Chapter 29
Minerva
The Viceroy accepted Octaviana’s invitation.
The list of tasks that Octaviana drafted for the staff was longer than I am tall. Sara and I worked wordlessly, rushing from one chore to the next, then doubling back and redoing our work because, according to Cosme, we did not meet la senora’s standards the first time around.
Sara wiped sweat from her brow, rocking back on her heels after an hour of re-scrubbing the tiles in the ballroom. I mirrored the movement, adding a neck stretch. My back was stiff. My hands were tight and red and swollen from hot water and suds.
“Whoever’s idea it was to invite the Viceroy,” Sara said, “I hope they rot.”
She resumed scrubbing. Paused. Lifted her head at me.
“If you tell anyone I said that…” She let the end of the sentence dangle. An unspoken warning.
“I would never,” I swore.
Satisfied with this answer, she cast her gaze out at the broad expanse of tiles left to scrub (scrub again). Her shoulders sagged.
“What’s the point? They’re going to walk and dance all over it with outside shoes anyway.”
“They want to see their reflections in it first,” I said. “It gives them a thrill to stomp on one another’s faces.”
Horror unfurled in me as the last word left my lips. Talking to Ygnacio had loosened my tongue too much.
But Sara’s laugh cracked brassy across the tiles.
“I like you,” she said, dunking her rag into her bucket of hot water. “You were so reserved when you arrived, but now?” Her smile weakened a bit. “You should watch your tongue.”
That didn’t sound like a threat—the words were still warm from her laughter.
“Noted,” I said.
We worked in silence until the ballroom passed Cosme’s inspection.
For my next assignment, I was sent upstairs to Senora Encarnación’s suite, where I would supervise the moving of furniture to make room for the Viceroy’s staff. They would sleep beneath the painted ceilings and graceful statues of her sitting room.
All the traces of Senora Encarnación’s taste were carried out of the room.
The side tables. The vases. Other members of the household staff would rehome them in other rooms. Wistful music floated through the corridor from Eugenia’s piano room.
My chest felt heavy and tight as the rooms filled with beds similar to those in the servants’ quarters, lined in orderly rows.
Eight in this room. More elsewhere. The Viceroy and his entourage would number a small army.
Later, as I dusted an otherwise unused drawing room on the second floor, Ygnacio appeared. He was silent, a translucent apparition that followed me from room to room the rest of the afternoon. If he was waiting to hear that I accepted his apology, he waited in vain.
I didn’t speak to him until I was turning down Eugenia’s bed that evening. He lounged on the bed as if he owned it, one arm cast over the pillows. There were no creases on the blanket. His hazy form had no weight.
“You consumed Senora Encarnación’s chispa,” I said, rearranging the pillows around him. Goose bumps raced up my forearm as my hand brushed his shoulder. “She’s not a ghost. So then where is she?”
He toyed with a pillow’s tassel. “I don’t know.”
I straightened and put my hands on my hips. “What do you mean you don’t know?”
“If I had this all worked out, I wouldn’t still be hanging around here, would I?” he snapped, petulant.
“I suppose not,” I said, leaning forward to fix the sheets. I shooed him back. He was so thin—almost fully transparent—that it seemed that if I were to give him a gentle push, I would fall right through him. “Given it’s so awful, et cetera.”
I could tell that his regard was lingering on me, on my face, as I folded down the sheets and straightened them.
“It has been more tolerable of late,” he said at last.
“Is it really that much worse than your life?” I wondered.
I couldn’t wrap my head around what he had gone through in the past, but I tried to envision what his present felt like.
How would I spend eternity invisible in this house?
Haunt the gardens, probably. Be left alone.
He spoke of a hunger for chispa, hunger that left him and his kin restless, but was that any worse than worldly hunger?
The kind of pangs that kept me awake, driving between my ribs like knives, as I thought of the precisely eight tortillas forbidden to me?
If I had to choose between an eternity of that life and what I think Ygnacio had…I’m not sure if I would choose hunger pangs.
Ygnacio rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling.
“Life was so long ago,” he said.
His voice was so soft, almost wounded, that I stopped straightening the sheets. The long line of his mouth and the heaviness in his dark eyes were mournful.
I walked to the other side of the bed and flopped down on my back next to him. A chill passed through me with a shiver—our shoulders brushed.
The ceiling was painted to look like the gardens outside, complete with labyrinthine hedgerows and ample gardenias, of course, but also jasmine.
Birds-of-paradise graced the corners of the room.
Doves flew around the mother-of-pearl light fixture in the center of the ceiling, their wings gilded by twilight’s pink and purple hues.
Ygnacio had laid the stones for this house. Did he also erect the walls, the ceilings? Did he build this ceiling, or was he already dead then?
“I think it’s lonelier than life was,” Ygnacio said softly.
“What about your kin?” I asked.
“They’re not really…they’re not much for conversation,” he said. “Or talking. I don’t know how verbal they are.”
“Really?” I asked in surprise.
“They’re so old,” he said. “Older than me.”
“By how much?”
The cold that brushed my shoulder told me that he shrugged. Or at least shifted. “We found the sarcophagi as we dug the foundation for the house.”
I pictured the stone boxes carved with strange glyphs being hauled from the dirt by a group of men. The precious metals and stones being chipped and pried away by crowbars and hammers and avarice.
“I wonder why they’re still here,” I said.
“If only I knew,” Ygnacio said heavily. “My father helped people who were dying. Held their hands, consoled their families. Then he buried them.” He paused.
“There were prayers and ceremonies. Something that he said released souls. Chispa—life—remained in the soil to give life to the next generation. He used to give blessings to all sorts of people, the sick, the pregnant, those who wanted children…” He trailed off.
“Now they just throw you in the dirt. I don’t think that’s what he meant when he said dying wasn’t something to be afraid of. ”
A knot tightened in my throat at his words. “How did he know?”
Ygnacio exhaled heavily, as if from physical exertion. “I’ve never spoken about these things.”
I heard a slight shift of the blankets; it was whisper-faint, the sound of him rolling over. I turned my head toward him, and discovered that we were almost nose to nose.
He looked like a boy. No reptilian glee at death. No fangs, no darkness. Fatigue frayed his edges, giving him the look of a timid fog, one that could be blown away by a breeze. So fragile that he would dissipate if I touched him.
His eyes were distant, clouded, as if he gazed at something far, far away.
“My grandmother said that when my father was a boy, he almost died. He fell when he was bringing fruit down from a tree, and he fell on a low stone wall. She thought he did die, for a moment or two. Or came so close to death that he caught a glimpse of it. The beyond.”
“Do you…do you think he’s there now?” I murmured.
A vivid wash of grief came over Ygnacios’s face.
“I hope so.” His voice was barely above breathing. “My father would have died far from here and whatever curse tethers me here. If I…no—” He cut himself off. “That’s stupid to hope for.”
“If you were to ever move on, you mean,” I said. “You hope you would find him?”
Ygnacio turned his head away from me to stare at the ceiling.
“And my sisters,” he whispered.
Could I one day find Armando and hear his voice once more? What would he say to me? Would he be proud of what I have done?
My mouth pulled down of its own accord; my eyes burned. I blinked to clear the blur that gathered at their edges.
I reached out as if to take Ygnacio’s hand. Gently, so as not to crack the delicate glass he appeared to be made of.
My hand passed right through his. It was like plunging my arm up to my elbow in water fresh from the well. My wrist went numb from the cold.
I kept my hand there.
“I could touch you, the other day,” I said.
A soft snort from Ygnacio. “When you threatened me with a butcher knife?”
“You deserved it.”
He loosed a hoarse laugh.
“I had more chispa then,” he said. “I could make myself more solid now, if I wanted to, but it would cost me. I’ve used a lot of it in the last few days.”
I had overheard in the kitchen that the guards found the slaughterhouse cage mangled. The rest of the day, clanging noises emanated from the slaughterhouse as a team of four men used hammers and crowbars to pound and wrench it back into shape.
“What happens if you burn through all the chispa?” I asked. “You wouldn’t pass on…no, otherwise that would have happened already.”
“I linger,” Ygnacio said, eyes tracing the flight of the doves on the ceiling.
“I become like cobwebs. Stuck in corners. Gathering dust. Sleepy. Eventually, hunger wakes me. Hunger animates me a little—enough to haunt people. Enough to fiddle with nightmares. And then someone dies, and I take their chispa.”
I suppressed a shudder. “And the cycle begins again.”
“I wonder, if we burned this house to the ground, if it would release me.”
His voice was distant, as if he was far, far away, and not right next to me. In a way, he was—he was a soul who died long ago, whom I never should have met. When we touched, time folded and crumbled between us, pale and weak in the face of whatever magic tied him to this world.
“It’s something to do with this place,” he continued. “But also this house. Perhaps because I died in it. Perhaps because I died building it.”
I was afraid of ghosts as a child. But the nightmares and folktales of my childhood left me woefully underprepared for how complicated they were. How frightening.
And how surprisingly fragile.
“Do you want me to release you, when this is all over?”
He turned to face me again, a frown creasing his features. “What do you mean?”
“The Viceroy will eventually fall.” My voice was low, more breathing than whisper.
We were alone, but one could never be too careful.
“Even if the Valbuenistas fail. Senora Encarnación was right—they’re weaklings and turncoats.
Whether by insurgents or infighting, they’ll eventually lose everything.
And then I’ll come back here, when the house is empty and abandoned, and I’ll set it all on fire. Burn it down to the bones.”
The expression that crossed Ygnacio’s face took me by surprise. He looked frightened.
“What if it fails?” he whispered.
“What if it works?”
His eyes were always dark, but seemed especially so in the low light, even though he was so translucent. They glimmered with emotion.
“Minerva…”
A clattering sound in the hall outside Eugenia’s room.
I rocketed upright, smoothing the sheets.
“You done?”
A wash of relief cooled the flush clawing up my neck. It was only Sara calling. No reason to be afraid.
“Just about,” I replied.
Ygnacio vanished from sight, but I knew he was still there.
I gathered my things. There was so much work to be done before the Viceroy arrived, but I was alight with eagerness to do it.
When I dimmed the lamps, I cast a look around the room. In the shadows that grew long, in the high corners of the ceiling. He was there, somewhere, I knew it. I could feel it.
“Think about it,” I said to the room.
I shut the door.