Vicente Navarro

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

Vicente Navarro was born in 1854 on the Westside of San Antonio, Texas, and died in 1919 of a sudden collapse, aged sixty-five, after forty-odd years as a newspaper compositor in the city that had raised him. He belonged to the House of Navarro, the Tejano ranching families who had guarded the San Antonio missions for five generations, and he was a setter of type, not a hunter, and never claimed to be anything else. He had one recorded child, Adriana Navarro, born in 1891 and dead in 1953, who was not a slayer either, and who in 1916 married Alexander Proctor Thorne and so carried the Navarro blood into the Proctor and Thorne lines. The family papers do not name his parents or record a wife. What they record is a man who read every line of every newspaper in south Texas before anyone else did, and who kept what he read. The Westside in 1854 was the old Mexican quarter of San Antonio, a district of adobe and limestone houses, goat pens, acequias and small gardens, lying west of the San Pedro Creek and the plaza. The Texas that had annexed itself nine years earlier had not yet altered it much. People spoke Spanish at home and in church, English and German in the market, and the language of the trades, which was mostly gestures, all over town. The Navarros who lived there were the town branch of a ranching family. They kept a house near the plaza for market days and for funerals and a ranch on the river for everything else. Vicente was born in the town house, and it is worth saying that the ranch never wanted him. He was a small, round-shouldered, near-sighted child who held a book an inch from his nose and could not sit a horse without being carried off, and the men of the family, who had been bred to the saddle for a hundred and fifty years, looked at him with affection and a certain puzzlement. He found his trade by accident, in the street. When he was eleven, in 1865, the first number of a German-language weekly, the Freie Presse für Texas, came out from a shop on Commerce Street, and a newspaper of any kind was a wonder. He stood at the window for an hour watching the compositor at the case, picking up letters one at a time with a motion so fast and exact that it looked like a card trick. The compositor, who was a Saxon with only one good eye, took pity on him, gave him a stick and a fount of spent type and told him to come back when he could set his own name upside down. He came back the next morning. He worked as an errand boy, a sweeper and a wash-boy for the forms, and by fifteen was a journeyman of sorts, setting in three languages, English, German and his own, and was the only man on Commerce Street who could correct a Spanish proof by eye. By the 1870s he had moved to the San Antonio Express, which had been founded in 1865 and by then was the big paper of the region, and he spent the rest of his life in its composing room. It was a long, low, ink-stained room on the second floor, hot in summer, cold in winter and lit by gas, where a dozen men stood at the cases in their shirt-sleeves with their sticks in their left hands, picking up the lead letters line by line. He stood there for forty years. In the cattle-trail years, when the herds went up to Kansas and the stock papers were full of market prices, brands and trail news, it was he who set the long columns of brand registrations, which had to be exact, because a wrong brand in the Express could mean a lawsuit. He was known for it. Ranchers would ask for the Navarro proof. It was the reading that made him useful to the House of Navarro. A compositor sees the news before the editor does and before the public does, in fragments, backward, letter by letter, and he sees things that are not printed. Vicente set the telegraph dispatches, the police court, the obituaries and the local items, and over the years he noticed that a certain kind of item came up again and again. A drover who failed to come back from a bivouac. A German farm empty at harvest. A family gone from a mission ranch, with the stock loose in the pasture. Each one, on its own, was a line of eight-point type at the foot of a column. Together they made a map. He began, in the later 1870s, to cut out the ones that troubled him and paste them in a ledger, and by the end of the decade he had a book that the old men of the mission families, on being shown it, asked to keep. He did not hunt and did not wish to. What he did was bring the book to the Navarros who did, on Sunday evenings, in the back room of a house on the Westside, and read them what he had found. He was a good reader. He was a quiet, precise man, with a clerk's voice, and he had the habit of saying what a thing was and what it was not, so that the hunters, who were men of action and much given to theories, learned to ask him first. The slayers of the White Ledger in San Antonio, who took a good deal of advice from the Navarros, came to know him as the man at the Express, and they sent him what they saw. Several of them, including, it was said, the young slayer Ramon Navarro, took to leaving notes for him under a stone outside the church. His book was the nearest thing the missions had to a newspaper of their own. The great Galveston storm came in September 1900, and it was the largest night of his working life. The telegraph had failed after dark on Saturday, and on Sunday and Monday the dispatches came in by relay, scrap by scrap, with the names of the dead in columns, and the Express put out extras. He set for thirty hours. He said later that he had never been so tired or so sure that the work was worth doing. The lists were long, and he set every name in the same small type, from the same case, with the same care, and when it was over he went home, slept for a day and went back. He had the habit, after that, of keeping a corner of the page for names that nobody else wanted to print. His daughter Adriana was born in 1891, when he was thirty-seven, and was the centre of his life. He brought her up in a narrow house on the Westside, with the help of a neighbour and the aunts, and taught her to read at the age of four from the headlines. She was bright, quick, fond of ink and not at all like him, and she was sent to the Sisters and then, at her own insistence, to a commercial school, where she learned typewriting and shorthand. She was not called to the work, and he was quietly relieved, but she knew what he did on Sundays and what the book was for, and she kept it after him. In 1916, at twenty-five, she married Alexander Proctor Thorne, a steady young man of the Thorne and Proctor lines who had taken a post in the city, and her father gave her away in the church on the Westside in a black suit that he had bought for the occasion and that was a size too large. The Express sent a cake. It was the first time anyone on the composing floor had seen him smile in the daytime. The war years, for him, were mostly dispatches. He set the casualty lists of 1917 and 1918, with the names of boys from the Westside and the German districts, and he was careful with the Spanish surnames, which the wire services had a habit of mangling. He was sixty-three when the war ended. He kept working, though the new linotype machines had taken over most of the hand-setting, because he said that somebody in the room ought to be able to fix a wrong letter with his fingers. He died in the spring of 1919, at the stone, in the middle of a column. The foreman said afterward that he had set a line, looked at it for a moment as though it had said something unexpected and sat down on the floor. He was dead before the doctor came, and his stick, still in his hand, was found to hold a half-set line that was correct to the last point. The ledger of clippings went to Adriana, and from her to the family. Vicente Navarro is remembered in the Navarro family as the compositor who read the whole country backward and kept what the newspapers threw away. In the Slayerverse he stands for the watchers of the printed page, the clerks and setters who, without a stake or a gun, saw the pattern in the small print and made it possible for the hunters to find the dark.