The Hacienda(9)

His weight on the mattress was so different from when I had shared a bed with Mamá in Tía Fernanda’s house. As grateful as I was for it, I fantasized idly about when he left for the capital and, for the first time in many, many months, I would have a bed to myself. And more. My own house. My own world. I slowed my mind with choosing paint colors for the different rooms downstairs, tempting dreaming to take me.

It was not until much later, as I swayed on the dark cusp of sleep, that I realized that since arriving at Hacienda San Isidro, I had not seen a single cat.





5





ANDRéS


Apan

Diciembre 1820

Three years earlier


AS I RODE ACROSS the countryside of the district of Tulancingo, the valley of Apan claimed me like a summer twilight: the bittersweet realization that I was nearly home was soft at first, teasing at the fringes of my senses, then took me all at once, swift and complete. Some kilometers outside the town, I told my traveling companions my mule had a stone in her shoe, and that they should ride on. I would rejoin them momentarily.

I dismounted.

For seven years at the seminary in Guadalajara, the Inquisition hovered over my shoulder like the shroud of death, ever watchful, its clammy breath foul on the back of my neck. From the age of sixteen until my ordination, I smothered my senses, drowning them in Latin and philosophy and penance. I prayed until my voice was hoarse. I wore a hair shirt when instructed it would purify me. I folded up the darkest parts of myself and shoved my contorted spirit into a box that remained locked.

But when my feet touched the earth of the valley, the axis of the world shifted beneath them. The windswept winter countryside and low gray skies turned their sleepy gaze toward me. They saw me, recognized me, and nodded in the slow, satisfied way of the ancient giants. I scanned the low, dark hills that curled around the valley like knuckles: for the first time in seven years, I sensed the spirits who hummed through this small corner of creation even when their names were forgotten.

The valley’s awareness of me overtook me in a roar, in a wave, and I trembled beneath my too-big sarape. For years I had buried myself behind thick walls, alone—my secret severed me from the other students at the seminary. Fear of discovery governed my every thought and step; I hid myself so completely that I lived a hair’s breadth from suffocation.

Now I was seen.

Now, the thing I feared most spread like a shadow in my breast: here, far from the eyes of the Inquisition, the parts of myself that I had shoved into a box began to unfurl, soft and curious as plumes of smoke, testing lock and hinge.

I forced them down.

Tell him I pray for his return to San Isidro. The birds pray for his return to San Isidro.

My grandmother’s prayer was answered. I was nearly home. But what would become of me, now that I was?



* * *




*

MY ARRIVAL WAS IMMEDIATELY consumed by preparations for the feast day of la Virgen de Guadalupe. Padre Guillermo and Padre Vicente had a specific vision for the procession of the statue of la Virgen and San Juan Diego through the streets of Apan, and made it clear what my place in it was: shouldering the litter carrying la Virgen and the saint at her feet alongside men from the town. Padre Guillermo was too old for such things, Padre Vicente said, and he—well, he would be leading the procession, wouldn’t he?

This was my place as a young cura, a sin destino priest with no parish and no hope of a career in a city. This was the proper place of a mestizo priest in the eyes of Padre Vicente. He was correct. More than he knew. Even if I had been a man of ambition, even if I had entered the priesthood with the intention of lining my life with silver and comfort like so many men I met in the seminary, I could not change what I was.

I knew Padre Guillermo from before I left for Guadalajara. How often he had found me asleep beneath the pews in the church as a boy and carried me back to my mother through the dawn, curled in his arms like a drowsy kitten. If Guillermo guessed at the reason I fled from the house in the middle of the night, seeking the silence of the house of God, he never mentioned it. It was he who wrote to Guadalajara and welcomed my transfer to the small parish of Apan, and when I arrived, dusty and exhausted from weeks on the road, he who embraced me. Guillermo, for all his fluster and pomp and his desire to please the wealthy hacendados who funded renovations in the church, was someone I trusted. But still, he had never lived on the haciendas as I had as a child. There were so many things he could never understand.

Vicente was new, a replacement for old Padre Alejandro, who had walked alongside the specter of Death for years. From the moment I met Vicente’s hawkish light gaze, a curl of fear turned in my bones. He could not be trusted—not with me, nor my secrets, nor with the struggles of my people.

The priests exited the church through the back to begin the procession, and I took my place among the three other townspeople elected to carry the litter of la Virgen—the aging master of the post, an equally graying baker, and his whip-thin son who looked no more than twelve. Nine years of insurgency had left no family unscathed. No townsperson, no hacendado, no villager had not lost a son or brother or nephew in their prime. If not in the battles that tore up the countryside and painted it black with blood, then to tuberculosis, or gangrene, or typhus.

I took my place and lifted the litter of la Virgen on my left shoulder. We were imbalanced; my height was not matched by the baker, so I would need to slouch to keep la Virgen at an even keel.