The Hacienda

by Isabel Cañas

From behind the door, the room laughed at me.

Had I misheard? Was I imagining it? I was certain I had heard light, bubbling laughter, like that of a wicked child, reaching through the heavy wooden door. But it was empty. Behind that door, I knew the room was empty. I had just seen it.

I did not tell Rodolfo about my conversation with Doña María José, though questions uncurled in my chest like weeds, their roots finding firm purchase in my ribs.

A wink of color caught my attention in the mirror. Two red lights stared at me from a darkened corner beneath the window. I blinked, and they were gone. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. An oily feeling slipped over my shoulders. I was being watched.

It was not until much later, as I swayed on the dark cusp of sleep, that I realized that since arriving at Hacienda San Isidro, I had not seen a single cat.

My ear, long accustomed to hearing the shifting moods of the fields and the skies, was sharp as a coyote’s.

Long grasses whispered against one another, gossiping like aunts as I crossed to the back wall of the garden.

“What was her name?” I paused, as if I couldn’t remember it. Of course I remembered it. How could I not? “María Catalina.” Deep inside the house, far from the warmth of the kitchen, a door slammed.

A peal of childish laughter sounded behind me. The candle’s flame flickered wildly as I shrank away from it, heart slamming against my ribs.

More lilting laughter echoed behind me, coy and light, so unlike Juana’s amused bray. Was I imagining it? I had never been drunk before, and—based on the sway in my step and the spin of my vision—there was no doubt that I was. Did one hear things? Did one feel the clammy brush of cold against their cheek as if it were someone’s flesh? I didn’t want to know. I focused on climbing the stairs as quickly as I could. Cool fingers brushed over my neck—no, I was imagining it, I had to be imagining the sensation of death-cold fingertips brushing over my earlobes, tugging at my hair.

Like an animal, the dark drew back.

Distantly, as if from three rooms away, a girlish giggle echoed.

A skull, white as the limestone, grinned coquettishly out at me.

The flesh beneath his chin trembled in the way of the well-fed as he spoke;

arm—“he would send me away. To Spain, to a prison, I don’t know or care. The people here need me. The war left scars. It left demons. It broke people.”

But in Titi’s teachings, I learned that some things could be known. I always heard the voices, no matter where I was. Now that I had returned to Apan, I felt the movement of weather; I knew when thunder would open the heavens over the valley. I knew when the riverbeds would flood with the spectral presence of the Weeper and how to placate her. I knew when the wildflowers would blossom, when horses would foal. I felt the presence of spirits in the mountains, how they shifted even in their deep slumber.

“I prayed for help, and what good did it do me? God has sent me the only incorruptible priest in México.” He opened his eyes. This time, when they met mine, there was a shade of intensity in them that caught my breath and held it fast. “I would not go so far as to say that.” A ribbon of warmth unspooled in my belly, its curiosity piqued by his words.