1
ANDRÉS
HACIENDA SAN ISIDRO
NOVIEMBRE 1823
THE LOW SWEEP OF the southern horizon was a perfect line, unmarred by even the smudge of horses tossing their heads in the distance. The road yawned empty.
1
ANDRÉS
HACIENDA SAN ISIDRO
NOVIEMBRE 1823
THE LOW SWEEP OF the southern horizon was a perfect line, unmarred by even the smudge of horses tossing their heads in the distance. The road yawned empty.
The carriage was gone.
I stood with my back to the gates of Hacienda San Isidro. Behind me, high white stucco walls rose like the bones of a long-dead beast jutting from dark, cracked earth. Beyond the walls, beyond the main house and the freshly dug graves behind the capilla, the tlachiqueros took their machetes to the sharp fields of maguey. Wandering the fields as a boy taught me agave flesh does not give like man’s; the tlachiqueros lift their machetes and bring them down again, and again, each dull thud seeking the heart’s sweet sap, each man becoming more intimately acquainted with the give of meat beneath metal, with the harvesting of hearts.
A breeze snaked into the valley from the dark hills, its dry chill stinging my cheeks and the wet in my eyes. It was time to turn back. To return to my life as it was. Yet the idea of turning, of gazing up at San Isidro’s heavy wooden doors alone, slicked my palms with sweat.
There was a reason I had once set my jaw and crossed San Isidro’s threshold, a reason why I passed through its gates like a reckless youth from legends of journeys to the underworlds.
That reason was gone.
And still I stood in the center of the dirt road that led away from San Isidro, away from Apan, my eyes fixed on the horizon with the fervor of a sinner before their saint. As if the force of my grief alone could transcend the will of God and return that carriage. Return the woman who had been taken from me. The echo of retreating hoofbeats and the clouds of dust they left curled in the air like copal incense, mocking me.
It is said that mortal life is empty without the love of God. That the ache of loneliness’s wounds is assuaged by obedience to Him, for in serving God we encounter perfect love and are made whole.
But if God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, if He is three in one in the Trinity, then God knows nothing of loneliness.
God knows nothing of standing with his back to a gray morning, of dropping to his knees in the dust. Of his shoulders slumping beneath the new weight of knowing what it meant notto be alone, and an acute awareness of his chest’s own emptiness.
God knows nothing of loneliness, because God has never tasted companionship as mortals do: clinging to one another in darkness so complete and sharp it scrapes flesh from bone, trusting one another even as the Devil’s breath blooms hot on their napes.
Sharp pebbles dug into my kneecaps through my worn trousers as I knelt, my breathing labored, too exhausted to sob. I knew what the maguey felt. I knew the whine of the machete. I knew how my chest gave beneath the weight of its fall. I knew how it felt to have my heart harvested, sweet aguamiel carving winding wet tracks down my hollowed chest. My wounds sinful stigmata, flinching and festering in the sun.
God knows nothing of being alone.
Alone is kneeling in dust, gazing at an empty horizon.
In the end, it was not the ink-slick shadows and echoing, dissonant laughter of San Isidro that broke me. It was not fear that carved my chest open.
It was losing her.
2
BEATRIZ
SEPTIEMBRE 1823
two months earlier
THE CARRIAGE DOOR CREAKED as Rodolfo opened it. I blinked, adjusting to the light that spilled across my skirts and face, and took the hand Rodolfo offered me as gracefully as I could. Hours of imprisonment in the carriage over rough country roads left me wanting to claw my way out of that stuffy box and suck in a lungful of fresh air, but I restrained myself. I knew my role as delicate, docile wife. Playing that role had already swept me away from the capital, far from the torment of my uncle’s house, into the valley of Apan.
It brought me here and left me standing before a high dark wooden door set deep in white stucco walls, squinting under the blinding sweep of azure September skies, the broad shoulders and steady hands of Don Rodolfo Eligio Solórzano at my side.
In the sunlight his loose curls gleamed bronze, and his eyes were almost as light as the sky beyond. “This is San Isidro,” he said.
Hacienda San Isidro. I let my eyes drag over the heavy door, its wrought-iron accents, the high dark spikes on the front of the walls, the wilting bougainvillea that wound through them, blossoms and thorns alike drained of color and dying.
It was not quite what I expected, having been raised in the verdant, lush gardens of an hacienda in Cuernavaca, but it was my new conquest. My salvation.
Mine.
* * *
WHEN I FIRST MET Rodolfo, dancing at a ball to celebrate the founding of the Republic, he told me his family had owned an hacienda that produced pulque for nearly two hundred years.
Ah, I thought, watching the sharp panes of his clean-shaven face flirt with the shadows of the candlelit ballroom. So that was how your family kept its money throughout the war.Industry will rise and fall, men will scorch the earth and slaughter one another for emperors or republics, but they will always want drink.
We danced the next round, and the next. He watched me with an intensity I knew then was a priceless tool.
“Tell me about the hacienda,” I had said.
It was a big house, he replied, sprawling over the low hills north of Apan, overlooking sharp-pointed fields of maguey. Generations of his family had lived there before the war of independence from Spain, cultivating the agave and producing pulque, its sour beer, to be shipped to the capital’s thirsty markets. There were gardens filled with birds of paradise, the air thick with swallows, he said, and broad, bustling kitchens to feed all the tlachiqueros and the servants and family. They celebrated feast days in a capilla on the property, a chapel adorned with paintings of saints and an altar carved by the scion of the family in the seventeenth century and gilded by later, wealthier generations.
“Do you miss it?” I asked.
He did not answer, not directly. Instead, he described the way the sun set in the valley of Apan: first rich golden, deepening to amber, and then, with a swift, sure strike, night overtook the sun like the extinguishing of a candle. The darkness in the valley was so deep it was almost blue, and when thunderstorms slinked over steep hills into the valley, lightning spilled like mercury across the fields of maguey, silvering the plants’ sharp tips like the peaked helmets of conquistadors.
It will be mine, I thought then. A flash of intuition that swept me with the strong, trusting arm of a lover into the next steps of the dance.
And mine it became.
For the first time since March, a house was mine.
So why didn’t I feel safe when the enormous door of Hacienda San Isidro groaned open and Rodolfo and I walked into the first courtyard of the estate?
A delicate tremor, the tremble of a monarch’s wings, fluttered at the back of my throat as I took in the hacienda.
Its buildings were muscular and ungainly, the awkwardly splayed limbs of a beast frozen halfway into adolescence. The rainy season was ending; the garden should have been shades of emerald at this point in September, but what scarce vegetation grew in the outer courtyard was as brown as the earth. Wild magueys scattered weed-like and drooping on either side of a grayed capilla—it must have once been white—and dotted the lawn that led up to the house. Rotting birds of paradise crowded in scattered beds, their heads submissively bowed before us as our boots crunched up the gravel path. The air felt heavier inside San Isidro’s walls, thicker, as if I had stepped into a strange, soundless dream where the stucco swallowed even the songs of the birds.
Outside of the chapel, we passed into an inner courtyard. Here, Rodolfo gestured to two rows of servants who stood at attention in front of their quarters and kitchen, waiting to greet us. Before they dipped their heads, a dozen pairs of black shining eyes swept over me, cool and assessing.
After explaining that the tlachiqueros were in the fields until dusk, Rodolfo made introductions: José Mendoza, once the right-hand man to the dismissed foreman Esteban Villalobos, had acted as record keeper for over a decade. He was the chief authority when Rodolfo was in the capital. Mendoza removed his weather-stained hat and placed it on his chest; his hands were gnarled with age and work. He looked old enough to be my grandfather.
Ana Luisa, the head of household, was a woman of about fifty, her steel-gray hair parted severely in the center, her plaits wound tightly around her head in a solemn crown. Her daughter, Paloma—Ana Luisa’s double with raven black hair and rounder cheeks—stood at her side. Other names rolled over me like water; I heard them but remembered none, for a figure caught my eye at an arched doorway at the far entrance to the servants’ courtyard.
A woman strode toward us, tall as a soldier and possessing all the same swagger. She wore a faded blue skirt that was short enough to reveal leather riding boots, stained with sweat; a wide-brimmed hat hung down her back by a cord around her neck, but if her complexion was any indication, she rarely wore it. Her skin was bronze and her hair streaked gold from long hours in the sun.
Stay out of the sun or you’ll never get a husband, Tía Fernanda once whispered snidely, pinching the skin on the back of my hand. Though she had never met my father, and my mother refused to reveal any information about how mixed his heritage was, it didn’t matter to Tía Fernanda: my hair and face gave her enough ammunition to find me undesirable. To refuse to let me stand next to her cream-pale daughters at the ball where I had met Rodolfo.
In the end, Fernanda’s behavior meant that I had a golden husband, and her daughters did not. Fate had been unkind to me, but sometimes, its pettiness worked in my favor.
The woman stopped directly in front of me. Her pale eyes were the mirror of Rodolfo’s, and her hair was the same color, sun-gilded and windswept. She gave me a swift, frank look from polished black shoes—quickly gathering dust—to my gloves and hat.
“You’re early,” she announced. “Is this my new sister?”
My lips parted in surprise. Who? Rodolfo had only ever mentioned a sister once in passing. She was called Juana; he said she was a few years younger than his own twenty-eight years, an age that led me to assume she was married. Never once had he mentioned her in the same breath as San Isidro.
“You look displeased,” Juana said after Rodolfo introduced me, a hint of amusement in her voice. It was not warm. “Did Rodolfo not warn you about me?” Her lips were dry, and thinner than was considered attractive. They disappeared entirely when she smiled; her teeth were almost too bright, even and ivory as a set of piano keys. “Don’t worry, I keep to myself. I won’t even be underfoot—I live over there.” She jutted her sharp chin over the line of servants, to a set of low buildings between the house and the capilla.
Not in the family’s house? “Why?” I blurted out.
Juana’s face shifted, resettled. “The house is terribly drafty this time of year,” she said lightly. “Isn’t it, Rodolfo?”
Rodolfo’s face looked a bit strained as he agreed and returned her smile. He was embarrassed by her, I realized with a start. Why? She was unusual, to be sure, but there was a frankness to her that reminded me of Papá’s no-nonsense manner. A simple, easy kind of authority, one that drew the attention of all the servants to her.
I could almost feel the air shift around me, toward her and her undeniable gravity. Rodolfo was not the master of this house.
Juana was.
A breathless fear uncurled in my chest; in response, I adjusted my posture, drawing my shoulders back as my father used to. There was nothing to be afraid of. This hacienda was mine. I married its patrón, and Juana chose to live among the servants. I ought to be glad Juana was so embarrassing to Rodolfo that he barely spoke of her. She was no threat to me. Let her stay in this middle courtyard, in the servants’ quarters. The main house would be mine to rule. My domain.
Those thoughts quieted the unsettled lurch of my gut as we chatted with Juana for another moment longer, and then left the servants to their work and walked through the arched doorway into the innermost courtyard.
Rodolfo had asked me twice if I wanted to stay in the capital, in his family’s old Baroque apartment, but I refused. I wanted the house. I wanted to steal Mamá away from Tía Fernanda, bring her here and show it to her. I wanted to prove to Mamá that marrying Rodolfo was right. That my choice would open a door into a new life for us.
And now, as I at last faced the house, the slant of its gap-toothed roof, its dark windows and age-weathered white stucco walls, a feral feeling seized me.
Get back.
My spine stiffened. I wanted to fling myself back from the courtyard as if I had been burned.
But I refused to let myself falter. I tightened my grip on Rodolfo’s hand and banished the feeling. It was foolish. I was taken aback by Juana, but that was no reason to flee. Not when I had won so much.
Not when I had nothing to run to.
The air was thick and silent, our footsteps the only sound as we reached a set of low, broad steps leading up to the front door. I stepped onto the first, then froze, a gasp stealing the breath from my lips.
A dead rat splayed across the third step, its head tilted back at a broken angle, its stiff tongue jutting through yellowed teeth. Perhaps it had fallen from the roof, but its skull had split open as if it had been flung from a height with incredible force. Shining brains spilled onto the stone step, a splatter of rotten pink covered with crawling black flies.
Rodolfo let out a weak cry of surprise and yanked me back from the steps.
Juana’s light laugh lilted over our heads. She was directly behind us, then at once at my elbow.
“Oh, the cats here get a little carried away,” she said gaily, as if explaining away a troublesome nephew. “Do you mind cats?”
3
THE TOUR RODOLFO GAVE me of the main house was brief. The housekeeper, Ana Luisa, would give me a more thorough introduction to its inner workings later in the day, he said. Though he had spent his childhood in this house and had many fond memories of it, he came and went too infrequently during the war to understand running it as well as she.
The house’s walls were thick, stucco and whitewashed; though the sun shone bright outside, cool shadows draped the halls. The building was arranged in a U shape around a central courtyard and was two-storied only over its central, largest section. The southern branch housed the kitchen and storerooms and was Ana Luisa’s domain. At the north end of the central wing, a staircase led to an upper floor composed of bedrooms, the suite of the patrón, and several empty drawing rooms.
As Rodolfo and I returned downstairs, I noticed a narrow passage to the right of the foot of the stairs. Its doorway was boarded up, a hasty job of mismatched wood and rusting nails.
“Juana told me there was damage in the northern wing,” Rodolfo said when he noticed how I paused, my attention drawn to the doorway. He took me gently by the hand and led me away. “An earthquake, or water, I can’t remember which. I will have Mendoza look into repairs.”
I tilted my chin up as we entered a formal dining room, tracing Moorish tiles imported from the peninsula by his forebears to a high ceiling. A narrow ledge ran around the circumference of the room, nearly twelve feet off the ground.
Rodolfo followed the line of my gaze. “When my parents used to have parties here, the servants would take candelabras up there,” he said. “It was as bright as an opera house.” Then his smile at the memory faded, and a shadow passed over his face. “Never go up there. A maid fell from there once.”
His words struck the air off-key, distant and slightly dissonant.
I shivered. Contrary to what Juana said, drafty was not the term I would have chosen to describe the chill inside the house. It sank into my bones like claws. The still air tasted of the staleness of an underground storeroom. I wanted to throw open all the shuttered windows, to let in fresh air and light.
But Rodolfo escorted me swiftly onward, closing the door with a snap behind him.
“We will dine somewhere more comfortable tonight,” he said.
Tomorrow, I promised the room. Tomorrow I would throw light into all its shadowed corners, order paint to be mixed to tidy its soot-soiled stucco.
From behind the door, the room laughed at me.
I froze. Rodolfo kept walking; my hand slipped out of his.
Had I misheard? Was I imagining it? I was certain I had heard light, bubbling laughter, like that of a wicked child, reaching through the heavy wooden door.
But it was empty. Behind that door, I knew the room was empty. I had just seen it.
“Come along, querida.” Rodolfo’s smile was overbright, strained. “There is much to see before dinner.”
And there was. Gardens, stables, household servants’ quarters, the village, where the tlachiqueros and farm workers lived, the general store, the capilla . . . San Isidro was a world unto its own.
Rodolfo left me in the care of Ana Luisa for a tour of the rest of the house, and I immediately wished he hadn’t. She was brusque and humorless.
“This is the green parlor,” she said, gesturing into one room but not entering. It had a single fireplace that was soot-stained; the walls were white, the floorboards scratched and tired.
“It’s not green.” My voice landed hollow on the empty space.
“The rug used to be,” was Ana Luisa’s only answer.
Like her voice, the house was devoid of color. White, brown, shadows, soot—these were the smudgy palate of San Isidro. By the time the sun was setting, and Ana Luisa had finished guiding me around the servants’ courtyard and the tidy capilla, I was exhausted. The house and the grounds were in various states of disrepair; the amount of effort it would take to prepare them for Mamá daunted me. But as Ana Luisa and I returned to the house and I took it in from the courtyard, from its foreboding dark door to the cracked tiles on the roof, I could not stop a flutter of emotion from rising in my throat.
This house was mine. Here I was safe.
* * *
SEVEN MONTHS AGO, I sprang from bed in the middle of the night, woken by pounding from somewhere in the house and shouting from the street. Heart in my throat, I stumbled into the dark hall and seized the handle of the parlor door with clammy hands, tripping over the rug. Light and shadows danced mockingly across dainty chairs and delicate wallpaper, across Papá’s worn map of his battles pinned to the wall opposite the second-floor windows.
I rushed to the windows. Flames filled the street below: there were men in military uniform, dozens of them, brandishing torches and dark muskets crowned with long bayonets, their steel grinning greedily in the light of the flames.
One of them pounded on the door, shouting my father’s name.
Where was Papá? Surely he would know the meaning of—
And then Papá opened the door. Papá was among them, his hair disheveled, a robe wrapped tidily around his wiry frame. He looked more tired than I had ever seen him, heavy shadows accenting the gauntness of his face.
But his eyes burned with hatred as he took in the men surrounding him. He began to speak, but even if I had pressed my ear to the window, I would not have been able to hear him, not from so far above, not over the din of the shouting. I was paralyzed as the men seized Papá by the upper arms and dragged him away from the house, into the street. He seemed so frail, so breakable . . .
Traitor. A single word rose from the din. Traitor.
Then they were gone.
Only a handful remained behind, their faces cast in shadow as they took the butts of their muskets and thrust them at the windows below. Glass shattered; men flung shining liquid and torches through the jagged teeth of broken panes. The men melted away into the night, and I could not move, not even as the smell of burning wood rose into the room and the floorboards beneath my knees grew warm.
Papá was not a traitor. Even though the man who became emperor and Papá began the war on different sides—Papá with the insurgents and Agustín de Iturbide with the Spanish—they worked side by side in the end. Papá fought for independence. For México. Every battle he and I marked in red ink on his map was for México, every—
Mamá’s shriek split my skull. I flung myself back from the window; my heel caught on the leg of a chair and sent me sprawling on the carpet. Heat scorched my lungs; the air rippled thick with it. Smoke rose in delicate columns through the floorboards as I pushed myself to all fours.
The map. I lurched upward, then to the wall, and reached for the pins on which it hung, hissing as they seared my fingertips.
“Beatriz!”
I ripped it down, folding it with shaking hands as I ran toward her voice. Smoke stung my eyes; my ribs seized with coughing.
“Mamá!” I couldn’t see, I couldn’t breathe as I tripped downstairs to the back door. Mamá grabbed me and yanked me into the street. Our backs sweated and blistered from the heat behind us; we were coughing, barefooted, shocked by the cold of the night.
Mamá had gone to the servants’ quarters to wake the household staff but found their beds cold and empty. Had they known? Had they known, and fled to save their hides, and never warned us?
They must have known. Someone must have told them what we learned in the pale, fragile light of the next morning: that Agustín de Iturbide, emperor of México, was deposed. Exiled. On a ship to Italy. And his allies? Even those who had been insurgents, like Papá? Rounded up and executed.
“Shot in the back like the cowards they were, that’s what I heard,” said my watery-eyed cousin Josefa across the breakfast table, sneering archly down her Roman nose.
With nowhere to go, Mamá took us to the home of the only family she had left in México, the only ones who still spoke to her after she married Papá, a man of a lower casta than she: that of Sebastián Valenzuela, the son of her father’s cousin.
“But Tío Sebastián hates us,” I whimpered as we walked, shivering, the veil of sweat the heat of the house doused us in turning frigid in the night.
Papá’s map crinkled against my nightdress, clenched protectively between my bicep and rib cage as we ran through the dark winding alleys of the capital. We rounded the back corner of the walls of my uncle’s house and collapsed on the muddy steps of the entrance to the servants’ quarters. Mamá said she couldn’t trust any of her or Papá’s friends. Not after what had happened. We had to come here.
“We don’t have a choice,” she said.
But Sebastián did.
His wife, Fernanda, made that perfectly clear as she took Mamá and me in. She could have left us on the doorstep. She could have turned us away, and Sebastián would not question her judgment.
It was true, and I knew it. My uncle had no love for us, never had, and only took us in out of whatever remaining scrap of childhood loyalty he felt for a cousin long disowned by the family.
He took us in, but he preached self-righteously at dinner our first day in his house how my father had made the wrong choices all through the war, first by throwing his weight behind the insurgents, then by compromising and forming a coalition with the monarchist conservatives.
Though I was exhausted and starving, ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
