Chapter XII
XII
Elías
“We are putting on a show of family unity,” Heraclio said that night, casting a disapproving look at Elías’s clothes. “We need Emilio Díaz to respect us.”
Elías had not brought clothing for dining with merchants; at Heraclio’s summons, he had dutifully washed his hair in freezing water and put on the cleanest things he had, and that was it.
There was nothing else to be done about his appearance.
If it offended Heraclio so, then perhaps he would allow Elías to return to the kitchen of Casa Calavera in silence, where he had dined since arriving at Mina San Gabriel.
There, he gingerly avoided the cook and scant servants recently arrived from Zacatecas and was avoided in return.
They all seemed to whisper about him; he had caught his father’s name and María Victoriana too many times, but this he could bear and ignore.
Heraclio’s commands, on the other hand…
“Do not talk about your father,” Heraclio said. “Or your mother. Or Almadén.”
That was fair. None of these things would impress the family’s silk-clad creditors and Carlos’s future in-laws. Barring his father—who seemed to lurk in every shadow of this place ready to trip him and land a strike where Elías’s underbelly was softest—they were easy enough topics to avoid.
Heraclio made to enter the dining room, then paused. He turned back to Elías. “Don’t pick any fights with Carlos.”
A childish flash of indignation in his breast. “So long as he picks none with me.”
Heraclio scrutinized him, perhaps to gauge whether or not he spoke in jest. Good luck figuring it out. Elías hardly knew himself.
“On second thought,” Heraclio said with a measure of consideration, “it would be better if you did not speak at all.”
“A show of family loyalty indeed,” Elías said, half under his breath.
“Do you want your silver or not?” Heraclio thundered.
Heraclio had always turned like the flip of a page, from silence to anger and back again. Cobwebbed memories floated through Elías, a guiding instinct. Do not bait. Only Abuelo Arcadio ever got away with that, and Abuelo Arcadio best loved a bullfight when blood was drawn.
Elías said nothing.
“That’s what I thought,” Heraclio said. “Show up, shut up, then take the money and leave. It’s what you want, it’s what I want. Don’t fuck it up.”
“Understood,” Elías said. He did: Emilio Díaz could call in their debt whenever he wanted to, and according to the law, they would have to pay immediately. This would ruin the Monterrubios, regardless of Elías’s mercury. And if they were ruined, he would never escape this godforsaken place.
And Emilio, Elías thought as he sat opposite the merchant at the table, seemed like a flighty fellow.
He and his wife filled the cold, stucco room with incessant chatter over dishes of steaming food; their touches of hands and exchanged, secretive looks read to him like an affection long lived in.
This did not endear them to him. They were high-strung, fussy rich people, the kind of family that would not hesitate to ruin another if they so much as smelled fear in the wind.
Alba sat at her father’s side. Thin, red scratches marred the skin of her forearms, just barely revealing themselves from under the sleeves of her dress.
It looked as if she had been scratched by a small animal or by splintered wood.
She pushed food around her plate and did not acknowledge her wine.
Likewise, she studiously ignored Elías’s presence, turning her face toward an impassioned conversation occurring down the table between the priest Bartolomé and Romero, who had also been invited to dinner.
“If the reports I have heard are correct, mercury constitutes a vital part of idolatrous practices happening here,” Bartolomé said, turning to Heraclio. “I’d wager that’s where your stolen mercury has gone. If we could discuss this, perhaps in private—”
“Enough business talk, Padre Bartolomé.” Heraclio dismissed this with a wave of his fork. “Let us enjoy this meal together first.”
Elías might have been interested in this conversation if he were not staring at the dark wine in his glass, wishing he could drink away his shame at having mocked Alba in the azoguería.
Bright points of furious color had appeared in her wan cheeks; her shoulders had pulled back as if drawing away from something offensive.
Him . He was that offensive thing. She had been polite, more than polite, even friendly , which was more than he deserved, more than he could have ever dreamed of…
and he might as well have spat in her face.
He should have held his tongue about Carlos. He was an idiot.
He ducked his head and obeyed Heraclio. He ate and did not speak.
Carlos was asking about Emilio’s estates in a place called Michoacán, which seemed obviously more fertile than here. Perhaps more tolerable too. Should Emilio choose to ruin the mine, perhaps it could be a distant and pleasant enough place to escape to.
“Where is Michoacán?” he asked.
Emilio and his wife both turned to look at him. To stare at him, in fact, and suddenly he felt as if he were an ogre, a hideous creature too large and brutish to fit even in this rough-hewn room.
Alba turned to Carlos; when she put a light hand on his forearm, he inclined his golden head to her.
For a moment, as she whispered something inaudible in his ear, they looked as at ease with each other as a couple who had been married for years.
Elías was weak for noting this. Weaker still for how his heart smarted with something akin to jealousy.
No, he was not jealous . Jealousy was for men who stood a chance.
“I take it you’ve recently arrived from Spain,” Emilio said. His tone was pleasant and conversational; his eyes shone from wine.
Elías’s fork clattered against his plate as he set it down. He could feel Heraclio watching him. Three words, and he had already spoken too much. But he had to reply. It would be rude not to.
“Yes,” he said.
Silence stretched, long and awkward. He should have answered with more detail, or at least with a pleasantry or two.
Comment on the crossing. But now too many moments had passed; now it would be even more awkward to add to what he had said.
He was trapped. He hated dinners like this.
He would never accept Heraclio’s invitation again.
Well, it hadn’t been an invitation, it was more of an arm-twist, wasn’t it?
“Same crossing as me, I imagine, though on different ships in the fleet.” A smooth interjection from Bartolomé. “Which were you on? I made the journey with Nuestra Senora de Regla .”
The flagship. Naturally the bronze priest would travel to the Indies in the beating heart of the treasure fleet.
“ América ,” said Elías. It was a bit too flat to be considered polite.
Elías went to Mass because Heraclio told him to, because it would be conspicuous if he were not there.
Mass did not interest him. He had prayed in cathedrals and Friday mosques and the darkness of a prison alike and had never once felt it did any good, so he no longer did.
But the way the priest had looked at him when he did not stand to receive Communion lingered under his skin.
It felt like looking directly at a surface that he knew should have been reflective and catching no glimpse of his mirrored self.
He had met men who were frank and men who were opaque. Bartolomé was neither, too much of neither , and this—even more than the way he turned the conversation like a cat with a toy—was why he struck Elías as uncanny.
“Michoacán,” the priest said to Emilio, layering unnecessarily exotic stress over the syllables. “I have read that it is greener than El Dorado. Tell me more, senor.”
Talk turned to travel and where Bartolomé had been when he was in His Majesty’s army.
Elías watched the plates like he would an hourglass.
When they were empty and the bellies below were full, he could escape this room.
He could escape the glint of jewelry from Alba’s throat and the way it drew the eye.
“I hear from Heraclio that you’re a well-traveled man.”
Elías looked up, taking two moments too long to shake off his thoughts. “I beg pardon?”
Everyone was looking at him. Emilio in particular peered at him across the table. He mused: “An alchemist who came all the way to the New World…from Constantinople.”
It was not a question, but Emilio landed on the final word of the sentence with a musician’s flourish. Elías could practically hear brass cymbals rattle his teeth.
A monosyllabic answer would not suffice.
He glanced at Heraclio; a low tilt of his uncle’s chin indicated that he should speak, and he should get on with it.
But then Alba lifted her attention to him. She met his eyes—a lustrous flash of ink spilled in the candlelight. Just as quickly, she refocused her attention on her plate.
He was filled with a powerful desire to be something other than an ogre. He wanted to be suave and urbane and interesting. It was an unnerving wish, root deep, almost adolescent in fervor.
“Yes.” He placed his fork down. Without the metal in his palm, perhaps his hands would feel less clammy. “I live—I mean, I lived there for almost three years.”
“Fascinating, I say!” Emilio cried, his delight a childlike, untainted thing. “This family is interesting after all.”
Carlos sliced a murderous look down the table at Elías.
“Did you ever see a Janissary?” Emilio continued, ignorant of Carlos’s simmering displeasure.
“I…yes, actually.” Neither Carlos nor Heraclio had ever asked about his life in Constantinople, nor expressed any interest in learning more about him; the shift in the attention of the room toward him felt like a sudden, bracing draft.
“We frequented Janissary coffee shops. My fellow students and I, that is. It is where one goes to hear everything that is happening in the city.”
In his mind, gulls rose and obscured his friends on the docks as they turned, not knowing that would be the last time they saw him. The last time they saw their money.
He hoped they assumed he had perished at sea. Drowning—or even capture by Barbary slavers—would be mourned. Forgiven. Eventually, forgotten.
All you ever do is leave.
Drawing up memories fed them, and they grew fat and muscled, visceral with color and voices. They lumbered into the room and hung behind those who sat at the table like overfed, ghostly wallflowers. Reminders of his past lives intent on filling his belly with dark shame.
But he was here. The past was gone. It was now .
No matter how strange it felt to talk about what was once daily life, what was so common and easy, haunts so comfortable he had assumed he would spend the rest of his life there—he was here .
Yes, it felt like talking about a dream to a roomful of strangers—and worse, family—but Emilio was looking at him like he had just declared that he had succeeded at transmuting lead into gold.
Gold. Silver. Cold, hard metal would be stamped at the treasury and pressed into his palms, weighing the lining of his coat once more as he boarded a galleon bound for the Philippines.
Unless Emilio decided to call in the Monterrubios’ debts.
He was no good at faking smiles, so he did not try, but he could lean forward, mirroring Emilio’s eager posture.
“I once overheard a group of them plotting to rebel against the Grand Turk,” he said.
“To overthrow him, like they did his father. We often went to the same coffee shop, but after that, I never saw them again.” He let his brows lift in a way he hoped was suggestive of the truth: Those men had been executed, and the sultan ruled on.
“Did you ever see the Grand Turk?” Emilio asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Elías said, shifting his weight back in his chair. “The Grand Turk doesn’t meet with foreigners, especially not with so lowly a scholar as myself.”
Alba straightened in her chair. She was luminous with curiosity, a silvery light drowning all the ghosts in the room until there was no one but her, no one he heard as she parted her lips to speak.
“Did you—” she began, then was cut off.
“But were you a foreigner, really?”
Romero sat next to Elías. His wineglass was empty, its sides smudged from the oily fingertips of frequent use. “If your mother was a Moor, then does that make you a foreigner to those people or not?”
A chill seeped into the room.
Elías stood, letting his napkin fall to the floor, filling the room like the ogre he was. No, he did not want this man as an ally. He would live friendless in this godforsaken land. He was alone.
And that was fine with him.
He looked Romero dead in the eye. Solemnly—priestlike, even—he lifted his own wineglass.
He dashed it in Romero’s face.
Then he turned away from the table. Chaos erupted behind him as he walked out the door.