*
It was dark when I returned to my father’s house and my sisters had already gone to their rooms. My conversation with Martin was still on my mind as I climbed the staircase. He’d complained about husbands losing their freedoms to their wives. I could see how this thought deterred him against marriage—so far, the best part of being a man was having the freedom to do as I pleased without giving explanations to anybody. But this dynamic wasn’t the same in all marriages. I can’t imagine my father letting a woman dominate him. If he had, then he would’ve never left Spain.
Midway through the hall, something stopped my pondering.
The smell of smoke.
I froze by Catalina’s room. Franco’s house came to mind. Maybe she’d fallen asleep with a candle lit. I knocked on the door, but nobody answered. This close to the door the smell of smoke was stronger.
Politeness aside, I turned the knob.
I’d envisioned a dramatic scene of burning furniture and my sister passed out on the floor. Nothing would’ve prepared me for the sight of Catalina sitting on her bed with a long cigarette dangling between her fingers. The room smelled like the cantina in Vinces. The least she could’ve done was open the window.
She turned around as soon as she heard the door and looked at me with wide eyes. Her hand flew behind her back in a failed attempt to hide her cigarette.
So this was what Vinces’s Santa did in her spare time: devote herself to a worldly, manly vice.
“Don Cristóbal! I didn’t hear you!”
“I apologize for intruding on your privacy, but I smelled smoke and I worried about your well-being.”
Her cheeks turned pink.
“Oh, this.” She shook her head. “I know I shouldn’t. It’s not ladylike, but I’m afraid I’m hooked beyond repair.”
I crossed the room toward the window. “Allow me.”
I lifted the window open. “We don’t want to cause an accident, right?”
She stood. “No, of course not.”
She didn’t seem to know what to do with the cigarette in her hand. I, for one, had never smoked and the one time I tried a cigar at Aquilino’s house, I despised it, but somehow this little secret of hers humanized her and made me want to get to know her better.
“Did you have a good time with Don Martin today?” she asked. “Julia said you went fishing with him.”
How did Julia know what I’d been doing?
“Yes.”
“Julia washes our clothes nearby. She said she saw the two of you.”
“I apologize for not letting you know. I hope you didn’t wait on me for dinner?”
“No. It’s quite all right.”
The ashes in her cigarette grew long and thin. I was desperate for her to either take a drag or flip the ashes on the glass ashtray sitting on her night table. But she didn’t do either. Instead, she squashed her cigarette against the ashtray’s surface.
“Is that Fortunata y Jacinta?” I pointed at a book on the bed. I didn’t say it, but I was astounded that she’d be reading such a scandalous novel.
Her cheeks flushed. “I found it among my mother’s things.” She shrugged. “It’s just a silly love story.”
I was familiar with the work of Benito Pérez Galdós. My Cristóbal breathed Spanish literature.
I sat next to her on the bed. “A tragic one.”
“Yes. But there’s beauty in tragedy,” she said. “Don’t you think?”
I remembered Cristóbal. Nothing beautiful about that.
“Not in real life.”
“I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me with the recent passing of my . . . my sister.” She picked up her fan from the table. Her embroidered collar was so high it must have choked her in this heat. “Tell me about her, about Purificación.”
She was very personable, this sister of mine, her eyes looked at me with kindness and her voice carried concern and understanding. There was no possibility that she sent Franco to kill me, none whatsoever.
But I’d caught her smoking, which meant she hid things from others. She had flaws, just like the rest of us, except that nobody in town knew it.
Or maybe they did.
“Is it true that she had a chocolate store?”
“Yes.” My voice cracked a little, thinking about the sunny salon where people enjoyed the delicacies La Cordobesa and I prepared. How simple my life was back then.
“My father was so proud of her.”
“He was?”
“Yes, he always told Angélica and me that we should be more like her, but neither one of us ever showed any interest in the business.”
Then why, oh why, did they want me gone? We could’ve all worked for a common goal, we could’ve continued with my father’s legacy together. But it seemed like one of them was too greedy for that. Or maybe both were.
“I was so sorry about her passing. I wish I could’ve met her,” she said.
Her words stung. They made me feel guilty, dirty about the way I was deceiving her. Catalina was a good person. She didn’t deserve this. I wanted to tell her the truth so badly. Would she hate me if I did?
“I’m sure she would’ve liked to know you, too,” I said.
“What did she look like? Anything like us?”
I hadn’t thought of this. Angélica seemed to be a carbon copy of my father, but Catalina must have taken after her mother because she had olive skin and dark, Moorish eyes. People used to say I also looked like my mother, a big-boned, tall woman.
“In some ways,” I said. “She had black hair like you, but your sister’s nose. She was also very musical. She loved zarzuelas.”
“Did she play any instruments, like Angélica and I?”
“Her voice was her instrument.”
This might have been a stretch. If you asked Cristóbal or La Cordobesa they would’ve said my “instrument” needed some tuning.
Catalina smiled. “How lucky you must have been to be married to a woman like her. She sounds exceptional.”
I took a deep breath. My voice might crack if I spoke. I stood up.
“I should go,” I finally said. “It isn’t proper for me to be here.”
“Of course.”