The Spanish Daughter(37)

I hadn’t thought of this. Angélica seemed to be a carbon copy of my father, but Catalina must have taken after her mother because she had olive skin and dark, Moorish eyes. People used to say I also looked like my mother, a big-boned, tall woman.

“In some ways,” I said. “She had black hair like you, but your sister’s nose. She was also very musical. She loved zarzuelas.”

“Did she play any instruments, like Angélica and I?”

“Her voice was her instrument.”

This might have been a stretch. If you asked Cristóbal or La Cordobesa they would’ve said my “instrument” needed some tuning.

Catalina smiled. “How lucky you must have been to be married to a woman like her. She sounds exceptional.”

I took a deep breath. My voice might crack if I spoke. I stood up.

“I should go,” I finally said. “It isn’t proper for me to be here.”

“Of course.”

“Good night, Do?a Catalina.”

I walked away without giving her the chance to answer. My sister’s words had touched me deeply. No, Cristóbal hadn’t been lucky to have me—the opposite was true. I wasn’t the one who was buried in the depths of the ocean. And I couldn’t believe how disloyal I’d been this afternoon by spending all that time with another man and what was even worse, enjoying myself. If there was a God in the Heavens, He would certainly punish me for such a callous betrayal.





CHAPTER 18

Catalina

Vinces, 1913



My mother’s fingers squeezed my ear painfully. “Have you gone mad, Catalina?”

Startled, I dropped the cigarette in my hand. I didn’t know what hurt more: my pride or my ear. I was already fifteen years old and yet my mother was treating me as though I were still a child.

“Pick it up!” she said, pointing at the cigarette I’d just dumped on the ground. I couldn’t believe she’d found my hiding spot behind the palo santo tree. My mother never left the house. How did she find her way out here?

“Let me go!” I said, trying to push her away, but she had a good grip of my ear.

“I said, pick it up.”

Twisting my body in an unnatural way, I picked up the cigarette. My mother dragged me toward the kitchen as if I were a sack of potatoes.

“How can you embarrass me like this?” she was saying. “Don’t you know you have a reputation around here? What if one of your father’s peones had seen you? You know that news travels faster than light in this town. What is wrong with you?”

Yes, what was wrong with me? I knew I had to be good, but I couldn’t stop myself from sinning.

“If it isn’t one thing, it’s another,” my mother said.

Things had been so challenging for us lately. It was nothing but lecturing. This was wrong, that was wrong. Follow your brother’s example, look how he entered the seminary.

For my mother, Gloria Alvarez de Lafont, having one child in the service of the Lord wasn’t enough. She would’ve only been satisfied if the three of us dedicated our lives to the noble cause, but Angélica was beyond hope with all those admirers, and me, well, my mother had made it her life’s goal to set me on the right path—no matter what.

To think that she’d been so proud of me when I told her I’d seen the Virgin. It had been months of prayer, of pilgrimage, of the eyes of the entire town and its surroundings on me. People had wanted to come see me, they wanted me to tell them all about the Sweet Mother, they’d traveled from every corner of the country to hear my message.

But that had been six years ago and my mother seemed to have forgotten already about our sore legs from kneeling on the cold floor—side by side—in prayer, or how she would comb my hair until it was as smooth as silk while she asked all the particulars of the Apparition. After all, she had to report every detail to her friends at the Cofradía since the town’s priest had forbidden me to share my experiences with anybody else.

Still gripping my ear, my mother hauled me across the kitchen and I did my best not to bump into counters and chairs.

“Armand! Armand!” she screeched.

But my father, thank God, was not home. He’d left for the warehouse early in the morning. I’d seen him from my bedroom window, from my prison.

I managed to set myself free once we reached the inner patio. But she got hold of my arm and dragged me all the way to the Saints Room.

This was my mother’s favorite room. It was smaller than the rest. It had a spare bed that had never been used and an armoire filled with doll-sized saints. There was the Virgin, of course, Saint Paul, Saint Joseph, and the Christ child. When I was little, I’d asked to play with the saints. After all, they looked just like dolls to me, but that had constituted the biggest sin and blasphemy of all time in my mother’s world.

An assortment of candles could be found inside one of the drawers with matches, rosaries, and the book of prayer.

“Right here, in front of all the saints, you’re going to purge!” my mother said in a roaring voice.

She handed me the cigarette, which I’d just started and had several more drags in it, and sentenced me.

“You’re going to eat this.”

Have I heard right? “Eat it?”

“Yes!”