I’ve told you before, nobody ever leaves this house. We’re trapped here, us and the shadows. That’s what my mother used to tell me. We’re trapped here till they come and take us, she’d say. Until who comes and takes us? Whoever might come knocking at the door and frighten the dead so hard they go off with the saints.
My granddaughter didn’t want to believe it. She thought she’d be able to up and leave the second she was old enough, that she’d go off to Madrid to study and never come back. But in the end she stayed. Where was she going to go? Who was going to pay for her to study in the capital, when only the rich kids do that? She did look around to see if there was any sort of funding for people like her but she soon abandoned that idea. Around here people only give you something if you’ve got something already and they can take it from you later. And if you’ve got nothing, that’s what they give you, nothing. People like us aren’t welcome in the capital to study, only to serve, but even then, maids are a dime a dozen. Can’t you see times have changed, my granddaughter would say to me, but really she was the one who needed her eyes opened. We spend our days hunting around for anything to throw in the cooking pot and they spend theirs showing off, and it’s always been that way. In the end she didn’t go to Madrid because at least here she had a roof over her head and food to eat. That’s what family is, a place to stay and food on the table and in return you’re cooped up with a bunch of living relatives and another bunch of dead ones. All families keep their dead under the mattress, my mother used to tell me, it’s just that we can see ours.
But I also see plenty of things that my mother couldn’t. At age six the saint appeared to me for the first time. My mother had gone out to chase payment for some sewing she’d already delivered to the Adolfinas, who were quick to put the orders in but slow to settle the bills, like all the trumped-up bastards who make out they’re richer than they are. None of the three sisters had tied the knot because marrying one would be like marrying all three and if they were hard work by themselves then together they were like a prison sentence, and there wasn’t a man alive who’d sign up for that. So, dance after dance, the three women remained single and if some guy did have his eye on one of them, the other two made sure to scare him off. They spent their days squandering the money left to them by their father, Don Adolfo, who’d made a killing in Cuba as a slave trader. With the outbreak of war there he’d sent his daughters and wife back, along with his great fortune and equally great passion for slaving, because not even the Jarabos treated the help like they did, with good, clean slaps. The money eventually started to run out and their maids went around telling everybody how the sisters mended the moth holes in their dresses on the sly, even though they still lived like the landed gentry. They even had a swimming pool installed with a changing room and everything, the first time anyone around here had seen anything like it. They asked my mother for embroidered tablecloths and linen sheets, but then she had to nag them for months to get paid, and that’s what she’d gone off to do when the saint appeared to me. My mother had left me at home carding wool. I hated that job because ever since I was little I’d found the smell of dead hair disgusting, but my mother didn’t care because disgust, like compassion, is a luxury the poor can’t afford.
It was late and the room was getting dark, when suddenly it was flooded with the brightest light I’d ever seen. A cold white light, the kind you get in an operating room or airport, although back then no one in this village of paupers had ever seen either. When the baker fell off the mountainside in his cart, they took him back to his house and opened him up right there on the kitchen table, with his daughters looking on. One of those girls was left half dumb from the horror, couldn’t string together more than three words after that, but I suspect she’d always been an idiot and what she saw that day just made it worse. The real tragedy, my mother said, was the baker’s wife, who was left with a brain-dead daughter and a husband who was no good for anything besides shitting his pants, but who wouldn’t kick the bucket either. I can tell you right now if that had been me he wouldn’t have been long for this world, my mother would mutter under her breath, and then she’d make me cross myself so the house didn’t start its screeching and creaking.
Anyway, I was saying how I closed my eyes for a moment, blinded by that light. When I opened them, there was a woman standing in front of me. She was dressed in a black tunic that covered her from the neck down and her hair was parted in the middle and tied back in a low bun. Her hands were clasped over her chest and her eyes were raised as if she were praying. I was shocked by the sight of her and couldn’t tell you how long I stayed like that. I only emerged from my stupor when I was shaken by the shoulders and the saint disappeared. My mother had come back from her errand and found me lying on the floor staring blankly at the ceiling. If you don’t snap out of it I’ll give you to the nuns, said my mother. I’ve been calling your name since I got in and you haven’t even looked at me. And you know full well I don’t have the patience of the baker’s wife.
The nuns had taken several girls from the village since the war. Some were handed over by their families because they couldn’t make ends meet. Others they went and collected on the priest’s orders because the parents were either in jail or in the cemetery, which boils down to the same thing. The aunts and uncles or neighbors got tired of supporting the girls and would go to the priest to have him make the problem go away. None of those girls were ever seen again. My mother said they sold them to rich people, the pretty ones as daughters and the ugly ones as maids.
Since then I’ve seen the saint plenty of times. She always appears to me in the same pose, just like on the prayer cards. Gazing solemnly upward as if she’s listening to God’s orders, poised to do anything for him, anything at all, even go after young girls like I was and scare them witless. She never looks at me or speaks to me directly, but I hear her voice inside my chest and I know I have to do as she tells me. How are you meant to argue with a saint? How can you not do everything they say?
When I told my mother about it, she said I’d better not breathe a word to anyone else. It was to stay within these four walls, just like my father’s screams. She never asked what the saint said to me, but she’d stare at me intently every time I returned from wherever the saint took me off to. I could see the envy on her face; she was jealous that I’d been chosen over her, that the only things to appear to her were those shadows in the grip of despair. She wanted a saint to speak to her, inside her chest. She wanted to see that saint shrouded in light and beautiful as a miracle. What had I done to be worthy of that, when I’d never even had to kill a man?
The older I got, the more jealous my mother became. The saint didn’t take me very often, though when she did she told me about things that were going to happen and things that had already happened but nobody ever spoke of. That’s how I found out that the miller was lying in a grave beside the cemetery wall, that the mayor’s son would get kicked by a horse and die, and that I’d watch the youngest Adolfina sister drown and not do a thing to help. My mother’s patience for my visions dwindled as her envy grew. Resentment made her cruel and miserly, or maybe she’d always been cruel and miserly and her resentment just drew it out. She forced me to wear her old dresses and hacked away at my hair with the garden shears, cutting out huge chunks and leaving it shorter on one side. She also made me drop out of school. The teacher told her I was bright and could even go and study in Cuenca, that the nuns ran a residence there and she could have a word with them about lowering the price because she was a widow, but my mother refused. I’ve never gone begging and I’m not about to start now, she said.
When we got home from talking to the teacher, she told me to freshen up in the washtub and go and ask for work from the Jarabos, who were looking for a maid because one of theirs was about to get married. You’ve always said we’d never serve those people, I protested, anything but serving you said. When you know how to do something else, you can get yourself a different job, my mother shot back, but I’m done being sponged off. That was my punishment. To serve the people my mother had refused to serve, to bow before those my father had refused to bow to. To obey on behalf of my whole family.
I served for nine years in that house, between the ages of ten and nineteen. The couple were civil enough to me and Carmen, the other maid, but every so often the mask would slip to reveal the hatred lurking beneath. Like when the señora ripped up the coats she no longer wanted so we couldn’t reuse the fabric, or when the señor forced us to remove every single stone by hand from the dirt road leading up to the finca so he wouldn’t get a flat tire. It was an age-old hatred they carried inside, so deep it took no effort to express it. It wasn’t fueled by anger but by contempt.
We, on the other hand, were full of anger. It ran in our blood like a fever. I don’t know if Carmen passed it on to me or I passed it on to her. Sometimes I think it was her because she’d been there longer and was older, but other times I think it was me because I brought all that bad blood from home. Either way, we stoked each other’s hatred. She’d tell me the suits the tailor dropped off at the house were worth twice our monthly wages, and I’d tell her the señora had poured two full bottles of perfume down the sink because she only liked the ones they made in Paris. But it was the eldest son we really despised. He studied law in Madrid, where he cozied up to all the right people, men who talked about modernizing the country and whose mouths, on speaking of their beloved Spain, filled with blood. He came back every summer because he liked the hills and going out hunting. Carmen and I would see him in the doorway, a bunch of dead partridges hanging from his belt, and hatred would spread through our guts like a disease. A few years later he was killed in a car crash and his parents buried him in the family vault, the biggest in the entire cemetery. The youngest son was still a child but you could see he was already spoiled.
Sometimes the señora made us cook the partridges the eldest shot. We had to pluck those birds with our bare hands and every single time we’d almost die of sadness and disgust. But of laughter, too, later, as we watched the family mop up the sauce we’d spat in. Old Carmen would hawk these great big globs that floated in the oil and then we’d stir them in with a spoon. You just can’t beat a lovely piece of game, the señora would say, and behind the kitchen door Carmen and I would have to hold in our snorts.
I think that’s what cemented our friendship—spitting in our masters’ dinner. She’d grown up with hardship but with love as well and you could tell from her character. She didn’t have that gnawing restlessness, that woodworm my mother and I had, that bastard itch that won’t leave you in peace or let you leave others in peace either. Her father had learned to play the bandurria by ear, just by trying and trying, and he livened up the romerías and fiestas and delighted all those who went to his house to dance and drink the night away. Her mother was quieter but she knew a lot of songs. If you pushed her, eventually she’d sing them for you, first in a hushed voice, blushing, but then she’d find her stride. Carmen had grown up around dancing, and I around yelling, and how could that not leave its mark? I hardly saw my mother anymore. When I came home in the evenings after clearing away the Jarabos’ dinner plates she’d already be asleep, and in the morning we’d barely exchange two words. She was making me shoulder my whole family’s punishment but even then the envy went on chewing her up inside. That’s when I knew she was never going to forgive me. It drove her wild with rage that the saint came and spoke to me instead of her. And she couldn’t stand the way I knew about a lot of things before they happened. That I wasn’t surprised when the mayor had to bury his son after his liver packed it in or that they found the youngest Adolfina sister drowned in the swimming pool shortly after I returned from her house on an errand for the Jarabos.
My mother’s resentment only grew when I met Pedro. He showed up one day at the Jarabos’ door, drenched in sweat and smeared with soot. A fire had broken out at the señor’s warehouse in Gascueña and all the contents, including some of the recent grape harvest, had been destroyed. Pedro took a seat on a kitchen chair to wait for the señor, who was due home at any minute. I moved the clay water jug closer to him and went out into the yard. The mule he’d arrived on was wheezing, struggling for breath. He must have whipped her hard to hurry her along. I led her into the shade and brought her a bucket of cool water from the tank. Don’t worry, that animal can take it, came a voice from the door. You shouldn’t have pushed her so hard, what difference does a few minutes make if the warehouse has already burned down? He wandered over to the mule and stroked her back. Everything they own can go up in smoke for all I care, but then I’m the foreman, he said, and if he finds out from anyone else that he lost a small fortune today, he’ll beat the shit out of me and I’ll never work again.
After that visit there were plenty more. At first he’d find excuses for coming to the house to deal with matters that until then had always been handled at the winery, but then he stopped pretending. He’d saunter in through the kitchen door and sit watching me shell peas or mix cakes. Carmen usually just smiled and left us to it, but one day she took me by the arm and said that Pedro had a girlfriend; she’d heard he was due to marry a girl from Gascueña and the whole wedding had been arranged. I already knew. The saint had told me, just like she’d told me he wasn’t going to marry that girl, that the person Pedro would marry was me.
He came to see me every Sunday, when the señora gave Carmen and me the afternoon off once we’d tidied the kitchen and left dinner ready. We’d meet at the edge of the path, head into the woods and come back with our clothes covered in dirt and sweat. Tongues started wagging in the village, as they always do—those bastards can never keep quiet. Carmen told me I’d been spotted coming down from the hills with tousled hair and flushed cheeks, and that they all knew I’d been going home via the woods instead of the main road, well after dark. But then, what could you expect from the daughter of a pimp who lived off women? I’d suckled the milk of a shameless mother, for all that she liked to play the respectable widow, year after year spent in mourning clothes as if she came from an even halfway-decent home.
One afternoon I led Pedro to a natural pool among the rocks and took off all his clothes. I’d never seen him fully naked; I’d only ever guessed at the hidden parts of his body while reaching my hands under his shirt or down his trousers. I liked his strong chest and broad back, and he liked my hunger and desire. I lay down on the ground and let him do as he pleased. He enjoyed having my body to himself. I already knew what was going to happen, I’d seen it on the kitchen ceiling. That afternoon I got pregnant.
Pedro didn’t want to marry me, but he never said so. He assumed his responsibility without reproach or blame and with his head held high, the way he did everything else. And he loaded his things onto his mule and came to live in the house with my mother and me. I stopped working for the Jarabos before I started showing to spare them the scandal of a pregnant maid. Pedro was still their foreman and he needed to stay in their good graces. We got married at night and without any guests. There was no reception or banquet, there was nothing to celebrate about our disgrace. My mother made my dress, black for mourning and wide for the shame.