Texas, p.28
Texas, page 28
“Who’s gonna go tell the greaser that we got our hands on his women?”
There’s no lack of volunteers, despite the possibility they’ll get a thrashing.
What do you know? No one gets a beating.
But Nepomuceno’s jaw trembles, and how.
“Tell him if they leave right now we’ll let the women go. If not, we’ll shoot them full of holes.”
Nepomuceno doesn’t give it a second thought. It’s no time for waffling, decisiveness is called for.
His orders: “We’re leaving this moment. We’re already on our way.”
No one disobeys Nepomuceno. His voice is so powerful that even the Mexicans who live in Bruneville begin packing their bags. But the fever passes before they close them. Only folks who don’t live in Bruneville board the barge, though there are some Bruneville residents who leave, fearing the vengeance that will fall on the town’s Mexicans.
Melón, Dolores, and Dimas (the orphans of Santiago, the fisherman) get on board.
Nat doesn’t, he stays in his room with the Lipans’ dagger.
The return to Laguna del Diablo isn’t easy. When they’re crossing the river they see Tim Black’s cadaver floating. It rose to the surface almost immediately, as if he were full of hot air.
Jones says, “He was a bastard, Tim Black, but this is a bad omen.”
Everyone’s heavy-hearted.
Suddenly, the night seems brief. When Nepomuceno decided to leave Bruneville, he was moved by his love for his wife—the widow Isa—something bigger than himself (though you might not believe it since she’s so long in the tooth by now).
Isa is spirited, full of life, and Nepomuceno has never enjoyed himself more with another woman; there’s no one who makes him feel so good, he doesn’t sleep or shoot the breeze with anyone else like he can with her. It’s a shame she can’t cook like his mother, not that she’s a bad cook. Her problem is that she’s too straightforward, she doesn’t like complications, her salsas are fresh and smell good but there’s no secret ingredient. They’re like she is: honest, direct, frank, without mystery.
Nepomuceno wants to bring them back to his camp. Even his daughter Marisa (because she’s with his wife).
“No, Nepito, I’m not doing that. If you want, take Marisa with you, she’s your daughter. But I’m spending the night in Matasánchez, at the hotel.”
No one can talk her out of it: Isa is a strong-willed woman. Marisa, poor thing, doesn’t matter to him, but she knows what she wants, and that’s to be with her father.
On both sides of the river the full moon is making cooks yearn for the perfection of browned onions and the drumbeat of the knife dicing them, for the sighs of bread, the fresh innards of tomatoes, the cautious flames, and sneezes caused by chiles and peppers. They dream in unison, attuned to one another.
Magdalena, La Desconocida, dreams of her mother. She’s a girl, back in her mother’s arms. She falls even deeper into sleep. Now the arms around her are Nepomuceno’s. A pleasure she has never experienced runs through her, electrifying; she wakes up.
The moon gives Felipillo Holandés his recurrent nightmare—he gets out of the Moses basket and walks along the wet sand, Nepomuceno and his men arrive, he cries out—but this time he doesn’t wake up. He dies in his dream. Then he awakens.
Laura, the girl who was once kidnapped, is lying next to El Iluminado. For days she’s followed him around like a shadow, except that she didn’t accompany him to Bruneville. They sleep like two spoons, nestled together.
A moonbeam lands on the girl’s eyelids. Laura opens her eyes. She thinks she hears the Talking Cross. She closes her eyes, afraid. She snuggles up to El Iluminado, disturbing his sleep. He jumps up. He feels the moon on his face. He kneels to pray.
At the Werbenskis’ house, the turtle that the cooks have been slowly mutilating to make delicious green soup (a dish fit for the gods) is also dreaming. In the dream, the turtle’s pain—its left back leg and right foreleg are gone, next they’ll cut off her other foreleg, then her other back leg, and finally her head, then they’ll stew it all up together, using the meat beneath her shell for the soup on Sunday—morphs into a feeling like she’s walking in the mud … a mud that covers her completely, eliminating the burden of being what she is, as well as engulfing her unbearable, gnawing pain. A pain you can chew like gum, gum that comes from the sapodilla, which the cooks cut out of the fruit to chew while they shell peas, pluck chickens, and remove the white pistils and green corollas from zucchini blossoms, making them sweet as sugar.
Mrs. Big’s icaco tree also dreams. We won’t go into detail in order to avoid the unpleasantness of the two cadavers’ erections, which the tree cannot forget, transformed by them into something bestial.
And the shadow of Mrs. Big’s icaco dreams, too. It’s a more dignified dream than the tree’s, but it, too, is saturated with violence.
The dogs dream dogs’ dreams, resigned to be “man’s best friend.” This awakens them. They bark passionately without ceasing. The dogs’ barking in unison awakens the turtle, the icaco, its shadow, some of the cooks (interrupting their collective dream), Ranger Neals (who awakens if a pin drops), and Dr. Velafuente.
The roots of Mrs. Big’s icaco tree don’t know how to sleep, and therefore can’t dream. Rigid, they extend through the muddy earth, thinking always of the Eagles because the Eagles are always going on about how “it’s so important to defend our roots,” etc.
Caroline Smith dreams of Nepomuceno as she dies.
Her dream seems bewitched. Nepomuceno guides her along a road, this can’t be real. The tree’s roots are exposed, hardened, challenging the wind. Its crown is buried in the dirt. She feels the rough, rocky road beneath the soles of her feet. Nepomuceno is carrying her. Caroline knows this road leads to her death, but she doesn’t care. Suddenly, she is facing a door. She opens it. She can’t pass through, she’s dead.
Corporal Ruby dreams anxiously, for him eternity is drowning in a roiling river.
Sarah-Soro, in New Orleans, also dreams what the moon wants her to dream—its powers reach that far. She dreams about Moonbeam, the Hasinai Indian who’s no longer with us. Scantily dressed, she dances on stage, never more beautiful. She speaks a few words in her native tongue, which Sarah understands.
In her corral, Pinta, Nepomuceno’s horse, has a very strange dream: she climbs a ladder up to the fat white cloud that is looking down on her from the sky.
There, the magnificent mare dreams the cloud’s dream: she’s not made of flesh, not even vapor. She’s just a color.
At her home in Matasánchez, Maria Elena Carranza is awoken from her dreams by a moonbeam falling across her eyelids. She gets up, feeling as if she’s been illuminated. She looks out the window and thinks she sees the Talking Cross fly past.
“Sweet Jesus!”
She drops to her knees and begins to pray.
Three times Nicolaso has awoken to the birds’ flapping, afraid there’s a coyote, a fox, an Apache—someone who wants to steal them. It’s just the moon making them stir.
In Bruneville, the moon shines on the Adventurer, who was formerly lying sick in the infirmary, but who has now fully recovered—he’s handsome and well dressed, but there’s something inscrutable in his expression; he’s paying Mrs. Big (she’s been drinking, but can still attend to business) for two horses. He also buys a donkey to carry supplies (animal fodder, beef jerky, hardtack bread—nothing like the bread that Óscar bakes, but it’ll last a long time) and water.
A cloaked figure awaits him beneath the icaco tree. It’s Eleonor. They’re running away together.
They ride, first along the road to Bruneville, then across open fields, for what’s left of the night and well into the morning, until they find a place to rest, though they have stopped three times to give the animals a break. There’s fresh water and trees for shade.
While they ride he doesn’t dream a thing. Eleonor dreams both when they ride and when they stop. Images come one on top of the other, flying through her head so quickly that she can’t focus on a single one, but they make her happy, happier than she’s ever felt before.
Glevack is with a lady of the night. Riding her.
Óscar’s dreams are poisoned. First, the well where he stops to drink is full of cadavers. Then the meat Sharp delivers him is full of worms. Last he offers Nepomuceno rotting bread. Instead of life, his bread bestows death.
No sooner has the sun appeared on the horizon than rumors begin to spread like wildfire through Bruneville and further north, and in Matasánchez and further south—distorted like Chinese whispers: rumors that Nepomuceno captured Bruneville dressed in a short cape thrown across one shoulder (a manteaux), a high collar right up to his beard, wide breeches, tight socks, shoes with shiny buckles, and a wide-brimmed hat, his strawberry blond beard trimmed in a narrow triangle (the folks who said this also said that Shears behaved like a gentleman, an eye for an eye, while the really malicious ones said that Nepomuceno shot him just because he felt like it); rumors that the invasion was about a girl, identifying who the girl was, debating whether he kidnapped her or not, or whether they raped Bruneville’s women. Someone even dared to say they used swords and lances and gunpowder to do unspeakable things to them. Someone else claimed that first they kidnapped the women, then they blew up the bridges (and that’s really going too far, there’s not a single bridge in Bruneville) … all sorts of crazy things. All the exploits of the Robin brothers mixed with the Coal Gang’s and other bandits, even the pirates who used to attack Matasánchez and the ones who built Galveston.
In the north they can’t stop talking about John Tanner, the White Indian who’s risen from the grave, going so far as to claim he came over with the Mexicans. In the south, folks who’ve heard of John Tanner claim that the White Indian defended the gringos.
In camp and beyond, folks sing along to their guitars, “Take care, Nepo, don’t let them kill you.”
Nepomuceno pays no heed to these rumors. But it kills him to think folks are going around saying he’s a pansy, that he let them take Lázaro prisoner and didn’t do anything about it.
Nepomuceno begins preparations for another attack on Bruneville, despite Jones’ vehement opposition.
Óscar doesn’t protest, he’s paralyzed. He’s heard that Glevack hid in his oven during the attack. That’s too much to bear. He’s a baker, a peaceful soul becoming a warrior, but his transformation is taking time.
From The Rancher:
“Nepomuceno entered Bruneville with seventy-seven men (and women). Forty-four of these men have been charged by Cameron County Grand Jury; thirty-four are Mexican. That’s not including Mexicans returning from the party, which made up the majority, and who, though they didn’t exactly aid and abet them, acted the fool to provide cover for them.
These seventy-seven people include the leading members of the Robins and the Coal Gang.”
Moonbeam’s funeral causes all sorts of problems in Bruneville. True, she was baptized, but they can’t bury her in the Christian cemetery.
Funeral services are for honoring civilized Texans. So they decide to bury her with the Negroes. But if they bury her with the Negroes she won’t be properly honored, and she certainly ought to be—she died defending Texas against the greasers; burying her with the Christians would be “the right thing,” but it’s not about doing “the right thing,” it’s about maintaining appearances and (as the mayor, Chaste, emphasized) “civilized society.”
After a lot of talk, they don’t even give her a pine coffin. They wrap her in a sheet they found who knows where—it’s contemptible. They toss her in a hole without so much as a prayer. Minister Fear, who baptized her, should have been there but … Fear won’t leave the house because he’s crestfallen, he’s been cuckolded.
As for Caroline, they couldn’t give her a proper burial. She committed suicide. They buried her in a nice coffin, on unblessed land.
Chief Little Rib—chief of the Lipans—hears the news from a messenger. He consults the shaman. Case closed: all commerce with Bruneville is suspended until things calm down. The shaman adds, “You can’t even do business with them when they are calm.”
At the watering hole where the Adventurer and Eleonor have stopped, he lays down to sleep. Eleonor sits down to think. She loses track of time. She begins to fall asleep, too. The Adventurer awakens. He grabs one of her legs, then the other, removing them from her skirts, and falls onto her, whipping his hard dick out of his pants. One, two thrusts. What a relief! He couldn’t wait a moment longer—he thinks, satisfied—it’s been so long since he had a poke, And this ain’t no weapon to keep holstered.
He puts away his weapon. He gets up. Without turning to look at Eleonor he goes off to look for brushwood to build a fire, he’s hungry.
Eleonor looks like a ghost. All her fragile beauty has disappeared. She doesn’t dare cry. She doesn’t even dare look at the Adventurer. She hardly dares breathe. Now she does look like the honorable wife of Minister Fear.
She tries hard not to dwell on what she’s feeling, That was so horrible, so empty, how can it be …
“My countrymen—I am moved to speak to you by a sense of profound indignation, the affection and esteem I hold for you, and my desire that you should enjoy the rights and protection denied to us, violating the most sacred of laws.
“Mexicans! When the State of Texas began to receive the recognition accorded to it by its sovereignty as part of the Union, bands of vampires, disguised as men, arrived and scattered throughout the State, with nothing other than corrupt hearts and perverse intentions to their names, laughing heartily as they foretold the pillaging and butchery dictated by their black hearts. Many of you have been imprisoned, hunted, and chased down like animals, and your nearest and dearest murdered. For you, there has been no justice in this world, you have been at the mercy of your oppressors, whose fury toward you grows daily.
“But these monsters consider themselves justified because they don’t belong to La Raza, who, according to them, don’t belong to the human race.
“Mexicans! My part is taken; the voice of revelation whispers to me that to me is entrusted the work of breaking the chains of your slavery, and that the Lord will enable me, with powerful arm, to fight against our enemies, in compliance with the requirements of that Sovereign Majesty, who, from this day forward, will hold us under His protection.”
The Two Eights, Pedro and Pablo, lead the first operation. For three nights they steal boats from anywhere they can (mostly from Bruneville, but they bring some small ones from the little docks in Matasánchez and its neighboring ranches as well), they take them to the Old Dock in Matasánchez, and there, with the help of Úrsulo, Connecticut, and a group of peasants who have supported Nepomuceno from the very start, they hide the boats on land.
Guitars, violins, and voices rise in song to Nepomuceno on both sides of the river. “Because he’s a wealthy rancher, he comes from good seed.”
Something is giving Nepomuceno terrible insomnia. He thinks of calling Jones and using the time to plan (or add to the proclamation—but it’s already so long that Juan Prensa has had to fetch extra reams of paper—it looks like they’ll have to fold it: “Maybe even stitch it”—“No, don’t stitch it, this isn’t woman’s work,”—“Then bind it like a book,”—“Fine, but … everyone needs to read it! Not like the Bible or some boring romance for women!”—“Then shorten it, Nepomuceno, don’t keep adding to it!”)—but he doesn’t call for anyone, this anxiety he feels can’t be shared … He thinks of La Desconocida, he’d like to call for her, for a brief moment he’s pricked by the needle of desire … but that would be beneath him, that woman’s for lovemaking, not forcing … besides, she’s not the filly he wants … what he wants is his woman … his wife … here … the only one who knows how … Isa … despite the fact he’s furious with her—how could he not be? She really screwed things up riding into town like that … Who in their right mind walks straight into a lion’s den?
The clouds are solid and white against the dark blue sky lit by the moon. The same moon, sick and tired of bursting with light, causes wolves to dream about the pleasure of sinking their fangs into a cow’s flesh, bloody meat.
Telegram: MINISTER FEAR IS MOVING IMMEDIATELY. STOP.
Another, from Mexico’s central government to Matasánchez (which lie far apart, that’s why there are so many complaints from the Far North, “They don’t even glance in our direction.”): DON’T LET NEPOMUCENO BREAK THE LAW.
The telegraphist is being run off his feet and he’s feeling down. He’s tired, “Everyone takes me for granted.”
From a conversation in Bruneville, in Spanish: “From now on, have no doubt, Nepomuceno himself will make sure the law is upheld, time’s up for the gringos.” “La Raza’s hour has come.”
On the fourth day Nepomuceno’s men fill all the boats to the brim. Once more they mobilize at night.
Carlos the Cuban, along with three other Eagles, takes Mrs. Big’s Hotel by force. They take up positions at the windows, waiting impatiently for the signal—a flare on the river—to fire at the U.S. troops who are guarding the dock, fast asleep in their uniforms.
Nepomuceno’s strategy bears his trademark: catching the enemy off guard. The U.S. troops aim their guns at Mrs. Big’s Hotel to respond to the shots that have left two of their men wounded. Meanwhile, their backs are turned on Nepomuceno and his men.
They soon arrive at the other side of the dock, where they’re least expected.
There are hundreds of them aboard the boats, vessels of varying size—canoes and skiffs that people on both sides of the river use for their daily errands, some of which are well-kept, others half-rotting rafts. Some (the Mexican ones) have their names painted in bright colors: Lucita, Maria, Mama, Petronila, and Dr. Velafuente’s White Lily (which is one of the finest, he uses it just for sport fishing, a luxury he seldom indulges in, and the occasional family outing).
The flare has also alerted Nepomuceno’s men who are waiting further inland for the sign to charge in on their horses.
