Savages

Elena—if she was to be honest with herself—was almost relieved.
    She was tired of his financial incompetence, his gambling, his other women, most of all his weakness. She misses him in bed, but nowhere else.
    Hernan is his father’s son.
    Even if he managed to take the seat at the head of the table he would not be there for long before they killed him.
    So she took the job instead, to save her son’s life.
    That was ten years ago.
    And now they respect and fear her.
    They don’t think her weak, and, until recently, she didn’t have to kill so many.

70
     
    Elena has a lot of houses.
    Right now she occupies the home in Rio Colonia, in Tijuana, but she also has three others in various parts of the city, a
finca
in the country near Tecate, a beach house south of Rosarito, another in Puerto Vallarta, a thirty-thousand-acre ranch in southern Baja, four condos in Cabo, and that’s just Mexico. She owns another ranch in Costa Rica and two more houses on the Pacific side, an apartment in Zurich, another in Sète (she prefers Languedoc; Provence is too obvious), a flat in London she has stayed in exactly once.
    Through shell corporations and DBAs she’s purchased several properties in La Jolla, Del Mar, and Laguna Beach.
    The Rio Colonia house is known as El Palacio. It’s a compound, really, with outer walls and explosive-resistant gates. Squads of
sicarios
man the walls, patrol the grounds, and cruise the streets outside in armor-plated cars that bristle with guns. Other squads of gunmen guard the first set of gunmen against potential treason. The leaded windows now have grenade screens over them.
    The “master bedroom” is bigger than many Mexican homes.
    She has furniture imported from Italy, a massive bed, a Renaissance-era mirror from Florence, and a flat-screen plasma television on which she secretively watches lurid soap operas. Her bathroom has a rain shower, a whirlpool bath, and magnifying mirrors that show every new line and wrinkle in what is still, at fifty-four, a pretty face.
    In the U.S., Elena would be called a definite MILF.
    She maintains her tight little body with rigid discipline in a private gym at the house and the
finca
. Men still sneak glances at her boobs; she knows she has a nice ass. But for what?
    Elena’s lonely in the big house.
    Hernan, miserably married to a
bruja
of a harridan, has his ownplace now; Claudia is a new bride to a nice, dull factory manager; and then there’s Magdalena.
    Elena’s wild child.
    Her youngest, her baby, the unexpected.
    Who seems to have intuited that her advent was unpredicted and responded by becoming unpredictable. It was as if Magda was always saying, through her actions, if you think I surprised you then, wait until you see what I have in store for you next.
    A bright child who shocked with her miserable performance in school, and then, just when you had given up on her academic life (“Please, Maria, find her a patient husband”), she became a scholar. A talented dancer who decided that gymnastics were “more her thing,” then quit abruptly to pursue horsemanship (as it were), then gave it up to return to the ballet. (“But I have
always
loved it, Mama.”)
    With her father’s face and her mother’s body, Magda broke a parade of boys on the wheel of her willfulness. Casually cruel, intentionally dismissive, a shameless tease—even her mother felt badly for a few of the tortured (“You will take it too far one day, Magda.” “I have geldings harder to handle, Mama.”)—Magda quickly intimidated the pool of available suitors in Tijuana.
    No matter, she wanted to leave.
    There were student trips to Europe, summers with family friends in Argentina and Brazil, frequent outings up to L.A. to go to clubs and shop. And then just when Elena had become resigned to the fact that her baby was just a party girl … surprise—Magda returns from Peru with a serious desire to become an archaeologist. And Magda being Magda, there was not a college in Mexico that could satisfy her ambitions. No, it had to be the University of California, Berkeley or Irvine, although Elena was reasonably sure that her daughter threatened the faraway former to smooth the way for the relatively nearby latter.
    Relatively close, yes, but Magda rarely makes the trip home. She’s busy with her studies, and her video messages home show her in bigeyeglasses, her hair pulled back into a plain ponytail, her body hidden in formless sweaters. As if, Elena thinks, she fears