Borderlands Read Online Free Page A

longer pillage the countryside so freely as they once did, and reports of peon insurrections are now quite rare. Like Don Porfirio himself, the rurales well understand the efficacy of hardness. They are authorized to make arrests on their own suspicions, incarcerate suspects indefinitely, interrogate by any means necessary to encourage the truth, and confiscate a suspect’s property as legal recompense to the state. And under the provision of the Law of Flight, they may legally shoot dead any man who attempts to escape their custody. Thus does that highly efficient police force often spare the state the cost and inconvenience of extending judicial formalities to those undeserving of them.
    Malefactors on La Luna Plata have always received swift punishment—the branding iron, the lash, or the noose, depending on the severity of the offense. My father was renown for tailoring the penalty to the transgression. As a descendant of devout apostles of the Inquisition, he owned an imagination well-suited to the invention of punishments. There was, for example, the arrogant mestizo foreman who set his mastiff bitch onto a group of Indian children for no reason but sport. My father sentenced him to kill the animal, skin it, and hang the carcass from a tree in the main plaza for a week. He then had to eat the dog’s hindquarters, raw and rotten, with the villagers looking on. He also had to forfeit half-a-month’s pay to each of the families of the children his dog had savaged.
    There was a band of drunkards whose loud cursings in the street disturbed the village mass every evening until the priest complained of it to my father, who had the men arrested and sentenced each one to receive a live coal in his mouth. He ordered a rapist to be conveyed to a pigsty, there castrated, and made to watch the swine consume his severed parts before he was hanged. He permitted the father and brother of a young woman who had been beaten to death by her bad-tempered husband to take the killer into the desert and do with him as they thought proper. Among other things, they flayed his skull, and on their return to the ranch they nailed the entire headskin to the crosspiece over the corral gate, where it was shortly devoured by birds and ants. After a few days, only the scalp remained, and it stayed up there for months, a withered testament to the hard certainty of Luna Plata justice.
    I was my father’s son in every way—educated by the Jesuit fathers, skilled in the arts of weaponry, easy in the saddle. I was confident in command of men, versed in the social graces, and wholly comfortable with my privilege. And I was guarded in my passions, or so I believed.
    On the matter of women my father was as adamant as on all else in life. I was still a boy when I discovered he kept a rawhide quirt on his bedroom wall, and I intuitively perceived how my mother came to bear the small dark scar on her wrist which she tried to conceal under lace-cuffed sleeves. I do not presume to judge my father on that point, though I have dwelt upon it.
    Understand: I loved my mother. She was a lovely woman of grace, refinement, and generous spirit. Yet who but my father can know what she was like as a wife? Whatever he felt in their most intimate moments, whatever urges she inflamed in his soul, whatever image of her he carried in his heart—such were the things he surely had in mind when he warned me of the perils of passionate love. In my boyhood he encouraged me to indulge my young appetite for women as freely as I wished. His own casual indulgences had produced a scattering of blue-eyed mestizos among the peons of La Luna Plata. “Enjoy your lust,” he advised me, “but beware of love. It is the most perilous of the passions.”
    A few days before my wedding, as we took brandy in his study, he advised me once again. He had arranged the marriage when Delgadina Fernández Ordóñez was but six years old. “She was an awkward, bony child,” my father told me with a