Chapter 40
Ygnacio
Perched on this imperious mountain above the valley, Minerva and I watch the Viceroyalty crack and crumble.
You’ll have guessed by now that the civil war drags on.
With no Viceroy and no clear successor, factions emerge among the loyalists, then splinter, and splinter again.
Senora Encarnación was right about them—weaklings and turncoats all.
From behind the high windows of la Casa de las Gardenias, we witness the Viceroy’s men turn on themselves, devouring their own tails.
The ones who think themselves clever choose this mountain fortress to ride out the worst of the violence.
They are not at all clever.
If I am the petty god of nightmares in this cursed place, then Minerva is the queen of its creatures. She sings lullabies to the mice of the house, directing them to bedrooms on every floor, toward wrists bearing amulets.
Nightmares blossom forth.
Madness reigns.
My kin are never hungry.
When at last the loyalists and remaining del Valles abandon the house, calling it cursed, we spend our days in the garden.
Filomena and other insurgents who perished that night play Mice and Hounds, or pilfer the library’s many books.
My kin slumber, sated. Minerva cannot tend the plants, but she relishes the visits of migrating monarch butterflies.
We doze side by side beneath overgrown trellises and watch them lilting drunkenly through the garden, undisturbed by the dead or the living.
“I could pick no better partner for eternity,” I tell her.
“It won’t be eternity,” Minerva says as she looks up at the house and its mist-silvered windows. “Not this part. You’ll see.”
The Viceroyalty falls. An interim ruler is selected—the young man who has become the head of the Valbuenistas. Who leads a group of men with pickaxes and torches up the sheer mountainside to la Casa de las Gardenias, overgrown with vines, abandoned for years.
Arnulfo Trevino has returned to fulfill his promise.
When the house is set aflame, he looks up at the fourth-floor windows. A bolt of grief sings through me when I recognize something of his sister in him, when she was alive.
It’s the chispa that sparks in his eyes.
Those are eyes that have seen too much.
It takes eyes like those to lead a wounded nation.
Perhaps, as he gazes up at the windows, he catches a flicker of two figures in the flames. Perhaps, when his eyes widen, it is because he sees Minerva.
I will never know.
For Minerva takes my hand and holds it. I imagine more than feel the weight of her head against my shoulder.
“Now this part is eternity,” she says.
I’m frightened. Perhaps she can sense it, for into my ear, she whispers:
“Yancho jiarú.”
And those are the last words spoken by the living or the dead in the House of Gardenias.