Why couldn’t you have waited for me? I sank to my knees at her side, not caring if the earth dirtied my trousers, not caring for anything at all but my own sorrow, my own self-pity. Tears welled thick in my throat; I shut my eyes and tilted my head back, to the sky and its pale winter sun. Why couldn’t you stay with me?
The wind lifted, shifting my hair, then fell again. Clouds slowed over the hills that ringed the valley. Far past the walls of San Isidro, a shepherd whistled to his dog, his note riding thin and high through the clear air.
The graves were quiet.
I received no reply.
All I wanted was her voice telling me what to do, correcting me, instructing me as she had since before I could even read.
Another lift of the wind. It swept tender over my face, and a memory bloomed behind my closed eyelids. I was a boy, watching my grandmother tuck wool blankets tight around a child with a fever, murmuring prayers I could not understand. We were in the village of an hacienda to the northeast of Tulancingo. Often, I accompanied Titi as she visited villagers on other estates surrounding Apan on an ornery gray donkey one of my cousins had named el Cuervito in jest.
That year, a fever had swept through many of the haciendas, seizing children in swift waves. I watched my grandmother tend to the child before her, a censer on the floor beside the cot and an egg in her right hand. The copal twined like a lazy snake toward the low ceiling of the room. A shadow hung over the child, as if someone had draped a smoky veil over the scene before me, and only my grandmother could pass through it unharmed.
Titi stood. Her back was already hunched, even then, her long braids white as milk, but an undeniable strength settled in her posture as she took the child’s mother in her arms and embraced her. Let the woman cry and comforted her softly—in castellano, I remembered, for the pueblo of that hacienda spoke otomí rather than our dialect of mexicano.
As we left, Titi took the censer from me. We walked a short distance from the house.
“What did you see when you looked at the child?” she asked.
The vision of the veil clung to me like the smell of smoke. Something was watching the boy, waiting. “He’s going to die, isn’t he?” I whispered.
Back then, she looked down at me and not the other way around. She nodded solemnly. “Yes.”
“What good did we do, then?” I asked, my voice cracking over the words. “If we can’t stop it?”
Titi stopped and took me by the elbow. I glared at her worn sandals. “Look at me, Andrés.” I obeyed. “What else did you see?”
I thought back to the dark room, the closeness of the air inside, how the only light came from the door and the fire lit to help sweat out the child’s fever. “His mother?”
“Some illnesses we cannot cure,” my grandmother said. “Others we can soothe. Sorrow is one of these. Loneliness is another.” She searched my face. “Do you understand? Tending to lost souls is our vocation.”
Our vocation. It was meant to be ours, shared, the burden slowly distributed from her shoulders onto mine with time. With years of working together. For it was Titi who taught me to listen to mortal and spirit alike, who taught me her own grandmother’s herbal cures and how to banish mal de ojo by passing a chicken’s egg over a child’s feverish body. She taught me all she could, all she knew.
“I fear it is not enough, not for you,” she once said. “One day, you will walk paths I do not understand. You must find your own way forward.”
My heart ached every time I recalled this, for I both loathed and feared the fact it was true. All I wanted was to walk the path Titi had. Even before I became a priest, it was clear I couldn’t.
I was the son of Esteban Villalobos, a Sevillan who came to Nueva Espa?a seeking his fortune and found work on Hacienda San Isidro.
And when he crossed the sea from the peninsula, he had brought his only sister.
I only saw her once. Not long after my mother died, when I was twelve years old, I returned to my father’s house in Apan after a few days spent with Titi and Paloma to find a tall woman in the kitchen. She had the presence of a bull, with broad, calloused hands, coppery brown hair, and dark eyes that sparked like gunpowder. My father called her Inés and introduced her to me as his sister; despite this, they were stiff and formal with each other. She said she had come to see him to bid farewell before returning to Spain and meant to leave for Veracruz the following day.
The next morning, after my father had left to attend the prison—part of his duties as the caudillo’s assistant—I woke to find that Inés had pulled up the edge of one of the floorboards in the kitchen and was in the midst of wedging a sheaf of papers beneath it.
I thought I had not made a sound, but she lifted her head. She went very still, locked her gunpowder eyes on me, and squinted, the corners of her eyes forming crow’s-feet.
“You,” she said. Her voice was archly matter-of-fact, as unfriendly as it was flat. “You’ve got the Devil’s darkness, don’t you?”
“I—I don’t know what you mean,” I stammered, shocked. I crossed myself for good measure. “God forbid.”
Her fair eyebrows bobbed once toward her hairline, sardonic. “Don’t lie. I knew it the moment I saw you.”
A sour feeling of shame mixed with fear washed over me. I had vexed her, though I did not know my sin nor how to fix it, and that frightened me. I watched in silence as she finished hiding the papers and thumped the wood back into place.
“Consider this your inheritance.” She patted the floorboards once; palm struck wood with a hollow, strange note. “Keep it hidden, if you know what’s good for you.”
Without another word, she gathered her belongings and left.
This. But what was it? It was barely a week after Inés left that I succumbed to curiosity and pried up the floorboard. The papers she had hidden were bound into a pamphlet, stained with age, their edges heavily thumbed with use. I had learned to read in school, and though I had little talent for it at that age, I recognized that though the glyphs on the page had the measured choreography of language, they were neither castellano nor Latin.
Behind me, the voices in the walls of my father’s house cooed. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end as I felt them peer over my shoulder at the glyphs, the darkness of their interest like wet mud slipping down my spine.
I took the papers to Titi that same day. Though she had never learned to read, we discovered interpreting the pamphlet Inés left did not require that skill: guided by the intuition of her own gifts, Titi was able to deduce the purpose of the glyphs. They were spells of protection and healing, exorcism and curses; Titi paired these with her own incantations and taught me how to harness the darkness she sensed in me. If Inés had owned this pamphlet of glyphs and had spoken of the Devil, then Inés herself must have also been a witch, albeit a very different sort than Titi. And whatever gave Inés her powers had been passed—either through blood, the gift of the pamphlet, or both—to me.