The Hacienda(38)

His head met the top of the doorframe with a solid sound.

“Carajo.”

I fought to hide my amusement as he cast a dirty look at the doorway and ducked through it to join me at the table. He thanked me profusely, then fell silent. The pozole and tamales vanished as if swept away by a starving ghost, and color once again bloomed across Andrés’s face. While there were not many things I trusted Ana Luisa about, I could trust her assessment of her nephew’s appetite.

He sighed and leaned back in his chair, drinking in the sun like a lanky lizard on a warm rock. Purple circles shadowed the skin beneath his closed eyes.

“Did you sleep at all?” I asked.

He made a noncommittal sound.

I ripped a tortilla and used it to fish a piece of pork from my soup. Mamá would cringe at my table manners, but what purpose would putting on airs before Andrés serve? None. There was something about his demeanor that set me at ease. Something in the way he looked at me that made me feel as if he saw me, and that there was no point in shoring up the stony walls I had hidden behind for so long.

I chewed the pork and tortilla thoughtfully, feeling life seep back into me with the red broth. “In the capilla . . . is it like the house?” I wondered.

“No. It’s quiet,” he said softly. “So, so quiet.”

Is there any vocation more natural for a man who hears devils? he had said. Perhaps what he meant was that there was no refuge more profound.

“Are all holy places?”

“Some. My mother used to panic because I would vanish in the night as a child. Then she would find me in the church, asleep beneath a pew in the morning . . .”

He opened his eyes, then straightened. Stiffly. The shift of his shoulders hinted that perhaps he thought he had spoken too much.

But something in my heart unfurled thinking about a small black-haired boy curled into a ball beneath a pew, and it wanted to know more. I wanted him to keep speaking.

“Is that why the witch became a priest?” I asked. “Because it was quiet in the church?”

He met my eyes levelly, the curve of his mouth angled slightly downward, as if suspicious I was mocking him. I was not. Was I prying too much? Perhaps. But I still yearned for him to reply.

“That was why my mother wanted me to become a priest.” His voice had a distant ring to it, confirming I was indeed prying, and that he was now on guard. “There are few places in the world for people who hear voices. Prisons. Asylums.”

“Rome,” I pointed out glibly.

His brows lifted to his hairline.

“There are plenty of saints who heard voices. Didn’t Santa Rosa de Lima?”

“I am no saint, Do?a Beatriz,” Andrés said evenly. “And some would think it blasphemous to be so flippant about sainthood.”

He tilted his head back and closed his eyes again, effectively shuttering the subject. My eyes followed the raven-black hair falling across his brow, danced down the arch of his throat to his collar, and were caught by the shock of white that gleamed there against the black of his clothing.

Warmth flushed my cheeks. As far as sin was concerned, perhaps blasphemy was the least of my worries.

I dropped my gaze to my soup. “What would you be if not a priest?” Not the most graceful change of subject, but certainly a necessary one.

He did not answer. I was prying again.

“I wanted to be a general.” It was I who had asked the question, and in his silence, I who answered it. “My father was a general. He used to show me his battle plans and lecture me on the direction of armies, how to take the high ground and win even when muskets were so scarce soldiers resorted to throwing stones.” I remembered Papá’s dark hand covering mine and guiding it as we dipped his pen in the pot of red ink. Imagining the scrape of the pen’s nib against paper sent a pang of homesickness through my ribs. “I loved his maps best of all. I think that’s what I wanted, when I said I wanted to be a general. Maps. I didn’t understand leading armies meant leading men to die until I was older.”

“So instead you married a pulque lord.”

The hint of mockery in his voice stung.

“I had no other choice.” The words echoed brittle, too familiar to my lips. I had said the same thing to Mamá when she saw Rodolfo’s ring on my finger. “Don’t mock what you can’t understand,” I muttered, and thrust my spoon into my soup with more force than was necessary. Droplets of broth sprayed the table. I glared at them, aware that Andrés was watching me carefully now.

“Can’t I?” he asked.

It was as if that single soft question broke a dam in me.

He couldn’t understand what it was like to be a woman with no means of protecting her mother. He couldn’t understand the stakes I faced when Rodolfo proposed.

Or could he?

I lost it as a child, he had said of the language. His skin and eyes were lighter than his cousin’s; it was clear he was mestizo, of a lower casta than the other priests. Like me in Tía Fernanda’s household. Perhaps he also toed among criollo society on uneasy feet: careful to never misstep, careful to watch his back. Careful to never retaliate when offhand barbs buried themselves in his flesh.

We came from such different worlds, different classes, different experiences: the general’s daughter of the capital, the boy of the rural hacienda. At first blush, we had next to no common ground. Perhaps we didn’t. But perhaps the lives we had lived were not so different, in this one regard. Perhaps if I let him see that, he might understand.