestfallen, but could only accept it. One could not force a son to love the same life as the father’s. If it’s what you truly want, he said of Mauricio’s choice of the army. Mauricio said it was. At their parting at the train station Reynaldo said, Remember, son, if you ever change your mind, the position will be yours.
The military life was everything Mauricio had anticipated and he flourished in it. He distinguished himself in the war against the French and soon became a sergeant. He displayed a gift for leadership and at the end of the war was selected for officer training. On the day before his twenty-second birthday he was made a lieutenant. He fought Yaquis in Sonora for a time and then saw combat against the rebels of Porfirio Diaz and was promoted to captain. He later became an adherent of General Diaz and joined him in the uprising against Lerdo and greatly impressed Diaz with his leadership and tactical expertise. He was made a major and was awarded a medal of valor that Diaz himself, the new president, pinned on him in a ceremony at the National Palace. Over the following years he earned a colonelcy and even more decorations for heroism against various military insurrectionists and marauding Indians. In 1885, at the age of forty, he was made a general and was given command of the military district headquartered just outside of Durango City.
Because so much of his duty had been in the faraway north—and because his Durango post was more than 500 miles from Mexico City and over 800 miles from Veracruz—Mauricio had only rarely had opportunity to visit his father and brother. He might have requested assignment to some post closer to Buenaventura, but he had come to prefer the dry heat and the sun-bright immensity of the desert to the looming shadowy forests and muggy wetlands of his boyhood. In the summer of 1886 it had been five years since his last visit home.
On his last visit, Mauricio had been the patron’s dinner guest in the casa grande. John Roger was impressed by the young general’s intelligence and bearing, and he shared Reynaldo’s faint hope that Mauricio might yet choose to become mayordomo. It was this hope, more than anything else, that had kept Reynaldo from retiring and ceding his post to his younger son, Alfredo, now twenty-five, who was avid to become the mayordomo. Alfredo was not unintelligent, but he lacked his older brother’s skills, his acumen, his natural authority. Lacked above all Mauricio’s self-discipline and sense of order. As a boy he’d been taught by Mauricio to shoot and to handle a knife, to fight with his fists, but had always been prone to pick on those smaller than himself. He had a liking for spirits but was not a good drinker, was loud and belligerent when drunk. No less troublesome was his penchant for young girls. On four occasions to date Reynaldo had been obliged to make monetary compensation to an outraged father for Alfredo’s violation of his daughter’s virtue. It was as demeaning to Reynaldo to have to make such payment as it was to the aggrieved fathers to have to accept it, but what else could be done? Except what the father of a pregnant fourteen-year-old did in flinging the bag of silver back in Reynaldo’s face and rushing around him to grab Alfredo by the throat and very nearly throttle him before several stewards pulled him off. Despite a bloody mouth, Reynaldo admired the man for doing as he did. John Roger did too, and he got the man a job at a ranch in Jalapa and made arrangement for the girl to be married to a young cowboy who promised never to mistreat her.
Nevertheless, if Mauricio did not claim his right to be the next mayordomo, Alfredo, as the only remaining Espinosa son, would perforce be entitled to the post. And though John Roger was aware of Alfredo’s shortcomings, Reynaldo had no doubt the patron would grant him the appointment. Don Juan had too much respect for the Espinosa tradition—and for the honorable service he, Reynaldo, had rendered to Buenaventura for so many years— to dishonor the family’s name by denying the post to the only Espinosa left to assume it. The fact remained, however, that Alfredo would certainly prove a failure and Don Juan would sooner or later have to dismiss him, and thus would the last of the Espinosa mayordomos be the first ever to be fired for incompetence, a turn hardly less dishonorable than if he were denied the job in the first place.
Reynaldo gave the dilemma much thought. And one late evening a resolution occurred to him. It was so simple he felt doltish for not having thought of it long before. When Don Juan offered him the job, Alfredo would turn it down. He would do so in a formal letter thanking Don Juan for the offer but expressing his regrets that, for reasons he wished to remain personal, he could not accept it. The letter would be notarized, would be historical proof that he had turned down the post, not been denied it. Thus would the Espinosa name be spared dishonor and the hacienda spared the harm of even the brief tenure of an incapable mayordomo. Don Juan would surely be pleased by this decision—and no doubt appoint Don Juanito the new mayordomo. Alfredo would of course be unhappy, but that was of no import. If he should be obstinate and refuse to write the letter, Reynaldo would write it himself and append his son’s signature to it and present it to the patron with a truthful explanation.
Having settled on this course of action, Reynaldo felt both relief and the full weight of his years. In the past few months he’d had recurrent episodes of breathlessness. Of nausea. He sometimes felt a tingling semi-numbness in his arm, a feeling similar to when he awoke from sleeping on it the wrong way. It was without question long past time for him to retire. All right then, when? Why not tomorrow? Just like that? Yes, just like that. He felt himself grinning. Tomorrow, at the end of the day. Don’t tell Alfredo till then. Best not give him too much time to dwell on it. Tomorrow afternoon you tell him, have him write the letter—or write it yourself, if need be—then have it notarized and go to Don Juan.
He fell asleep smiling.
Alfredo was aware of his father’s perception of him as unsuitable to be mayordomo, and he could tell that the patron felt the same way. But he knew he could do the job and that Mauricio thought so too. Alfredo had last seen his brother five years prior, on which occasion Mauricio had told their father once again that he was not interested in managing the hacienda and did not intend to leave the army until it forced him to retire. Let Alfredo have the job, Mauricio said, and gave his brother a wink.
Alfredo had always idolized Mauricio. He believed his brother was the only one who saw the truth of him and respected him and recognized that he would make a fine mayordomo. The great desire of his father and Don Juan for Mauricio to manage the hacienda was of course understandable, Mauricio was so talented in so many ways. What galled Alfredo wasn’t that they so badly wanted Mauricio for the job, but that they didn’t want
