Сильвия Морено-Гарсия - Mexican Gothic

“Is his room upstairs? He can’t possibly hear people talking in the dining room.”

“Noises carry,” Francis said, his face serious, his eyes fixed on the old house. “Anyway, it’s his house and he sets the rules.”

“And you never bend them.”

He glanced down at her, looking a little perplexed, as if it had not occurred to him until now that this was a possibility. She was certain he’d never drunk too much, stayed out far too late, nor blurted the wrong opinion in his family’s company.

“No,” he said, once again with that resigned note in his voice.

When they walked into the kitchen, she took off the sweater and handed it back to him. There was one maid now, the slightly younger maid, sitting by the stove. She did not look at them, too occupied with her chores to spare them a single glance.

“No, you should keep it,” Francis said, ever polite. “It’s rather warm.”

“I can’t be stealing your clothes.”

“I have other sweaters,” he said.

“Thanks.”

He smiled at her. Florence walked into the room, again decked in a dark navy dress, her face severe, glancing at Francis and then at Noemí, as if they were small children and she was trying to determine whether they had scarfed down a forbidden box of sweets. “If you’ll come with me for your lunch,” she said.

This time it was the three of them at the table; the old man did not materialize and neither did Virgil. The lunch was conducted quickly, and after the dishes were cleared Noemí went back to her room. They brought up a tray with her dinner, so she supposed the dining room had been just for the first night and the lunch was also an anomaly. With her tray they also brought her an oil lamp, which she set by the bedside. She tried to read the copy of Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande, which she’d brought with her, but kept getting distracted. Noises did carry, she thought, as she focused on the creaking of floorboards.

In a corner of her room there was a bit of mold upon the wallpaper that caught her eye. She thought of those green wallpapers so beloved by the Victorians that contained arsenic. The so-called Paris and Scheele greens. And wasn’t there something in a book she’d read once about how microscopic fungi could act upon the dyes in the paper and form arsine gas, sickening the people in the room?

She was certain she’d heard about how these most civilized Victorians had been killing themselves in this way, the fungi chomping on the paste in the wall, causing unseen chemical reactions. She couldn’t remember the name of the fungus that had been the culprit—Latin names danced at the tip of her tongue, brevicaule— but she thought she had the facts right. Her grandfather had been a chemist and her father’s business was the production of pigments and dyes, so she knew to mix zinc sulfide and barium sulfate if you wanted to make lithopone and a myriad of other bits of information.

Well, the wallpaper was not green. Not even close to green; it was a muted pink, the color of faded roses, with ugly yellow medallions running across it. Medallions or circles; when you looked at it closely you might think they were wreaths. She might have preferred the green wallpaper. This was hideous, and when she closed her eyes, the yellow circles danced behind her eyelids, flickers of color against black.

5

Catalina sat by the window again that morning. She seemed remote, like the last time Noemí had seen her. Noemí thought of a drawing of Ophelia that used to hang in their house. Ophelia dragged by the current, glimpsed through a wall of reeds. This was Catalina that morning. Yet it was good to see her, to sit together and update her cousin on the people and things in Mexico City. She detailed an exhibit she had been to three weeks prior, knowing Catalina would be interested in such things, and then imitated a couple of friends of theirs with such accuracy a smile formed on her cousin’s lips, and Catalina laughed.

“You are so good when you do impressions. Tell me, are you still bent on those theater classes?” Catalina asked.

“No. I have been thinking about anthropology. A master’s degree. Doesn’t that sound interesting?”

“Always with a new idea, Noemí. Always a new pursuit.”

She’d heard such a refrain often. She supposed that her family was right to view her university studies skeptically, seeing as she’d changed her mind already thrice about where her interests lay, but she knew rather fiercely that she wanted to do something special with her life. She hadn’t found what exactly that would be, although anthropology appeared to her more promising than previous explorations.

Anyway, when Catalina spoke, Noemí didn’t mind, because her words never sounded like her parents’ reproaches. Catalina was a creature of sighs and phrases as delicate as lace. Catalina was a dreamer and therefore believed in Noemí’s dreams.

“And you, what have you been up to? Don’t think I haven’t noticed you hardly write. Have you been pretending you live on a windswept moor, like in Wuthering Heights ?” Noemí asked. Catalina had worn out the pages of that book.

“No. It’s the house. The house takes most of my time,” Catalina said, extending a hand and touching the velvet draperies.

“Were you planning on renovating it? I wouldn’t blame you if you razed it and built it anew. It’s rather ghastly, isn’t it? And chilly too.”

“Damp. There’s a dampness to it.”

“I was too busy freezing to death last night to mind the dampness.”

“The darkness and the damp. It’s always damp and dark and so very cold.”

As Catalina spoke, the smile on her lips died. Her eyes, which had been distant, suddenly fell on Noemí with the sharpness of a blade. She clutched Noemí’s hands and leaned forward, speaking low.

“I need you to do a favor for me, but you can’t tell anyone about it. You must promise you won’t tell. Promise?”

“I promise.”

“There’s a woman in town. Her name is Marta Duval. She made a batch of medicine for me, but I’ve run out of it. You must go to her and get more. Do you understand?”

“Yes, of course. What kind of medicine is it?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you do it. Will you? Please say you will and tell no one about it.”

“Yes, if you want me to.”

Catalina nodded. She was clutching Noemí’s hands so tightly that her nails were digging into the soft flesh of her wrists.

“Catalina, I’ll speak to—”

“Shush. They can hear you,” Catalina said and went quiet, her eyes bright as polished stones.

“Who can hear me?” Noemí asked slowly, as her cousin’s eyes fixed on her, unblinking.

Catalina slowly leaned closer to her, whispering in her ear. “It’s in the walls,” she said.

“What is?” Noemí asked, and the question was a reflex, for she found it hard to think what to ask with her cousin’s blank eyes upon her, eyes that did not seem to see; it was like staring into a sleepwalker’s face.

“The walls speak to me. They tell me secrets. Don’t listen to them, press your hands against your ears, Noemí. There are ghosts. They’re real. You’ll see them eventually.”

Abruptly Catalina released her cousin and stood up, gripping the curtain with her right hand and staring out the window. Noemí wanted to ask her to explain herself, but Florence walked in then.

“Dr. Cummins has arrived. He needs to examine Catalina and will meet you in the sitting room later,” the woman said.

“I don’t mind staying,” Noemí replied.

“But he’ll mind,” Florence told her with a definite finality. Noemí could have pressed the point, but she elected to leave rather than get into an argument. She knew when to back down, and she could sense that insisting now would result in a hostile refusal. They might even send her packing if she made a fuss. She was a guest, but she knew herself to be an inconvenient one.