32: Andrés

32

ANDRÉS

AFTER A DAY AND night of hovering at Beatriz’s bedside, using my grandmother’s gifts to ensure that her recovery was seamless and quick, Paloma unceremoniously ushered me out of her house.

“She can’t rest properly if you keep meddling. Go be useful elsewhere,” she said. With a meaningful tilt of her head, she gestured out the doorway at the main house of the hacienda. “You know what I mean.”

I did.

The morning was gray and misty as I walked across the courtyard to the house, my aunt Inés’s pamphlet in hand. Its pages had been damaged by rain, but its glyphs survived without a smudge. I suspected something a bit stronger than ink bound them to the page.

The house watched my approach, silent and apprehensive. Its stucco was stained with soot from the smoke, but the fire had primarily damaged the far side of the house. From the front, it was the same it had always been: a few tiles missing from the roof, wilting bougainvillea. Flower beds weeded, then abandoned.

I could almost feel it narrowing its invisible eyes as it sized me up: like it, I looked the same as I had before the night of the fire. But a different man opened the front door and stepped into its cavernous quiet. It smelled of rain, wet wood. The aftertaste of smoke lingered heavy on the mist that seeped into the ruins of the dining room and, above it, Beatriz’s study and bedchamber.

The night of the fire, the roof had collapsed on Juana. Mendoza and I searched for her body there the next day and found it in the formal dining room, shattered and scorched. The floor of the burning room had collapsed into the room below before rain could extinguish the flames.

We buried Juana in the Solórzano plot with even less fanfare than her brother . . . and as far from her brother as we could manage. The caudillo Victoriano Román abandoned his investigation against Beatriz when Paloma brought forth a blood-blackened knife and dress from Juana’s rooms; her evidence was compounded by Juana’s arson and the blatantly clear attempt she had made to kill Beatriz.

I shook away the memory of finding Beatriz ringed by flames. It haunted me like my own shadow. In my brief, stolen hours of sleep since that night, I saw nothing but her silhouette against Perdition’s rage. In dreams, I could not move. I cried out to her but was voiceless. My feet were too heavy, my arms feeble and unable to move as fire devoured her, as her screams for help whipped the flames higher, still higher.

I woke drenched in cold sweat, her name knotted in my throat.

Never again would I allow her to be so threatened. I swore no more harm would come to anyone under this roof. I was there that morning to ensure that.

But would it be enough?

Paloma told me that she and Mendoza had found a stack of letters addressed to Beatriz among Rodolfo’s papers, that she suspected they came from Beatriz’s mother.

She wants to leave, Cuervito, she said. We must let her.

I wanted to flinch away from the softness of her voice. I found my beloved cousin’s brusqueness fortifying. I longed for her sharp edges, a blunt retort. To receive her sympathy made me fear she saw too much. It made me fear she saw even more clearly than I how powerfully I wanted Beatriz to stay.

But would I want to stay, if I were Beatriz? So many Solórzanos had died in this house over the years. Some violently, some not. Their voices would always live in its walls, as would the memories of the hundreds of people of my family who had served them. Such houses were what they were. I could not remove those voices any more than I could remove the foundation of the house. Some people could live in such houses utterly unaware of the company they held. For others, the walls were halfway to sentience, as difficult to live with as an overly intrusive relative.

But there was one force I needed to release. One body left to bring to the graveyard once its spirit had passed.

I could only hope it would be enough to convince Beatriz to stay.

Evil twitched in the shadows of the house, unnaturally inky black. It slipped through the halls, following me as I stepped into the green parlor. I left the door open, inviting it to follow, as I walked toward the center of the room. I began to move furniture and rolled the green rug away, my movements even and deliberate as I took a piece of charcoal from my pocket and set it to stone. I drew the first line of an exorcism glyph.

The door slammed behind me.

My heart skipped a step, then steadied as I flexed my hands. Scars were forming beneath the bandages wound around my knuckles, sustained from the burns of lightning.

I was not the same man who had faced the darkness before.

I continued sketching the correct glyphs under the watchful gaze of the darkness, my hand steady even as the hair rose on the back of my neck. Newfound power did not mean I was not still prey. I could smell my own natural fear rising, its tang metallic and sweet.

She was here.

Of course she was here. I would not grant her the satisfaction of seeing me afraid of her. I inhaled deeply, turned the page of the pamphlet, and continued working for long, silent minutes until the circle was closed.

Then I rose, stepped into the center of the circle, and faced the shadows.

“Buenos días, doña,” I said.

A soft hiss. A rattlesnake’s hiss, but deeper in timbre. A predator’s hiss.

“Enough,” I said, voice ringing with chastisement. “It is time.”

My arms loose at my sides, I turned my palms out to the shadows.

That simple act was all it took. Like an arroyo glutted by a flash flood, I was flush with dark power. The darkest parts of myself were no longer bound, no longer confined to the box. It no longer weighed heavy in my chest, chained with shame and self-loathing and fear of what awaited me after death. It spread over my limbs with the weightlessness of dew, a steady comfort. I wore it with the ease of my own shadow, even when I turned to my grandmother’s gifts. Even when I celebrated Mass and led the people of San Isidro in prayer.

The darkness howled, building around me with the electricity of a storm.

You must find your own way, Titi always said.

If I continued walking the path I knew was right, one day, I would find my own balance. My way. My calling.

I reached into the darkness and took the spirit of Doña María Catalina in my fist. It flung its weight away from me, battling for release with sheer force of will as Titi’s incantations unspooled from my lips.

“Enough,” I repeated in castellano.

I yanked down with all my strength.

A sound like a cord snapping split the darkness. The house’s stormy rebellion died.

The spirit of Doña María Catalina stepped into the parlor, as real as she had been when I saw her in this room years ago. She shimmered like a mirage as I drew her into the circle. She was as delicate and sugar-spun as when I first saw her in the plaza de armas of Apan years ago, dressed in gray, her corn silk hair haughtily upswept. The enmity she felt for me in life, that she directed at me through the house, was perfectly etched on her features as she crossed her arms over her chest.

Hate like hers was a cancer. It was time to excise it from my home, once and for all.

“I think you know what I’m here to do,” I said.

Her mouth twisted into an elegant scowl.

I hope you burn, she spat. Burn, burn, burn.

The thrum of her voice struck my ears like drumming. Like the pulse of unholy fire that lit my dreams.

They burn people like you.

How long those words had wounded me.

I gave Doña Catalina my most beatific smile. Yes, I still feared discovery, by Padre Vicente or someone worse. Yes, I feared the hereafter. I was a sinner. I was a witch. I had sinned and would sin again, like all men. But whatever my decisions meant for life after death was between me and the Lord. All I could do was serve the home and people I loved using every gift I was born with.

I squared off with the apparition of Doña Catalina.

It was long past time for her to face the Lord herself. She and I both knew it; an expression of resignation shadowed her features as I lifted my voice with incantations, as my power wound itself thickly around her. In a moment, I would sever her from the house for eternity. If she feared what waited for her on the other side, she gave no indication of it.

“There is only One who decides who burns and who does not,” I said.

With a sound like the ripping of paper, the apparition of Doña Catalina turned to ash. It hovered on the air, then drifted slowly down through the silence to the charcoal glyphs on the floor. There, they curled in on themselves like burning paper, shrinking and melting away.

I made the sign of the cross.

“Let His will be done,” I said.