He laughed, thinking of the fine palomino he had raised with such care.
"You'll have to try him someday," he said.
"Someday he'll throw you and cripple you. There never was a crazier three-year-old."
They strolled along the farthest side of the garden, under young jacaranda trees; the wind had shaken blossoms onto the path and some of them popped as they stepped on them, making a soft, damp sound. In the moonlight, the mauve flowers on the trees were white or gray or faintly blue.
The main façade of the hacienda showed here, the house almost centering a walled enclosure that had turrets at the four corners. Walls and house were of cut stone, stuccoed white. The house was a simple rectangle with six veranda arches on the ground floor and the same number on the upper floor. The chapel—with a blue and white zigzagged tiled dome—had been built into one side of the residence, and its short spire prodded the cool sky. Moonlight softened the block-like severity of the old building. A sweep of trees set off the place, and behind the trees, dusty gray, rose a mountain range, low and rounded. Columnar cypress plunged out of the main patio and looked about stiffly. There were twenty rooms and two patios in the hacienda, and the cypress were the stage props for the drama that had occurred there for almost three hundred years.
A breeze shook the trees and they bent and swayed about the house; panicles of fresh palm blossoms rustled. A chill nipped the walkers in the garden, as cool air swung down from the volcanic heights.
"It's getting chilly," Angelina said. "Let me go in and get my scarf."
"No. Let's go inside. How about a game of pool?" He questioned the wisdom of his own suggestion, wondering how this gesture could make up for his shortcomings. He cleared his throat, expecting a refusal.
"We haven't played for a long time. Let's. I'll get my scarf."
In the doorway of the poolroom, Raul lit his pipe while Angelina went for her scarf and Manuel Boaz brought lighted candles for their game. Manuel was a burly fellow—almost sixty, part Negro. He had been with the Medinas since childhood. His mother had died in a remote mountain hut on the hacienda. Some said she had been insane. Manuel had the speech of a southerner because a Oaxacan had raised him. He lit candles on wall brackets and leaned in the doorway as Raul and Angelina chalked their cues. Tall, almost gray-skinned, his Negroid face took on a mask of shadows and pale half-lights as he leaned against the doorframe. He wore the customary white of the hacienda peasant and was barefooted. Unlike the Indians, he had to shave, but he had neglected his beard for several days and its stubble crinkled in the light from the candles.