No wonder in lazy Uukumil everyone held to the old ways. No wonder, either, that their priest grew more overzealous, intent on preserving morality and the Catholic faith. He eyed every woman in town with suspicion. Each diminutive infraction to decency and virtue was catalogued. Women were meant to bear the brunt of inquiries because they descended from Eve, who had been weak and sinned, eating from the juicy, forbidden apple.
If the priest saw Casiopea he would drag her back to her house, but if he did, what of it? It was not as if the priest would strike her any harder than Martín would, and her stupid cousin had given her no chance to tidy herself.
Casiopea slowly walked to the town square, which was dominated by the church. She must follow Martín’s orders, but she would take her time doing so. She glanced at the businesses bunched under the square’s high arcades. They had a druggist, a haberdasher, a physician. She realized this was more than other towns could claim, and still she couldn’t help but feel dissatisfied. Her father had been from Mérida and had whisked her mother off to the city, where Casiopea was born. She thought she belonged there. Or anywhere else, for that matter. Her hands were hard and ugly from beating the laundry against the stone lavadero, but her mind had the worst of it. She yearned for a sliver of freedom.
Somewhere, far from the bothersome grandfather and impertinent coterie of relatives, there would be sleek automobiles (she wished to drive one), daring pretty dresses (which she’d spotted in newspapers), dances (the faster, the better), and a view of the Pacific sea at night (she knew it courtesy of a stolen postcard). She had cut out photos of all these items and placed them under her pillow, and when she dreamed, she dreamed of night swimming, of dresses with sequins, and of a clear, starlit sky.
Sometimes she pictured a handsome man who might partner with her for those dances, an amorphous creation glued together by her subconscious using the pictures of movie stars that appeared between the print ads for soap and bobby pins, and which she’d also preserved, safe at the bottom of the cookie tin that contained every precious item she owned. Despite this, she did not engage in the gleeful whispering and giggling of her female cousins, who spoke their dreams. She kept her mouth tightly shut; the pictures were in the tin.
Casiopea purchased the items she needed and began circling back home, her steps leaden. She stared at Grandfather’s house, the best house in town, painted yellow, with elaborate wrought-iron grilles at the windows. Grandfather’s home was as pretty as El Principio ever was, he claimed. That had been the famous hacienda nearby, a huge building where dozens and dozens of poor workers had toiled in misery for decades before the revolution freed them and sent the old owners fleeing abroad, though it didn’t improve the workers’ conditions.
A big house, as fancy as one could get, filled with the same valuables a hacendado might have, this was Cirilo Leyva’s house. With his money the old man could have kept his family in Mérida, but Casiopea suspected he longed to return to Uukumil so he could parade his wealth before the people he’d grown up with. It was the opposite journey Casiopea wished to make.
How beautiful this yellow house!
How much she hated it.
Casiopea rubbed away the beads of sweat above her upper lip.
It was so hot Casiopea felt her skull was being baked. She ought to have taken the shawl to protect herself. Yet, despite the heat, she dallied outside the house, sitting under a Seville orange tree. If Casiopea closed her eyes she might smell the scent of salt. The Yucatán peninsula, Uukumil, they were distant, isolated from everything, and yet the scent of salt was always nearby. This she loved, and she might miss in a distant, landlocked city, although she was willing to make the trade.
Finally, knowing she could not wait any longer, Casiopea went into the house, crossed the interior courtyard, and delivered the provisions. She saw her mother in the kitchen, her hair in a tidy bun, chopping garlic and speaking with the servants. Her mother also worked for her keep, as the cook. Grandfather appreciated her culinary abilities, even if she had disappointed him in other respects, mainly her marriage to a swarthy nobody of indigenous extraction. Their marriage produced an equally swarthy daughter, which was deemed even more regrettable. The kitchen, though busy, was a better place to spend the day. Casiopea had helped there, but when she turned thirteen she had hit Martín with a stick after he insulted her father. Since then, they’d had her perform meaner tasks, to teach her humility.
Casiopea stood in a corner and ate a plain bolillo; the crusty bread was a treat when dipped in coffee. Once Grandfather’s meal was ready, Casiopea took it to his room.
Grandfather Cirilo had the largest room in the house. It was crammed with heavy mahogany furniture, the floor decorated with imported tiles, the walls hand-stenciled with motifs of vines and fruits. Her grandfather spent most of the day in a monstrous cast-iron bed, pillows piled high behind him. At the foot of the bed there lay a beautiful black chest, which he never opened. It had a single decoration, an image of a decapitated man in the traditional Mayan style, his hands holding a double-headed serpent that signaled royalty. A common enough motif, k’up kaal, the cutting of the throat. In the walls of old temples, the blood of the decapitated was sometimes shown spurting in the shape of snakes. The image etched on the lid, painted in red, did not depict the blood, only the spine curving and the detached head tumbling down.
When she was younger, Casiopea had asked Grandfather about that singular figure. It struck her as odd since he had no interest in Mayan art. But he told her to mind her own business. She did not have a chance to ask or learn more about the artifact. Grandfather kept the key to the chest on a gold chain around his neck. He took it off to bathe and to go to church, since the priest was strict about forbidding any ornamentation during his services.
Casiopea set her grandfather’s supper by the window and, grunting, he stood up and sat at the table where he had his meals every day. He complained about the salting of the dish, but did not yell. On the evenings when his aches particularly pained him, he could holler for ten whole minutes.
“Do you have the paper?” he asked, as he did every Friday. The two days when the railcar stopped by the town, they brought the morning daily from Mérida.
“Yes,” Casiopea said.
“Start reading.”
She read. At certain intervals her grandfather would wave his hand at her; this was the signal that she should stop reading that story and switch to something else. Casiopea doubted her grandfather cared what she read, she thought he simply enjoyed the company, although he did not say this. When he was fed up with her reading, Grandfather dismissed her.
“I heard you were rude to Martín today,” her mother told her later, as they were getting ready for bed. They shared a room, a potted plant, a macramé plant hanger for said plant, and a cracked painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Her mother, who had been Grandfather’s most darling daughter as a child.