Woes of the True Policeman

one moment to the next, depending whether it was sunny or cloudy, he could seem like an old hippie or a gravedigger. His men said he was tough and they treated him with familiarity, but also with respect. He wasn’t Irish, as some thought, but American, a gringo, and Catholic.
    Every Sunday morning, Don Gabriel Salazar’s wife brought in a priest to say Mass at the private chapel on the other side of the big house. And Cochrane was the first to arrive, nodding to the mistress of the house and sitting in the first row. Next came the domestic staff, the cook, the maids, the gardener, and some bodyguards, though not many of them, since they preferred to spend Sunday mornings at the gardener’s house, playing cards, cleaning their guns, listening to the radio, thinking or sleeping. Pancho Monje never attended the service.
    Once Alejandro Pinto, who didn’t go to Mass, either, asked whether he believed in God or whether he was agnostic. Alejandro Pinto read occultist magazines and knew the meaning of the word agnostic . Pancho didn’t, but he guessed it.
    “Agnostic? That’s for faggots,” he said. “I’m an atheist.”
    “What do you think comes after death?” asked Alejandro Pinto.
    “After death? Nothing.”
    The other bodyguards were surprised that a boy of seventeen should be so sure about what he believed.

2
    In 1865 a thirteen-year-old orphan was raped by a Belgian soldier in an adobe house in Villaviciosa. The next day the soldier’s throat was cut and nine months later a girl was born, named María Expósito. The young mother died of childbed fever and the girl grew up in the same house where she was conceived, as the ward of the farmworkers who lived there. In 1880, when María Expósito was fifteen, on the feast day of St. Dismas, a drunken stranger rode off with her on his horse, singing at the top of his lungs:
    Qué chingaderas son éstas
    le dijo Dimas a Gestas.
    On the slope of a hill that the country folk, with inscrutable humor, called the Hill of the Dead and that, seen from town, looked like a shy and curious dinosaur, he raped her several times and vanished.
    In 1881 María Expósito had a daughter whom she baptized María Expósito Expósito and who was the wonder of the town of Villaviciosa. From the time she was very small she showed herself to be clever and spirited and although she never learned to read or write she was known as a wise woman, learned in the ways of herbs and medicinal salves.
    In 1897, after she had been away for six days, the young María Expósito appeared one morning in the plaza, a bare space in the center of town, with a broken arm and bruises all over her body. She would never explain what had happened to her, nor did the Villaviciosa officials insist that she tell. Nine months later a girl was born and given the name María Expósito, and her mother, who never married or had any more children or lived with any man, tried to initiate her into the secret art of healing. But the only thing the young María Expósito had in common with her mother was her good nature, a quality shared by all the María Expósitos of Villaviciosa (though some were quiet and others liked to talk), along with a natural ability to forge bravely ahead through periods of violence or extreme poverty.
    The childhood and adolescence of the last María Expósito, however, were more carefree than her mother’s and grandmother’s had been. In 1913, at sixteen, she still thought and behaved like a girl whose only duties were to accompany her mother once a month in search of herbs and medicinal plants and to wash the clothes behind the house, in an old oak trough rather than the public washtubs that the other women used.
    This was the year that Colonel Sabino Duque (who in 1915 would be executed for cowardice) came to town looking for brave men—and the men of Villaviciosa were famous for being something more than brave—to fight for the Revolution. Several boys from the town enlisted, selected by the town officials. One of them, whom until then María Expósito had thought of only as an occasional playmate, the same age as she and seemingly as naïve, decided to declare his love the night before he went to war. For the purpose he chose a grain shed that no one used anymore (since the people of Villaviciosa had little left to store) and when his declaration only made the girl laugh he proceeded to rape her on the spot, desperately and clumsily.
    At dawn, before he left, he promised he