Chapter XVI #2
“I have been in communication with the Inquisition in the capital,” Bartolomé said.
“I came to Nueva Espana at their recommendation but have not yet taken up the position they offered me. I convinced them that rumors of idolatry in remote towns were worth investigating because I wanted to spend time with old friends.” He did not so much as look at Carlos when he said this, but Elías did and marked the flush that rose beneath Carlos’s collar.
“But perhaps the Lord saw me tempted to take my leisure, for He has brought my work to me.”
Elías could not help his brows from lifting. Pallor crept beneath Heraclio’s weathered cheeks. To have the Inquisition brought down around one’s head would be a death blow to his business.
Part of Elías wanted to see it happen. He wanted to sit in a box at the theater and watch the morbid opera unfurl, his heart swelling with selfish rapture as the singers died and the curtain fell on the whole Monterrubio mining undertaking.
Never mind that he would be brought down with it—part of him would gladly sink to the bottom of the sea if it meant bringing Carlos and Heraclio down along with him.
He and the greed of the Monterrubios would strike the silt and settle and rot there for eternity; his ghost would cackle forever at the bottom of the deep.
But if the Inquisition came to the hacienda de minas, they would find Alba.
“That shrine is the Devil’s work,” Bartolomé said.
“So was Romero’s death. I do not have the information to link the two more than that, not yet, but I am on the hunt.
I know one thing for certain.” Righteous fire blazed in him as he declared: “The shrine must be destroyed. Immediately. You must destroy it, and forbid your workers from worshiping idols and demons, or I shall summon the Inquisition.”
Heraclio was not a man to sputter. His way of being in the world struck the same prideful chord as Abuelo Arcadio’s; he had neither the charm nor the patience nor the curiosity that Elías remembered, albeit reluctantly, in Victoriano.
And yet : He sputtered.
“I swear it, Padre,” he said with an emphatic sweep of one hand. “There is no need to write to the Inquisitors. It will be gone before nightfall.”
“Good,” Bartolomé said. “Now release this innocent man.”
Heraclio turned to Elías, almost surprised, as if he had forgotten he was there. He gestured at him to stand.
No apology, no excuse. It was stupid of Elías to anticipate groveling; Heraclio and Carlos did not grovel, and certainly not to him, but the priest’s presence and what had transpired had given rise to a brief, curious flicker. Would they?
Of course not.
They watched in stony silence as Elías rose, dusted the dirt and hay from his trousers, and followed Bartolomé out the door.
There were workers lingering in the central aisle of the stable; they parted like the proverbial sea before the priest, their curiosity lingering on Elías’s shoulders and back as he stepped into the sun.
Mere minutes had passed since he was dragged away from the chapel, but it felt as if the sun were higher in the sky.
As if it were burning brighter behind that low veil of clouds.
He expected Bartolomé to be drenched in its holy glow, but when he drew abreast of the priest, he found instead a man who looked tired. Profoundly tired.
They walked in silence.
For a few steps, Elías did not know where he was going, only that he was walking free and shaking off the sensation of clenched hands on his arms and shirt. Then the chapel loomed in his vision.
He slowed his stride; Bartolomé matched his step and gave him a look that was half question, half invitation. Join him in the chapel?
“I’ll be going,” Elías said and belatedly jerked a thumb toward the workshop.
The other option was to return to the house for breakfast, but…
walking into a room of people who still considered him a murderer was not how he wished to resume his morning.
He would first let Bartolomé spread the good word that Romero’s murderer was still on the loose. “Thank you. I owe you.”
Bartolomé brushed this away with a gentle gesture—again, all Elías could read in it was tired .
“You owe me nothing,” Bartolomé said. “But you do owe it to yourself to receive the sacraments. If you are not in a state of grace, I am always here to speak with.” He slowed his walk further and paused, as if reexamining what he had just said.
“I can’t imagine that is appealing to you.
I know you don’t like me—whether by nature of my friendship with Carlos or your feelings about the Church.
You lived under the rule of the Grand Turk.
I can’t imagine that experience endears you to a strange priest in a foreign land. ”
“Indeed,” Elías said, so taken aback that frankness stole his tongue, “no.”
A weak smile. A glint of amusement in those pale eyes; a shade of gratitude, perhaps, for the honesty. “Nevertheless,” Bartolomé said, “I am here.”
And when he walked to the chapel, it was Elías’s turn to pause, and watch.
He had been raised to distrust golden veneers and holier-than-thou comportment; this had never led him astray.
He wondered, for the first time, if he was wrong.
—
His hands shook as he stacked books. Gripping the broom helped; when there was no more floor to sweep, when the dirt had been scoured away near to bedrock, he sat on the chair Alba had sat in last night and wiped the sweat from his brow with his forearm. Still, his arm trembled.
He should get food, but even going to the kitchen…His mind ran six steps ahead of him and flung open the doors to men gasping and pointing, to Socorro grimly rolling up her sleeves and coming at him with her tools for grinding maíz.
It was a stupid fear. Romero had not been loved.
Most cut him a broad berth. His temper was foul and his sense of humor fouler; young women walked more quickly in his presence, their eyes trained on the ground.
That was indicator enough of bone-deep rot in a man.
It was difficult to imagine more than a superficial show of grief for his sudden absence.
But who had disliked him enough to kill him?
Rather: Who disliked him enough to risk Heraclio’s wrath?
The door of the workshop swung open.
“You’re all right,” María Victoriana said. Her silhouette entered, holding a clay bowl with one hand and a basket in the other. It wasn’t a question, but he answered anyway.
“I am.”
María Victoriana stalked to the table and moved stacks of books to one side with her elbow.
Then, she emptied her arms. The bowl was filled with scrambled eggs that still steamed in the pale light from the door, that smelled of that vibrant red sauce he had come to love the burn of.
The basket was filled with…cloth? Or so he thought.
Then she unfolded it, and the scent of tortillas, hot and perfectly spotted with char from the stove, rose like the coming of a new prophet.
“You never came to the house for breakfast,” she said by way of explanation.
He was already at the table and reaching for a tortilla.
She plopped herself onto a stool.
He ignored her and ate. Dinner was so many hours ago; it was only now that he realized how much the nerves of being in the formal dining room had prevented him from eating his fill.
“I don’t know if I like you, but I don’t want you to die,” María Victoriana said.
This surprised him enough to tear his attention from the food. The answer that tripped to his tongue: Well, how funny that she should say that, because he also did not like himself and also did not want to die. They had a great deal in common after all.
He swallowed. Reached for another tortilla and tore it in two.
“I won’t,” he said instead.
“You look too much like him to die. It wouldn’t be fair.”
She did not look at him as she spoke. Her eyes were fixed on the empty hearth, and though her expression was stony, the words wavered. As if they struggled to carry the weight of what they hid.
Elías set his hands down. More softly, this time, he repeated: “I won’t.”
“Promise?”
Being dragged to the stables had cast his world on its side; those moments had tasted of a liminality that he was still familiar with, many years later.
The cruel wrench of fate that had him thrown into the mud of Almadén to fight or rot crept in like a sly twist of the breeze: it was never there, until it was, and then his life would never be the same.
He hadn’t thought that death would come for him. Prison, absolutely, because that was what had awaited him before.
Perhaps that assumption was naive. He did not know the laws of this land. He did not know what Heraclio and Carlos were capable of, not until the latter had laid hands on him.
Perhaps he still did not know.
“The priest doesn’t think it’s me,” he said to assure her. To assure himself. “Heraclio and Carlos listen to him.”
“Fine, then.”
She folded her arms over her chest and watched as he spooned water from the well bucket into a cup for himself. He hesitated before he drank. He held it out to her instead.
“You want…?”
She shook her head.
He drank. Cleared his throat. Another peace offering, then: “Did Victoriano have any books on better ways to reserve and reuse mercury? Other than beating that sackcloth with a paddle, I mean. Feels like that would fall to me, now that…”
“Of course he did,” María Victoriana said. The arms folded across her chest loosened. She made as if to stand, then paused. She eyed the stacks of books on the table but made no move toward them.
Was she waiting for his permission? Were they his, as this crumbling shack was? No matter—they wouldn’t be his forever. When he left this awful place, she could take all the spoils she wanted.
He waved her toward the table.
She required no more invitation. He had barely finished the gesture before she was on her feet and had her hands on the books, lovingly sorting through them and reorganizing them.
Dust from thick, moisture-wrinkled pages rose into the air as she opened them and inhaled deeply of their smell, her eyes fluttering shut with delight.
In earnest, this time: Perhaps they did have something in common after all.
“I bet he journaled about it,” she said. “He wrote all the time. He never thought a full sentence without having me write it down somewhere.”
And yet he never wrote to Elías.
“Wait,” he said. “Without having you write it down?”
María Victoriana did not look up as she pawed through the books. She lifted one hand and mimed a tremble.
Elías tightened his grip on the tortilla. Salsa dripped down his hand—he was aware, more than usual, of how it fluttered, no matter how much he focused on keeping it still.
“I talked about his shakes the other day. They got so severe that he couldn’t write,” she said. “He taught me when I was five and dictated everything to me. Until his mind started to go, too, that is.”
She set a stack of books aside with a satisfying thump. The movement of this pile had revealed a leather-bound tome, slender and dark.
She frowned.
“This isn’t his.” She cracked it open. “Oh. Oh… my .”
She laid the book open on the table and snatched her hands back as if she had been burned.
A page of pentagrams gleamed luridly up at them, their lines as thick and black and lustrous as if they had been inked that morning.
“What on earth is that?” María Victoriana cried.
Elías tilted his head to the side, wondering the same. Then it occurred to him: a swoop of gulls; the crowds of the book bazaar behind the Sultan Ahmet Mosque. He wiped his hands on his trousers and abandoned his breakfast to investigate.
“Ah! El Libro de San Cipriano ,” he said.
“It’s a historical artifact. See the stamp here, inside the front cover?
It once belonged to the library of a prince in Granada, someone who ruled before los Reyes Católicos retook the south.
” María Victoriana stared blankly at him.
“I bought it because it’s written in aljamía. ”
“Al…jamón?” María Victoriana said. “These glyphs are about food?”
“No. Aljamía ,” he repeated. “The letters are Arabic, but the words are castellano. Listen—”
He pointed to the ligatures and began to read aloud. At first he was slow, stumbling as he grasped where the author had chosen to represent vowels or drop them entirely, assuming the reader’s familiarity with his meaning. Then, his pace quickened.
“?‘And I call upon thee, and thy power, and thy strength, to carry out my will—’?” Here he paused.
“See, castellano this old sounds somewhat like Portuguese, and then the author uses Arabic verbal nouns when discussing summoning . Why summoning in this context, though…? It doesn’t make grammatical sense. ”
But María Victoriana was not listening. She was looking around the workshop, wide-eyed. The air had shifted around them; there was a breeze in the room that did not come from the door. That was not wintry cold. That could have smelled, faintly, of sulfur.
But he had to be imagining that.
María Victoriana reached over and shut the book. It closed with a hearty snap .
“I wouldn’t let the priest know that you have this,” she said, and there was no scolding in her voice, no harshness, only a frankness that sent a wave of fear rolling through his gut. “He might not defend you after all.”