The Hacienda(5)

With nowhere to go, Mamá took us to the home of the only family she had left in México, the only ones who still spoke to her after she married Papá, a man of a lower casta than she: that of Sebastián Valenzuela, the son of her father’s cousin.

“But Tío Sebastián hates us,” I whimpered as we walked, shivering, the veil of sweat the heat of the house doused us in turning frigid in the night.

Papá’s map crinkled against my nightdress, clenched protectively between my bicep and rib cage as we ran through the dark winding alleys of the capital. We rounded the back corner of the walls of my uncle’s house and collapsed on the muddy steps of the entrance to the servants’ quarters. Mamá said she couldn’t trust any of her or Papá’s friends. Not after what had happened. We had to come here.

“We don’t have a choice,” she said.

But Sebastián did.

His wife, Fernanda, made that perfectly clear as she took Mamá and me in. She could have left us on the doorstep. She could have turned us away, and Sebastián would not question her judgment.

It was true, and I knew it. My uncle had no love for us, never had, and only took us in out of whatever remaining scrap of childhood loyalty he felt for a cousin long disowned by the family.

He took us in, but he preached self-righteously at dinner our first day in his house how my father had made the wrong choices all through the war, first by throwing his weight behind the insurgents, then by compromising and forming a coalition with the monarchist conservatives.

Though I was exhausted and starving, my appetite vanished. I stared at the cooling food on my plate, unmoving.

“It is a tragedy, but it was bound to happen,” Tío Sebastián mused sagely. His too-long gray muttonchops quivered with each gluttonous bite he took.

I could not decide if the feeling that seized my throat meant to make me vomit or cry. Humiliation seared my cheeks. Papá risked his life for independence, and I had a map to prove it. His rivals must have betrayed him, lied about him. And he was killed. I lifted my head, eyes fixed on my uncle. I opened my mouth—

A soft touch at my elbow.

Mamá’s touch. Nothing she ever did was above a murmur, none of her movements were anything but graceful and soft, but her message was piercingly clear: do not speak.

I bit my tongue, the pork on my plate going blurry as hot tears pricked my eyes.

She was right.

If Tío Sebastián chose to turn us out, Mamá and I would have nowhere to go. The realization was like a slap to the face: no one would take us. Our lives depended on pleasing my mother’s cousin and the beady-eyed, petty wife who poured poison into his ear.

I forced food into my mouth. It stuck to my dry throat like glue.

That night, as Mamá and I curled together, forehead to forehead, in the one narrow bed Tía Fernanda would spare us, I sobbed until I thought my ribs would crack. Mamá brushed away the sweaty hair that stuck to my forehead and kissed my hot cheeks.

“You must be strong,” she said. “We must bear this with dignity.”

With dignity.

With silence was what she meant.

I could not inherit my father’s property. I could not work. I could not care for Mamá, whose face grew wan and peaked. Reliant on my uncle’s charity, on my sour aunt’s thin goodwill, I had nothing. I wore castoffs from my cousins, I was not allowed to study or go out, for fear my presence would lower the esteem of the Valenzuela name in the eyes of the other criollos and peninsulares. I was a body without a voice, a shadow melting into the walls of a too-crowded house.

And then I met Rodolfo.

When he entered that ball to celebrate the founding of the Republic, when his broad shoulders filled the doorway, a sense of peace swept through the room. The tide changed, the hum quieted. He was solid. Reliable. He had a commanding voice, rich and golden, his bronze hair bright in the candlelight. He was smooth and collected, with all the confident, quiet authority of an idol in his temple.

My breath caught. Not because of his easy, lopsided smile, or the coy, almost timid way he approached me to ask for a dance. Not because his youth and his status as a widower gave him a romantic, tragic reputation among Josefa and her tittering friends. But because of the silence with which the room watched him. I craved that. I wanted to cup a room in my palm, to tell it to be still, to tell it to hush.

If Rodolfo was aware of his powers of enchantment, he did not reveal it. Of course he wouldn’t. He was a military man, a protégé of Guadalupe Victoria, one of the generals who formed the Provisional Government that ousted and replaced the emperor.

By the end of our first dance, I realized that a politician like Rodolfo would not overlook my father’s legacy for long. If it did not frighten him off when we were first introduced, when he was told my surname—Hernández Valenzuela, indicating my father’s family and then my mother’s—then it might later.

And at twenty, I faced a ticking clock: marry soon, when I was seen as fresh and virginal and desirable, or marry not at all.

So when it became clear he was attracted to my laugh like bees to piloncillo syrup and to my eyes, my mother’s eyes, bright as Chiapas jade, I seized it.

When I announced to my mother that I would be marrying Don Rodolfo Eligio Solórzano Ibarra, she set down her embroidery into her lap without grace, mouth dropped open in surprise. The months since my father’s death had taken a toll on her: her pale skin no longer called to mind fine china, but faded, crumbling paper. Violet shadows weighed beneath her eyes, which had lost their vigor. Her cheeks, once haughty in their height, were hollow, thinned by exhaustion.