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glorified clerks . My family had been the better of his by leagues since long before the founding of New Spain. We had come wearing armor—not, like his people, lace and rose-water. Now this smiling, bloated pig sat reveling in the circumstance that put him in official authority over me.
    “That isn’t what I believe,” I said. “And if you say her name again, I will tear out your tongue.”
    I have not been allowed from my cell since.
    I do have periods of lucidity—this moment is proof of that. Sometimes they last for days, but I have yet to pass a week without relapsing into … what shall we call it … my spectacular dementia. I’ve been told quite explicitly what I look like in the throes of my lunatic fits. I tear out my hair—what’s left of it. I slaver like a sunstruck dog. My eyes roll up in my head. I beat my fists on the heavy wooden door, on the stones of the walls and the floor. I howl for hours. In this place of iron and shadows and sweating stone, I become the madman of theatre. I lack only the rattling chains, but I expect they’ll come soon enough.
    My howling has rent my voice to a croak which some of my keepers find amusing. My battered hands often look like spoiled meat. They brought a mirror to me last week, thinking, I suppose, the shock might do me good. I saw eyes like firepits, a beard gone wild, facial bones jutting sharply against skin the color of lemonwater. I roared and smashed the glass, and the officious fools bolted from the room like spooked mares. If I were given to religion, or to self-pity, or—worst of all—to the sentiments of Romance, I might say that I have come to know hell. But such talk is the idiom of fools, the self-pitying locution of stage plays and poetry, and I will no more indulge in it myself than I will endure it in others.
    Forgive me: I tend to ramble in these periods of respite from the dementia. Insanity of this sort is more than mental torture, it is abject humiliation. How I envy the steadfastly insane all around me. They are spared such recurrent seizures of sanity as I must bear, spared these periodic realizations of where we are, and why.
    Suicide? Bah! Some choose it, of course. Not a month goes by without at least one wretch found hanging in his cell or drowned in one of the garden ponds. Cowards, all of them! Suicide is contemptible, the final refuge of the true poltroon. (Like Rojas, that bastard slyboots!) But not I. I will not kill myself, not ever. I am insane, but I am no coward.
    Again, I beg your pardon. I not only ramble like a fool, I shame myself with gross discourtesy. My name is Don Sebastián Cabrillo Mayor Cortés y Mendoza. I am patrón of the Hacienda de la Luna Plata. My family has owned this region of Sonora since Coronado marched through it on his way to search for the Seven Cities of Gold. The first of my New World ancestors, Don Marcos Cabrillo, was a lieutenant in Coronado’s expedition. He lost a foot in a battle with Yaqui Indians and was left behind when the column moved on. With a following of four other maimed soldiers and a handful of converted indigenes, he laid claim to all the land visible from the bloodstained mesa where he had been crippled. He named his portion of the earth after the region’s dazzling silver moon—La Luna Plata—and over the next three and a half centuries the hacienda expanded to more than a hundred square miles. It took sharp steel to conquer this country of cactus and rock, and an iron will to rule it. It took hardness—as each generation of Cabrillo men was taught by the one before it. As my father taught me. “Hardness,” he told me repeatedly through my youth, “is everything .”
    By the time my father became patrón of La Luna Plata, his authority, like that of hacendados everywhere, was enforced not only by his own pistoleros but also by the powerful Guardia Rural, the national mounted police. Since the rurales’ wise creation by our esteemed president, Porfirio Díaz, bandits no