“You won’t shock me. He and I have few secrets between us,” Paloma said flatly, leaning against the side of the kitchen doorway. She scanned the garden beyond: a few chickens wandered in a wide pen abutting the kitchen wall. “I’m not like him, but I was our grandmother’s shadow, just as he was.”
She stepped into the garden and approached the chicken coop. I turned away. Yes, I cooked. But though Tía Fernanda’s cooks tried to teach me, I could not stomach the killing of fowl. Later, when she had plucked and gutted the chicken and I was washing my hands after helping dispose of the unneeded parts, Paloma said: “So how did Andrés hurt himself this time?”
I cleared my throat. Wiped my hands on the rough apron I had thrown on over yesterday’s dress.
“To be frank,” I began in a low voice, low enough that I hoped the house could not hear, “Padre Andrés tried to exorcise whatever it is that makes this house . . . what it is.”
Paloma made a soft noise of understanding. Evidently, talk of exorcisms in the same breath as her cousin did not surprise her in the least. She jerked her chin to the shelves. “Pots for rice are there.”
I stepped around her as she reached for a meat cleaver, found the pot, and placed it on the enormous stove. I wiped sweat from my brow. The warmth of the kitchen felt clean and whole after the bone-deep chill of the rest of the house.
“He hit his head,” I said. “So hard that he vomited and cannot remember half of what happened in the night. And now he cannot recall prayers your grandmother taught him.”
Paloma looked up at this, cleaver held aloft over the chicken carcass. “That’s not good.”
“I’m afraid,” I said, averting my eyes to the pot. My hands moved without my thinking, and soon, the smell of browning rice enveloped us like a rich blanket. “How long has the house been this way?”
A long moment passed. Paloma continued cutting up the chicken into the appropriate-sized pieces. Instead of answering, she asked another question: “How is it that a woman of your class is like this?”
“What?” I said. Mad? I wondered.
“Useful.”
I stared at the rice, moving it around the bottom of the pot with a large wooden spoon. I added more ingredients; cumin bit the air, mixing with the sizzle of broth hitting hot oil.
Useful. From Paloma’s tone, I knew it was meant to be taken as a compliment. But how I had loathed being called useful by Tía Fernanda. As if being of use to her was the only way I could earn any worth.
In faltering sentences, I explained my family’s past: my mother being turned out by her family for marrying my father, how we relied on Papá’s extended family in Cuernavaca, living with them in an ancient stone house on an hacienda that produced sugar. Papá inherited a little from those relatives, and his rise through the army and position in the emperor’s cabinet meant we catapulted to as high a class standing as Mamá had started. I explained how we fell just as quickly: when Papá was murdered, refuge with Mamá’s cousins was our only choice. How Tía Fernanda treated me. How when an offer of marriage was extended to me, I seized it like a drowning man clings to driftwood. For what other choice was there?
Paloma sighed softly when I came to the end of my tale. She was chopping tomatoes for the sauce.
Her face had an odd look on it.
Pity, I realized with a start. Paloma pitied me for my story. Pride flung up hard walls around me.
“So that is why I am useful,” I said. “Because my family will have nothing to do with me.”
“I thought you would be like the other one, when you arrived,” Paloma ventured in a small voice.
The other one. María Catalina.
I waited for her to elaborate, but she did not. One by one she put the tomatoes in the pot, salted them generously, and remained silent as she stirred.
“What was she like?” I prompted.
Her face changed again at this question. It lost its open look and shuttered. She stirred a few moments longer. “Like the patrón,” she said at last.
“How so?”
She worried her bottom lip as she withdrew the spoon from the pot. “I wouldn’t say this to most people, but you seem to have a level head about the world.” I glanced at the censers in the doorway. Levelheaded was not how I would describe myself after living inside these walls. “I think you see the world more clearly than the hacendados,” she continued. “We don’t have a choice when it comes to our patróns. We tolerate them. We survive them. Some have a harder time of it than others. Our patrón makes life difficult for young women who work in the house. Do you understand?”
My face must have betrayed my confusion, for with a small, frustrated noise, Paloma pivoted to blunter language. “Girls feared working in the house, near the patrón, because some of those who did became pregnant. Against their will. When the se?ora found out, she was furious. She said that she didn’t want him leaving a trail of bastards across the countryside.” Paloma set the heavy lid on the pot with a resounding clang. “She got her wish. She made sure of it.”
My heartbeat echoed in my ears. I was swept back to my first day at San Isidro, when Rodolfo led me on a tour through the cold, dark house. In the dining room, he forbade me from going up to the ledge that ringed the room.
A maid fell from there once, he said.
I could not speak for shock. Not only had Paloma accused my husband of raping servants, but he and his first wife of murdering them.
She folded her arms across her chest, her flint-hard eyes challenging me to defy her. To lose my temper, to tell her to stop lying.
I couldn’t.
For I believed her.
I sank into one of the small chairs by the kitchen table and put my head in my hands.
Mamá hated Rodolfo because of his politics. But perhaps that had cloaked something else, an instinct, an intuition. Rodolfo was not who I thought he was.
And his first wife?
Red eyes, flesh-colored claws . . .
“I’ve overheard the patrón talk about the Republic,” Paloma said. “About abolishing the casta system. About equality.” She snorted. “I don’t think he knows what that word means. Not when he and his treat their dogs better than us.”
From the moment I had woken to Paloma pounding on Andrés’s door, the morning had dealt me blow after blow. Ana Luisa dead. Rodolfo returning. The voice. Andrés’s loss of memory.
Now this.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked weakly.
Paloma did not look up when she answered. “You said your family doesn’t want you. That means you’re one of us, now.” Her voice grew distant, cold, as if it were coming from the mouth of a much older woman. “That means you’re trapped in San Isidro, just like the rest of us. And you’ll die here like the rest of us.”
19
THE SHADOWS AROUND THE house grew long. The afternoon rain Andrés predicted came and filled the small central plaza of the hacienda village with mud.
I adjusted my wool shawl around my shoulders, making sure its longer end covered the basket I carried. It was still heavy with copal, though Andrés and I were now halfway through our task.