The weakest mare suffered every day… until a man decided to act.

The weakest mare suffered every day… until a man decided to act.

The white colt of Saint Lucia

My name is Sebastián Ramos Silva, though everyone on the ranches knows me as Chano. For forty-three years I was one of those men who lower their heads before they’re given an order. Not out of cowardice, but because life had taught me that when you have children to feed, you swallow your pride even if it burns like cheap mezcal.

I was a muleteer from a young age. I knew the dusty roads of Zacatecas, the trails of San Luis Potosí, the dry pastures of Tamaulipas, and the treacherous rains of northern Veracruz. My wife, Concepción, died eight years ago. The doctors said it was pneumonia, but I always believed she died of exhaustion: exhaustion from waiting for me, from raising our two children almost alone, from living a life harder than she deserved.

My children went to Monterrey to look for work and I kept walking, because a muleteer who stops for too long begins to feel useless.

That’s how I arrived at the Santa Lucía ranch, in the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental. It belonged to Don Evaristo Ledesma, a short man with a heavy belly and a cold gaze. He almost never shouted. That was the worst part. When he got angry, he spoke in a low voice, as if he were gritting his teeth.

The ranch was large, with fat cattle, fine horses, and a white house that gleamed in the sun. But inside, everything had a somber air. The farmhands worked in fear. The animals did too.

I saw her a few days after I arrived.

She was a thin, wet-sand mare with prominent ribs and a star-shaped white mark on her forehead. She stood alone in a small, shadeless corral enclosed by old wire. While the other horses rested under cover, she endured the sun as if she were worthless.

“Her name is Estrella,” Don Nacho, the oldest muleteer on the ranch, told me. “Don’t look at her too much, Chano.”

-Because?

—Because pity here only gets you into trouble.

But I couldn’t stop looking at her.

Estrella had a still, heavy gaze, like that of someone who no longer expects anything from anyone, but continues breathing out of sheer habit. I knew that look. I had seen it many times in the mirror.

Don Evaristo used her for everything: carrying loads, pulling, riding when the other horses were tired. And when something went wrong on the ranch, he took it out on her. One day I saw him hit her with a leather whip because a buyer refused to close a deal. Nobody said a word. Chepe turned away. El Pollo lowered his head. Don Nacho clenched his jaw.

I also remained still.

I didn’t sleep that night.

I remembered my father telling me, “Sometimes you have to choose between dignity and beans. And when there are hungry children, the beans win.”

But that night I thought that maybe beans nourish the body, and cowardice is killing something deeper.

From then on, I began to approach Estrella secretly. I brought her green alfalfa, pieces of piloncillo, and clean water. At first, she tensed up when I entered the corral. After a few days, she let me touch her neck. Then she began to approach me whenever she saw me.

One October morning, before sunrise, I noticed something strange about her belly. I approached slowly, looked at her side, and felt a thud in her chest.

She was pregnant.

A pregnant mare, thin, beaten and used as a beast of burden.

I told Don Nacho.

“I already knew that,” he murmured.

—And why is nobody saying anything?

—Because the boss doesn’t listen.

—Then we have to make him listen.

Don Nacho looked at me as if I were a child talking about stopping a storm with my hands.

—Be careful, Chano. Don Evaristo doesn’t forgive anyone who contradicts him.

But I could no longer pretend that I didn’t see.

Weeks passed. Estrella grew heavier, more tired. I cared for her as best I could. Until one night, when a storm threatened but didn’t materialize, I heard a long moan from the corral.

I ran with my flashlight.

Estrella lay on the ground, sweating, breathing with difficulty. The foal was in a bad position. One leg was bent inwards and the birth wasn’t progressing.

I went to see Don Nacho.

“This is something a veterinarian would do,” he said when he saw it.

—The vet takes six hours to arrive. She can’t wait six hours.

Don Nacho looked at me. Then he knelt down.

—Then go ahead, Chano. I’ll hold her.

It was forty minutes of dirt, sweat, fear, and prayers. Estrella strained, and I felt my arms going numb. There were moments when I thought we would lose her. But suddenly, the foal emerged.

He fell motionless.

Three seconds.

Four.

Five.

Then he shook his head.

He was alive.

It was white. White like a newborn cloud. White in a way that seemed impossible under the yellow light of the lantern.

Estrella lifted her neck and began to lick it with a tenderness that made me cry silently.

“Look at him,” whispered Don Nacho. “That animal was born to be looked at.”

The next day, when Don Evaristo saw the colt, his expression changed. There was no tenderness in his eyes, only calculation. Value. Money. Future.

“You’re going to take care of both of them,” he ordered me. “Good pasture, cleanliness, vigilance. That colt could be worth a lot.”

—I was already taking care of it—I replied.

He looked at me for a long time, surprised that I had answered like that.

From that day on, the colt grew strong. I named him Sereno, because he was born on a damp night, under that quiet dew that falls unnoticed and appears all over everything at dawn.

Sereno ran around the yard on his slender, clumsy, and beautiful legs. Estrella followed him with her eyes, more alive than before. I thought that perhaps, after so much pain, I finally had a reason to lift my head.

But Don Evaristo hadn’t changed. He was just waiting.

One day I had to go out for three days to deliver cattle in Parral. I left precise instructions: Estrella was not to carry anything, she was not to be ridden, and she was not to be separated from the foal.

When I returned, I found her exhausted, with tense muscles and a dull look in her eyes.

“The boss mounted her yesterday,” Chepe told me in a low voice. “He said he needed a horse.”

I went to the big house.

—Don Evaristo, Estrella has just given birth. You can’t ride her like that.

He lowered his voice.

—That animal is mine.

—Yes. And if he ruins it, it will also affect the colt that he thinks is worth so much money.

That stopped him, not out of humanity, but because I spoke to him in his language: loss and gain.

But I knew it had left its mark on me.

Three weeks later, I heard the word that chilled my blood: boarding.

Don Evaristo had sold Sereno to a buyer in Torreón. Estrella would go with him alone so the colt wouldn’t cause any problems during the trip. Afterward, the buyer would decide what to do with her.

And we all knew what that meant.

“You can’t send her like that,” I told him.

—An animal without a use has no value, Chano.

—Not for you. Yes for me.

The silence fell heavily.

—You forgot your place.

—No, Don Evaristo. I think I’m just now finding it.

He fired me at that moment.

That night I went to say goodbye to Estrella. The moon illuminated the corral. Sereno slept beside her, white as a miracle.

I put my hand on the mare’s neck and understood that if I left alone, I would carry that guilt to my grave.

At four in the morning, before the ranch woke up, I opened the corral. Don Nacho was waiting for me outside with coffee and an envelope containing eight hundred pesos.

“This is robbery, Chano,” he said.

-I know.

—The boss is coming for you.

—I know that too.

—Then take this. You’re going to need it.

He didn’t hug me. Ranch men don’t always know how to hug. But he put his hand on my shoulder, and that was enough.

I led Estrella and Sereno out through the back path. I called an old friend, Beto, who had a cattle truck. Two hours later, the animals were on their way to some abandoned land I inherited from my father near Matehuala.

I thought the hardest part was over.

I made a mistake.

Two weeks later, Don Evaristo arrived on my property. He got out of his truck with a stern face. I was standing by the corral, with Sereno running free behind me.

“Do you know what you did?” he asked.

-Yeah.

—I could bring the police on you.

-Could.

He stared at Estrella. The mare grazed peacefully. Sereno galloped under the sun, white, powerful, happy.

Then Don Evaristo grabbed a hoe that was leaning against the fence. He raised it angrily.

“You damned mare!” he shouted. “Because of you, an old farmhand thought he could challenge me.”

I saw his hands tighten on the handle. I saw Estrella back away. I saw Sereno stand between his mother and him, not understanding the danger.

I only had seconds.

I jumped in and stood in front.

—If you’re going to hit, hit me.

Don Evaristo stood motionless, the hoe held high.

I was trembling. Of course I was trembling. But I didn’t move.

“For a mare?” he spat.

“No,” I said. “Not for me. Because I’m tired of being the man who looks at the ground.”

His eyes changed. They didn’t soften suddenly. People like him don’t change like that. But something broke in his face. Perhaps shame. Perhaps exhaustion. Perhaps seeing himself reflected in an animal he could no longer control.

He lowered the hoe.

We sat under a mesquite tree and talked for hours. I offered him my land as payment, my money, my labor. He stared at Sereno for a long time.

“Keep the mare,” he finally said. “The colt will be split. You take care of it. I’ll get a share of what it earns if it races.”

It wasn’t perfect justice. But it was life. And Estrella would live.

I accepted.

Sereno grew up as if the wind had nurtured him. At two years old, he ran his first race in Hermosillo. He came in second. In the next one, he won. In the third, people stopped talking when they saw him go by: a white lightning bolt on the track.

Don Evaristo received his share for a while. Then he sent a note with his foreman: “The deal is done. The rest is yours.”

I kept that paper.

Estrella died peacefully years later by the stream. Sereno stayed by her side all morning, as if guarding the mother who brought him into the world against all odds.

I still live on my father’s land. I’m not rich, but I no longer hang my head like I used to. My children come to visit me. My grandchildren chase Sereno around the pasture and say he looks like a legendary horse.

Sometimes, when the dew falls on the grass and the world stands still, I speak softly to that white horse.

—You are what was left when everyone gave up.

He looks at me with those dark eyes, as if he understands.

And maybe he understands.

Because sometimes the weakest, the one no one saw, ends up becoming what everyone comes to look at.

And sometimes an old man, who has spent his life obeying, learns late, but not too late, that dignity also needs nourishment.

And the day one stops pretending not to see, that is the day one’s true freedom begins.