Сильвия Морено-Гарсия - Mexican Gothic

“At least the doctor at the clinic might offer a second opinion, or he might have other ideas about Catalina.”

“There’s a reason why my father brought his own doctor from England, and it’s not because the health care in this place was magnificent. The town is poor and the people there are coarse, primitive. It’s not a place crawling with doctors.”

“I must insist—”

“Yes, yes, I do believe you will insist,” he said, standing up, the striking blue eyes still unkindly fixed on her. “You get your way in most things, don’t you, Miss Taboada? Your father does as you wish. Men do as you wish.”

He reminded her of a fellow she’d danced with at a party the previous summer. They had been having fun, briskly stepping to a danzón, and then came time for the ballads. During “Some Enchanted Evening” the man held her far too tightly and tried to kiss her. She turned her head, and when she looked at him again there was pure, dark mockery across his features.

Noemí stared back at Virgil, and he stared at her with that same sort of mockery: a bitter, ugly stare.

“What do you mean?” she asked, challenge peppering the question.

“I recall Catalina mentioning how insistent you can be when you want a beau to do your bidding. I won’t fight you. Get your second opinion if you can find it,” he said with a chilling finality as he walked out of the room.

She felt a little pleased to have needled him. She sensed that he had expected—as had the doctor—that she would accept his words mutely.

—

That night she dreamed that a golden flower sprouted from the walls in her room, only it wasn’t…she didn’t think it a flower. It had tendrils, yet it wasn’t a vine, and next to the not-flower rose a hundred other tiny golden forms.

Mushrooms , she thought, finally recognizing the bulbous shapes, and as she walked toward the wall, intrigued and attracted by the glow, she brushed her hands against these forms. The golden bulbs seemed to turn into smoke, bursting, rising, falling like dust upon the floor. Her hands were coated in this dust.

She attempted to clean it off, wiping her hands on her nightgown, but the gold dust clung to her palms, it went under her nails. Golden dust swirled around her, and it lit up the room, bathing it in a soft yellow light. When she looked above, she saw the dust glittering like miniature stars against the ceiling, and below, on the rug, was another golden swirl of stars.

She brushed her foot forward, disturbing the dust on the rug, and it bounced up into the air again, then fell.

Suddenly, Noemí was aware of a presence in the room. She raised her head, her hand pressed against her nightgown, and saw someone standing by the door. It was a woman in a dress of yellowed antique lace. Where her face ought to have been there was a glow, golden like that of the mushrooms on the wall. The woman’s glow grew stronger, then dimmed. It was like watching a firefly in the summer night sky.

Next to Noemí the wall had started to quiver, beating to the same rhythm as the golden woman. Beneath her the floorboards pulsed too; a heart, alive and knowing. The golden filaments that had emerged together with the mushrooms covered the wall like a netting and continued to grow. She noticed, then, that the woman’s dress was not made of lace, but was instead woven with the same filaments.

The woman raised a gloved hand and pointed at Noemí, and she opened her mouth, but having no mouth since her face was a golden blur, no words came out.

Noemí had not felt scared. Not until now. But this, the woman attempting to speak, it made her indescribably afraid. A fear that traveled down her spine, to the soles of her feet, forcing Noemí to step back and press her hands against her lips.

She had no lips, and when she tried to take another step back she realized that her feet had fused to the ground. The golden woman reached forward, reached toward her, and held Noemí’s face between her hands. The woman made a noise, like the crunching of leaves, like the dripping of water onto a pond, like the buzzing of insects in the pitch-black darkness, and Noemí wished to press her hands against her ears, but she had no hands anymore.

Noemí opened her eyes, drenched in sweat. For a minute she didn’t remember where she was, and then she recalled she had been invited to High Place. She reached for the glass of water she’d left by the bedside and almost knocked it down. She gulped down the whole glass and then turned her head.

The room was in shadows. No light, golden or otherwise, dotted the wall’s surface. Nevertheless, she had an impulse to rise and run her hands against the wall, as if to make sure there was nothing strange lurking behind the wallpaper.

6

Noemí’s best bet for obtaining a car was Francis. She didn’t think Florence would give her the time of day, and Virgil had been absolutely irritated with her when they had spoken the previous day. Noemí remembered what Virgil had said about men doing as she wanted. It bothered her to be thought of poorly. She wanted to be liked. Perhaps this explained the parties, the crystalline laughter, the well-coiffed hair, the rehearsed smile. She thought that men such as her father could be stern and men could be cold like Virgil, but women needed to be liked or they’d be in trouble. A woman who is not liked is a bitch, and a bitch can hardly do anything: all avenues are closed to her.

Well, she definitely did not feel liked in this house, but Francis was friendly enough. She found him near the kitchen, looking more washed out than the previous days, a slim figure of ivory, but his eyes were energetic. He smiled at her. When he did, he wasn’t bad looking. Not quite like his cousin—Virgil was terribly attractive—but then she thought most men would have had a hard time competing with Virgil. No doubt that’s what had hooked Catalina. That pretty face. Maybe the air of mystery he’d had about him too had made Catalina forget about sensible matters.

Genteel poverty , Noemí’s father had said. That’s what that man has to offer .

Apparently also a rambling, old house where you were liable to have bad dreams. God, the city seemed so far away.

“I’d like to ask you for a favor,” she said after they’d exchanged morning pleasantries. As she spoke she linked her arm to his with a fluid, well-practiced motion, and they began walking together. “I want to borrow one of your cars and go into town. I have letters I’d like to post. My father doesn’t really know how I’m doing.”

“You need me to drive you there?”

“I can drive myself there.”

Francis made a face, hesitating. “I don’t know what Virgil would say about that.”

She shrugged. “You don’t have to tell him. What, you don’t think I can drive? I’ll show you my license if you want.”

Francis ran a hand through his fair hair. “It’s not that. The family is very particular about the cars.”

“And I’m very particular about driving on my own. Surely I don’t need a chaperone, and you’d make a terrible chaperone, anyway.”

“How so?”

“Who ever heard of a man playing chaperone? You need an insufferable aunt. I can lend you one of mine for a weekend if you’d like. It’ll cost you a car. Will you help me, please? I’m desperate.”

He chuckled as she steered him outside. He picked up the car keys hanging from a hook in the kitchen. Lizzie, one of the maids, was rolling bread upon a floured table. She did not acknowledge either Noemí or Francis even one bit. The staff at High Place was almost invisible, like in one of Catalina’s fairy tales. Beauty and the Beast , that had been it, had it not? Invisible servants who cooked the meals and laid down the silverware. Ridiculous. Noemí knew all the people who worked in her house by name, and they certainly were not begrudged their chatter. That she even knew the names of the staff at High Place seemed a small miracle, but she’d asked Francis, and Francis had obligingly introduced them: Lizzie, Mary, and Charles, who, like the porcelain locked in the cabinets, had been imported from England many decades ago.