Aztec Rage (24 page)

Raquel's own mother was indifferent to literature but loved music and bequeathed that sensibility to her daughter. A wounded soul, her mother had endured life's vicissitudes with failing health and a weakening will, a tragic fate Raquel was hell-bent to avoid.

Her father's interests, on the other hand, were bolder, more energetic. Loving all forms of the arts—literature, music, painting, and philosophy—he had possessed the finest private library in Guanajuato, an asset that had not served him well when the Inquisition knocked on his door, charging that he was a secret Jew.

An only child, she had joined in her father's intellectual pursuits despite the social convention that women lacked the intellect for serious learning. Recognizing that a woman like Doña Josefa—with her intelligence, erudition, and social status—would exert a positive influence on his daughter, her father encouraged their friendship and asked her to godmother his child. Although Raquel was a mestiza Doña Josefa insisted that Raquel be widely read and demanded a determining role in educating Raquel. Raquel's father acceded to all of the doña's demands.

But that world was gone. The father Raquel adored had been carried home on a door, passing from their lives with merciful quickness. God had
not been so kind to her mother. A fragile woman, she had suffered unbearably when her husband died amidst disgrace, suspicion, and tragedy. After his death, her mind and body succumbed as well. She had passed away a month ago. Until her passing, Raquel had cared for her and struggled with the creditors to save something of her inheritance.

The financial struggle was mostly lost, and she was alone in life. Her friends assumed she would enter a convent, the only path available to women who lacked a man's protection and support. A woman could avail herself of no other opportunities except to function as a wife, a whore, or a servant. The convent offered protection, both financial and physical, sheltering many women plagued by an impecunious dowry.

Had Raquel sought the church's protection, she would not have felt alone. She would have followed the path of the historical figure she admired most, a poetess who had died over a hundred years before: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Sor Juana, “Sister Juana,” entered the convent not for spiritual solace but for study and contemplation, the kind of life only a convent could provide her. Sor Juana's exact birth date was not clear (probably around 1648), though at birth she was unquestionably a “daughter of the church,” meaning illegitimate, a bastarda.

Sor Juana had been an intellectual prodigy, composing a loa, a brief dramatic poem, at the age of eight. While other girls applied themselves to pleasing men, Sor Juana pleaded with her mother to disguise her as a boy so she could attend a university. Denied an education because of her sex, her grandfather provided the bulk of her instruction.

Despite her beauty, intelligence, and compelling personality, her low birth and her poetic aspirations held her back. Only life in the convent allowed her to write poetry and plays, experiment with science, and develop a large library. When a bishop restricted her studies, however, she rebelled, defending her right as a woman to seek after truth. She was known even in Spain as the “Méjican Phoenix” and the “Tenth Muse.”

Ultimately, she was not able to continue her intellectual pursuits; the dogmatists in the church assailed her. Persecuted for her writing and her worldly thoughts, she gave up her books and signed a confession in her own blood. After her famed reply to the bishop, she withdrew from the outside world. She died in her mid-forties after she became ill while nursing the sick during an epidemic.

Lines from Raquel's favorite Sor Juana poem summarized Raquel's views on her own life.

       
The pain and torment of this love
that my heart cannot conceal,
I know I feel, but cannot know
the reasons why it's this I feel.

       
I suffer greatest agonies
to reach the heights of ecstasy,
but what commences as desire
is doomed to end as misery.

       
And when with greatest tenderness
I weep for my unhappiness,
I only know that I am sad
but reasons I cannot express.

       
First forbearing, then aroused,
conflicting grief I am combating:
that I shall suffer much for him, but with him
I shall suffer nothing.

She wondered how Sor Juana felt going into a convent. Never to love or be loved by a man. Never to unite with a man, to be in his arms, breast to breast, to be intimate.

She remembered the feeling of having Juan inside of her, his lips on hers, caressing her. She remembered the fear and awe when Juan made love to her, but most of all, the pounding of her blood.

Raquel had told Josefa that she lacked Sor Juana's courage. She could not endure a convent's discipline, abstinence, and abnegation.

She had enough money to leave Guanajuato and its loathsome memories. She would move to Méjico City and purchase a small, respectable house, all that she needed for the solitary life she planned for herself. And she had financial prospects there. A Portuguese businessman who had been a friend of her father's was broadminded enough to ask her to teach his three daughters liberal arts. She might be able to expand her tutelage, though few parents wanted educated daughters. Her best hope was to teach the children of foreigners living in the capital.

It would be a fresh start, getting her away from the Bajío and its memories, while preserving the independence to use her mind. Doña Josefa supported her desire for independence.

The older woman's voice brought Raquel back to the present.

“Godoy has us allied with Napoleon against the British. That's like a mouse warring on a cat. Already we have lost our fleet. How will the colony be defended against an invasion by the British? How long will Napoleon wait before gobbling us up?” She sighed and shook her head. “My dear, not so long ago Spain was a great power. That our leaders betray us breaks my heart, especially when our enemies proliferate, when war festers and spreads in Europe like the pox.”

Raquel had only been half-listening to her godmother's lament. They had received word that morning about a subject closer to her heart. She
stared out the window of the coach, deep in thought, when Josefa read her thoughts.

“You're thinking about him, aren't you, my dear?”

She didn't need to tell her grandmother his name. “Yes. I was thinking about what María said last night. Months have passed but still people talk about him.”

“And why not? Has anything so scandalous happened in the colony before? I've never heard anything like it in my lifetime. An Aztec baby switched for a Spanish one? A peon growing up to be a much admired gachupine caballero? Now he has escaped from jail, and there are reports he has turned highwayman. Oh, how horrified are the gachupines. The irony is exquisite, except for your love of this unfortunate young man.”

“I don't love him.”

“Of course you do. He's a bad man, and your misfortune is to care for him.”

“That he was a changeling isn't his fault.”

“Of course not, but his treatment of you is. He exploited, then abandoned you in your time of need.”

“I don't blame him. It was an arranged marriage. He never loved me and would never have married me if it had not been arranged for financial reasons, not if I had been the most beautiful woman in the colony, because I'm a mestiza. Besides, he's in love with another woman, one who is said to be the most beautiful woman in the colony. My father's misfortunes and loss of the dowry allowed him to escape a miserable marriage and an unhappy life.”

Doña Josefa scoffed. “He's a fool. Her reputation as a flirt and social climber is common gossip, even here in Querétaro. The woman has a face men find attractive, but her husband-to-be will pay dearly for her charms when she demands the most scintillating jewels, the most extortionately expensive houses, only the finest clothes and coaches.”

“Well, he need not fear that now. He need only fear the viceroy's constables.”

Raquel's tone was neutral as she spoke about Juan, but her heart was not. She loved him from the first moment she had seen him. Because of that love, she had given him the most precious and valuable thing a young woman could give a man, her virginity. He broke her heart when he walked away from her and the planned marriage.

Her stoic features cracked, and she fought back tears. “I do truly love him. I will never love another man. I'm just afraid that I will never find happiness and that I will die in a convent writing regrets with my blood like Sor Juana.”

The older woman suddenly chuckled. “I'm sorry, my dear, it's not funny, but I wonder how people would react if they knew that the infamous Juan de Zavala had escaped the Guanajuato jail wearing your father's boots.”

THIRTY-THREE

M
Y PLAN, AFTER
I left the hacienda—with a live dog strapped to the chest of a dead man—was to head northwest, in the direction of Zacatecas. I had hunted in the Zacatecas area and in the wild country north of it before. At some point, the people at the hacienda would join the viceroy's constables in their search for me. The less populated, ill-protected North was the logical route for a fleeing bandido to take.

Zacatecas was the second richest silver-mining region in the colony. Money flowed there like beehive honey, and the town was wilder and more untamed than Guanajuato. I might even flee farther north; it was hundreds of leagues to the Río Bravo and the settlements beyond. Towns were often weeks apart, and one could journey for days without seeing strangers. With saddlebags full of stolen silver one could stay lost forever.

Yes, going to Zacatecas was a fine plan, and one I carefully avoided. Instead, once I left my tracks for a route north, I did a wide circle of the area surrounding the hacienda and headed south. Zacatecas was the first place my pursuers would look. Even worse, many of the mine owners and suppliers had visited our hacienda and knew my face. They would recognize me the first time I walked down a Zacatecas street.

Other dangers abounded as well. En route to distant settlements like Taos and San Antonio, a lone rider had to fear not only bandidos but also wild indios, some of them still practicing the cannibalism favored by their ancestors. I had hunted with care when I went into those areas, more wary of two-legged beasts than the four-footed kind.

I also knew the unsettled areas of the south and east well, probably better than the constables searching for me. I had hunted the territory that stood at the edge of the great region of mountains and high flatlands we call the Valley of Méjico. I also knew what lay east beyond the mountains: the torrid disease-ridden wet-hot coasts, where, when it rained, the ocean itself seemed to fall from the sky, hot enough to melt a man to the bone. But down that coast also lay the colony's main port, Veracruz.

Hernán Cortés founded a town called La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz (The Rich Town of the True Cross) when he first landed on the east coast of the colony back in 1519. Eh, he didn't name the town for its “untold riches” since all he had found was swamp and sand. He named it instead after his conquistador dreams, the lust for worldly riches.

Once I was in Veracruz, I would find a way to get on a ship taking me perhaps to Havana, queen of the Carribean.

I had to get out of the colony. I doubted now that if I was captured, I would be sent to the Far East on that infamous Manila galleon. The constables
would hang me from the nearest tree. Escape through Veracruz was the only way out.

To get there I would have to cross mountains, descend into the hot zone to the coast, and follow the coast south to the port. Besides the hazards of constables and bandidos, I would have to traverse the coastal areas where mosquitoes and crocodiles abounded, and countless victims died from the dreaded vomito negro lurking in the stinking swamps.