I had invented a way of transcribing Titi’s teachings in mexicano for myself, but when I was sixteen, my father discovered notes I had stuffed haphazardly beneath my cot in his house.
I thought I knew his temper like I knew the weather. With a flood of pulque would come predictable storms, slamming doors, raised voices. With enough patience, I could skirt the worst of it; I learned to melt into the walls as if I were one of the voices myself. But if my own temper thinned, or if I snapped back at him, I courted danger. When I tried to snatch the papers back from him, I expected to be shouted at, shoved, or struck for my trouble.
Instead, my father shrank away from me.
“They burn people like you, you know. You, Inés . . . they should burn you.” His eyes popped from his skull with fear, bloodshot but for the bright white above and below his irises. “Send you to Hell where you belong.” Sharp as a darting animal, he reached for a wooden cross on the wall, yanked it off, and flung it at me. I ducked. It struck the wall behind me with a dull thud and fell to the floor, cloven in two. “Go to Hell.”
I left for San Isidro that night. I never saw him again.
Word came from town that he packed his belongings and left Apan. Some said he meant to go north, to Sonora or Alta California. Others said he spat on the earth and swore he would return to Spain.
It was not long after that Titi insisted I go to Guadalajara. That I fulfill my mother’s dying wish by becoming a priest.
“You must,” she said as she bid me goodbye. “This is what is right.”
I was far less firm in my conviction. I was afraid of insurgents and Spaniards on the road, of bandits, of the Inquisition circling me like Daniel in the den of lions. What wisdom was there sending a damned soul straight into the Church’s jaws, when I ought to be hiding from them?
The fear in my father’s eyes as he shrank away from me had seared me like a brand. Its mark would never heal over, never scar.
They should burn you.
“How can you know this is right?” I said, fear cracking my voice. “How?”
“Ay, Cuervito.” She patted my hands. The touch of her gnarled hands was soft, but her dark eyes were steely in their confidence. “You will learn to feel it. When the time comes, you will know what is right.”
Years had passed, and that time had not come.
I balled my hands into fists, the winter wind cold on my face, my knees pressing into the damp dirt of her graveside.
How could one simply know?
In Guadalajara, I endured homily after homily on faith and belief. On placing my fate in the hands of the unknown. In my splintered self, God was one thing. God was invisible and unknowable, but I learned to have faith that He was there, even if I doubted He paid as much attention to the smudge of earth that was Apan as He did other places.
But in Titi’s teachings, I learned that some things could be known. I always heard the voices, no matter where I was. Now that I had returned to Apan, I felt the movement of weather; I knew when thunder would open the heavens over the valley. I knew when the riverbeds would flood with the spectral presence of the Weeper and how to placate her. I knew when the wildflowers would blossom, when horses would foal. I felt the presence of spirits in the mountains, how they shifted even in their deep slumber.
So why didn’t I know whether or not I should help Paloma and Mariana?
I thought of Mariana in the firelight, flinching away from my every movement like a wounded dove, a frail shadow. I knew she hurt. It was written across her spirit clear as ink. I knew Paloma’s fierceness. Her conviction.
I knew when I looked at the small congregation that morning at Mass that my grandmother’s absence was a wound. The people of San Isidro—the people who were my home—were in pain without her.
Priest or not, I knew I was meant to fill that absence.
But no one would instruct me how. No one could.
It was up to me to find my way alone.
18
BEATRIZ
Present day
AFTER ANA LUISA’S FUNERAL, Andrés followed me gingerly into the parlor. He stared at the blood dripping from the wall for a long time.
At last his chapped lips parted. “I have to close the circle.” His voice was barely above a whisper.
“Is it possible?” I asked.
“I hope so.” He inhaled through his nose and exhaled long and slow. “Cielo santo. I hope so.”
He faced the circle, his eyes fluttering shut, and began to chant softly. His hands extended out in front of him, palms facing upward like a supplicant’s. I fell back a step.
The humming I had noticed earlier increased. It rose in volume and pitch, a swarm of bees filling the room; pulses of it rolled over my skin in waves, raising gooseflesh. Quickening my heartbeat.
Soon, I became aware that Andrés’s voice faltered. Though I could not understand him, I thought he was pausing, and starting again. The humming hovered at one pitch and then dropped, and began its slow rise anew.
Finally, Andrés stopped chanting altogether. I waited for him to turn to me, I waited for solace to flood over us like dawn after a long night . . . but the determined line of his shoulders collapsed. He lowered his head, held it in his hands.
The hum of the circle continued. If I closed my eyes, I could still see the circle as if it were etched in red marks on the inside of my eyelids. My intuition told me he was not finished yet. “Did you close it?”
“No.”
A long moment of silence passed.
Distantly, a trill of mocking laughter. Cold shot down my spine.
“Are you going to try again?” I asked.
He inhaled deeply. “I can’t.”
He couldn’t? What did that mean? I drew forward a step, the click of my shoes on flagstone echoing through the room. He had steepled his hands before his face, pressing them to the hard line of his mouth. His face was gray, his gaze fixed on the circle, unmoving, not even as I drew close.
I thought of him on his back on the floor of the capilla, gray faced and coughing, his teeth stained with blood. Can’t fix broken witches.
Last night and the shock of this morning were trying for me, but even more so for him.
“You need to rest,” I said. If I were honest with myself, I would admit that I wanted to say let me care for you. If he was my protector through the night, I would be his in the day. Share this burden, I meant to say. You’re not alone. Instead, I bit my tongue. Resisted the desire to take him by the arm. The situation we found ourselves in was dangerous enough. Becoming too familiar with him could lead nowhere but more trouble. “Come, let’s go to the kitchen.”
“I can’t remember.” The tremble in his voice struck a hollow note. His expression as he stared at the circle—was that fear behind his eyes? “The right prayer. I can’t remember it. I can’t close it. I can’t.”
His voice cracked over the last word. Sympathy yawned in my chest; now I did let myself put a light hand on his forearm. But deep in my bones, I did not believe him. How could I? Andrés cured the sick. Andrés rose into the air like a saint. Andrés was capable of anything. “Do you have it written down somewhere? Among your things in town?”