Page 40 of The Hacienda
Is there any vocation more natural for a man who hears devils?he had said. Perhaps what he meant was that there was no refuge more profound.
“Are all holy places?”
“Some. My mother used to panic because I would vanish in the night as a child. Then she would find me in the church, asleep beneath a pew in the morning...”
He opened his eyes, then straightened. Stiffly. The shift of his shoulders hinted that perhaps he thought he had spoken too much.
But something in my heart unfurled thinking about a small black-haired boy curled into a ball beneath a pew, and it wanted to know more. I wanted him to keep speaking.
“Is that why the witch became a priest?” I asked. “Because it was quiet in the church?”
He met my eyes levelly, the curve of his mouth angled slightly downward, as if suspicious I was mocking him. I was not. Was I prying too much? Perhaps. But I still yearned for him to reply.
“That was why my mother wanted me to become a priest.” His voice had a distant ring to it, confirming I was indeed prying, and that he was now on guard. “There are few places in the world for people who hear voices. Prisons. Asylums.”
“Rome,” I pointed out glibly.
His brows lifted to his hairline.
“There are plenty of saints who heard voices. Didn’t Santa Rosa de Lima?”
“I am no saint, Doña Beatriz,” Andrés said evenly. “And some would think it blasphemous to be so flippant about sainthood.”
He tilted his head back and closed his eyes again, effectively shuttering the subject. My eyes followed the raven-black hair falling across his brow, danced down the arch of his throat to his collar, and were caught by the shock of white that gleamed there against the black of his clothing.
Warmth flushed my cheeks. As far as sin was concerned, perhaps blasphemy was the least of my worries.
I dropped my gaze to my soup. “What would you be if not a priest?” Not the most graceful change of subject, but certainly a necessary one.
He did not answer. I was prying again.
“I wanted to be a general.” It was I who had asked the question, and in his silence, I who answered it. “My father was a general. He used to show me his battle plans and lecture me on the direction of armies, how to take the high ground and win even when muskets were so scarce soldiers resorted to throwing stones.” I remembered Papá’s dark hand covering mine and guiding it as we dipped his pen in the pot of red ink. Imagining the scrape of the pen’s nib against paper sent a pang of homesickness through my ribs. “I loved his maps best of all. I think that’s what I wanted, when I said I wanted to be a general. Maps. I didn’t understand leading armies meant leading men to die until I was older.”
“So instead you married a pulque lord.”
The hint of mockery in his voicestung.
“I had no other choice.” The words echoed brittle, too familiar to my lips. I had said the same thing to Mamá when she saw Rodolfo’s ring on my finger. “Don’t mock what you can’t understand,” I muttered, and thrust my spoon into my soup with more force than was necessary. Droplets of broth sprayed the table. I glared at them, aware that Andrés was watching me carefully now.
“Can’t I?” he asked.
It was as if that single soft question broke a dam in me.
He couldn’t understand what it was like to be a woman with no means of protecting her mother. He couldn’t understand the stakes I faced when Rodolfo proposed.
Or could he?
I lost it as a child, he had said of the language. His skin and eyes were lighter than his cousin’s; it was clear he was mestizo, of a lower casta thanthe other priests. Like me in Tía Fernanda’s household. Perhaps he also toed among criollo society on uneasy feet: careful to never misstep, careful to watch his back. Careful to never retaliate when offhand barbs buried themselves in his flesh.
We came from such different worlds, different classes, different experiences: the general’s daughter of the capital, the boy of the rural hacienda. At first blush, we had next to no common ground. Perhaps we didn’t. But perhaps the lives we had lived were not so different, in this one regard. Perhaps if I let him see that, he might understand.
“My father was intelligent. Kind. He loved my mother so much you couldn’tbreathebeing in the same room as them. But Mamá’s family cared about limpieza de sangre,” I said, letting the spite of a long-nursed wound rake over these final words.Cleanliness of blood.The Valenzuelas cherished that poisonous criollo obsession with casta, the belief that any non-peninsular heritage spoiled what was desirable and pure. “They disowned her for marrying a mestizo.”
This was the truth I could never articulate to Mamá because—as much as she loved me, perhaps because she loved me—she couldn’t see what other criollos saw:You’re nearly as lovely as Doña María Catalina, though quite darker.
“Look at me. It’s obvious that I favor my father,” I said. Fears I had never found the words to express rushed out of me, a stream overflowing in the rainy season. Now that I had begun, I did not think I could stop. Andrés did not try. He watched me, thoughtful and silent, as I gestured at my face, my black hair. “Then when he was killed and we lost everything, I knew it would be a miracle if I married at all. What else could I have done when Rodolfo proposed? Turn my nose up at the smell of pulque and let my mother live on scraps from my uncle’s table? Let her starve when he lost patience and turned us out?” I gestured in the general direction of the house, fear of what lurked within its walls making the motion hatefully sharp. “Thatwas supposed to be a home for her. It was supposed to beproof that I made the right decision. Proof that she was wrong to be angry with me about Rodolfo.” My voice trembled—with anger or hurt, I could not tell. Perhaps both. I folded my arms protectively over my chest. “But still she refuses to answer my letters, and I’m stuck withthat.”
A long silence followed my outburst, punctuated only by distant conversation from the kitchens.
