Chapter V #2
Part of Alba expected that Bartolomé would also be extended an invitation to the Monterrubio hacienda de minas.
Part of her also expected him to turn it down—perhaps he had responsibilities to the parish in Zacatecas, perhaps he would tend to the sick or something equally Christlike.
She did not know, nor did she much care.
All she knew is that she certainly did not expect him to be sitting opposite her in the carriage from Zacatecas the next morning, her knees slamming uncomfortably into his as they ascended rocky foothills and winding passes into the mountains.
Her teeth jarred each time the carriage’s wheels hit a rock or unexpected divot.
She could avoid this if she unclenched her jaw and relaxed, or unfolded her arms and dropped her shoulders.
She did not.
Papá was certainly at ease in the priest’s presence. He snored as if he were at home in his chair by the fireplace in his and Mamá’s favorite parlor, the west-facing one with a view of the cathedral. His jowls shook gently with the sharp rocking of the carriage, his head lolling gently to one side.
And Mamá? Mamá leaned forward to laugh at Bartolomé’s jokes about pagan practices common in these more desolate parts of the colony.
“Perhaps you will find some at Mina San Gabriel,” Mamá joked in return.
“I should hope not,” the priest replied. “But if I do, I know what my mission is.”
“And what is that, Padre?”
“Saving souls, senora,” was the reply. It was directed at Mamá, but he met Alba’s eyes squarely as he spoke.
A chill ran down her arms. The more she spoke to him, the more she risked discovery. She tightened her arms over her chest. Turned her face to the side and looked out the dirty window.
Mamá toyed with her rosary in her lap, rapt as Bartolomé went on about the importance of conversions in this wild, uncivilized part of Nueva Espana.
Mamá had been icy toward her ever since yesterday morning’s conversation.
Yes, Alba had snapped at her. Yes, it was unkind.
Yes, Alba had played the moment over and over in her mind like a musician who simply could not master a portion of a song, wondering why she had not bit her tongue.
It had not been fair to Mamá to speak so sharply.
Mamá’s feelings were like perfectly ripe fruit: easy to bruise, easy to spoil.
They had to be treated with care. Alba did, for she knew that leaving them to rot had consequences for everyone in the house.
Normally, she was happy to placate Mamá.
But was Mamá ever happy to placate Alba ?
Each rock of the carriage, each precarious swell of nausea—they led her closer to a life of freedom. She could stomach this journey. She would .
Bartolomé said something to draw Alba into the conversation; she ignored it.
She focused on the clop of shod hooves on stone.
Watched the gray line of the mountains. The road was wide; here, halfway into the mountains, it followed the path carved by an anemic stream.
The mountains had seemed to loom over them when they took a short midmorning break to stretch their legs, but now, amid the rocks and silhouettes, they seemed endless.
Mazelike. As if the ascent were both barely begun and almost finished.
Mamá giggled at something Bartolomé said, her laugh fawningly girlish and shrill against Alba’s skull.
Alba fluttered her eyes closed. Let that keep her from rolling them in annoyance. She certainly felt as if she were in Purgatory in this airless box, smothered by Mamá’s perfume and the knock of Bartolomé’s knees on hers.
A shout from outside; Alba opened her eyes and craned her neck to peer up ahead of the horses, where Heraclio and Carlos rode.
They turned a bend and passed first one mule, then another, then a whole line of them, each as heavily laden as the first.
A handful of men walked alongside and among the mules.
As the carriage passed, so, too, did their faces pass before Alba: some were indios, but others criollo, weathered and squinting against the sharp, white winter sun. In the middle of the mule train, one face caught her eye and held it.
The man she had danced with.
Elías.
His hair was tied back at his neck; some fell into his face anyway, clinging to temples gleaming with sweat. He had one hand on the neck of a mule and one on a walking stick.
He looked to the carriage, and their eyes met.
The convict .
He faltered slightly as he walked but did not drop his gaze.
He lifted his hand from the mule’s neck, then did nothing with it—perhaps he meant to greet her, but the carriage was already moving, and he was falling back.
Alba turned her head to watch him grow smaller and smaller behind them, a dark silhouette among the mountains, until the carriage turned a bend.
She had not expected to see him ever again.
Carlos had many cousins back in Spain; he had never spoken of one called Elías.
Perhaps because he was a convict. But if he was—surely he was, there was no world in which Carlos, so preoccupied with the Monterrubio reputation, would allow that term to be used if it were not the truth—then why had he seemed so gentle?
Why had she felt such comfort in his presence?
What kind of man was he, really?
For a moment, when they were dancing, she had idly thought she was comfortable with him. It was a silly, girlish thing to think. The Champagne had certainly gone to her head. She did not know him at all, and likely never would.
As the road grew level and the afternoon long, she drifted somewhere on the borders of sleep despite Mamá and Bartolomé’s conversation, despite Papá’s snoring.
In the murky ripples of half dreams, she thought she heard his voice. Thought she felt a calloused hand take hers in the dark and lead her into the golden warmth of music and clinking glasses and candlelight.
Then the carriage’s wheel hit another rock; she jolted from sleep. Her mouth was sour and dry and her neck ached.
They had stopped.
Bartolomé peered out the window, then opened the door.
Cold, dry air rushed into the carriage, clearing any cobwebs of sleep from Alba’s mind with a swift strike.
She did not accept Bartolomé’s hand to help her down the carriage steps; she clung to the frame of the door as she lowered herself to rocky earth.
The sun had dipped low and reddened the horizon. A distant ring of pickaxes; a whistle of wind through barren peaks.
Mountains rose in a crown of thorns around a long stucco house.
It might have been white once, but now appeared earthen in color.
Soot stained one wall, visible even in the long, blue shadows cast by the mountains.
Chickens milled by an outdoor kitchen, chittering to one another and to an errant goat as they pecked the hard earth.
A cold breeze bit her cheeks and tugged at her hair. Alba tightened her shawl around her shoulders.
“ Rustic ,” Mamá murmured archly behind her. She followed this with a low, judgmental noise . “Not a glass window in sight. Are we to be imprisoned in the dark all winter? They might as well put us in a coffin.”
“Lucero,” Papá chastised gently.
“Thank goodness our things are following,” Mamá said. She took Papá’s hand as he helped her out of the carriage, an arch, critical expression crossing her features as she took in the house. “It looks practically abandoned. Alba, where are you going?”
Gravel crunched beneath Alba’s shoes as she walked away from the carriage, away from the house, to slightly higher ground, where the mountains’ shadows had not yet eclipsed the last late slant of sunlight.
The breeze turned to wind; it tugged more persistently at her hair and at the shawl that was perfect for winter in the city but was already proving far too flimsy for this place. Her ears ached from the cold.
She closed her eyes and stood still as sunlight slipped featherlight over her skin. A brush of weak warmth.
It was fleeting. The sun moved; the warmth vanished. Alba was alone, suspended in the cold, the sole subject of the mountains’ long gaze.
Deep in her breast, nestled somewhere against the back of her ribs, something turned .
It had a physical weight to it. It was like an organ shifting, lifting and resettling into the wrong spot, crowding somewhere too tight under her lungs.
Her breath caught; she tightened her arms.
Liquid cold filled the cavity of her chest, pouring and splashing and splattering against everything in its path like an overturned bottle of ink.
Leave this place.
A susurration flitted around her awareness like the cold in the wind; it settled somewhere behind one ear, pressing like ice, like a dagger, against the tender skin there. Its edge cradled a threat.
Get out .
“Alba!” Mamá called.
She jumped; her heart hit the back of her throat with a meaty strike.
Voices rose in cacophony from the figures moving between the carriage and the house below—Heraclio ordered cedar chests to be brought this way and that; Papá wondered aloud if all soldiers-turned-clergy traveled with Bartolomé’s unpriestlike number of weapons in his luggage.
“Come down here before you get hurt!” Mamá cried.
Alba gathered her skirts, fingers half frozen and fumbling, and obeyed. Rocks tripped and scattered down the path before her; they gained speed as they rolled and bounced down the hill, down the mountain, down, down, down—
It was too easy to imagine following them, tripping and tumbling heels over head, smashing the fine bones of neck and skull on the dark rocks below—
Leave.
“Come.”
She jumped. Carlos was at her side. She had no memory of reaching even ground, but she was among the bustle again, among the braying of irritable mules and greetings and men groaning as they staggered beneath the weight of Mamá’s luggage chests.
Carlos took her hand. His flesh burned against her icy knuckles.
“Let me show you the house,” he said. “You seem exhausted from the journey.”
He led her through the narrow doorway of Casa Calavera.
Mamá’s voice echoed from down a hall that smelled vaguely of mildew, complaining again about the dark and the lack of glass panes in the windows.
It felt as if it were coming from far away.
Alba felt as if she were no longer in her body, not even as Carlos shifted her hand to the crook of his bent arm and guided her through the house.
For she could not shake the feeling that there was something that did not want her here.