Casa Naranjal was a crumbling, iguana-infested estate. Its lands were filled with orange, lime, and avocado orchards. Jacarandas burst into lavender fireworks in the spring. Clusters of bananas hung heavy under rattling fronds. In the rainy season the river swelled, then broke its banks. The estate was walled off from the prying eyes of the local villagers. Don Ezequiel, a toothless old man, guarded its massive wooden gates. Most days, he sat in the shade of an adobe hut eating frijoles on the blade of a knife. My mother loved to sit beside him on the hard earthen floor and watch him eating.
Along with the estate, Granny Nanette had inherited a small staff of servants, a private cook, and three horses that roamed the property untethered. A handsome dark-haired gardener, dressed only in white, picked mangosteens for their breakfast, chased armadillos off the lawns, and fished large worms out of the black-bottomed pool. My grandmother spent her days locked away in her bedroom, terrified of the strange world that had saved her, unable to communicate with anyone but her two children. Her bedroom was on the upper floor of an octagonal tower covered in purple bougainvillea. Directly underneath was a grand living room with soaring ceilings and massive doors that opened onto the landscape. The closest the kids ever got to their mother during the day was the sound of her pacing back and forth above them on the Saltillo floor.
A colonnaded terrace connected the living room to the kitchen, where every morning the cook prepared the masa for tortillas and crushed green tomatoes into salsa verde. Gilded birdcages filled with brilliant-colored parrots and cockatiels were strung between the terraced arches. Wallace and Austin would eat alone at the long dining table, feeding the birds bits of their fried plantains while the parrots chattered to them in Spanish. Mum has always claimed this was how she learned to speak Spanish. Her first words were “Huevos revueltos? Huevos revueltos?”
For three months, the children never went to school. Granny Nanette had no idea how to arrange it. （My mother loves to tell me this any time I express worry over my children’s education. “Don’t be so ordinary, Elle,” she says. “It doesn’t become you. Slide rules are for the meager.” An attitude largely informed by the fact that she can barely add, as I like to point out.）
Austin was afraid to leave the grounds, so Mum wandered around on her own with an old Leica her father had given her, taking photographs of white bulls in the empty fields; wild horses in dry riverbeds, their rib cages swollen from hunger; scorpions hiding in the shade of the woodpile; her brother drinking Limonada by the pool. Her favorite place was the graveyard outside the village. She loved the caged madonnas, the spicy marigolds brought in armfuls by the villagers, the pink-stucco tombstones that looked like dollhouse cathedrals, the paper flowers draped over painted crypts—turquoise, tangerine, lemon-yellow—whatever was the favorite color of the deceased. She would go to the cemetery to read, curled up in the shade of a tomb, comforted by the souls of the dead.
Most afternoons, my mother rode her favorite horse across the valley and over a steep hill into Antigua. She would tie her horse to a post and wander the cobbled streets, explore the ruins of the ancient churches and monasteries, long ago destroyed by earthquakes, still scattered throughout the city. She loved the milagros that the old women sold in the main square to hang on silver chains—tiny charms: amputated legs and arms, eyes, a pair of lungs, a bird, a heart. Afterward, she would go into the cathedral and burn incense, praying for nothing.
One evening, as she was riding home to the valley down a steep trail that narrowed between two boulders, a man stepped out from behind the rocks, blocking her way. He took the reins of her horse and told her to get down. He put his hand on his machete, stroked his crotch. She sat there, cowlike, mute. Enough of this, she thought. She kicked her horse hard in the gut and ran straight over the man. She says she still remembers hearing the crack of his leg bone, the squelch of the horse’s hooves in his stomach. That night at dinner, over a bowl of turkey soup, she told her mother what she had done.
“I hope you killed him,” Granny Nanette said, dipping a tortilla into her soup. “But Wallace, dear,” she added, “that sort of behavior is unbecoming in a girl.”
10:15 A.M.
The shock of being called an asshole by his grandmother has gotten Jack up off the sofa. I should try it, but it would only devolve into a hideous shouting match that would leave me in tears and Jack in adolescent triumph. I don’t have my mother’s haughty gravitas.
My cell phone buzzes. Peter reaches across the table and picks it up before I can get to it. “Jonas is texting you.” He clicks on the message.