Chapter VIII
VIII
Elías
Elías woke in Casa Calavera with his back and legs aching from the journey from Zacatecas, immediately resentful of how he could see his breath on the air as he yanked layers of clothing onto his stiff body.
The kitchen was outdoors, as kitchens were in his grandmother’s village—the familiarity struck him like a blow, leaving him dizzy.
The line of workers’ houses beyond Casa Calavera caught his eye like a vision from a half-remembered dream.
Yes, those things were familiar, but the slant of light from the east?
It was all wrong. It was sharper here, cutting and white and glass-like.
The breads were different. Everything was made from a grain called maíz and had an unfamiliar texture.
The water smelled foreign. Even the woodsmoke had a different edge.
This he did not mind—it was spiced and rich, as if it were reaching toward him from a bazaar many seas away.
He remained mired in thought as he walked toward Victoriano’s workshop to assess it in the light of day.
There was much to be done: Not only did he need to introduce himself to the other workers, he needed to become acquainted with the work of an azoguero, and fast. His mind had thrown out old papers on alchemy and rewritten itself full to bursting with knowledge on mercury refinement methods and diagrams of amalgamation patios over the course of the long voyage.
But theory was only theory until he mixed the powdered ore with the sun beating on his back, until mercury slipped through his fingers.
And what theory he did have was decades out of date.
Surely the azogueros of the Indies had improved their techniques since the publication of Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias.
Surely the Peruvian methods and terms referenced in that text could not be perfectly applicable in Nueva Espana…
He was so distracted that he did not notice a figure scrabbling from shadow to shadow behind him until she—for the figure was she , the exact she he never wanted to speak to again—had fallen into step with him.
“The earthquake ruined the roof after the rainy season,” María Victoriana said. “Same as some of the buildings on the amalgamation patio, but those got fixed right away.”
He lengthened his stride to pull ahead of her; she broke into a jog to keep up. She was neither tall nor as small framed as some—Alba came to mind, as fragile and as fine as crystal beneath his hands as they danced, but he shoved this thought away.
María Victoriana’s dark brown hair was plaited and wound around her head like a crown; her bright red-and-brown rebozo gave her the look of a winter bird hopping over stones to keep up with him.
Her face was broad-paned, her nose a brief, pert accent above a mouth that moved in an eerie echo of his father’s.
Strange, that he should see his father’s features for the first time in twenty years on a stranger’s face.
It wasn’t strange . It was fucked up, that’s what it was.
“I maintained it as best I could, but Mamá didn’t want me visiting. It upset her,” she said.
She was an older adolescent, maybe fifteen or sixteen.
He had been about the same age when he gave up on his father ever returning.
The tempests and lashing out had passed, and he had accepted that it was him and Mamá.
They were in Sevilla then. They had to rely on Abuelo Arcadio and the Monterrubio family, for Victoriano had stopped sending money for them from the Indies.
Elías worked, first at the river docks, helping cargo from the port disembark, then keeping books for a merchant. He saved. He worked into the night until his eyes burned. Each coin earned was another coin toward leaving the Monterrubios behind.
He was practically a child. He had been a child, when Victoriano left him and Mamá.
And what had the man been doing, as Elías burned in the sun overseeing chests coming off ships, as he filled every sunlit hour and others besides with work so that he and Mamá did not have to rely on sneering relatives?
Taking care of someone else.
Elías kept walking. Bit his tongue until it hurt.
“Papá said that when you were in prison you learned about mercury. Because the prison was a mine.”
That stung like a foreman’s whip. How lovely, that Abuelo Arcadio had kept Victoriano apprised of Elías’s failures over the years while keeping Elías in the dark about Victoriano’s. May Abuelo Arcadio rot where he stood.
“He said that you learned magic with metals,” María Victoriana continued as Elías approached the workshop. “That you were trying to turn lead into gold. Are you a sorcerer? The priests say that sorcery is the Devil’s work. Did you make a deal with the Devil?”
Perhaps she was younger than sixteen. Fourteen? He never spent time with young people and had no ability to discern their age.
“My father said a lot of things,” Elías said flatly. “He didn’t always mean them.”
“Are you calling Papá a liar?” María Victoriana’s voice turned stony and defensive.
Elías tried the door of the workshop. The handle fell off in his hand. He tilted his head back at the blinding sky and shut his eyes. Sighed deeply, then gave the door a sharp kick.
It swung inward.
The room was dark and smelled of mildew and the same kind of spicy woodsmoke from the kitchen.
“I guess this is yours now.”
He turned, surprised by the maturity of the bitterness in María Victoriana’s voice. She stood in the doorway, sentry-like, hunched shoulders silhouetted against the bright white light from outside.
“But that’s fine,” she added. Harsh, cold. It was clearly not fine, as far as she was concerned. “Papá said that when he was gone, I would inherit the mine.”
This startled a bark of dry laughter from Elías’s throat.
“Is that so?” he said. “Have you chatted with Heraclio about that?”
María Victoriana’s face firmed into a haughty expression. “Mamá is worried you’ll want Papá’s share of the mine. That you’ll take it from me. And that you could, because you’re a man and a peninsular. But you’re different from Heraclio and Carlos. You’re peninsular, but you’re not like them.”
Elías’s hackles lifted. “And what is that supposed to mean?”
Her stance had grown defiant. “You’re new here, so I’ll explain it nice and slowly.
Nueva Espana has castas. The closer you are to peninsular, the more you get out of the world.
I’m mestiza, and you’re…different. So we’re on even footing, you and I.
If you try to take my mine, my inheritance, I’ll sue you in court. And you’ll lose.”
Elías had no time for this. He was meant to meet Romero at the entrance of the mine, and then supervise the collection of ore to be taken to the amalgamation patio.
María Victoriana stepped back abruptly, but the defiance in her stance did not retreat.
“Oh, would I?” he snapped.
“Yes,” María Victoriana said. “Because I have Papá’s will, and you’re not in it.”
It was a slap across the face—swift enough to snatch the breath, leaving a stinging, hot flush in its wake.
“Look,” Elías said. “I don’t want this damn mine. I don’t want these fucking rocks. The only reason I am here is because my father—”
“ Our father,” María Victoriana interrupted.
“He left us ”—Elías matched her stress with his own, exaggerated and with no small amount of mockery—“in a staggering amount of debt, both to the family and to the merchant who is currently staying in Casa Calavera. As his only son, that is my inheritance. Will or no will.” His breathing hurt.
Perhaps because his chest hurt. Because everything hurt.
“So unless you plan to embrace this newfound familial loyalty wholeheartedly and help me with that , then leave me alone.”
Her mouth, once level, had dipped into a crescent, its ends pointed down. Her lips trembled.
What better way to begin his time at the hacienda de minas than making a child cry?
The right thing to do would be to apologize. She was his sister, wasn’t she?
He had danced around the word in his mind since he arrived, avoiding it all night. Sister . How bitter it tasted.
“María Victoriana!”
Her head snapped toward the sound of her name. It came from the direction of the mine entrance—and judging from the sudden alertness in María Victoriana’s expression, it had to be her mother.
She gave him one last harsh look. “If Papá was a liar, then he lied about one thing,” she said, eyes fiery. “You’re awful.”
Then she turned on her heel and raced away.
—
Climbing up to the entrance of the mine meant that Elías roughly followed María Victoriana and her mother away from the workshop, up the footpath to the ugly maw in the side of the mountain.
When they peeled off the path and nipped around a corner, enough workers also headed in that direction that Elías followed thoughtlessly.
Romero’s instructions the night before had been vague, primarily consisting of up and you won’t miss it.
If people were moving that way, then it had to lead to the mine.
He turned a corner around a large rock and stopped.
A small grotto opened before him. Its opening—a doorway of sorts—was as perfect as if it had been hewn by human hands; high enough, he wagered, for him to slip in without brushing the crown of his head against stone.
This was obviously not the mine. Yet a curious sensation curled through him, moving him forward, as if his veins themselves had lifted and tugged against bone and sinew to follow…follow what? A beckoning. An invitation. Come , it whispered. Come .
Inside, the ceiling swept high, higher than he had expected from so narrow an opening; he would think it carved if not for the roughness of the rock overhead and the faint glistening of liquid, which accentuated needle-thin stalactites.