The Lord of Opium

“Mi abuelita says that if you have food, water, and a roof over your head, you’re rich,” Fidelito said, quoting his beloved grandmother. “You don’t need a lot of stuff. After all, you can’t eat a hundred hamburgers or sleep in a hundred beds.”

“That’s crap,” said Listen. “You can save the hamburgers for another day.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Listen, not that it’s any of your business.”

Fidelito reached out and she slapped him. Hard. “Don’t touch me.”

“Okay,” said the little boy, rubbing his face. He seemed hypnotized by her.

“¡Que barbaridad! He was only trying to be friendly,” Sor Artemesia said.

“Don’t want friends,” Listen said.

“Whether you want them or not, there’s no excuse for being unkind.”

Listen made a rude noise. “You aren’t the boss of me. I’m going to grow up to be beautiful and marry a drug lord.”

“You’re already pretty,” said Fidelito. Ton-Ton and Chacho rolled their eyes.

“Crot you!” swore Listen. That was too much for Sor Artemesia. She picked up the little girl in an expert hold and strode off.

Cienfuegos laughed. “Sister Artemesia knows her way around here. I’ll bet she’s on her way to the kitchen to find a bar of soap. I’d better calm things down before they go too far.”

He left, and the boys went up the marble steps of the hacienda. The trunks of orange trees on either side were painted white, and the dark-green leaves above were starred with creamy blossoms. An eejit was spraying them with water. More eejits dusted and polished furniture in the great entry hall. Like the field workers, they were dressed in drab brown uniforms, but they needed no hats because they worked indoors. “You sure have a lot of servants,” remarked Chacho. Matt realized that he hadn’t noticed the deadness in the workers’ eyes or the mechanical way they went about their chores.

“El Patrón liked a lot of servants,” Matt said uneasily. The boys knew about eejits, of course. TV shows portrayed them as crazed zombies that lurched around and ate brains. Nothing could have been further from the dreary reality.

A peacock, sitting in a window, gave a loud cry as the boys passed. “Ohhh,” Fidelito said, sighing. “What a beautiful bird!” And so Matt was saved from discussing eejits. They passed a side garden with a blue tile fountain, and Chacho halted.

He went up to the fountain and put his hands into the spray. “Water,” he said reverently. He stood there, letting it fill his palms and pour over the sides. “So much water,” he murmured. Several peacocks posed like works of art on a velvety green lawn. At the top of a tree, a mockingbird sang. Chacho listened with his mouth open, as it trilled one song after another until it flew away.

Matt heard, in the silence that followed, the sound of an eejit clipping the lawn with scissors. “Let’s go,” he said. He hurried them on to El Patrón’s private wing, where one of the rooms had been cleared for the boys. Matt made a mental note to have another one prepared for Sor Artemesia.

Ton-Ton, Chacho, and Fidelito eased their way past a clutter of ancient Egyptian statues and Roman glassware that had, through the centuries, taken on the rainbow color of soap bubbles. The plunder of a long lifetime crowded the halls. Ton-Ton reached for a rooster made of pure gold and hesitated. “It’s okay. You can pick it up,” said Matt.

“I m-might leave fingerprints on it. My hands are, uh, dirty.”

“You can roll it in the mud for all I care. Relax, compadre. There aren’t any Keepers here,” Matt said, referring to the men who had enslaved them at the plankton factory.

“It’s too p-pretty.” Ton-Ton looked longingly at the golden rooster. “Where did you get it?”

“It belonged to El Patrón. He collected tons of stuff.” Matt saw that he would have to do something to put his friend at ease. “You should see his music boxes. Remember the gentleman and lady doing the Mexican Hat Dance? There are dozens more.”

Ton-Ton brightened. Machines were something he understood. They went on, past paintings of men and women in somber black clothes. The effect was chilling, as though they were being watched by a throng of disapproving ghosts. “There’s a nice one,” cried Fidelito. In one alcove was the portrait of the woman in a white dress that had impressed Matt. “Is that María?”

“It can’t be,” said Matt, smiling because he, too, thought it looked like María. “These paintings are hundreds of years old.” The woman smiled as though she had a secret she was dying to tell someone. He thought she was like a ray of light in the dim hallway.

“There’s a label,” Chacho said. He brushed away a plume of dust from a brass plate below the picture. “It says ‘Goya.’ What’s a Goya?”