Borderlands (3 page)

So do all outsiders feel.

So do many of the characters in these stories feel.

RUNAWAY HORSES

“
Our passions are ourselves
.”

–
ANATOLE FRANCE

From the bars of my high window I can see the shimmer of the Río Zanjón through the trees, and beyond them the dark Sierras de San Antonio. The mountains are especially beautiful under a full moon, even though on those nights a crowd always comes out from town and gathers by the iron-barred front gate to be entertained by our howling. I have heard their raucous laughter, their mock howls and drunken derisions. I have imagined their bright faces and delirious exultation not to be among us. Usually, however, on those evenings of the full moon I am oblivious to their echoing caterwauls because I am howling with the other inmates, and when I howl, I am aware of nothing but the brute events that brought me here.

At first I was permitted to visit the gardens behind the main building twice a week, like most of the others. But before I’d been here a month I attacked another inmate. We tumbled into a rose bed, snarling and grappling in the dirt. I got my hands hard on his throat and his eyes bulged like red plums. I would certainly have killed him if the guards had not rushed up and clubbed me insensible. When the warden pressed me for an explanation, I told him the fellow had been singing about a woman named Delgadina, which was the name of my wife.

“But señor,” he said, “there must be
hundreds
of women called Delgadina. Why do you believe he was singing about your wife?”

Bastard. Addressing me as “señor” rather than “don.” I knew all about him. He came from a family of sucklings to the viceroy—bureaucrats, administrators, a line of glorified
clerks
. My family had been the better of his by leagues since long before the founding of New Spain.
We
had come wearing armor—not, like his people, lace and rose-water. Now this smiling, bloated pig sat reveling in the circumstance that put him in official authority over me.

“That
isn’t
what I believe,” I said. “And if
you
say her name again, I will tear out your tongue.”

I have not been allowed from my cell since.

I do have periods of lucidity—this moment is proof of that. Sometimes they last for days, but I have yet to pass a week without relapsing into … what shall we call it … my spectacular dementia. I’ve been told quite explicitly what I look like in the throes of my lunatic fits. I tear out my hair—what’s left of it. I slaver like a sunstruck dog. My eyes roll up in my head. I beat my fists on the heavy wooden door, on the stones of the walls and the floor. I howl for hours. In this place of iron and shadows and sweating stone, I become the madman of theatre. I lack only the rattling chains, but I expect they’ll come soon enough.

My howling has rent my voice to a croak which some of my keepers find amusing. My battered hands often look like spoiled meat. They brought a mirror to me last week, thinking, I suppose, the shock might do me good. I saw eyes like firepits, a beard gone wild, facial bones jutting sharply against skin the color of lemonwater. I roared and smashed the glass, and the officious fools bolted from the room like spooked mares. If I were given to religion, or to self-pity, or—worst of all—to the sentiments of Romance, I might say that I have come to know hell. But such talk is the idiom of fools, the self-pitying locution of stage plays and poetry, and I will no more indulge in it myself than I will endure it in others.

Forgive me: I tend to ramble in these periods of respite from the dementia. Insanity of this sort is more than mental torture, it is abject humiliation. How I envy the steadfastly insane all around me. They are spared such recurrent seizures of sanity as I must bear, spared these periodic realizations of where we are, and why.

Suicide? Bah! Some choose it, of course. Not a month goes by without at least one wretch found hanging in his cell or drowned in one of the garden ponds. Cowards, all of them! Suicide is contemptible, the final refuge of the true poltroon. (Like Rojas, that bastard slyboots!) But not I. I will not kill myself, not ever. I am insane, but I am no coward.

Again, I beg your pardon. I not only ramble like a fool, I shame myself with gross discourtesy. My name is Don Sebastián Cabrillo Mayor Cortés y Mendoza. I am patrón of the Hacienda de la Luna Plata. My family has owned this region of Sonora since Coronado marched through it on his way to search for the Seven Cities of Gold. The first of my New World ancestors, Don Marcos Cabrillo, was a lieutenant in Coronado’s expedition. He lost a foot in a battle with Yaqui Indians and was left behind when the column moved on. With a following of four other maimed soldiers and a handful of converted indigenes, he laid claim to all the land visible from the bloodstained mesa where he had been crippled. He named his portion of the earth after the region’s dazzling silver moon—La Luna Plata—and over the next three and a half centuries the hacienda expanded to more than a hundred square miles. It took sharp steel to conquer this country of cactus and rock, and an iron will to rule it. It took hardness—as each generation of Cabrillo men was taught by the one before it. As my father taught me. “Hardness,” he told me repeatedly through my youth, “is
everything
.”

By the time my father became patrón of La Luna Plata, his authority, like that of hacendados everywhere, was enforced not only by his own pistoleros but also by the powerful Guardia Rural, the national mounted police. Since the rurales’ wise creation by our esteemed president, Porfirio Díaz, bandits no longer pillage the countryside so freely as they once did, and reports of peon insurrections are now quite rare. Like Don Porfirio himself, the rurales well understand the efficacy of hardness. They are authorized to make arrests on their own suspicions, incarcerate suspects indefinitely, interrogate by any means necessary to encourage the truth, and confiscate a suspect’s property as legal recompense to the state. And under the provision of the Law of Flight, they may legally shoot dead any man who attempts to escape their custody. Thus does that highly efficient police force often spare the state the cost and inconvenience of extending judicial formalities to those undeserving of them.

Malefactors on La Luna Plata have always received swift punishment—the branding iron, the lash, or the noose, depending on the severity of the offense. My father was renown for tailoring the penalty to the transgression. As a descendant of devout apostles of the Inquisition, he owned an imagination well-suited to the invention of punishments. There was, for example, the arrogant mestizo foreman who set his mastiff bitch onto a group of Indian children for no reason but sport. My father sentenced him to kill the animal, skin it, and hang the carcass from a tree in the main plaza for a week. He then had to eat the dog’s hindquarters, raw and rotten, with the villagers looking on. He also had to forfeit half-a-month’s pay to each of the families of the children his dog had savaged.

There was a band of drunkards whose loud cursings in the street disturbed the village mass every evening until the priest complained of it to my father, who had the men arrested and sentenced each one to receive a live coal in his mouth. He ordered a rapist to be conveyed to a pigsty, there castrated, and made to watch the swine consume his severed parts before he was hanged. He permitted the father and brother of a young woman who had been beaten to death by her bad-tempered husband to take the killer into the desert and do with him as they thought proper. Among other things, they flayed his skull, and on their return to the ranch they nailed the entire headskin to the crosspiece over the corral gate, where it was shortly devoured by birds and ants. After a few days, only the scalp remained, and it stayed up there for months, a withered testament to the hard certainty of Luna Plata justice.

I was my father’s son in every way—educated by the Jesuit fathers, skilled in the arts of weaponry, easy in the saddle. I was confident in command of men, versed in the social graces, and wholly comfortable with my privilege. And I was guarded in my passions, or so I believed.

On the matter of women my father was as adamant as on all else in life. I was still a boy when I discovered he kept a rawhide quirt on his bedroom wall, and I intuitively perceived how my mother came to bear the small dark scar on her wrist which she tried to conceal under lace-cuffed sleeves. I do not presume to judge my father on that point, though I have dwelt upon it.

Understand: I loved my mother. She was a lovely woman of grace, refinement, and generous spirit. Yet who but my father can know what she was like as a wife? Whatever he felt in their most intimate moments, whatever urges she inflamed in his soul, whatever image of her he carried in his heart—such were the things he surely had in mind when he warned me of the perils of passionate love. In my boyhood he encouraged me to indulge my young appetite for women as freely as I wished. His own casual indulgences had produced a scattering of blue-eyed mestizos among the peons of La Luna Plata. “Enjoy your lust,” he advised me, “but beware of love. It is the most perilous of the passions.”

A few days before my wedding, as we took brandy in his study, he advised me once again. He had arranged the marriage when Delgadina Fernández Ordóñez was but six years old. “She was an awkward, bony child,” my father told me with a smile. “Legs as spindly and knobby as sugarcanes, eyes like a baby owl’s. Your luck is pure gold, Sebastián. Who would have thought she’d bloom into a rose of Castile?”

It was indeed a matter of luck—a bartered bride’s beauty, or her lack of it, is of no significance in these arrangements. My father’s sole concern, of course—the only concern of any don seeking a bride for his son—was to secure some sort of economic or political gain for our family. My union with Delgadina would increase both the expanse of our land and the strength of our political influence in Hermosillo, the capital, where her father, Don Antonio, had powerful connections. “Your dowry,” my father said proudly, “is the most admirable I’ve heard of since my own.”

He paused to light a cigar and regarded me over the flame. “I am told,” he said, “that she is spirited and quick of wit. Somewhat saucy. Occasionally even impertinent. Such qualities in any woman can be amusing, sometimes charming. It is natural to desire a beautiful woman, but if she also possesses charm and a proper wit, well, then love is certainly possible.”

He stood at the window and stared for a long moment at the distant San Antonios. “But listen, my son,” he said with sudden gravity. “Of all the misfortunes a man might meet in life, none is more terrible than to become subservient to a woman. That is a perversion of the natural order. Yet it can happen when a man loves a woman with more passion than he can control. Passion is like a powerful stallion champing at its bit. We must keep a tight rein or risk losing control of the beast. A man on a runaway horse, Sebastián, is both a dangerous fool and an object of ridicule, a thing of scorn in every man’s eyes—and to all women. Such a man’s own wife will look on him with contempt. If she is a worthy woman, she will curse the day fate married her to a weak, unworthy man.”

He had leaned closer to me as he spoke and now was gripping my forearm hard. “Passion, Sebastián, is like fine brandy—a joy, a great pleasure to the man who knows how to drink. But it is an infernal cruse to the fool who gulps without restraint. This you
must
remember.”

He was suddenly aware of his own intensity and stepped back, smiling awkwardly, and then busied himself refilling our cups. Without looking at me, he said, “Never give her reason to question even in her own mind who is master and who is maid.”

I respected my father above all men, but I was not as guarded as he, as suspicious, as—let us speak bluntly—as
fearful
of the heart’s strong passions. I had the arrogant confidence of youth. Unlike him, I was absolutely sure of my self-control, utterly confident that my love for Delgadina would never prove a weakness. Indeed, even as he counseled me in his study, he did not know that I was already in love with my bride-to-be. I had been since the first time I’d seen her, a little more than two years before, when she was yet fourteen and I five years older.

It was at my cousin Marco’s wedding reception. I was in the main patio with another cousin, Roberto Luis, a handsome but salacious fellow who would be killed in a duel a year later in consequence of publicly insulting the daughter of a don. He asked if I knew that my betrothed was in attendance, and then laughed at my look of surprise. “Over there,” he said, pointing to a group of girls standing in the shade of a willow at the far end of the patio, protected from male encroachment by a clutch of sharp-faced dueñas. “The sleek thing in the green dress. You lucky prick! A little skinny, maybe, but look at the melons on her!”

She was laughing with the others at some amusement, then turned in a sudden swirl of copper hair and caught me staring at her across the crowd. She smiled boldly and held my gaze—and I felt the breath sucked out of my heart. One of the crones spotted the look between us, and in the next instant the dueñas hastily herded them all into a side patio and out of sight.