The sharpness in Ana Luisa’s voice took me by surprise.
“What won’t please her?” I asked. Surely not the mouthwatering pozole. Starved of rest, my mind was slow to follow what Ana Luisa meant.
She avoided my eyes as she stirred the cauldron of soup before her. Wood from the fire beneath the stove crackled; the silence between us filled with blue smoke. The heat made a bead of sweat drip down her brow.
“That you invited the witch onto her property,” she said at last.
Panic threaded through my chest.
The witch, she said.
Laughter drifted over from the direction of the capilla. I looked over my shoulder. The baptism group was filtering away from the doorway; Andrés lingered next to the beaming young mother, head inclined to listen to her. A grin flashed across his face at something she said. When he placed a hand on the toddler’s wet hair, the girl peered up at him shyly, eyes wide, then buried her face in her mother’s neck.
If Andrés’s witchcraft were revealed, if Padre Vicente learned of his true nature, I knew he would suffer a cruel punishment. But moments like this would also be lost. If anything happened to Andrés, it would leave a gaping wound in the lives of people who needed him.
But Ana Luisa must know. Her own mother was Andrés’s teacher; she herself first demonstrated to me the power of copal. The markings on the inside of the kitchen door were her own work.
But I had promised Andrés I would not tell anyone. Now that oath was seared in my soul by a fierce protective flame. I would keep his secret—and conceal my knowledge of it—even if it meant lying to everyone I knew. Even Rodolfo. Even my mother.
“You cannot possibly mean Padre Andrés,” I said, filling my voice with pious offense. I brought my hand to my forehead and made the sign of the cross for good measure. “He is a man of God.”
“He is many things,” Ana Luisa said flatly. “A friend of Do?a Juana is not one of them. I would not have him in the house if I were you.”
I set my jaw. This was my property, not hers and Juana’s. I married the master of the house, and I was the final authority on the matter of guests.
“Thank you for sharing your concerns,” I said, keeping my tone crisp and neutral. “But my hospitality will not be compromised by whatever grudges Do?a Juana chooses to harbor. No guest is unwelcome in San Isidro, especially not one I invited to bring God’s word and the sacraments to a community in need of them.” I took the tray primly.
Ana Luisa gave me a sideways look, slicing right through my pretenses. Weighing what I had said, no doubt. Weighing my mettle.
If she knew what Andrés was capable of, why wouldn’t she want someone who could cure the house within its walls? Why would Juana not?
Ana Luisa reached into a basket of tamales and plucked out four with practiced hands. She set these on the tray, stacked carefully between the two bowls of pozole. Delicate fingers of steam rose from their husks.
“For your guest,” she said gruffly. “Never underestimate how much that flaquito can eat.”
Andrés and I met at a humble table drenched in sunlight behind the southern wall of the capilla, outside of the tiny rooms that adjoined the chapel for visiting clergy.
Andrés filled the doorway of the rooms when I called his name. His eyes lit with eagerness at the sight of the steaming tray, and he stepped forward—
His head met the top of the doorframe with a solid sound.
“Carajo.”
I fought to hide my amusement as he cast a dirty look at the doorway and ducked through it to join me at the table. He thanked me profusely, then fell silent. The pozole and tamales vanished as if swept away by a starving ghost, and color once again bloomed across Andrés’s face. While there were not many things I trusted Ana Luisa about, I could trust her assessment of her nephew’s appetite.
He sighed and leaned back in his chair, drinking in the sun like a lanky lizard on a warm rock. Purple circles shadowed the skin beneath his closed eyes.
“Did you sleep at all?” I asked.
He made a noncommittal sound.
I ripped a tortilla and used it to fish a piece of pork from my soup. Mamá would cringe at my table manners, but what purpose would putting on airs before Andrés serve? None. There was something about his demeanor that set me at ease. Something in the way he looked at me that made me feel as if he saw me, and that there was no point in shoring up the stony walls I had hidden behind for so long.
I chewed the pork and tortilla thoughtfully, feeling life seep back into me with the red broth. “In the capilla . . . is it like the house?” I wondered.
“No. It’s quiet,” he said softly. “So, so quiet.”
Is there any vocation more natural for a man who hears devils? he had said. Perhaps what he meant was that there was no refuge more profound.
“Are all holy places?”
“Some. My mother used to panic because I would vanish in the night as a child. Then she would find me in the church, asleep beneath a pew in the morning . . .”
He opened his eyes, then straightened. Stiffly. The shift of his shoulders hinted that perhaps he thought he had spoken too much.
But something in my heart unfurled thinking about a small black-haired boy curled into a ball beneath a pew, and it wanted to know more. I wanted him to keep speaking.
“Is that why the witch became a priest?” I asked. “Because it was quiet in the church?”
He met my eyes levelly, the curve of his mouth angled slightly downward, as if suspicious I was mocking him. I was not. Was I prying too much? Perhaps. But I still yearned for him to reply.
“That was why my mother wanted me to become a priest.” His voice had a distant ring to it, confirming I was indeed prying, and that he was now on guard. “There are few places in the world for people who hear voices. Prisons. Asylums.”
“Rome,” I pointed out glibly.
His brows lifted to his hairline.
“There are plenty of saints who heard voices. Didn’t Santa Rosa de Lima?”
“I am no saint, Do?a Beatriz,” Andrés said evenly. “And some would think it blasphemous to be so flippant about sainthood.”
He tilted his head back and closed his eyes again, effectively shuttering the subject. My eyes followed the raven-black hair falling across his brow, danced down the arch of his throat to his collar, and were caught by the shock of white that gleamed there against the black of his clothing.
Warmth flushed my cheeks. As far as sin was concerned, perhaps blasphemy was the least of my worries.
I dropped my gaze to my soup. “What would you be if not a priest?” Not the most graceful change of subject, but certainly a necessary one.