Catalina Navarro

Slayer of House of Navarro, parent of a spouse who married into the Proctor line.

Catalina Navarro was born in 1904 in San Antonio, Texas, in the King William district south of downtown, and lived seventy-two years as a bookkeeper and, for fifty-five of them, as a vampire slayer of the House of Navarro. The family book knows her as The Flint Lamp, a name for the small steady light that is struck out of a hard stone and carried through the dark in a cupped hand, and it classes her as a Hunter, which in the Navarro sense means a slayer who fixes on one quarry and does not leave the trail until the business is finished. Her craft was Plaza Reading, the discipline of standing in a crowded public square at the turn of the light and seeing, in the movement of the people, the one who does not belong, and her gear was a pistol and silver-tipped stakes. She belonged to the House of Navarro, the Tejano ranching families who guarded the San Antonio missions. She never married, and she had one child, Elena Navarro, born in 1932 and dead in 2002, who married Wendell Proctor of the White Ledger line in 1962. She died in 1976 in a car accident, aged seventy-two, on a road that she had driven, by her own estimate, a hundred thousand times. She was born in King William because her family had a place there, as the Navarros had a place in most of the city. The district, which lay along the river south of downtown, had been laid out by German merchants in the 1860s and was full of limestone mansions with iron fences and big, shady yards, and the Navarros who lived there were the servants, gardeners and bookkeepers of the great houses, a quiet and respected class who kept the keys. Catalina was born in the back bedroom of a rented cottage behind one such mansion, on a warm night in July, with a midwife from the Westside, an aunt and two cats in attendance. The family papers do not name her parents with any confidence, but remember that she was the youngest of four, the only girl, and a sharp, small, brown-eyed child with a strong opinion about arithmetic. She was carried round the block the next morning to be shown to the neighbours, and the German lady next door, who kept a boarding house, said that the child was the image of an abacus. She was a bookkeeper by nature. At five she was keeping her brothers' marbles in a tin, with a tally, and at seven she was discovered with a stub of pencil in the kitchen reconciling the cook's accounts and finding a discrepancy of six cents. The nuns who taught her at the school on the river said that she added by looking at a column and waiting. She was sent at fifteen, in 1919, to a German merchant's counting house on Commerce Street as a ledger clerk, which was thought a great honour for a Tejana, and she did not disappoint. She kept the books of a wholesale grocer, then of a hardware merchant, then of a lumber yard, and she left a trail of audited ledgers in the district that were still being quoted for their neatness thirty years later. She worked for the same lumber firm for fifty years. It was through a quarrel that she was called. She was seventeen, in the autumn of 1921, and had had a bitter, short, stupid row with her oldest brother, over the money that she had saved for school and that he wished to borrow for a horse. She said what she thought. He said what he thought. He went out of the house at dusk, slamming the door, and was found two days later in the river, drowned, at a bend below the Navarro ranch. She was a good Catholic girl and she went to the funeral, and was inconsolable, and for a month she did not speak to anyone. It was a month in which a good many things were said about forgiveness that she did not wish to hear. He came back on the fortieth night. She was in the kitchen of the cottage, at the table, with a lamp, doing her accounts, and there was a step in the yard that she knew, and a hand on the latch. She went to the door. He stood on the step in his Sunday coat, white and wet, and said that he had come to finish the quarrel. He said it in his own voice, with his own look, and she, who had been awake for most of forty nights and wished for nothing so much as the chance to take back what she had said, almost let him in. She had her hand on the bolt. It was the lamp that saved her, or the habit of the accounts. She noticed that the flame did not lean towards him, as flames lean towards a living person who comes in at a door, and that there was no breath on the cold. She took her hand off the bolt. She said, in a voice she did not know, that he might finish it in the morning. She spent the night with a kitchen knife, a rosary and the lamp, and in the morning she went to her uncle, who had guarded the Navarro lands and the mission graves for thirty years, and told him what she had seen. He listened without moving. Then he took her out to the river, to the bend where the body had been found, and showed her the marks, and told her that the thing at her door had been a creature wearing her brother's face, which had taken him in the water and which would come again. He asked whether she wanted to know the rest. She said that she wanted to know all of it. She was seventeen, and she was called. She worked beside her uncle for three years, and she took the creature at the river bend on the first of November, which is the day of the dead, with a pistol that had been her grandfather's and a lamp that she had lit herself. She was not afraid, she said, and the family has never believed her. She said that it was the only quarrel in her life that she had finished. The Flint Lamp was a name that she took herself, from the stone that struck the fire, and she meant it as a modest one. She was not a spectacular hunter. She was a patient one, who liked to settle on a district and watch it. Her craft was the plazas, the great open squares of the old city, the Main Plaza before the cathedral, the Military Plaza where the chili queens set out their stalls, Alamo Plaza with its hotels, the market on Produce Row, and what she read in them was not a face or a coat but the shape of the crowd. A vampire in a crowd, she said, was a stone in a stream. The people moved round it, a little too far, a little too carefully, without knowing why. She would stand in the doorway of a bank at dusk with her ledger under her arm, and she would watch a plaza fill and empty, and she could tell you, within ten minutes, where the stone was. She took, by the family's count, thirty-four of them in fifty-five years, all but four in the open air of a public square. She never married. She had a daughter, Elena Navarro, born in 1932, who was raised in the cottage in King William and, from the age of six, in the counting house, under the desk, among the account books, where she learned to read before she walked. The family papers are reticent about the child's father and Catalina was reticent too, though she said, when she was asked, that it had been an honest arrangement and was concluded, and that she had not had cause to regret the child. Elena was not called. Catalina took the view, in this as in other matters, that a debt need not be inherited, and brought her up to be a bookkeeper, a good Catholic and a person who could sit in a plaza and enjoy it. She was, in her own way, very tender. She was in the habit of leaving the child's supper under a cloth, and a note, when she went out at dusk. The Depression years she spent in the counting house, keeping the lumber firm alive, and in the plazas, at dusk, keeping the city safe. Both jobs were done for less than she was worth. The war years of the forties filled San Antonio with soldiers, the plazas were full of uniforms, and a vampire in a crowd of ten thousand young men was harder to see than a stone in a flood. She worked at it six nights a week and said that she had never been so tired. In the Korean War years she was forty-six, and the plazas were thick again, and she stood at the edge of them in a good grey coat with her pistol in her bag, reading the faces. Elena married Wendell Proctor in 1962, in the Mission of San José, with the Navarro uncles and the Proctor cousins in two blocks on either side of the aisle. Catalina, who was fifty-eight, in a dark blue dress and her mother's rosary, said that it was the only time in her life that she had seen the two houses stand together without a ledger. She retired from the lumber yard in 1969, and from the plazas in 1974, and she spent the last two years of her life in the cottage, with a garden, a cat and a good deal of leisure for the first time since she was fifteen. She was killed in a car accident on a wet night in the spring of 1976, on the road home from the mission, when a truck came across the white line on a curve. She was seventy-two. It was observed that she had, as usual, been looking at the other cars. A small pocket ledger was found in her bag, with the last entry dated that evening, which said that the plaza had been quiet. Catalina Navarro is remembered in the Navarro family as the bookkeeper of King William, the girl who struck her light from a quarrel and carried it round the plazas for half a century. In the Slayerverse she stands for the hunters who work in the open square among ordinary people, who prove that a crowd tells the truth about what moves in it, and who show that a small light, patiently carried, is enough to read by.