Page 6 of The Hacienda
I heard his first wife was murdered by highwaymen on the Apan road. Really? I heard she died of typhus. I heard she was kidnapped by insurgents. I heard she was poisoned by the cook.
Rodolfo was my salvation. I seized him like a drowning man seizes driftwood in a flash flood. His solidness. His name. His title. His shoulders that cut into Apan’s blinding sky like the mountains surrounding the valley and the calloused, honest hands that led me to the gate of San Isidro.
He was safe. He was right. I had made the one decision that was guaranteed to lift me from the grim fate to which my father’s murder had doomed us.
I only prayed that one day, Mamá could see my decision to marry him for what it was: the key to a newlife.
4
RODOLFO, JUANA, AND Ireconvened for dinner in a small drawing room near the kitchen that had been repurposed for dining. Its windows opened to the back of the house: a terrace, lined with pillars and arches, overlooked a dead garden with wilted birds of paradise and black skeletons of flower beds. Heavy-bellied clouds had rolled into the valley; Ana Luisa’s daughter, Paloma, fastened the window shutters against the rain as we sat. The drawing room was cozier for three than the formal dining room, but I soon wished it were less cozy.
“I apologize for the state of the flowers,” Rodolfo said, his gaze trailing over the shutters as Paloma flitted shyly away to the kitchen. “Juana cares for maguey more than she cares for gardens.”
Juana snorted. I looked up from my food in surprise. As much as I disliked my cousins in Tío Sebastián’s house, I was well accustomed to their fine manners. It was how I had also been raised.
“Maguey is resilient,” she said flatly. “It is an admirable trait.”
Rodolfo’s eyes slid across the table to her, their blue no longer brilliant, but icy. “Beauty is also an admirable trait,” he said. A playful retort and delivered utterly without warmth. “This the maguey lack, I believe.”
“Then you’re not looking hard enough.” The edge to her voice laid clear how little she cared for his thoughts on any matter, be it maguey or anything else.
No wonder Rodolfo had never spoken to me of his sister. The air between them crackled with friction.
“The garden is beautiful, querido,” I lied, forcing a brightness into my voice that rang hollow in the closeness of the room. Rodolfo cast me a sideways glance, disbelieving. I rested my hand on his knee under the table, rubbing my thumb against the fabric of his trousers in a calculated attempt to break the tension. “My mother taught me something about gardening, when we lived in Cuernavaca,” I added. “Give me some time with it. You won’t recognize it when you return.”
In two weeks, Rodolfo would head back to the capital. He had accompanied me on the road to Apan to protect me from highwaymen, but his political work meant he could not stay in the country. The Provisional Government meant to hold elections for a president, and if sneakily peering at Rodolfo’s correspondence had taught me anything, it was that his mentor, Guadalupe Victoria, meant to win these elections.
Rodolfo opened his mouth to reply but was interrupted by his sister.
“We don’t need gardens,” she said harshly, not bothering to direct the comment at me. It dismissed me as efficiently as a slap across the face. “What we need is to keep San Cristóbal from poaching our land.”
“I decide what we need or don’t,” Rodolfo snapped. His sudden shift of temper sent a tremor of surprise down my spine. “If Doña Beatriz wants a garden, she will have a garden. My wife’s word is mine in this house, do you understand?”
If Juana did, she did not say. “I’m retiring,” she announced to the room at large, falsely bright, and set her napkin on the table with a rude slap.I stiffened as she pushed back from the table; then, with a brusquegood night, she was gone.
***
IF THE RANCOR BETWEENRodolfo and Juana cooled over the two weeks he spent with us at San Isidro, I did not see it. I did not see her at all. It was as if she had vanished into the harsh rows of maguey that carved the fields below the main house, ephemeral as a ghost.
She did not join us when Rodolfo and I went into the town of Apan for Mass on Sunday.
It was my first visit to Apan, and the first time I would be seen by the hacendados of the other estates and their wives. Something in the air shifted as we passed through the gates of the hacienda, and I relaxed back into my seat. I rested my head on Rodolfo’s shoulder and rocked with the carriage’s movement, listening as he told me about the hacendados to whom he would introduce me after Mass.
“Their politics are slow to change, but they were my father’s allies and will continue to be ours, if their tolerance of Juana is any measure of their patience.” He took my gloved hands into his lap and held them, running a thumb over the lace absentmindedly. Though my eyes were closed, I could picture his wry half smile as he said, with a touch of knowing amusement, “Besides, country society is rather toothless compared to the capital.”
It took an hour to ride to the center of Apan. When Rodolfo helped me out of the carriage, I was struck by how small the town was. Some three thousand people lived here, Rodolfo said, and perhaps a thousand more scattered on surrounding haciendas, but what was such a number to me, who had grown accustomed to the density of the capital? Now I saw it concretely. The town itself—the central plaza de armas before the parish, post, barracks, other assorted buildings—was so small we could have passed through it in the carriage in ten minutes.
Sickly cypress trees lined the path up to the church. Though its frontfacade was simple, decorated only with carved stone, its stucco walls were impeccably whitewashed, as bright against the azure sky as the clouds. A bell rang from a single tower announcing the beginning of Mass.
I had assembled my attire from demure colors, soft gray and green, and was glad I did so as we entered the church. Even though my dress was by no means the most elaborate, it was by far of the highest quality, and I drew stares from the townspeople as I fell into step beside Rodolfo up the aisle of the church. My mantilla fluttered gently against my cheek as I genuflected and took a seat in a pew reserved for us and other hacendados near the altar.
In the capital, I had been merely one general’s daughter among many; here I was Doña Beatriz Solórzano, the wife of one of the wealthiest estate owners, urbane and mysterious. Whispers rippled through the pews behind me in the quiet moments before the beginning of Mass.
I relished it. I cupped that power and held it close to my chest as Mass began. San Isidro was not what I had pictured when I married Rodolfo, but that powerwas. This was my new life. This was what I had won.
Mass was a long hour of incense and murmurs, rising and sitting. We all moved as one, speaking and responding, the steps of the dance carved into us from years of repetition like the rhythm of a lullaby. I had always found the Latin rites monotonous at best but paid even less attention than usual now there were hacendados around me to size up. Rather than watch the gray-haired, plump priest and his raven-like mestizo attendant behind the altar, my attention flitted like a hummingbird from head to head in the pews. Which of these strangers would be a friend? Who might be a foe?
After Mass, Rodolfo began his introductions: Severo Piña y Cuevas and his wife, Encarnación, of Hacienda Ocotepec, a pair of Muñoz brothers from Hacienda Alcantarilla, and elderly Atenógenes Moreno and his wife, María José, of San Antonio Ometusco. All were pulque-producing haciendas, and—judging from the fine silk and stately peninsular fashionsof the wives—they had survived eleven years of civil war as well as Rodolfo’s family had.
