“My father was so proud of her.”
“He was?”
“Yes, he always told Angélica and me that we should be more like her, but neither one of us ever showed any interest in the business.”
Then why, oh why, did they want me gone? We could’ve all worked for a common goal, we could’ve continued with my father’s legacy together. But it seemed like one of them was too greedy for that. Or maybe both were.
“I was so sorry about her passing. I wish I could’ve met her,” she said.
Her words stung. They made me feel guilty, dirty about the way I was deceiving her. Catalina was a good person. She didn’t deserve this. I wanted to tell her the truth so badly. Would she hate me if I did?
“I’m sure she would’ve liked to know you, too,” I said.
“What did she look like? Anything like us?”
I hadn’t thought of this. Angélica seemed to be a carbon copy of my father, but Catalina must have taken after her mother because she had olive skin and dark, Moorish eyes. People used to say I also looked like my mother, a big-boned, tall woman.
“In some ways,” I said. “She had black hair like you, but your sister’s nose. She was also very musical. She loved zarzuelas.”
“Did she play any instruments, like Angélica and I?”
“Her voice was her instrument.”
This might have been a stretch. If you asked Cristóbal or La Cordobesa they would’ve said my “instrument” needed some tuning.
Catalina smiled. “How lucky you must have been to be married to a woman like her. She sounds exceptional.”
I took a deep breath. My voice might crack if I spoke. I stood up.
“I should go,” I finally said. “It isn’t proper for me to be here.”
“Of course.”
“Good night, Do?a Catalina.”
I walked away without giving her the chance to answer. My sister’s words had touched me deeply. No, Cristóbal hadn’t been lucky to have me—the opposite was true. I wasn’t the one who was buried in the depths of the ocean. And I couldn’t believe how disloyal I’d been this afternoon by spending all that time with another man and what was even worse, enjoying myself. If there was a God in the Heavens, He would certainly punish me for such a callous betrayal.
CHAPTER 18
Catalina
Vinces, 1913
My mother’s fingers squeezed my ear painfully. “Have you gone mad, Catalina?”
Startled, I dropped the cigarette in my hand. I didn’t know what hurt more: my pride or my ear. I was already fifteen years old and yet my mother was treating me as though I were still a child.
“Pick it up!” she said, pointing at the cigarette I’d just dumped on the ground. I couldn’t believe she’d found my hiding spot behind the palo santo tree. My mother never left the house. How did she find her way out here?
“Let me go!” I said, trying to push her away, but she had a good grip of my ear.
“I said, pick it up.”
Twisting my body in an unnatural way, I picked up the cigarette. My mother dragged me toward the kitchen as if I were a sack of potatoes.
“How can you embarrass me like this?” she was saying. “Don’t you know you have a reputation around here? What if one of your father’s peones had seen you? You know that news travels faster than light in this town. What is wrong with you?”
Yes, what was wrong with me? I knew I had to be good, but I couldn’t stop myself from sinning.
“If it isn’t one thing, it’s another,” my mother said.
Things had been so challenging for us lately. It was nothing but lecturing. This was wrong, that was wrong. Follow your brother’s example, look how he entered the seminary.
For my mother, Gloria Alvarez de Lafont, having one child in the service of the Lord wasn’t enough. She would’ve only been satisfied if the three of us dedicated our lives to the noble cause, but Angélica was beyond hope with all those admirers, and me, well, my mother had made it her life’s goal to set me on the right path—no matter what.
To think that she’d been so proud of me when I told her I’d seen the Virgin. It had been months of prayer, of pilgrimage, of the eyes of the entire town and its surroundings on me. People had wanted to come see me, they wanted me to tell them all about the Sweet Mother, they’d traveled from every corner of the country to hear my message.
But that had been six years ago and my mother seemed to have forgotten already about our sore legs from kneeling on the cold floor—side by side—in prayer, or how she would comb my hair until it was as smooth as silk while she asked all the particulars of the Apparition. After all, she had to report every detail to her friends at the Cofradía since the town’s priest had forbidden me to share my experiences with anybody else.