The Hacienda(90)

The wind shifted; smoke from the cooking fire carried over to me, and I shuddered. Paloma looked up from stirring a vat of pozole over the fire.

I lifted the letter I held in my hand, too shaken to speak.

Paloma’s face transformed with pity. She set her ladle aside and wiped her hands on her apron. “I found them among the patrón’s belongings,” she said softly.

I shook the letter once, still speechless. He lied.

“My mother . . .” I fumbled for words. “She wants me to come to her.”

“Will you go?”

I nodded. My voice was hoarse from disuse; could I trust it to carry me through a sentence? “I have to,” I said. “I can’t stay.”

Paloma held out her arms to me. I cried in her embrace like a child.

“Now that’s enough,” she said after a minute or two, pulling me away by the shoulders. “If you cry any more you’ll reopen your side, and it’s me Andrés will be angry with.”

I sniffed and looked around us. We were somewhere in the village. Small houses nestled up against one another like sparrows against a winter wind; a few curious onlookers peered at us but quickly turned away or vanished into their houses when they saw me looking.

“Where is he?”

Paloma shrugged, turning back to the pozole. “Back at the house, trying to get it to listen to him,” she said. “He’ll wear himself out eventually. And when he does, he knows where to find us.”





32





ANDRéS



AFTER A DAY AND night of hovering at Beatriz’s bedside, using my grandmother’s gifts to ensure that her recovery was seamless and quick, Paloma unceremoniously ushered me out of her house.

“She can’t rest properly if you keep meddling. Go be useful elsewhere,” she said. With a meaningful tilt of her head, she gestured out the doorway at the main house of the hacienda. “You know what I mean.”

I did.

The morning was gray and misty as I walked across the courtyard to the house, my aunt Inés’s pamphlet in hand. Its pages had been damaged by rain, but its glyphs survived without a smudge. I suspected something a bit stronger than ink bound them to the page.

The house watched my approach, silent and apprehensive. Its stucco was stained with soot from the smoke, but the fire had primarily damaged the far side of the house. From the front, it was the same it had always been: a few tiles missing from the roof, wilting bougainvillea. Flower beds weeded, then abandoned.

I could almost feel it narrowing its invisible eyes as it sized me up: like it, I looked the same as I had before the night of the fire. But a different man opened the front door and stepped into its cavernous quiet. It smelled of rain, wet wood. The aftertaste of smoke lingered heavy on the mist that seeped into the ruins of the dining room and, above it, Beatriz’s study and bedchamber.

The night of the fire, the roof had collapsed on Juana. Mendoza and I searched for her body there the next day and found it in the formal dining room, shattered and scorched. The floor of the burning room had collapsed into the room below before rain could extinguish the flames.

We buried Juana in the Solórzano plot with even less fanfare than her brother . . . and as far from her brother as we could manage. The caudillo Victoriano Román abandoned his investigation against Beatriz when Paloma brought forth a blood-blackened knife and dress from Juana’s rooms; her evidence was compounded by Juana’s arson and the blatantly clear attempt she had made to kill Beatriz.

I shook away the memory of finding Beatriz ringed by flames. It haunted me like my own shadow. In my brief, stolen hours of sleep since that night, I saw nothing but her silhouette against Perdition’s rage. In dreams, I could not move. I cried out to her but was voiceless. My feet were too heavy, my arms feeble and unable to move as fire devoured her, as her screams for help whipped the flames higher, still higher.

I woke drenched in cold sweat, her name knotted in my throat.

Never again would I allow her to be so threatened. I swore no more harm would come to anyone under this roof. I was there that morning to ensure that.

But would it be enough?

Paloma told me that she and Mendoza had found a stack of letters addressed to Beatriz among Rodolfo’s papers, that she suspected they came from Beatriz’s mother.

She wants to leave, Cuervito, she said. We must let her.

I wanted to flinch away from the softness of her voice. I found my beloved cousin’s brusqueness fortifying. I longed for her sharp edges, a blunt retort. To receive her sympathy made me fear she saw too much. It made me fear she saw even more clearly than I how powerfully I wanted Beatriz to stay.

But would I want to stay, if I were Beatriz? So many Solórzanos had died in this house over the years. Some violently, some not. Their voices would always live in its walls, as would the memories of the hundreds of people of my family who had served them. Such houses were what they were. I could not remove those voices any more than I could remove the foundation of the house. Some people could live in such houses utterly unaware of the company they held. For others, the walls were halfway to sentience, as difficult to live with as an overly intrusive relative.

But there was one force I needed to release. One body left to bring to the graveyard once its spirit had passed.

I could only hope it would be enough to convince Beatriz to stay.