When the Owl Cries Part 3

Petaca stretched over 1,580,000 acres: sugarcane fields, corn land, wheat land, cattle country, hills, valleys, rivers, lava beds, half a volcano, a lagoon, a pre-Columbian pyramid, villages with their gardens and orchards. The main house was thirty miles from Colima, the capital of the state. Peasants of the neighboring haciendas had dubbed Petaca the "Hacienda of the Clarin." Their ironical name referred to Raul's father, not the mockingbirds in the grove behind the residence. He had made many a man "sing." The nickname, said with a ttck of the tongue, conveyed their condemnation.

Fernando Medina, the Clarin, lay in bed, propped on pillows. His bed faced a tall grilled window, its wooden shutters flung back. As he lay against his pillows, one hand twitched nervously. He was seventy-nine, white-headed, ashen and scrawny, part Coro, part Spanish. Bowled over by a stroke, he still had a patriarchal air. His eyes could still explode. The white eyebrows, though thin, arched imperially. Decaying and absent teeth had crumpled his mouth; only when he was angry could it regain its forcefulness; at all other times it mocked the man. Don Fernando had been rebellious. As a young fellow, he had quarreled with his father over a trivial matter and shot and killed him. This was the venom of his life. No law had punished Fernando.

As he lay against his pillow, his hand trembling, he coughed and moaned. He hated inactivity; he hated being alone; he hated his room; lifting a small copper bell from the bed table, he clanged it erratically. As his hand quivered more violently, he plunged it under the sheet and pinned it down.

"Did you ring, Don Fernando?"

"Of course I rang. Bring me a cigarette and light it, Chavela."

"But Dr. Velasco asked me not to ... you..."

"Get a cigarette and be quick about it! Don't tell me what Dr. Velasco said, and don't run to him with your prattles."

"Si, Don Fernando," she said, cringing a little.

As he waited for the cigarette (she had to go to the kitchen for a light), he eyed the grilled window. The bronze bars had a chunk of landscape wedged between them: a strap of corn land with giant chirimoya trees beyond. The chirimoyas had green limbs, and their mat of branches formed an umbrella cap of foliage. Don Fernando's sight was weak and branches did not exist for him. The umbrella seemed to float in mid-air. The effect annoyed him. He clanged his bell.

Chavela, a fat Tarascan peasant in her twenties, hurried back, a cigarette in one hand and a charcoal ember in the other. Pincher-wise she gripped the glowing ember between splints of wood, tongs she had improvised.

"Light my cigarette, you fool, before the charcoal falls on the bed!

Did you have to bring it here? Don't you ever think for yourself?"

Chavela's broad chocolate face looked troubled; her big steady hands seemed to lift on strings as she brought the ember to the tip of her cigarette and puffed violently, close to Fernando's bed. Smoke corkscrewed from her nose and mouth, and she frowned and coughed, and then grinned. Carefully, she placed the cigarette between his lips.

"There," she said. For a second, her eyes narrowed; she turned away, repelled, and as she turned, the ember dropped alongside the bed.

"You could have burned me!" wailed Fernando. "Where's Angelina? ...

get her!"

"She's outdoors, playing with the children."

"Playing with the children: doesn't she do anything else? Doesn't anybody do anything here?"

A heavy tread outside Fernando's room made Chavela glance toward the door; a spur dragged its wheel over tiles; it was Jorge Farias, the corn-production manager, a hungry-looking man, half Spanish, half Tarascan. He removed his wide-brimmed straw hat as he halted in the bedroom doorway; the rough brim sc.r.a.ped across his trousers.

"Farias wants to see you," said Chavela, and went out.

"May I come in?" asked Farias.

Don Fernando motioned him inside with childish gesture. As Farias entered, the old man spat on the floor.

Farias was dressed in soiled brown trousers and a white shirt designed like a four-pocketed jacket, he had on black riding boots spurred with star-shaped rowels, polished from use. He stood stiffly erect. He disliked the old man. Nearly fifty, he felt that his years of service, doled out to the Clarin, had been largely wasted; yet he liked his job and was proud of any help he could render his own people whenever Fernando's vigilance slackened.

"Can't you bear to look at me?" said Fernando.

"I'm at your service," said Farias.

"Sit down ... sit down!"

The spurs dragged. The chair by the window squeaked. Farias supposed he would be told to check the crops along the boundary line of the Santa Cruz del Valle hacienda, where it adjoined Petaca. He dreaded the journey through the mountains, but remembered he could take his son along, unless the Clarin had another job for Luis. But the Clarin's mind was slipping. Last week, he had ordered Felipe locked in the pillory; Felipe had not been guilty of stealing; it had been Carlos Vasconcales who had robbed the corn bins; nothing Farias could say had altered the Clarin's decision. Farias studied a crack in the red tiles; the crack wandered like a river toward the old man's bed.

Farias found himself staring at Don Fernando. Cigarette smoke hooded his face--a falcon's hood of gray.

"I want you to leave here early tomorrow. Check the crops along Santa Cruz del Valle. Go armed."

"Yes, sir."

"There's something else. Check the stone fences along our property; take time to fix them if they're down; we can't have cattle foraging on our corn. Understand?"

"Yes, sir. I'll check thoroughly. Anything else?"

"Expect trouble.... You may go."

Fernando attempted to see Farias walk to the door, but his eyes had shifted out of focus; he saw a brownish blur; he shook himself and waited. The click of spurs faded. He raised his cigarette and inhaled deeply. Slowly, his sight cleared. The window and its barred landscape returned. He welcomed the sight now, thinking of death with a throb of panic: death would remove all landscapes, however blurred.

His shaky hand carried the cigarette to his mouth and then let it fall.

He slept.

He dreamed of a fracas over the impounding of a stream on the lower slope of the volcano; that quarrel had taken place thirty or more years ago; yet now, in the dream, the angry voices of workers rose; his _administrador_ drew a revolver; a peasant yanked away the gun....

Waking, Fernando clattered his copper bell, and this time his son appeared.

"Yes, Father," said Raul, near the bed.

"A drink of water."

"Yes."

Raul poured a gla.s.s of water from a bed-table water bottle; a great green fly buzzed about the mouth of the bottle; his father reached for the gla.s.s; the hand shook and drops spilled.

The room had been papered in egg-white paper with brown aviaries triangled on it; from every aviary a flock of birds--all resembling swallows--cascaded. A black wooden wardrobe that weighed half a ton filled one wall. Its double doors, sides, and corners were ornamented with carved eagles and bra.s.s gewgaws. Some of the eagles had conch-sh.e.l.l eyes. The eyes peered into a full-length mirror, framed in carved wood. Above a washstand hung a Swiss etching of the Matterhorn, a sketchy rendering. Fernando's bed was four-posted and canopied with a dingy white cloth.

Raul glimpsed himself in the mirror as he held his father's gla.s.s, and the reflection startled him. Catching the resemblance, he set down the gla.s.s with a jerk and began to walk out of the room.

"Raul," said his father.

"What is it, Father?" said Raul, compelling himself to speak politely.

"I sent Farias to check the corn fences."

"He'll check them carefully," said Raul.

"Will Velasco come this afternoon?"

"He'll come unless he has a sick person to take care of."

"I feel bad. I feel as if ... Raul, it's bad."

"But you've felt that way before."

"Yes, I have. Still, I feel...." He said no more.