Chapter 3
Ygnacio
A labored creak stretches long. The door opens.
An old woman stands before Minerva. Her back is sloped; she leans slightly forward as if her head is a great weight to hold. She rests one hand on a cane of dark wood. Its shaft is carved, its decoration opulent with the leaves and open blooms of gardenias.
“Yes?” The old woman’s voice crackles like paper underfoot.
Be firm. Minerva has burned every bridge between her old life and this.
“ ‘Lady’s maid wanted,’ ” she says. “ ‘Inquire at Casa Azafrán.’ This is the right house, isn’t it?”
“This is indeed Saffron House,” the old woman says, sweeping rheumy eyes over Minerva. “But tell me, senorita…”
“Trevino. Minerva Trevino.”
“Senorita Trevino.” The old woman’s voice trails off as she takes in Minerva.
What does she see? A girl in a style of dress that fell out of fashion fifteen years ago that is both too tight at the shoulders and too loose at the hips.
Dark curls, frizzy in the noon light, are wrestled into a braid.
Her chin is imperious and pointed, her mouth thin-lipped and pressed into a no-nonsense line.
Her eyes are hungry, the irises so dark they bleed into the pupils; these are eyes too wary to be set in a face so young. “How old are you?”
Lie, Arnulfo’s voice whispers in her ear.
“Eighteen, senora.” She should be seventeen soon. Or perhaps she is seventeen already—Armando kept the reckoning of those things, and Armando is gone.
The old woman runs her tongue over dry lips, narrowing her eyes. “My name is Encarnación del Valle,” she says. “Is that a problem for you?”
Del Valle. The only del Valle Minerva has heard of once ruled as Viceroy, but it was a name with no body or meaning to her. A name that, when it occasionally flew from her brothers’ lips, was followed by a volley of curses.
“I see no reason why it should be,” she says.
Instantly, she knows she has misspoken—Senora Encarnación raises threadbare brows with a scoff.
“Working for a del Valle will not harm your reputation then?” Her voice lifts in pitch, mock incredulity weaving through her words.
“The last girl left because of politics. Two have answered my flyer and then turned their backs on me. I am an old woman, senorita. I am high and dry in this old house, unable to care for it, barely able to care for myself, and I have no time for flippant girls. Buenas tardes.”
She hobbles back a step and closes the door with force that belies her words and humped back.
Minerva throws her arms forward. Palms meet the heavy door with a slap; she braces her feet and holds it.
Politics have always floated over her life like butterflies migrating north, the markings on their delicate wings spelling brutal, simple things like hunger and lack. Politics are a privilege. Politics will not keep her on the wrong side of this door.
What would Arnulfo say? What would Armando do? Minerva’s mind is a room swept clean, empty but for the truth. So she speaks it, even as the old woman pushes back on the door with a grunt.
“Senora, I do not take a good, honest job for granted. I cannot take anything for granted. I work hard. I do not complain. So long as you will have me, I will not leave you. I swear it.”
For a long moment, there is no sound but the strain of the door’s hinges. A breeze shifts the dying vines that cling to the house; they scrape against stone. The old woman’s face remains fixed in a haughty, wounded expression.
“Please,” Minerva says. She readjusts her feet, anchoring them more firmly. “Let me prove it to you.”
“I believe in actions, not words,” the old woman says. The pressure on the other side of the door lessens. “So you had better come inside and get started.”
Minerva catches herself as the door opens inward.
A sweeping staircase to her left leads to a second-floor balcony, and perhaps a third floor beyond it; the ceiling of the foyer vaults high, higher than any building she has ever been inside.
As she follows Senora Encarnación, she feels like a mouse stepping into the belly of a cave. A cave that smells of mothballs and stale air. It smells like the dustiness of a lonely life.
Senora Encarnación talks as they move through the sepulchral gloom, her tour punctuated by the rap of her cane and the occasional flick of a ringed hand.
“These are the turncoats,” the old woman says, gesturing at oil portraits of groups of young parents and children on the walls, pale-faced and ornately dressed within their gilded frames.
Family, perhaps? “Weak-willed, ungrateful brats.” Her cane strikes the ground with a force that echoes through the dark hall.
Family, then, but perhaps also enemies.
Minerva follows Senora Encarnación through a doorway.
She blinks, for in this room, at the back of the house, the windows are thrown open to a garden more lush than any she has ever seen.
Life flourishes in the sunshine outside—birds-of-paradise, bougainvillea, thick verdant jasmine.
Hummingbirds zip past the windows, lurching from flower to flower.
Fresh air spills through the windows over a ceramic sink with a brass faucet for running water, countertops that are clean and broad.
At least a dozen shelves, if not more, carved from pale cedar.
A narrow door leads to una despensa. A pantry.
This is a house that assumes there will always be enough food to fill a separate room.
Her hollow stomach twists, sending a pang through her gut.
“And this will be your room.” Senora Encarnación gestures to a humble, unadorned door in the side of the kitchen. At the old woman’s command, Minerva opens it.
It is larger than the room she has slept in all her life. A bed with bright white sheets and two thick pillows stands against one wall, a cedar chest at its foot. Muscular, healthy vines fall over the windows outside, blocking the light from the garden.
“I cannot see a thing,” Senora Encarnación grumbles. Her cane taps over to a small table by the window. There is a lamp on the table. The moment before she lights it, Minerva registers that it has no wick, no oil. Only a small knob in its tarnished brass base that Senora Encarnación turns.
A single golden butterfly rises from a trap door that opens at the bottom of the lamp, its wings batting languidly as it floats upward.
Once, twice, three times its wings lilt, slowly, as if through water.
Then, before Minerva’s eyes, it dissipates into thousands of tiny pieces, like a cloud of pollen.
A moment later, it has all melted into a thick honey glow to illuminate the room.
Chispa.
Minerva grew up by flickering firelight. Candles, when they could afford them. Once or twice, as a child, she spied chispa lamps through the windows of the wealthy, burning steady and golden and pure. No soot stained those windows. No smoke clouded their homes.
“Take the lamp,” Senora Encarnación orders crisply. “I will show you my rooms next.”
The lamp’s base is warm to touch. Its glow spills over Minerva like sunshine.
Chispa lit homes. It provided heat. It gave life to contraptions like printing presses.
To guns. No one in the slums knew precisely what chispa was, only that their men—and sometimes children—traveled far before dawn and after dusk to seek work in the mine.
Childhood gossip said that chispa was the breath of dead gods.
How Armando had scoffed when Minerva repeated this.
“It was the source of the Viceroy’s wealth,” he said. “The reason the Viceroy even ruled. Was and always will be the purview of the wealthy, that’s all you need to know.”
It was the golden foundation on which life in the Capital was built, gleaned from a single mine south of the city that the loyalists and Valbuenistas once fought over, tooth and nail. It’s what her father spent long days prying from the cold darkness of the underground.
And now Minerva holds it in her hands.
She follows Senora Encarnación upstairs, into a bedroom with thick drawn curtains, then into a bathroom with an enormous ceramic tub with clawed feet. She catalogues the litany of the old woman’s ailments and apothecary cures that must be administered daily.
But the chispa swirls against the movement of the lamp as Minerva walks, as distracting as a living thing. She catches a lilt of movement swirling in the honey, a gesture like that of a butterfly’s wings.
A bright voice carries up to the second floor from somewhere downstairs, calling “hola, senora.” A stranger’s voice. The chispa shudders from Minerva’s jolt of surprise.
“The cook, Mariquita, comes once daily,” Senora Encarnación explains. “It will be your responsibility to prepare breakfast and warm leftovers for supper. But the midday meal is her task. Are you hungry?”
Minerva’s stomach answers before she can, filling the quiet with a plaintive, desperate gurgle.
A whisper of a smile plays on the old woman’s lips. “Of course you are, Senorita Trevino. Let’s go downstairs.”
That night, Minerva shuts the windows of her room and turns the lamp low. She slides beneath thick blankets and curls onto her side. She watches the glow from the chispa in the lamp, each lifelike ribbon of golden movement drawing her closer to sleep.
Her stomach has settled since dinner, when her second helping of chicken with rich, dark mole sent stabbing pain through her ribs.
Senora Encarnación made sure of that with one of her dozens of herbal teas that live in the pantry.
Minerva’s belly rests, content and quiet, for the first time in weeks.
The whole room is quiet. No one breathes except for Minerva. No one snores. No one will wake her with crying in the middle of the night.
The doors of this old citadel of mothballs and dust are locked against the night, an impenetrable barrier between her and what was once her life.
“I did it,” she whispers, not knowing to whom she is speaking. To herself? To her brothers, who cannot hear her anyway, who did nothing to help her?
How does one love brothers who never wrote, who never checked on her, who cast her off so easily?
Minerva doesn’t know how, but somehow, it is love that pushes the wound deep, against her bruised heart. All she wants is to show them what she did. All she wants is for them to toast her victory in the golden glow of the chispa.
Tears drip over her nose, onto the sheets she holds tight in one fist.
“I don’t need you,” she says. “I don’t.”
She is safe, but she is alone—achingly, profoundly alone.