He did not answer. I was prying again.
“I wanted to be a general.” It was I who had asked the question, and in his silence, I who answered it. “My father was a general. He used to show me his battle plans and lecture me on the direction of armies, how to take the high ground and win even when muskets were so scarce soldiers resorted to throwing stones.” I remembered Papá’s dark hand covering mine and guiding it as we dipped his pen in the pot of red ink. Imagining the scrape of the pen’s nib against paper sent a pang of homesickness through my ribs. “I loved his maps best of all. I think that’s what I wanted, when I said I wanted to be a general. Maps. I didn’t understand leading armies meant leading men to die until I was older.”
“So instead you married a pulque lord.”
The hint of mockery in his voice stung.
“I had no other choice.” The words echoed brittle, too familiar to my lips. I had said the same thing to Mamá when she saw Rodolfo’s ring on my finger. “Don’t mock what you can’t understand,” I muttered, and thrust my spoon into my soup with more force than was necessary. Droplets of broth sprayed the table. I glared at them, aware that Andrés was watching me carefully now.
“Can’t I?” he asked.
It was as if that single soft question broke a dam in me.
He couldn’t understand what it was like to be a woman with no means of protecting her mother. He couldn’t understand the stakes I faced when Rodolfo proposed.
Or could he?
I lost it as a child, he had said of the language. His skin and eyes were lighter than his cousin’s; it was clear he was mestizo, of a lower casta than the other priests. Like me in Tía Fernanda’s household. Perhaps he also toed among criollo society on uneasy feet: careful to never misstep, careful to watch his back. Careful to never retaliate when offhand barbs buried themselves in his flesh.
We came from such different worlds, different classes, different experiences: the general’s daughter of the capital, the boy of the rural hacienda. At first blush, we had next to no common ground. Perhaps we didn’t. But perhaps the lives we had lived were not so different, in this one regard. Perhaps if I let him see that, he might understand.
“My father was intelligent. Kind. He loved my mother so much you couldn’t breathe being in the same room as them. But Mamá’s family cared about limpieza de sangre,” I said, letting the spite of a long-nursed wound rake over these final words. Cleanliness of blood. The Valenzuelas cherished that poisonous criollo obsession with casta, the belief that any non-peninsular heritage spoiled what was desirable and pure. “They disowned her for marrying a mestizo.”
This was the truth I could never articulate to Mamá because—as much as she loved me, perhaps because she loved me—she couldn’t see what other criollos saw: You’re nearly as lovely as Do?a María Catalina, though quite darker.
“Look at me. It’s obvious that I favor my father,” I said. Fears I had never found the words to express rushed out of me, a stream overflowing in the rainy season. Now that I had begun, I did not think I could stop. Andrés did not try. He watched me, thoughtful and silent, as I gestured at my face, my black hair. “Then when he was killed and we lost everything, I knew it would be a miracle if I married at all. What else could I have done when Rodolfo proposed? Turn my nose up at the smell of pulque and let my mother live on scraps from my uncle’s table? Let her starve when he lost patience and turned us out?” I gestured in the general direction of the house, fear of what lurked within its walls making the motion hatefully sharp. “That was supposed to be a home for her. It was supposed to be proof that I made the right decision. Proof that she was wrong to be angry with me about Rodolfo.” My voice trembled—with anger or hurt, I could not tell. Perhaps both. I folded my arms protectively over my chest. “But still she refuses to answer my letters, and I’m stuck with that.”
A long silence followed my outburst, punctuated only by distant conversation from the kitchens.
A pair of barn swallows dipped from the sky, looping like butterflies over Andrés’s head. He reached for the few remaining tortillas, ripped one into small pieces, and rested his left hand on the table, palm up.
The swallows descended on him. One went straight for the tortilla, perching its small, clawed feet on the base of his thumb as it pecked at the offering in his palm. The other hovered warily on his sleeve. It tilted its head to the side, beady eyes appraising. Then it bounced closer, once, twice, and joined its fellow tearing at tortilla scraps.
“A doctor. For the insurgents. That’s what I wanted to be,” he said. He kept his eyes downcast, watching the sweetly staccato movements of the swallows, their satisfied preening.
“I saw men who lost limbs to gangrene. Children died of tuberculosis. My older brothers . . . they joined the insurgents and were killed. Two in battle. The third disappeared. I discovered later that he died in prison, just after the war ended. I thought . . .” He trailed off. “I wanted to fix things. Fixing people who were wounded—and there were so many—seemed like an obvious choice. I already knew how to heal. But the last thing my mother wanted was to lose another one of us to the war. She wanted me to join the priesthood. My grandmother made sure her wishes were carried out and sent me to Guadalajara.”
The swallows chirruped at each other, then lifted from Andrés’s arm in unison. I followed their sweeping path up, up, up to the slender bell tower of the capilla.
“They sent you to fight in a different war.”
His mouth twisted—sad, sardonic amusement. “Ah yes, the war for souls. The war where we are all soldiers of San Miguel Arcángel, battling the forces of the Devil with flaming swords.” He mulled this over for a moment. “I think my mother was more concerned about saving my soul than sending me to save the souls of others.”
Because of the voices.
So, so quiet, he had said.
“Do you hear voices in the house?” I asked.
“Yes.” A firm answer.
I flinched. I wasn’t sure if I had expected him to answer in the affirmative or not, but hearing it aloud still sent a tremor down my spine.
“That alone is not unusual,” he continued. “My family has lived in the shadow of that house for seven generations. Any building of that age has memories down to its bones. But its voices are different now. One dominates the rest; its intent is unclear to me. I thought it would be easy to calm, like a spooked horse, but after last night . . .” Apprehension flickered across his face. “I need to think about how I’m going to fix it. Restrategize, if you will.” He steepled his long fingers and pressed them to his lips, silently ruminating.
Juana, Juana.
“Do you hear it . . .” I faltered. “Do you hear that voice say any names?”
Andrés lifted his eyes to mine, his brow creasing in concern. A cold, oily fear slipped down my spine.
“No,” he said. “No, I do not.”
14
ANDRéS