The Hacienda

by Isabel Cañas

But if God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, if He is three in one in the Trinity, then God knows nothing of loneliness.

God knows nothing of being alone. Alone is kneeling in dust, gazing at an empty horizon.

So that was how your family kept its money throughout the war. Industry will rise and fall, men will scorch the earth and slaughter one another for emperors or republics, but they will always want drink.

I was a body without a voice, a shadow melting into the walls of a too-crowded house.

Freedom. I knew the taste of that craving as keenly as a toothache, and I had learned to recognize it in other women: it was a flash of hot yearning in their eye when they thought no one was looking.

The only thing less desirable than the daughter of a traitor was a madwoman.

Papá distrusted the Church as a rule. Priests were conservative and corrupt, he said. I had never once told a priest anything aside from what was required from me in bland, unspecific confessions or society small talk. I knew I couldn’t trust them,

So long as the sinful parts of my pocked, split soul were crushed into submission, I was given a place to belong. So long as that part of myself was bound with chains, I had His love.

she measured me with a frankness that snatched my spirit from my body and set it on the scales of justice.