The Witches of El Paso

Chapter 18

18

Nena was invited to dine with the de Galvez men to celebrate Emiliano’s recovery and the end of the family’s quarantine.

During dinner, Emiliano and Don Javier talked about the acequias, about wine barrels, and about the price of horses. They didn’t include Nena in the conversation, but she didn’t mind, glad to be with other people at mealtime after so many days of eating alone. Emiliano wore a white shirt and black pants, a red sash. He looked like a completely different person than the rotting corpse she’d found in his bed two weeks before.

Nena watched Don Javier throw albóndigas down his throat, chewing while he talked. Not wanting to ruin her appetite, Nena looked down, concentrating on her own food. The little meatballs were delicious, served in a light tomato sauce. Next came lomo with carrots and potatoes, and then after that, coffee, with figs. This was the first grown-up dinner Nena had ever attended.

When Don Javier was done with the last fig, he patted the sides of his mouth daintily with his napkin. He took out a pipe and put tobacco in it, lighting it with a tinderbox, the dank smell of the tobacco filling the room.

For the first time that night, Don Javier turned his attention to Nena.

“I’ve been given the job of finding you a husband,” he said.

“Well,” Nena said, an objection ready to fly from her mouth.

“It’s not going to be easy. You don’t have a dowry. You’re an orphan. You’re small, but not in a pretty way, and your hair isn’t really done like a lady’s.” Don Javier looked at her appraisingly, as though examining livestock. “Couldn’t say what’s wrong exactly.”

“No, se?or,” Nena said. It was true her hair was taking a long time to grow out from when she’d cut it to look like Ingrid Bergman.

“My daughter tells me you’re a hard worker.”

“Yes.”

“You know how to run a kitchen, tell the servants what to cook?”

“Yes.”

“Convent trained. So you could teach the catechism to children?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“Men have lost their wives in this outbreak. You could marry a widower. One who doesn’t need a dowry. We will attend the concert at the Palacio Municipal. Urrea will be there.”

Emiliano laughed.

“What’s funny?” Don Javier asked.

“Urrea’s not a bad man, but he’s the ugliest backside of a hog I’ve ever seen.”

“What does that matter?”

“How about Fonseca instead? At least he’s tall. And he’s already outlived three wives, so why not a fourth?” Emiliano winked at Nena.

“Do you need to make light of everything?” Don Javier asked. “You’ve been saved from death, and you still won’t act like a man.”

Emiliano laughed at this, too.

“Maybe marriage will make you grow up!” Don Javier shouted. He turned to Nena. “You know Emiliano’s novia from the convent?”

“Yes. Eugenia.”

“She’s coming with ten thousand.”

Nena guessed that the number referred to pesos, and ten thousand sounded like a lot. Did Don Javier and Emiliano not know that Eugenia had fallen ill? Nena wondered what Don Javier would say if he knew the state of Eugenia’s face. Would the money make up for the scars? It sounded like it might. Not that Eugenia was Nena’s main concern. The two weeks she’d spent alone were dull, but they’d also been peaceful, the first time in her life she hadn’t had to do any sort of work, and she’d daydreamed about the kind of life that she might find for herself in El Paso del Norte. But now she understood she was in a worse predicament at the de Galvez house than she’d been in at the convent.

She didn’t want to marry anyone. She couldn’t marry anyone. She had to get home. Without the magic of the aquelarre, leaving El Paso del Norte would now be even more difficult, if not impossible. The little bit of the brebaje that she’d had left was gone, used up to cure Emiliano, and since that day Nena hadn’t felt any vibrations of La Vista. The two weeks she’d spent alone, she’d opened her mind often, inviting any sort of encanto to her, but none came.

On the night of the concert, María helped Nena out of the wool dress, sliding her into one made of a beautiful pink ivory silk that reflected the light and that sounded rich when it swished. This dress fit Nena much better than the one she’d been wearing, and she wondered where it came from. It was hard to imagine Sister Benedicta wearing such a dress. Nena couldn’t picture her in anything that wasn’t black. María sat Nena on a little stool, taking a silver brush off the dressing table. With long, even strokes, she gathered Nena’s hair into what felt like a complicated braid at the back of her head, letting a few pieces fall around her face.

María picked up the silver mirror, holding it up in front of Nena.

Carmela’s cross hung from a ribbon around Nena’s neck. The corset had pushed up her breasts, so that it made her appear to have a bosom. Nena looked like a real woman, grown up. Olga and Luna would hardly recognize her if she were to show up at the front door. Nena quickly put this thought away. It made her feel lost, which she couldn’t be right now. She had to be smart and calm, able to make the right choices.

When they got to the Palacio Municipal, Don Javier guided Nena through the rooms. The men bowed to them, and the women smiled tight, false smiles. Don Javier led Nena forward through the big sala, into another room with a low ceiling and a wooden chandelier, lit with dozens of flickering candles. Rough chairs, set up in rows, curved around a small spinet. Don Javier brought Nena to the middle row of seats, and they sat down.

Nena heard fans snapping open and closed. She smelled perfume, and the odor she was starting to understand was the smell that was always there in this time, of unwashed bodies and stale clothes.

The other guests began to find their seats. In front of Nena, two women sat down, their tall peinetas and scarves blocking Nena’s view of the stage. Nena sat up, leaning to one side so that she could look in between their heads.

“Perdón,” Emiliano said, sliding onto the chair next to her, his legs so long that he had to stretch them out underneath the chair in front. Nena flitted her gaze at him, taking in his long lashes, his big, proud nose. Nena fixed her eyes toward the front of the room.

A woman stomped out onto the space in front of the chairs. She wore a tall wig, lots of white powder, rouge on her cheeks, and blood-red lipstick. She was very unattractive under all the makeup. Nena felt sorry for her. Then she sang, sending her voice to the back of the room. People stopped talking. Nena leaned forward. All of the emotions Nena felt that she couldn’t express seemed to be held by the voice of this singer, rage and fear and hope tied together. Through each song, Nena listened, feeling the notes touch the parts of her that ached. The last song took the hairs off the top of Nena’s head. The song made Nena feel like if it was possible to make music like that, anything could be done.

Nena clapped and clapped when the singer was finished. She heard herself saying, “Oh, oh, oh.”

“Haven’t you ever heard opera before?” Emiliano asked.

Nena turned to look at him, taking in his waxed mustache, his big dark eyes.

“That was magnífico,” Nena said. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”

He stood up and bowed to Nena, as though he were just meeting her. He put out his hand. She put her hand in his, and he kissed it. “Encantado.”

He was very handsome, but she’d seen him at his worst, dying and covered in pustules. And what kind of man kissed a girl’s hand like that? It was so silly, she laughed.

Emiliano stepped back. He looked at Nena’s breasts, pushed up. She wanted to tell him that what he saw was a lot of trouble over nothing.

“You’re from the Santa Fe branch of the family, Papá tells us. Why haven’t I ever heard about you?”

“Wasn’t the singer divine?” Nena asked, thinking that divine was the right kind of word to describe her.

“You know, you aren’t supposed to like music at things like this too much. You aren’t even supposed to listen to it. You should be like those other women and talk during the performance.”

“That would be very rude.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t. Would you like a bebida?” he asked. Nena looked at Don Javier for permission.

“Bring her back soon, there are a few people I want to introduce her to,” Don Javier said.

They moved to the hallway. Emiliano took a couple of glasses from a servant holding a tray.

He looked at Nena’s chest again as he spoke to her. “This champagne is from France, but it’s been ruined by the ocean trip. They should be serving our wine. It’s the finest in the New World.”

“When will I get to taste the finest wine in the New World?” Nena asked.

“When? Every day you make it to the dining table.”

Nena laughed again, though she wasn’t quite sure why. Two sips of champagne had made her feel silly and warm.

“You find me amusing, but I find you something else,” he said, leaning in, so close to Nena’s face that she could feel his long eyelashes touching her cheek, his breath in her ear. He put his hand on her waist. His hand was big enough that it felt like it covered her whole side.

“Can I tell you a secret?” he asked Nena.

“Yes,” she said, touching his forearm.

“I like listening to music, too.”

“Can you hear the—the other music?” Nena asked, not sure how to ask if he had visions, or if he could hear encantos like she could. He was related to Sister Benedicta, and maybe eating the brebaje had awoken something in him.

“You mean like the quadrille? Very much so. I love to dance,” he said.

“Oh, me too,” Nena said, though she was a bad dancer. Maybe Emiliano could teach her.

Nena looked up at him. She wanted him to brush her cheek with his eyelashes again. She never wanted him to take his hand off her waist. He looked down at her and smiled.

“You were laughing before,” he said. “Why are you so serious now?”

“Because I am serious,” she said.

“There you are.” Don Javier appeared next to them. “The singer is starting up again. We should take our seats.”

The next day Nena walked with María to noon mass at the cathedral. Dark vigas stretched across the ceiling, black planks of wood lying on top of the beams, making the ceiling seem even higher up than it was. The place smelled like a barn, with bird poop in the font, and pigeons roosting in the vigas, flapping their wings and cooing. Instead of pews, rough benches sat in rows, also dirty with the mess of birds. The area behind the altar seemed to be used for storage, crates and barrels stacked up high. Nena had never seen a building, let alone a church, this badly taken care of. Nena wondered what her sisters would think of the cathedral.

Nena and María kneeled. Nena closed her eyes, thinking rather than praying. She couldn’t marry anyone here, not even Emiliano. Not that he was an option for her. She didn’t have one peso, let alone thousands. Not that she wanted to marry him. But if he were in her time, she would allow him to take her to the movies. Thinking about the movies made Nena sick with longing, wishing she could sit on a velvet chair in the dark, listening to the overture, excited to enter a new world for a few precious hours.

Nena felt something crawling on her shoe, and she opened her eyes. A mouse. She kept her mouth closed, stifling her scream as she kicked at it.

“Shh,” María said, her eyes still closed.

When mass ended, María and Nena walked out through the square toward the outdoor market. Pieces of colorful cloth hung over the crude tables to make some shade, giving the market the look of a festival.

Walking closer to the market, Nena smelled food frying in oil, the smoke from the mesquite fire under the cauldron of pozole, sold by a small woman who reminded Nena of her mamá. A seller called out, “Masa! Masa!” At one stall, a man sold bags of wheat, at another, coffee. On the butchers’ tables sat liver and pieces of beef and whole legs of goats. The meat let off a strong rotten odor, and flies covered every part of the goat legs, turning them black. When the butcher waved his hand, the flies jumped up all at once, and then they settled down again, crawling on top of each other.

Nena heard a noise, loud laughing, breaking glass, and next to the market, on the plaza, she saw Emiliano sitting at a table outside a rough adobe building, drinking with friends. The young men shouted when they talked, leaning back in their chairs. The waiter bent over, picking up the pieces of the broken glasses.

“It’s not ladylike to stare,” María said, pulling at Nena’s arm.

“He was very kind to me last night,” Nena said, instantly angry with herself for saying anything.

“He flirts with all the pretty girls,” María said.

“You think I’m pretty?” Nena asked. This was a pitiful thing to ask, but Nena couldn’t help herself.

“Oh, Elena,” María said, which was not answering the question. She meant no. María shook her head. “You be careful.”

She really tried her best most of the time. It was true that she sometimes made bad choices, but that was only because she was trying to help other people.

“Se?orita Elena,” Nena heard. Emiliano was calling to her from his table. Nena walked closer to him. Emiliano tried to bow to her, stumbling, knocking his chair over. He smelled of drink. He threw his arm around the shoulders of a man with red hair.

“Joaquín, this is our ward, Se?orita Elena,” Emiliano said. “She loves opera.”

“Me too,” Joaquín said, bowing to Nena.

“But she doesn’t know much about going to recitals. She doesn’t know you’re not supposed to listen. Real ladies talk and fan themselves,” Emiliano said.

“My sister could give you lessons on how to do that,” Joaquín said.

“She knows your sister. They were in the convent together.”

“Then you know that Eugenia’s so sophisticated she never closes her mouth,” Joaquín said, laughing.

“Don’t talk about her that way,” Emiliano said, a darkness flooding his face.

“I’ll talk about Eugenia however I want,” Joaquín replied. Nena saw that though he was steady on his feet, Joaquín was drunk, too.

“I’m warning you.” Emiliano stepped closer to his friend.

Joaquín put his hand on Emiliano’s shoulder, squeezing it.

Emiliano shoved Joaquín, who fell backward onto the dusty stones. Joaquín got up, his face now the same color as his hair. He punched Emiliano in the eye. Emiliano punched him back, and then they were on the ground, wrestling.

The other three friends shouted “pégale!” laughing, but the fight seemed serious to Nena, a dark shadow racing under the feet of the boys. She started to feel hot, and dizzy. A buzzing in her ears grew louder. She touched Carmela’s cross. She made herself think about the solid riverbank as she was pulled into the waters of La Vista. She saw flashes of men on horses. Men in buckskins, with lances, making an unholy sound at the back of their throats, high-pitched and meant to scare. A musket shot. A knife flashing in the sun. Nena felt the knife in her belly, and she choked, coughing up blood on the road outside of El Paso del Norte.

Nena was back in her body, lying on the ground, and María was loosening the back of her dress. The boys looked down at her.

Nena stood up, too quickly, the blood pounding in her head, ashamed of herself. She’d thought La Vista no longer made her faint.

Emiliano was laughing, holding his eye. “We thought we’d lost you!”

She hated for Emiliano to see her like that, helpless and gone, lying in the dust. María was already pulling Nena away in the direction of the de Galvez house, and Nena was glad to go with her. She had let her guard slip.

“I told you to be careful,” María said. “If you faint like that in public, you’re going to get a reputation for yourself, and then where will you be? No one will want to marry you. Why do you think Sister Benedicta had to go to the convent?”

Nena wouldn’t be allowed back at the convent, so where would she be sent? She was afraid to ask.

At supper that evening, a dull headache throbbed behind Nena’s eyes, but Emiliano appeared fresher and more alert than seemed possible after being so drunk earlier in the day. His hair was neatly combed, and he’d changed clothes. He had a black eye, but it didn’t do anything to hurt his healthy color.

“You’re too hotheaded,” Don Javier said, eating his pigeon pie in giant bites. “You need to learn some discipline.”

“The boys and I were just having fun.”

“You should be spending your time working.”

“Elena told me she wanted to see the vineyard,” Emiliano said, winking at Nena with his good eye.

“The vineyard? Women don’t belong there,” Don Javier said.

“She says she doesn’t believe we grow the best grapes in the New World,” Emiliano said.

“I didn’t say that,” Nena said.

“You don’t think our wine is the best?” Don Javier asked.

“That’s not—”

“We can’t have her spreading rumors like that, right?” Emiliano asked.

“I don’t know anything about wine. I’ve never seen how vines grow,” Nena said, mad at Emiliano for teasing her.

Don Javier stopped eating. He wiped his mouth with his napkin, but he missed a spot of grease on his chin. He looked directly at Elena. “How vines grow. You think you can see it happening? The stupidity of women never ceases to amaze me.”

“Don’t you think we should make her less ignorant?” Emiliano asked, smiling.

“We can do better than that. When we take you to the vineyard, we’ll invite Se?or Urrea to come. He wrote to tell me that he saw you at the concert, and he wants to meet you,” Don Javier said.

“I don’t want to go to the vineyard,” Nena said.

“I have the perfect horse for you to ride,” Emiliano said.

Nena kept quiet, furious. Emiliano, she now understood, was the kind of person who liked to toy with people. But Nena wasn’t a toy, she was a witch.

A lot of good that did.

It was true that the brebaje had protected her from smallpox, but making that brebaje had also gotten her banished from the convent.

Her visions had never brought anything but grief.

Foretelling how and when Se?or Echeverria would die hadn’t stopped him from evicting the Montoyas. He was very much alive when he stood outside their house, his car running, watching the family move. The tíos had sent over a truck and some workers to help cart the furniture. The new house had two rooms: a bedroom for Nena’s parents, and the other room for everything else—living, eating, and the place the girls would sleep. The paint on the walls peeled. There was one toilet in a room off the kitchen, but no proper bathroom.

After the trip to the Jockey Club and the move, Nena’s papá never went outdoors, and he hardly ever left his bedroom, but he still loved to tell stories. When Nena came home from school, she’d put down her books, pour two glasses of water, make a plate of food for her papá, and bring it to him, sitting on the edge of his bed, listening as he wheezed out his narratives, usually needing to stop to catch his breath right at the point where the soldiers faced Apaches bristling with weapons on the other side of the river.

“Now, listen. You wouldn’t think that a woman named Eduviges would be beautiful, but she was,” her papá would say, telling the story of two ancestors, Eduviges, the daughter of the owner of a silver mine in Zacatecas, and Dionicio, a railroad engineer from New Mexico. After a secret courtship, Eduviges rode her horse, chasing after Dionicio’s slow-moving train, leaping out of her saddle and into Dionicio’s waiting arms, leaving behind a fortune for love. What names people had in the old days! Nena loved hearing about family silver mines, even if they were long gone.

Nena didn’t like it when her papá told stories about witches, like the one about the bruja who taught a woman how to peer into a washbasin to check on her shepherd son. These stories gave Nena jabs of embarrassment and shame, afraid she was going to be found out for what she was. She didn’t want to end up like Do?a Hilaria in her dirty house with all those dogs, yelling curses at little girls. Nena wanted to be brave and smart like her sisters were, each in their own way.

When Olga was a senior in high school, she started a Spanish Speaking Club, a protest against the prohibition of speaking Spanish at school. The club met for the first time at lunch in the cafeteria, a small group sitting at one table, Olga at the head. Everyone waited to see what the principal was going to do, but the lunch hour passed, and nothing happened. The next day, the members of the club again spoke only Spanish at lunch, and still the principal didn’t say anything. On the third day, Luna started the Speak English Only Club, sitting her group down at the table next to Olga’s club.

Luna and Olga started arguing at school, and they were still fighting when they picked Nena up from her school. Nena liked it when they fought, because then they forgot to nag her about doing her homework, to order her to wash her hands. In Spanish, Olga told Luna to make dinner, which Luna pretended not to understand. Olga, who was just as stubborn as Luna in her own way, refused to speak English, and they went back and forth, Olga telling Luna what to do in Spanish, and Luna telling Olga to “Please use the language of the United States.” It got bad enough that Nena started to worry. She said that they didn’t have to fight, she would fix dinner instead.

They both told her to shut up, Olga in Spanish and Luna in English. Nena started to cry, and then they heard their papá shouting at them from his room. He had a hard time even whispering, so they knew it was serious.

Luna and Olga told Papá their versions of what had happened. After listening, Papá told Luna that she had to disband her club, reminding her that theirs had been one of the founding families in Albuquerque and that the Montoyas had been speaking Spanish in their part of the world since 1584, almost two hundred years before the United States was a country. He was disappointed in Luna, and so were their ancestors.

Even though Nena usually loved it when Papá talked about the ancestors, she felt sorry for Luna. As Luna changed into her waitress uniform, getting ready to go in for the evening shift, Nena tried to help her. She found Luna’s waistband bunched up on the floor of the closet, and she crawled under the bed to drag out Luna’s work shoes. Nena watched Luna take her lipstick out of its hiding place in the hollow post of the bed and put it in her pocketbook. This frightened Nena. It meant that Luna was planning to go somewhere after work.

When Luna finally came home, it was late. Mamá, Olga, and Nena were waiting for her, sitting together on the sofa. Luna smelled like cigarettes, and she was wearing someone else’s dress, lipstick bright on her face. She was beautiful and very alive, and Nena was sorry she was so wicked.

“Where were you?” their mamá asked her in Spanish.

“Nowhere.”

“Who were you with?”

“A couple of the chicas from the restaurant. We went dancing,” Luna said. And then she admitted that they’d been out with a man, too, one of the waiters. There was a huge escándalo, lots of tears and slammed doors, and their papá said he would not have his daughter shame the family, but at the end of all of the arguing, it was decided that Luna could be out in public with Beto—that was the name of the waiter—if Olga went with them to chaperone.

Beto was twenty-four, which seemed ancient to Nena. He slicked his hair back with pomade and he had huge brown eyes. His face looked kind of flattened out, like someone had smashed it with a cast-iron pan. He had big hands and forearms, and he was the kind of handsome that makes you think that nobody else notices how good-looking he is but you.

The first time Olga chaperoned Beto and Luna, she wore a dress with a high collar, her hair pinned tight to her skull. She brought her math textbook for the streetcar ride, so that she wouldn’t waste any time. But as the months passed, Nena watched Olga transform. She started to curl her hair. She fixed some of her dresses in the new style, shorter. And before she went out with Luna and Beto she put on her own secret lipstick, applying it and then blotting all but a tiny bit off with her handkerchief. As they walked down the street, Beto put his arms around both girls, and when he said goodbye, he didn’t kiss either of them, he performed a little bow, like a real caballero.

One week, Beto told the girls he’d borrowed a car and he was going to take all of them to the Hueco Tanks for a picnic. It wasn’t really a park then, but Beto was somehow related to the Escontrias, the family that owned the land. Luna bought Cokes and store-bought rolls, and Olga made tiny little albóndigas in a red chile sauce. But the Saturday they were supposed to go, one of the busboys came by the house to tell Luna that she was needed to cover the lunch shift at the restaurant. “Go without me,” she ordered her sisters.

During the car ride, Olga’s voice got very high-pitched, and she giggled at everything Beto said, even dumb things like “Look, a roadrunner.” Once they got to the Hueco Tanks, they passed the Escontrias’ adobe ranch house, following a path through a thicket of mesquite, walking out toward the red rocks. A family of javelinas ran across the path, disappearing into the sage and the sotol. At the tanks they walked around looking at the paintings on the rocks, made by many different bands of Indios over many centuries.

Beto pointed out the Apache paintings of men on horses, of running deer. Underneath an overhang, like it was meant to be hidden, he showed the girls a yellow painting of triangles arranged in a grid, four across and five down. Even then Nena knew it was something powerful, without understanding that it was a prayer for rain, or maybe more like a map, offered to the god Tlaloc so that he could find his way from Central Mexico to this dry part of the world. Looking at the triangles, Olga made a joke about geometry, something about the hypotenuse that Nena didn’t understand and that Beto didn’t seem to get either, but he laughed and moved close to her, putting his finger out to trace the same triangles Olga had just touched. Under another overhang, they all three touched the signatures of the passengers of the Butterfield Express, written in axel grease on top of the older paintings made by the Indios. At noon, they ate, sitting on a big rock next to a dark pool of water, cool under the overhang. Beto’s contribution to the lunch was a box of chocolate-covered cherries. They were the most delicious thing Nena had ever tasted, and she had five before Olga made her stop.

Nena had to go to the bathroom. She walked around the hill and behind a bush, where she squatted. When she was done, she wandered around by herself. She touched one of the pictographs, a thunderbird, putting her whole palm on it. She got down on her stomach and looked into one of the pools, trying to see the freshwater shrimp that were supposed to live there, and then she saw them, tiny little ghost bodies, floating in the water. She heard a rattle—it had to be a snake—and she ran back to where Olga and Beto were sitting. They were kissing, and when they saw her, they were so shameless they kept holding on to each other.

When they got home, Luna was waiting for them. She’d shaved ice off the block in the icebox with a butter knife and was rubbing it into her face, her feet in a basin of water. She smelled like tortillas and grease, and she looked tired. She knew. Olga knew that she knew. The two sisters didn’t talk to each other for a week, but as terrible as that week was, Nena had loved Olga more for doing what she did, for not being perfect.

Remembering this gave Nena some comfort. It wasn’t just the fact that Olga made mistakes like everyone else. It was what happened afterward. Beto gave Luna a ring, and they set a date to be married. When Beto came by the house the first time after that, Olga asked him if he wanted coffee, and she went into the kitchen to make it. Nena found her standing in front of the percolator, tears flowing silently down her cheeks. Nena had hugged her, but Olga’s arms hung limply by her sides, and her tears wouldn’t stop. Nena finished making the coffee, putting cups on a tray to take out to Beto and Luna, who she interrupted kissing on the couch. Nena thought it very cruel of Luna to shove it in Olga’s face like this.

Nena watched over the months as Olga slowly healed herself. She finally started going to the movies with a boy who had sometimes taken her to high school dances, a boy Olga and Luna had made fun of for his thick glasses, the grease under his fingernails from working on the weekends at his father’s garage. He was nowhere near as good-looking as Beto, but he had something that Beto didn’t have. He read books, and Olga loved nothing more than reading.

Nena wasn’t a reader. She wasn’t the kind of person to attract a beautiful man. She was herself. Her sisters had their talents, and she had hers. It was time that she admitted to herself what she was.

She was no longer the girl who was afflicted by visions, the girl who had tried to keep herself from seeing what La Vista brought to her. Nena was a grown-up now, and she had brought into the world a very powerful encanto. She had done it, Elena Eduviges Montoya, not Sister Benedicta, not Madre Inocenta.

Nena was a real bruja now, and when she went to the vineyard she was going to use her powers to put things right, to go home.

The next morning, Nena found herself sitting in her underclothes, María brushing her hair with many dozens of strokes, making it crackly and full of electricity instead of smoothing it out.

Nena could hear Emiliano singing in the stable yard, belting out something like a ranchero, a cowboy song, about a naughty maid. He had a bad voice, off-key, but loud. She wished she could pay him back for his teasing.

“Arms up,” María said, pulling a petticoat over Nena’s head, the first of many layers. When she was done, Nena wore a big fluffy white skirt, a tight jacket with loose sleeves, a hat with a veil, and tall riding boots.

Out in the stable yard, Emiliano’s servant Antonio and the groom saddled up the horses. A tiny gray burro teetered under a huge pile of baskets loaded onto its back, so many that it seemed like they were going on a long trip, not simply a ride and a picnic. María held the bridle of the burro, stroking his nose. Emiliano wore a beautiful linen shirt with a brown suede jacket, tight pants with gold buttons. His hair was neatly combed, his neck was thick from exercise. The edges of his black eye were already turning yellow. He looked practically ugly, Nena told herself, wishing it were true.

Don Javier had also dressed up to go out riding, similarly to Emiliano, except that the gold buttons along the sides of his pants strained, right on the edge of popping off. But once he was on his horse, he sat tall in the saddle, elegant in a way he wasn’t on the ground. He wore giant spurs, each with five big spikes an inch in length. Nena felt sorry for his horse.

Emiliano walked toward Nena, leading a very large gray horse. “May I present to you Palomita,” he said, bowing.

The beast may have been called Palomita—Little Dove—but except for her color, she looked nothing like her name. She had huge nostrils, and big muscles in her pompies, muscles she could use to buck Nena off her. Nena’s stomach felt weak when she thought about climbing up on the back of the creature. She told herself that she’d wanted to be like Pilar, fighting the fascists in Spain, as skillful at horseback riding as shooting rifles, and now here finally was her chance to learn how to ride. Nena touched the horse’s side, patting it, feeling her warmth. Nena pulled her hand away, finding little hairs all over her palm. Disgusted, she rubbed them off on her riding outfit.

“She’s a sweet mare, very gentle,” Emiliano said.

Palomita showed Nena her big teeth. In her neighborhood at home, Nena saw plenty of working horses, pulling wagons for the milkman and the man who took away the rubbish, but Nena was a city girl, and the only horse she’d ever ridden was the broken-down nag named Margarita. People paid a nickel to have a picture taken, wearing the owner’s sombrero and a bandolier to look like the Mexican revolutionaries who had lived in her neighborhood not that long before.

“Antonio,” Emiliano yelled at the man who had opened the gate the first day Nena arrived at the de Galvez house. “Come and help Se?orita Montoya up.”

Antonio kneeled, offering his cupped palms. Nena felt everyone watching her. She stepped into Antonio’s hands and then started to swing her leg over the horse.

María and Don Javier gasped. Emiliano laughed. “Ja, ja, ja!” He was laughing at her again.

“No, not like that,” Antonio hissed up at Nena as María shook her head back and forth. “Don’t you know how to sit sidesaddle?”

Nena tried again.

“No, no. Keep your right knee bent, there, now put your left leg in the stirrup. Lean back, pull in your stomach, now turn your body toward the horse’s head.”

Nena followed his instructions, wedging herself in. Palomita twisted her ears, rolling her eyes back at Nena while she danced, shivering her behind. Nena felt pinched and pulled, her feet, her chest, her legs twisted underneath her body. She pressed her knee more firmly into the front of the saddle. Pilar and Ingrid Bergman had not had to ride this way.

While Emiliano and Don Javier settled themselves onto their horses, Antonio added a few packages to the burro’s load, then he jumped on top of his own horse. It didn’t seem to bother him that he was barefoot and that the horse had no saddle, just a rope. María got to ride a fat pony, the horse Nena wished she could be on instead. The stable boy opened the gate, and they headed out of the courtyard and onto the street.

Nena stayed very still in the saddle as Palomita picked her way through the garbage on the street. Palomita fit herself behind Emiliano’s horse, putting her nose right up against the other horse’s tail, even though the horse kept farting awful clouds of gas. Nena breathed through her mouth, taking the smallest breaths possible of the foul air. When they arrived at Se?or Urrea’s house, a little boy ran out. “Papá can’t come today, his piles are too bad, and he can’t sit on a horse.”

Emiliano laughed. Nena didn’t think it was funny, but she was relieved that Se?or Urrea wouldn’t be joining them.

They rode toward the ferry crossing. The Rio Bravo still ran big and fast. On the other side, they rode northwest in the direction of Santa Fe. Nena had always imagined El Camino Real as a grand road, paved with cobblestones, instead of just a track of hard-packed dirt only occasionally rutted by wagon wheels, cutting across an open plain scattered with rocks, yucca, and sage. She was in the land of her father’s stories, where people were always being killed by Apaches on the Jornada del Muerto, the dangerous stretch of El Camino Real in the wilds between El Paso and Santa Fe.

Emiliano drew his sword, slicing the air with it, and then he kicked his horse, heading off fast. Don Javier whipped his horse to follow Emiliano, and then without Nena doing anything, Palomita took off after the other horses, laying her ears back and stretching her nose forward. Nena hung on tight. They raced along the river, toward the east, finally coming to the edge of the vineyard, stopping next to the acequia.

The horses drank. Antonio helped Nena off Palomita. Her back had become one big knot from the twisting and bouncing, and she could barely walk. But it smelled nice out here away from the town, with the scent of the rich earth, of the river fat with melted snow. The very tips of the grapevines had fresh growth, giving a green haze to the rows of trellises intersecting with irrigation ditches.

Nena adjusted her veil, watching as Antonio and María quickly unloaded the baskets and undid a bundle of sticks, arranging them as kindling to make a fire.

Emiliano hurried toward Nena. He’d taken off his jacket, and his shirt was unbuttoned at the top. He swung out his elbow, leaning in toward her, like he was expecting her to slip her hand between his arm and his chest, which she did, dismayed how easily she gave in to him. Through the linen of his shirt, Nena felt his muscles. He led her down a row of vines, stopping in the middle, where they were out of sight of the others. Birds swooped down in the vines, and it was warm, dry, and not at all unpleasant. Emiliano took out a knife and cut a tendril from one of the vines, handing it to Nena.

“We grew these vines from cuttings that were brought here from Spain.”

“That’s very far.”

“Once the Apaches are subdued, I’m going to build a house right here, above the flood zone.”

“Apaches?”

“I’ll grow old and fat like Papá and I’ll plant flower gardens for Eugenia. She loves flowers.”

“I don’t,” Nena said. Emiliano smiled at her.

Nena let go of Emiliano’s arm, walking away from him.

Emiliano walked fast to catch up to her. “You’re a funny person. Is everyone from up north like you?”

“Yes, we’re all bad horsewomen.”

“Emiliano!” Don Javier called.

“Vengo!”

Back in front of the bunkhouse, María handed Nena a tablecloth to put over the rough table the vaqueros used outside the casita. Nena smoothed out the tablecloth, beautifully embroidered, white floss on white linen. It seemed far too nice to use outside, and Nena wondered who’d made it. Maybe Emiliano’s mamá. Out of the burro’s packs, Antonio unloaded china, silverware, and pewter cups packed in straw, setting the places at the table. He had water boiling in a copper pot hanging from an iron crossbar over the fire, and he’d set up a grill. On top of that he’d put a heavy iron pan. He poked the embers of the fire, feeding it more wood. Nena put the tendril Emiliano had given her into one of the pewter cups.

She looked out at the desert, at the tidy irrigation ditches cut from the river to the vines. It hit Nena for the thousandth time that she didn’t belong in this place, that this was not her real life. She was on the north side of the river, east of where home was in her time, but close enough to walk if she could sing herself back. It made sense to sing the healing song here, putting things back into place, blinking Nena forward to her own time, traveling like a mariquita.

“Let’s eat,” Don Javier called out.

Nena and the others sat down, perching on camp stools. Don Javier looked ridiculous balancing on the stool, the three little legs sprouting out of his bottom. Nena was sorry to admit to herself that in the sun, Emiliano was even more handsome than indoors. He had very fine bones in his face, which made him look almost delicate. This made Nena mad. She didn’t want to be thinking about Emiliano. Antonio passed around bolillos in a little basket, a bowl of beans, a platter of squash. He served the meat, spooning a cream sauce over the pieces of pork. Emiliano poured the wine. Nena drank a sip. She didn’t like the flavor, and that single swallow made her feel too warm.

“Riding always gives me an appetite,” Don Javier said.

“What doesn’t make you hungry?” Emiliano asked, grinning.

“Who taught you to say things like that? I would never talk to my father that way.” Don Javier jabbed a cutlet with his knife. “You’ll have to calm down when you’re married.”

“I was already telling Cousin Elena that I’m planning on growing fat like you.”

“You should follow my example in some way. If it weren’t for your mamá’s dowry, we’d only have half the vineyards. You could use Eugenia’s dowry to plant another dozen hectares.”

“Yes,” Emiliano said, suddenly serious. “We could get the Chávez land for a good price. There’s a house on the land that I could fix up for me and Eugenia.”

“More foolishness. You can’t live out here,” Don Javier said.

“If the garrison isn’t doing its job with the Apaches, then maybe we should do it ourselves.”

“Don’t talk nonsense.”

“You don’t think I know how to fight?” Emiliano asked.

“What do you think about that, Se?orita Elena? Do you think this lazy son of mine would have the guts to ride out against Apaches?”

“No,” Nena said, and Emiliano looked at her with surprise, anger twisting his face. Good.

Nena got up from the table, and walked off into the vineyard by herself, hoping that Emiliano and Don Javier would be too busy bickering to worry about her.

Once she was sure that she hadn’t been followed, she took in a breath, and opening her mouth to breathe out, she began to sing the encanto of healing, surprised that it came to her so easily. Madre Inocenta had said that Nena would go home when the time was right. This had to be it, now. Nena felt certain that at any moment, the earth would twirl and her El Paso would spin back into view.

Nena sang louder. Her feet lifted off the ground. The song seemed to be working, but Nena stayed in El Paso del Norte.

“Se?orita Elena,” Nena heard. Emiliano was calling for her, very close. “Where are you?”

Nena stopped singing, falling to the ground and landing on her hands and knees.

“Se?orita Elena? What were you doing?” Emiliano asked.

“I tripped,” Nena said quickly, wondering what he’d seen.

Emiliano reached out his hand, helping her stand. Emiliano was frowning, thinking. “That song you were singing.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve heard it before.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yes, I’m sure of it.”

“I sang it to you the day I came to nurse you,” Nena said, too frustrated to lie.

“I understand,” he replied, and the way he looked at her, she felt like this was the very first time he had actually listened to her.