Paloma had told me how quickly the disease seemed to strike the house. One day, Do?a Catalina was her usual barbed self, energetically quarreling about finances with Juana over dinner. The next, the patrón’s wife was confined to her room; Ana Luisa said she was too ill to move or be seen. For three weeks she remained in her room in convalescence, only tended by Ana Luisa. Then she abruptly died. Paloma watched her quiet funeral from a distant perch on the graveyard wall: she waited, hands clenched in anticipation, until the casket that held the hateful woman was firmly covered with earth.
And even after Do?a Catalina’s death, I remained banished from the land my family lived on. For two years, I lived in Apan alone, a stalk hacked away from the heart of the maguey, anger and resentment toward the Solórzanos weeping from my wound. Rumors of Rodolfo’s remarriage and return to San Isidro with a new bride had licked through the town weeks before they actually set foot on its dust; when they finally appeared in the church, they were like salt flung on an unhealed wound. I scarcely spared the new wife a glance. Whatever fate she had sealed for herself by marrying that monster was no concern of mine, I told myself.
Until she made it my concern.
It was because Paloma was present that I lingered after Mass the day Beatriz sought Padre Guillermo’s blessing for the house. Juana and Ana Luisa had forbidden Paloma from coming to town to seek me out; I had not seen her in two years and was desperate to speak with her.
The first words Paloma spoke to me were a desperate hiss. “Do?a Juana is hiding something. Mamá too. Something terrible.” There was a wildness in her eyes that stopped my heart: that was the feral fear of hunted things. “La se?ora is going to ask priests to bless the house, but it needs so much more than that. You must come help.”
She was in danger. I knew then I would fight to return to San Isidro, banishment or no. I had let her be harmed in that house once before. I would not allow it to happen again.
At that moment, I looked up and met the new Do?a Solórzano’s eyes.
She had dark hair, was small but proud shouldered. Her maguey green eyes were a shock of color against the black lace of her mantilla. These met my gaze and held it fast: she measured me with a frankness that snatched my spirit from my body and set it on the scales of justice.
A thought unspooled in my quiet mind, unbidden, swift and certain as the click of a lock: this one is different.
She was. She asked me to come to San Isidro. She opened the gates of the hacienda and ended my banishment.
The sensation of San Isidro’s earth beneath my feet after years away was intoxicating . . . until I grew close enough to sense the sickness and rage that putrefied its very air. When Do?a Beatriz Solórzano begged me for help, I knew I would not turn her away. Any chance to remain at Hacienda San Isidro and protect Paloma from the poison that seeped through the house was one to be seized. But the desperation in Beatriz’s voice unlocked a compassion in me I thought my anger at the Solórzanos had buried for eternity.
She was alone. No one—not husband, friend, or family—stood by her side as she faced the jaws of that cavernous, sickened house.
Tending to lost souls is our vocation, Titi often said.
That was what I was doing when I covered Beatriz’s sleeping body with a blanket in the green parlor last night, my touch featherlight even as it lingered a breath too long. A lost soul sought aid, and I gave it. That was what I was doing. That was who I was, that was the responsibility I inherited from Titi and the Cross I chose to take upon my shoulders.
Then why hadn’t I yet sought penance for my moments of failure?
A breeze snaked through the maguey, carrying the voices of the few tlachiqueros who paced the rows of the fields while their fellows took siesta. I worried my lip distractedly as I walked. Last night, I had revealed my true nature to Beatriz. She swore she would tell no one, but the fact remained that outside of Titi’s people and the villagers of the haciendas, she was the only person with whom I had spoken so frankly. Was it sleeplessness that loosened my tongue? Was it the way Beatriz listened, her head lilting gently to the side?
Or was it a graver failing? A very human failing, one that drew my eye to her more often than not?
A failing that left me following the bend of Beatriz’s waist as she set the tray of pozole on the table beside the capilla, tracing the line of her back up to her neck, to the curls that brushed against her skin, to the curve of her throat?
Look at me, she said.
Ah, but I had, and therein lay the sin.
I realized in a sharp flash, the white blow of sun in the desert, that as much as I loathed him, I envied what Rodolfo had.
I should have banished the thought immediately. Sought forgiveness and punishment for it in the same breath. I should have stepped away to collect myself, to regain the cool, controlled detachment I had fought so hard to earn. The hard-won aloofness from worldly desires that I so liked about myself.
I coveted the patrón’s wife. The map my training gave me was clear on this matter: repent.
So why did I continue to turn the sin over in my mind, examining it like an old coin, instead of casting it as far from my heart as I could? Was it because there were graver matters at hand? Or was it because—God forbid—a stubborn part of me did not yet want to be forgiven?
A shadow crossed my path. I lifted my chin sharply, tightening my grip on the mule’s reins.
Directly before me stood Juana Solórzano. Her feet were planted firmly in the dirt of the road; she looked at me with a bland, almost bored sort of aggression.
“Villalobos.” Her voice raked over my skin like a hair shirt. No one addressed me by my surname but her. It was a constant reminder that my father had once served hers, that my family still served her, and that no matter how tall I grew, how far I traveled, how much I studied, how high I rose, she would always look down her nose at me. “You’re not supposed to be on my property.”
Juana’s enforcement of Do?a Catalina’s banishment even after her death surprised me. Angered me. Perhaps I should have overcome that. Perhaps I should have been able to forgive her with time.
Should is an oddly powerful word. Shame and anger have a way of flying to it like coins to lodestone. I had achieved detachment from so many worldly things, but this clung like burrs. It was a snake that sank its fangs so deep they touched bone, spreading its venom through my marrow.
“Buenas tardes, do?a.” I reached up with my left hand and tipped my hat to her. Let her read every ounce of quiet insubordination I poured into the movement. Let her know that I could hold grudges just as long as she. “I came at the invitation of Do?a Solórzano.” The living one, I added silently. “And I’ll return in a few days at her invitation as well.”
I clicked my tongue to the mule and led it forward and off the road slightly, so as to carve a path around where Juana stood.
She told me I was imagining it. Beatriz’s voice echoed in my mind as I remembered the hollowed-out, exhausted fear evident in the slump of her posture when we spoke in the sacristy storeroom. But she told me she was afraid of the house. She and Ana Luisa both.
I believed Beatriz’s conclusion was sound. I had known Juana—if from a distance—for most of my life, and I knew her to be sharp-eyed. Attentive. If she avoided the house as much as Beatriz said, then she knew something was wrong with it.