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  “What name shall we give him?” he asked when he placed the baby in his father’s arms.

  “Alejandro, like me, my father, and my grandfather,” he replied.

  “He will be called Diego,” Regina interrupted, drained by fever and by the steady trickle of blood soaking the sheets.

  “Why Diego? No one in the de la Vega family is named Diego.”

  “Because that is his name,” she replied.

  Alejandro had suffered with her through the long hours of labor, and more than anything in the world he feared losing her. He saw that she was losing blood and he could not bring himself to argue with her. He concluded that if on her deathbed she had chosen that name for her firstborn, she must have good reason, so he authorized Padre Mendoza to baptize the boy on the spot; he seemed as weak as his mother and he ran the risk of ending up in limbo if he died before receiving the sacrament.

  It took Regina several weeks to recover from the battering of the birth, and then it was only because her mother, White Owl, arrived, barefoot and carrying her bundle of medicinal plants over her shoulder, just as candles were being set out for Regina’s funeral. This medicine woman had not seen her daughter for seven years that is, since the day she went off into the forest to round up warriors from other tribes.

  Alejandro attributed the timely appearance of his mother-in-law to the Indians’ communication system, a mystery the whites could never unravel. A message sent from the Presidio in Monterey took two weeks to reach Baja California, with horses dropping beneath their riders, but when it arrived it was already old news to the Indians, who had received it ten days before through some magical means. There was no other explanation for how that woman could have appeared out of nowhere without being summoned, just when she was needed most. White Owl took over without saying a word. She was little more than forty, tall, strong, beautiful, weathered by sun and hard work. Her young face, with honey-colored eyes like her daughter’s, was framed by an untamed mop of smoke-colored hair, to which she owed her name. She came in without asking permission, pushed Alejandro de la Vega aside when he attempted to find out who she was, walked straight through the complicated layout of the mansion, and stopped at her daughter’s bed.

  She called her by her true name, Toypurnia, and spoke to her in the tongue of their ancestors, until the dying woman opened her eyes. Then from her pouch she took the medicinal herbs needed to save her, boiled them in a clay olla over the brazier that warmed the room, and gave them to her to drink. The entire house was saturated with the odor of sage.

  In the meantime, Ana, with her habitual good nature, had taken Regina’s child, whimpering with hunger, to her breast; thus Diego and Bernardo, Ana’s son, began their lives with the same milk and in the same arms.

  That made them milk brothers for as long as they lived.

  Once White Owl found that her daughter could stand, and that she could eat without being nauseated, she put her plants and belongings back into her pouch, took one look at Diego and Bernardo, who were sleeping side by side in the same cradle without showing the least sign that she was curious about which of the two was her grandson and left without a goodbye. Alejandro de la Vega watched her go with great relief. He was grateful that she had saved Regina from certain death, but he was happier to be grateful from a distance; he felt uncomfortable under that woman’s influence, and worse, the Indians on the ranch were becoming insolent. They appeared for work in the morning with faces streaked with paint, at night they danced like sleepwalkers to the sound of mournful ocarinas, and in general they ignored his orders as if they had lost their Spanish.

  Normality returned to the hacienda at the same rate that Regina recovered her health. By the following spring, everyone except Alejandro de la Vega had forgotten that Regina had had one foot in the grave. It did not require medical training to deduce that she could not have any more children. Without his realizing, this knowledge began to come between Alejandro and his wife as he turned his devotion to Diego. He had dreamed of a large family, like those of other dons in the region. One of his friends had fathered thirty-six legitimate children in addition to the bastards that he didn’t bother to count. He had twenty children from his first marriage in Mexico, and sixteen from the second, the last five born in Alta California, one per year. The fear that something bad would happen to that one irreplaceable son, as it did to so many small children who died before they learned to walk, kept de la Vega awake at night. He formed the habit of praying aloud, kneeling beside his son’s bed, crying out to heaven to watch over him.

  Emotionless, arms folded across her breast, Regina observed her humbled husband from the doorway. In those moments she thought she despised him, but later, in bed, surrounded by the warmth and scents of their intimacy, they found a shortlived reconciliation. At dawn Alejandro dressed and went down to his office, where an Indian girl served him his hot chocolate, thick and bitter the way he liked it. He began the day by meeting with his foreman to give him instructions about the ranch, then turned to his multiple duties as alcalde. Husband and wife spent the day apart, in their own occupations, until sunset marked the hour to meet again. In summer they dined on the terrace of the bougainvillea, always accompanied by musicians playing their favorite songs. In winter they ate in the Sewing Room, where no one had ever sewed on so much as a button; the name came from a painting of a Dutch woman embroidering by the light of a candle. Often Alejandro stayed overnight in Pueblo de los Angeles because it grew late at a fiesta, or because he was playing cards with other dons. The round of dances, cards, musical evenings, and get-tog ethers went on every day of the year. There was nothing else to do, other than the outdoor sports that both men and women engaged in. Regina was not involved in any of it; she was a solitary soul, and except for her husband and Padre Mendoza, she distrusted anyone Spanish on principle. Neither did she have any interest in accompanying Alejandro on his trips or in the American ships that brought in contraband; she had never gone on board to negotiate with the sailors. At least once a year Alejandro went to Mexico City on business, absences that tended to last a couple of months. He returned from them laden with gifts and new ideas, but these too failed to move his wife. Regina went back to her long horseback rides, with her son in a kind of papoose basket on her back, and she lost the slight interest she’d had in the domestic chores now delegated to Ana. She fell into her old habit of visiting the Indians, even those not on their ranch, with the aim of identifying their problems and, if possible, easing them. As the colonists continued to divide up the land and subdue the tribes of the region, a system of obligatory service developed that was different from slavery only in that the Indians too were subjects of the king of Spain, and in theory had certain rights. In practice they were dirt-poor; they worked in exchange for food, liquor, tobacco, and permission to raise a few animals. In general the ranchers were benevolent patriarchs, more interested in their pleasures and passions than in the land and their peons, but occasionally a rancher came along who had a bad temper, and then the indi ada as the Indian population was called, went hungry or was pitilessly beaten. The neophytes at the mission were just as poor; they lived with their families in round huts built of sticks and straw, they worked from sunup to sunset, and they were totally dependent on the mission brothers for their livelihood. Alejandro de la Vega tried to be a good patron, as he wrote in a letter to Eulalia de Callis, but it annoyed him that Regina kept asking for more for the Indians, even after he had explained to her that they could not treat them any differently from those on other ranches because that would cause problems in the colony. Padre Mendoza and Regina, unified by the same desire to protect the Indians, had become friends. He had forgiven her for attacking the mission, and she was grateful because he had brought Diego into the world. The patrones stayed out of their way; the missionary had moral authority and she was the wife of the alcalde. On the occasions that Regina wanted to launch one of her campaigns for justice, she dressed in Spanish style, combed her hair into a severe bun, wore an
amethyst cross upon her breast, and attended functions in an elegant carriage, a gift from her husband, abandoning the spirited mare she usually rode. Even so, she was coolly received, because she was not one of them. No rancher would admit to having an Indian ancestor. To a man, they claimed Spanish heritage: white skin and pure blood. That Regina did not even try to hide her origins was not something they could forgive, although that was what Padre Mendoza most admired about her. When they learned that Regina’s mother was an Indian, the Spanish colony turned its back on her, though no one dared snub her to her face, out of respect for her husband’s position and fortune. They continued to invite her to parties and balls with the tranquil assurance that they would not see her there. Her husband would come alone.

  De la Vega did not have a lot of time for his family, busy as he was with running the town, his hacienda, and business affairs, and with settling disputes, of which there seemed to be no shortage among the townspeople. Every Tuesday and Thursday, without fail, he went to Pueblo de los Angeles to fulfill his political obligations, a prestigious burden with more duties than satisfactions but one he refused to give up out of a sense of service. He was not greedy, he did not abuse power, and authority came naturally to him, but he was not a man with grand vision. He never questioned the ideas he had inherited from his ancestors, even though sometimes they were not appropriate to the reality of America. To Alejandro, everything came down to a question of honor, pride in being who he was an exemplary Catholic hidalgo and in holding his head high. He worried that Diego, too tied to his mother’s apron strings, to Bernardo, and to the Indian servants, would not assume the position that was his by birth, but he reasoned that the boy was still very young, there would be time to guide him. He told himself he would start directing his son’s manly formation as soon as possible, but that moment always got put off; there were other more urgent matters to attend to. Sometimes the desire to protect his son and make him happy moved him to tears. His love for the child perplexed him; it was like being stabbed in the heart. He outlined lofty plans for him: he would be brave, a good Christian, loyal to the king like every male de la Vega before him, and wealthier than any of his relatives had ever been: the master of vast, fertile lands with a temperate climate and abundant water, where nature was generous and life was sweet, not as it was on the barren estates of his ancestors in Spain. He would have more herds of cattle, sheep, and swine than King Solomon; he would breed the best bulls and the most elegant Arabian horses; he would become the most influential man in Alta California; he would be governor. But that would be later. First he had to grow up, go to the university or to military school in Spain.

  De la Vega anticipated that by the time Diego was old enough to travel, Europe would be in better shape. Peace was too much to expect, since there never was peace on the old continent, but he could hope that level heads had prevailed. The news they were receiving was disastrous. He explained all this to Regina, but she did not share his ambitions for her son, and cared even less about problems on the other side of the ocean. She could not conceive of a world beyond limits she could travel to by horseback, say nothing of worry about events in France. Her husband had told her that in 1793, precisely the year they were married, King Louis XVI had been beheaded before a mob screaming for revenge and blood. Jose Diaz, a friend of Alejandro’s and a ship’s captain, had given him a miniature guillotine, an awesome toy he used to cut off the tips of his cigars and, in passing, illustrate how the heads of nobles had rolled in France, a terrible example that to Alejandro’s way of thinking could sink Europe into absolute chaos. That little machine seemed a tempting idea to Regina, for she speculated that if the Indians had it, whites would respect them, but she had the good sense not to share those musings with her husband. There was cause enough for bitterness between them; it wasn’t smart to add another.

  She was shocked by how much she had changed. She looked at herself in the mirror and could find no trace of Toypurnia; she saw only a woman with hard eyes and clenched lips. The need to live in a world foreign to her, and to stay out of trouble, had made her cautious and underhanded; she rarely confronted her husband, she preferred to act behind his back. Alejandro de la Vega never suspected that she was talking to Diego in her own tongue, so he was unpleasantly surprised when the first words out of his son’s mouth were in the Indian language. If he had known that his wife used each of his absences to take the child to visit his mother’s tribe, he would have exerted his authority.

  Whenever Regina appeared in the Indian village with Diego and Bernardo, grandmother White Owl abandoned her chores and devoted herself completely to them. The tribe had been reduced through mortal illness and by the number of braves who had been recruited by the Spanish; barely twenty families remained, more miserable every day. The grandmother filled the young boys’ heads with myths and legends of her people; she cleansed their hearts with the smoke of the sweet grass she used in her ceremonies and took them with her to pick magical plants.

  As soon as they were able to stand firmly on their two feet and hold a stick, she had the braves teach them to fight. They learned to fish with sharpened wands, and to hunt. She gave each of them a whole deerskin, complete with head and horns, to wear during the hunt; that was how they would stalk a deer. They waited, motionless, until their prey wandered near, and then shot their arrows. The growing presence of the Spanish had made the Indians submissive, but when Toypurnia-Regina was around, their blood was fired with the memory of the war of honor she had led. Their awed respect for her was translated into affection for Diego and Bernardo. They treated both as their sons.

  It was White Owl who took the boys to explore the caves near the de la Vega hacienda. She taught them to read the symbols carved on the walls a thousand years before, and showed them how to use them as a map. She explained that the caves were divided into seven sacred directions, a basic map for spiritual journeys, which is why in ancient times initiates had gone there to seek their own centers, which ideally should coincide with the center of the world, where life originates.

  When that correspondence was reached, the grandmother informed them, a luminous flame from the bowels of the earth blazed up and danced in the air for a long while, bathing the initiate with light and warmth. She explained that the caves were natural temples, and that they were protected by a higher energy, and that was why they should enter them only with good in mind. “Whoever goes in with bad intentions will be swallowed up, and after a while the cave will spit out his bones,” she told them. She added that if you help others, as the Great Spirit commands, a space in your body opens to receive blessings; that is the only way to prepare yourself for okahue.

  “Before the whites came, we went to those caves to seek harmony and find okahue, but no one goes now,” White Owl told them.

  “What is okahue?” Diego asked.

  “The five basic virtues: honor, justice, respect, dignity, and courage.”

  “I want all those, Grandmother.”

  “You must pass many tests, without crying,” White Owl replied curtly.

  From that day on, Diego and Bernardo began to explore the caves on their own. Before they were able to memorize the petroglyphs to guide them, as their grandmother had told them to do, they marked their route with pebbles. They invented their own ceremonies, inspired by what they had heard and seen in the tribe, and by the stories of White Owl.

  They asked the Great Spirit of the Indians, and Padre Mendoza’s God, to allow them to be granted okahue, but they never saw the flames blaze up and dance in the air, as they hoped. Their curiosity, however, did lead them to a natural passage. They had moved some rocks to lay out a medicine wheel on the ground, like the ones the grandmother traced: thirty-six stones in a circle and one in the center, out of which led four straight roads. When they moved a round stone that they had intended to set in the center of the circle, several others rolled away, uncovering a small entrance. Diego, who was slimmer and more agile, crawled inside and discovered a tunnel that quick
ly opened up enough for him to stand. The boys returned with candles and picks and shovels, and in the following weeks worked at widening the passageway.

  One day the tip of Bernardo’s pick opened a little hole that let in a ray of light; enchanted, the boys discovered that they had come out smack in the rear of the huge fireplace in the living room of the de la Vega hacienda. A few mournful chimes from the grandfather clock welcomed them. Many years later they would learn that the site of the house had been chosen by Regina precisely because it was close to the sacred caves.

  After their discovery, Diego and Bernardo set about strengthening the tunnel with boards and rocks, since the clay walls tended to crumble, and they also opened a hidden door in the bricks of the fireplace to connect the caves with the house. The hearth was so tall, wide, and deep that a cow could stand inside, a fitting dimension for the dignity of that room, which was never used to entertain guests but sometimes accommodated Alejandro de la Vega’s political meetings. The furniture, rough and uncomfortable, like that in the rest of the house, was lined up around the walls, as if they were for sale in a carpenter’s shop, accumulating dust and that rancid smell old furniture gets. The most prominent object in the room was an enormous oil of Saint Anthony ancient, bone-thin, covered with sores, and wearing rags in the act of rejecting Satan’s temptations, one of those horrors commissioned by the square unit in Spain and greatly appreciated in California. In a corner of honor, where they could be admired, were the staff and trappings of the alcalde’s office, which the owner of the house used in performing official duties. Those ranged from major matters, such as laying out streets, to trivial ones like granting permission for serenades; after all, if that were left to the wishes of smitten suitors, no one in the town would have slept. Hanging from the ceiling above a great table of cedar wood was an iron lamp the size of a cart wheel; it was set with one hundred and fifty candles that had never been lit because no one had the spirit to lower the huge contraption to light them. On the few occasions the room was opened they used oil lamps. The fireplace was never lighted either, although a fire was always laid with large logs. Diego and Bernardo got into the habit of coming back from the beach by using a shortcut through the caves, emerging like ghosts into the dark hollow of the fireplace. They had sworn, with the solemnity of children absorbed in their games, never to share that secret with anyone. They had also promised White Owl that they would enter the caves for good purposes only, and not for trivial games, but for them everything they did there was part of their training for okahue.