13

13

I WOKE STIFF-BACKED ANDbleary-eyed, a blanket smelling faintly of copal pulled up to my nose. Birdsong and the distant neigh of a horse floated into the room through the windows. With a tumbled rush of images, I remembered where I was.

The green parlor.

The candles were extinguished. A single copal censer remained lit; its smoke toyed with the morning light, drawing my eye to Andrés as he sat back on his heels and brushed charcoal off the palms of his hands. He had been scrubbing the witch’s circle from the floor. All that was left was a faint shadow and a smear of blood, oxidized and dark on the gray stone.

“I must go to the capilla,” Andrés said. “I said Mass would be at six.”

Succumbing to sleep in the faint hours of the morning meant that my head had lolled onto his shoulder. I had a memory, murky enough that I was uncertain if it was a dream or not, of being lowered to the floor, of a blanket being tucked around me. I slept deeper than I had in over a week; knowing that Andrés had watched over me opened a startling warmth in my chest, something akin to affection.

I shifted and pulled the wool blanket around my shoulders self-consciously. I was a married woman. Feeling a budding tenderness like this for someone who was not my husband—who was a priest—could spin perilously close to sin.

“I will spend the morning in the village.” The color had sapped away from Andrés’s face; his eyes were shaded with the haunted, sleepless wariness I knew well from my own mirror. “After that, I am afraid I must leave.”

Leave.

The word struck like a pailful of cold water. My fingers tightened on the blanket. “Why?”

“I have received word that I am needed by the villagers of Hacienda Ometusco,” he said. “They’re suffering an outbreak of measles.”

I frowned. “How do you know that?”

“Prayers travel,” he said.

“People pray to you?”

“Cielo santo, no.” He brushed his palms against each other again in a vain attempt to clean them. “I hear . . . I am alerted to people’s prayers.” A window shutter had cracked open in the night; a breeze slipped through it now, teasing a groan out of its aging hinges. Andrés paused, considering the draft, still as a cat attentive to the far-off call of a bird. Listening, perhaps. Then he shifted his weight and, with a long exhale, rose. “I should leave this afternoon, not long past noon. I will return in two days. Three at the most.”

He extended a hand to help me to my feet. His palm was broad, calloused. Smudged with charcoal.

“But what if you fall ill?” I had heard many stories from Papá of medics falling ill with the same diseases they tried to cure in his soldiers.

“I never do.” He shrugged with the careless certainty of a young man who knew he was invincible. “In my absence, I will protect certain rooms of the house for you. But first we must also discuss . . . possible solutions.”

I took his hand. Let him guide me to my feet. Stars sparked my vision from rising so quickly; I tightened my hand on his as I steadied myself.

Then I dropped it. Cleared my throat. “We can eat the midday meal together, if that suits.”

He nodded solemnly. “Until then.”

---

*   *   *A BATH THEN A walk in the sunshine softened the stiffness of my limbs and flushed away any tangled feelings I had about Andrés leaving. I spent the morning dozing on the back terrace of the house, weaving in and out of the misty realm of dreams. Once, a flash of red eyes pierced the gloom, but a low male voice rose and fell, reciting prayers, soothing me into slumber.

When I woke, the house behind me was still. The garden was still. Even the grasses had ceased their whispering.

It was as if the house sensed Andrés’s presence. It was weighing it, tasting it. Deciding what to make of the echo of magic that bloomed from the green parlor into its clammy corridors, slipping through the house’s many cracks like smoke.

I left the house for the communal kitchen in the village, where I knew Ana Luisa was preparing lunch for the tlachiqueros and other servants.

Voices caught my attention; a group of villagers was gathered near the capilla, dressed in blindingly starched whites and brightly colored skirts. At the group’s center was Padre Andrés; at his side, a young woman with festive ribbons in her plaits bounced a small child on her hip. The child looked less than impressed with the spirited atmosphere; her hair was slick with water and shone like a newborn colt in the sunlight as she cast a suspicious look up at Andrés.

A baptism.

Despite the harrowing night, despite how my back still ached from sleeping on flagstones, the young mother’s joy was infectious, even from a distance. A smile tugged at my lips as I made my way to the kitchens.

I greeted Ana Luisa brightly, earning myself a suspicious sideways glance. A sudden distrust slicked down the nape of my neck.

“I will be dining outside the capilla,” I announced. “With Padre Andrés. If you have something to serve as a tray, I will carry our food there and bring the dishes back so as not to inconvenience you.”

I tried to make it sound like I didn’t want to disrupt her pattern of work. In truth, I didn’t want her near when I was discussing what to do about the house with Andrés.

Ana Luisa said nothing for a long time. I helped her stack a tray with two covered bowls of pozole, spoons, and a cloth laden with warm tortillas. A gentle slick of pork fat rippled across the surface of the rich broth; whole cloves of garlic and thick white pieces of corn spun, following the stirring of Ana Luisa’s wooden spoon.

“This will not please Doña Juana.”

The sharpness in Ana Luisa’s voice took me by surprise.

“What won’t please her?” I asked. Surely not the mouthwatering pozole. Starved of rest, my mind was slow to follow what Ana Luisa meant.

She avoided my eyes as she stirred the cauldron of soup before her. Wood from the fire beneath the stove crackled; the silence between us filled with blue smoke. The heat made a bead of sweat drip down her brow.

“That you invited the witch onto her property,” she said at last.

Panic threaded through my chest.

The witch, she said.

Laughter drifted over from the direction of the capilla. I looked over my shoulder. The baptism group was filtering away from the doorway; Andrés lingered next to the beaming young mother, head inclined to listen to her. A grin flashed across his face at something she said. When he placed a hand on the toddler’s wet hair, the girl peered up at him shyly, eyes wide, then buried her face in her mother’s neck.

If Andrés’s witchcraft were revealed, if Padre Vicente learned of his true nature, I knew he would suffer a cruel punishment. But moments like this would also be lost. If anything happened to Andrés, it would leave a gaping wound in the lives of people who needed him.

But Ana Luisa must know. Her own mother was Andrés’s teacher; she herself first demonstrated to me the power of copal. The markings on the inside of the kitchen door were her own work.

But I had promised Andrés I would not tell anyone. Now that oath was seared in my soul by a fierce protective flame. I would keep his secret—and conceal my knowledge of it—even if it meant lying to everyone I knew. Even Rodolfo. Even my mother.

“You cannot possibly mean Padre Andrés,” I said, filling my voice with pious offense. I brought my hand to my forehead and made the sign of the cross for good measure. “He is a man of God.”

“He is many things,” Ana Luisa said flatly. “A friend of Doña Juana is not one of them. I would not have him in the house if I were you.”

I set my jaw. This was my property, not hers and Juana’s. I married the master of the house, and I was the final authority on the matter of guests.

“Thank you for sharing your concerns,” I said, keeping my tone crisp and neutral. “But my hospitality will not be compromised by whatever grudges Doña Juana chooses to harbor. No guest is unwelcome in San Isidro, especially not one I invited to bring God’s word and the sacraments to a community in need of them.” I took the tray primly.

Ana Luisa gave me a sideways look, slicing right through my pretenses. Weighing what I had said, no doubt. Weighing my mettle.

If she knew what Andrés was capable of, why wouldn’t she want someone who could cure the house within its walls? Why would Juana not?

Ana Luisa reached into a basket of tamales and plucked out four with practiced hands. She set these on the tray, stacked carefully between the two bowls of pozole. Delicate fingers of steam rose from their husks.

“For your guest,” she said gruffly. “Never underestimate how much that flaquito can eat.”

Andrés and I met at a humble table drenched in sunlight behind the southern wall of the capilla, outside of the tiny rooms that adjoined the chapel for visiting clergy.

Andrés filled the doorway of the rooms when I called his name. His eyes lit with eagerness at the sight of the steaming tray, and he stepped forward—

His head met the top of the doorframe with a solid sound.

“Carajo.”

I fought to hide my amusement as he cast a dirty look at the doorway and ducked through it to join me at the table. He thanked me profusely, then fell silent. The pozole and tamales vanished as if swept away by a starving ghost, and color once again bloomed across Andrés’s face. While there were not many things I trusted Ana Luisa about, I could trust her assessment of her nephew’s appetite.

He sighed and leaned back in his chair, drinking in the sun like a lanky lizard on a warm rock. Purple circles shadowed the skin beneath his closed eyes.

“Did you sleep at all?” I asked.

He made a noncommittal sound.

I ripped a tortilla and used it to fish a piece of pork from my soup. Mamá would cringe at my table manners, but what purpose would putting on airs before Andrés serve? None. There was something about his demeanor that set me at ease. Something in the way he looked at me that made me feel as if he saw me, and that there was no point in shoring up the stony walls I had hidden behind for so long.

I chewed the pork and tortilla thoughtfully, feeling life seep back into me with the red broth. “In the capilla . . . is it like the house?” I wondered.

“No. It’s quiet,” he said softly. “So, so quiet.”

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 voice stung.

“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 than the 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’t breathe being 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. “That was supposed to be a home for her. It was supposed to be proof 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 with that.”

A long silence followed my outburst, punctuated only by distant conversation from the kitchens.

A pair of barn swallows dipped from the sky, looping like butterflies over Andrés’s head. He reached for the few remaining tortillas, ripped one into small pieces, and rested his left hand on the table, palm up.

The swallows descended on him. One went straight for the tortilla, perching its small, clawed feet on the base of his thumb as it pecked at the offering in his palm. The other hovered warily on his sleeve. It tilted its head to the side, beady eyes appraising. Then it bounced closer, once, twice, and joined its fellow tearing at tortilla scraps.

“A doctor. For the insurgents. That’s what I wanted to be,” he said. He kept his eyes downcast, watching the sweetly staccato movements of the swallows, their satisfied preening.

“I saw men who lost limbs to gangrene. Children died of tuberculosis. My older brothers . . . they joined the insurgents and were killed. Two in battle. The third disappeared. I discovered later that he died in prison, just after the war ended. I thought . . .” He trailed off. “I wanted to fix things. Fixing people who were wounded—and there were so many—seemed like an obvious choice. I already knew how to heal. But the last thing my mother wanted was to lose another one of us to the war. She wanted me to join the priesthood. My grandmother made sure her wishes were carried out and sent me to Guadalajara.”

The swallows chirruped at each other, then lifted from Andrés’s arm in unison. I followed their sweeping path up, up, up to the slender bell tower of the capilla.

“They sent you to fight in a different war.”

His mouth twisted—sad, sardonic amusement. “Ah yes, the war for souls. The war where we are all soldiers of San Miguel Arcángel, battling the forces of the Devil with flaming swords.” He mulled this over for a moment. “I think my mother was more concerned about saving my soul than sending me to save the souls of others.”

Because of the voices.

So, so quiet, he had said.

“Do you hear voices in the house?” I asked.

“Yes.” A firm answer.

I flinched. I wasn’t sure if I had expected him to answer in the affirmative or not, but hearing it aloud still sent a tremor down my spine.

“That alone is not unusual,” he continued. “My family has lived in the shadow of that house for seven generations. Any building of that age has memories down to its bones. But its voices are different now. One dominates the rest; its intent is unclear to me. I thought it would be easy to calm, like a spooked horse, but after last night . . .” Apprehension flickered across his face. “I need to think about how I’m going to fix it. Restrategize, if you will.” He steepled his long fingers and pressed them to his lips, silently ruminating.

Juana, Juana.

“Do you hear it . . .” I faltered. “Do you hear that voice say any names?”

Andrés lifted his eyes to mine, his brow creasing in concern. A cold, oily fear slipped down my spine.

“No,” he said. “No, I do not.”