A hot, dusty, flyblown Mexican border town – a town without hope, without grace, the end of the road for all those who’ve the misfortune to find themselves washing up here. The time is about the turn of the century, long after the heroic period of the West is past; and there was never anything heroic about these border raiders, this poverty-stricken half-life they lead. The Mendozas, a barbarous hierarchy of bandits, run the town, its corrupt sheriff, its bank, the telegraph – everything. Even the priest is an appointment of theirs.
The only establishment in the town with a superficial veneer of elegance is the bar-cum-whorehouse. This is presided over by a curious, apparently ill-matched couple – an ageing, drunken, consumptive European aristocrat and his mistress, the madame, who keeps him. She’s called Roxana, a straightforward, ageing, rather raddled, unimaginative, affectionate woman.
She is the sister of Maria Mendoza, the bandit’s wife – that’s how she obtained the brothel concession. Roxana and her man, the dying, despairing man they call the Count, arrived, the pair of them, out of nowhere, a few years back, penniless, in rags; they’d begged a ride in a farm cart . . . ‘I’ve come home, Maria, after all this time . . . there’s nowhere else to go.’ Roxana’d had a lot of experience in the trade; with her brother-in-law’s blessing, with his finance, she opened up a bar-cum-brothel and staffed it with girls who’d got good reason to lie low for a while – not, perhaps, the best class of whore. Five of them. But they suit the customers very well; they keep Mendoza’s desperadoes out of trouble, they service his visitors – and sometimes there’s a casual visitor, a stray passerby, a travelling salesman, say, or a smuggler. The brothel prospers.
And the Count, in his soiled, ruffled shirt and threadbare suits of dandified black, lends a little class to the joint; so his life has come to this, he serves to ornament his mistress’s bar. A certain bitterness, a dour dignity, characterises the Count.
The Count lets visitors buy drinks for him; he is a soak, but a distinguished one, nevertheless. He keeps a margin of distance about himself – he has his pride, still, even if he’s dying. He’s rumoured to have been, in his day, in the Old Country, a legendary marksman. The girls chatter among themselves. Julie, the Yankee, says she’s heard that he and Roxana used to do an act in a circus. He used to shoot all her clothes off her until she was as naked as the day she was born. As the day she was born!
But hadn’t he killed Roxana’s lover, no, not her lover but some man she’d been sold to, some seamy story . . . wasn’t it in San Francisco, on the waterfront? No, no, no – everything happened in Austria, or Germany, or wherever it is he comes from, long before he met Roxana. He’s not touched a gun since he met Roxana. He never shoots, now, even if his old-fashioned, long-barrelled rifle hangs on the wall . . . look! He was too good a shot; they said that only the devil himself – it’s best not to pay attention to such stories, even if Maddalena once worked in a house in San Francisco where Roxana used to work and somebody told her – but the Count’s shadow falls across the wall; they hush, even if Maddalena furtively crosses herself.
In this town, nobody asks any questions. Who would live here if they had the option to live anywhere else? Poor Teresa Mendoza, pretty as a picture, sweet sixteen, sullen, dissatisfied, she got a few ideas above her station when they sent her off to a convent to learn how to read and write. What does she need to read and write for? Not when she’s condemned to live like a pig. But she’s going to get married, isn’t she? To a rich man? Yes, but he’s a rich bandit!
In the afternoon, the slack time, Roxana and her sister sit in Roxana’s boudoir with the shades down against the glaring sun, rocking on cane rocking-chairs, smoking cigars together and gently tippling tequila. Maria Mendoza is a roaring, mannish, booted and spurred bandit herself; savage, illiterate, mother of one daughter only, the beautiful Teresa. ‘We finally fixed it, Roxana; signed, sealed and almost delivered . . . See, here’s the picture of Teresa’s fiancé . . . isn’t he a handsome man? Eh? Eh?’
Roxana looks at the cherished photograph dubiously. Another bandit, even if a more powerful one than Mendoza himself! At least she, Roxana, has managed to get herself a man who doesn’t wear spurs to bed. And Teresa hasn’t even met her intended . . . ‘No, no!’ cries Maria. ‘That’s not necessary. Love will come, as soon as they’re married, once he gets his leg over her . . . and the babies, my Teresa’s babies, my grandchildren, growing up in his enormous house, surrounded by servants bowing and scraping.’ But Roxana is less certain and shakes her head doubtfully. ‘Anyway, there’s nothing Teresa can do about it,’ says her mother firmly; ‘it’s all been fixed up by Mendoza, she’ll be the bandit queen of the entire border. That’s a lot better than living like a pig in this hole.’
The Mendozas do indeed live like pigs, behind a stockade, in a filthy, gypsy-like encampment of followers and hangers-on in the grounds of what was once, before the Mendozas took it over, a rather magnificent Spanish colonial hacienda. Now Mendoza himself, Teresa’s hulking brute of a father, gallops his horse down the corridors, shoots out the windowpanes in his drunkenness. Teresa, the spoiled only daughter, screams at him in fury: ‘We live like pigs! Like pigs!’
Problems in the brothel! The pianist has run off with the prettiest of all the girls; they’re heading south to start up their own place, she reckons her husband won’t chase her down as far as Acapulco. They wait for the stagecoach to take them away, sitting on barrels in the general store with their bags piled around them; the coach drops one passenger, the driver goes off to water the horses. Any work here for a piano-player? Why, what a coincidence!
He’s from the north, a gringo. And a city boy, too, in a velvet coat, with such long, white fingers! He winces when he hears gunfire – a Mendoza employee boisterously shooting at chickens in the gutter. How pale he is . . . a handsome boy, nice, refined, educated voice. Is there even the trace of a foreign accent?
Like the Count, he is startlingly alien in this primitive, semi-desert environment.
Roxana melts maternally at the sight of him; he delights the Count by playing a little Brahms on the out-of-tune, honky-tonk piano. The Count’s eyes mist over; he remembers . . . The conservatoire at Vienna? Can it be possible? How extraordinary . . . so you were studying at the conservatoire at Vienna? Although Roxana’s delighted with her new employee, her lip curls, she is a natural sceptic. But he’s the best piano-player she’s ever heard.
And, anyway, nobody really asks questions in this town, or believes any answers, for that matter. He must have his reasons for holing up in this godforsaken place. The job’s yours, Johnny; you get a little room over the porch to sleep in, with a lock on it to keep the girls out. They get bored . . . don’t let them bother you.
But Johnny is in the grip of a singular passion; he is a grim and dedicated being. He ignores the girls completely.
In his bedroom, Johnny places photographs of a man and a woman – his parents – on the splintered pine dressing-table; pins up a poster for the San Francisco Opera House on the wall, Der Freischütz. He addresses the photographs. ‘I’ve found out where they live, I’ve tracked them to their lair. It won’t be long now, Mother and Father. Not long.’
Hoofbeats outside. Maria Mendoza is coming to visit her sister, riding astride, like a man, while her daughter rides side-saddle like a lady, even if her hair is an uncombed haystack. She looks the wild bandit-child she is. But – now she’s an engaged woman, her father forbids her to visit the brothel, even to pay a formal call on her good aunt! Ride back home, Teresa!
Sullen, she turns her horse round. Looking back at the brothel as she trots away, she sees Johnny gazing at her from his window; their eyes meet, Johnny’s briefly veil.
Teresa is momentarily confused; then spurs her horse cruelly, gallops off, like a wild thing.
In the small hours, when the brothel has finally closed down for the night, Johnny plays Chopin for the Count. Tears of sentimental nostalgia roll down the old man’s cheeks. And Vienna . . . is it still the same? Try not to remember . . . he pours himself another whisky. Then Johnny asks him softly, is it true what he’s heard . . . stories circulating in the faraway Austro-Hungarian Empire; the Count starts.
The old legend, about the man who makes a pact with the devil to obtain a bullet that cannot miss its target . . .
An old legend, says the Count. In the superstitious villages, they believe such things still.
All kinds of shadows drift in through the open window.
The old legend, given a new lease of life by the exploits of a certain aristocrat, who vanished suddenly, left everything. And the Mendozas, here, the bandits – aren’t they all damned? Vicious, cruel . . . wouldn’t a man who’s sold his soul to the devil feel safest amongst the damned? Amongst whores and murderers?
The Count, shuddering, pours yet another whisky.
Is it true what they used to whisper, that the Count – this Count, you! old man – had a reputation as a marksman so extraordinary that everyone thought he had supernatural powers?
The Count, recovering himself, says: ‘They said that of Paganini, that he must have learned how to play the fiddle from the devil. Since no human being could have played so well.’
‘And perhaps he did,’ says Johnny.
‘You’re a musician, not a murderer, Johnny.’
‘Stranglers and piano-players both need long fingers. But a bullet is more merciful,’ suggests Johnny obliquely.
Out of some kind of dream into which he’s abruptly sunk, the Count says: ‘The seventh bullet belongs to the devil. That is how you pay – ’
But tonight, he won’t, can’t say any more. He lurches off to bed, to Roxana, who’s waiting for him, as she always does. But why, oh why, is the old man crying? The whisky makes you into a baby . . . but Roxana takes care of you, she’s always taken care of you, ever since she found you.
Roxana mothers the newcomer, Johnny, too, but she also watches him, with troubled eyes. All he does is play the piano and brood obsessively over the Mendoza gunmen as they sport and play in the bar. Sometimes he inspects the Count’s old rifle, hung up on the wall, strokes the barrel, caresses the stock; but he knows nothing about the arts of death at all. Nothing! And he takes no interest in the girls, that’s unhealthy.
It seems to Roxana that there’s a likeness between her old man and the young one. That crazy, black-clad dignity. They always seem to be chatting to one another and sometimes they talk in German. Roxana hates that, it makes her feel shut out, excluded.
Can he be, can young Johnny be . . . some son the Count begot and then abandoned, a child he’d never known, come all this way to find him?
Could it be?
Old man and young one, with eyes the same shape, hands the same shape . . . could it be?
And if it is, why don’t they tell her, Roxana?
Secrets make her feel shut out, excluded. She sits in her room on the rocking-chair in the dusk, sipping tequila.
Voices below – in German. She goes to her window, watches the Count and the piano-player wander off together in the direction of the little scummy pond in front of the brothel, which is set back off the main street.
She crosses herself, goes on rocking.
‘Speak English, we must leave the Old World and its mysteries behind us,’ says the Count. ‘The old, weary, exhausted world. Leave it behind! This is a new country, full of hope . . .’
He is heavily ironic. The ancient rocks of the desert lour down in the sunset.
‘But the landscape of this country is more ancient by far than we are, strange gods brood over it. I shall never be friends with it, never.’
Aliens, strangers, the Count and Johnny watch the Mendozas ride out on the rampage, led by Teresa’s father; a band of grizzled hooligans, firing off their guns, shouting.
Johnny, calm, quiet, tells the Count how the Mendozas killed his parents when they raided a train for the gold the train carried. His parents, both opera singers, on their way back across the continent from California, from a booking in San Francisco . . . and he far away, in Europe.
Mendoza himself tore the earrings from his mother’s ears. And raped her. And somebody shot his father when his father tried to stop the rape. And then they shot his mother because she was screaming so loudly.
Calm, quiet, Johnny recounts all.
‘We all have our tragedies.’
‘Some tragedies we can turn back on the perpetrators. I’ve planned my revenge. A suitably operatic revenge. I shall seduce the beautiful señorita and give her a baby. And if I can’t shoot her father and mother, I shall find some way of strangling them with my beautiful pianist’s hands.’
Quiet, assured, deadly – but incompetent. He doesn’t know one end of a gun from the other; never raised his hand in anger in his life.
But he’s been brooding on this revenge ever since the black-edged letter arrived at his lodgings in Vienna; in Vienna, where he heard how a nobleman made a pact with the devil, once, to ensure no bullet he ever fired would miss the mark . . .
‘If you’ve planned it all so well, if you’re dedicated to your vengeance . . .’
Johnny nods. Quiet, assured, deadly.
‘If you’re quite determined, then . . . you belong to the devil already. And a bullet is indeed more merciful than anger, if accurately fired.’
And the Count has always hated Mendoza’s contempt for himself and Roxana, who live on Mendoza’s charity.
But Johnny has never used a gun in his life. Old man, old man, what have you to lose? You’ve nothing, you’ve come to a dead end, kept by a whore in a flyblown town at the end of all the roads you ever took . . . give me a gun that will never miss a shot; that will fire by itself. I know you know how to get one. I know –
‘I have nothing to lose,’ says the Count inscrutably. ‘Except my sins, Johnny. Except my sins.’
Teresa, sixteen, sullen, pretty, dissatisfied, retreats into her bedroom, into the depths of an enormous, gilded, four-poster bed looted from a train especially for her, surrounded by a jackdaw’s nest of tawdry, looted glitter, gorges herself on chocolates, leafs through very very old fashion magazines. She hugs a scrawny kitten, her pet. Chickens roost on the canopy of her bed. Maa! maa! a goat pokes its head in through the open window. Teresa twitches with annoyance. You call this living?
Her door bursts open. An excited dog follows a flock of squawking chickens into the room; all the chickens roosting on the bed rise up, squawking. Chaos! The dog jumps on to the bed, begins to gnaw at the bloody something he carries in his mouth. Kitten rises on its hind legs to bat at the dog. Teresa hurls chocolates, magazines, screaming – insupportable! She storms out of the room.
In the courtyard, her mother is slaughtering a screaming pig. That’s the sort of thing the Mendoza womenfolk enjoy! Ugh. Teresa’s made for better things, she knows it.
She wanders disconsolately out into the dusty street. Empty. Like my life, like my life.
Willows bend over the scummy pool in front of Roxana’s brothel; it has a secluded air.
Teresa skulks beside the pool, sullenly throwing stones at her own reflection. Morning, slack time; in voluptuous déshabillé, the whores lean over the veranda: ‘Little Teresa! Little Teresa! Come in and see your auntie!’ They laugh at her in her black stockings, her convent-girl dress, her rumpled hair.
Roxana’s doing the books, behind the bar, with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses propped on her nose. The Count pours himself elevenses – she looks up, is about to remonstrate with him, thinks better of it, returns to her sums. Morning sunshine; outside on the veranda, the whores giggle and wave at Teresa.
Johnny idly begins to play a Strauss waltz. Roxana’s foot taps a little.
The Count puts down his whisky. Smiles. He approaches Roxana, presents his arm. She’s startled – then blushes, beams like a young girl. Takes off her glasses, pats her hair, glances at herself in the mirror behind the bar, pleasantly flustered. Seeing her pleasure, the Count becomes more courtly still. Still quite a fine figure of a man! And she, when she smiles, you see what a pretty girl she must have been.
Johnny flourishes the keys; he’s touched. He begins to play a Strauss waltz in earnest.
Roxana takes the Count’s proffered arm; they dance.
‘Look! Look! Roxana’s dancing!’
The whores flock back into the room, laughing, admiring. And begin to dance with one another, girl with girl, in their spoiled negligees, their unlaced corsets, petticoats, torn stockings.
Maddalena, partnerless, lingers on the veranda, teasing Teresa. Music spills out of the brothel.
‘Teresa! Teresa! Come and dance with me!’
Slowly, slowly, Teresa arrives at the veranda, climbs the stairs, peers through a window as, flushed and breathless, the dancers collapse in a laughing heap.
She and Johnny exchange a flashing glance. But her aunt catches sight of her. ‘Teresa, Teresa, scram! This is no place for you!’
At the Mendozas’ dinner-table, her father sits picking his teeth with his knife.
‘I want to learn the piano, papa.’
He continues to pick his teeth with his knife. She didn’t want to learn the piano at the damn convent; why does she want to learn it now? To be a lady, Papa; isn’t she going to have a grand wedding, marry a fine man? ‘Papa, I want to learn the piano.’
Teresa is spoiled, indulged in everything. But her father likes to tease her; he’ll drag out her pleading as long as he can. He doesn’t often have his daughter pleading with him. He cuts himself a chunk more meat, munches.
‘And who will teach you piano in his hole, hm?’
‘Johnny. Johnny at Aunt Roxana’s.’
He’s suddenly really angry. You see what an animal he can become.
‘What? My daughter learn piano in a brothel? Under the eye of that fat whore, Roxana?’
Maria leaps to her sister’s defence, surging down on her husband with the carving knife held high. ‘Don’t you insult my sister!’
Mendoza twists her wrist; she drops the knife. ‘I’m not having my daughter mixing with whores!’
‘I want to learn piano,’ the spoiled child insists.
‘Over my dead body will you go to Roxana’s to learn the piano, not now you are an engaged girl.’
‘Then, papa, buy me a piano, let Johnny come here to teach me.’
A creaking wagon delivers a shiny, new, baby grand in the courtyard of the rotting hacienda, among the grunting pigs and flapping chickens.
Effortlessly, it’s installed in Teresa’s room; entranced, she picks at the notes. ‘Kitty, kitty, the young man in the black jacket is coming to teach me piano . . .’
Her mother chaperones her, sitting, lolling in a rocking-chair, sipping tequila. Johnny, neat, elegant, a stranger, damned, with a portfolio of music under his arm, has come to give Teresa lessons. First, scales . . . soon, Czerny exercises. Johnny waits, watchful, biding his time.
Bored, her mother sips tequila and nods off to sleep . . . A Czerny exercise; Teresa hasn’t quite mastered it. Making a mess of it, in fact. On purpose? Johnny’s presence makes her flutter.
Johnny stands behind her, showing her where to put her hands. His long, white hands cover her little, brown paws with the bitten fingernails.
She turns to him. They kiss. She’s eager, willing; he’s surprised by her enthusiasm, almost taken aback. Despises her. It’s going to be almost too easy!
But where is the seduction to be accomplished? Not in Teresa’s bedroom, with her mother dozing in the rocking-chair. Not in Johnny’s room at the brothel, either, under Aunt Roxana’s watchful eye.
‘In church, Johnny; nobody will look for lovers there.’
A huge, cavernous, almost cathedral, built in expectation of mass conversions among the Indians, now almost in ruins, on a kind of bluff, brooding over the half-ruined village. Empty. And they make love on the floor of the church, the savage child, the vengeance-seeker. Afterwards, triumphant, she buries her face in his breast, shrieking for glee; he is detached, rejoicing in his own coldness, his own wickedness.
Naked, Teresa wanders down the aisle of the church towards the altar, stands looking up vaguely at the rococo Christ. She pokes out her tongue at her saviour.
‘I’ll be here again, soon. I’m going to be married.’
‘Married?’
‘To a fine bandit gentleman.’ Makes a face. ‘Because I have no brothers, I am the heiress. My son will inherit everything, but first I must be married.’
‘Oh, no,’ says Johnny, lost, gone into his vengeance. ‘You won’t be married. I won’t let you be married.’
Suspicious, at first. Then . . . ‘Do you love me?’ Exultant, shouting. ‘So you love me! You must love me! You’ll take me away!’
The Count rummages through a trunk in his and Roxana’s bedroom, he gets out old books and curious instruments. The room is full of mysterious shadows. Roxana tries the door, finds that it is locked; she rattles the handle agitatedly. ‘What are you up to? What secrets do you have from me? Is it the old secret? Is it – ’
The Count lets her in, takes her into his arms. ‘He’ll take the burden from me, Roxana. He wants to, he’s willing, he knows . . .’
‘Your . . . son has come to set you free?’
‘Not my son, Roxana.’
She is so relieved that she almost forgets the dark import of what he’s saying. Yet she must ask him: ‘And what’s the price?’
‘High, Roxana. Do you love a poor old man, do you love him more than you love your kin?’
Wide-eyed, she stares at him.
‘Yes, old man, I do believe I do. It’s been so long, now, since we’ve been together . . .’
‘We’ll be together for ever, Roxana.’
So he goes on assembling his occult materials and now she helps him. She has only one reservation. ‘The little Teresa, nothing must happen to her . . .’
‘No. Not Teresa. What harm has she ever done to anyone? Not Teresa.’
An eclipse of the moon. In the church, in darkness, at the altar, the Count and Johnny summon the appropriate demon – the Archer of the Dark Abyss. Such a storm! Out of nowhere, a great wind, whirling the dust into a sandstorm. Roxana, alone in her bedroom full of curious shadows, draws the shutters close and mutters prayers, incantations.
The great wind blows open the doors of the church, sets them creaking on their hinges. Out of the sandstorms, hallucinatory figures emerge and merge, figures of demons or gods not necessarily those of Europe. The unknown continent, the new world, issues forth its banned daemonology.
The Count has summoned up more than he bargained for. He and Johnny crouch in the pentacle; Aztec and Toltec gods appear in giant forms. The church seems to have disappeared.
When the ritual is done, all clears; the interior of the church is a shambles, however, the Christ over the altar cast down on its face. Johnny and the Count pick themselves up from the floor, where the wind has left them. The Count is coughing horribly, his face is livid; the rite has nearly killed him.
Outside, all is calm now, a clear, bright night. The moon is back in the heavens again. Johnny, a man in the grip of a mania, stern, firm, helps the shaking Count to his feet.
‘Where is the weapon?’
‘He has come. He’s waiting. He’ll give it to us.’
Outside, against the wall, so still he’s almost part of the landscape, an Indian sits in the dark, poncho, slouch hat, waiting, impassive.
The Count, leaning heavily on Johnny, greets the Indian with some courtly ceremony. But Johnny barks: ‘Got the gun?’
‘I got it.’
The gun changes hands. Johnny grabs it.
‘How much?’
‘On account,’ says the Indian and grins. ‘On account.’
He tips his hat. His pony, in the graveyard, grazes on a grave. The two Europeans watch him walk towards his pony, mount, ride. In the immense stillness of the night, his hoofbeats diminish.
Johnny inspects the Winchester repeater in his hands; it looks perfectly normal. Not used to guns, he handles it clumsily. His disappointment is obvious.
‘What’s so special about it? Could have bought one in the store.’
‘It will fire seven bullets,’ says the Count, impassive as any Indian. ‘And the seventh bullet is the one that he put in it, it belongs to him.’
‘But – ’
‘The seventh bullet is the devil’s own. He will fire the seventh shot for you, even though you pull the trigger. But the other six can’t miss their targets. Though you’ve never used a gun before.’
Incredulous, Johnny takes aim, fires at a movement in the darkness. He rushes towards the scream. His target, Teresa’s kitten, dead.
‘Five left now, for your own use,’ says the Count. ‘Use them sparingly. They come at a high price.’
Teresa wants her kitten. ‘Kitty! Kitty!’ But the kitten doesn’t come. ‘The dogs have eaten it,’ says Teresa’s mother. ‘And hold still, Teresa, you’re wriggling like an eel; how can I fit your wedding-dress . . . ?’
It’s a store-bought wedding-dress, come on the stagecoach from Mexico City. All white lace. And a veil! In front of the clouded mirror in Teresa’s bedroom, Maria pops the veil on her daughter’s head; what a picture. But Teresa sulks.
‘I don’t want to get married.’
Too bad, Teresa! Tomorrow you must and will get married.
I won’t. I won’t!
You won’t wheedle your father out of this one, not this time.
Teresa, in her wedding finery, picks out a few notes of the ‘Wedding March’ on her piano; furious, she slams the lid shut.
Johnny, at the piano in the whorehouse, plays a few bars of the ‘Wedding March’; a wedding guest, drunk, flings his glass at the mirror behind the bar, smashing it. The whores superstitiously huddle and mutter. The place is packed out with wedding guests, all notable villains. But there is too much tension to be any joy. Roxana, unsmiling, rings up the price of a replacement mirror on her cash register. The Count, morose, stoops over his drink at the bar. The wedding guests treat him with genial contempt.
Teresa creeps out of her bedroom window, steals along the street, conceals herself hastily in the shadows when an Indian on a pony comes riding down the street.
Her lover waits for her by the scummy pond. Take me away. Save me! He strokes her hair with the first sign of tenderness. Perhaps he will take her away, if she can bear to look at him after the holocaust. Perhaps . . .
It’s very late, now. Only the Count stays up. He’s gazing at the recumbent form of a wedding guest passed out on the floor, snoring. The whores have stuck a feather hat on the visitor’s head, taken off his trousers, daubed his face with rouge.
When Johnny comes in, the Count silently pours him a drink. He looks at the boy with, almost, love – certainly with some emotion.
‘I could almost ask you . . .’
Johnny smiles, shakes his head, whistles a few bars of Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’.
‘But then . . . be good to the little Teresa. “The prince of darkness is a gentleman . . .”’
Maybe. Maybe not. But, maybe . . .
How Teresa’s hair tangles in the comb! A great bustle in the Mendoza encampment; they’ve got a carriage for her, decked it with exuberant paper flowers. But she herself is nervous, anxious; she chews at her underlip, she lets the women dress her as if she were a doll. Her mother, oddly respectable in black, weeps copiously. Teresa, in her wedding-dress and veil, suddenly turns to her mother and hugs her convulsively. The woman returns the embrace fiercely.
Johnny kisses the photographs of his father and mother. It’s time. Unhandily carrying the rifle, in his music student’s black velvet jacket, elegant, deadly, mad, he goes towards the church.
They’ve put back the rococo, suffering Christ; Johnny crouches beneath him, hiding under the skirts of the altar cloth. He tests the weight of the gun in his hand, peers through the sights.
The Count won’t go to the wedding. No, he won’t! He won’t get out of bed. Please, Roxana, don’t you go to the wedding, either! What? Not see my little niece Teresa get married? And you should come, too, you irreligious old man. Aren’t you fond of Teresa?
But the Count is sick this morning. He can’t crawl out of bed. He coughs, stares at the ominous bloodstains on his handkerchief.
‘I’m dying, Roxana. Don’t leave me.’
Though the bridegroom has arrived already, a huge brute, the image of Teresa’s father. He takes his place before the altar. The congregation rustles. The organ plays softly.
Roxana, late, troubled, untidily dressed, slips in at the back of the church.
Teresa steps out of the flower-decorated carriage in front of the church. She’s really worried, now, looking desperately around for Johnny. Her mother kisses her, again; this time, the girl doesn’t respond, she’s got too much on her mind. Her mother and the Mendoza womenfolk enter the church. Her father, a little dressed up, boots polished, offers her his arm.
Traditional gasps as she walks down the aisle – isn’t she lovely! Even if her eyes search round and round the church for her rescuer. Where can he be? What will he do to save me?
The organ rings out.
Teresa arrives beside her bridegroom. From beneath her veil, she gives him a swift glance of furious dislike. The priest says the first words of the wedding service.
Johnny flings back the altar cloth, leaps on the altar, shoots point-blank the wide-eyed, open-mouthed Mendoza.
Mendoza tumbles backwards down the altar steps.
Silence. Then, shouting. Then, gunfire. Havoc!
But no bullet can touch Johnny; he shoots the bridegroom as the bridegroom leaps forward to attack him; shoots three – four – into the crowd of Mendoza desperadoes, two men fall.
Teresa, in her wedding finery, stands speechless, shocked.
Her mother, wailing, rushes from the crowd towards her dead husband.
Johnny aims, shoots Maria. She drops dead on to the body of her husband.
Teresa at last wakes up. She rushes through the havoc in the church; she is appalled, the world has come to an end.
Roxana fights free of the crowd and goes running after her. The church is a mêlée of shots, noise, gunsmoke.
Outside the church, the girl and woman meet. Teresa can’t speak. Roxana hugs her, grabs her hand, pulls her down the path, towards the whorehouse.
Johnny erupts from the church door. Now he’s like a mad dog. Blazing, furious, deadly – carrying a gun.
By the scummy pool, Roxana hears Johnny coming after them. She drags Teresa faster, faster – the girl stumbles over her white lace hem, now filthy with dust and blood. Faster, faster – he’s coming, the murderer’s coming, the devil himself is coming!
The Count’s mistress and the beloved little Teresa run towards the whorehouse, where the Count gazes out of the window; run towards him, with the madman hot on their heels.
The Count opens the whorehouse door.
He’s carrying the rifle that hangs on the wall of the bar.
Slowly, shakily, he raises it.
He’s aiming at Johnny.
Teresa sees him, breaks free of Roxana’s hand, dashes back towards her lover – to try to protect him? Some reason, sufficient to her hysteria.
Johnny, startled, halts; so the old man’s turned against him, has he? The old man’s turned his own magic rifle on the young one, the acolyte!
He takes aim at the Count, fires the seventh bullet.
He’s forgotten it’s the seventh bullet, forgotten everything except the sudden ease with which he can kill.
He fires the seventh bullet and Teresa drops dead by the side of the scummy pool. Her lace train slides down into the water.
The Count bursts into a great fit of tears. Roxana kneels by the dead girl, uselessly speaks to her, closes her eyes gently. Crosses herself. Gives the weeping Count, slumped on the whorehouse veranda, a long, dark look.
The crowd spills out of the church.
Johnny drops his gun, turns, runs.
Coda
Almost the desert. White, fantastic rocks, sand, burning sun. Johnny stole one of the Mendozas’ horses; now it founders beneath him. He shades his eyes; there’s a village in the distance . . .
But this village seems deserted. A weird, shabby figure in his music-student’s black jacket, he draws water from the well, drinks. At last, a thin, ragged, filthy child emerges from the derelict house.
‘The smallpox came. All dead, all dead.’
Flies buzz on an unburied corpse in a murky interior. Johnny retches. He’s white-faced, fevered – you would have said, a man with the devil pursuing him.
At the end of the village, gazing across the acres of desert before him, a figure is propped against the wall, a figure so still, so silent as at first to seem part of the landscape. He smiles to see Johnny stumbling towards him.
‘I was waiting for you,’ says the Indian who sold Johnny the gun. ‘We have some business to conclude.’