Chapter XIII
XIII
Elías
Elías fumbled kindling with frozen hands. Within a few minutes, he had coaxed an anemic fire to life in the hearth of the workshop. He had stalked directly here through the cold, not bothering to find where he had put his sarape. No need, not when anger flushed his neck and chest with heat.
“Candles,” he muttered, stepping back from the fire and rolling his sleeves up his forearms.
He lit them around the room. Their glow, though homey and inviting, did little to warm the space.
He had not been here since that morning with María Victoriana; it was as if the mess and ruin conspired together to force him out.
The earthquake she mentioned must have been what had left the small spill of rubble on one side of the simple building; adobe bricks had closed most of the wall up, but not entirely.
The night could still glimpse him within, still whisper a cold greeting whenever he passed by that corner of the room.
The room itself was square, with the hearth on one side, a worktable in the center, and a bookshelf of unsanded, unpainted wood against the wall on the far side.
Three chairs cowered from his presence in different corners of the room; the worktable had a stool.
This was stacked with books and covered in dust.
It would take hours to clean. Perhaps days.
He began.
Movement kept thought at bay; at bay was where thoughts belonged.
Rags were found and thrown in a bucket. The presence of a bucket necessitated a plunge into the icy darkness and walk to the well.
The stars were tired. Their winks were weak, faraway things.
Only the moon kept him company as his boots crunched up the path to the well.
The mouth of the mine loomed far above him, somehow darker than the night sky.
That mine and all that lived in its foul belly was the source of everything that had plagued him since his father first left for the Indies so many years ago.
Elías had run far away, and then farther, and farther still; and yet the forces at the heart of the world had conspired to play a divine prank and bring him back to the rock where all his troubles began.
There, they bound him to it with silver chains. How uproariously funny.
He made an obscene gesture at the mine.
He took water back to the workshop. He scrubbed.
The soap smelled foreign and stung his hands, but repeatedly plunging his arms in cold water up to his elbows was medicinal.
Stop dawdling, ya Elías, there’s work to be done , Mamá would say, pointing to the corners of the room, the highest shelves and corners of the windows.
Even when they were relegated to the smallest, darkest rooms near the cellar in the Monterrubio mansion in Sevilla, she had insisted on keeping the space spotless.
To her, cleanliness was second only to the nobility of holding one’s chin high in the face of humiliation.
After his father left, she neither dried Elías’s tears nor coddled him.
Perhaps she knew even then that Victoriano would never return.
Perhaps she had intuited that one day Elías would be alone in the world and gentleness would not prepare him for that.
She was hard, but she was good. She loved him.
She was noble. And she never, ever deserved to be treated the way she had been by the Monterrubios.
Hot stones hissed as soapy water scalded soot away from the hearth.
Years ago, Abuelo Arcadio had no patience when Victoriano returned from his work selling goods to the overseers of the North African presidios with a half-Spanish, half-Arab wife and their infant son in tow.
His attitude rippled through Elías’s cold, narrow-faced aunts, who made it abundantly clear that they looked after him and his mother as a matter of charity, not familial loyalty.
He and his mother swallowed every insult.
For where else would they go? Mamá’s family was across the sea in villages outside of Ceuta.
In Sevilla, she had no one but the Monterrubios.
She had to wait, first for a long time and then even longer, for the money that Victoriano promised from the Indies.
Elías had forced himself to grow. The sooner he worked, the sooner he saved, the sooner he would amass enough to sweep his mother away from the sneers and sideways glances of the Monterrubios.
Work, take the money, leave. Never look back.
He had done it once. He would do it again.
Victoriano’s books slowed his fevered cleaning. He had pushed a pile to the side; one fell off the top of the stack and opened on the worktable.
Equations and diagrams caught his eye; the handwriting stopped his heart in its tracks.
It was his father’s.
It was like hearing an echo of Victoriano’s voice through a tunnel, layered and dissonant from the distance and the passage of time. He hadn’t seen that hand since Victoriano had stopped writing.
Or at least since Victoriano had stopped writing to him . Apparently, he had kept writing to Abuelo Arcadio.
Summon Elías. Elías knows mercury.
How little shame the man showed in summoning his son when he was of use. Never mind when his son needed him .
Victoriano’s grave lay just beyond the chapel, outside the town of San Gabriel. Elías had noted its location when told by Heraclio and refused to visit it.
He should throw the book in the fire. Watch Victoriano’s handwriting shrivel and melt in the flames and turn to dust like his body beneath the cursed earth of Nueva Espana.
He was about to do so. He walked to the fire and tilted the book at an angle that would give it satisfying heft when he cast it into the hearth.
Then, a leaf of paper slipped from between its pages and drifted to the floor.
He paused. Picked it up before the drafts could nudge it toward embers. Victoriano’s messy scrawl slanted in an uncanny echo of Elías’s own; after a moment, he found it easy to skim.
It was a map of Mina San Gabriel.
There were descriptions of cave-ins, notes about where certain lines of ore led and how to follow them deeper into the mountains, comments on where the air was bad…
This was actually useful. Would have been even more useful to know a few days ago, in fact, before Alba had gotten lost in the dark.
He flipped through notes on refining silver by mercury.
There were diagrams and measurements, instructions followed by second-guessing and corrections in brighter, fresher ink.
The margins were thick with comments on how Romero was a mediocre azoguero and a drunk whom he suspected of skimming silver for his own profit.
Perhaps he should not burn this notebook after all.
Elías laid it flat on the worktable. He pulled a candle close, ignoring the burn of hot wax against his fingertips, and read by its flickering light.
…a figure swathed in a white shroud, before which they leave mercury on the altar as an offering.
She is skeletal and, to me, sinister; Carolina scoffed at my foreigner’s eye when I said this to her, for she claims that this so-called goddess is a neutral, if not benevolent, force.
I am not so certain. The shrine casts fear into my heart whenever I draw near; I am not brave enough to enter it, not when so many go there and pray for Young Izquierdo’s demise.
I fear that this force—be it goddess, spirit, angel, or monster—may grant their prayers…
I can only hope that they do not pray for mine.
A draft slipped over Elías’s back, so close as to be intimate; his shoulders seized with a violent shiver.
He looked up. The candles had burned low. The fire was embers. Darkness thickened in the corners of the room; wind groaned through the valley and slipped through every crack in the mud brick, lacing the room with ice.
He had been dozing; he should head back.
Though he had no idea what time it was, the current inhabitants of Casa Calavera tended to turn in early.
If it were just Carlos and Heraclio in the parlor, it would be easy to sneak past them and deal with whatever they had to say about dinner in the morning.
He shut the notebook and left it on the worktable. Turned to the door, dreading the long walk back to Casa Calavera exposed to the wind and without a sarape.
He braced for cold. He was not braced for what he saw when he opened the door and stepped into the night.
A ghost.
No, of course not. There were no such things as phantoms. He was a man of reason; he would not permit such thoughts to cross his mind.
It was a woman.
A woman walked to the mine dressed in nothing but a white nightgown.
That was not the only ghostly thing about her appearance. She moved as if animated by an invisible puppeteer, and a bully at that—she jerked slowly, inch by torturous inch, her weight slinging with each awkward step.
Something like the aftertaste of fear hung metallic in his mouth.
Black hair, unplaited and long, swung with each drunken movement of the puppeteer. Its luster gleamed familiar in moonlight.
It couldn’t be.
“Senorita Díaz?” he called.
The woman walked on.
He followed. First hesitantly, then with more confidence when the woman did not reply—when Alba did not reply, he corrected himself.
For indeed, it was Alba. It had to be. There was so little he trusted in this godforsaken place except this: For better or for worse, he could pick her figure from a crowd out of the corner of his eye.
“Senorita Díaz! You’ll catch your death of a cold. Where are you going?”
The mine.
The place where, when he had found her, she shook as hard as someone dying of fever, her eyes glassy with panic. She swore she had heard voices.
Mines were not safe places, but mines were something known. Her panic that day was not.
This was not.
This felt like a scene from a strange dream, but he knew he was not dreaming. The air was piercingly clear and cold; there was enough light from the moon to see the mine ahead, to feel as if it were watching them.
Something was not right.