Several of the chickenshad stopped laying eggs even though they were young and healthy. Her mother accepted the news with stoic practicality. She said they would butcher them and have them for supper.
The butchering always made Alba flinch. Her mother would grab a chicken by the legs, lay its head against a chopping block, and cut it off with one sure swoop of the axe. Then she’d tie its feet together and hang it to prevent the headless animal from thrashing around on the ground.
Alba despised everything about this process, from the boiling of the water to the cutting of the chicken meat. That afternoon, her mother chopped off the heads of two birds and hung them, and Alba shoved a bucket beneath the animals to collect their blood.
They were supposed to scald and pluck the animals next, but Alba kept thinking about Tadeo and how he always made fun of her when she had to handle the animals. He called her “princess,” mocked her for her squeamishness. One time, when she’d cracked an egg and found blood at its center, she’d shrieked in horror and Tadeo had teased her about it for a whole week.
He mocked her and they fought, but she mocked him too, and in the end their quarrels ended with a hug. But he wasn’t thereanymore; he wouldn’t smile during dinner and ask if Alba had fainted this time around.
Alba’s mother said a woman should not fear blood. Blood was a woman’s destiny anyway, each month there was blood between her thighs, so blood from a bird should not frighten her.
Alba removed the viscera of one of the birds, which shone like jewels against the palm of her hand, and wondered if the witch had carved her brother open like this and pulled out his ruby-red heart.
She began to cry. Fernanda and Magdalena, who were helping her mother in the kitchen, stared at her in surprise.
“What is it?” her mother asked.
“We are cursed and Tadeo is dead,” she said, unthinking.
Fernanda almost dropped the pot that she was carrying, and Magdalena looked at them in confusion. Her mother grabbed Alba by the arm and pulled her out of the kitchen.
“Don’t you say that, especially in front of one of the servants,” she chided, in a voice that was almost a hiss. “I don’t need them thinking of phantoms when they’re working.”
“It’s true, Mother. We’ve been bewitched.”
“What is true is that people are superstitious, and if you frighten them, they’ll leave, and then who will help around here? Don’t be silly, Alba. You’re no use to me like this. Go wash yourself and come back, there is more work to be done.”
She hurried up the stairs and washed her hands in the porcelain basin, tinging the water pink with blood. When she ventured downstairs, instead of returning to her mother’s side, she slipped into the parlor. She rubbed a hand against her eyes.
“Are you unwell, Alba?” Arturo asked.
She turned around and shook her head. “I was cutting onions,” she lied.
He stood at the doorway and looked at her skeptically. “It must have been a large number of onions,” he said as he walked past her, moving toward the piano.
“I suppose the kitchen is not my place.”
“Very likely not.”
He pulled out the piano bench and tapped his fingers against the keys, wringing a lovely melody from the instrument. She edged closer to him, mesmerized by the music.
“Do you like it?” he asked. “I played it at a salon in Mexico City. It’s a waltz by Waldteufel.”
“Oh, it’s beautiful, but you should play ‘Over the Waves.’ I love that one. I’d like to dance it at a big party one day.”
“Will you wear a pretty dress?”
“Yes, a watered-silk pink taffeta dress,” she said, and smiled, brushing her fingers against the hollow of her throat. “And diamonds in my ears and around my neck.”
Arturo turned his head and looked at her. “I might have thought to buy you diamonds, except that you don’t seem to like my gifts.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The necklace I gave you.” He pressed a key and then repeated the note. “You seem to have switched it for a cheap locket.”
Her hand wrapped around Valentín’s locket, she glanced at the floor. “I was in the kitchen butchering chickens, Uncle. I can’twear pearls there,” she said, for she didn’t want to tell him the locket was blessed and she feared removing it lest a terrible evil befall her.
“No, I suppose not.”
