Michener, James A. (26 page)

In the larger house lived the head of the local Veramendis, an austere man who kept to himself, supervising the education of his many children. His very able son Juan Martin, now ten, could already speak three languages—Spanish, French and English— because the wise old man could foresee that these latter tongues were bound to become important in Tejas.

Don Ramon did not go to the big house, but to the smaller one in which lived his good friend Don Lazaro Veramendi, of the lesser branch, who had granddaughters of his own and therefore the same problems as the Saldanas.

'Good day, dear friend!' Don Ramon called out as he entered the patio and saw Veramendi reading under one of the gnarled trees. 'I remember the day that tree was planted . . . how many years ago?'

The two men, each approaching seventy, discussed the origin of this garden and agreed that it must have been planted either just before or just after the arrival of the Canary Islanders, sixty years earlier. 'Those were exciting days,' Don Lazaro said.

'And so are these. Do you feel the changes that overtake us?'

'I do.' He was about to specify what changes concerned him when two of his granddaughters, girls of eleven and fourteen, ran onto the patio from one door of their home, past the flower beds and through a door of the larger house. As they ran the two old men studied their untrammeled movement.

'It's them I've been thinking of,' Don Ramon said, and when Veramendi looked up in surprise, Saldana added: i mean all the girls of our families. Our Trinidad especially. Where will she find a husband 7 ' Before Don Lazaro could respond, he clarified his

remark: 'I mean, of course, a respectable Spanish husband? Where?'

Veramendi, proud of his family's distinctions, astonished his friend by saying judiciously: 'I no longer worry about that, Don Ramon. We're Spanish, yes, and proud to be, but neither you nor I was born in Spain, and we do well in Bejar. I think our children will do the same.'

'But maintaining the Spanish blood, things Spanish, a sense of Castile and Aragon—how can we ensure that if our grandaugh-ters . . .'

'They'll marry as events dictate, and do you know one thing, Don Ramon? I doubt if any of them will ever see Spain. This is the new land. This is our homeland now.'

'Wouldn't you prefer. . . ? How many granddaughters have you —four, five?'

'I have six, thanks to God's bounty,' Veramendi said, 'and five of them will need husbands. Maria's to be a nun, by the grace of the Virgin, so we need only five young men.'

'And you'll be just as happy if they've been born in Mexico?'

'I was born in Mexico and I yield to no man . . .'

'I mean, wouldn't you be just a bit prouder—more secure, I mean—if your girls were married to men born in Spain? Men with honest Spanish roots?'

Don Lazaro clapped his hands and laughed at his friend: 'You have roots in Spain—the town of Saldana, if my memory serves me. And what the devil good has it ever done you?'

Don Ramon pondered this difficult question a long time, his brow deeply wrinkled. But then a benign smile appeared: '1 often think of those dark centuries when Spain writhed under the heel of Muhammadanism. There was every reason for my ancestors to marry with the infidels. Power, money, an appointment at the Moorish court. But they protected their Spanish blood with their lives. No Moors in our family. No Jews. We starved, lived in caves, and in the end we triumphed.'

'Do you feel about mestizos the way your ancestors felt about Moors?'

i do. To be the carrier of pure Spanish blood fortifies the spirit. On that awful day when messengers galloped in to inform my father that his brother, Fray Damian, had been tortured to death by the Apache, our family found courage in the fact that we were Spaniards, untouched by Mexico, and that as Spaniards we had to behave in a certain way ... to preserve our honor.'

'So what did your Spanish father do?'

'He handed me a gun, although I was barely fifteen, called for volunteers, and set forth to punish the Apache. We killed sixty-seven.'

'And what did that prove? Forty years later the Lipan Apache were still there, and they killed two of your sons not ten miles from where they killed your uncle.'

'Finally we drove them back. In the end, Spain always conquers.'

'So in their place we got the Comanche, and they're worse.'

Don Ramon fell silent, put his left thumbnail against his teeth and studied this amazing Veramendi, who had from boyhood been so willing to accept Bejar as it was, never cursing the Indians, never brawling with the Canary Islanders, never arguing with the friars about the allocation of river water to the irrigation ditches. He had always whistled a lot, and now he whistled easily as if any problems really worth serious worry lay far in the distance.

'Don Lazaro, I don't think you'd worry even if one of your granddaughters married a mestizo!'

Veramendi pondered this, and said: it seems highly likely, what with the dilution of our Spanish blood, that two or three of my girls might have to find their husbands among the locals.' When Saldafia gasped, Veramendi added an interesting speculation: 'Let's! be perfectly reasonable, Don Ramon. The Spanish army doesn't send many peninsulares to Mexico any more, only a scattering of officers now and then, and damned few of them ever get north to this little town. We don't even get any peninsular priests any more. Saltillo's no better. I looked last time I was down there. And in i Mexico City the grand families pick off the young Spaniards as soon as they arrive from Vera Cruz. So true Spaniards are gone. No hope at all.

'That leaves young men like you and me as we were half a century ago. Spanish, but born in Mexico. And there's a'limited number of us, believe me. I saw it in Saltillo. So what does that leave our granddaughters, yours and mine? It leaves a crop of fine young men half Spanish, half Indian, and you have some of the best on your own ranch.'

Saldana was shocked: 'Would you allow a mestizo ranch hand to marry one of your granddaughters?'

Veramendi, not willing to confess that he had been preparing himself for just such an eventuality, changed the conversation dramatically: 'Do you want to know what I really think, old friend?' When Don Ramon said: 'I'm afraid to listen, the way you've been raving,' the old man said firmly: 'I suspect that you and I are looking in the wrong direction. Right now we face south,

looking always at Mexico City, from where God in His merciful bounty sends us all the good things we enjoy. Right now we look south along El Camino Real as our blessed lifeline. Dear friend, let's face realities. Let's change our position and look north. The good things of this life henceforth will not come up El Camino Real, they will come down it—from Louisiana, or from los Estados Unidos.'

When Don Ramon failed to respond, his friend said, as he gazed north: 'So what I really suppose is that my granddaughters will marry Frenchmen posing as Spaniards. Or even worse, one of those rough norteamericanos.'

'But aren't all americanos Protestants?'

'Men can change, especially where a beautiful girl's involved . . . and free land.' Again Don Ramon was flabbergasted, whereupon Don Lazaro clapped him on the knee: 'Since your little Trinidad is about the prettiest in town, you may find yourself completely surprised at whom she marries.'

At last Don Ramon found his voice: 'By God, Don Lazaro, you sound as if you wouldn't even stop at Indians.'

'I don't want them for these girls,' Don Lazaro snapped instantly, 'because the Indians are not yet civilized. But the granddaughters of these girls, they might be very proud to marry the type of Indian who's going to come along.'

'When I was a boy, if the viceroy heard a Spaniard utter such a statement ... off to the dungeons at San Juan de Ulua.'

At this, Veramendi leaped from the stone bench, danced about the garden, and chuckled with delight. Then he took a position staring down at Saldana and reminded him of a few important facts:

'Two years ago I was sent by our viceroy to New Orleans to help our Spanish Governor Miro bring that French city into our system, and I never worked with a better man. judicious, far-seeing, patriotic. I wish we had a governor like that in Tejas. He preached constantly to those below him that our new province of Louisiana was to be a haven for people of all kinds, French in the majority, norteamericanos next in number, Spaniards of the better sort ruling fairly and running the businesses, with many, many blacks and Indians doing the work. All nations and yes, unwisely, all religions. Governor Miro accepted everyone as his brother.

'Well, you can guess that his liberal attitude toward religion got him into immediate trouble, because officials in Mexico supported the Inquisition, which is a fine institution, if properly run. But Madrid sent out a wild-eyed, savage-spirited Spanish priest named Father Sadella to

head our Inquisition. Yes, Father Sadella came out to New Orleans to establish religious courts, religious jails and religious gibbets from which he was going to hang every damned Protestant or free-thinker like me and maybe even Governor Miro himself. And when Louisiana was sanctified he was going to hang all the Protestants in Tejas. He had lists of names

'He was a terrifying man, Don Ramon, and had he come down here, in due course you would have found yourself entangled in his webs. For what? 1 don't know, but he would have found something you had done or hadn't done. He was tall and very thin and had deep-set eyes which darted from side to side as if he constantly expected a dagger. Imagine, jails and gibbets established in Tejas!

'Governor Miro assembled eight of us he could trust and asked us bluntly: "What can we do to save ourselves from this dreadful man?" and I said: "Murder him, tonight," but Miro warned against such action: "If we did that, Madrid would have to respond, and all of us would be hanged." A Spanish officer from Valencia, a pious man I believe, for I saw him always in church, made the best proposal: "Let us arrest him right now, and throw him onto the Princesa Luisa, which is ready to sail, and then hope that the ship sinks." A very wise priest born in Mexico City added the good touch: "We'll march him aboard at ten in the morning with the whole town at the docks to jeer at him and laugh. We'll make a holiday of it as if all Louisiana approved what we're doing. And that will draw Father Sadella's ugly teeth."

'So we had a festival, even the firing of a cannon. 1 arranged for that. And that's how we saved Tejas from the ieg irons and gallows of the Holy Inquisition.'

Don Ramon studied his knuckles, which had grown taut as the tale unfolded: 'Why do you tell me something for which you could still be thrown in jail?'

'Because it represents the new truth, as I see it. Mexico City would never have dared oppose the Inquisition. New Orleans did. Down El Camino Real, from our new holdings in Louisiana, will come new interpretations of old customs. And along the same road, from los Estados Unidos, will come new ways of doing things, a new sense of government, and lusty, energetic young men who will marry our girls.'

'Will you permit that?'

'Who can stop it?'

is the old Spain dead?'

it's been dead for fifty years. I could have built a great city here. All it needed was two thousand Spaniards of the better sort ruling fairly, supervising things and running the businesses. But they were never forthcoming. Spain had its chance, but passed it by.'

The two men, debris from a flood of empire which had receded with terrible swiftness, sat gloomily for some minutes, seeing in imagination the royal road along which the promised help should have come but never did. Then, as if by malignant design, a bugle sounded from the presidio and the army contingent marched out for one of its weekly parades, seeking to prove that Spain still had the power to defend its farthest outpost.

Two aspects of the march impressed them when they went to the gate to watch: the slovenliness of the drill and the incredibility of the uniforms. Only the two officers, Captain Moncado and Lieutenant Marcelino, were properly outfitted. In gold trousers and smartly polished boots they made a stiff and handsome pair, very military in appearance except that Marcelino had no proper hat. He marched bareheaded, which made him seem two feet shorter than his commander and somewhat ridiculous.

The enlisted complement for Bejar was ninety-four, but of these, only sixty-four had bothered to show up, and of those, only two groups of three each wore uniforms, but no one outfit was complete. The front rank wore fine blue uniforms, but here again hats were missing. The second group, marching immediately behind, wore green uniforms that had been popular thirty years earlier; this time only one hat was missing.

The eight men in the next two ranks also had uniforms, each one completely different, and behind them came twenty men dressed in either leather jackets or army trousers, but never both. And whichever half they did have was preposterously patched with cloth of another match.

The next ranks wore no uniforms at all, only the floppy white garments of the countryside, and of these men, half had no shoes; they marched barefoot. Unbelievably, the last fifteen in the parade had no hats, no shirts, no shoes; they marched in trousers only and these of every possible length and style.

At the front, Captain Moncado and Lieutenant Marcelino moved smartly and in step as if they were on duty in Spain, as did the six enlisted men who had matching uniforms. But the rest straggled along, kicking dust, out of step, neither neat nor erect, for all the world more like field hands returning to town at the end of a wearing day than soldiers representing Spanish dominion overseas.

Two-thirds of the troops had guns, but of every imaginable make and age; surely, if the poorest dozen were fired, they could not be reloaded in less than ten minutes. Some of the remaining men carried lances, shields or swords, and many had no formal weapon whatever except a club hacked from some tree. And this

was the military might which was supposed to protect Bejar and its six missions, safeguard the roads, and defend the outlying farms from the skilled attacks of some four thousand Comanche, those dreaded horse Indians from the north who had captured a few Spanish steeds, bred them, and galloped south to lay waste all Spanish settlements. This was the grandeur of Spain in the year 1788.