Chapter XXXI
XXXI
Alba
The window in her room was open. She knew this before she opened her eyes. The cluck of chickens from the courtyard seemed crisp, and there was a freshness to the room, a brush of chilly breeze against her cheeks. The insides of her eyelids glowed red.
Sun.
What time was it?
What—
She tried to thrust herself upright. Failed.
She was tied down to the bed with rope. Ropes at her wrists, around her ankles…
Memories swept up like nausea and struck her in the front of her skull, dizzying her. Sparks scattered across her vision.
Elías.
His face was the last thing she saw in the midst of the exorcism. He had thrust Bartolomé aside, sending the priest splaying on the ground, and approached. His hands were black, as if he had dipped them in ink. A delicate vapor rose off them like mist from a field at dawn—
Then blackness. Nothing. A still room, a ringing in her ears. An emptiness in her, a sense of vacancy. She was hollow as a drum. She felt weak, but she felt…alone.
“Mija, lie back down.”
Mamá was at her bedside, dabbing a cloth in a bowl of steaming water. So, not alone in the room. But alone in her body.
What had Elías done?
The work of Bartolomé left her feeling like the skin of an animal carcass stripped from its flesh and dumped in the dirt. But Elías—he had done something.
The emptiness that hummed white and rhythmic in her head was proof of that.
“Let me put this compress back on your poor head,” Mamá said.
The light hinted at late afternoon. Where was Elías?
“Mamá, what are you doing here?” she said. With a jolt, she realized that for the first time in days, her voice felt like her own. It was not muscling past something else. It had no dissonant notes. It felt like it was hers . “I don’t want you to fall ill.”
Mamá laughed, but it was a dry laugh, partially forced. The kind of laugh that she gave when she wanted someone to know that the jig was up. “Padre Bartolomé has assured me that your condition is far from contagious,” she said, “provided that I say my prayers and guard against evil.”
Alba stared at her as she tried to force her aching mind to process the information. Mamá dabbed the compress on her forehead. Warm water ran down her temples.
“Your father and I know all about what torments you have been through now,” she said.
“I am so sorry. I didn’t see. And it happened right under our very noses.
” Her eyes glistened like fine crystal in sunlight.
“To think that sorcerer would curse you,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion, “when all his family ever did was offer him a new life here in the Indies.”
Dread was a stone rolling down a hill: a gentle push, and it rolled faster, and faster, and faster—
“I can’t even say his name.” Mamá shuddered theatrically and crossed herself, the compress sending droplets of water across the silk of her dress. The holy motion sent a steep sweep of nausea through Alba’s head. “That devil. To think that we broke bread with him.”
“That isn’t true,” Alba said. “He helped me. If it were not for Elías, I—”
“Hush, mija, I know you’re confused,” Mamá said. “Padre Bartolomé said that you would be.”
“No,” Alba said. “Mamá, if it were not for Elías, I could be dead. Who is calling him a sorcerer? Where is he?”
Mamá frowned. “I see I have upset you. I have said too much. I am so sorry, mija.” She turned to the door to the sitting room. “Padre Horacio,” she called.
Alba whipped her head to the door as a strange man entered.
His hair was salt-and-pepper, his beard fully white.
He had the long face of a dog and a tired, sloped bend of the back.
His eyes, however, were dark, so dark they could have been black, and when they fell on Alba, an urge to recoil crept under her skin.
“Padre, she is awake, but she is confused,” Mamá said, placing the compress in the bowl. She stood.
Mamá should stay. The impulse lit in Alba like a child’s plea, urgent and swift. She did not want to be left alone with this man.
“Mamá,” she said. “Who is that?”
“Padre Horacio, mija,” Mamá said. “He arrived last night from the capital. He and the others will be helping Padre Bartolomé look after you.”
Alba’s mouth was dry as sand. “Others?”
“The other Inquisitors, of course. Thanks be to God,” Mamá said, and nodded at Padre Horacio. “Won’t you sit, Padre?”
Alba reached for her mother’s arm, for her skirts, but they slipped out of her reach. Reality slid through her fingers, slick as oil, tilting and tripping her no matter how she fought to find her footing.
Her pulse thrummed like a rabbit’s as Padre Horacio pulled the chair beneath the window and—without so much as greeting her—began to pray the rosary in a low voice.
“Mamá,” Alba said, her voice low and urgent. “These people will hurt me. You can’t leave me with them. They will hurt me .”
Pity swept over Mamá’s face. “Mija,” she said, her voice softening as she put the compress down. “You can’t see what we see. You are hurting now. Your papá and I…we know that this is necessary. You will understand, when you are well.”
She stood.
“No,” Alba cried. “Don’t leave!”
Mamá shut the door softly, as if she didn’t want to disturb Alba.
Alba was greatly disturbed.
The capital was several days’ journey from Zacatecas, and that was without the hours-long climb into the mountains.
If this man arrived last night…
They had only been at Mina San Gabriel for a little over a week. Bartolomé must have written to them many days ago. Perhaps after they first arrived. Perhaps even before .
He had never said a word. Never warned them. Had he meant to dupe them?
Was the exorcism a trap set for Elías? Even if it wasn’t, he had walked right into the jaws of the beast. He had seen how she suffered, and he had done something —though Alba knew not what—in front of Padre Bartolomé and Carlos that had condemned him.
Her head was quiet. Was it this priest droning on in the corner of her room, or was it what Elías had done at the end of the exorcism?
What had he done?
Where was he?
In danger, that was where he was. And she was in bed, God knew how many hours after the fact. Abandoned here by her mother.
Left here to die.
She did not want to die, and so she would not .
Abandoned, again. Not worth fighting for. You were the worst thing to happen to her.
She was the worst thing to happen to the woman she was born to, and she was the worst thing to happen to her mother now. She had ruined Mamá and Papá’s chance at happiness, for when they received their child at last, it was a monster.
You are a monster.
She was a monster.
So act like one.
A freezing spray of water; Alba hissed in pain as the droplets struck her face like needles.
The priest was praying loudly. Oh, she wanted to rip his fat face off, to toss it out the window and watch the chickens make sport of it—
“Are you hungry, senorita?”
María Victoriana stood at the doorway Mamá had disappeared through, holding a tray.
“I hope I am not interrupting,” she said, casting a look between Alba and the priest who stood over her, flinging more droplets of holy water at her face. “It sounded like an argument.”
“Come in, girl,” the priest said.
A bowl of soup steamed on the tray, its aromas of calabaza and puerco wafting into the room.
No, Alba was not hungry. But she was desperate for an ally. If one could be found in María Victoriana, then yes, she was hungry.
She remained obediently still as María Victoriana placed the bowl on the table at her bedside and slowly began feeding her spoonfuls.
“Where is Elías?” Alba asked.
María Victoriana looked as if she hadn’t heard her. Perhaps she hadn’t. Perhaps Alba’s faculties of speech had vanished, and though she screamed, no one would hear her, no one would save her from this torment—
“Where is he?” she asked, louder, testing her speech.
María Victoriana hushed her sharply. “Let me feed you as I have been ordered, senorita.”
That tone cut like acid. The girl would not tell Alba anything.
She would be trapped here forever, until the priests saw fit to torture her, and then there would be no Elías to intervene, there would be nothing but the demon and the priests and her strung between, flaccid meat, powerless to save herself.
Heat seared her chest. She gasped, and instinctively flung herself upward. She hit the restraints of the ropes and fell back, but the burning on her chest remained—
“Oh no, it spilled!” María Victoriana cried out.
There was puerco con calabaza all over Alba’s chest, in her hair, on the sheets. Hot broth burned her skin. There was too much of it everywhere, and she could not escape the smell; she wanted to vomit.
“I have to clean this up!” María Victoriana declared, louder and more obviously than was necessary. She immediately set to stripping the bed, pulling broth-soaked sheets out from under Alba.
“Your nightgown,” she said. “It’s soaked. I am so sorry, senorita. I must change it.”
The priest was on his feet and huffing nonsense, holy water in hand, as María Victoriana scurried to the chest of clothing at the foot of Alba’s bed and began pawing through it. When she emerged with a clean white nightgown, she turned to the priest.
“I need to change her clothing, Padre,” she said. “I was frightened, and my clumsiness led to this, and I will be punished if I don’t clean it all up. Please.” Her voice pitched sharply toward tears. “I don’t want to be punished, Padre!”
“So clean it up!” the priest snapped. “I don’t want you here a moment longer.”
“But Padre,” María Victoriana said, her eyes growing theatrically wide, “I cannot change her with you watching. She will be naked.”
Color rose in the priest’s face; he blustered, wordless, then snarled, “I shall not leave.”
María Victoriana had found the weak spot in the tendon; she took a firm thumb and pressed on it. Hard.
“For shame, Padre!” she breathed. “The indecency! I’ll go directly to Padre Bartolomé and say—”