The Hacienda(4)

From behind the door, the room laughed at me.

I froze. Rodolfo kept walking; my hand slipped out of his.

Had I misheard? Was I imagining it? I was certain I had heard light, bubbling laughter, like that of a wicked child, reaching through the heavy wooden door.

But it was empty. Behind that door, I knew the room was empty. I had just seen it.

“Come along, querida.” Rodolfo’s smile was overbright, strained. “There is much to see before dinner.”

And there was. Gardens, stables, household servants’ quarters, the village, where the tlachiqueros and farm workers lived, the general store, the capilla . . . San Isidro was a world unto its own.

Rodolfo left me in the care of Ana Luisa for a tour of the rest of the house, and I immediately wished he hadn’t. She was brusque and humorless.

“This is the green parlor,” she said, gesturing into one room but not entering. It had a single fireplace that was soot-stained; the walls were white, the floorboards scratched and tired.

“It’s not green.” My voice landed hollow on the empty space.

“The rug used to be,” was Ana Luisa’s only answer.

Like her voice, the house was devoid of color. White, brown, shadows, soot—these were the smudgy palate of San Isidro. By the time the sun was setting, and Ana Luisa had finished guiding me around the servants’ courtyard and the tidy capilla, I was exhausted. The house and the grounds were in various states of disrepair; the amount of effort it would take to prepare them for Mamá daunted me. But as Ana Luisa and I returned to the house and I took it in from the courtyard, from its foreboding dark door to the cracked tiles on the roof, I could not stop a flutter of emotion from rising in my throat.

This house was mine. Here I was safe.



* * *




*

SEVEN MONTHS AGO, I sprang from bed in the middle of the night, woken by pounding from somewhere in the house and shouting from the street. Heart in my throat, I stumbled into the dark hall and seized the handle of the parlor door with clammy hands, tripping over the rug. Light and shadows danced mockingly across dainty chairs and delicate wallpaper, across Papá’s worn map of his battles pinned to the wall opposite the second-floor windows.

I rushed to the windows. Flames filled the street below: there were men in military uniform, dozens of them, brandishing torches and dark muskets crowned with long bayonets, their steel grinning greedily in the light of the flames.

One of them pounded on the door, shouting my father’s name.

Where was Papá? Surely he would know the meaning of—

And then Papá opened the door. Papá was among them, his hair disheveled, a robe wrapped tidily around his wiry frame. He looked more tired than I had ever seen him, heavy shadows accenting the gauntness of his face.

But his eyes burned with hatred as he took in the men surrounding him. He began to speak, but even if I had pressed my ear to the window, I would not have been able to hear him, not from so far above, not over the din of the shouting. I was paralyzed as the men seized Papá by the upper arms and dragged him away from the house, into the street. He seemed so frail, so breakable . . .

Traitor. A single word rose from the din. Traitor.

Then they were gone.

Only a handful remained behind, their faces cast in shadow as they took the butts of their muskets and thrust them at the windows below. Glass shattered; men flung shining liquid and torches through the jagged teeth of broken panes. The men melted away into the night, and I could not move, not even as the smell of burning wood rose into the room and the floorboards beneath my knees grew warm.

Papá was not a traitor. Even though the man who became emperor and Papá began the war on different sides—Papá with the insurgents and Agustín de Iturbide with the Spanish—they worked side by side in the end. Papá fought for independence. For México. Every battle he and I marked in red ink on his map was for México, every—

Mamá’s shriek split my skull. I flung myself back from the window; my heel caught on the leg of a chair and sent me sprawling on the carpet. Heat scorched my lungs; the air rippled thick with it. Smoke rose in delicate columns through the floorboards as I pushed myself to all fours.

The map. I lurched upward, then to the wall, and reached for the pins on which it hung, hissing as they seared my fingertips.

“Beatriz!”

I ripped it down, folding it with shaking hands as I ran toward her voice. Smoke stung my eyes; my ribs seized with coughing.

“Mamá!” I couldn’t see, I couldn’t breathe as I tripped downstairs to the back door. Mamá grabbed me and yanked me into the street. Our backs sweated and blistered from the heat behind us; we were coughing, barefooted, shocked by the cold of the night.

Mamá had gone to the servants’ quarters to wake the household staff but found their beds cold and empty. Had they known? Had they known, and fled to save their hides, and never warned us?

They must have known. Someone must have told them what we learned in the pale, fragile light of the next morning: that Agustín de Iturbide, emperor of México, was deposed. Exiled. On a ship to Italy. And his allies? Even those who had been insurgents, like Papá? Rounded up and executed.

“Shot in the back like the cowards they were, that’s what I heard,” said my watery-eyed cousin Josefa across the breakfast table, sneering archly down her Roman nose.