Clara Navarro

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

Clara Navarro was born in 1879 at Bandera, Texas, and lived seventy-seven years as a typist in San Antonio, most of them in offices that had the army for a customer. She belonged to the House of Navarro, the Tejano ranching families who guarded the San Antonio missions, and she was not a slayer, though she raised one. She had a single recorded child, the vampire slayer Juan Navarro, born in 1905 and dead in 1972, who took her name, as the Navarros sometimes let a child do when a father had drifted out of the record. The family papers do not name her parents or the man who fathered her son, and they are as silent about both as they are about a great many things, but they do record the woman: quick, dry, exact, and capable of typing ninety words a minute with her hat still on. She died in 1956 of a sudden collapse, aged seventy-seven, at her desk, it is said, between one line and the next. The Navarros remember her as the woman who typed the mission book into a form that could be carried. Bandera in 1879 was a cypress-cutting town on the Medina River, forty-odd miles northwest of San Antonio, settled by Mormon shingle makers, Germans, Alsatians and a colony of Polish families who had arrived speaking no English and sang at their work. The Navarros who lived there were an outlying branch of the mission families, running goats and a few hundred head of cattle in thin hill country, and they kept to themselves and to the hounds. Clara was born in a cedar-picket house with a good well, in the same year that the machinist Ramon Navarro, a kinsman of the Bandera branch, came home one June evening looking as though he had seen something in a wheat field. The child knew nothing of that. She knew the smell of woodsmoke, the sound of cowbells at dusk and the fact that the grown people stopped talking when she came into the room. She was a small, dark, upright girl, with a level gaze and a horror of mess, and she taught herself to read from the labels of tinned goods and the Sunday paper. Nobody in the house was much of a scholar, but they took her to the little school at Bandera, where a German teacher put her at the front, and by nine she was correcting his spelling. She had a habit of tidying other people's things. She lined up the boots by the door in order of size and arranged the spices in the kitchen alphabetically, and once, at eleven, re-shelved the entire contents of the town store, without being asked, on a Saturday afternoon when the owner had gone to the river. He was furious. On Monday he offered her a job. It was the first she held, and she kept it for three years, for a nickel a week and all the peppermint she could eat. The hunters of the House of Navarro kept a book, as every great house did. The Navarro book, which was older than the state of Texas, was a long, battered register of the missions' guardians, their hounds, their tallies and their cautions, written in three languages, by a dozen hands, over two centuries. It was falling to pieces. The leaves were cracked, the ink had faded to brown, and in the 1890s the elders of the family began to worry that the book would not survive another generation in the damp of a ranch house. It was Clara, at seventeen, who said that the answer was to copy it. She had by then been sent to San Antonio, to an aunt on the Westside, and to a commercial school run by the Sisters, where she had learned shorthand and, on a second-hand Remington with a sticking e, the new art of typewriting. The elders had never seen such a machine, and they thought it a kind of loom. She showed them what it could do. It took her eleven years. She worked in the evenings, in the aunt's front room, on a borrowed table with a lamp, and she typed the old book onto good paper, in clean, even lines, in carbon copies, three at a time. She did not always understand what she was copying. The old hands were difficult, the Spanish was the Spanish of the eighteenth century, and there were passages in a kind of Latin that nobody living could read. She typed them letter by letter, with her tongue between her teeth, and she was never once found to have altered a word. The copies went to three houses, to a cousin in Laredo, to an uncle at Goliad and to the church on the river, and it was said afterward that if San Antonio had burned, the book would have survived it. The original went into a tin box, and the box into a wall. Her son was born in 1905 at Bandera, in the cedar-picket house where she herself had been born, to which she had gone home for her lying-in in the middle of a torrid August. She called him Juan, for her grandfather, and she registered him, to the evident relief of several persons, as a Navarro. She was twenty-six. She went back to work within the month. She found a place with a cotton broker on Commerce Street, and later with the Quartermaster Corps at Fort Sam Houston, which was the largest employer in the city and ran on carbon paper. She was a first-class typist, as quick as any man in the building, and was paid less than the slowest of them, which she observed, in a tight voice, every payday for thirty years. She never complained aloud. She simply typed faster. Juan was a thin, watchful, clever boy. She brought him up with the help of her aunt, on the Westside, in a narrow house with a pecan tree and a porch, and saw that he was taught his catechism, his sums and his Spanish. He was called to the work as a young man, and she did not try to stop him. She said only that if he was going to be a hunter, he would be a hunter who could spell. She typed his tally cards, and his notes of what he saw at night, and later the reports that he gave to the book, and she kept the carbons in a shoebox under her bed. In 1928 he married Harriet Proctor, of the White Ledger, in the church on the river, and she sat in the front pew in a dark blue hat with her hands folded. It was said that she did not cry. She had, she told her aunt afterward, been too busy counting the guests. The city changed around her. In the year of the great influenza, 1918, when Juan was thirteen, the wards at the post filled within a week and the typists in the Quartermaster's office were pulled to the wards to write down the names of the sick. She did it for seven weeks, and she took no ill. She wrote, by her own count, more than four thousand names, and she never spoke of it. The Great War, which had brought thousands of soldiers to the city, left her with a desk by the window and a pension that was less than she thought fair. The Depression years, when half the Westside was out of work, she got through by taking in outside typing in the evenings, for lawyers and for the church, and by the simple, stubborn fact that she had never spent a cent that she had not counted twice. She retired from the post in 1944, at sixty-five, and went to live with Juan and Harriet in a house on the Westside, in a room with a window on the pecan tree. She took the old typewriter with her, and she went on typing, letters, recipes, a small history of the family that nobody asked her for. Her hands were still quick. In the autumn of 1956, at seventy-seven, she sat down one morning to finish a letter and did not get to the end of the line. The page was found in the machine with the carriage half across and the last word unfinished. Juan took it out, and finished the word, and had the letter posted. Clara Navarro is remembered in the Navarro family as the woman who typed the mission book into three copies and thereby saved it, the typist who made the old hands legible. In the Slayerverse she stands for the clerks and copyists of the House of Navarro, who never walked a river bottom at night and who kept the record of a craft alive by the plain work of a pair of quick hands and a good ribbon.