17: Andrés

17

ANDRÉS

Enero 1821

Two years earlier

COLD RAIN SLICKED THEroad from Apan to Hacienda San Isidro, leaving my clothes splattered with mud. The walk took the better part of the day; I arrived as evening darkened in the west.

I had returned to Apan nearly six weeks ago, but finally I was home.

Passing through the gates of the property was like passing into a memory that no longer fit. I was a foot too big for a shoe, deformed by the world beyond as I returned to the landscape of my boyhood. The road to San Isidro felt like a path into a dream. I had left the quotidian world of the Church and townspeople and passed into a beyond where the bellies of the clouds hung low and listening, where the coyotes were afraid to draw near Titi’s house. Where all the pieces of me had once made sense. Where I hoped they would again.

It was a false hope, of course. The muddy earth of the hacienda grounds was no different from town. My troubles were not immediately lifted from my shoulders the moment I arrived.

Tía Ana Luisa greeted me with her usual stiffness. Never a warm woman, I doubted she would ever forgive me for the crime of being born with the innate potential she lacked, for becoming my grandmother’s pupil when Titi refused to teach her.

“Paloma is up at the house with the others,” she said, taking my waterlogged bag of few belongings. “I imagine you’ll be staying at the capilla, now that you’re . . .” Here she gestured vaguely at the collar at my neck. “This.”

I let Ana Luisa take my bag to the capilla and followed her instructions to go to the kitchen of the main house. There, Paloma would warm dinner for me, and I could sit by a lit fire and read the Bible to the women of the house as they mended or did embroidery.

Night deepened as I approached the house.

Hello, old friend, I thought as I strode through the softening rain.

It grumbled in reply, shifting cantankerously on its foundations.

I couldn’t help but smile. The house had more moods than a swallow had feathers. I was fond of its peevish spells; its impatient creaks and groaning inspired an urge in me to pat its side affectionately as I would a stubborn but lovable mule. As a child I knew this ancient house of spirits was unlike anything else I had ever seen. Now, after having stepped through the doorways of countless old houses, I knew it was unique.

“Cuervito!” A woman hovered impatiently at the glowing doorway of the kitchen, calling my childhood nickname: little raven. It was Paloma. Aside from the procession, I had not seen her since she was twelve or thirteen, and to see her so grown still caught me by surprise. “Hurry up!”

She ushered me into the warmth of the kitchen, taking my soaked wool sarape and hanging it by the fire. Then she turned, hands on her hips in an uncanny imitation of Titi. “Will you ever stop growing?”

I shrugged, sat where she ordered, and waited patiently while she prepared a plate for me. Years apart had not changed my role in the family: the sole surviving boy among a loud, bossy host of women, my job was to sit and listen, eat the food placed before me, and reach things stored in high places.

Warmth seeped into my waterlogged clothes and windswept bones.

This was home.

When I was dry and fed, Paloma brought me to the green parlor to meet the wife of the patrón.

A fire roared in the hearth. The silhouette of Doña María Catalina Solórzano, the spun-sugar mistress of Hacienda San Isidro, rose to greet me. I knew from Paloma’s chatter in the kitchen that the staff referred to her as Doña Catalina. A handful of household staff rose as she did—I recognized one as Paloma’s friend Mariana, transformed by adolescence like Paloma.

“Padre Andrés.” Doña Catalina’s voice was crisp as a new sheet of paper. Firelight took to her pale hair like dye; it was as if a halo of red gold framed her small, pointed face. “How good of you to join us. Ana Luisa says you have a wonderful voice for reading, among your other fine qualities.”

Desagradecido, sin vergüenza. . . Throughout my childhood, Ana Luisa had many things to say about me, but never that. I donned the pious, bashful smile I had learned to wear in Guadalajara, the one that concealed any apprehension or distrust I felt while speaking with parishioners, and took the Bible from her with a respectful bob of my head.

I sat opposite her and opened the Bible to the letters of St. Paul to the Ephesians.

The room was silent but for the crackle of the fire.

I paused, letting my fingertip skip down the page of the Bible without seeing the lines it crossed. How odd that the house should choose to be so quiet in this room. I could always hear its complaining, its sly gossiping, its murmuring commentary in the background of every conversation.

It was quiet.

This was not the pious silence of holy places, nor the respectful hush of graveyards. This was . . . odd.

I cleared my throat, aware that Doña Catalina still watched me, and began to read.

Paloma took her place next to Mariana and picked up her needlework. Dark, wispy hairs flew free of her plait; she worried her bottom lip as she stitched, like Titi did when she had something on her mind. There was a heaviness in the room that wasn’t from the warmth of the fire; a tenseness that I could not place. And when Paloma insisted on walking with me to the small rooms that adjoined the capilla, a pile of blankets in her arms, I did not protest.

The room was humble: a fireplace, a table, a bed. Packed-dirt-and-gravel floor, polished smooth with varnish and generations of footsteps. One shelf for books and an austere wooden cross on the wall. Paloma shut the door and put the blankets on the table. She lit a few candles, then hovered as I crouched before the hearth and began a fire. Once or twice I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. She was worrying her bottom lip again; now that her hands were not occupied with needlework, they toyed with the tassels at the end of her shawl.

I knew the look of someone who had much to say but was afraid to speak. I lowered my voice to make sure it was soft, and would not frighten her away, the way I spoke to birds.

“Something is worrying you,” I said. “Maybe I can help.”

“Help is exactly what I want,” she blurted out, lifting her head. She pulled a chair out from the table and sat on it, then drew her knees to her chest protectively. “Your help, specifically. You see . . .” She trailed off, her gaze on the fire. “My friend is too afraid to ask you directly, even though I told her you were harmless. She . . . Mariana, the one sitting with us tonight. She’s shy.” I nodded. Shy was not the word I would have chosen. Mariana had flinched whenever I shifted my weight, her shoulders coiled tight. She pricked herself while sewing at least twice from the sudden movement.

That was the way my mother had moved, when she was still alive.

“Titi must have taught you,” Paloma said. “She must have. You have to help her.”

Our grandmother taught me many things. I didn’t immediately follow her meaning. “I don’t understand.”

Paloma searched for words, clearly flustered. Her eyes shone with tears of frustration, and when she spoke, her voice trembled: “When he was here, the patrón forced himself on Mariana.”

I stared at her, grasping for words, shock stinging like a slap to the face. I found none. My God, why do You forsake Your people? Why do You not protect them from the gilded monsters that prowl the earth?

I thought of bright-haired Solórzano smiling at Padre Guillermo, his lissome wife at his side; my stomach turned to stone, and sank deep, deep underwater. I was wrong to think old Solórzano’s son was any better than his father. The pulque dons were poisoned men.

“Don’t look so stupid. You know exactly what I mean.” The women of my family sheathed their fears and sorrows in knives and claws; the sharpness of her voice did not offend me, but drove home how distressed she was. “She’s with child now. She’s meant to marry Tomás Revilla from Hacienda Ometusco, but if he finds out, if anyone finds out . . .” Her wavering voice broke off, as if she were simply unable to continue.

My heart turned over in my chest. I rocked back on my heels.

“When is the wedding?” I asked softly. “Perhaps there is a way for Mariana to hide the pregnancy, until . . .”

“You’re not listening,” Paloma snapped. “She doesn’t want it. Isn’t that reason enough?”

Her words fell like an enormous pine in the forest, leaving a long silence in their wake. The fire smoked; a soft crackle indicated the kindling was taking the flame. I did not turn away from Paloma.

“You need to help her. You know what I mean.” Paloma’s voice was still frail but grew steadier as she struck her final blow: “Titi would.”

Titi was not a priest, I wanted to cry, but bit my tongue. Could Paloma understand how fear had been my only bedfellow since leaving for Guadalajara? She did not live cheek to jowl with Padre Vicente; though the Inquisition had left for Spain amid the upheaval of the insurgency, it still beat in the veins of many clergy, flooding them with the vigor of the righteous.

I had to continue to hide myself. That was how I had survived, and how I would continue to survive. There was no question about that.

I dropped her gaze and turned to the smoking kindling.

“I need to pray about this,” I said to the fire.

“Prayers are empty talk.” I flinched at the acidity in Paloma’s voice. She stood sharply, her jaw set fiercely as she tightened her shawl around her shoulders. “She needs help.”

She left and let the door slam behind her.

---

*   *   *AFTER CELEBRATING MASS IN the capilla the next morning, I left the chapel, taking a shortcut through the graveyard of generations of dead Solórzanos. My feet followed the path with the habit of many years; hopping over the low wall, I was a boy of eight again, or twelve, or fifteen, visiting my grandmother on an escape from town with its endless days of school and chores and endless nights of dodging my drunken father’s outbursts.

The house watched me out of the corner of its eye. Rather than toying with me, plying me with centuries-old gossip and whispers in singsong voices as it had when I was a child, it kept a cautious distance. Perhaps it could smell the change in me. Perhaps it knew how deeply I had buried the parts of me it found the most interesting.

A hush fell around me as I wove between the graves and the aged, humble headstones. Paloma was the seventh generation of our family to live on this land; one day, she, too, would be buried here, and her children would continue living beside the house, her daughters working under its roof, her sons taking up the machetes of tlachiqueros or herding sheep. Another generation would make its living in the shadow of the golden Solórzano family and their maguey.

I walked down the hill to where the villagers buried their dead. I had spent the better part of the night staring at the ceiling in the dark, wondering what I should do. It was time to stop wondering and ask Titi directly.

I followed Ana Luisa’s direction to where my grandmother was buried, my shoes leaving deep impressions in rain-saturated earth. I felt it before I read her name on the grave: Alejandra Flores Pérez, d. Julio 1820.

July. I was ordained that month. I left Guadalajara in the fall; I was slow on the road, deterred by moving armies and the threat of bandits, but I had returned as soon as I could.

Yet it was not soon enough.

Why couldn’t you have waited for me?I sank to my knees at her side, not caring if the earth dirtied my trousers, not caring for anything at all but my own sorrow, my own self-pity. Tears welled thick in my throat; I shut my eyes and tilted my head back, to the sky and its pale winter sun. Why couldn’t you stay with me?

The wind lifted, shifting my hair, then fell again. Clouds slowed over the hills that ringed the valley. Far past the walls of San Isidro, a shepherd whistled to his dog, his note riding thin and high through the clear air.

The graves were quiet.

I received no reply.

All I wanted was her voice telling me what to do, correcting me, instructing me as she had since before I could even read.

Another lift of the wind. It swept tender over my face, and a memory bloomed behind my closed eyelids. I was a boy, watching my grandmother tuck wool blankets tight around a child with a fever, murmuring prayers I could not understand. We were in the village of an hacienda to the northeast of Tulancingo. Often, I accompanied Titi as she visited villagers on other estates surrounding Apan on an ornery gray donkey one of my cousins had named el Cuervito in jest.

That year, a fever had swept through many of the haciendas, seizing children in swift waves. I watched my grandmother tend to the child before her, a censer on the floor beside the cot and an egg in her right hand. The copal twined like a lazy snake toward the low ceiling of the room. A shadow hung over the child, as if someone had draped a smoky veil over the scene before me, and only my grandmother could pass through it unharmed.

Titi stood. Her back was already hunched, even then, her long braids white as milk, but an undeniable strength settled in her posture as she took the child’s mother in her arms and embraced her. Let the woman cry and comforted her softly—in castellano, I remembered, for the pueblo of that hacienda spoke otomí rather than our dialect of mexicano.

As we left, Titi took the censer from me. We walked a short distance from the house.

“What did you see when you looked at the child?” she asked.

The vision of the veil clung to me like the smell of smoke. Something was watching the boy, waiting. “He’s going to die, isn’t he?” I whispered.

Back then, she looked down at me and not the other way around. She nodded solemnly. “Yes.”

“What good did we do, then?” I asked, my voice cracking over the words. “If we can’t stop it?”

Titi stopped and took me by the elbow. I glared at her worn sandals. “Look at me, Andrés.” I obeyed. “What else did you see?”

I thought back to the dark room, the closeness of the air inside, how the only light came from the door and the fire lit to help sweat out the child’s fever. “His mother?”

“Some illnesses we cannot cure,” my grandmother said. “Others we can soothe. Sorrow is one of these. Loneliness is another.” She searched my face. “Do you understand? Tending to lost souls is our vocation.”

Ourvocation. It was meant to be ours, shared, the burden slowly distributed from her shoulders onto mine with time. With years of working together. For it was Titi who taught me to listen to mortal and spirit alike, who taught me her own grandmother’s herbal cures and how to banish mal de ojo by passing a chicken’s egg over a child’s feverish body. She taught me all she could, all she knew.

“I fear it is not enough, not for you,” she once said. “One day, you will walk paths I do not understand. You must find your own way forward.”

My heart ached every time I recalled this, for I both loathed and feared the fact it was true. All I wanted was to walk the path Titi had. Even before I became a priest, it was clear I couldn’t.

I was the son of Esteban Villalobos, a Sevillan who came to Nueva España seeking his fortune and found work on Hacienda San Isidro.

And when he crossed the sea from the peninsula, he had brought his only sister.

I only saw her once. Not long after my mother died, when I was twelve years old, I returned to my father’s house in Apan after a few days spent with Titi and Paloma to find a tall woman in the kitchen. She had the presence of a bull, with broad, calloused hands, coppery brown hair, and dark eyes that sparked like gunpowder. My father called her Inés and introduced her to me as his sister; despite this, they were stiff and formal with each other. She said she had come to see him to bid farewell before returning to Spain and meant to leave for Veracruz the following day.

The next morning, after my father had left to attend the prison—part of his duties as the caudillo’s assistant—I woke to find that Inés had pulled up the edge of one of the floorboards in the kitchen and was in the midst of wedging a sheaf of papers beneath it.

I thought I had not made a sound, but she lifted her head. She went very still, locked her gunpowder eyes on me, and squinted, the corners of her eyes forming crow’s-feet.

“You,” she said. Her voice was archly matter-of-fact, as unfriendly as it was flat. “You’ve got the Devil’s darkness, don’t you?”

“I—I don’t know what you mean,” I stammered, shocked. I crossed myself for good measure. “God forbid.”

Her fair eyebrows bobbed once toward her hairline, sardonic. “Don’t lie. I knew it the moment I saw you.”

A sour feeling of shame mixed with fear washed over me. I had vexed her, though I did not know my sin nor how to fix it, and that frightened me. I watched in silence as she finished hiding the papers and thumped the wood back into place.

“Consider this your inheritance.” She patted the floorboards once; palm struck wood with a hollow, strange note. “Keep it hidden, if you know what’s good for you.”

Without another word, she gathered her belongings and left.

This.But what was it? It was barely a week after Inés left that I succumbed to curiosity and pried up the floorboard. The papers she had hidden were bound into a pamphlet, stained with age, their edges heavily thumbed with use. I had learned to read in school, and though I had little talent for it at that age, I recognized that though the glyphs on the page had the measured choreography of language, they were neither castellano nor Latin.

Behind me, the voices in the walls of my father’s house cooed. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as I felt them peer over my shoulder at the glyphs, the darkness of their interest like wet mud slipping down my spine.

I took the papers to Titi that same day. Though she had never learned to read, we discovered interpreting the pamphlet Inés left did not require that skill: guided by the intuition of her own gifts, Titi was able to deduce the purpose of the glyphs. They were spells of protection and healing, exorcism and curses; Titi paired these with her own incantations and taught me how to harness the darkness she sensed in me. If Inés had owned this pamphlet of glyphs and had spoken of the Devil, then Inés herself must have also been a witch, albeit a very different sort than Titi. And whatever gave Inés her powers had been passed—either through blood, the gift of the pamphlet, or both—to me.

I had invented a way of transcribing Titi’s teachings in mexicano for myself, but when I was sixteen, my father discovered notes I had stuffed haphazardly beneath my cot in his house.

I thought I knew his temper like I knew the weather. With a flood of pulque would come predictable storms, slamming doors, raised voices. With enough patience, I could skirt the worst of it; I learned to melt into the walls as if I were one of the voices myself. But if my own temper thinned, or if I snapped back at him, I courted danger. When I tried to snatch the papers back from him, I expected to be shouted at, shoved, or struck for my trouble.

Instead, my father shrank away from me.

“They burn people like you, you know. You, Inés . . . they should burn you.” His eyes popped from his skull with fear, bloodshot but for the bright white above and below his irises. “Send you to Hell where you belong.” Sharp as a darting animal, he reached for a wooden cross on the wall, yanked it off, and flung it at me. I ducked. It struck the wall behind me with a dull thud and fell to the floor, cloven in two. “Go to Hell.”

I left for San Isidro that night. I never saw him again.

Word came from town that he packed his belongings and left Apan. Some said he meant to go north, to Sonora or Alta California. Others said he spat on the earth and swore he would return to Spain.

It was not long after that Titi insisted I go to Guadalajara. That I fulfill my mother’s dying wish by becoming a priest.

“You must,” she said as she bid me goodbye. “This is what is right.”

I was far less firm in my conviction. I was afraid of insurgents and Spaniards on the road, of bandits, of the Inquisition circling me like Daniel in the den of lions. What wisdom was there sending a damned soul straight into the Church’s jaws, when I ought to be hiding from them?

The fear in my father’s eyes as he shrank away from me had seared me like a brand. Its mark would never heal over, never scar.

They should burn you.

“How can you know this is right?” I said, fear cracking my voice. “How?”

“Ay, Cuervito.” She patted my hands. The touch of her gnarled hands was soft, but her dark eyes were steely in their confidence. “You will learn to feel it. When the time comes, you will know what is right.”

Years had passed, and that time had not come.

I balled my hands into fists, the winter wind cold on my face, my knees pressing into the damp dirt of her graveside.

How could one simply know?

In Guadalajara, I endured homily after homily on faith and belief. On placing my fate in the hands of the unknown. In my splintered self, God was one thing. God was invisible and unknowable, but I learned to have faith that He was there, even if I doubted He paid as much attention to the smudge of earth that was Apan as He did other places.

But in Titi’s teachings, I learned that some things could be known. I always heard the voices, no matter where I was. Now that I had returned to Apan, I felt the movement of weather; I knew when thunder would open the heavens over the valley. I knew when the riverbeds would flood with the spectral presence of the Weeper and how to placate her. I knew when the wildflowers would blossom, when horses would foal. I felt the presence of spirits in the mountains, how they shifted even in their deep slumber.

So why didn’t I know whether or not I should help Paloma and Mariana?

I thought of Mariana in the firelight, flinching away from my every movement like a wounded dove, a frail shadow. I knew she hurt. It was written across her spirit clear as ink. I knew Paloma’s fierceness. Her conviction.

I knew when I looked at the small congregation that morning at Mass that my grandmother’s absence was a wound. The people of San Isidro—the people who were my home—were in pain without her.

Priest or not, I knew I was meant to fill that absence.

But no one would instruct me how. No one could.

It was up to me to find my way alone.