Last Train From Cuernavaca Read online

  Chinito’s pidgen English had that affect on her. Conversations with him could set her to singing tunes from The Mikado for the rest of the day. Thanks to her music-hall parents, she knew by heart every song that Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Sullivan had written.

  In the restaurant she found the waiters, their heavily laden trays held high, performing their nightly ballet collision-free. On the dance floor couples waltzed to the tunes of the musicians she recently had hired. Normally she would have checked with Luís, the cantinero, too, but tonight she passed by. That new captain was probably in there playing cards with friends. If she thought about it she could still feel a tingle in her fingers where he had kissed them. That flustered her, and Grace didn’t like to be flustered.

  In the past two years she had met plenty of young officers at the Colonial. Most of them were from Mexico’s bureaucratic or aristocratic classes, the upper middle class known as los correctos. The boys were gallant and full of fun and they had affectionately dubbed her Mamacita. But they had little on their minds except drinking, gambling, fast horses, pretty women, and outrageous pranks. Captain Martín might be more polished than most of them, but he didn’t fool Grace. Besides, he must be at least six or seven years younger than she.

  After talking with the night clerk at the front desk, she had one more task. She always made sure the pair of parrots had returned to their roost in the jacaranda tree. As she headed for the courtyard she softly sang a tune from the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, Bunthorne’s Bride. “A very delectable, highly respectable, threepenny ’bus young man.”

  She jumped when someone started pounding on the Colonial’s massive front gate. Whoever he was, he must have been using a sledgehammer to make such a racket. Grace didn’t know much Spanish, but she recognized words that mule drivers employed when they passed the hotel on their way to the nearby market. Her chambermaids always advised her to cover her ears when mule drivers were in the vicinity.

  Socrates hurried to open the gate. Grace would have been hard-put to define Socrates’s position, other than do-all. If the Colonial had a mayor, Socrates would occupy the office. Grace wasn’t sure she could manage the hotel without him and his wife María.

  As the shouting crescendoed, Grace suspected that the culprit was Colonel Rubio. She had been expecting him to arrive tonight. Now that she heard him, she wished she had refused the governor’s request to billet Rubio and his staff here, but saying “no” to the governor would have been foolish. Staying in his good graces was essential for her business.

  “Our commanding officer has arrived.”

  Grace whirled and found Captain Martín standing behind her. Something about his stance gave her the notion he had come to protect her. She wondered if protection would be necessary.

  “Is the colonel always this loud?”

  “Only when he drinks.”

  “And how often does he drink?”

  “Only when he is awake.”

  Rubio strode into the courtyard, but stopped short when he saw Grace.

  “Señora Knight…” He bent into a bow that looked likely to end nose-down on the tile mosaic. To Grace’s relief he hoisted himself vertical again. He was short and round and bald. He wore a uniform crusty with gold braid and brass buttons. His epaulets looked as big as the business ends of two push brooms. He had the air of a man with a high opinion of himself and a low opinion of everyone else.

  He beckoned to Captain Martín for a conference.

  “The colonel wants to know when breakfast will be served,” the captain said.

  Looking into Captain Martín’s dark eyes, the words “very delectable” showed up in Grace’s mind again. She elbowed them away.

  “I take breakfast in the courtyard at eight o’clock, if the colonel would care to join me.”

  “He says it will be his pleasure. And he wonders if the plums that grow in Cuernavaca’s orchards are available. He says his good friend, General Huerta, recommends the stewed plums you serve here.”

  “Yes, of course. And please ask the colonel to give my regards to General Huerta when next he speaks to him.”

  Huerta had billeted here last summer. At least, Grace thought, Colonel Rubio won’t be a patch on General Victoriano Huerta when it comes to a temper of the volcanic sort.

  Huerta looked like a bulldog wearing a monocle. He had always been polite to her, but some days Grace imagined she could see steam coming out of his ears and nostrils. The day President Madero called Huerta back to the capital Grace had celebrated with champagne.

  General Huerta had served during former president Porfirio Díaz’s regime, and President Madero retained him along with the rest of the federal army. Francisco Madero had come to the Colonial on several occasions. Grace admired him, but she could not understand why that genteel, intelligent little man had put his former enemy, Huerta, in charge of the military.

  Colonel Rubio bowed again with the exaggerated aplomb of the inebriated. “Entonces, hasta la mañanita, señora, y muy buenas noches.”

  “Buenas noches, Coronel.”

  “May I ask which room is the colonel’s, Señora Knight?” asked Captain Martín.

  “Upstairs, room twenty on the left at the far end of the corridor.”

  Colonel Rubio started unsteadily up the curved sweep of marble steps to the gallery overlooking all four sides of the courtyard. Captain Martín followed.

  On his way up, the colonel rapid-fired Spanish at the captain. The only word Grace recognized of it all was garrapata, louse. Rubio repeated it several times.

  Dear God, she thought, I pray the man is not infested.

  She did not notice the worried look on Captain Martín’s face when he glanced back over his shoulder. She did not notice his relief when he realized she hadn’t understood Rubio.

  Drawn by the ruckus, the Colonial’s day-manager, Lyda Austin, appeared. Her accent was distilled Texan. “I see Colonel Fatso found his way home. More’s the pity.”

  “Now, Lyda.”

  “Gracie, the man has eyes like cold gravy.”

  Lyda and Grace watched Captain Martín climb the stairs behind Rubio. He looked ready to stop the colonel’s momentum should he decide to topple backward.

  “I see you’ve met Captain Martín,” said Lyda.

  “We spoke briefly.”

  “I registered him this evening. He’ll be staying in the room next to Rubio’s.”

  Captain Federico Martín would be living here. Grace’s heart gave a desperate flutter, like a butterfly caught in a spider’s web.

  “He’s a charmer, he is,” said Lyda. “And you know what we say in Texas about charm.”

  “What do Texans say?”

  Only when Captain Martín’s muscular rear echelon had turned the corner at the top of the stairs did Lyda shift her gaze to Grace.

  “Charm is as obvious as a barn fire.” Lyda paused. “And Captain Federico Martín is a barn on fire with hay stacked to the rafters.”

  3

  Brat and Ugly

  Angela Sanchez ladled the beans onto a warm tortilla still bearing the imprints of her mother’s fingers. As she rolled it up and shoved it into her mouth like cane into a sugar press, her father beamed at her. Well, he didn’t exactly beam. He was a Spaniard. Pure Castilian, thin as a coach whip and twice as jovial. Beaming was foreign to him, but a spark of something like approval flickered in his obsidian eyes. The approval was not of Angela’s manners, but of her motives.

  “See how eager the child is to go to school. I told you she would like it once she became accustomed to it.”

  “I am not a child,” Angela mumbled around the tortilla and beans. “I am almost sixteen years old.” She was tall like her father, solidly built like her mother, and with a hauteur all her own.

  “Daughter, have respect,” Angela’s mother murmured in Nahuatl.

  Angela grabbed the satchel with her primer, slate, and lunch inside. She threw the satchel’s strap over one shoulder, and bolted past her.

  “
Feed the chickens before you go,” Don Miguel called after her.

  “Quin tepan, Tahtli. Later, Father.” Angela knew that answering in Nahuatl instead of Spanish annoyed him. Her mother and all the workers and servants on her family’s small hacienda spoke Nahuatl. She couldn’t help but be fluent in it, so annoying him was a bonus.

  This was late October but a warm breeze riffled her hair as she hurried down the long corridor. She waded through pools of early morning sunlight where the high arched openings framed the exuberance of the courtyard. Riots of bougainvillea vines and hibiscus bushes almost hid the big stone cistern there.

  Heavy beams and an iron crosspiece barred the oaken doors, but she went out through the small portal cut into one of them. She found her bay mare where the stable boy had left her. Like Angela, the mare was a talker. She was small, chunky, and restless as a rat, but with good bones and a fine lineage.

  Angela looped her satchel over the pommel and tugged on the cinch to make sure it was tight. She led the horse to the mounting block, pulled her long skirts up, and vaulted onto the mare’s back. With the hem of her dress riding above her scarred brown knees, she urged the mare into a canter under the canopy of eucalyptus trees lining the avenue to the house.

  When she came within sight of the nine men and the yoked mule teams she slowed to a walk. She didn’t want them to think she had been hurrying to catch up with them. At the sound of her mare’s hoofbeats they fell silent. Her father had always been fair and generous with his workers. He even sympathized with General Emiliano Zapata’s renewed rebellion, but men will be human. Angela suspected they had been arguing about how they would divide her father’s estate among themselves when Zapata forced President Madero to make good on his promises of land reform.

  Angela didn’t see what any of it had to do with her. The intrigues of Mexico City might as well take place on the moon for all the difference it made out here. She hiked her skirts higher and reined her mare alongside eighteen-year-old Antonio Perez.

  “Ujulé, Ugly,” she said in Nahuatl, “Is it true that God made the mule to give the Indian a rest?”

  “A mule like you gives no one rest, Chamaca, Brat.” Antonio replied in Spanish to make the point that Angela was his employer’s daughter and of a higher class, but he insulted her anyway. They had been doing it since they were children.

  “You are the tick in the mule’s ear.”

  “Bold talk from one no bigger than the flea on a tick’s butt.”

  All the workers except Antonio knew that Angela was infatuated with him; and everyone but Angela knew that Antonio had loved her since she was small. They also knew that nothing could ever come of it. A gentleman might take an Indian to wife, but the reverse did not happen. Ever. And even though Angela was half Indian, she was the patrón’s daughter.

  Arquímedes Guerra, the patriarch of the field crew, knew that. “We’re all made of the same clay,” he often said, “but a chamber pot can never be a vase. You, my child,” he told her, “are a vase.”

  Arquímedes was no relation, but Angela called him colli, grandfather. When she wanted advice or sympathy she went to him rather than her father.

  “Have you decided to go to school today, mi hija, my daughter?”

  Angela grinned. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll go.” She had been saying that for months. Don Manuel’s attempts to educate his daughter had been no more successful than his efforts to make a lady of her.

  “‘Para pendejo no se necesita maestro,’” Antonio observed. “‘To be a fool requires no teacher.’”

  One of the men added his centavo’s worth. “All a woman needs to know is how to cook beans, sew shirts, grow corn, and make babies.”

  There followed some discussion of the part about making babies. Antonio said he would rather stick a lighted firecracker in his pants than fall in love. Angela commented on how fortunate that was for the women of the world.

  Arquímedes smiled at them both. “Men and women are two locked boxes,” he said. “And in each one lies the key to open the other.”

  “There is no defense against love and a rash,” Antonio grumbled.

  Antonio led the mules onto the lane that followed the irrigation ditch to the cane fields. Before Arquímedes followed him, he put a hand on the mare’s neck and looked up at Angela.

  “You should listen to your father, mi hija. When Zapata’s revolution comes we will need educated people of good heart to make sure everything is as it should be.”

  Angela shrugged. “The revolution came and went.”

  “Do you see any changes because of it? Have we poor farmers received back the land the hacendados stole from us?”

  “No, but there’s nothing I can do about that, educated or not.” Angela reined her horse toward the river. “Ma xipatinemi.” She called over her shoulder. It was the Nauhuatl form of good-bye. It meant, “May you be well.”

  She tethered her mare to graze beyond the bare dirt surrounding the roots of a banyan tree. The tree was as big around as the hacienda’s blacksmith shop and its canopy spanned the river. Angela’s great, great, great grandfather had brought it from Spain as a seedling.

  In the 150 years since then it had sent down hundreds of aerial roots from its branches. They had reached the ground, taken hold, and thickened into trunks. As the trunks grew wider they crowded each other, forming a maze of nooks and crevices. As far back as Angela could remember the banyan had been her citadel, her kingdom, her refuge.

  She kicked off her shoes. She tugged her blouse over her head and untied the drawstring on her skirt. She dropped it around her ankles and stepped out of it. She draped her clothes over a bush, then she took a running start onto a jutting rock and leaped off. She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around her legs, and hit the river with a force that sent water up like a geyser.

  She snorted and spouted and splashed, then she walked out of the river, dripping. She retrieved the bundle she had hidden among the banyan’s roots. It contained the white cotton trousers, tunic, leather sandals, and wide-brimmed straw hat that all the farmers wore. She put them on and climbed the tree, finding footholds in the intricate fretwork of roots and branches.

  She walked out on the broad limb that gave the best view of the men in the cane field and settled down where it forked. She reclined with her back against the upper branch, her legs draped along the lower one. Through the years the birds had gotten used to her presence. Anoles and chameleons commuted across her and an iguana as long as her arm dozed like a tabby cat nearby.

  From here she could see Antonio guiding the plow. He had draped his shirt over the handle and Angela never tired of watching the glide of muscles in his bare back and arms. She wanted to tell him how she felt about him, but she was certain he would laugh at her.

  Her eyelids were beginning to droop like the iguana’s when the squad of soldiers galloped across the field. Their horses’ hooves sent dirt flying from the newly plowed furrows. They herded the workers into a line along an old ditch, dry except for mud in the bottom.

  Dread hardened into a canker in Angela’s chest. Most of her father’s men fell on their knees, but Antonio and Arquímedes remained on their feet. They were the first ones shot. Angela bit down on her knuckles to keep from screaming when the two of them pitched into the ditch.

  The soldiers emptied their rifles into the rest, then dismounted to make sure they were dead before they kicked the bodies over the edge. They reined their horses around, and driving the mules ahead of them, they headed in a cloud of dust for the hacienda. Soon strands of vultures began weaving a wreath over the ditch.

  Not until the sun was hovering above the horizon did Angela come down from the tree. As if to delay doing what she had to, she folded her skirt and blouse and put them and her shoes into her satchel. She rolled up her pants legs so they wouldn’t get soaked with blood. She picked up the biggest stick she could find to beat off the vultures, and led the mare to the ditch.

  The bodies sprawled in heaps ab
ove the muddy water. Somewhere under them lay Antonio and Arquímedes. Angela crossed herself before she slid down the steep sides of the trench. Flies, crows, and buzzards rose in a raucous black cloud when she hit the bottom. Ignoring the thunder claps of their wings, Angela grasped arms and feet and started hauling the corpses off the pile.

  When three of them proved too heavy for her, she took the rope used to dislodge tree stumps and tied it to an ankle. She climbed up the embankment, looped the other end around the saddle pommel, and led the mare along the rim, dragging the body away. She repeated the operation for the second and third.

  She uncovered Arquímedes lying face up in the shallow water. His lightless eyes stared at heaven. She knew he was dead, but she knelt next to him and put her ear to his heart anyway. He groaned.

  “¡Ay, Dios!” She jumped back and realized that Arquímedes had not made the sound. Antonio had.

  “Dream with the angels, colli.” Angela made the sign of the cross over Arquímedes and rolled him away. Antonio lay on his side underneath, his body almost hidden by black sludge. His head was cradled on his arm as if asleep on his reed mat at home. It kept his nose barely above water.

  Angela sat in the mud, lifted his head into her lap, put her arms around him, and sobbed. She was making God extravagant promises in exchange for Antonio’s survival when he opened his eyes.

  “Where did the bullet go in, Ugly?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Brat.”

  “Where do you hurt?”

  “Everywhere. What about the others?”

  “They are with God.”

  “The old man, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “The devil take the sons of whores.”

  “Why did they do it?”

  “They wanted us to tell them where the men went.”

  “The ones who ran into the hills to join Zapata?”

  “Yes. We told the sons of bitches to look in hell.” He stared up at her face, covered with mud and blood. “Angelita, you are the most beautiful woman in the world.” His eyes closed.