SEVEN

DID I NOT foretell this would be a bad day?

The vultures had gathered at the house by the time I returned with Pablo. A pack of demanding cousins who had come over from Spain and continually entreated us for handouts hovered about. I ignored them, as I always did. I didn’t grow up with any of them and shared no family resemblance, experiences, or common interests with them.

The doctor came out of the room when my presence was announced. He blocked the door so I could not enter my uncle’s room.

“You must not go in,” he said. “You uncle is very ill, I would say near death.”

“Then I should see him.”

He avoided my eyes. “He does not wish to see you.”

“What?”

“He has asked for his priest.”

I did not know what to say. I left the room and went down to the stable to check my horses. My uncle was dying and did not wish to see me? True, we were not close, but other than that grasping pack of importuning cousins, I had no other family in the colony. Were there to be no last words between my uncle and me?

His sudden illness puzzled me. I had never known him to be sick. I went back upstairs after the priest arrived and waited in the anteroom outside my uncle’s bedroom. After a while the priest came out. I thought for a moment he would speak. He stood in front of me, wide-eyed, his jaw moving, then fled the house. I stood at the window and watched him rushing up the street. Eh, he too had hellhounds at his heels. Where was he rushing to? Was it not the duty of the priest to be at my uncle’s bedside when he gave up the ghost?

The doctor came out of the bedroom, saw me sitting in the anteroom, and ducked back into the bedroom, slamming the door.

Dios mío, what had happened to the world? Had the earth stopped revolving around the sun? Was the sky about to fall? Nothing would surprise me.

I went back down to the stable to talk to my horses, taking a jug of wine with me.

When Pablo informed me that Luis de Ville, the alcalde, had arrived, I only shrugged. That the mayor of the city had rushed to my uncle’s bedside was unexpected, but then everything that had happened that day had been muy loco.

Minutes later, Pablo informed me that the corregidor had come.

The mayor and now the chief officer of justice. To my uncle’s deathbed?

Yet they failed to summon me, Juan de Zavala, who was both my uncle’s heir and his employer. I was the imposing, important personage, not Uncle Bruto. Nothing would happen after his death except I would bury him and find someone else to manage my affairs.

I decided to remind the offensive fools that I was both gachupine and a man of substantial means.

The entire group—doctor, priest, mayor, and officer of justice—was in the anteroom when I came in. They turned and stared at me as if I were the one who was about to give up the ghost.

“Bruto de Zavala is dead,” Señor Luis de Ville, the alcalde, said. “He is in the hands of God.”

Or El Diablo, I thought.

The alcalde grabbed my arm and rushed out of the room. “Come with me,” he said.

I followed him into the kitchen. He turned and stared at me, at my face, intensely.

“Juan, I have known you since you were a child.”

“True,” I said.

“Bruto spoke to all of us before he passed. He told us something.”

“Yes. Is it bad news?” I asked. “He has mismanaged my estate, is that what he told you? How bad is it? How much do I have left?”

“Juan . . .” The man looked away.

“Alcalde, what is it? What are you trying to tell me?”

“You are not Juan de Zavala.”