Chapter 6
Minerva
I fled from one life for another in mere hours. I know now that lives are fragile. That they can be shattered by a careless strike.
I did not know that the same could be said for countries.
The morning paper did not come.
Senora Encarnación tapped her cane impatiently at her breakfast table. She narrowed her eyes behind the round glasses perched on the tip of her nose.
“Don’t go to market today,” she ordered without looking up from her pan dulce. “I have a feeling.”
Within a quarter hour, we heard shouting outside.
The strike of Senora Encarnación’s cane hastened, staccato, up the winding stairs to the never-used third-floor drawing rooms.
The air around her, throughout all of Casa Azafrán, seemed to be holding its breath.
In anticipation for what? I did not know, but my back was taut as I pulled a dusty chair next to the window for Senora Encarnación and knelt before the sill.
I rested my arms on the cracked paint and the dust of the windowsill, so close to the glass that a soft fog formed from my shallow breathing.
We watched through glass dusty and stained from years of weather. Long minutes passed.
Then—at once and without fanfare—the world turned a corner.
Soldiers poured down Calle Jacaranda. Columns of men in black uniforms darkened the broad boulevard, ants swarming a slice of overripe papaya, singleminded, never faltering. Each held a rifle. Each bore a slash of red fabric across his chest.
El Presidente’s soldiers wore blue.
A group of them raced down the boulevard toward the soldiers in black. Soon they would collide.
“They’re headed to the Viceroy’s palace,” Senora Encarnación murmured. El Presidente’s mansion, at the end of Calle Jacaranda. There was no reason to whisper, but she did, squinting fiercely through her glasses.
A crack of thunder. No—
A hard hand on my shoulder. Senora Encarnación shoved me down; my teeth crashed together as I caught my chin on the windowsill. Pain cracked through my jaw as it snapped shut. My tongue throbbed where I bit it, but I barely felt it.
Gunshots popped in the street below. An irregular pattern.
A vague smell of mildew rose from the carpet. Dust gathered, shroud-like, on the molding.
I shuddered to suppress a sneeze; Senora Encarnación held me down.
Finally, her hand released my shoulder. I lifted my head and peered, hesitant, over the edge of the windowsill.
The battle had passed.
Dark bodies lay fallen among the hedges of the Calle Jacaranda mansions, their limbs at awkward angles, cast aside like children’s dolls. Threads of gleaming liquid followed grooves and the squared-off corners of cobblestone.
The last few soldiers in black continued down the boulevard, toward el Presidente’s mansion, then vanished from my sight altogether.
Senora Encarnación stared down the street. She twisted the signet ring on her left hand. Once to the left. Once to the right. Again.
A hammering at a door downstairs echoed through Casa Azafrán.
I was on my feet at once, stumbling out of the drawing room on numb, bloodless legs. Senora Encarnación’s bark followed me down the long flights of stairs to the back of the house.
Her immediate command: “Look through the keyhole first.” The second rattled me: “If they have guns, do not open the door.”
I lightened my footsteps to a creep as I neared the kitchen. The pounding came from there, from the door that led to the garden.
I angled my approach to the doorway, keeping out of sight of the windows. The stern doors of Casa Azafrán no longer seemed like impenetrable barriers between me and the outside. Someone had infiltrated the garden. They might mean harm. They must.
Or if they did, wouldn’t they have broken the door down already? Wouldn’t there be shouting?
I crouched and peered through the keyhole.
I jerked back as if the light had burned me. The sanctity of my garden was shattered. A man—or boy, really—stood at the back door. A pistol was strapped to his hip.
But for the first time, I broke one of Senora Encarnación’s orders.
Arnulfo didn’t stand like he used to. He perched on the stones of the garden path like a cat ready to flee, every hair standing on end. His jacket was turned inside out; a thin mustache lined his upper lip. So did sweat, though the morning was still gray and cool.
“We have to get out of here,” he said. “No time to get anything.”
His voice was exactly the same. I hadn’t heard it in months. Since he and Armando vanished in the middle of the night without warning and never returned.
And now he was here, standing right in front of me. My mind slowly parsed what he had said, stitching it together with the inside-out jacket and why he smelled vaguely of metal and smoke.
“How did you find me?”
“This is one of the old del Valle mansions,” he said, casting a suspicious glance up at the windows of the second and third floors. “The worst place to be today.”
“You knew I was here?”
“El Presidente is dead,” he snapped. He was on the balls of his feet, ready to run. His eyes flicked over my shoulder, into the darkness of Casa Azafrán. “Anyone connected to the democratic regime is in danger. Let’s go.”
He knew I was here the whole time. No doubt both of them did. And they never wrote, they never reached out. They never visited. They never did anything.
They were as bad as Senora Encarnación’s relatives. How stupid of me to pity her, rattling around in this old house alone like a cockroach in a locked coffin.
I was just as pitiable. Safe from the outside, but utterly abandoned.
“I’m not connected with the regime,” I said. It came out flat.
“Of course you are.” Panic gave his voice bite; reflexive anger flared in my chest, immediately hot and bright, swift as the turn of a lamp’s switch. “Armando was one of el Presidente’s aides. But now he’s dead. He’s dead and we have to go now.”
He reached out to grab my hand. “If they find out he’s your brother, they will kill you.”
I took a step back.
Armando was not dead. He left.
He and Arnulfo both. I was a burden, so they dropped me in the path of the storm and fled, not caring what happened to me. I found my own way out of Papá’s tempest. I found walls to keep me and good wages and a place to rest my head.
“The Valbuenistas are going into the mountains,” Arnulfo said. “There’s a group leaving from the back corner of the slum at noon. They’re risking their lives waiting for us. We have to go.”
Images flashed in my mind’s eye: a group of strangers, gray and wet and huddled in the jungle. Rocky ground. Scraping monkey scat or bat guano from where I needed to rest my head at night.
For what? For whom? For a president whose rule did nothing to my life but make money scarcer and tempers worse? For brothers who knew where I was for months and said nothing?
“No.” I had the keys to every door in this house. I ate three meals a day and was warm on chilliest nights. “I’m safe here.”
“You are not.” His voice cracked along a desperate edge. “I can’t lose you, too.”
“Lose me?” My voice didn’t sound like my own. It was a molten thing. It was its own. “You left me. You chose politics over me. I can take care of myself. I don’t need you.”
“Minerva!”
The color drained from Arnulfo’s face like the extinguishing of a lamp as Senora Encarnación’s voice and the tap of her cane approached the kitchen.
“Who are you talking to?” she demanded as she entered the kitchen.
I leaned to the right and brought the door with me, obscuring Arnulfo from Senora Encarnación’s view.
Go, I mouthed.
The wily Arnulfo I knew would have vanished by now. He would have said suit yourself and run the second I said I was not leaving.
This Arnulfo’s weight shifted. He hesitated. His eyes glimmered, wet and glassy, as they traced my face. Like he was memorizing it.
It gave my heart a savage twist.
But I made my choice. I chose to keep what I have won. I chose this place, and he knew it.
“Fuck,” he breathed. “Fuck.”
Then another tap of Senora Encarnación’s cane sent him leaping back from the doorway. He flung himself toward the garden wall, climbed the jasmine vines, and disappeared over the top, leaving an aroma of crushed blossoms in his wake.
I shut the door and locked it. When I put the key back in my pocket, my palm ached from how hard I was gripping it.
“It was Paloma, one of the maids from Casa Jazmín,” I said, raising my voice to cover any remaining sounds of Arnulfo’s flight as I turned to Senora Encarnación.
I don’t know anyone named Paloma. The name will flit right by Senora Encarnación like a fruit fly.
The names of the other houses’s servants are not worthy of note.
“She said that el Presidente is dead. She’s running away and said I should go, too. ”
Senora Encarnación seemed paler than usual in the gray light of the kitchen, but at my words, her face was a moon coming from behind a cloud.
“The pretender is dead.” Wonder flushed her voice.
“Only liberals and dogs flee in times like these. You and I, however…” She removed her spectacles and let them hang from the pearl rope around her neck, then tapped a sharp march to the pantry door and opened it.
“I don’t expect Mariquita will come. You will have to make lunch, but first—” She withdrew a dark green bottle and brandished it as high as her humped back allowed.
Its label was faded with age; an ink sketch of a gardenia bloomed beneath her gnarled fingers.
“We toast the dead. Long live the Viceroy! Long live the del Valles who were loyal to the last! Long live us, Senorita Trevino!”
The pop of the cork was like a gunshot.
The bubbles bit the roof of my mouth. They soured my knotted stomach.
Senora Encarnación had two glasses and hummed an old bolero as she retreated with a third to the breakfast room. She joyfully cursed the family portraits and asked herself, in a singsong, girlish voice, where she had left her finest green ink and stationery.
But now he’s dead.
I leaned forward on the kitchen counter, where the bottle and my half-empty glass sat abandoned. Rested my forearms, then my head, on the cool marble. My breathing quickened. Grew sharper.
He’s dead and we have to go now.
I didn’t cry. I wouldn’t until lunch was made, until the dishes were scrubbed and put away, until Senora Encarnación’s letters were posted and she snored contentedly by the window in the third-floor drawing room.
Then I leaned my back to the kitchen cupboards and slid to the floor.
But I had to wipe the wet from my cheeks and nose hastily. I sucked air into my aching ribs and stumbled up. Rushed to the foyer to answer the sharp ring of the door’s aged bell, my heartbeat as sharp as Senora Encarnación’s cane. Would there be strangers with guns this time?
It was a silver-haired footman in dark green livery on the doorstep of Casa Azafrán. He bore a perfumed letter for Senora Encarnación, its wax seal the regal, lush green of a gardenia bush.
It was an invitation.
A summons.