“Don’t go getting yourself killed over this, Fulgencio.”
“I’m already dead inside, Mamá. How much worse can things get? Adios.”
That night, Fulgencio sped back to El Dos de Copas, hopeful to extract more information from his grandfather. He found him at his usual spot at the table, playing solitaire before the relief of the Virgen de Guadalupe on the adobe wall.
“Abuelo, tell me about la maldición de Caja Pinta.”
His grandfather sat quietly, palming cards in a hypnotic daze.
“¿Abuelo?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What do you mean, you don’t remember?”
“You must forgive me, but my mind isn’t what it used to be. My memories are foggy.”
“So at one point you knew?” Fulgencio asked, sitting down across from him, searching his solemn eyes.
“I never knew much. There were so many stories and rumors. And I wasn’t like you, Fulgencio. I didn’t have a talent for seeing the people who have passed to El Otro Lado or talking to them. Some of us do. And some of us don’t. Ni modo. It was useless for me to try to understand it, so I gave up.”
“Why did you abandon my mother? Was it because of the curse?”
“I never abandoned her. Is that what she claims?” Fernando Cisneros kept laying down the most terrible combinations of cards Fulgencio had ever seen. His luck remained abysmal even decades after his death. “Look, now that you mention it, I remember why I gave her to my relatives—El Chino Alasan’s family—to raise on their ranch, Las Lomas. The curse has something to do with losing the ones you love, or not being able to hang on to love. After my wife died in childbirth, I was afraid that if I kept Ninfa, she would die before her time too. So I gave her away. I was afraid to love.”
“Hmm, so that’s why you told me to not be afraid to love,” Fulgencio recalled. “I didn’t fear it, but now I’ve been in pain because of it most of my life. Why didn’t you warn me about all this?”
“I didn’t want to burden you with my superstitions. Besides, curses are meant to be broken, m’ijo. And maybe you are the one who can finally set our family free from la maldición. I remember I once thought I could help you by crossing over to the other side of life and death, but it didn’t work out that way. All I’ve been able to do is sit here. I have not had the energy or power to venture outside these walls to seek the answers.”
Fulgencio furrowed his brow, realizing at that moment that this multigenerational maldición might be too big for one person to overcome. “I need to tell someone right away, someone who will help me break it,” he realized with a sense of urgency. “Someone who will help me figure this out.”
“Someone spiritual, Fulgencio. Someone powerful. Someone strong,” Fernando Cisneros added.
“Brother William,” they both realized at the same time. And the Virgencita began to do an Irish jig on the wall. Apparently, she liked him.
“Yes, Brother William. He’s been kind, coming out here often and paying his respects ever since you first brought him when you were still a child.”
“I need to go now,” Fulgencio said, wishing he’d installed a phone line at the ranch. “Gracias, abuelito.” He gave Fernando Cisneros a kiss on the cheek and rushed out the door.
That night, huddled over coffee in his office at San Juan del Atole, Brother William took copious notes of everything Fulgencio could recount regarding la maldición de Caja Pinta, the collected ruminations of La Señora Villarreal, Ninfa del Rosario, and Fernando Cisneros.
“So, all these years,” Brother William asked, “in moments of trouble and anger, you would hear these words you did not understand?”
“Yes, and a thundering white noise that would drown everything else out. But it wasn’t just in difficult moments, now that I think of it. It happened at times when Carolina would be talking to me, opening up to me. Instead of listening to her, all I could hear sometimes were these mysterious chants in my head.”
“I can’t believe you never told me,” Brother William shook his head. “Maybe I could have helped you sooner.”
“I thought something was wrong with me, that people would think I was crazy,” Fulgencio admitted.
“Well,” Brother William sighed. “I think we’re all a little bit crazy. But once we figure that out, we can start doing something about it.”
Twenty-Three
Brother William and Fulgencio worked feverishly to unravel the nature of la maldición. Each Sunday, they drove out to El Dos de Copas and ventured in every direction within the surrounding ranchlands to interview the campesinos, rancheros, and ejidatarios, recruiting Cipriano to help them as well. Any scrap of information might be of use. Soon, Brother William determined that he would need to keep a journal, one with the multitude of diverging rumors and tall tales. These were possibilities, he explained to Fulgencio, not necessarily realities. As it turned out, there were as many different versions of the story as there were people willing to share. The legends all held Mauro Fernando Cisneros, Fulgencio’s great-great-grandfather, at their center. But in each of them, he played a different role. He was by turns a tyrant, a magnanimous leader, a gunfighter, a gambler, a lover of many women, a singer, a humble farmer, an arrogant aristocrat. And in varying accounts, he had either abandoned his wife or killed her, loved her too much or not enough, cheated on her or been obsessed with her, invariably bringing about la maldición. Other iterations claimed la maldición had been placed on him and his lineage for stealing lands, for robbing cattle, for taking treasure, for killing indios, for fighting the gringos, for helping the gringos, for owning slaves, for freeing slaves, and so on and so forth.
And finally, there was the question of who had cast the hex in the first place. Some guessed the culprit had been his very wife, jealous that he had spawned children with a lover. Others blamed Mauro Fernando’s mother-in-law, who had possessed a reputation for practicing brujería. Yet others conjured an illegitimate brother cut out of the will and left penniless. Or it might have been a jilted lover, a jealous neighbor, a belligerent nemesis who felt cheated at the card table or in a land deal. So many years had passed that nobody knew the truth for certain. In lieu of a clear narrative, the abundant and self-propagating rumors had circulated those lands as commonly as dust devils and tumbleweed since the mid-1800’s. Without many other forms of entertainment, the rancheros and campesinos found it fun to speculate about la maldición.
“It’s not fun for me, Brother William,” Fulgencio rued one such Sunday after a dispiriting round of interviews, sipping tequila at the table as his grandfather and his aging mentor played a game of poker. “As if I weren’t suffering enough already from losing Carolina. Now I also feel like I could go mad. Every day, having to collect all of this ancient history, and add more and more conflicting and confusing information to it. It could drive me insane. I may have to start taking some of those antianxiety pills that I give my cousin Gustavo.”