Chapter XXV
XXV
Elías
While Bartolomé went to inform the rest of the household that Alba had fallen victim to matlazahuatl, Elías sat.
He ran his fingers over the rosary. He did not pray.
Or perhaps he did: He gazed at Alba’s cracked door as one might at stained-glass windows in a cathedral.
His mind wandered back to the workshop, back to the circle scored on the packed dirt floor with charcoal.
There, he hit a vat of dread, thicker and heavier than quicksilver.
What if someone went to the workshop and saw what he had done?
María Victoriana was right.
He was on his feet, pacing the fine rug that covered the stone floor of Alba’s sitting room.
Half his mind noted, distantly, that it was Eastern made; wasn’t that pattern Isfahani?
It would have been brought to Nueva Espana at enormous cost via the Philippine fleet. Would be a shame to wear it thin.
The other half of his mind flung itself against the walls of his skull in panic, desperate to run to the workshop and scrub the floor until his hands bled.
But a demon was in the next room, latent beneath Alba’s skin, a predator lying in wait for its quivering prey.
So he paced.
When the rumble of his stomach and the shift of light outside told him that twilight was near, Bartolomé returned.
“Has she stirred?” he asked, thinly veiled anxiety lifting the pitch of his voice.
When Elías shook his head, the priest murmured, “Thanks be to God. Now you go rest.”
—
The workshop was as Elías and Alba had left it.
Stools were thrown on their sides, mineros felled by a blast deep in some underground cavern.
The hearth was cold and black. The charcoal lines he had scored on the ground mere hours ago, when he had been buoyant with mad optimism, with a convert’s arrogant belief, seemed deeper.
As if some great dragon had taken an idle claw and traced each curve of the circle, each demonic letter.
At the center of it all lay El Libro de San Cipriano . Its pages were splayed open, shameless as a nude on brothel sheets. Its diagrams of circles—annotated with Elías’s hand—gazed brazenly up at the world.
He lurched forward and snapped the book shut.
It had been lying on cold ground for hours, but its cover was warm.
He was imagining it. Imagining the bite of sulfur on the delicate insides of his nostrils. He was weak, exhausted, his stomach so empty that it brought to mind his first days on the Atlantic crossing, when he had ached for food but even a sip of water made him retch acid into a leaky bucket.
He set the book down on the table. On second thought, he stacked several other books atop it. To keep it from discovery, or to keep it from opening of its own volition? He was not quite sure.
Discovery would spell his doom. Had he not watched Bartolomé write a letter to the Inquisitors? He had practically dictated half of it himself.
“Joder,” he said to himself. And again: “ Joder .”
He fell to his knees and began scrubbing the circle.
It was only by bringing dirt from outside that the circle could be properly covered.
He filled in the gouge marks—for they were gouge marks, though he had traced the glyphs with charcoal, a material much softer than the hard-packed earth—and walked back and forth over the circle, tamping the fresh earth down and spreading it to blend with the rest of the room.
The circle laughed at him. It was as if it had tossed a blanket over its head to play, as with an infant, and winked coyly at Elías as it did so, for it was also in on the joke that it could not be seen.
Elías stamped the dirt harder.
If the mercury was taking his mind at last, he was not letting it go without a fight.
“Elías?”
His heel caught on nothing; he stumbled backward into the hearth.
María Victoriana stood in the doorway, shadowed by a second figure, one whom Elías had not seen since he first saw the shrine.
Her mother.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?” he sputtered.
Neither looked fooled by this haphazard attempt at normalcy. He had been caught hiding something, and it was evident from their expressions that they both knew it.
“You need to come with us,” María Victoriana said.
His heart skid to a stop. “I beg your pardon?”
“Have dinner with us,” Carolina said, casting María Victoriana a look he could not parse. Her request was carefully casual, unlike María Victoriana’s accusing tone. “I wish to get to know Victoriano’s son better.”
“Now?” Food was appealing—this he could not deny—but the timing?
“Now,” Carolina said, with a measure of forcefulness that seemed to have a power of its own. He straightened. The workshop was still in a state of disarray, yes, but perhaps something closer to its quotidian disorder. Nothing occult had occurred here. Nothing at all.
“Let me…” He grabbed a small leather satchel from its hook on the wall. This he normally used to take small pouches of mercury to and from the incorporadero, keeping his own supply under tight control; he moved the pile of books and stuffed El Libro de San Cipriano inside.
He could almost feel it humming with pleasure. It did not want to be parted from him.
“Books do not want anything,” he muttered as he swung the satchel so that the book was at his back.
His face flushed hot when he realized that he had spoken aloud.
María Victoriana raised a brow. “If you say so,” she said, and, as she turned to lead the way, she added under her breath: “Loco.”
—
Elías had seen the mud brick structures that formed the small town of mine workers and their families on his way to the entrance of the mine, but he had never come close to them.
They crossed a thin line etched in the dirt and lined with a faint gleam— mercury, perhaps?
It was difficult to tell as twilight lengthened dark, purple fingers of shadow across the valley.
The workers’ huts fell into their clutches first, and the farther he walked from the workshop and Casa Calavera, the more he felt as if he were walking into the night itself, descending into an unknowable darkness.
They entered a grander home among the other adobe structures. It boasted more than one room; in addition to the half-outdoor kitchen where a fire crackled merrily beneath an earthenware pot, there were living quarters, and a wooden door separating the bedroom from the rest of the house.
He sat when and where Carolina insisted, never taking the satchel off.
A clay bowl was put before him, steam carrying the aromas of comino and rice.
Tortillas served as cutlery, which was good, because he was so famished he would have eaten with his hands anyway.
His teeth sank into chicken so tender it fell off the bone.
Perhaps the Inquisition should come speak to Carolina. How one made the anemic, half-naked birds that pecked the earth outside Casa Calavera into this had to be nothing short of witchcraft.
Presently he was aware of María Victoriana eating next to him; across the wooden table from them sat Carolina, who had no food before her. For a moment, she traced the whorls of the wood in the top of the table, then she cut him a sharp look.
“There are some things you need to understand because you’ve used that,” she said, pointing at his satchel.
Elías choked; cleared his throat. He pasted a look of what he hoped was utter innocence on his features. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
María Victoriana kicked his shin under the table.
“Don’t play stupid with Mamá,” she muttered out of the side of her mouth.
His second interrogation of the day, but this one had an enforcer.
“I’m sorry,” he said, lifting his eyes to Carolina. A lesser man than he might have withered under the intensity of her look; perhaps he was that lesser man, for he felt a profound urge to shrink away. “There…there are things that are dangerous to speak of.”
“And things that are dangerous to do,” Carolina said. She gestured expansively at him, then seized one of his hands. Before he could protest, she flipped it, palm facing up, and examined his fingertips.
They were still black.
“Before Victoriano died,” she began, one eyebrow arching gracefully as she released his hand, “he made me swear an oath.” She wore a mask of careful, studied indifference, but beneath it, her voice trembled.
“He was not sure if you would come. But if you did…he said that when he first came to México, he felt lost. Alone. He did not wish for you to feel the same. He asked me to look out for you.” Her eyelashes—which were long and straight and black enough that her eyes appeared lined by kohl—batted forcefully.
She took a sharp breath, as if to fortify herself. “I have not. Not yet,” she added.
Elías did not want to feel kinship with Victoriano. He did not want to think of his father as a man, simply a man, alone in a friendless land just as he was. No. He did not need his father’s favors nor to be looked after as if he were a child playing with dangerous toys. He did not want any of it.
“I don’t need—”
“First of all: We don’t use books like that .” Carolina cut him off brusquely. “I don’t know what exactly you’re doing or how to prevent you from killing yourself, but for Victoriano, I must try.” She leaned forward. “You must know what it is you face.”
Elías’s heart beat in his ears.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“It was more than twenty years ago. Perhaps twenty-five. Victoriano was new here, and therefore foolish, because he did not yet know the Izquierdos as well as we did.
“By us I mean us who live here, of course—it has always been us and them, el pueblo and la casa. My mother’s mother was brought here by force from Texcoco, along with many others, not long after the opening of the mines in Fresnillo.
There were people who had lived here before, but by the time my grandmother arrived, they were dry bones, done in by matlazahuatl or pox or the musket when they rebelled. ”