The Hacienda

by Isabel Cañas

It is said that mortal life is empty without the love of God. That the ache of loneliness’s wounds is assuaged by obedience to Him, for in serving God we encounter perfect love and are made whole. 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 loneliness, because God has never tasted companionship as mortals do: clinging to one another in darkness so complete and sharp it scrapes flesh from bone, trusting one another even as the Devil’s breath blooms hot on their napes.

Industry will rise and fall, men will scorch the earth and slaughter one another for emperors or republics, but they will always want drink.

Fate had been unkind to me, but sometimes, its pettiness worked in my favor.

Please. The prayer reached out, up to the heavens to God, out to the spirits that slept in the bellies of the hills ringing the valley. I knew no other way to pray. Give me guidance.

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.

My views on the clergy were informed by Papá, who often repeated the words of revolutionary leader Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. Of his enemies in the Church, the insurgent priest said they were Catholic “only to benefit themselves: their God is money. Under the veil of religion and of friendship they want to make you the victims of their insatiable greed.”

I wanted an exorcism.

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

I was not mad. All I wanted, as any devout Catholic would, was for a priest to come and tread his holy, plump feet over my threshold and throw water at things in return for my husband’s money. That was all I wanted.

Who would intercede on my behalf in a situation like this? Our Lady of Dust and Secrecy? Our Lady of Women Disobeying Their Husbands?

There is nothing more beautiful than the sound of match against paper, the sharp spark of amber and gold, the small crackle of a wick taking flame.

The house watched me leave, its stare baldly appraising.

This was not the house I had known as a child, its chatter secretive and benign. The earth at the house’s foundation was saturated with sickness, a blight, its black veins leading up the hill to the gate and tangling under it like the roots of a cursed tree.

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.

Look at me, she said. Ah, but I had, and therein lay the sin.

So why did I continue to turn the sin over in my mind, examining it like an old coin, instead of casting it as far from my heart as I could?

Even the darkness here was different. Shadows dyed the corners of the room a soft, deep charcoal gray. The dark of dreamless sleep, the dark of prayers in the night. The dark touched by hopeful fingers of dawn.

Hello, old friend, I thought as I strode through the softening rain.

though the Inquisition had left for Spain amid the upheaval of the insurgency, it still beat in the veins of many clergy, flooding them with the vigor of the righteous.

“Some illnesses we cannot cure,” my grandmother said. “Others we can soothe. Sorrow is one of these. Loneliness is another.” She searched my face. “Do you understand? Tending to lost souls is our vocation.”

What wisdom was there sending a damned soul straight into the Church’s jaws, when I ought to be hiding from them?

Priest and witch, a source of curses and comfort.

In their eyes. The eyes of the caudillo, the eyes of a judge, the eyes of the hacendados . . . they bore down on me, scrutinizing me, my cousin, my friend. Scrutinizing who we were. What we were. The casta system was abolished, of course, but the courts outside the capital carried on with business as usual:

Yes, I feared the hereafter. I was a sinner. I was a witch. I had sinned and would sin again, like all men. But whatever my decisions meant for life after death was between me and the Lord. All I could do was serve the home and people I loved using every gift I was born with.

He belonged to this place in ways I could never comprehend, and he chose to keep belonging: the village. His family. The Church. His land.

Colonialism has carved the landscapes of our homes with ghosts. It left gaping wounds that still weep.