The Hummingbird's Daughter (29 page)

The girls gawked at trolley cars. They walked through the shadows of the great cathedral on the main square. Late in the night, they sat on a bank in Xochimilco and soaked their feet in the ancient waterways of the Aztecs.

Twenty years later, though neither Gabriela Cantúa nor Josefina Félix had ever been to Mexico City, they’d have no trouble pointing out their various wanderings on a map.

Thirty-two

SEÑOR CANTÚA WAS, like many restaurateurs, a philosopher. He was well aware of the fact that one could not stand in the way of destiny. Who knew the secrets of the heart, or the secrets of history, or the secrets of God’s will? The truth was that Cantúa was tired of the Alamos road, tired of the stinking wanderers and the dreaded Rurales who ate his goat-meat tacos. He was tired of worrying about Gabriela. He had several other children back home, near the coast, and a wife he never saw because that seaside city was safer than these terrible haunted places where he had sought his fortune. And now Tomás Urrea was offering a kind of liberation. Gabriela was, after all, nearly an old maid!

Certainly, Cantúa figured, Señor Urrea would offer a fair bride price. Enough, perhaps, to open the restaurant in Guaymas that he really wanted to run. Open windows letting in a fresh sea breeze. Tuna, shrimp, oysters, and beer. One daughter happy on a hacienda—a Cantúa running a hacienda! And five or six children and a wife, happy on the beach. Everybody rich!

Who was he to stand in the way of miracles when they came unbidden out of the sky?

He took up a pencil and sharpened it with a steak knife.

My Dear and Esteemed, Many Times Blessed by Our Merciful Lord, Noble and Courageous Leader and Shining Example to Our People, Don Tomás,

You at once honor and alarm me with your heartfelt testament of love.

We must meet like real men and discuss the fate of my daughter, Gabriela. No riches can ever equal her value to me! No price could ever meet her true worth!

However, we could speak of arrangements that, although never even reaching one small percentage of her eternal grace and Godly golden value, would have to be generous. Of course you agree! Anything less than a small fortune would be an insult to my Dear Angel! I only think of her suffering mother and her own peace of mind. Knowing of your kindness toward myself and my beloved bride and my dear, dear children, how can Gabriela feel anything less than truly loved? Loved and valued! By you, my dear Don Tomás! Gracias a Dios y Viva México!

Your humble servant and            

Fellow Father,                            

Señor Cantúa (of the restaurant)

(Father of Gabriela)                    

P.S. One look in her luminescent eyes, my friend, and you will swoon as if you had tasted the ambrosial liquors of Heaven. You will forsake all other loves for my Gaby, Don Tomás. Of this I can assure you.

When Tomás finished reading this letter, he called Huila in and read it to her.

“What is he doing,” Huila asked, “selling a horse?”

As a token of his respect, Tomás sent Segundo and the Parangarícutirimícuaro beekeeper in a wagon with a fresh side of beef, a barrel of soap, a crate of candles, tequila in clay jugs, and a bag of gold coins to cover any expenses Cantúa might meet in the celebratory weeks to follow.

“Ah cabrón!” Cantúa laughed, clapping his hands. “Ah cabrón!”

Gaby mounted the wagon to Cabora, never thinking she would stay. But one night with Teresita led to a second night, then a third, then Tomás offered her her own bedroom. And suddenly, there she was.

After a week, it seemed to Tomás as if Gabriela had always been there. They finally, secretly, made love. It seemed that her smell had always been on his fingers, her tart berry smell, and her long hairs had always been on his pillowcase, and her flavor on his lips.

They all knew something had to happen, but they didn’t know what it would be. No one knew the hour, or the nature, of Loreto’s wrath, though they all suspected that, sooner or later, she would explode. They had all felt it building over the months since her catastrophic raid on the ranch, and now, with this final outrage, Tomás had lit a fatal fuse.

Huila was first to see the buggy coming down the road.

The servants, not wanting to observe this development, rushed into the house. Aguirre was gone again, on some journey into the north, or he would have affixed his spectacles to his nose and studied the scene. Dogs slunk under the benches in the courtyard, though she was still a mile away.

They watched the black carriage come across the plain. It was speeding like a mad crow, coming at them in a wedge of dust. All of them knew, without knowing, that Loreto was holding the reins. Her rage flew high above the carriage like a great wind.

Tomás, with his arm around Gabriela’s shoulders, stood before the great house and stared. Segundo moseyed away, back to the rendering plant. He preferred the stench of melting cattle to the wrath of Loreto. And Huila, older now than she had ever dreamed, leaning on a cane that would in a year become a crutch, sat in the shade of the plum tree on a yellow bench festooned with blue hummingbirds—a gift from Señor Cantúa.

“Ay, ay, ay,” she mourned, digging in the dirt between flagstones with her cane. Though she couldn’t keep a grin from her face, she lamented. “Mira qué cosas.”

She shook her head.

She had always, of course, assumed that men were idiots. Tomás was chief among the pendejos. Their foolishness had amused her since the beginning of time. But suddenly she understood that women were idiots, too. That all people under the sun were fools. Wasting lives. Sniffing up each other’s legs like dogs, scurrying around in circles while their days bled away. All life, she had been taught, was a dream—the flesh is the sleep of the soul. She liked Tomás, and she liked Loreto, and the new one, Gabriela, was sweet as honey on the tongue. But, if this was the dream, she couldn’t wait to awaken.

Teresita, a little afraid of Loreto’s coming, hung back, away from them all, and watched the small black vehicle bounce and shimmy as it came forward. She saw the dark rainbows in the air above it. She thought she caught Huila’s eye from a distance. It looked as if Huila was laughing. It was a new laugh, bitter as burned coffee.

Gabriela was ashamed, but strong. She loved Tomás, and he loved her, and there was nothing one could do when love came. It was fast, and it was strong, and if it were not good, then surely God would not have allowed it such power. The power of her love made her giddy—Tomás spoke things to her that would make any woman swoon. “You talk so pretty,” she had gasped one night, and for some reason, this had delighted him. He suckled at her like an infant, crooning poems, songs, speeches to her. Anything, anything, she would hear anything from his lips. Book chapters or newspaper reports, Bible passages—it was all music to her. His refined accent, his big words, words she did not even know. His awe when she dropped her dress—the way he studied her belly, the down near her navel, and the way he held her breasts to his lips, and the way he traced her spine, sighing as he did it, as if he had never been in the presence of something so holy. It made her laugh, and it made her weep. And the burning sensations he brought to her body, the clenching in her stomach and the explosion of lightning in her flesh, as if the darkness within her were laughing and screaming, her skin and organs yelling, this too made her weep. “Oh my love, my love,” she cried into his shoulder, as if she could not contain a sorrow so deep it was joy instead, “I never thought I would feel these things. Es un milagro! Es tremendo este amor!”

And after loving, they slept entwined. He wrapped his long arms and legs around her, his fist clenched in her wild hair, his face buried there and smelling her as he dreamed. Before dawn, they awoke making love. He was already inside her, moving slowly, and neither of them even awake. And when he awoke, he too wept.

She had only been living at the ranch for a few weeks, but it was already hers. She had won it. She saw it in his face. In his smile. In his laughter. In the grimace of delight when he was atop her. Their love was destiny. She stood tall. She was ready to face whatever horror came. For her home. For her man.

Rattling, wheels spitting wedges of rock, the black carriage skidded sideways and rocked. The two horses foamed at the mouth, their lashed sides gleaming with sweat.

“Bastard!” Loreto cried, her voice echoing all across the startled landscape, cowboys and cows, mockingbirds and horses, children and dogs astounded by this outburst. Her hair was a tangle, an explosion around her head. Her skirts were hiked up, revealing her white legs.

Huila hit the ground three times with her cane, as if applauding.

Loreto’s arm rose. The whip snapped.

“What have you done to me,” she demanded.

Tomás held his hands out before him.

“What have you done to me!”

Her finger uncurled and pointed at Gabriela.

“Is this the one?” she said.

Tomás stood tall again and said, “Mi amor —”

“Don’t you talk to me like that!”
Loreto shouted. “Not in front of her!”

The cowboys were starting to laugh behind their hands. To the men, this was more amusing than shooting coyotes, or seeing a bareback rider bucked off. Millán, the former miner from Rosario, grabbed his crotch and squeezed it. “Bitch,” he said to his companions. They moved away from him. Millán made them nervous.

Tomás knew he needed to take command of the scene, or he would be no man in the eyes of his cowboys.

“I am the patrón!” he bellowed. “I do what I please!”

He gestured wildly as he declaimed. “Yo soy el que manda aquí!”

“You give commands, do you?” she answered. “Did you order this tramp into your bed?”

He yelled. And she yelled back at him, and he yelled back at her: accusations and recriminations fouled the air. He was no man; she was less than a woman. And she was no wife; he was never a true husband. If she had been a wife—then there would have been no need for Gabriela. If he had been a husband, a man of any kind whatsoever, she wouldn’t have turned away from him. They danced like this with everyone watching until the whip flew again and he caught it, wrenched it from her hands, and threw it to the ground.

The watchers were astonished.

“You,” he said. “Get off my land.”

“Tomás . . .”

“Get off my land now. Go away. Don’t ever come back.”

The People were aghast. They would tell this over and over, at supper, over their morning coffee, in the fields, in bed: the patrón ran Doña Loreto off the ranch. He banished her from Cabora. He didn’t care what the Church said. If he saw her at Cabora ever again, he would divorce her. He was macho, after all. He was todo un hombre, they said, with a certain respect he had not earned before. It would have been better, the men said, if he had struck her. The women said nothing.