The Master Of Monterey: A Novel

Capítulo III

Capitulo 111 The glorious conquest was less than twenty-four hours old when Don Bragas de Le6n, the lionhearted one, marched into the hills to form the nucleus of the guerrilla force that would harass the Yanqui invaders until the approaching army of Governor Micheltorena arrived to eradicate them completely, at which time Micheltorena would take his rightful place as the Master of Monterey. The Governor was rumored to have marched from Los Angeles with three hundred men under arms, and Don Le6n rode into the wilds of the San Gabriel Mountains to be ready to meet him. He left early in the morning with seven horses, three Ohlone vaqueros, a sergeant from the garrison named Vargas who had read lYanhoe, and a mule carrying boxes of rifles and powder and shot, which had mysteriously come into Mister Lurkin's hands. Comandante Silva had led his twenty-nine soldiers out of the Presidio with colors flying in the presence of Major McCormick's marines, and the American flag was run up in place of the Mexican flag above the old fort. The Mexican soldiers were ordered to remain as a unit until transportation could be arranged to Manzanillo. Most of the soldiers had not been paid by the government in years, and so they were +> 103 -+ immune to Don Le6n's exhortations to join the guerrillas once they found out he wouldn't pay them either. To his talk of honor and glory, they preferred being twelve hundred miles further from a ship of forty-four cannon and twelve hundred miles closer to the National Treasury. Only Sergeant Vargas, who had read Sir Walter Scott's narrative as a literal transcription of reality, and who understood the present situation as prefigured by King Richard 's crusade to the Holy Land against the infidel and return home to claim his throne, agreed to meet the lionhearted one at dawn. They rendezvoused at Mister Lurkin's trading house and drank several glasses of pulque, which the Trader carefully noted in his account book, figuring four glasses equaled one cowhide. Lurkin casually mentioned that he had heard that Micheltorena was bringingfour hundred men, which further inflamed Don Le6n. Without much persuasion , he encumbered his land with more debt to buy the arms he thought he would need, a debt that he was certain the government would make good after the glorious victory. Major McCormick, ignorant of the nascent threat, was inspecting the crumbling ramparts ofthe Presidio and attempting to find a cannon that might fire a shot without the breech exploding. He noted with a surly expression that most of the cannon were aimed toward the sea, in the general direction of the National Intention, and he ordered them wheeled around and aimed toward the edge of the forest. - The enemy will come from inside the land, he reasoned. Then he noticed some mysterious scratchings around the torch hole of the cannon, and he called a younger lieutenant over to confirm his suspicions. The lieutenant stated that the +~ 104 - 105 -+ Indians of the Caribbean had been, still, they would surely welcome Jones with gifts in the same manner, and rejoice at the coming reign of democracy just like the Indians had rejoiced at becoming subjects of Ferdinand and Isabella, as Columbus reported them saying. Because Columbus was referred to as the Christum Ferens, the Christ Bearer, Waxdeck began to refer to Jones as the Democratium Ferens, the Bringer of Democracy. He wrote furiously, so that the meaning of everything that happened would be fixed in advance, and he sent for Hannibal frequently to make copies for the Commodore's perusal and, so Waxdeck thought to himself, for the Commodore's instruction. Hannibal attempted to keep up with the copying required by Waxdeck and at the same time not let the couplets he had to write over and over again interfere with his own prose narrative . At times he grew confused, and suddenly found himself breaking into prose while copying Waxdeck's epic and accidentally describing his own actions to continue his line and his story in the land beyond that other history. Other times, he found that a heroic couplet had leaked into his own writing, which he then diligently scratched out. When this happened, Hannibal wondered whether he had made a mistake in taking up writing to achieve his ends, whether Plato was correct and writing did kill memory. He wondered if he would ever be able to keep a story separate...