6: Beatriz

6

BEATRIZ

Present day

AFTER BREAKFAST ONE MORNING, Rodolfo saddled his horse and bade farewell to me at the gates of San Isidro.

He cupped my chin in one hand, searching my face. “Are you sure?”

This was now the third time he had asked if I was going to be all right at San Isidro. I had slept fitfully and woken before him, staring at the cobwebs between the Nicaraguan cedar beams in our bedroom. There was so much in the air of the house that felt other.

Perhaps it was that many generations had lived here before me, slept under the same beams. Each had made it their own. So, too, would I.

“Of course, querido,” I said. “I need to settle in. Make it presentable for my mother. You know how she is about tidy houses.” He didn’t. His smile was knowing all the same. A politician, an actor, even with his wife. I paused, weighing the wisdom of what I was about to say next, then went ahead anyway: “Promise me you’ll deliver my letters to her. In person, if you can spare the time.”

Mamá hated everything that Rodolfo stood for. She would not welcome his presence, especially if he was delivering messages from me, her turncoat daughter. But I had to try, even if none of my other letters had been answered.

“Of course,” he said, and kissed me. A brief, chaste brush of lips. His skin had a bite of citrus from his aftershave. “Don’t hesitate to write if there is anything you need. Anything at all.”

With that, Rodolfo mounted his bay mare and rode south. I waited until his dark hat was nothing more than a smudge on the horizon, then retraced my steps through the courtyards, midmorning sun already hot on my hat. Now that he was gone, there was something I needed to do before anything else.

Once inside the house, I headed upstairs. The suite of the patrón was divided into four rooms: the first was a parlor of sorts, bare of much furniture and cluttered with chests filled with my clothes from the capital. The only windows were set high in the wall and were far too narrow for my liking; they had no glass panes and were covered with old cedar shutters. Such was the way with country houses, Rodolfo had explained. It would be hard to adjust to this after years of sewing by the large glass-paned windows in Mamá’s parlor in the capital.

The next room was a drawing room, a study of sorts. Rodolfo had left a number of books here from his studies: military texts, a Bible, Plato’s Republic. A door on the left-hand side of the room led to the bedchamber, and off the bedchamber was the room for washing.

I knelt before the first of my chests. The lock clicked open, and I lifted the heavy lid. Atop my bedclothes, undergarments, and stockings was a small square of folded paper. I took it, held it to my nose, and inhaled deeply. Something about the smell of paper was Papá. It was his map, the one piece of home I snatched as I fled.

I took it, and a handful of embroidery pins, to the study and pinned it to the wall above Rodolfo’s desk. Yes, the room was still dusty, still in desperate need of airing out. Too dark. But Papá was on the wall now. His neat x’s in red, the sweep of his charcoal pencil directing armies.

This tiny bit of the house was home now, and I would not rest until the remainder of it was as well.

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*   *   *UNTIL THE FIRST SHIPMENT of furniture arrived from the capital, I was going to see what could be done about the gardens. I tightened the ribbons of my hat, took a pair of gloves from my chests, and made for the back terrace. While Rodolfo was present, I sat on my hands, fighting every urge to clean the house myself. Rodolfo was still unaware of how I had toughened my hands to work Tía Fernanda’s house, and I intended to keep it that way.

I strode through the cool halls and made my way to the parlor that had heavy cedar double doors to the terrace. I threw them open and inhaled deeply of fresh morning.

I had resented every callus I built following Tía Fernanda’s orders, every cut I accidentally gave myself in the kitchen. But here? The garden before me was mine to fix, and though it was wilted and brown, a fierce affection for it welled up in me. This was mine to make ready for Mamá. I could already picture her standing next to me on this terrace, her green eyes lifting up to the bright azure sky.

My earliest years were spent on an hacienda in Cuernavaca on a vast sugar plantation with my father’s extended family—the Hernández side, the one that had less Andalusian blood, as he euphemistically described his darker complexion and thick black hair. The vine-covered stone main house sprawled lazily among palm trees and two-hundred-year-old fountains and was crowded with generations of cousins, but we lived in a smaller house apart from most of the family. For while Papá was loved by his aunt, the matriarch of the hacienda, she alone tolerated his choice to join the insurgency against Spain. Our small cottage once belonged to a long-dead foreman, or a gardener, and was connected to the main house by arches covered with thick vines, their lush green accented by trailing bougainvillea.

Mamá did not mind this slight. She loved how the boisterous growth of the gardens always threatened to overtake the buildings of the hacienda and draw them into a verdant embrace. She had a miraculous way with everything living and green, and when Papá was away fighting, she spent hours with her broad-rimmed hat walking the property with the head gardener, discussing irrigation and pruning.

The arid climate and dead grasses of the lawn before me were not quite the same palate she had worked with in Cuernavaca, but I had no doubt she would work her miracles on the gardens of San Isidro. Long grasses whispered against one another, gossiping like aunts as I crossed to the back wall of the garden. A tall wooden ladder was propped against it; though its bottom rungs were splintered and cracked, the next few bore my weight. I climbed until I could peer over the row of bricks that lined the top, gap-toothed with age.

San Isidro was built on high ground to the northwest of the town. The rainy season had just ended; the green that swept from their foothills to the town’s edges looked as soft as one of Mamá’s rugs. Its hue was browner and earthier than Cuernavaca’s bold strokes, its color broken only by white dots of sheep and the severe rows of the hacienda’s maguey fields.

There, in the farthest corner of the fields, the dark forms of tlachiqueros swung machetes in steady arcs or strode through the rows of maguey. Every once in a while, a male voice rose from among them; a shout of surprise, or a swoop of laughter as they drained aguamiel, the honey water that collected in the heart of the maguey plant and that was fermented to make pulque.

I squinted against the rising sun. A woman’s form strode among them—I knew it was Juana from the determined sway of her skirts and her broad-rimmed hat.

Perhaps I could understand Juana’s fierce dedication to the hacienda. For Rodolfo, San Isidro was a source of guaranteed income during the transition of power between Spain and México, emperor and republic. It was a godsend. But for Juana? The money it generated for her family allowed her freedom. She lived well without marrying, an enviable privilege in wartime and peace alike. As far as I knew, she had lived on the hacienda all her life. Why, then, was she so dismissive at dinner with Rodolfo of my desire to improve the gardens? Were my attempts to revive the wilting grounds so repugnant?

Juana, Juana.

A voice lilted from behind me. So faint it could have been the twisting of the breeze in the grass.

I looked over my shoulder at the house. Its red-tile roof looked too heavy for its walls; the way the building was situated on a gentle slope made it look stocky and squat; the way the wings were crowded atop one another, their shoulders overlapping at various angles and heights, made them look like too many teeth in a mouth.

The ladder rung my feet rested on broke with a brittle snap.

My breath left my lungs in a yelp rather than a scream as I fell. I flung both my arms out and caught the top of the wall, hissing as my face struck stucco.

Madre de Dios.

I hung there, heart pounding, for a long moment. I was going to be fine. A fall from this height could not hurt me. The wall was only about as tall as Rodolfo—not very high at all.

I prepared myself, then let go of the wall. I caught myself in a low crouch and straightened. A breeze stung my cheek; I must have broken skin when I grazed it on the wall.

“Buenos días, Doña Beatriz.”

I whirled to face the kitchen doorway.

Ana Luisa, gray haired and dressed in a white top and a villager’s pale blue skirts, filled it. “What are you doing out here?”

“Inspecting the grounds,” I said, holding my chin high as I smoothed my skirts. I prayed she hadn’t witnessed my fall, nor had noticed the scrape on my cheek. “Why is this garden in such a state?” I added, hoping my question would distract her from my flustered state.

“I hadn’t noticed, Doña Beatriz,” she said archly. Her tone was drier than the brown grass crunching beneath my shoes as I crossed to her. As I grew close, I noticed that a strong smell of incense rose from her clothing. “I have not been in this garden in months. Not since . . .” Something in her eyes grew distant, and I was sure she was changing the direction of her sentence mid-step. “Not since the patrón was here last. We stay in our houses and make use of the kitchen there, and Doña Juana sees no use in living in the house alone.”

As head of the household, Ana Luisa held a high position among the people who worked on the hacienda, second only to the foreman José Mendoza. I knew from working with Tía Fernanda’s servants that such a place in a household’s hierarchy and the trust of the señora meant autonomy. Freedom. I knew the taste of that craving as keenly as a toothache, and I had learned to recognize it in other women: it was a flash of hot yearning in their eye when they thought no one was looking. The determined curl of a hand into a fist beneath a table. With so many brothers and husbands, fathers and patrones slain in the war, more and more women in the capital could unsheathe their knives and take what was now theirs. I was no different. And I doubted the women of the countryside were any different, be they the daughters or widows of hacendados or heads of household like Ana Luisa.

My arrival had supplanted Juana as natural authority, rattling the hierarchy of the hacienda. Perhaps Ana Luisa looked at me and saw a threat to the comfortable order of her world.

Perhaps she was right.

“I have plans to make this place habitable again, and the garden is no exception,” I said, lifting my chin as I had seen Tía Fernanda do a thousand times. “My mother will be joining us from the capital in a few weeks’ time, and I want everything perfect for her arrival.”

Ana Luisa’s dark brows had raised slightly at my tone; she nodded once, solemnly and without embellishment, then took a rag from a hook near the kitchen door and resumed cleaning. “As you say, Doña Beatriz.”

The smell of copal incense grew stronger as she stepped into the doorway. My throat tightened. Not from the strength of the smell—which I found unusual, but not unpleasant—but from a sudden wash of shame.

I heard Tía Fernanda’s own voice within my command. All at once I was back in her house, taken by the arm and escorted to the kitchen in the midst of preparations for a dinner party.

A dinner party to which I was decidedly not invited.

Of course you understand you cannot be seen, my aunt had said, her nails carving half-moons into my upper arm. My cheeks—already too dark, in her esteem—flushed with heat. She had made her opinion on my father’s heritage well known. It did not bear repeating. In the meantime, you need to be useful, she said, the oily sweetness in her voice slipping down the nape of my neck. Maybe then you’ll be worth something.

No matter how I tried to ignore her, Tía Fernanda’s voice lingered, a faint smell of rot I could not banish. It echoed every time I put on my wide-brimmed hat and gloves, every time I checked my complexion in the mirror. Thanks to her, every time I took Rodolfo’s arm, a small, wounded part of me wanted to shrink away from him, from what I clearly did not deserve.

And I heard her in my voice as I gave an order to Ana Luisa.

Embarrassment stung the back of my throat.

With Rodolfo gone, I was the lady of the house. For weeks I had looked forward to this moment, but now that authority in the house was mine and mine alone, I had no idea how to enact it.

I turned my back on Ana Luisa and the kitchen and walked into the dark, clammy air of the hall toward the front garden. Once there, I set my hands on my hips and glowered at the wilting birds of paradise, the stray wild maguey, the weeds consuming the flower beds near the front door, a general surveying the battlefield.

I was afraid of how openly Ana Luisa disliked me. I was unsteady on my feet and lashed out. I should not speak that sharply again—cementing authority the way Tía Fernanda had, with haughtiness, with coldness, had sowed hate and hurt in me and most of her servants.

But then how would I establish my place as the head of the household? I did not have Rodolfo’s easy inborn authority as a man. Nor Juana’s as a criolla and an hacendado’s daughter.

I would have to find my own way. Somehow. I had to, before Mamá arrived.

If she ever answered my letters begging her to come. I could only hope that she would stomach the sight of Rodolfo.

I shoved the thought aside and pulled on my leather gloves, laying siege to the flower beds. I weeded violently, leaving piles of deadened flowers in my wake. With the exception of a break for lunch and a short siesta in the cool of the house, I continued until the shadows grew long in the courtyard.

“What on earth are you doing?”

I jumped.

Juana stood over me, eyes narrowed as she scanned the sweat-stained rim of my hat and the dirt on my dress. Her cheeks were pink from the sun; sweat darkened her blouse beneath her armpits and below her throat.

“My brother would say this is what we have servants for, Doña Solórzano,” she drawled.

I jerked my hands out of the dirt, brushing off the gloves.

Was she mocking me? I could not parse her expression as I rose and shook out my skirts. It was evident from our one dinner together that Juana did not hold what Rodolfo thought in high esteem. Nor vice versa. Nor that she believed caring for the gardens was as important as tending the maguey. But why?

“My husband would say he admired women who understand the amount of work that goes into running a property.” I had heard him talk about women’s education and the importance of widows running haciendas in the country in the wake of the war with his colleagues and twisted his words to make them sound as if they were approving of my behavior.

Juana snorted softly. She surveyed the pockmarks my labor had left in the soil. “He may admire them, yes. But he doesn’t often marry them.”

I busied myself with taking off my gloves to hide the curiosity in my expression. So Juana had never caught María Catalina weeding the garden, that was for certain. What else did she know about my husband’s first wife? They had lived together on the hacienda for a time, hadn’t they?

“I’m joining you for dinner tonight,” Juana said abruptly.

She announced this as if she were the host and not I, as if the house were hers and not mine. I bit back the retort that sprang to my lips.

The animosity between my husband and his sister, the fact that Juana was such a curiosity to Doña María José and the other hacendados’ wives, the rumors about the departed María Catalina . . . there was so much I didn’t know about Hacienda San Isidro.

So much that Juana did.

If she warmed to me, if she saw me as unthreatening to her way of life here, perhaps she would confide in me.

I would find my place as lady of the house. I would make it my own. But I could not risk alienating Juana, not yet.

I followed as she strode into the house.

“How do you like it?” she wondered, her chin tilted up, gaze skipping over the high ceiling of the entryway. It was an idle question, perfectly innocent on the surface, but something uncertain lurked beneath it.

“It’s . . .” I let the word trail off. Juana turned and faced me, the evening light from the open doorway illuminating her face, dancing off the flyaway bronze hairs that had come loose from their knot at her nape. Her wide, pale eyes met mine so frankly I couldn’t help but respond in kind. To say exactly what I was thinking as I untied my hat and took it off my sweaty hair. “I want to blast the roof off. It seems like the only way to let in the amount of fresh air I want.”

A peal of surprised laughter burst forth from Juana. It swept up to the high ceiling, tangling in the cobwebs. “I thought Rodolfo said you were a general’s daughter, not of an artillery man.” A warm curl of pleasure had unfurled in my chest at making Juana laugh, but it cooled quickly. Rodolfo had told her about me—why hadn’t he told me a single thing about her? What other secrets was he keeping from me about San Isidro? About his first wife?

“What other violent plans do you have to clear the air?”

What I wanted to do was take a tlachiquero’s machete to the walls to carve more windows.

“Color,” I replied curtly.

“What if the house doesn’t like color?” Juana teased. Was she toying with me or trying to be friendly? In the capital, women played chess with their words, moving coyly around china and silk to check one another, to protect their territory, to take one another off the board. I had never been close with anyone but Mamá—even my cousins and friends from before Papá’s death were sharp clawed and evasive, keeping me at bay with barbs and sideways looks.

“The house will like what I tell it to like,” I said, folding my arms across my chest. Because it is my house, I added silently. “We will start with blue.”

Juana’s thin lips vanished as she grinned. “I like you,” she said bluntly. “What shades of blue do you have in mind, General Beatriz?”

My folded arms loosened. My experiences since my father’s death had laid stone after stone in my chest, building walls so impenetrable that Mamá commented on how hard it had become to reach my heart. But still, I liked being told I was liked.

I waved to Juana to follow me to the stairs. “I brought silks from the capital,” I said. “Blues the likes of which you’ve never seen.”

A moment of hesitation, then Juana’s boots followed me down the hall.

She did not speak, so I filled the silence by lecturing her about what I would do with each room as we passed. I would model the dining room after ours in the capital, where Papá and Mamá once hosted generals; the parlors I would decorate in colors that would please Mamá, like soft yellows and pinks.

“I lied about the house being drafty,” Juana said in a small voice as we took the stairs. I cast her a look over my shoulder. Her face was drawn; she followed right at my heels, but her attention slinked down the wrought-iron banister to the northern wing. “The truth is . . . I am overwhelmed by it all. There is so much to do,” she said. She continued, her voice brightening and picking up speed. “There used to be so many people here, in the old days,” she said. “I remember it before the war more than Rodolfo does. It was always full of people when our parents threw parties. The kitchens were teeming with servants, and the house was always spotless.”

“Where are all the servants now?” I opened the door and led her into my bedroom parlor, listening carefully as she continued.

“I dismissed them,” Juana said curtly. “We couldn’t afford any of that during the war. When our father died and Rodolfo joined the insurgents, I was the only one left. None of the hacendados would help me after what Rodolfo did—imagine, a Solórzano joining the insurgents. He may as well have joined the Indios ransacking the haciendas. Our father was well respected in the district, but after that?” She shook her head and made a dismissive sound.

Her voice raked over the words Indio and insurgents derisively. I clicked my tongue softly in disapproval. For a moment, I weighed pointing out that those same people were the forces that all the conservative hacendados and monarchy-supporters had joined in the end of the war, that those insurgents were now the men who ruled the Republic. Those same people were the ones who made peace possible, thus allowing Hacienda San Isidro to continue to profit from the sale of pulque. They made Juana’s life possible. I glanced over my shoulder to see her features had settled into a stony, determined expression; I thought it better to bite my tongue.

“It was up to me to keep the hacienda running. Ana Luisa was my only help,” she continued, oblivious to my silence. “I had to manage the money carefully. It was that or sell the land.”

I understood the decrepit state of the house more now. It wasn’t that Juana cared more for maguey than for the garden. She neglected the house that had been in her family for generations because she would do anything to keep the land. An hacienda like this was freedom. I, too, had sacrificed to have autonomy like hers in my grasp.

Perhaps she and I had more in common than I initially thought. Perhaps we would not have to battle over the property—perhaps we could be allies. Even friends, despite our differences.

I knelt before the chest that held my silks. I had a deep blue skirt, one of the few things Mamá purchased for me before I announced my engagement to Rodolfo. I had been angry at her for spending our precious savings on something so frivolous as a birthday gift, but now I wanted to use its color all over the house in her honor: chair covers, china, glass. A click of the lock; I opened the chest.

“Jesus Christ!” Juana cried, her boots scraping against the floor as she leaped backward.

Dark liquid soaked the silks in the chest. I could not move; a metallic tang filled my nose. Sent my head spinning. My silks. Gifts from my mother, artifacts from a life I no longer had, that I clung to, that I treasured.

They were . . . wet. How was that possible? It had rained on the carriage as we drove through the mountains two weeks ago, but the chests had been covered.

I reached—

“Don’t touch it!” Juana shrieked.

My fingertips met sticky warmth. I drew them back sharply.

They were red. Bright bloodred.

Humming like a thousand bees filled my ears. A single, thick glob of scarlet dripped from my hand back into the chest, where it landed with a smack.

My silks. They were soaked in blood.