The Hacienda(10)
“?Todo bien, Padre Andrés?”
I looked over my shoulder at the baker’s son and grunted in the affirmative. Past him were the low stone walls of the graveyard. I turned my face away quickly.
More of my family now lay beneath the earth than walked it, but I had not paid my respects to those who lay behind the parish of Apan. My brothers were not there. Antonio and Hildo had died in battles in Veracruz and Guadalajara; only the Lord knew where they rested. The third, Diego, had vanished somewhere near Tulancingo last year. He was alive, I knew it, and was held somewhere, but none of my frantic letters to every insurgent I knew resulted in any reply. My grandmother was not there. She was buried near her home in the village of Hacienda San Isidro. I wished my mother could be buried near her, on the land where she had been born, the land that was home, the land where her family had lived for seven generations, but she was in the cemetery behind me.
I would visit soon. But not now. Not yet.
On Padre Vicente’s command, we began to walk around the church to the plaza de armas. Apan was four proper streets and a tangle of alleys; gray and quiet on most days, it burst at the seams on the feast day of la Virgen. People from the haciendas traveled into town for the Mass and the procession. They were dressed in their feast day best, men in starched shirts and women in bright embroidery, but as we proceeded slowly behind Padres Vicente and Guillermo, it became clear how faded and patched these clothes were. There were too many gaunt faces, too many feet without shoes, even in the middle of winter. The war left no part of the countryside untouched, but it left its deepest mark on those who had the least.
But whenever I glanced up, I saw eyes bright as an autumn sky. Burning with curiosity. Fixed not on la Virgen and rapturous Juan Diego, but lower.
On me.
I knew what they saw.
They did not see the son of Esteban Villalobos, onetime Sevillan foreman to old Solórzano on Hacienda San Isidro, then assistant to the caudillo, the local military officer who maintained order in Apan and the surrounding haciendas. Resident thug and drunk who had returned to Spain seven years ago.
They did not see the newly ordained Padre Juan Andrés Villalobos, a cura trained in Guadalajara, who regularly prayed before a cathedral retablo resplendent with more gold than they had ever seen in their lives.
They saw my grandmother. Alejandra Pérez, my sijtli, called Titi by her many grandchildren and by a good measure of the countryside besides.
It was unlikely they saw her in my features—these were more my Spanish father’s than my mother’s. No. I knew they felt Titi’s presence. Perhaps they even felt the shift of the earth beneath their feet, the attention of the skies tilting toward me. There, they said. That one. Look.
And look they did. They made a show of gazing at la Virgen and crossing themselves when blessed by Padre Vicente’s swinging golden censer, but I knew they watched me beneath Juan Diego’s wooden knees.
I kept my eyes on the dusty road before me.
The people of Hacienda San Isidro were clustered in a group near the end of the procession, at the front of the church. I raised my head and found my cousin, Paloma, standing with a few other girls her age. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other in anticipation, craning her neck, scanning the procession. When her eyes caught mine, a smile illuminated her face like lightning. I nearly stumbled, like Christ on the road to Calvary, from the shock of seeing someone so familiar after so many years apart. I had returned to Apan, yes, but now, in Paloma’s presence, I felt I was home.
They were all there, the people of the hacienda I had known my whole life: my aunt and Paloma’s mother, Ana Luisa, the old foreman Mendoza who had replaced my father in the wake of his indiscretions. They watched me with intense black eyes, taking me in for the first time in seven years, knowing me as their own.
I knew they expected me to step into Titi’s shoes.
But how could I? I was ordained. I had followed the path Titi and my mother urged me to take: I was not lost to the last decade of war, be it by gangrene or a gachupín’s bayonet. I had skirted the attention of the Inquisition and become a man of the Church.
They will teach you things I cannot, Titi said as she put me on the road to the seminary so many years ago. Besides, she added, a sly twinkle in her eye as she patted my chest, aware her palm rested directly over the darkness that lived curled around my heart, won’t you be well hidden there?
The people of San Isidro needed more than another priest. They needed my grandmother. I needed her. I missed how she always smelled of piney soap, how the veiny backs of her hands were so soft to hold, her knobby fingers and wrists so strong and sure as they braided her white hair or ground herbs in the molcajete to cure a family member’s stomach pain. I missed the mischievous glint in her dark eyes that my mother, Lucero, had inherited, and that I wished I had. I even missed her exasperatingly cryptic advice. I needed her to show me how to be both a priest and her heir, how to care for her flock and calmly deflect the withering suspicion of Padre Vicente.
But she was dead.
I closed my eyes as the procession shuffled to a halt before the front door of the church.
Please. The prayer reached out, up to the heavens to God, out to the spirits that slept in the bellies of the hills ringing the valley. I knew no other way to pray. Give me guidance.
When I opened them, I saw Padre Vicente shaking hands and blessing members of a group of hacendados. Their silks and fine hats stood out against the crowds, garish as peacocks in a famine. The old patróns of Hacienda Ocotepec and Alcantarilla tipped their hats to Padre Vicente, their pale-haired ladies and daughters clasping his hand in their gloved ones. Even the hacendados had not escaped the ravages of war. Their sons had left to fight for the gachupínes, the Spanish, and left only old men and boys to defend the estates against insurgents in the countryside.