Inside the café, Nepomuceno avoided discussing what had happened in court that morning, but didn’t hesitate to talk up a deal he made with a Galician from Puerto Bagdad called Nemesio—they say he has bags under his eyes from eating so much chorizo. “Yeah, I signed a contract for 3,500 head of livestock with him; I hand them over and he takes them to Cuba. Business is good … My ranches are overflowing with cattle and horses: roan, bay, chestnut, piebald, dappled (and, I won’t deny it, there are mavericks, too, though I don’t go looking for them. Why would I, when my corrals are already full of animals, happy as clams? It’s not my style to go looking for wild ones. If I have mavericks it’s because they came to my ranch of their own free will, they like it on my land, we treat the animals well, they never lack for water, grass, or feed, or protection from the wolves).”
“So what do ya need Nemesio for? You can take care of things yourself …” the barkeep said.
More than a few customers nodded. Nepomuceno didn’t deny it.
Charlie, a recent arrival, asked him if the boats that would be transporting the livestock were his.
“They’re all Stealman’s,” answered a guy called David. His family makes a big deal out of their ancestry but they’re poor as fleas; he thinks he’s Nepomuceno’s rival, and likes to talk trash about him. “I said ‘all,’ and I mean everything that floats, except the tugboat, but as of today that’s his too. He paid almost nothing for it because he was calling in unpaid debts. That’s how he does business …”
David speaks like he’s working up to go in for the kill: “Bagdad, Nepomuceno? Ha! Bagdad ain’t nothing! If you’d made your contracts in Galveston back when things were going well for you, you’d be singin’ a different song today! Now you’re just a hungry gull peckin’ at some crumbs!”
The news of Stealman’s latest business acquisition turns Nepomuceno’s coffee bitter. If you smelled his breath you’d back away, he’s so full of bile.
Two weeks earlier old Arnoldo had asked Nepomuceno for help. “These wily gringos want my tugboat. They say I have a debt and I gotta pay it off with my boat. Listen, Nepomuceno, they invented this so-called debt, they say I owe them rent for the dock, can you believe it? And they calculated it from the date the law was passed. What kind of plague has befallen us? And how are we going to get rid of them? They want everything, you see, and I don’t need to tell you, just look what they did with your mother’s land, they wanna take over the whole damn world, these freeloading gringos …”
You can imagine how, for Nepomuceno, this was like rubbing salt into a wound.
He doesn’t say another word. He motions for the bill. Teresa approaches the bar and for a moment he is drawn out of his own problems.
Ah, lovely Teresa.
Teresa thinks in all of Bruneville and Matasánchez, in the entire Valley, there’s no one as dreamy as Nepomuceno; when she sees him she smiles in such a way that, some other time, it would have made his whole week; and though right now there’s no smile in the world could achieve that, it distracts him from his fury. “Teresa, pretty, Teresa,” he’s not defeated yet, after all, turnabout is fair play. He recalls how, ten months ago, he stole the election from under Stealman’s nose when he was certain of victory …
The gringos who are invading the Rio “Grande” Valley are fortune-hunters who fall into two camps: the Blues and the Reds.
The Reds are the big business owners and ranchers, wealthy and powerful. Stealman is their leader, along with a select few: King, Mifflin, Kenedy (it would be interesting to know the details of how they agreed to divvy up south Texas, but that’s not our business).
The Blues are small businessmen who struggle day-to-day to make a living, including Mr. Chaste, the mayor and pharmacist; Mr. Seed, who owns the corner coffee shop; Sharp, the butcher who owns the stalls on the east side of the market; Herr Werbenski, owner of the busy pawn shop who sells firearms and ammo on the side; and Peter Hat.
Nepomuceno supported the Blues in the mayoral election; he gathered Mexicans from across the Río Bravo and offered them a good meal (which he paid for) and a few coins (from his own pocket), then he transported them across the Río Bravo (he’d made a deal with old Arnoldo), plying them with quantities of sotol (which he had bought in bulk), and delivered them half-drunk to the polling booths to vote for his candidate, Mr. Chaste.
And that’s how the Blues won the mayoral election.
Nepomuceno recalls all this in the Café Ronsard, once again savoring his victory and the joy of crushing Stealman, which boosts his spirits, but a second later they plummet; it makes no difference whether Mr. Chaste is a Blue or a Red, he’s a wretched gringo (a pale-faced Anglo who pretended to be a Mexican’s best friend before the elections, no sooner had he won than he called them “worthless greasers”).
Teresa smiles at him again.
No matter, Nepomuceno thinks, contented; he won that battle.
Ooh, that Teresa is something else … but then he begins thinking about Stealman and old Arnoldo again, and he feels even worse.
His moods are unpredictable these days. He’s jumpy. He goes out into the street. Four of his men wait with their mounts; the other eight or so who accompanied him into Bruneville have stayed away from the Market Square so as not to set the gringos on edge. Three are waiting at the turnoff to Rancho del Carmen, and the rest are even further ahead. These days it’s safest to travel in packs.
Mexicans might think his men are simply vaqueros, or shady bandits, or lively young men. To gringos they’re all worthless greasers.
The fact is that vaqueros are no longer what they used to be, back in Lázaro’s day: they were both tender and tough with the herd, defending it from buffalo stampedes, wolves, and drought; leading the cattle to green pastures and rescuing them from gullies if necessary; fattening them up daily and always returning them to the corral.
Some say everything changed when the slaughterhouse opened in Bruneville. Others say it happened before that, when the buffalo began to be hunted to extinction, the Indians started carrying firearms, and grass began to be sown, causing the land itself to change. Grass grows fast and feeds the fast-growing herds, but it needs a lot of water—if it doesn’t rain it dries out—and it’s destructive: it kills trees and other plants, including grains and fruits, even sweet potatoes.
The truth is that the volume of cattle has ravaged the prairie … When a herd passes through it’s worse than wildfire because the earth isn’t cleansed for renewal, it’s just trampled.
(The slaughterhouse is past the docks, near Mrs. Big’s Hotel. Cattle and swine low, bellow, and bawl; they’re slaughtered by the dozens, sliced in half, they’re hung on hooks and shipped out on boats; there’s a constant stream of blood, and a pervasive stench.
In the slaughterhouse they experiment with ice, trying to freeze the meat to prevent it from rotting … it’s not that they have a problem with the flies and worms, but they want it to appear fresh, despite the fact it’s nearly rotten—if they could find buyers, they’d even sell the worms and flies by the pound.)
But back to our story: Nepomuceno sees Shears beating the old vaquero mercilessly in the Market Square.
“What’s going on here?” he asks calmly (despite the fact he’s deeply fond of Lázaro Rueda) to take things down a notch.
La Plange, the photographer who claims to be French, though no one knows where he’s really from—some say he’s Belgian or Dutch, though these days he asks folks to pronounce