Carmen Boullosa: Texas: The Great Theft

Nepomuceno wants to bring them back to his camp. Even his daughter Marisa (because she’s with his wife).

“No, Nepito, I’m not doing that. If you want, take Marisa with you, she’s your daughter. But I’m spending the night in Matasánchez, at the hotel.”

No one can talk her out of it: Isa is a strong-willed woman. Marisa, poor thing, doesn’t matter to him, but she knows what she wants, and that’s to be with her father.

On both sides of the river the full moon is making cooks yearn for the perfection of browned onions and the drumbeat of the knife dicing them, for the sighs of bread, the fresh innards of tomatoes, the cautious flames, and sneezes caused by chiles and peppers. They dream in unison, attuned to one another.

Magdalena, La Desconocida, dreams of her mother. She’s a girl, back in her mother’s arms. She falls even deeper into sleep. Now the arms around her are Nepomuceno’s. A pleasure she has never experienced runs through her, electrifying; she wakes up.

The moon gives Felipillo Holandés his recurrent nightmare — he gets out of the Moses basket and walks along the wet sand, Nepomuceno and his men arrive, he cries out — but this time he doesn’t wake up. He dies in his dream. Then he awakens.

Laura, the girl who was once kidnapped, is lying next to El Iluminado. For days she’s followed him around like a shadow, except that she didn’t accompany him to Bruneville. They sleep like two spoons, nestled together.

A moonbeam lands on the girl’s eyelids. Laura opens her eyes. She thinks she hears the Talking Cross. She closes her eyes, afraid. She snuggles up to El Iluminado, disturbing his sleep. He jumps up. He feels the moon on his face. He kneels to pray.

At the Werbenskis’ house, the turtle that the cooks have been slowly mutilating to make delicious green soup (a dish fit for the gods) is also dreaming. In the dream, the turtle’s pain — its left back leg and right foreleg are gone, next they’ll cut off her other foreleg, then her other back leg, and finally her head, then they’ll stew it all up together, using the meat beneath her shell for the soup on Sunday — morphs into a feeling like she’s walking in the mud … a mud that covers her completely, eliminating the burden of being what she is, as well as engulfing her unbearable, gnawing pain. A pain you can chew like gum, gum that comes from the sapodilla, which the cooks cut out of the fruit to chew while they shell peas, pluck chickens, and remove the white pistils and green corollas from zucchini blossoms, making them sweet as sugar.

Mrs. Big’s icaco tree also dreams. We won’t go into detail in order to avoid the unpleasantness of the two cadavers’ erections, which the tree cannot forget, transformed by them into something bestial.

And the shadow of Mrs. Big’s icaco dreams, too. It’s a more dignified dream than the tree’s, but it, too, is saturated with violence.

The dogs dream dogs’ dreams, resigned to be “man’s best friend.” This awakens them. They bark passionately without ceasing. The dogs’ barking in unison awakens the turtle, the icaco, its shadow, some of the cooks (interrupting their collective dream), Ranger Neals (who awakens if a pin drops), and Dr. Velafuente.

The roots of Mrs. Big’s icaco tree don’t know how to sleep, and therefore can’t dream. Rigid, they extend through the muddy earth, thinking always of the Eagles because the Eagles are always going on about how “it’s so important to defend our roots,” etc.

Caroline Smith dreams of Nepomuceno as she dies.

Her dream seems bewitched. Nepomuceno guides her along a road, this can’t be real. The tree’s roots are exposed, hardened, challenging the wind. Its crown is buried in the dirt. She feels the rough, rocky road beneath the soles of her feet. Nepomuceno is carrying her. Caroline knows this road leads to her death, but she doesn’t care. Suddenly, she is facing a door. She opens it. She can’t pass through, she’s dead.

Corporal Ruby dreams anxiously, for him eternity is drowning in a roiling river.

Sarah-Soro, in New Orleans, also dreams what the moon wants her to dream — its powers reach that far. She dreams about Moonbeam, the Hasinai Indian who’s no longer with us. Scantily dressed, she dances on stage, never more beautiful. She speaks a few words in her native tongue, which Sarah understands.

In her corral, Pinta, Nepomuceno’s horse, has a very strange dream: she climbs a ladder up to the fat white cloud that is looking down on her from the sky.

There, the magnificent mare dreams the cloud’s dream: she’s not made of flesh, not even vapor. She’s just a color.

At her home in Matasánchez, Maria Elena Carranza is awoken from her dreams by a moonbeam falling across her eyelids. She gets up, feeling as if she’s been illuminated. She looks out the window and thinks she sees the Talking Cross fly past.

“Sweet Jesus!”

She drops to her knees and begins to pray.

Three times Nicolaso has awoken to the birds’ flapping, afraid there’s a coyote, a fox, an Apache — someone who wants to steal them. It’s just the moon making them stir.

In Bruneville, the moon shines on the Adventurer, who was formerly lying sick in the infirmary, but who has now fully recovered — he’s handsome and well dressed, but there’s something inscrutable in his expression; he’s paying Mrs. Big (she’s been drinking, but can still attend to business) for two horses. He also buys a donkey to carry supplies (animal fodder, beef jerky, hardtack bread — nothing like the bread that Óscar bakes, but it’ll last a long time) and water.

A cloaked figure awaits him beneath the icaco tree. It’s Eleonor. They’re running away together.

They ride, first along the road to Bruneville, then across open fields, for what’s left of the night and well into the morning, until they find a place to rest, though they have stopped three times to give the animals a break. There’s fresh water and trees for shade.

While they ride he doesn’t dream a thing. Eleonor dreams both when they ride and when they stop. Images come one on top of the other, flying through her head so quickly that she can’t focus on a single one, but they make her happy, happier than she’s ever felt before.

Glevack is with a lady of the night. Riding her.

Óscar’s dreams are poisoned. First, the well where he stops to drink is full of cadavers. Then the meat Sharp delivers him is full of worms. Last he offers Nepomuceno rotting bread. Instead of life, his bread bestows death.

No sooner has the sun appeared on the horizon than rumors begin to spread like wildfire through Bruneville and further north, and in Matasánchez and further south — distorted like Chinese whispers: rumors that Nepomuceno captured Bruneville dressed in a short cape thrown across one shoulder (a manteaux ), a high collar right up to his beard, wide breeches, tight socks, shoes with shiny buckles, and a wide-brimmed hat, his strawberry blond beard trimmed in a narrow triangle (the folks who said this also said that Shears behaved like a gentleman, an eye for an eye, while the really malicious ones said that Nepomuceno shot him just because he felt like it); rumors that the invasion was about a girl, identifying who the girl was, debating whether he kidnapped her or not, or whether they raped Bruneville’s women. Someone even dared to say they used swords and lances and gunpowder to do unspeakable things to them. Someone else claimed that first they kidnapped the women, then they blew up the bridges (and that’s really going too far, there’s not a single bridge in Bruneville) … all sorts of crazy things. All the exploits of the Robin brothers mixed with the Coal Gang’s and other bandits, even the pirates who used to attack Matasánchez and the ones who built Galveston.