Chapter III
III
Alba
Alba set her palm on the handle of the confessional door. The wood was smooth, worn and oiled by thousands of penitent fingertips.
She hesitated.
“We shouldn’t keep Lucia waiting.” Mamá was already halfway to the alcove of Santa Rosa de Lima on the far side of the cathedral, where she always prayed her penance.
They could have arrived punctually at the seamstress’s home—or even early—if they had skipped coming to the cathedral altogether. But pointing this out would be of no use. Mamá never skipped daily confession, and so neither did Alba.
She opened the door of the confessional and shut it behind her. Her silk skirts gave a long-suffering sigh as she settled onto the hard wooden kneeler.
“May God, who has enlightened every heart, help you to know your sins and trust in His mercy.”
The voice from behind the confessional grate was not one she recognized. Good. A measure of the tightness in her shoulders loosened.
When she was a child, sleepless with anxiety the night before her first confession, Mamá had stroked her hands and assured her that the priests simply heard too many confessions a day to be able to match the sins they absolved to a particular parishioner.
Besides, were there not far too many parishioners for them to recognize them by voice in the dark?
Perhaps this was true. The priest might not know it was Alba. But Alba usually knew the priest, and unwrapping any feeling—much less sins and failures—before someone she knew made her want to claw her way out of the dark, stuffy box of the confessional.
She set palm to palm before her, as if to pray. She interlaced her fingers. First one way, then the other. Rose-scented rosary beads clicked and skipped over one another.
The priest cleared his throat.
“Forgive me, Padre, for I have sinned.” The phrase could have been one word, accented with a hum of impatience. “It has been”—a matter of hours, really, Mamá made sure of that—“a day since my last confession.”
She worried the cuticles of her thumbs. Mamá would slap her hands away if she saw, but here, she was alone. Well, she wasn’t, but as the silence stretched long, she could imagine she was.
“Take your time.” The priest’s voice was low, as soft as a thought.
It fell away as quickly as one, as sins crawled out of her mind and crowded into the confessional, heavy and huffing from the effort.
Each breath made the air taste staler. Even the traces of church incense had lost their bite, smothered and flattened.
“I think I have blackmailed someone,” she burst out.
A shift of clothing from the other side of the grate.
“What do you mean ‘you think’?” the priest asked.
“It wasn’t on purpose,” she said.
It was in self-defense. There had been a battering ram at her gate, one that she had overheard through a locked door:
No Basque families , Papá’s voice thundered.
Alba could easily envision him wagging a warning finger, whitening brows bristling in firelight.
Think of the Echeverría men—they keep disappearing in El Norte.
We cannot take that financial risk now, not when it seems that the bloody Monterrubios have no intention of keeping to their repayment schedule.
Voices dropped to a murmur. Then—
But who cares for the money when that duke would take her away to Spain! Mamá’s voice pitched toward a wail, despairing. I will not have that, not when there are merchants in Puebla who—
The world—well, Zacatecas at least—was built on silver.
The city would have remained a windblown, sun-bleached outpost if it had not been founded above dark rivers of ore.
Silver made the great clock of Alba’s world tick with measured, predictable beats: plata passed from purse to purse.
Men rose to the heavens or drowned with it tied around their necks.
And women, when they came of age, were bartered away for it.
It was naive to assume she would be exempt. Being Mamá’s only daughter, adopted after long years of barrenness, would not spare her from being carved up for purchase at the butcher.
For this was the reality: There were men who would pay Papá for her.
She had been at parties and dinners where the long gazes of older men in silks and powdered wigs left thick slime across her skin.
She had felt their clammy hands groping her waist during the contradanza, their alcohol-stale breath too close to her face as they tried—and failed—to whisper seductively in her ear.
An ugly daughter , she had heard those same voices whisper. But a wealthy family .
Such memories hurtled her back toward a family wedding when she was fourteen, trapped at the wrong end of an impossibly long, dark hall she had wandered down looking for some quiet.
A paunchy behemoth of a man barricading her escape.
A ringed hand over her mouth, cutting off her scream.
Metal pressed hard into her lips and cheeks; the hand reeked of tobacco.
A whole body pressed against her, pinning her to the wall—
The hand dropped. The weight lifted. She could gasp for air.
Another drunken male guest had asked in a slurred voice after the location of the chamber pots. The barricade replied. Then vanished.
Alba remained in the hall, back to the wall, panting against the constraints of her corset, heart racing out of time with her pulse. Multicolored sparks exploded silently around the corners of her vision.
She would not faint. If she did, she knew no one would find her. No one would rescue her. She had to compose herself, rearrange her jewelry, and reenter the ballroom alone.
Once the marriage deed passed from hand to hand, a stranger would own her body. Would expect to exploit it for heirs that would inherit their own silver and titles.
Disgust bloomed and spread like a fungus, curling into and rotting her bones.
She was out of time.
One night, she waited until Mamá and Papá had gone to bed, then padded downstairs into Papá’s office. She had sleepwalked often as a child; if caught by a servant or parent, she knew exactly how to mime being awoken with a cry of surprise and a bumbling cascade of frightened sobs.
The Persian rugs were plush beneath her bare feet, their designs silvered by the moonlight pouring in through glass windowpanes.
The whole scene seemed touched by the moon’s otherworldly lacquer as she fell to her knees before the desk in the corner, then opened the lowest drawer, where she knew Papá kept his most important paperwork.
The Monterrubios owed Papá money. But how much? And was it enough for the shameful plan falling into place in her heart?
“Whom did you blackmail?” the priest asked.
Alba refolded her hands. The rosary had left indentations in her palms; it clicked as she shifted it.
“My fiancé,” she said.
Well. Now he was her fiancé. He used to be a boy who hid in the curtains with her at the parties of wealthy mineros.
No one had ever concealed the fact that Alba was adopted.
Mamá and Papá were cypresses with fine, pale hair, their eyes the light brown of crisp cones of piloncillo.
Alba’s hair fell down her back in a slick, black sheet; her eyes were so dark that pupils only seemed distinct from irises in direct sunlight.
It didn’t matter that she found the arrangement of these features—though severe—pleasing when she saw her own reflection. They were universally decreed ugly.
It’s like a dog is staring at you , a cousin had once declared when Alba was six. Then he barked at her and howled in amusement at his own cleverness.
These were the children she avoided when she sought out richly furnished drawing rooms with heavy drapes.
One day, she heard the scramble of shoes on the rug and the rough breathing of someone in flight.
Curtains reshuffled themselves, then, with a sigh, weight settled next to her.
She imagined darkness surrounding the other child.
The quiet of thick fabric. The tickle of dust motes that she had come to associate with slowing heartbeats and peace.
“Who’s there?” she whispered.
A gasp. “Who’re you ?”
“Alba.”
“Oh.” There was palpable relief in the word. “Carlos Monterrubio.”
One of the new arrivals from Spain. Music drifted up through the floorboards, muffled by the carpets. The laughter of drunken adults was distant, dreamlike.
“They’re playing wedding downstairs,” Carlos said. “I hate playing wedding.” The drapes could not conceal the frustration that pushed his voice close to cracking.
“I know,” Alba said. She did not. She was rarely invited to join games.
She’s too serious , the other girls said.
But how could she not be acutely aware that the riches surrounding her were not her birthright but a gift of chance, a twist of fate?
So Alba studied her Latin and went to Mass and emulated the pious and quiet.
She followed Mamá and Papá to the mansions of the merchants of Zacatecas and studied catechism with their daughters.
Hers was the one head of black hair among the shades of wheat as they learned to stitch and curtsy and dance. She could never forget it.
“I never want to marry a girl,” Carlos said, so softly it was swallowed by the curtains.
“You can hide here until they get bored enough that they’ll leave you alone,” Alba said softly. “It works for me.”
“Thank you.”
The silence they sat in forged an alliance.
Years passed; the alliance strengthened, quiet and steady.
They were each other’s shields at gatherings throughout Zacatecas.
Even though some of Alba’s catechism and embroidery acquaintances tittered over how golden and beautiful Carlos grew, he never attached himself to any of them.
He preferred to dance with Alba or not to dance at all.
If men did not want to spend time with women, it was easy—they simply didn’t.
It wasn’t fair .
The priest cleared his throat. “Why would you blackmail your fiancé?” he asked.