Under the Skin (11 page)

minutes before the pain became excruciating. He was offered the
command of a regional rurales headquarters but he disdained desk
jobs and instead chose to retire. Though the decision delighted his
wife and children, it was a difficult one, for he had been in the rurales
since the age of sixteen, when he had turned his back on his father’s
patrimony—a hacienda and vast cattle ranch in Zacatecas state—and
enlisted in the national police.

On the day of his retirement he was received in the National
Palace by Don Porfirio himself, who presented him with an unexpected prize—the title to La Hacienda de Las Cadenas, an estate
which until recently had belonged to a political rival of the Porfiriato. The president slid the ornately embossed paper across the polished desktop and told Comandante Calveras to consider it a spoil of
war, the sweetest of life’s possessions. But a man with title to a hacienda, Don Porfirio said, should of course have the means to maintain the place, and so he also awarded the comandante a trunk filled
with silver specie, a prize of such weight that it required three strong
men to load it onto the transport wagon. Comandante Calveras had
by then already amassed a considerable sum of money by means of the
rurales’ right to confiscate the assets of fugitives and of killed or convicted criminals—a sum which, together with el presidente’s cash
award, now amounted to a small fortune.

But eight months after Don César’s retirement, there came the
Revolution—and before another year passed, Porfirio Díaz was exiled
in Paris, never to return.

The memory of the Revolution taints Don César’s tongue with the
taste of blood. The name of “Revolution” was entirely undeserved by
that lunatic decade of national riot and rampage by misbegotten Indian brutes and primitive bastard half-castes. The shit-blooded
whoresons had razed his father’s hacienda and crucified the man on
the front door of the casa grande before setting the house aflame. A
few months afterward they murdered Don César’s own family as well.

By means of an exorbitant bribe, Don César had secured passage for
his wife and three children (his angelic trio of blond daughters!)
aboard a federal troop-and-munitions train bound for Juárez, from
where his beloveds were to cross the river to refuge in El Paso. But
just south of Samalayuca, a bare forty miles from the border, the track
under the train was dynamited.

The handful of survivors told of the slew and crash and tumble of
the railcars one upon the other, the hellish screams, the great screeching and sparkings of iron, the explosions of the munitions that the
rebels had desired for themselves but in their incompetence destroyed
along with the train. (“Viva Villa!” they shouted—“Viva Villa!”—
even as they looted the wreckage and the dead and robbed the survivors.) Don César had traveled to Samalayuca and was able to
identify his daughters’ remains by their diminutive forms and take
them back for burial at Las Cadenas, but his wife was unrecognizable
among the array of charred and mutilated corpses and she was interred with the others in a mass grave.

In the years to follow he had endured the loss of his family as he
endured the abuses and indignations of one raiding pack of mongrels
after another, each calling itself an army of the Revolution and each
claiming the sanctioning ideal of liberty—a word not one in every
hundred of them owned the literacy to recognize in print. He had
withstood the sudden emptiness in his life as he had withstood the
degradations to his estate, his great house, his fields, his person, the
spit in his face, the ridicule of his crippled leg. He endured their insults, their laughter, the ceaseless threats to shoot him, hang him,
quarter him, burn him alive, endured it all with indifference. How
could their threats of death make him afraid? Only a man with desire
to live could be made afraid of death.

But one of them had perceived the truth of his lack of fear—the
leader of one of the first gangs of invaders to arrive at Las Cadenas,
the one they called El Carnicero and whose revolver muzzle had

pressed to Don César’s forehead as the man asked if he had a last word.
A large man whom he would hear described by some as handsome in
spite of his dusky mestizo hide, his face hard but smooth-featured, his
eyes black as open graves and untouched by his mustached smile.
Don César stared hard into those eyes and waited for the blast to end
his misery. But then the brute laughed and took the gun from his
head.

You’re not afraid, the man said. You’re only miserable. You
want
to die, don’t you, patrón? Why is that, I wonder.
The man put a hand on Don César’s shoulder and leaned close to
him in the fashion of a commiserating intimate. They tell me you
were a comandante of rurales, patrón. Is that how your leg came to be
maimed? Ay, what a hard life that must have been, the rurales. Tell
me, patrón, has life been
cruel
to you? Have you been robbed of your
possessions, of your comforts? Have you lost
loved ones
? Does your fine
hidalgo mind hold memories too horrible to bear? Ay, don’t tell me,
patrón... have you suffered
injustice
?
Some among the mob of onlooking peons snickered and some
laughed outright and some called out to El Carnicero to shoot the
gachupín son of a bitch. They who an hour before would have cowered in Don César’s presence, who would have obeyed his every command without hesitation and were ever in fear of displeasing him,
they now laughed at him oh so bravely. How they had hastened to
show their whip and branding scars—as if they hadn’t deserved
them!—to this murderer, this notorious executioner and infamous
right hand of Pancho Villa the bandit, Villa the mad dog, the king of
all half-caste whoresons. Yet some few of the spectators wept in their
witness of Don César’s ordeal.
Yes, you have suffered much, patrón, El Carnicero said, holstering
the revolver. He slid his hand behind Don César’s neck and held him
gently and smiled at him. Then the hand clamped tight and Don
César saw but an instant’s gleam of the knife before all in a single mo

Don César screamed and clapped a hand to the emptied socket and
flexed into a half-crouch of agony, biting his lip hard against further
outcry. His remaining eye saw blood pocking the dust at his feet and
staining his boots. Some in the mob laughed, some cried out, some
blessed themselves and turned away.

El Carnicero grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up to
face him. He had the bloody eye in his palm and held it for Don César
to see. This thing, the man said, bobbing his palm as if assaying the
worth of what it contained, has always been blind to justice, to the
truth. He dropped the eye to the ground and made Don César look
down at it and then ground it under his bootheel.

Maybe the other eye will now serve you better, El Carnicero said.
If it does not, I will come back and remove it too.
He told the mob not to kill Don César, that killing would be too
swift a punishment and kinder than he deserved. Then he wished
Don César a long remaining life full of unpleasant memories and rode
away with his gang of devils.
Still more thieves and scavengers fell upon the hacienda over the
following years. Sometimes they came almost on each other’s heels,
sometimes there were no raiders for months, but always they had
come, pack after pack, each finding less remaining to pillage on Las
Cadenas. But each had heard the story of how the patrón—the former
rurales comandante—had come to wear the eyepatch. They had all
heard of El Carnicero and knew better than to kill a man he had
deigned to leave alive. What if the Butcher should come back to
pleasure himself further with this gachupín once more and learn that
someone had killed him? What if he should learn who had done it?
And so Don César lived and endured. It might be that the man
who cut out his eye never knew that he had protected the patrón of
Las Cadenas from other rebel bands, or that he had given Don César

a reason to live. Don César withstood the remaining years of the
Revolution in anticipation of the deaths of his tormentors—and of
rebuilding the hacienda as best he could, if for no other purpose
than to show that it could not be destroyed by such rabble as his
tormentors.

Two years after the loss of his eye, he received word of El Carnicero’s death. The man had drowned in a horseback crossing of a lake
in northern Chihuahua. Don César sang at the news, he did a little
dance. But his celebrant joy was checked by the knowledge that Pancho Villa—the man who had unloosed El Carnicero on Mexican civilization—was yet alive. And the bastard managed to stay alive all
through the Revolution. In 1920, when the government made its
separate peace with Villa and granted him a hacienda, Don César’s
rage was apoplectic. Then three years later came the news of Villa’s
assassination by persons unknown—and Don César declared a threeday fiesta to commemorate the grand occasion.

Every year since then, he had made an annual hundred-mile trip
to Hidalgo de Parral, the town where Villa had been killed and was
buried, and there Don César had pissed on the monster’s grave. Three
years after Villa’s death, unknown persons broke into his tomb and
made away with his head, and Don César had been torn in his emotions—elated by the desecration to Villa’s remains, but dismayed not
to have thought to commit the act himself. He fancied he would have
used the skull as a dish to feed his dog. The headless cadaver had been
reburied and the grave fortified, but even a concrete grave can be
pissed upon, and so Don César continued to make his yearly visits to
Parral.

The Revolution had reduced the breadth of his patronage and
robbed the estate of an opulence it would never recover—not to speak
of the caches of money the bastards had rooted out. Yet the hacienda
had survived. Unlike his father’s estate, whose ownership had been
usurped by a decree of the revolutionary government, Las Cadenas re

mained Don César’s property by prevailing legal title. The casa
grande stood intact, and most of its outbuildings. Nor had all of Don
César’s hidden strongboxes been discovered.

For all their plundering, the savages had been unable to thieve the
beauty of the land nor drive away all of the hacienda’s peon population, who after all had nowhere else to go. Even many of those who
had fled the estate during the years of greatest violence had begun to
come back to Las Cadenas’ guardian walls, their hats in their hands,
to ask Don César if they might serve him as before. And he had taken
them back. And if some among them had returned with errant notions that the strict discipline of Las Cadenas had been ameliorated by
the riot called the Revolution, well, his whips and branding irons
were at hand to prove them wrong, and he again made routine use of
those instruments of moral and political instruction. Occasionally he
invented punishment on the moment, as when he unleashed one of
his hunting dogs on a twelve-year-old boy who had flung a pebble at
the beast for barking at him. The boy’s face was horribly disfigured
and his left arm forever crippled, and well into his adulthood mothers would point him out to their children as an example of the consequence of transgression against Don César, or El Comandante, as he
was commonly known among the peons.

His surviving gold and silver amounted to a fraction of his former
wealth but it was sumptuous in comparison with what remained to
so many of his caste. Many had seen their great houses reduced to
rubble, their estates razed to charred earth. Many had lost every peso.
Many had lost their lives. With his remnant money Don César was
able to restore Las Cadenas to a semblance of its former splendor. He
repaired the casa grande, re-tiled its roofs, re-landscaped its patios, refurbished its rooms. He put his peons to work on the estate’s damaged earth until portions of the fields again began to produce maize.
He acquired some few horses of passable worth and the herd slowly
grew to respectable size.

But without his family to inhabit it, the casa grande, for all its revived beauty, was like an empty husk, and his sense of isolation increased over the years. His sleep was ever fitful, visited nightly by
frightful dreams. He was consumed by horrid spells of melancholy.
His loneliness swelled to smothering size. Vaguely insidious yearnings stirred in him like a nest of vipers. He of course had his pick of
the prettiest mestizo girls on the estate, but their gratifications were
strictly of the flesh and left him in progressively greater despond for
reasons he could not name. His heart itself felt like a house abandoned, a dwelling for none but creatures of the dark.

And then one day of the preceding summer, when he was on the
Gulf Coast on business, he caught sight of the girl for the first time.
He saw her as she dashed across the beach road, the blue skirt of
her school uniform swirling around her brown legs. He could not
take his eyes off her as she strode down the streets of the city, a straw
bag over her shoulder, her black hair wet from her swim and swinging to her hips. Men turned and stared as she passed them by.
Don César directed his driver to follow her. She made her way deep
into an increasingly squalid neighborhood of stinks and strident
voices and at last entered a courtyard containing two tiers of hovels.
She vanished through the doorway of one on the lower floor.
He ordered his men to make discreet but thorough inquiries. By
the following evening he knew that she was sixteen years old and
lived in that dismal place with her mother and father and was their
only surviving child. The father was a street cleaner for the city and
given to drink, the mother did seamstress work at home and was herself drunk every night. The couple frequently and violently quarreled, common behavior in that shabby barrio. They were the girl’s
only living kin. She’d had an uncle, a fisherman, whom she had
clearly favored over her parents, but he had drowned in the gulf the
year before. Despite her family’s poverty, she was enrolled in an excellent Catholic academy, attending on a scholarship she had won at