Henri La France is a twenty-year-old French bullfighter and anarchist in Antiterra, a member of the Deep Ones and later of the core of the Regulators.
| Type | Character |
| Groups | The Deep Ones; The Regulators |
| Era | Antiterra 1888–1889 |
| Spanish entry | Henri La France |
Description
Big-nosed and sharp-featured, with an athletic body trained in the bullrings of southern France, he joins the group still carrying a matador’s bright sword under a red cape. He is nicknamed the “brave coward”: bold in advancing, ashamed in retreating, but he never surrenders. He hesitates and fires anyway; he flees with shame without losing his footing. His anarchism is a temperament rather than a program.
One depiction shows him in a hotel corridor in a long dark frock coat, a revolver in his left hand and a white handkerchief to clean it, a dagger at his belt still pink with fresh blood, beside a half-open door where a man’s leg rests on a chair.
History
- Origin: he appears as an anarchist bullfighter in Act 1 of the Anarquirón.
- Wandering: separated from the Deep Ones and robbed, he wandered for three days, stowed away on freight trains and went hungry. He fathered a son, presumably Zoro.
- Fatherhood: at nineteen he fathered Zoro, later Dr. Zoulu, with the Black snake charmer of the traveling circus of the South. The adult Zoro who appears in Labrador is his son, come from the future; at the same time the one-year-old baby Zoro is somewhere in the United States.
- Baton Rouge (1889): one of the city’s regents as a former member of the Deep Ones, known as “the Frenchman” or “young Henry”. In the bullring he personally gave a display of his skill to newly arrived outsiders (Zoro, Maleika, Cornelio, Benetton). “Henri the Bullfighter” is the name he uses there; it is a facet of the same person, not another character.
- The Regulators: part of the core group in the final phase of Antiterra.
Relationships
- Ludovico — echo of the anarchist temperament of the Anarquirón.