Noemí, like any good socialite, shopped at the Palacio de Hierro, painted her lips with Elizabeth Arden lipstick, owned a couple of very fine furs, spoke English with remarkable ease, courtesy of the nuns at Monserrat—a private school, of course—and was expected to devote her time to the twin pursuits of leisure and husband hunting. Therefore, to her father, any pleasant activity must also involve the acquisition of a spouse. That is, she should never have fun for the sake of having fun, but only as a way to obtain a husband.
“You’ll see it. It’s all very English. Um, that’s what Uncle Howard wanted, a little piece of England. He even brought European earth here.”
“What are your thoughts on the intermingling of superior and inferior types?” he asked, ignoring her discomfort.
Noemi felt the eyes of all the family members on her. Her presence was a novelty and an alteration to their patterns. An organism introduced into a sterile environment. They waited to hear what she revealed and to analyze her words. Well, let them see that she could keep her cool.
It was the kind of thing she imagined impressing her cousin: an old house atop a hill, with mist and moonlight, like an etching out of a Gothic novel. Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, those were Catalina’s sort of books.
“It’s more fun driving without the hood on. It makes your hair look movie-star perfect. Also, it gives you ideas, you think better,” she said, running a hand through her wavy hair jokingly. Noemi’s father said she cared too much about her looks and parties to take school seriously, as if a woman could not do two things at once.
He reminded her of a fellow she’d danced with at a party the previous summer. They had been having fun, briskly stepping to a danzón, and then came time for the ballads. During “Some Enchanted Evening” the man held her far too tightly and tried to kiss her. She turned her head, and when she looked at him again there was pure, dark mockery across his features.
Noemí stared back at Virgil, and he stared at her with that same sort of mockery: a bitter, ugly stare.
The woman raised a gloved hand and pointed at Noemí, and she opened her mouth, but having no mouth since her face was a golden blur, no words came out.
Noemí had not felt scared. Now until now. But this, the woman attempting to speak, it made her indescribably afraid.
“These are my wives,” Howard said. “Agnes passed away shortly after our arrival to this region[…] It was a long time ago. But she has not been forgotten. Her spirit lives on in High Place. And there, the one on the right, that is my second wife. Alice. She was fruitful. A woman’s function is to preserve the family line. The children, well, Virgil is the only one left, but she did her duty and she did it well.”
“I have seen the world, and in seeing it I’ve noticed people seem bound to their vices. Take a walk around any tenement and you’ll see the same sort of faces, the same sort of expressions on those faces, and the same sort of people. You can’t remove whatever taint they carry with hygiene campaigns. There are fit and unfit people.”
Of course he had a point. Catalina was his wife, and he was the one who could make choices for her. Why, Mexican women couldn’t even vote. What could Noemí say? What could she do in such a situation? Perhaps it would be best if her father intervened. If he came down here. A man would command more respect. But no, it was as she said: she wasn’t going to back down.
Catalina had told her she expected more. True romance, she said. True feelings. Her cousin had never quite lost that young-girl wonder of the world, her imagination crowded with visions of women greeting passionate lovers by moonlight[…] Noemí wondered if High Place had robbed her of her illusions, or if they were meant to be shattered all along. Marriage could hardly be like the passionate romances one read about in books.
The Doyles’ silver collection was quite staggering, each shelf lined with salvers, tea sets, bowls, and candlesticks that sat dusty and dull behind glass. A lone person could not hope to tackle this whole task alone, but Noemí was determined to prove herself in front of this woman.
“When I was younger, I thought the world outside held such promise and wonders. I even went away for a bit and met a dashing young man. I thought he’d take me away, that he would change everything, change me,” Florence said, her face softened for the briefest moment. “But there’s no denying our natures. I was meant to live and die in High Place. Let Francis be. He’s accepted his lot in this life. It’s easier this way.”
“When the mine was open, he would have been glad to see Catalina married to me. Back then I would have been worthy. He wouldn’t have thought me inconsequential. It must still irk him, and you, to know Catalina picked me. Well, I’m no two-bit fortune hunter, I’m a Doyle. It would be good of you to remember that.”
“It’s the house,” Francis murmured[…] “It wasn’t made for love, the house.”
“Any place is made for love,” she protested.
“Not this place and not us. You look back two, three generations, as far as you can. You won’t find love. We are incapable of such a thing.”
His fingers curled around the intricate iron bars, and he stood there, for a second, looking at the ground, before he opened the gate for her.
He shook his head and set the pen back on the desk. “She’s no quack. Many people go to Marta for remedies, and she helps them well enough. If I thought she was endangering the health of the townsfolk I wouldn’t allow it.”
Once could conclude that this was a case of three silly, nervous women. Physicians of old would have diagnosed it as hysterics. But one thing Noemí was not was hysterical.
She did not wish to blush in front of him. To turn crimson like an idiot in front of a man who wielded such meticulous hostility toward her. But she thought of his mouth on hers and his hands on her thighs, like it had been in the dream, and an electric thrill ran down her spine. That night, that dream, it had felt like desire, danger, and scandals, and all the secrets her body and her eager mind quietly coveted.
Et Verbum caro factum est.
She knew what she had not properly seen in her previous dreams, and she did not wish to see now, but there it was. The knife and the child. Noemí closed her eyes, but even behind her eyelids she saw it all, crimson and black and the child torn apart and they were eating him.
“There’s a cicada fungus. Massospora cicadina. I remember reading a journal article which discussed its appearance: the fungus sprouts along the abdomen of the cicada. It turns it into a mass of yellow powder. The journal said the cicadas, which had been so grossly infected, were still ‘singing,’ as their body was consumed from within. Singing, calling for a mate, half-dead. Can you imagine?” Francis said. “You’re right, I do have a choice. I’m not going to end my life singing a tune, pretending everything is fine.”
Noemí clacked her teeth together in fear and thought to cry too, but then she recalled the words, the mantra.
“Open your eyes,” Noemí said.
And Noemí did. She opened her eyes, and the room was dark.
It wasn’t ugly. That wasn’t what repulsed her. But it seemed to her it represented the youthful fancies of another girl, of a dead girl. Perhaps two girls. Had Virgil’s first wife worn this too?
It reminded her of an abandoned snake’s skin. Howard would slough off his own skin, would sink into a new body, like a blade entering warm flesh. Ouroboros.
He would die, he would slide into a new body, and Francis would cease to exist. A demented cycle. Children devoured as babes, children devoured as adults. Children are but food. Food for a cruel god.
“Can you go on?”
“I think so,” he said. “I’m not sure. If I faint—”
“We can stop for a minute,” she offered.
“No, it’s fine,” he said.
“Lean on me. Come on.”
“You’re hurt.”
“So are you.”
He hesitated, but did rest a hand on her shoulder, and they walked together, with Catalina ahead of them.
The future, she thought, could not be predicted, and the shape of things could not be divined. To think otherwise was absurd. But they were young that morning, and they could cling to hope. Hope that the world could be remade, kinder and sweeter. So she kissed him a second time, for luck. When he looked at her again his face was filled with such an extraordinary gladness, and the third time she kissed him it was for love.
