Country of the Bad Wolfes Read online

  She had just turned sixteen when she wed Melchor Cervantes, two years after her sister Gloria had married and gone. Melchor was twenty years old and newly graduated from military college. María Palomina had warned both daughters since their early childhood never to fall in love with a soldier, especially a young officer with dreams of glory, and how many young officers did not have such dreams? Few young men of that sort lived to be old men, she told the girls, and told them too of her own passionate betrothal when she was seventeen to just such a young soldier who was killed before they could marry. She anyhow thought Sófi too young to marry anyone. She pleaded with her and Melchor to wait at least another year, but she was arguing with a wildfire. Forbid them, she beseeched Samuel Thomas, make them wait. But he would not. They would only run away, he said, and you would regret that even more. María Palomina was in tight-lipped vexation for three days before she finally admitted defeat, and Sófi and Melchor were married three weeks later.

  They lived in a little house next to the army post, just outside the city. He was permitted to come home on most nights and they were very happy. They had been married almost four months when his battalion was sent to quell an insurgency in the hills near Pachuca, some fifty miles from Mexico City. Rebels. There were always rebels. Melchor was eager for his first combat and promised Sófi he would earn a medal of bravery in her honor. He rode off like a prince of war in his pristine lancer uniform, his high boots gleaming, his shako affixed with a proud black plume. The following week he was killed in an ambush. His comrade and best friend later told Sófi that Melchor had been shot in the head by a ragged and shoeless boy barely big enough to hold the antique musket. For lack of proper ammunition the boy used a stone for a bullet. The friend wanted to tell her what they did to the captured boy but she did not want to hear it. She lit a candle for Melchor’s soul three times a day and prayed to the Blessed Mother to please, please let his seed from their last lovemaking take root in her womb. Then awoke one morning to the death of that hope, its blood staining her bed sheet. She thought she would never stop crying. But of course did.

  She went back to live with her mother and father. She dressed in black for a year and wore her hair loose in the mourning mode and passed her days working in the café. She grew to understand that you can mourn someone for a long time, even for the rest of your life, but you cannot grieve forever. Besides, she dearly wanted children.

  Almost as soon as she put away her black dress she began to be courted by Arturo Villaseñor, a thirty-three-year-old city policeman whose beat took him past La Rosa Mariposa three times a day and where he often stopped in for a cup of coffee. Arturo had known many women and received much pleasure from them, but he had never wanted to be married until he met Sófi. She let him woo her for three months before she said yes to his proposal, and they married the month after that. She was yet only seventeen.

  They say you can never love anyone else as much as you love the first, Sófi had told John Roger, but I disagree. I think you can love somebody else as much or even more than the first one. What you cannot do again is be in love for the first time. The sadness of that knowledge is why the first one seems so special.

  But there is only one first time for anything we do in life, John Roger said, from birth to death.

  Exactly so, Sofía Reina said.

  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 Villaseñor was a good man and Sófi 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. María 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 Sófi, 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 Sófi 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. María 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 Sófi for a time and help with the baby and the housekeeping. By late summer, six months after Arturo’s death, Sófi 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 Sófi 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.

  Sófi 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 Sófi 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 Sófi 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 café. María 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 Tomás had since returned from the army to help María Palomina manage the café, when Sófi 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 Sófi 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 Sófi 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 Sófi 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 Sófi gave birth to a husky boy whom she and Jorge called Pieto Tomás, 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 María 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 do something was followed by a loud and prolonged fart and the room erupted with laughter. Later that evening while dancing with Sófi, Pieto tripped over his own feet and fell and broke his arm, and so the following day they hired a neighborhood girl named Prudencia to care for the babies during working hours while Sófi tended to Pieto’s duties in the bakery until he could resume them. Under his instruction she learned the work quickly and well, and even after Pieto was able to work again she kept working too, and the bakery increased both its output and profits.

  Neither child had ever evinced any sign of illness until Pieto Tomás 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 Sófi’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.

  Sófi 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.

  Sófi and Pieto were in the rear of the store, working at the ovens, and so didn’t know of the accident until a neighbor rushed in to tell them. They ran out to the collapsed bridge where a large crowd had gathered, and several men had to restrain old Pieto by force to keep him from jumping in. A work crew had been summoned and was quick to arrive but it took them several dives to free the wagon of the mule carcass and then several dives more to lash lines to the wagon so that a winch could pull it over on its side and the bodies retrieved. Pieto was half crazy with grief and keening like a dog. Sófi stood on the bank the whole while with her arms crossed and a hand to her mouth, staring down at the dirty water with no thought that she would later remember. The first bodies recovered were of Jorge and Prudencia, sodden and muddy and lank in that unreal way that only the dead can be. Finally a diver came bursting to the surface, gasping for air, and handed up to workers on the bank the two small and ill-formed effigies of mud that had been her children. She nearly screamed. Nearly vomited. Nearly fainted. Nearly turned her face up to heaven to bellow maledictions. Nearly threw herself into the water to inhale a great fatal draught of it. Nearly did all of those things but finally only put her face in her hands and wept.

  Late that night, as she lay sleepless, she heard Pieto pacing in the other room and then after a while heard him go out the front door. In the morning his body was in the canal, floating facedown. That afternoon she moved back to La Rosa Mariposa.

  This time there was no lying in bed for two weeks and staring at the ceiling. She simply put an apron on over her black dress and set to work. Her mother and brother did not know what to say to her, how to conduct themselves around her. It was hard enough to express an adequate condolence to someone who had all at once lost her husband and two children, but what could you say to someone for whom such a catastrophe was only one more in a series of disastrous losses?

  Sófi could hardly bear their solicitude. Their strenuous efforts at casual conversation in her company only made her as self-conscious and tense as they were. She stood it for two weeks before telling them to stop treating her as if she were made of glass. She was heartbroken, yes, and so what that she was? She would sooner or later get over it. She always sooner or later got over it. What else was there to do except sooner or later get over it, what else? What that old fool Pieto did? Yes, fool! Only a fool could have lived so long and not known that there is nothing you cannot sooner or later get over.

  Maybe he did know that, María Palomina said softly, but could not endure the wait. Sófi stared at her mother. Then went back to work.

  For weeks her eyes were red and dark circled, and her lean frame contracted to the skeletal for her lack of interest in eating. But the weeks did pass, and she did, as she knew she would, get over it. Did regain an interest in her meals and the table talk of her mother and brother and the news of the neighborhood and sometimes even that of the larger world.

  It was during that period of getting over it that she began to wonder if perhaps she were cursed. She had always prided herself on her rational mind and had disdained superstitions of all stripes, bu
t the sum of her misfortunes by the age of twenty-four defied rational understanding. But even when, solely for the purpose of self-argument, she allowed for the possibility she was cursed, she could not think why she should be, neither by God nor witch nor someone of the Evil Eye. Had she transgressed against any such agent of fortune, she felt sure she would have known it, and hence would know whose forgiveness to ask, what penance to perform, what atonement she must make. She refused to believe she could be cursed and not know why or by whom, and so was left with no explanation for her misfortunes except random bad luck. Bad luck could befall anybody anytime anywhere for no particular reason, just as good luck could. Everybody knew that too. Her bad luck, she told herself, was only bad luck, no matter its tenacity, no matter its accumulated heft. The idea was devoid of self-pity, an emotion she had abhorred since childhood and would recoil from whenever she sensed its encroachment. She told herself that her bad luck would change, as luck always did, bad or good, and there was nothing to do about it except hope for the change to come sooner rather than later.

  She was five years into her third widowhood when Diego Guzmán proposed to her in October of 1882. He was a shoemaker without any family, his shop just two streets from La Rosa Mariposa. A handsome, courtly, well-spoken man of thirty-eight whose hair and mustaches had early gone white. Better than anyone else, he understood Sófi’s sad history, himself having lost two wives, one to the cholera and one to the unbelievable failure of her twenty-year-old heart as they were dancing at a fiesta. Both marriages had produced a child, a son each one, but the first died of some mysterious illness a few days after his first birthday, and the second somehow got tangled in the bedclothes and smothered at the age of five months. Diego had been wifeless for more than eight years when he began courting Sofía Reina.