“Good night, Do?a Catalina.”
I walked away without giving her the chance to answer. My sister’s words had touched me deeply. No, Cristóbal hadn’t been lucky to have me—the opposite was true. I wasn’t the one who was buried in the depths of the ocean. And I couldn’t believe how disloyal I’d been this afternoon by spending all that time with another man and what was even worse, enjoying myself. If there was a God in the Heavens, He would certainly punish me for such a callous betrayal.
CHAPTER 18
Catalina
Vinces, 1913
My mother’s fingers squeezed my ear painfully. “Have you gone mad, Catalina?”
Startled, I dropped the cigarette in my hand. I didn’t know what hurt more: my pride or my ear. I was already fifteen years old and yet my mother was treating me as though I were still a child.
“Pick it up!” she said, pointing at the cigarette I’d just dumped on the ground. I couldn’t believe she’d found my hiding spot behind the palo santo tree. My mother never left the house. How did she find her way out here?
“Let me go!” I said, trying to push her away, but she had a good grip of my ear.
“I said, pick it up.”
Twisting my body in an unnatural way, I picked up the cigarette. My mother dragged me toward the kitchen as if I were a sack of potatoes.
“How can you embarrass me like this?” she was saying. “Don’t you know you have a reputation around here? What if one of your father’s peones had seen you? You know that news travels faster than light in this town. What is wrong with you?”
Yes, what was wrong with me? I knew I had to be good, but I couldn’t stop myself from sinning.
“If it isn’t one thing, it’s another,” my mother said.
Things had been so challenging for us lately. It was nothing but lecturing. This was wrong, that was wrong. Follow your brother’s example, look how he entered the seminary.
For my mother, Gloria Alvarez de Lafont, having one child in the service of the Lord wasn’t enough. She would’ve only been satisfied if the three of us dedicated our lives to the noble cause, but Angélica was beyond hope with all those admirers, and me, well, my mother had made it her life’s goal to set me on the right path—no matter what.
To think that she’d been so proud of me when I told her I’d seen the Virgin. It had been months of prayer, of pilgrimage, of the eyes of the entire town and its surroundings on me. People had wanted to come see me, they wanted me to tell them all about the Sweet Mother, they’d traveled from every corner of the country to hear my message.
But that had been six years ago and my mother seemed to have forgotten already about our sore legs from kneeling on the cold floor—side by side—in prayer, or how she would comb my hair until it was as smooth as silk while she asked all the particulars of the Apparition. After all, she had to report every detail to her friends at the Cofradía since the town’s priest had forbidden me to share my experiences with anybody else.
Still gripping my ear, my mother hauled me across the kitchen and I did my best not to bump into counters and chairs.
“Armand! Armand!” she screeched.
But my father, thank God, was not home. He’d left for the warehouse early in the morning. I’d seen him from my bedroom window, from my prison.
I managed to set myself free once we reached the inner patio. But she got hold of my arm and dragged me all the way to the Saints Room.
This was my mother’s favorite room. It was smaller than the rest. It had a spare bed that had never been used and an armoire filled with doll-sized saints. There was the Virgin, of course, Saint Paul, Saint Joseph, and the Christ child. When I was little, I’d asked to play with the saints. After all, they looked just like dolls to me, but that had constituted the biggest sin and blasphemy of all time in my mother’s world.
An assortment of candles could be found inside one of the drawers with matches, rosaries, and the book of prayer.
“Right here, in front of all the saints, you’re going to purge!” my mother said in a roaring voice.
She handed me the cigarette, which I’d just started and had several more drags in it, and sentenced me.
“You’re going to eat this.”
Have I heard right? “Eat it?”
“Yes!”
She couldn’t possibly.
“Do it!”
“No!”
My mother slapped me with all her might. My cheek felt as if one of the saints had fallen on it.
“You’re not leaving this room until you eat this. Do you know what kind of women smoke?”
I shook my head.
“The kinds of women who get paid to copulate with men: the women of the night! That’s who!”
I stared at the cigarette in my hand, which Franco had gotten for me with much effort, and I took a bite—it was the only way I could ever leave this place. Once my mother got her mind set on something, there was no contradicting her.
The cigarette tasted as if I’d licked the bottom of a chimney and then chewed a piece of paper. I spat tobacco pieces on the floor. Ignoring my coughs, my mother pushed my hand toward my mouth, making it clear that I had to take another bite. I did just that, eyes shut, breath held. This time I swallowed the moist pieces.
“Are you ever going to do this again?”
I shook my head, swallowing the last piece between coughs. My throat itched. I wanted to throw everything up.
“Now you’re going to take me to your room and give me your entire stash.”