The Hacienda(31)

Padre Andrés nodded. “You may leave me, if you wish. Get some sleep.”

Had he noticed the purple shadows beneath my eyes? I laughed, dry and humorless. “I can’t sleep in this house, Pa—Andrés,” I corrected myself. Addressing a priest by his given name should have struck me as strange, but it rolled naturally off my tongue. Perhaps because he was so young, perhaps because he spoke to me as if I were his peer, not his parishioner.

We reached the green parlor, and I opened the door. Darkness crept from the corners of the room. Cold flushed the stone floors like icy water.

The house was awake.

“This is the green parlor,” I said, my voice echoing despite how low I kept it. The room had a single door and the customary high windows; unlike my bedroom, which had the door to the study as well as to a small room with a chamber pot, it was a sturdy, defensible position. One could have one’s back to the wall and face the door. It was the kind of room I would have wanted, if I were spending the night on my own for the first time in a house like this. I echoed Ana Luisa’s explanation: “It is called the green parlor because—”

“Because it used to be green,” he murmured, half to himself, as he stepped into the room. It was still bare of furniture; as Padre Andrés had requested earlier, I brought a few blankets and laid them near the fireplace, near two copal censers and abundant candlesticks. He gestured to the flagstones as he scanned the rafters. “The carpet. It was green.”

“Padre Guillermo said you were familiar with San Isidro,” I said. “Why?”

He did not immediately reply. He had tilted his head to the side, as if he had caught a strain of distant music. A long moment passed; he was so still, the darkness beyond him so complete, that he almost seemed to bleed into it.

Then he turned; candlelight caught on the sharp panes of his face. “My mother lived her whole life on this land until she married my father. My grandmother lived here as well. I stayed with her often, when I was a boy.”

So he had known this house and knew something had changed. That, too, must be the reason why he chose to go against Padre Vicente’s orders to help me: attachment to a childhood home. “Where is she now?” I asked. “Your grandmother?”

“Buried beyond the capilla.” Padre Andrés set his bag and the lit censer down next to the blankets. “Do things happen every night?” His voice was now crisp and serious as he set to lighting the candles with matches, illuminating the room like a chapel.

I cleared my throat, embarrassed to have pried so much. “The feeling of . . . of being watched never goes away, not even during the day. Some things have happened in broad daylight.”

“Your discovery.”

The skeleton in the wall.

A clammy veil settled over the small of my back at the thought. “Generally, it is worst between midnight and dawn.”

Padre Andrés rose, his height unfolding like a plume of smoke. “With your permission, I will now examine the house without copal.”

“You’re mad,” I said flatly. Or at least he would be by the end of his experience in San Isidro if he insisted on doing that. The red eyes in the dark flashed through my mind. “If something were to happen to you . . .”

What would then happen to me? I could protect myself with copal, but it would eventually burn out. I could not be left alone in the dark. Not anymore.

“I will be safe, Do?a Beatriz.”

But I wouldn’t be. If I knew anything about how the house felt—and lately I was beginning to worry I knew altogether too much—I knew that it resented people like him and me. People with plans and ideas. Dread drummed a militant beat in my chest at the thought of going back to my room and sitting in the dark, all the while aware he was poking and prodding around the house’s entrails. He didn’t understand what this house was. He couldn’t.

I did.

“I will accompany you,” I said firmly. “This is my house. I am responsible for you.”

“Do?a Beatriz,” he said, taking a candle to match the one I held in one hand. “I know what I am doing.”

Then I would be safe at his side. Wouldn’t I be? I cast a longing glance past him at the smoke from the censer. No harm could come to me in the presence of a priest.

Or so I told myself.

“We can start with the parlors,” I said, forcing more confidence than I felt into my voice. “Make our way to the kitchen, then retrace our steps to the north wing.”

He walked at my side as we began, asking to pause in certain rooms. As we approached the kitchen, the house was coy. The tendrils of its feeling kept their distance from Padre Andrés, but I could feel it calculating, feel it watching him with care. The sensation writhed under my skin like a centipede.

What if it did nothing to him? What if this were all in my head? If I were imagining the cold, imagining the thundering pounding on the door of my bedroom, imagining—a wash of sweat appeared on my palms—the watching? The cold hands tugging at my hair? The voices? What then? Should I ask him to exorcise me instead?

The light from our candles jumped and licked the doorframe of the kitchen. Our shoes met with Ana Luisa’s herbs, the ones that grew so abundantly in the garden. Andrés fell into a crouch and brushed his fingertips over them, then lifted his fingers to his nose to smell the sap. He made an indecisive sound, stood, and cast his glance around the room as if looking for something.