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.