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commented Rose judiciously, sipping her coffee, “that the simplest way to discourage such importunate hospitality would be to win heavily at picquet. Hannibal’s quite capable of it. I’ve played with him.”
    “Oh, he won
thousands
of pesos from my father, and from Don Anastasio—the husband of Franz’s full sister Isabella and one of my father’s oldest friends. Don Anastasio’s hacienda lies just to the west of Mictlán. That doesn’t matter to my father. Hannibal took five or six hundred from Franz, which I think was the reason Franz threatened to kill him. Father gave orders to Vasco—the foreman of his vaqueros, who is loyal to him and could not abide either Franz or Anastasio—not to permit Hannibal to leave the hacienda, and when my father came down sick three days later . . .”
    “Can we return for a moment,” interposed January, “to the part about your brother threatening to kill Hannibal?”
    “Did they quarrel?” asked Rose. Beyond the open door the courtyard had fallen absolutely silent with the hour of siesta, the autumn heat pressing down upon the house and the city around it as surely as any evil fairy’s spell upon an enchanted castle. The servants had vanished; with the window shutters closed, the bedroom was stuffy and dim.
    “Quarrel?
Dios,
no!” Consuela dipped a fragment of
pandolce
into her coffee. “You know Hannibal never quarrels with anyone, not even when he has taken a drop too much opium. But my brother was a savage, Señora. A cold savage, who never raised his voice. When he was with the Army, Franz had three of his men flogged to death, one of them by his own hand; it is rumored also that he beat one of his servants here in town to death as well.” She shook her head, her face in its frame of tumbled black curls suddenly somber and very Indian.
    “So—three days before the wedding my father went into one of his crazy fits. God forbid that even the bride should have more attention paid to her on her wedding-eve than he. He began talking to his idols, and wandering about the house in his nightshirt, and thinking that Santa Anna—who as his dear friend was there for the wedding—was the war-god of the old Indians, to whom the ancient priests offered the torn-out hearts of living victims, which always makes the servants nervous.
    “Josefa—our eldest sister, as I have said, who does not have much use for me—sent at once for her confessor and for her confessor’s confessor, to pray that the Devil be driven out of our father. Natividad’s mother, Señora Lorcha, also sent for a priest, and tried to have my father marry Natividad before anyone could do anything about it, but Fernando arrived in the midst of that ceremony with two mad-doctors from town and had Father put under restraint. Hannibal tried to slip out in all the confusion and was caught by the vaqueros and brought back. It is fifteen miles to the city, you understand, and most of it open rangeland, and even with Father locked up in his room Vasco would not take orders from Fernando.”
    Consuela sighed and broke off another piece of
pandolce.
“So in the midst of all this praying and cursing and conversations with sacred jaguars and people who weren’t there, Hannibal was playing cards in the
corredor
upstairs with me and Valentina and Natividad, on the afternoon before the wedding-feast, with all of our respective duennas present, naturally. And suddenly Fernando came out of my father’s study and took Hannibal by the throat, and thrust him up against the wall and snarled, ‘Know that when I am master here you will pay dearly for your perfidy,
Norteamericano
bastard.’
    “And of course Hannibal replied ‘My dear Fernando, you’re as mistaken about my intentions as you are about my nationality and the circumstances of my birth,’ but of course my brother did not listen. He was not a listener, my brother Franz.”
    She angled her coffee-cup in her fingers; a hot sliver of light from the door touched