Michener, James A. (25 page)

D

ON RAMON DE SALDANA, ELDEST SON OF COMMANDANT

Alvaro and Benita, was sixty-six years of age and sprightly in mind and limb. Often he reflected upon the three great joys in his life and the two inconsolable tragedies.

He was sole owner of the vast Rancho El Codo, twenty-five thousand acres named after an elbow of the Medina, that river which marked the boundary between the two provinces of Coahuila and Tejas. It was a rich and varied parcel, well watered, and stocked with thousands of cattle, sheep and goats. Most important, it bordered a segment of Los Caminos Reales, that system of royal highways which reached out like spokes from Mexico City, the hub of New Spain. This portion reached from Vera Cruz through Mexico City to San Antonio de Bejar, as the town was now called, to the former capital of Tejas at Los Adaes, and its presence along the ranch meant that Don Ramon could sell provisions to the royal troops that patrolled the vital route; Rancho El Codo was an inheritance of which he was justly proud.

He was also inordinately pleased that he had, like his grandfather in Spain, sired seven sons in a row without, as he boasted, 'the contaminating intrusion of a single daughter.' The humorous honorific, Hidalgo de Bragueta, Sir Knight of the Codpiece, was not customarily used in Mexico, but Don Ramon liked to apply it to himself.

His third and chief pride in these declining years of a long frontier life was his granddaughter Trinidad, thirteen years old and as charming a child as could be found in the northern provinces. Petite and dark-haired, she was a lively young lady with a wonderfully free and outgoing nature better suited to a canter over the mesquite range than to an afternoon of sipping hot chocolate with the mission friars, and although she was not a vain girl, preferring at this stage in her life a good horse to a pretty dress, she did like to look trim and paid attention to her appearance.

The thing that strangers noticed most about Trinidad was her curious face, for although it was beautiful, with a flawless light complexion bespeaking her unsullied Spanish blood, her mouth was strangely tilted, creating the impression of a timeless smile.

Her lower teeth had grown in most unevenly, preventing her jaws from meeting naturally, and this made the left corner of her mouth dip down while the right turned up. Had her other features been less than perfect, this defect might have marred her looks; instead, it created a kind of additional interest, for when she came up ready to curtsy to a stranger, her unusual mouth seemed to be smiling inquisitively as if to say 'Hello, what have we here?' And when she did speak, a very slight lisp, or unevenness, added to her air of mystery and to her attractiveness.

She was a clever child, her doting grandfather had taught her to read Cervantes, stories from the Bible, and even the less salacious of the romances being published in Mexico City; and a French cleric who had served some years earlier in one of Bejar's five missions had taught her his native language. She also had a marked talent for drawing, and so skillful were her rough sketches of people in the town that everyone who saw them could recognize this pompous priest or that officious occupant of the governor's residence. She was at her best, however, on horseback, for she was at that age when young girls are almost reluctant to face maidenhood and an interest in boys, and seek intuitively to cling to girlhood, lavishing their considerable affection on horses. In Trinidad de Saldaria's case it was one particular horse, a spirited brown gelding called Relampaguito, Little Lightningbolt. She would allow no one to abbreviate this rather long proper name or to give her horse a nickname; he was Relampaguito, a horse of importance, and she cared for him as if he were a much-loved younger brother.

It was Don Ramon's pleasure to ride forth in the early morning with Trinidad at his side, leave the town of Bejar where the Saldanas had their town house, and ride toward the Mision Santa Teresa. From the presidio he would pick up an armed guard and continue on to the edges of his ranch, whose new pastures, acquired from one of the Canary Island families, now reached eastward to those belonging to the mission.

Grandfather and granddaughter rode easily, side by side, admiring the good work begun by Uncle Damian in building this mission and later reveling in the splendid ranch the family had acquired through the energy and the agility of the Saldafia brothers. At such times Trinidad liked to ride on ahead, act as if she were a military scout and call back 'I see Apache!' Then both grandfather and granddaughter would race their horses toward some spot on the horizon and rein in as if they saw Apache campfires, although once in a while Don Ramon would warn: 'You must never joke about the Apache. At a place like that down there my uncle Damian was

martyred and your father killed,' and then the past became painfully real for the little girl.

The great tragedy of Don Ramon's life was that although he had sired seven sons, all had died during his own lifetime: four in service to the king—two in Spain, two in Mexico; one of cholera, which swept the northern provinces periodically; and two tortured and scalped by the Apache. All were dead, and Don Ramon sometimes recalled bitterly the words of that wise ancient who said: 'In peace, sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury their sons.' In Tejas it had always been war, threat of war against the French, real war against the Apache, comic war against the pirates who tried to infiltrate from the Caribbean, unending war against nature itself. And what made the slaughter of his sons so difficult to accept was that often the wars in which they engaged were later proved to have been unjustified. His fourth son, Bartolome, had been slain during a skirmish with the Austrians, and shortly thereafter a solid peace with Austria came into effect. Same with the French. From his earliest days Don Ramon had been taught to fear them, but now all the territories along the Mississippi River which had once been French were Spanish, and to make things even more bewildering, just a few years ago a Paris-born Frenchman living in Natchitoches, had he but lived a little while longer, would actually have served as governor of Tejas.

All his sons dead! Don Ramon, more than most, had witnessed the fearful price paid by those Spaniards who had sought to bring civilization to Tejas: the loneliness of the first missions, the years of unrewarded drudgery in the presidios, the martyrs among the friars, the slain heroes like his sons, the anguish of the governors who tried to rule without funds or adequate police facilities, and the backbreaking efforts of the good women like his late wife who supported their men, making each new house just a little more civilized, just slightly more removed from the roughness of the frontier.

Once when his sorrows seemed almost unbearable, he clasped his granddaughter to him and cried: Trinidad, if this forsaken place ever becomes habitable, remember your fathers and your mothers who strove to make it so.' She was ten at the time, and said: 'I have only one mother. I had only one father.' And he swept his arms grandly over the entire town and cried with passion: 'All the good Spaniards here are your fathers and mothers. They have all lived so that you might live. And you shall live so that those who come after . . . when this is a great city . . .' He kissed her head. 'They will all be your children, Trinidad, yours and mine and Fray Damian's.'

'Even the Canary Islanders?' she asked, for relations with those proud and arrogant people had never been good.

Today even they are my brothers,' Don Ramon said, but he had not really intended going that far.

Don Ramon, his granddaughter Trinidad and her mother Engracia, widow of Agustin de Saldana slain by the Apache, lived in a beautiful rambling adobe-walled house facing the Military Plaza that stretched westward from the still-unfinished church of San Fernando. Passers-by were charmed by the Saldana home: 'Its walls are always so neatly whitewashed, and the seven wooden beams which jut out from the front wall are always hung with pots of flowers or with golden gourds or strings of corn and chilies drying in the sun. Don Ramon's house looks as if happy people live inside.'

Behind this inviting wall hid a nest of eleven interconnected small rooms forming a large horseshoe, the center of which was a lovely patio opening onto an even more beautiful garden where stone benches faced a fountain that gushed cool water whenever Indian servants worked the foot pumps. No one who stepped inside this house or into the garden for even two minutes could deceive himself into thinking that it was a French house or English, and certainly it wasn't German. This was an evocation of Spain set down in the wilderness of New Spain, and as such it epitomized the ancient Spanish preoccupation with protecting families; stout walls safeguarded them from outside terrors, and a tiny chapel enabled them to hold private religious services. And just as the house protected the family, so the family jealously guarded its prerogatives, prepared to do almost anything, including murder, to defend them. The Saldana family was fighting to avoid submersion in a sea of mestizo and Indian faces, determined to resist intruders coming down El Camino Real from the new Spanish possession of Louisiana or from the uncivilized Yankee lands farther east and north.

And therein lay the second tragedy in Don Ramon's life, festering, causing him nagging grief: his blood was pure Spanish, nobody could challenge that, but it was of diminished quality because he had not been born in Spain. He was a criollo, not a peninsular; that honored name was reserved for those actually born in the Iberian peninsula. Criollos could have pride; peninsulares had glory.

Since the only chance the Saldanas of Bejar had to reestablish their honor was to marry Trinidad to some gentleman of Spain, this became almost an obsession with Don Ramon, and one afternoon in 1788 he said to Engracia: 'Each day our little girl looks

more like a woman. Please tell me how we can find her a suitable husband ... a real Spaniard . . . from Spain.'

Engracia Sarmiento de Saldaria, having been born in central Spain to a minor branch of the notable Sarmiento family and brought to Mexico, where her father served as governor of a province to the south, appreciated the wisdom of getting the Mexican Saldanas back into the mainstream of Spanish life: 'I never forget, Don Ramon, that your father Alvaro and your saintly-uncle Damian, may God bless his soul in heaven, were true-born Spaniards. You, unfortunately, were not, through no fault of your own or your father's.'

Don Ramon took no offense at this sharp reminder of his deficiency; he was always ready to lament, even in public, that he was not a peninsular, and he had witnessed too many instances in which families of distinction from the best parts of Spain had slowly deteriorated in Mexico: 'You've seen what happens, Engracia. They come here as proud peninsulares, and first they allow their sons and daughters to marry locals. Good families and all that, but born like me here in Mexico. With that relaxation to begin with, it isn't long before someone marries a mestizo. I've seen it a dozen times. Beautiful girls. Some sing like angels, sew well, keep a good house, tend their babies. But they are half Indian. And look what happens to their children. Look at young Alenon. He finally did it, married an Indian girl.' He sighed at the incalculable loss. 'The famous Alencon blood, lost in a desert of Indian adobes.'

'Is there any way we could send Trinidad to Spain?' her mother asked.

'If Ignacio or Lorenzo had survived when they went to Spain . . . but they died. I suppose we have family, somewhere. How about the Sarmientos?'

'My family would be very contemptuous of any girl born in Mexico . . .' She said this without rancor or self-pity, but the manner in which her voice trailed off betrayed the enormous damage she had incurred by marrying a criollo.

'I knew our former governor. Not well, but I did know him.'

'You know what he said when he sailed home. "May the Indian dust of this forsaken land never dirty my boots again." I doubt that he would welcome her.'

'I've been thinking, Engracia, that perhaps you and I ought to travel down to Mexico City. If we started next year in February, Trinidad would be fourteen. She's an extremely attractive girl, you know that. Her quizzical little smile, it tears my heart, and there must be many young officers from Spain . . .'

'I would travel a great distance, Father, to find my daughter a proper husband.'

'Let me speak to Veramendi about it.'

And so the serious discussions started, with Don Ramon walking sedately the three blocks that separated the Bejar residences of these two leading families.

On Calle Soledad, for many years the only real street in town, the Bejar branch of the powerful Veramendis of Saltillo owned two elegant many-roomed houses, facing a common patio which was itself a work of art: seven old trees for shade and graveled walks graced with statues carved by Indian workmen who had copied Italian engravings of religious figures. Half a dozen niches in the adobe walls contained flowerpots holding vines whose creeping ends flowed down across the wall, forming beautiful patterns when the sun shone through them.