IT IS TEMPTING to speculate how León Fuertes might have developed had he received his birthright: the twenty shares of Mituco Company stock and the income of their dividends; the Garza family mansion with its spacious rooms and seignorial appointments; access to the fine schools of Mituco Marítimo; and membership in a directing class. Tempting but idle. He was programmed genetically for excellence, and noblesse oblige serves just as well as poverty for a whetstone to ambition. More important, I think, than the fact of his disinheriting was the process by which it was accomplished. The town combined against him and his mother; he began his life not just unlegacied but outcast and reviled. This no doubt exacerbated the strange duality22 in his character: an intense yearning for respectability alternating with (linked to, balanced by) a total unconcern (if not contempt) for what others might think.
Before León Fuertes had spent eight hours in this world, all Mituco knew the details of his coming into it, down to the last hair on the eighth leg of the tarantula inscribed on his mother’s mons and the synchronizing of his father’s death with his first cry. As I have noted, gossips had long suspected Rebeca of malevolent powers and intentions. By the morning of 13th November, 1917, many mituqueños were ready to accept (and none was willing to dispute in public) the thesis of Señorita Zoreida Bocanegra (who had preserved her virginity23 for Don Patricio Garza during the twenty years he lived in Paris, only to discover that neither he nor anyone else wanted it) that Rebeca Fuertes was a witch, that she had bewitched first Don Patricio then Dr. Azael Burlando, that she had engendered little León and his sister in connection with Beelzebub, and that she had murdered Dr. Burlando by enchantment.
That diabolical agencies were operating on Mituco became even plainer at Dr. Burlando’s wake, which was attended by a great number of mituqueños, despite the fact that few of them had cared much for him in his life and none had ever spoken to his widow. A tempest such as had not struck the island since the shipwreck of Javier Cortada or been associated with it since 1610 raged all that night, and at the stroke of midnight wind burst the shutters and blew out all the candles in the house. When, after much confusion, light was restored, mourners discovered the image of the horned god blazoned on the coffin and a large crucifix hanging inverted in its niche beside the sala door. Then, at dawn, when the pallbearers (five of them directors of the Mituco Company, the sixth Don Pedro Caoba, who claimed the right by virtue of having lost more games at chess to Dr. Burlando than any other habitué of the Café Progreso) tried to lift the coffin, they could not budge it. It took twelve men to lug it from the bier out to the glass-walled, horse-drawn hearse. Then one man stumbled, another lost his grip, and the coffin fell and splintered on the ground. There was no corpse; the casket was filled with rocks. The obvious conclusion was that Dr. Azael Burlando had, in fact, a contract with the devil, and that it covered his body as well as his soul.
Despite these strange events and the great volume of accusatory gossip they engendered, no official action was taken against Rebeca for a time. A small mob collected about the clinic on the evening of 14th November and set up quite a noise of shouting for Rebeca to leave the island, but though the constable on duty at the door made no move to disperse them, they were finally shoo’d off by the Spanish surgeon. When Rebeca went home on the 16th, she found the façade of the mansion scarred with obscene slogans and warnings to get out or else, and heard from her maid and little Nicolas, both badly frighted, of shots fired in the night and shouts of “Burn the witch-bitch!” When she reported these depredations to the chief of police, he joined her in deploring them, adding, however, that given his small force and the general mood of the community, he could not guarantee that they would not recur. It was not until the 18th, after Rebeca had presented herself at the offices of the Mituco Company and requested that twenty shares of stock and the deed to the mansion be made over to her, that Mituco acted officially. That afternoon Licentiate Jacobo Mangle, the Public Prosecutor (and also Counsel General to the Mituco Company) filed charges against Rebeca Fuertes for the crime of witchcraft, citing a statute drafted in the 17th Century by the Holy Inquisition.
Crime was so rare in Mituco Marítimo that the island had no jail. A small room on the top floor of the Administration Building was fitted hurriedly with bars, and Rebeca was confined there incomunicada, for the statute specified that an accused witch be permitted contact only with her confessor, while Rebeca felt she had enough to bear without suffering the intrusions of a priest.24 Fatigued as she was, solitude was solace. Her great distress was that León was kept from her. Rebeca had, at the moment she emerged from anesthesia, conceived an almost superhuman love for her second son. This was a new emotion for her, since the love for my uncle Nicolas which Dr. Burlando had supposed he’d noticed wasn’t love at all, but rather a clever counterfeit which Rebeca, appalled that her first-born meant no more to her than any other infant, had crafted in hope that Nicolas might take it for bona fide and so be spared the resentment of a loveless childhood. As for her daughter, Rebeca was hard put not to hate her outright, for the little girl seemed proof that Dr. Burlando had unfairly won his bargain, getting two children when he only paid for one. But (perhaps in compensation for the hatred she had felt for him while he was in her womb) Rebeca’s love for León was spontaneous and true, and from the moment she was shut away she screamed so stridently for him that Licentiate Mangle, who had offices below her cell and, with the din, was quite unable to prepare his case, after a day or two relented and had León brought. León Fuertes was, thus, nursed in prison—albeit a clean one with walls of wood, not stone—a circumstance in which he took rather more pride than shame during his later life.
As far as I can ascertain, Rebeca Fuertes was the last person to be tried for witchcraft in the Western world. Because of the great interest in the case, the process was conducted not in the courtroom of the Alcaldía (which, since Mituco Marítimo saw mainly civil actions, was quite small) but in the Municipal Theater, the venue of Rebeca’s initiation to both art and love. Subscribers to the regular dramatic season were allowed to buy their customary places at a mark-up; other seats sold briskly; and when the court convened at 9 A.M. on 1st December, 1917, the house was packed. Care was exercised, however, to preserve the solemnity of the proceedings. A backdrop originally painted for the third act of Man and Superman, and which the artist, eschewing Shaw’s stage directions, had amply strewn with hungry tongues of flame, hung from the second lift. Dr. Emilio Cedra, the Magistrate of Mituco (and Chairman of the Board of the Mituco Company), presided from a dais draped in black velvet, and there were costly tables of mahogany for Licentiate Mangle and Dr. Everardo Palo de Bamboa (a Director of the Mituco Company), appointed by the court for the defense. There was an elevated witness stand and a sumptuously carved enclosure for the seven jurymen (who were all Directors of the Mituco Company and whose foreman was Don Arnulfo Bocanegra, Señorita Zoreida’s brother). The Bishop of Mituco was present as amicus curiae and was seated beside Dr. Cedra on a ceremonial throne brought over from the Church of San Roque. Spotlights illuminated the central dais, the prosecution and defense tables, the witness stand, and the jury box, while from above the stage, red and amber lights played on the backdrop. Spectators were forbidden to enter while the trial was in session, and the refreshments on sale in the outer lobby were limited to nonalcoholic beverages.
The charges against Rebeca Fuertes25 were substantially those gossiped up by Zoreida Bocanegra. They were read off by the clerk as soon as the jury had been impaneled. Rebeca smiled calmly throughout this reading. She had chosen, over her counsel’s mild protest, to wear a dress of yellow silk brocade, a relic of the Chinese wardrobe she had brought to Mituco three years before, and her refusal to wear mourning had the effect of confirming all present in the prejudices they had carried with them into the theater: the vocal many were more than ever certain of her guilt; the silent few were convinced that she was being tried unjustly. All were forced to admire her composure, but it was evident that childbirth and imprisonment had wreaked a toll. Her face was haggard, her complexion ashen. And though none present realized it, she achieved serenity only by blacking out events about her and casting her mind across the plaza up to the room where her maid minded little León. She had ceased, in fact, to think about herself at all and existed only as a mother.
The case for the prosecution consumed three days. Licentiate Jacobo Mangle established that Don Patricio Garza had been known both in Mituco and in Europe for his great culture and mature judgment and that nonetheless he had taken the defendant, then an unwashed urchin, into his home and lavished luxuries upon her. Don Patricio’s former valet testified that he had on numerous occasions observed the defendant whispering to her Peruvian mare, and the Bishop of Mituco was then called upon to read into the record and clarify in layman’s terms a great volume of material from the science of demonology, explaining how witches operate with the aid of familiar spirits who take the form of animals. Mangle then summoned a cloud of witnesses to testify how Don Patricio had doted on Rebeca, exceeding the boundaries of good taste and stretching the limits of imagination in preparing entertainments for her fifteenth birthday. He established that Don Patricio’s suicide was a direct result of Rebeca’s desertion. He then called Señorita Zoreida Bocanegra, who describes herself as Don Patricio’s childhood playmate, sometime fiancée, and lifelong friend, and who stated under oath and in the strongest terms that the only explanation for Don Patricio’s comportment vis-à-vis the defendant was that he had been bewitched. Through all this testimony Rebeca’s counsel sat gazing up at the fresco of nymphs and cupids which adorned the theater ceiling and made no move to cross-examine.
Dr. Palo de Bamboa was similarly silent while the prosecution built a case for the enchantment of Dr. Burlando and for Rebeca’s copulation with the devil. He waived cross-examination even when Timoteo Ramos, a noted guzzler of flor de sueño tea, testified that when Dr. Azael Burlando informed the chess and domino players of the Café Progreso that Rebeca was pregnant, forty-two demons issued from his mouth, led forth by Asmodeus, Astaroth, and Belberith and followed in descending line of rank to lowly Urobach, who slunk out last. Dr. Palo said nothing when Rebeca’s tattoos (described by the nurse) were confirmed by the bishop as Devil’s Marks, insignia fixed on the bodies of women who have intercourse with Satan. His only intervention came after Licentiate Mangle had called the Spanish surgeon to establish the time and manner of Dr. Burlando’s death. In cross-examination of the surgeon, Dr. Palo made it clear that at the moment of Dr. Burlando’s seizure, as at the moment of his death, Rebeca had been unconscious under heavy anesthetic.
When it came time for the defense to make its case, Dr. Palo refused to take the line Rebeca urged on him: that the case against her had been fabricated by the Directorate of the Mituco Company to confiscate her mansion and little León’s stock, and that the company, not content to rely on gossip and coincidence, had exacerbated superstitions by contriving to steal Dr. Burlando’s body and fill his coffin with rocks. He refused as well to put Rebeca on the stand. He called one witness, Señora Perfecta, whom he had subpoena’d from Mituco de Tierra Firme. He introduced her as a witch of thirty years’ active practice and asked the court to consider her testimony expert. Here Licentiate Jacobo Mangle objected and with great histrionics demanded to know what evidence the defense could show that the witness was anything more than a busybody and a fake. The public applauded vigorously, and while judge Cedra was hammering for order, the witness beckoned Dr. Palo with a forefinger and whispered something in his car. When the theater was quiet and after judge Cedra had instructed the bailiffs to remove any person whose conduct interfered with the calm tenor of the trial, Dr. Palo asked if the honorable and valiant counsel for the prosecution wished the witness to prove her expertise by cursing him. Mangle blanched and, to the great amusement of all present, hastily withdrew his objection. Judge Cedra concealed his smile behind a handkerchief, cleared his nostrils into it, rapped twice, and ruled that in the absence of current protest from the prosecution, the witness’s testimony would be considered expert. Señora Perfecta was then sworn and asked to tell the court, in her own words, about witches.
Señora Perfecta was, by her own claim, forty-seven years of age and looked no older. Her skin had the sheen and color of a telephone, but she was straight-nosed and high-foreheaded. Grand matriarchal bosoms swelled beneath the bodice of her dress, and when she gestured, folds of flesh flapped from her upper arms with elephantine dignity. Her voice was clear, her gaze firm even in the spotlight. Neither Judge Cedra nor the Bishop of Mituco commanded more authority.
Señora Perfecta said, first of all, that local witches got their powers not from Satan but from the spirits of Mituco, who had sojourned on the island in vast numbers during pre-Columbian times and who, though now diminished, still visited there more frequently than in any other region of America. A Mituco witch could use her powers only to do good for Mituco and the mituqueños, as when, almost a hundred years before, Doña Filomena de Balsa had hit General Isidro Bodega’s Dutch Finance Minister with the Curse of the Tides. As for powers, the powers were three, the Powers of Love, of Death, and of Eternity. And the Powers of Love were three, and they were love potions, aphrodisiacs, and fertility charms. And the Powers of Death were three, and they were the Curses, the Curse of the Tides, and the Curse of the Winds, where the accursed dried up and shriveled and blew away, and the Curse of the Rocks, where the accursed solidified. And the Powers of Eternity were also three, but they could not be revealed.
When Señora Perfecta concluded her discourse on witchery, the theater was silent, except for a heavy gasping from Licentiate Jacobo Mangle, who was probably wondering which of the three Curses Señora Perfecta had meant to aim at him. Then Dr. Everardo Palo de Bamboa thanked the witness for her deposition and asked if, in her expert opinion, the defendant, Rebeca Fuertes, was a witch.
“Ha!” said Señora Perfecta, smiling contemptuously in the direction of the defendant. Rebeca Fuertes was no witch at all. She commanded no magic, either for good or evil. She had no powers other than those a clever and good-looking woman might be expected to enjoy in a community where men were pigs. Señora Perfecta declared that she had known the defendant as a child, when all she did was eat mangoes and make mischief, whereas a witch was serious from birth and began her apprenticeship at seven years. Señora Perfecta related how Rebeca had consulted her, then asked rhetorically if any witch, much less a witch with all the powers Licentiate Mangle had attributed to Rebeca, would go all the way to Mituco de Tierra Firme or offer good money for a fertility charm. Certainly not! A witch would make her own and be done with it. She Señora Perfecta, had been brewing up love potions and fertility charms since she was twelve and selling them (with precious few complaints) since she was seventeen. “Rebeca Fuertes a witch? Ha!”
Dr. Palo then released the witness for cross-examination, and Licentiate Mangle asked if Rebeca might not have acquired witchly powers in some foreign country, China, for example. Señora Perfecta replied that such powers would be invalid in the Mituco area. Licentiate Mangle then asked if that might not explain why Rebeca consulted her. In other words: some of Rebeca’s powers—those for fertility charms, for example—might be invalid on Mituco, whereas others … In the expert opinion of the witness, then, was it not possible that a witch covened in foreign parts might retain her evil powers on Mituco, her powers, say, for bewitching men, even for casting death spells on them, while losing her benevolent powers, her powers, say, for fertility charms?
For the first time Señora Perfecta seemed to be uncertain of herself. She hesitated, looked long toward Rebeca, then set her chin and said no.
But could the witness be sure?
Completely.
Might not the witness be influenced by considerations of personal pride and professional jealousy?
Dr. Everardo Palo de Bamboa leaped to his feet and objected to this unethical attempt to discredit and intimidate an expert witness. Señora Perfecta fixed her gaze on Licentiate Jacobo Mangle and began muttering under her breath. The prosecutor felt his thumb tips go hard as stone and withdrew his question before Judge Cedra had had time to rule.
“No further questions,” he mumbled, and walked shakily back to his table.
“The defense rests,” said Dr. Palo de Bamboa.
That night the air above Mituco Marítimo was thick with spirits. Clouds of them obscured the moon and hissed at those few passers-by unwise enough to leave their homes. The greatest concentration was in the Plaza Cortada. The constable on duty in the square huddled beneath the statue of Javier Cortada and counted more than a thousand between midnight and twelve-thirty. They streamed in from the wooded southern portions of the island toward the upper storey of the Guest House, where Señora Perfecta was lodged at court expense. All the milk in the town curdled. All the cream turned sour. And Licentiate Jacobo Mangle woke to find his two big toes calcified to granite. They broke off cleanly when he tried to put on his shoes, and from that day on he walked flatfooted, like a duck. These happenings, which were the common knowledge of everyone in town before the trial reconvened to hear charges to the jury, were variously interpreted: loudly as signs of Rebeca’s guilt; silently as proof of her innocence. She alone took no notice of them, having slept quite soundly all night long with little León nestled to her breast.
In his charge to the jury Licentiate Jacobo Mangle reiterated all the testimony he had introduced to substantiate the charges against Rebeca. He was particularly graphic about the nature and placement of her tattoos, and his description of how the tarantula’s “foul and hairy members gripped even to the core of that fragrant fruit with which this modern Eve poisoned her poor Adam” drew titters and applause from the public. When it came time for him to refute the testimony of the defense’s single witness, he remembered his vanished toes and took valor from his anger and denounced Señora Perfecta’s denial of Rebeca’s witchhood, pointing resolutely at the witness, who sat in the first row, and declaring that she had allowed jealousy, or perhaps even a bribe from the defense, to lead her from the truth. Here the little fingers of both his hands solidified and broke away and fell to the board floor of the stage with slight, dry thumps, and Mangle, his fury throttling his fear, ground them both to dust with the heel of his right shoe and screamed that Rebeca had cursed him and called upon the jury to convict her and judge Cedra to impose the harshest penalty provided by the law.
The applause to this was such that Licentiate Mangle permitted himself half a dozen bows before waddling back to his table. In fact, most of those present were agreed that the Municipal Theater of Mituco had heard no such ovation since Rebeca’s Swan Lake variation eighteen years before. Judge Emilio Cedra pounded for three solid minutes before the theater grew quiet enough for his voice to be heard threatening to clear the courtroom if the public would not keep order. Then Dr. Palo de Bamboa rose and called meekly for acquittal. The jury ought well to disregard the ranting of the prosecutor and the wholly circumstantial evidence he had introduced and attend instead to the testimony of the one witness (with all respect to Monseñor Ramillo, who knew much more about divine than witchly matters) qualified to pronounce on who might or might not be a witch: Señora Perfecta. The calm examination of her testimony by reasonable men could only, Dr. Palo said, result in an acquittal for his client. He called again for such a verdict, then resumed his seat and his inspection of the ceiling frescoes.
Judge Emilio Cedra admonished the jury to consider the evidence with care and dismissed them to the main dressing room behind the stage. They were back within five minutes. Rebeca Fuertes was guilty, Foreman Arnulfo Bocanegra said, on four counts of witchcraft, that is, of all the charges brought aganist her save that of having caused Dr. Burlando’s death.
Rebeca took this news with no show of emotion. She was thinking that it was close to little León’s feeding time and scarcely heard the verdict or the applause which followed it. Judge Cedra thanked the jury and advised the Clerk of the Court (who was also the Chief Clerk of the Mituco Company) to proceed forthwith with the sequestering of any and all property obtained by the defendant from the late Dr. Azael Burlando. Such goods had been extracted by enchantment, and under law a felon might not benefit from his crime. He then ordered the court adjourned until nine next morning, when he would pass sentence.
This sentencing aroused some speculation. The penalty for witchcraft, established in the 17th Century and unchanged since that time, was death by fire. On the other hand, the Republic of Tinieblas had abolished the death penalty by constitutional amendment in 1912. Would judge Cedra cite Mituco’s quasi-independent status and order Rebeca burned? Or would he impose some lesser penalty not mentioned in the statute? Discussion of this problem waxed virulent in the Café Progreso, where the lists were drawn between those who liked to consider Mituco the most advanced and civilized area of the republic and those who, masking their excitement behind an outraged moral sense, longed privately to witness so unique a public entertainment as a burning at the stake. And in every other corner of the island people were wondering about the sentence, or commenting on the verdict, or rehashing the highlights of the trial. In fact, the only person on Mituco whose mind was not totally occupied by Rebeca Fuertes, her trial, or her forthcoming sentence was Rebeca herself.
Rebeca neither wondered about her punishment, nor minded that she stood condemned and destitute, nor suffered that her child was branded as the devil’s spawn. She had descended into apathy deeper than ever she had known during the opium’d twilights in the brothel at Tsinan. She lay wide-eyed yet unthinking, while her cell filled up with darkness, while, below her window, the board streets of Mituco emptied, while the human noises of the town dissolved into mosquito hum and cricket chirp. And it seemed that little León had sucked this same dullness from her breast, for he lay awake yet silent beside her and neither wailed nor whimpered as his feeding hours passed. Then, at midnight, the spirit of Rosalba Fuertes entered Rebeca’s cell.
Rosalba called to her great-granddaughter in the same resolute tones with which she bad propositioned General Isidro Bodega, and told her to rouse herself. And when Rebeca hesitated, Rosalba told how she had journeyed all the way to Ciudad Tinieblas in a vain effort to conceive a President of the Republic. Was Rebeca so slothful and despairing as not to do as much to save a future president already born? And so Rebeca rose and found the door to her cell standing open and her guard sleeping as though dead beside the threshold, and she took up her son León and carried him out into the passageway and let her great-grandmother’s spirit lead her down the darkened stairways of the Alcaldía out into the Plaza Cortada. And there Rebeca waited, still dazed, until the spirit of her grandmother, Raquel Fuertes, appeared before her and showed her the constable sleeping as though dead beside the statue of Javier Cortada. And when Rebeca hesitated, Raquel Fuertes told how she had fought her way into the bed of the tyrant General Epifanio Mojón in hope of conceiving a President of the Republic, and asked how Rebeca, with a future president already in her arms, could waver undecided. And so Rebeca let the spirit of her grandmother lead her across the square and down the board street to the quay where, eighteen years before, she had taken the lighter out to S.S. Pluto. And Rebeca waited at the head of the quay until the spirit of her mother, Rosenda Fuertes, appeared to her and pointed out a sloop warped at the far end of the quay with its sails flapping in the offshore breeze. And when Rebeca hesitated, Rosenda scolded her and told how she had journeyed all through the violent summer of 1883, from Ciudad Tinieblas to La Merced, from La Merced across Salinas Province to Otán, and how she had given up her virginity to General Feliciano Luna on a hard bench in the mayor’s office, all in unrealized hope of conceiving a President of the Republic, and now Rebeca, ungrateful as always, had conceived and born and suckled a future president, the greatest of all the Presidents of Tinieblas, yet stood like an idiot not knowing what to do. And so Rebeca let her mother’s spirit lead her out along the quay to where the sloop was waiting. And its crew was General Feliciano Luna and General Epifanio Mojón and General Isidro Bodega. And there Rebeca hesitated for the final time, asking if they could take her other children and her maid,26 who had gone over to Mituco de Tierra Firme when the court bailiffs evicted them from Don Patricio’s mansion. But the three generals said there wasn’t time, and when Rebeca stepped over the gunwale with León in her arms, General Isidro Bodega slipped the bow line and General Epifanio Mojón hauled at the mainsheet and General Feliciano Luna swung the tiller, and the sails filled with a sound like cannon fire, and the sloop swept out into the bay. And when the sun came up five hours later over Ciudad Tinieblas, Rebeca Fuertes was standing on the sea wall near the public market with her baby in her arms.