Page 62 of The Hacienda
Useful.From Paloma’s tone, I knew it was meant to be taken as a compliment. But how I had loathed being calledusefulby Tía Fernanda. As if being ofuseto her was the only way I could earn any worth.
In faltering sentences, I explained my family’s past: my mother being turned out by her family for marrying my father, how we relied on Papá’s extended family in Cuernavaca, living with them in an ancient stone house on an hacienda that produced sugar. Papá inherited a little from those relatives, and his rise through the army and position in the emperor’s cabinet meant we catapulted to as high a class standing as Mamá had started. I explained how we fell just as quickly: when Papá was murdered, refuge with Mamá’s cousins was our only choice. How Tía Fernanda treated me. How when an offer of marriage was extended to me, I seized it like a drowning man clings to driftwood. For what other choice was there?
Paloma sighed softly when I came to the end of my tale. She was chopping tomatoes for the sauce.
Her face had an odd look on it.
Pity, I realized with a start. Paloma pitied me for my story. Pride flung up hard walls around me.
“So that is why I amuseful,” I said. “Because my family will have nothing to do with me.”
“I thought you would be like the other one, when you arrived,” Paloma ventured in a small voice.
The other one.María Catalina.
I waited for her to elaborate, but she did not. One by one she put the tomatoes in the pot, salted them generously, and remained silent as she stirred.
“What was she like?” I prompted.
Her face changed again at this question. It lost its open look and shuttered. She stirred a few moments longer. “Like the patrón,” she said at last.
“How so?”
She worried her bottom lip as she withdrew the spoon from the pot. “I wouldn’t say this to most people, but you seem to have a level head about the world.” I glanced at the censers in the doorway.Levelheadedwas not how I would describe myself after living inside these walls. “I think you see the world more clearly than the hacendados,” she continued. “We don’t have a choice when it comes to our patróns. We tolerate them. We survive them. Some have a harder time of it than others. Our patrón makes life difficult for young women who work in the house. Do you understand?”
My face must have betrayed my confusion, for with a small, frustrated noise, Paloma pivoted to blunter language. “Girls feared working in the house, near the patrón, because some of those who did became pregnant. Against their will. When the señora found out, she was furious. She said that she didn’t want him leaving a trail of bastards across the countryside.” Paloma set the heavy lid on the pot with a resounding clang. “She got her wish. She made sure of it.”
My heartbeat echoed in my ears. I was swept back to my first day at San Isidro, when Rodolfo led me on a tour through the cold, dark house. In the dining room, he forbade me from going up to the ledge that ringed the room.
A maid fell from there once, he said.
I could not speak for shock. Not only had Paloma accused my husband of raping servants, but he and his first wife ofmurderingthem.
She folded her arms across her chest, her flint-hard eyes challenging me to defy her. To lose my temper, to tell her to stop lying.
I couldn’t.
For I believed her.
I sank into one of the small chairs by the kitchen table and put my head in my hands.
Mamá hated Rodolfo because of his politics. But perhaps that had cloaked something else, an instinct, an intuition. Rodolfo was not who I thought he was.
And his first wife?
Red eyes, flesh-colored claws...
“I’ve overheard the patrón talk about the Republic,” Paloma said. “About abolishing the casta system. Aboutequality.” She snorted. “I don’t think he knows what that word means. Not when he and his treat their dogs better than us.”
From the moment I had woken to Paloma pounding on Andrés’s door, the morning had dealt me blow after blow. Ana Luisa dead. Rodolfo returning. The voice. Andrés’s loss of memory.
Nowthis.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked weakly.
Paloma did not look up when she answered. “You said your family doesn’t want you. That means you’re one of us, now.” Her voice grew distant, cold, as if it were coming from the mouth of a much older woman. “That means you’re trapped in San Isidro, just like the rest of us. And you’ll die here like the rest of us.”
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