The Hacienda(50)
I turned my head.
Thick strokes of blood splayed across the white stucco, forming a single word, repeated over and over:
RODOLFO RODOLFO RODOLFO RODOLFO RODOLFO
It had been blank. Mere minutes ago it had been white and plain. And now—
A single droplet of blood rolled from the last O. It was fresh blood, as wet as new paint and dripping.
RODOLFO RODOLFO RODOLFO
I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t breathe.
RODOLFO RODOLFO
“Did she . . .” Andrés trailed off.
She. She.
I heard she died of typhus. I heard she was kidnapped by insurgents.
“Did you know Rodolfo’s first wife?” I demanded.
“I . . .” Andrés paused. “I met her. Yes.”
“What did she look like?”
“Like she came from a peninsular family,” he said softly. “Tall, white. She had the palest hair I have ever seen. It looked like corn silk.”
I tore myself away from the wall to look at Andrés. If he had eaten or rested, it hadn’t improved his appearance—his face was sickly, his expression queasy.
“Andrés. I had a dream when you were last here.”
I told him what I had dreamed: the woman in gray, her hair like corn silk, and her eyes like embers. Her flesh-colored claws. The shredded sheets, the marks carved deep in the wooden headboard of the bed.
He listened silently, still hovering in the doorway, either too ill or too stunned to move until I delivered the final piece of what I had to say.
“Juana told me Rodolfo is coming back in two days.”
Andrés looked back at the wall. His eyes followed a thick bead of blood as it carved a fresh path down the stucco. The scrawl was rough, frantic. Could it have been written in fear?
Was it a warning?
“I think you are in danger, Beatriz,” he breathed.
That I knew was true.
But from whom?
17
ANDRéS
Enero 1821
Two years earlier
COLD RAIN SLICKED THE road from Apan to Hacienda San Isidro, leaving my clothes splattered with mud. The walk took the better part of the day; I arrived as evening darkened in the west.
I had returned to Apan nearly six weeks ago, but finally I was home.
Passing through the gates of the property was like passing into a memory that no longer fit. I was a foot too big for a shoe, deformed by the world beyond as I returned to the landscape of my boyhood. The road to San Isidro felt like a path into a dream. I had left the quotidian world of the Church and townspeople and passed into a beyond where the bellies of the clouds hung low and listening, where the coyotes were afraid to draw near Titi’s house. Where all the pieces of me had once made sense. Where I hoped they would again.
It was a false hope, of course. The muddy earth of the hacienda grounds was no different from town. My troubles were not immediately lifted from my shoulders the moment I arrived.
Tía Ana Luisa greeted me with her usual stiffness. Never a warm woman, I doubted she would ever forgive me for the crime of being born with the innate potential she lacked, for becoming my grandmother’s pupil when Titi refused to teach her.
“Paloma is up at the house with the others,” she said, taking my waterlogged bag of few belongings. “I imagine you’ll be staying at the capilla, now that you’re . . .” Here she gestured vaguely at the collar at my neck. “This.”
I let Ana Luisa take my bag to the capilla and followed her instructions to go to the kitchen of the main house. There, Paloma would warm dinner for me, and I could sit by a lit fire and read the Bible to the women of the house as they mended or did embroidery.
Night deepened as I approached the house.
Hello, old friend, I thought as I strode through the softening rain.
It grumbled in reply, shifting cantankerously on its foundations.
I couldn’t help but smile. The house had more moods than a swallow had feathers. I was fond of its peevish spells; its impatient creaks and groaning inspired an urge in me to pat its side affectionately as I would a stubborn but lovable mule. As a child I knew this ancient house of spirits was unlike anything else I had ever seen. Now, after having stepped through the doorways of countless old houses, I knew it was unique.
“Cuervito!” A woman hovered impatiently at the glowing doorway of the kitchen, calling my childhood nickname: little raven. It was Paloma. Aside from the procession, I had not seen her since she was twelve or thirteen, and to see her so grown still caught me by surprise. “Hurry up!”
She ushered me into the warmth of the kitchen, taking my soaked wool sarape and hanging it by the fire. Then she turned, hands on her hips in an uncanny imitation of Titi. “Will you ever stop growing?”
I shrugged, sat where she ordered, and waited patiently while she prepared a plate for me. Years apart had not changed my role in the family: the sole surviving boy among a loud, bossy host of women, my job was to sit and listen, eat the food placed before me, and reach things stored in high places.
Warmth seeped into my waterlogged clothes and windswept bones.
This was home.
When I was dry and fed, Paloma brought me to the green parlor to meet the wife of the patrón.
A fire roared in the hearth. The silhouette of Do?a María Catalina Solórzano, the spun-sugar mistress of Hacienda San Isidro, rose to greet me. I knew from Paloma’s chatter in the kitchen that the staff referred to her as Do?a Catalina. A handful of household staff rose as she did—I recognized one as Paloma’s friend Mariana, transformed by adolescence like Paloma.