Two
My granddaughter, Catarina, at whose urging I am writing these stories down after years of telling them, and who is reading them after me, tells me I must try to do better to describe what I was feeling. I confess, this is very hard for me. Even today, I struggle sometimes to put names to what I feel. And reaching back through the years, to recapture what I felt at a given time, untangle the mess, and put words to each part? Nearly impossible. But I will try, cariña.
For most of this time, you can assume what I felt was usually some mixture of confusion, fear, and anger, with sometimes a little happiness and laughter thrown in. Yes, always. I never quite lost the first two, that I had carried with me away from Marenga, and I was always at least a little angry at what fate – or my own brain – had done to me. Sometimes very angry. And always very frustrated. As hard as I tried, I could not escape it, any more than I could force the connections I knew now were missing between my brain and my mouth, and let me speak. But I always hid the anger as best I could. Diego was best at pulling me out past the anger, and helping me to be happy, because he believed in me, and I tried so hard to live up to that.
Then, five years after Diego's return and putting on his mask, came that terrible day when my life was completely changed, again, and this time with no blessed shutting down of memory to erase it. I remember every moment of that black day.
We had been up most of the night before, Diego and I, doing I can't remember what. But I was lying on my small bed, fully dressed but deeply asleep, mid-morning when the earthquake struck. I was tossed out of bed and onto the floor before I was aware, and woke up silently screaming. I managed to shove my feet into my boots, and staggered through what I now know were aftershocks down the hall. At the front door I halted. Despite my promise above, I can only describe what I felt as shock and horror. There, on the tile floor by the door, in a large pool of blood, and covered with fallen debris, were lying both Father and Diego. They were dead, unmoving, unbreathing, their blank eyes in white faces staring unblinking at nothing.
I don't know how long I stood there, staring, when I heard a crash from the hidden cave below the house. I turned automatically and went through the secret passage, and found that Diego's black Arabian stallion Toronado, that he rode as Zorro, had kicked down the door to his stall in fear in the earthquake, and escaped out the tunnel. Without thinking, I grabbed his bridle and ran after him. I just caught the barest glimpse of him, galloping south. It took me hours of running to catch up to him, and then to convince him to stop and let me come up to him. Only the fact that I had been grooming him daily for five years let me slip on his bridle and then climb somehow onto his bare back.
And there I sat, for long minutes, staring back north towards the hidden hacienda, as it rolled over me. I had lost everyone. Everything. My whole life was gone. I had literally nothing to go back to. The adoption had never been made official. It was only talk. And even if it hadn't been, how could I, a mute boy of perhaps sixteen – even if I let my hearing be known – how could I hope to run a large rancho by myself? No one would even let me try, even if I had any idea what to do. I had nothing. It was all swept away, with the only family I knew. There were two huge holes in my heart that could never be filled, and only silence and absence and no love left.
I had nowhere else to go, either, no one to turn to. I thought briefly of Victoria, of riding and asking her for help, but even then, I shied away from telling her the truth of it, of who her masked lover had been. It wasn't my secret to tell, then or ever. I couldn't face her, couldn't bear to be the one to crush her heart.
I turned Toronado's head back to the south, and rode away. And just kept riding.
