When news of the tragedy reached Soledad, she hurled herself into the river, striving to grieve at her husband’s freshly dug grave, but drowning instead. It was by sheer miracle that a woman from the neighboring ranch pulled her limp body from the water and birthed her unborn twins in the muddy shoals.
Incensed by the tragedy, Soledad’s mother—Minerva Villarreal—demanded the newborns be given to her, but Mauro Fernando’s will stipulated that if he and his wife were to die, his younger brother would be entrusted with the care of his children and the stewardship of his lands until his eldest son reached adulthood. And so it was. But Soledad’s mother was not satisfied. Enraged by the loss of her daughter and grandsons, which she blamed on Mauro Fernando’s pride and machismo, the powerful bruja wove a damning incantation.
“She authored la maldición de Caja Pinta.” Brother William’s eyes glowed with the treasure of his discovery.
“Go on!” exclaimed Fulgencio, salivating at the promise of an answer to what might have contributed to his devastating failure with Carolina. “Please go on.”
Brother William explained that the hex was complex. Soledad’s mother, who had been part india and spoke the native Aztec tongue of Nahuatl, had decreed that all male descendants of Mauro Fernando Cisneros would carry the maldición until her demands were met. The maldición would always prevent them from hanging on to their love, would doom them to inevitably lose the women they cared for most by echoing and amplifying the same emotions that had led Mauro Fernando Cisneros to cause her daughter’s untimely death: machismo, pride, vanity, insecurity, possessiveness, jealousy, envy, and ultimately, rage.
She wove her spell at the mouth of the river where it emptied out to sea, using the fecund waters from the estuary. She chanted powerful words in the Nahuatl language to craft it. And through her dark magic, the maldición wove its way into the family’s DNA. But because she knew that the curse would befall her own descendants, she felt a tinge of sorrow and regret as she concluded her incantations. And, at the last instant, she included a way for the spell to be broken.
“What way? For God’s sake, Brother William. Enough of the past. What must we do to change the future?”
“I found the bruja herself. You see, while Soledad haunts the dune on the banks of the río, her mother wanders twenty miles downstream at the river’s mouth. Every night, she roams the shores of the beach in mournful desolation. They say her wails of sorrow can be heard in the howling of the midnight wind. She will not be allowed to rest, and neither will her daughter’s spirit, until the spell and the maldición are at last dissolved. She is tired, in fact. So she told me.”
“And?” Fulgencio pleaded.
“Well, it’s a tall order. There are several steps to breaking the maldición,” Brother William said as Fulgencio scribbled feverishly in his tattered notebook. “First, you must unify the lands that were torn asunder by the invaders, causing your great-great-grandmother’s eventual death. You must do this so that you can then achieve the second step. You see, Soledad is buried beneath that dune and she is anchored to that land. So once you consolidate the lands, you must move Soledad’s remains to be with Mauro Fernando’s at the family burial ground north of the river.”
“Okay, continue,” Fulgencio beseeched.
“Third, you must save the life of a living female descendant of Soledad’s mother and—lastly—grant her the free passage that her own daughter was denied. Since her daughter died trying to get into the United States, you must help another woman in the bloodline achieve Soledad’s goal. And not just any woman: a woman in desperate need, a woman who might die otherwise.”
Fulgencio stopped writing. He set his pen down, the words La Farmacia Ramirez printed neatly across the shiny silver writing instrument. He sat stunned. “That is a tall order.”
“I told you, but then again, so was winning all those championships back in high school, Fulgencio. I’m confident you can find a way. The most important thing is, at long last you know! You know what the maldición is. And you know how to dispel it.”
“At last I understand, Brother William. Why I could not control my anger. Why I heard this strange noise between my ears at times, and those words I could never comprehend.”
“Those words were Nahuatl,” Brother William asserted, pouring a round of tequilas.
“Isn’t it kind of early to drink?” Fulgencio asked, as the Brother nudged a shot glass toward him and another toward his grandfather.
“I’m not on the clock anymore, Fulgencio.” He smiled. “And we need to celebrate. My gambit worked.”
“What gambit?” Fulgencio asked.
“Going to El Otro Lado to find the answers for you,” Brother William replied.
He seemed happy to have died, relieved even, thought Fulgencio. And it was fortunate—for both of them—that he was such a powerful spirit that he could roam at will and not be tethered to his bones or to the room in which he perished.
“Thank you, Brother. Now to get to work.” Fulgencio felt a sudden surge of adrenaline. He recalled the passion that had always burned in his soul to labor and toil, and he felt it rekindling within him yet again.
The three men raised their glasses, saluted the Virgencita on the wall, and drank to a future that might redeem the past.
Twenty-Five
In the years that stretched between Brother William’s passing and Miguelito Rodriguez Esparza’s death, Fulgencio set out to accomplish each and every step required to rewrite his fate and position him for his renewed pursuit of Carolina Mendelssohn.
Utilizing the funds he had amassed through his entrepreneurial zeal, he began to purchase all of the lands required to put Caja Pinta back together in its original form. It was an arduous task, and one that he was glad to have El Chotay fully alive for at the time. El Chotay spent most of his time during those days running back and forth to the courthouse to bring Fulgencio documents on who owned which parcels of land, who owed taxes, who was on the verge of going into foreclosure, anything and everything that might help Fulgencio strike a good deal and recover his family’s original lands legally. The pharmacy began to resemble a strange hybrid between drugstore and history museum, as Fulgencio hung maps of the original Spanish land grants on the walls, accompanied by copies of important documents and original titles bearing the royal stamp of the Spanish monarchs. El Primo Loco Gustavo, who knew a thing or two about computers, even created a map of Caja Pinta showing all of the current parcels that it had been divided into along both sides of the river. As Fulgencio acquired each patch of land, he changed the color of that section from red to green on the map and reprinted it. Fulgencio and his minions stood transfixed before the map for hours, strategizing about his next move and discussing the particulars of each land owner’s situation and demands. Even Fulgencio’s customers became intrigued by his quest, taking the opportunity to learn about the ancient history of La Frontera, something they had not been taught in the Texas history books.