The Hacienda(35)
“As if Padre Vicente would believe me,” I said dryly, but the joke fell flat between us.
“If he were to learn of this”—here Andrés made an expansive circular gesture with one long arm—“he would send me away. To Spain, to a prison, I don’t know or care. The people here need me. The war left scars. It left demons. It broke people.” Fervor hardened his voice. “They need to be listened to, they need to be heard, and there are things they can’t speak about with the other priests.”
“Because they don’t speak that language?”
“Mexicano? That matters less,” Andrés said. “Neither can I, not anymore. I lost it as a child.” To my questioning look, he added: “I memorized what my grandmother taught me. I mean that the other priests . . . they’re rich men from the capital and Guadalajara. They cannot speak the language of the people’s troubles. They can’t see what I am, and it must stay that way. Apan, San Isidro . . . this is my home. I know these people. Their wives are like my mother, their sons my brothers. I know. And I listen.”
He returned to where he had been sitting next to me, crossing his long legs. Then, there in the center of a witch’s circle, he drew a rosary from his pocket. The silver face of la Virgen winked in the candlelight as the centerpiece slid past his graceful fingers.
Truly, I had never met a priest like him before.
“I promise,” I whispered. “I swear I won’t say a word. Thank you. For this. For believing me.”
“You didn’t even need to speak for me to believe you,” he said. His attention on the door was now watchful rather than fearful as his fingers moved from bead to bead with a meditative rhythm. “Your face said it all. And then walking through the door . . . I didn’t plan to resort to this”—his slight nod at the circle around us indicated this was the dark glyphs—“but in all my years cleansing sickened homes, I have never faced anything like that.” His voice trailed off for a moment, as if caught and held captive by a memory. “How much have you been able to sleep recently?”
My laughter was dry, its sensation foreign and hoarse in my throat. Perhaps I could count the hours, no more than a handful a night since Rodolfo left . . . nine days ago? Ten? “Does the answer ‘I haven’t’ suffice?”
“Here.” He reached for one of the blankets I laid out earlier and passed it to me. “I’ll keep watch.”
My fingers sank into the thick wool. I could allow myself to fall, to give in to the silence, while someone else stood watch. The peace of being inside the circle enveloped me like mist, cool and soothing. Sleep. The idea of it was so intoxicating that I didn’t care that it meant sleeping next to a man who was not my husband, whom I had only met a few days ago.
A man who was a witch.
I bunched part of the blanket into a pillow and curled onto it like a cat settling before a warm hearth.
It was so quiet that I could hear the crackle of wicks bearing their flames, the brush of Andrés’s calloused fingertips over the beads of his rosary. His voice was a low, steady hum.
I was not alone.
Between one Hail Mary and the next, I slipped over sleep’s dark edge and fell, fell, fell . . .
* * *
*
IN DREAMS, I FOUND myself on my feet, folding Tía Fernanda’s patterned linens in the study of San Isidro, my hands red from harsh laundry soap. Instead of the high small windows that broke up the wall in waking life, tall bright windows were cut into the stucco like the ones that graced my family’s home in the capital. One was open, and a breeze billowed through the room, carrying birdsong from a garden. The sheets rippled in the breeze as I folded them. I had a stack of clean sheets and lifted them into my arms as I made my way to the bedchamber. I stepped through the doorway, turned the corner, and stopped dead.
The white sheets and mattress were torn to pieces. Shredded as if by a hundred sharp knives, savagely pierced as if by bayonets. Long marks scarred the wooden headboard; the pillows were carved into chunks, the feathers that had once stuffed them floating serenely on the air, unaware of the carnage they overlooked.
The birdsong had fallen silent.
I stepped forward to touch the bed, to make sure it was true. The sheets I had been holding were gone from my arms in the slippery way of dreaming, and when I put my hand on the bed, it came away red with blood. The sheets were clean. I frowned.
The sound of footsteps on carpet sounded softly from the study.
“Padre Andrés?” I said, because in the dream, it was natural that Andrés should be somewhere in the house. He needed to see this.
I turned to the door. A figure walked into view in the study: a woman with a shock of long hair as pale as corn silk, her dress the fashion of the capital and sewn from gray fabric that shimmered in the light. She faced me, a glint of gold winking from her throat.
Her eyes were pits, pits that burned with the crepuscular glow of embers, of hellfire. Her stance shifted, her shoulders curling like a puma’s, and she hissed at me, baring hundreds of long, needlelike teeth that grew longer, longer. She raised her hands, which ended in long, curving flesh-colored claws.
The door of the bedchamber slammed shut.
I woke with a start, my heart in my throat.
Slam.
I shoved myself upright. The candles had burned low—I must have been asleep for hours—but the amount of copal in the room had not lessened. Andrés was pale; beads of sweat glistened at his hairline. He was still murmuring Hail Marys, his watchful gaze on the door.