Page 9 of The Hacienda
I would visit soon. But not now. Not yet.
On Padre Vicente’s command, we began to walk around the church to the plaza de armas. Apan was four proper streets and a tangle of alleys; gray and quiet on most days, it burst at the seams on the feast day of la Virgen. People from the haciendas traveled into town for the Mass and the procession. They were dressed in their feast day best, men in starched shirts and women in bright embroidery, but as we proceeded slowly behind Padres Vicente and Guillermo, it became clear how faded and patched these clothes were. There were too many gaunt faces, too many feet without shoes, even in the middle of winter. The war left no part of the countryside untouched, but it left its deepest mark on those who had the least.
But whenever I glanced up, I saw eyes bright as an autumn sky. Burning with curiosity. Fixed not on la Virgen and rapturous Juan Diego, but lower.
On me.
I knew what they saw.
They did not see the son of Esteban Villalobos, onetime Sevillanforeman to old Solórzano on Hacienda San Isidro, then assistant to the caudillo, the local military officer who maintained order in Apan and the surrounding haciendas. Resident thug and drunk who had returned to Spain seven years ago.
They did not see the newly ordained Padre Juan Andrés Villalobos, a cura trained in Guadalajara, who regularly prayed before a cathedral retablo resplendent with more gold than they had ever seen in their lives.
They saw my grandmother. Alejandra Pérez, my sijtli, called Titi by her many grandchildren and by a good measure of the countryside besides.
It was unlikely they saw her in my features—these were more my Spanish father’s than my mother’s. No. I knew they felt Titi’s presence. Perhaps they even felt the shift of the earth beneath their feet, the attention of the skies tilting toward me.There, they said.That one. Look.
And look they did. They made a show of gazing at la Virgen and crossing themselves when blessed by Padre Vicente’s swinging golden censer, but I knew they watched me beneath Juan Diego’s wooden knees.
I kept my eyes on the dusty road before me.
The people of Hacienda San Isidro were clustered in a group near the end of the procession, at the front of the church. I raised my head and found my cousin, Paloma, standing with a few other girls her age. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other in anticipation, craning her neck, scanning the procession. When her eyes caught mine, a smile illuminated her face like lightning. I nearly stumbled, like Christ on the road to Calvary, from the shock of seeing someone so familiar after so many years apart. I had returned to Apan, yes, but now, in Paloma’s presence, I felt I washome.
They were all there, the people of the hacienda I had known my whole life: my aunt and Paloma’s mother, Ana Luisa, the old foreman Mendoza who had replaced my father in the wake of his indiscretions. They watched me with intense black eyes, taking me in for the first time in seven years, knowing me as their own.
I knew they expected me to step into Titi’s shoes.
But how could I? I was ordained. I had followed the path Titi and my mother urged me to take: I was not lost to the last decade of war, be it by gangrene or a gachupín’s bayonet. I had skirted the attention of the Inquisition and become a man of the Church.
They will teach you things I cannot, Titi said as she put me on the road to the seminary so many years ago.Besides, she added, a sly twinkle in her eye as she patted my chest, aware her palm rested directly over the darkness that lived curled around my heart,won’t you be well hidden there?
The people of San Isidro needed more than another priest. They needed my grandmother.Ineeded her. I missed how she always smelled of piney soap, how the veiny backs of her hands were so soft to hold, her knobby fingers and wrists so strong and sure as they braided her white hair or ground herbs in the molcajete to cure a family member’s stomach pain. I missed the mischievous glint in her dark eyes that my mother, Lucero, had inherited, and that I wished I had. I even missed her exasperatingly cryptic advice. I needed her to show me how to be both a priest and her heir, how to care for her flock and calmly deflect the withering suspicion of Padre Vicente.
But she was dead.
I closed my eyes as the procession shuffled to a halt before the front door of the church.
Please. The prayer reached out, up to the heavens to God, out to the spirits that slept in the bellies of the hills ringing the valley. I knew no other way to pray.Give me guidance.
When I opened them, I saw Padre Vicente shaking hands and blessing members of a group of hacendados. Their silks and fine hats stood out against the crowds, garish as peacocks in a famine. The old patróns of Hacienda Ocotepec and Alcantarilla tipped their hats to Padre Vicente, their pale-haired ladies and daughters clasping his hand in their gloved ones. Even the hacendados had not escaped the ravages of war. Their sons had left to fight for the gachupínes, the Spanish, and left only old men and boys to defend the estates against insurgents in the countryside.
The only young man among them was one with light brown hair and piercing blue eyes, whose saintly face looked like it was carved and painted for a statue in a gilded retablo. He stood apart from the others and met Padre Guillermo’s effusive greeting with a calculated half smile.
It took me a moment to place why he seemed so familiar.
“Don Rodolfo!” Padre Guillermo cried.
He was the son of old Solórzano. Now, presumably, he was the patrón of Hacienda San Isidro. I had seen him from a distance as a boy on the property; I knew children in the village did not mind him, and even played with him chasing frogs in the creek below the house from time to time. Now, he could not be more different from the villagers: his clothing was finely tailored and cut a sharp silhouette. A criolla woman hung on his arm, whom he introduced to Padre Guillermo as his new bride, Doña María Catalina.
He had brought her from the capital to be safe from typhus, he said. She would join his sister on Hacienda San Isidro and stay for the foreseeable future.
“Does this mean you are returning to the capital soon, Don Rodolfo?” Padre Guillermo asked.
“I am.” He glanced over his shoulder at the other hacendados, then leaned into Padre Guillermo and lowered his voice. “Things are changing very quickly, and the capital is not safe.” His voice lowered further; another man would not have been able to hear him over the general commotion of the crowd, but my grandmother left me with many gifts. My ear, long accustomed to hearing the shifting moods of the fields and the skies, was sharp as a coyote’s.
“You must watch over Doña Catalina, Padre,” Rodolfo said. “You understand... my politics are not popular with my father’s friends.”
“May he rest in peace,” Padre Guillermo murmured, his tone and the slow dip of his head subtle assent.
