Chata and Chinita: A Novel

by Laura Preston

The two girls shivered a little in their sudden awakening, as, scarcely knowing how, they were lifted from the diligence and stood upon their feet at the door of the inn, with an injunction to watch the basket, the five parcels tied in paper or towels, the drinking-gourd, the bottle of claret, and the young parrot which their mother had brought with her as a suitable gift to her declining relative. With habitual obedience they did as they were bid, more than once rescuing a parcel from the long, skinny claw of a blear-eyed hag, who crouched in the shadow of the wall whining for alms, while at the same time they cast their admiring glances at the really beautiful church upon which the white rays of the moonlight streamed, converting it for the nonce into a symmetrical pile of virgin snow or spotless alabaster. The priest’s house, a long low building with numerous barred windows, stood on one side of it, while an angle of the square was formed by a mass of buildings, the frowning walls of which were apparently unpierced by door or window. This was a convent. Later the children learned to know well the gardens it enclosed, and also the taste of the wonderful confections the sweet-faced sisters made. The other buildings seemed poor and small in comparison to those, with the exception of the inn which rose gloomily behind them, a solitary rush-light burning palely in the yawning vestibule, and the torches flaming in the courtyard, where benighted travellers were loudly bargaining for lodgings,—no hope of supper presenting itself at that late hour.

While Rosario and Chata were noticing these things with wide-open eyes but with ill suppressed yawns, Don Rafael and Doña Rita were returning the salutations of the concourse of friends who had come to meet them; and as soon as the children had been embraced in succession by each affectionate cousin or punctilious friend, they were hurried across the plaza upon the side where the shadows lay black as ink, and with a regretful glance at the seeming palaces of marble that rose on either hand were conducted with much kindly help and cheerfulness over the rough cobble-stones along a narrow street of single-storied houses, above the walls of which, as if piercing the roofs, rose at intervals tall slender trees, indicating the well-planted courts within. Reaching the more scattered portions of the town where the moonlight shone clear over open fields and walled gardens and orchards, with low adobe houses scattered among them, they at last entered, somewhat to the disappointment of Chata, a rather pretentious house which fronted directly upon the street. She was consoled upon the following day to find a garden at the back, where a triangle of pink roses of Castile, larkspur, and red geraniums grew, almost choking with their luxuriance the beds of onions and chiles, and rivalling in glory of color the “manta de la Virgin” or convolvulus, which entirely covered the half-ruinous stone-wall—the gaps filled with tuñas and magueys—which divided the cultivated land from the thickets of mesquite and cactus that lay beyond.

In the garden the children spent many hours while their mother sat chatting at the side of the invalid, who rallied wonderfully as she heard the endless tales of her daughter’s prosperity; though like many another nouveau riche, Doña Rita had her fancied self-denials to complain of. One of the clerks at the hacienda had a wife whose father had given her a string of pearls as large as cherries upon her wedding day, while she the wife of the administrador was left to blush over the shabby necklace—not a bead of which was bigger than a pea—which Rafael had gone in debt to give her on her wedding day, and which until the advent of the fortunate Doña Gomesinda she had thought most beautiful; and then too her dearest friend had a daughter who would inherit a fine house of three rooms or more in that very town, and money and jewels fit for a hacendado’s daughter; and it was quite possible that she would marry—who could tell? it might even be an attorney or an official,—while with two to endow (and it was well known that Rafael loved to enjoy as he went), Heaven only knew to what her own flesh and blood were doomed! There was Rosario for example,—and her own grandmother, who would not be prejudiced, could judge if there was a prettier or more daintily-bred girl in the whole town,—what chance was there that an officer or an attorney, or indeed any one but a clerk, a ranchero, or a poor shop-keeper, should pretend to their alliance when they could give so poor a dower with their daughter? Doña Rita’s eyes filled with tears, and decidedly she was obliged to compress her lips very tightly to prevent herself from uttering further complaint; for since Rosario had with true Mexican precocity burst into the full glory of young womanhood, this had become a very real grievance to her mother, but one of which, with the awe of the promoted as well as trained daughter and wife, she had seldom ventured to hint of either to Doña Feliz or Don Rafael.

As Rosario had outgrown her sister in physique, so had she also in womanly dignity and apparent force of intellect At least she thought of matters, and even to her admiring mother and female relatives began to give weighty opinions upon affairs which either wearied Chata or interested her little. The grandfather, old Don José Maria, used to sit under a fig-tree watching with disapproving eyes as Chata darted hither and thither chasing a butterfly or ruby-throated humming-bird, or with her lap full of flowers or neglected sewing pored over some entrancing book lent her by the village priest (he was a man whose ideas, had he not been the Santo Padre, would have been the last that should have been tolerated in the bringing up of sedate and simple maidens); and those same eyes lighted with pride as they fell on Rosario, beating eggs to a froth to mix with honey and almonds for her grandfather’s delectation, or bending over a brasier of ruddy charcoal watching anxiously the cooking of the dulce, of which already more successes than failures showed her a born artist. Then again sometimes, when Don José came in the cool of the evening from the plaza where he had been to buy his jar of pulque or his handful of garlic, he could see his favorite sitting demurely in the upper balcony with her head bent over her needle, listening it is true to that maldito libro, “that pernicious book,” which Chata was reading, but as far as he could see doing no other harm, unless the very fact of a young and pretty girl looking into the street was a harm in itself,—but Maria Purissima! one must not be too rigorous with one’s own flesh and blood: like others before him and more who will come after, Don José Maria forgot in tenderness to the grandchildren the discipline he had thought absolutely necessary with the preceding generation.

Chata, too, thought it delightful to sit on the balcony and peer through the wooden railing at the long stretch of sand which led far away where the houses dwindled into a few half-ruinous hovels, where children and dogs throve as well as the bristling cacti. On Sunday mornings very early, as the mother and daughters came from Mass along that road, they used to be covered with dust thrown up by the scores of plodding donkeys who wended their way to the plaza laden with charcoal and vegetables, eggs and screaming fowls. Doña Rita and her daughters would cover their faces with their rebosos, and trip daintily by, scarcely appeased by the admiring salutations and apologies of the drivers, who pulling off their rough straw hats apostrophized the dust and the scorching sun and the clumsy donkey, “by your license be the name spoken!”

Sometimes more distinguished wayfarers passed over the road and turned into the inn, or rode on to the barracks which lay quite at the opposite extremity of the little town; for it happened that a company of soldiers were quartered there. They were for the most part well clad in a gay uniform of red and blue, and every man had a profusion of stripes on his sleeves or lace on his cap. No one knew and no one asked whether they were Mochos or Puros, Conservatives or Liberals,—for the nonce they were Ramirez’s men. This General had been a Liberal the month before, and was suspected of favoring the clergy at this time. Who could tell? Who knew what he might be on the morrow? In the night all cats are gray; in times of perplexity all soldiers are patriots. The ragged urchins of El Toro threw up their hats for the soldiers of Ramirez, and the discreet householders leaned from their balconies every evening to hear the little band play, and to exult for a brief quarter of an hour in the mild excitement inseparable from a garrison town.

Chata and Chinita had delighted in the distant music, and had caught glimpses of the soldiers, as disenchanting as those of the rude grimy structures they had in the moonlight imagined to be marble palaces; they had gazed up and down the dusty street and watched the noisy ragged urchins play “Toro” with a big-horned, long-haired, decrepit goat, with crowds of half naked elfin-faced girls as spectators, until they were actually beginning to weary of the attractions of the town and long for home,—when one day the beat of a drum was heard and a squad of soldiers went filing past, with a young officer riding at their head, who threw a glance so killing at the balcony where the young girls stood that, whether intended to reach her or not, it pierced the heart of Rosario on the instant.

Chata had also noticed the young officer (a slender undersized young fellow, with a swarthy lean face and keen black eyes, shaded by a profusely decorated sombrero), but merely as a part of the mimic pageant,—a prominent part, for the trappings of his horse, as well as his own dress, were covered by that profusion of ornament affected by gallants whose capital was invested in the adornment of the person with which they hoped to conquer fortune; for in those days there were numberless roystering adventurers, who to a modicum of valor united a vanity and assurance which provided many a rich girl with a dashing and fickle husband, and his country with a soldier as false to Mexico as to his Doña Fulana.

It was just after this that evening after evening Rosario would lean pensively over the balcony rail, resisting Chata’s entreaties to come to the garden where there was no dust to stifle them, and where the dew would soon begin to fall upon the larkspurs and roses, and already the wide white cups of the gloria mundo were beginning to fill with perfume. The dew would chill her, the perfume sicken her, Rosario said. Chata remonstrated; Rosario smirked and smiled. Chata grew vexed; she thought the smile in mockery of her. She need not have lost her sweet temper,—Rosario was thinking of a far different person. The young captain was walking slowly down the opposite side of the street; he had just laid his hand on his heart. It was on him Rosario smiled.

Doña Rita, discreetest of mothers, was not one to leave her daughters to their own devices unwatched. It was she who always accompanied them in their walks or to Mass; yet curiously enough the young captain found means to slip a tiny note into Rosario’s ready hand, as she knelt on the grimy stone floor of the church. Obviously, Doña Rita could not be in two places at once, and she usually knelt behind Chata, who needed perhaps some maternal supervision at her devotions; and it came about that the space behind Rosario was occupied by some stranger. It was Don José Maria who first noticed that quite as a matter of course that stranger grew to be the Captain Don Fernando Ruiz; and quite accidentally it happened that thereafter the mother and daughters went to an earlier Mass. Don José Maria was not so early a riser as Don Fernando was; so he was not there, while the young soldier was in his usual place.