The Hacienda(52)
I had to continue to hide myself. That was how I had survived, and how I would continue to survive. There was no question about that.
I dropped her gaze and turned to the smoking kindling.
“I need to pray about this,” I said to the fire.
“Prayers are empty talk.” I flinched at the acidity in Paloma’s voice. She stood sharply, her jaw set fiercely as she tightened her shawl around her shoulders. “She needs help.”
She left and let the door slam behind her.
* * *
*
AFTER CELEBRATING MASS IN the capilla the next morning, I left the chapel, taking a shortcut through the graveyard of generations of dead Solórzanos. My feet followed the path with the habit of many years; hopping over the low wall, I was a boy of eight again, or twelve, or fifteen, visiting my grandmother on an escape from town with its endless days of school and chores and endless nights of dodging my drunken father’s outbursts.
The house watched me out of the corner of its eye. Rather than toying with me, plying me with centuries-old gossip and whispers in singsong voices as it had when I was a child, it kept a cautious distance. Perhaps it could smell the change in me. Perhaps it knew how deeply I had buried the parts of me it found the most interesting.
A hush fell around me as I wove between the graves and the aged, humble headstones. Paloma was the seventh generation of our family to live on this land; one day, she, too, would be buried here, and her children would continue living beside the house, her daughters working under its roof, her sons taking up the machetes of tlachiqueros or herding sheep. Another generation would make its living in the shadow of the golden Solórzano family and their maguey.
I walked down the hill to where the villagers buried their dead. I had spent the better part of the night staring at the ceiling in the dark, wondering what I should do. It was time to stop wondering and ask Titi directly.
I followed Ana Luisa’s direction to where my grandmother was buried, my shoes leaving deep impressions in rain-saturated earth. I felt it before I read her name on the grave: Alejandra Flores Pérez, d. Julio 1820.
July. I was ordained that month. I left Guadalajara in the fall; I was slow on the road, deterred by moving armies and the threat of bandits, but I had returned as soon as I could.
Yet it was not soon enough.
Why couldn’t you have waited for me? I sank to my knees at her side, not caring if the earth dirtied my trousers, not caring for anything at all but my own sorrow, my own self-pity. Tears welled thick in my throat; I shut my eyes and tilted my head back, to the sky and its pale winter sun. Why couldn’t you stay with me?
The wind lifted, shifting my hair, then fell again. Clouds slowed over the hills that ringed the valley. Far past the walls of San Isidro, a shepherd whistled to his dog, his note riding thin and high through the clear air.
The graves were quiet.
I received no reply.
All I wanted was her voice telling me what to do, correcting me, instructing me as she had since before I could even read.
Another lift of the wind. It swept tender over my face, and a memory bloomed behind my closed eyelids. I was a boy, watching my grandmother tuck wool blankets tight around a child with a fever, murmuring prayers I could not understand. We were in the village of an hacienda to the northeast of Tulancingo. Often, I accompanied Titi as she visited villagers on other estates surrounding Apan on an ornery gray donkey one of my cousins had named el Cuervito in jest.
That year, a fever had swept through many of the haciendas, seizing children in swift waves. I watched my grandmother tend to the child before her, a censer on the floor beside the cot and an egg in her right hand. The copal twined like a lazy snake toward the low ceiling of the room. A shadow hung over the child, as if someone had draped a smoky veil over the scene before me, and only my grandmother could pass through it unharmed.
Titi stood. Her back was already hunched, even then, her long braids white as milk, but an undeniable strength settled in her posture as she took the child’s mother in her arms and embraced her. Let the woman cry and comforted her softly—in castellano, I remembered, for the pueblo of that hacienda spoke otomí rather than our dialect of mexicano.
As we left, Titi took the censer from me. We walked a short distance from the house.
“What did you see when you looked at the child?” she asked.
The vision of the veil clung to me like the smell of smoke. Something was watching the boy, waiting. “He’s going to die, isn’t he?” I whispered.
Back then, she looked down at me and not the other way around. She nodded solemnly. “Yes.”
“What good did we do, then?” I asked, my voice cracking over the words. “If we can’t stop it?”
Titi stopped and took me by the elbow. I glared at her worn sandals. “Look at me, Andrés.” I obeyed. “What else did you see?”
I thought back to the dark room, the closeness of the air inside, how the only light came from the door and the fire lit to help sweat out the child’s fever. “His mother?”
“Some illnesses we cannot cure,” my grandmother said. “Others we can soothe. Sorrow is one of these. Loneliness is another.” She searched my face. “Do you understand? Tending to lost souls is our vocation.”
Our vocation. It was meant to be ours, shared, the burden slowly distributed from her shoulders onto mine with time. With years of working together. For it was Titi who taught me to listen to mortal and spirit alike, who taught me her own grandmother’s herbal cures and how to banish mal de ojo by passing a chicken’s egg over a child’s feverish body. She taught me all she could, all she knew.