1908: 9
The rain did notsummon any horrid phantoms. The sun rose, set again. Peace reigned inside the house. The memory of the terror that had attacked Alba grew dimmer and dimmer with each passing hour. Yet a shapeless fear gnawed at her heart. She looked warily out the window, eyed the shadows in her room at night with suspicion.
On the fourth night after she’d spoken to Valentín, she woke up sobbing in her bed.
She could not remember what she’d dreamed. It had not been the same dream as before, of the creature that bit her and drew blood. For one thing, there was no fresh mark upon her skin, and for another, the quality of the dream was different. She was sure of this, even if the dream came back to her only in blurred snatches.
She remembered the redness of blood and the way her hands shook. She remembered an awful sorrow that made her cry when she awoke even if she did not understand why she wept.
—
She was helping withthe laundry. The sun had come out from behind the clouds, thus Dolores and Alba hurried to pin the bedsheets to the clothesline before the weather changed. Nevertheless, the sun didn’t warm her head; instead Alba felt as if it chilled her limbs.
Her fingers were slow, clumsy, as she scooped the wooden clothespins from a bucket.
She had that funny feeling inside her skull again, that portent. She lifted her arms and stretched the bedsheet upon the clothesline. Two of her siblings were playing nearby, their squeals of joy interrupted when Dolores warned them not to touch the laundry.
She bent down to pick up a pillowcase and when she looked up the world turned into a dark splash of red. The bedsheets hanging from the clotheslines were scarlet and the clouds that drifted in the distance were tinted crimson. It was like gazing through a pane of colored glass in a great Gothic cathedral. Even her hands, when she looked at them, were painted a terrible shade of vermilion, as if she’d squeezed rotten cherries and let the juice drip down her arms.
Alba dropped the pillowcase she was holding and stepped back.
“Niña Alba?” Dolores asked, looking at her curiously.
Something terrible was going to happen. She could feel it. The dream, the tangled snatches of it that still lodged in her memory, now seemed to reassemble themselves like jagged shards of pottery.
Valentín,she thought, and she blinked. The redness faded. She turned away and headed back into the house, rushing into the laundry room, where Fernanda was bent over a stone washboard, her hands wringing a hypnotic rhythm from the fabric as she scrubbed a shirt clean.
Alba went past the maid; she flung open the door that led to the kitchen.
Alba’s mother was making soap that day. She used ashes and lard, and as a girl Alba had liked to see the concoction boiling in a pot and her mother adding grease or lye depending on what was needed, looking in wonder at the frothy mass as it solidified. Such alchemy was more suited to her tastes than the strong scents of blood and guts coming from the kitchen.
“Mother, I must ride to the Molinas’ ranch today,” she said.
Her mother, with a kerchief tied around her head, was busy by the stove and did not look at Alba as she spoke. “Whatever for? You were just there.”
“Yes, but when I was there Valentín said he’d fetch me a tonic to help me sleep and I want to get it.”
Her mother did turn now to look at her and shook her head. “For those dark circles under your eyes, the remedy is chamomile tea, I told you this, and I can make it tonight.”
“But I would be quick, I promise, and I’ve helped Dolores with the laundry already.”
“Let the girl take a holiday,” Arturo said. “I’ll accompany her.”
She had not seen her uncle standing by the doorway and was startled by his voice. Alba’s mother sighed and wiped her hands with a rag. She shook her head and looked at her brother, then at Alba.
“Fine. But don’t eat a thing while you’re there. Otherwise you’ll peck at your food in the afternoon.”
“We’ll go immediately and be back quickly,” Alba promised.
“First we must change into proper clothes,” Arturo said.
“I see nothing wrong with your clothes,” she told him. Her uncle took a terribly long time to ready himself and she feared he might even want a bath drawn before stepping out of the house. She must go quickly.
“I see plenty wrong with yours. Alba, you can’t possibly head out in that dress and with your hair like that,” her mother said.
Alba looked down at the old brown housedress with its dirty cuffs, which was fine for chores but obviously the wrong choice when it came to visiting friends.
“What am I going to do with you, Alba? You’re awfully scatterbrained these days.”
