The Hacienda(96)
Perhaps I should have respected the finality of her farewell, let my path and hers continue to diverge. But I was weak. I wrote her a letter and sent it. Hastily followed by a second, dashed off when anxiety spun me awake in the black of the night; this was briefer, formal, apologizing for assuming she wanted to hear from me, apologizing for the contents of the first, which were decidedly . . . raw. Perhaps inappropriate. Certainly stupid.
I had not let myself hope for a reply. How could I? What if I had, and a reply never came? Or what if she did reply . . . ? I did not know what I would do then.
Now that it had happened, I discovered that my hands had begun to shake.
The house shifted around me. Could I interpret its creaking as self-satisfied? As pleased with itself? Perhaps it had filched this from Paloma and Mendoza’s bookkeeping room. Perhaps, over the course of my quiet visits, it had sensed that a hole was gouged open in me as well, that I was healing from wounds just as it was.
Perhaps it also sensed the reason why. A curious presence tugged at my attention from above. I heard no words—houses, healed as I had healed this one, were not capable of speech—but I understood its question.
Where? it wondered. Where is she?
I knew which she it referred to. Not María Catalina, no—it was relieved to be rid of her. The she it had helped save, by whisking us down the stairs and out the door the night of the fire. She who had left with the intention of never returning. She whose letter I slipped into my pocket.
“Gone,” I whispered. “It’s just you and me, now.”
I walked to the doorway and patted it as I passed through, as one would pat the flank of a horse at the end of a long, exhausting journey.
Somewhere upstairs, a door slammed.
I jumped, snatching my hand back with a curse.
Soft laughter spilled overhead. I looked up at the rafters, heart thumping against the inside of my chest. That was not the shrill, girlish giggle that plagued Beatriz and me over the last few weeks—no, this was a harmony of different voices, some smokier and older than I had ever heard before.
I willed my heart to slow and scowled at the rafters.
The house was teasing me.
“Cielo santo,” I snapped. But an affectionate smile toyed at the corner of my mouth as I turned to the front door.
Hacienda San Isidro was healing from its wounds.
I stepped into the sunlight and took Beatriz’s letter from my pocket. I brushed my fingertips over my name written by her hand, over the green wax with which she had sealed the letter, a reverent thief with his stolen treasure.
With time, God willing, so, too, would I heal. But I was not ready to. Not yet.
I opened it.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
IT BEGAN BECAUSE I am afraid of the dark.
Over the course of the first eighteen years of my life, my family lived in nine houses. I learned by the fourth of these that not all houses are the same. Some are still. Empty and quiet. Others have long, long memories, hung thick like curtains and so dense you can taste their bitterness the moment you cross the threshold.
I have a theory about houses, says Andrés.
From the age of thirteen, as my family settled into its eighth house, I found the sensation of being watched unbearable. I began to sleep with the lights on. For years, I have endured teasing from my sisters. I still fear the intimate horrors houses see and keep, what grudges build over decades and stain their walls like so much water damage.
But it’s only a theory, after all.
A theory that planted the seed of an idea.
* * *
*
AS A YOUNG MEXICAN-AMERICAN reader, I struggled to find representation in genre fiction. It simply didn’t exist. I clung to any brunette on the page, desperate for mirrors that reflected my experience of feeling out of place in spaces that should feel like home.
I knew from the opening sketches of this idea that this book—a sacrifice at the altar of my childhood fears, an homage to Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier—would feature characters who looked like me and my family, who acted and sounded like us. I also knew I wanted it to take place during or after Mexico’s War of Independence, a period that has fascinated me for years.
As I am a historian by training, I flung myself into researching the crucial, complicated period directly following the end of Mexico’s War of Independence. A historical period is more than the dates of its battles and politicians jockeying for power in affluent capitals. It is the sum of a thousand strokes of a mad artist’s brush: it is droughts and floods, new inheritance laws, fabrics and building materials becoming cheap or too expensive, taxes imposed to be paid or ignored, the privileging of one language over another. It is the rhythms of daily life in towns that are silenced, the spirits that move in the shadows cast by the conquerors’ history books.
I knew that in the year 1823, two years after the end of the draining eleven-year War of Independence, money was scarce. I also knew I wanted my novel to be shaped by the classic Gothic trappings of a grand old house and a mysterious new husband. As I sifted through the ashes of the War of Independence, searching for the right setting, I followed the money.
It led to pulque.
It led to an hacienda.
And as I wrote, The Hacienda began to engage with the ugly themes of the period: the racist casta system, the racial and socioeconomic dynamics of the hacienda and land ownership, colonialism, and oppressive religion. The novel evolved. It became more than the story of a house, for in this period, a house like Hacienda San Isidro was more than four walls, more than a home.