The Hacienda(56)

My whole body trembled as I crossed the room to Paloma. As I stepped through the doorway, I cast a look at Andrés over my shoulder.

The wall behind him was perfectly blank.

No blood. No name.

It was gone.



* * *




*

THE COLD IN MY bones did not lift as Paloma and I entered the kitchen. While she lit the oven, I knelt in the doorway to light the censers that stood guard there. It took me longer than usual to get the resin to light; my hand shook violently. Finally, smoke twined upward like columns, filling the kitchen with the distinctive aroma of copal. I inhaled of its comfort. My heart slowed. This was safe. This I could rely on. This would not falter.

Andrés, on the other hand . . .

I bit my lip as I glanced down the hall. Before me, it was a cool dark, a neutral dark that did not watch me. Perhaps the house’s attention was on Andrés. He has secrets, Beatriz . . .

A shudder tripped over my shoulders.

How was I going to survive the night? How was I going to survive at all? How on earth was I to receive Rodolfo? Would he humor my many censers ringing our bed? Would he think me superstitious, or worse, mad?

Was I going mad?

The darkness smirked at me.

I jerked back from the doorway and turned to Paloma. The kitchen faced south, and she had thrown its wide door open to the garden. Sunlight streamed rich and warm into the room as she stoked the fire.

“What are we making?”

Her voice was taut. I knew that feeling. She itched to work with her hands, to forget.

“Something simple and filling,” I said. “Arroz con pollo,” I decided. “It will be easy to make a lot. Padre Andrés is exhausted, and I worry . . . I think he might be ill.”

“What happened?”

I did not know how to reply.

“You won’t shock me. He and I have few secrets between us,” Paloma said flatly, leaning against the side of the kitchen doorway. She scanned the garden beyond: a few chickens wandered in a wide pen abutting the kitchen wall. “I’m not like him, but I was our grandmother’s shadow, just as he was.”

She stepped into the garden and approached the chicken coop. I turned away. Yes, I cooked. But though Tía Fernanda’s cooks tried to teach me, I could not stomach the killing of fowl. Later, when she had plucked and gutted the chicken and I was washing my hands after helping dispose of the unneeded parts, Paloma said: “So how did Andrés hurt himself this time?”

I cleared my throat. Wiped my hands on the rough apron I had thrown on over yesterday’s dress.

“To be frank,” I began in a low voice, low enough that I hoped the house could not hear, “Padre Andrés tried to exorcise whatever it is that makes this house . . . what it is.”

Paloma made a soft noise of understanding. Evidently, talk of exorcisms in the same breath as her cousin did not surprise her in the least. She jerked her chin to the shelves. “Pots for rice are there.”

I stepped around her as she reached for a meat cleaver, found the pot, and placed it on the enormous stove. I wiped sweat from my brow. The warmth of the kitchen felt clean and whole after the bone-deep chill of the rest of the house.

“He hit his head,” I said. “So hard that he vomited and cannot remember half of what happened in the night. And now he cannot recall prayers your grandmother taught him.”

Paloma looked up at this, cleaver held aloft over the chicken carcass. “That’s not good.”

“I’m afraid,” I said, averting my eyes to the pot. My hands moved without my thinking, and soon, the smell of browning rice enveloped us like a rich blanket. “How long has the house been this way?”

A long moment passed. Paloma continued cutting up the chicken into the appropriate-sized pieces. Instead of answering, she asked another question: “How is it that a woman of your class is like this?”

“What?” I said. Mad? I wondered.

“Useful.”

I stared at the rice, moving it around the bottom of the pot with a large wooden spoon. I added more ingredients; cumin bit the air, mixing with the sizzle of broth hitting hot oil.

Useful. From Paloma’s tone, I knew it was meant to be taken as a compliment. But how I had loathed being called useful by Tía Fernanda. As if being of use to her was the only way I could earn any worth.

In faltering sentences, I explained my family’s past: my mother being turned out by her family for marrying my father, how we relied on Papá’s extended family in Cuernavaca, living with them in an ancient stone house on an hacienda that produced sugar. Papá inherited a little from those relatives, and his rise through the army and position in the emperor’s cabinet meant we catapulted to as high a class standing as Mamá had started. I explained how we fell just as quickly: when Papá was murdered, refuge with Mamá’s cousins was our only choice. How Tía Fernanda treated me. How when an offer of marriage was extended to me, I seized it like a drowning man clings to driftwood. For what other choice was there?

Paloma sighed softly when I came to the end of my tale. She was chopping tomatoes for the sauce.

Her face had an odd look on it.

Pity, I realized with a start. Paloma pitied me for my story. Pride flung up hard walls around me.

“So that is why I am useful,” I said. “Because my family will have nothing to do with me.”