Page 10 of The Hacienda
Curiosity sharpened my ears, though I fought to keep my face aspassive as a saint’s. To be unpopular with the conservative criollo hacendados, those who clung to their wealth and the monarchy, meant that Rodolfo was sympathetic to the insurgents and independence. It was not unusual for sons of hacendados to turn the tables and support the insurgents, but I did not expect it of the son of old, cruel Solórzano. Perhaps Rodolfo was different from the other criollos. Perhaps, now that old Solórzano was dead, the people of San Isidro would suffer less under the younger man’s watch.
I peered at the woman on his arm. She looked as if she had stepped out of a painting: her small, pointed face was crowned by hair pale as corn silk. Her eyes were doe-like, dark and wide-set; when they flicked in my direction, they slid right over me. They passed over the townspeople, unseeing, and then refocused on Padre Guillermo.
Ah. Those were eyes that did not see faces that were not peninsular or criollo. There were many such pairs of eyes among the hacendados and their families. How could such a woman survive without her ilk, alone in the country, in that enormous house at the center of Hacienda San Isidro? She looked as if she were made from expensive white sugar, the likes of which I had only ever seen in Guadalajara. Unreal as a phantom lilting pale on a riverbank. I had seen women like her in Guadalajara, pious, wealthy women with hands as soft as a lamb’s spring coat, utterly incapable of working. Such people could not survive long in the country.
I wondered then if the changes Don Rodolfo hinted at would end the war at last. Whenever it did, I was sure that his spun-sugar wife would flee back to the comforts of the capital, typhus or no.
How very wrong I was.
6
BEATRIZ
Present day
AFTER BREAKFAST ONE MORNING,Rodolfo saddled his horse and bade farewell to me at the gates of San Isidro.
He cupped my chin in one hand, searching my face. “Are you sure?”
This was now the third time he had asked if I was going to be all right at San Isidro. I had slept fitfully and woken before him, staring at the cobwebs between the Nicaraguan cedar beams in our bedroom. There was so much in the air of the house that feltother.
Perhaps it was that many generations had lived here before me, slept under the same beams. Each had made it their own. So, too, would I.
“Of course, querido,” I said. “I need to settle in. Make it presentable for my mother. You know how she is about tidy houses.” He didn’t. His smile was knowing all the same. A politician, an actor, even with his wife. I paused, weighing the wisdom of what I was about to say next, then went ahead anyway: “Promise me you’ll deliver my letters to her. In person, if you can spare the time.”
Mamá hated everything that Rodolfo stood for. She would not welcome his presence, especially if he was delivering messages from me, her turncoat daughter. But I had to try, even if none of my other letters had been answered.
“Of course,” he said, and kissed me. A brief, chaste brush of lips. His skin had a bite of citrus from his aftershave. “Don’t hesitate to write if there is anything you need. Anything at all.”
With that, Rodolfo mounted his bay mare and rode south. I waited until his dark hat was nothing more than a smudge on the horizon, then retraced my steps through the courtyards, midmorning sun already hot on my hat. Now that he was gone, there was something I needed to do before anything else.
Once inside the house, I headed upstairs. The suite of the patrón was divided into four rooms: the first was a parlor of sorts, bare of much furniture and cluttered with chests filled with my clothes from the capital. The only windows were set high in the wall and were far too narrow for my liking; they had no glass panes and were covered with old cedar shutters. Such was the way with country houses, Rodolfo had explained. It would be hard to adjust to this after years of sewing by the large glass-paned windows in Mamá’s parlor in the capital.
The next room was a drawing room, a study of sorts. Rodolfo had left a number of books here from his studies: military texts, a Bible, Plato’sRepublic. A door on the left-hand side of the room led to the bedchamber, and off the bedchamber was the room for washing.
I knelt before the first of my chests. The lock clicked open, and I lifted the heavy lid. Atop my bedclothes, undergarments, and stockings was a small square of folded paper. I took it, held it to my nose, and inhaled deeply. Something about the smell of paperwasPapá. It was his map, the one piece of home I snatched as I fled.
I took it, and a handful of embroidery pins, to the study and pinned it to the wall above Rodolfo’s desk. Yes, the room was still dusty, still indesperate need of airing out. Too dark. But Papá was on the wall now. His neatx’s in red, the sweep of his charcoal pencil directing armies.
This tiny bit of the house washomenow, and I would not rest until the remainder of it was as well.
***
UNTIL THE FIRST SHIPMENTof furniture arrived from the capital, I was going to see what could be done about the gardens. I tightened the ribbons of my hat, took a pair of gloves from my chests, and made for the back terrace. While Rodolfo was present, I sat on my hands, fighting every urge to clean the house myself. Rodolfo was still unaware of how I had toughened my hands to work Tía Fernanda’s house, and I intended to keep it that way.
I strode through the cool halls and made my way to the parlor that had heavy cedar double doors to the terrace. I threw them open and inhaled deeply of fresh morning.
I had resented every callus I built following Tía Fernanda’s orders, every cut I accidentally gave myself in the kitchen. But here? The garden before me wasmineto fix, and though it was wilted and brown, a fierce affection for it welled up in me. This wasmineto make ready for Mamá. I could already picture her standing next to me on this terrace, her green eyes lifting up to the bright azure sky.
My earliest years were spent on an hacienda in Cuernavaca on a vast sugar plantation with my father’s extended family—the Hernández side, the one that had lessAndalusian blood, as he euphemistically described his darker complexion and thick black hair. The vine-covered stone main house sprawled lazily among palm trees and two-hundred-year-old fountains and was crowded with generations of cousins, but we lived in a smaller house apart from most of the family. For while Papá was loved by his aunt, the matriarch of the hacienda, she alone tolerated his choice to join the insurgency against Spain. Our small cottage once belonged to along-dead foreman, or a gardener, and was connected to the main house by arches covered with thick vines, their lush green accented by trailing bougainvillea.
Mamá did not mind this slight. She loved how the boisterous growth of the gardens always threatened to overtake the buildings of the hacienda and draw them into a verdant embrace. She had a miraculous way with everything living and green, and when Papá was away fighting, she spent hours with her broad-rimmed hat walking the property with the head gardener, discussing irrigation and pruning.
The arid climate and dead grasses of the lawn before me were not quite the same palate she had worked with in Cuernavaca, but I had no doubt she would work her miracles on the gardens of San Isidro. Long grasses whispered against one another, gossiping like aunts as I crossed to the back wall of the garden. A tall wooden ladder was propped against it; though its bottom rungs were splintered and cracked, the next few bore my weight. I climbed until I could peer over the row of bricks that lined the top, gap-toothed with age.
San Isidro was built on high ground to the northwest of the town. The rainy season had just ended; the green that swept from their foothills to the town’s edges looked as soft as one of Mamá’s rugs. Its hue was browner and earthier than Cuernavaca’s bold strokes, its color broken only by white dots of sheep and the severe rows of the hacienda’s maguey fields.
There, in the farthest corner of the fields, the dark forms of tlachiqueros swung machetes in steady arcs or strode through the rows of maguey. Every once in a while, a male voice rose from among them; a shout of surprise, or a swoop of laughter as they drained aguamiel, the honey water that collected in the heart of the maguey plant and that was fermented to make pulque.
