The Hummingbird's Daughter_ A Novel - Luis Alberto Urrea [31]
“I did nothing,” Teresita replied.
Huila put down her cuasia and put her fists on her aching hips for a moment.
“Give me your hands,” she said.
Teresita put out her hands, palm down. Huila placed her palms against Teresita’s.
“Make them hot,” Huila said.
Teresita didn’t even think about it. She told her palms to warm, and they heated immediately upon Huila’s outstretched hands.
“Mira, nomás,” Huila said.
She pulled up a chair and sat, looking up at Teresita. She fished a cigar stub out of her apron and lit it with a redheaded kitchen match.
“My hands are always hot,” Teresita said.
“I see.”
Huila smiled. One never knew where the gift would appear. God, too, has His jests.
Loreto came into the kitchen in a long white gown with a lacy frill at her chest, her voluminous hair wild around her head in a nimbus, her scents coming upon Teresita like a fog from the coast: oranges, lilacs, ginger. Teresita had never seen teeth that white.
Huila stood with her head bowed and said, “Doña.”
Although she was cruel to Tomás, she deferred to Loreto with a kind of love no man could understand. Loreto knew the rules imposed on the woman with no medicine by the light of the day, the endless despair of suspecting her man was also the man of a hundred more, none of them as kind or lovely or strict or clean, and she knew the agonies of the birthing bed too well.
“I heard voices,” Loreto said, pulling her hair back. “I thought for a moment that a ghost was in the house, or a bandit.”
Teresita smiled at this apparition.
“Hello,” said Loreto.
“Do you clean your teeth?” Teresita asked.
Loreto didn’t know what to say to that, so she simply said, “Yes.”
“We had a small problem,” Huila said.
Loreto bent to Teresita’s lacerated thighs.
“Ay Dios,” she said. “Who did this?”
“My aunt,” Teresita said.
“And why on earth would she do this?”
“I got caught in your house this morning,” Teresita said.
Huila remained quiet. She wished that the child would keep her mouth shut. But God arranged the scene and had His plans for the outcome. Huila was still learning to allow fate to flow unimpeded.
Loreto sat in Huila’s chair.
“I suppose that was very naughty of you,” she said. “Coming inside uninvited.”
“She was looking for me,” Huila said.
Loreto raised her eyebrows and leaned toward Teresita.
“Huila,” she said, “is very, very naughty! No wonder you got in trouble.”
Teresita giggled. Loreto smiled and stared up into those curious eyes. She looked at the sleepy eyelids, the slightly drooping left eye. They looked so familiar. And the pointed nose, and those lips, with their slight pout.
She turned to Huila. Her face was eloquent, though her mouth remained shut. Huila flicked some lint from her dress, looked around the kitchen, sighed. When she finally made eye contact with Loreto, she shrugged.
Loreto knew the features of the Urrea face. She was not only wife and lover to Tomás. It was a tradition on the haciendas to keep the bloodline clean, and cousins often married cousins. Wives were chosen like good mares, for bloodline and looks. Don Miguel, the great patriarch, dreamed of siring whole lines of Urreas whose lineage was all Urrea on each side. He dreamed of a baptism certificate that would read: Fulano Urrea Urrea Urrea Urrea! Loreto was cousin as well as wife. She had been looking at those lips all her life.
Terrible questions burned in her, awful doubts and heavy sorrows, and she could not voice them, and she would not think about them.
She rose. She patted Teresita on the head. She was five years older when she rose than when she’d sat down.
“Of course,” she said, “you will stay with us. I will fetch you a nightgown. And then we will all sleep. Let’s sleep late, eat a nice big breakfast, and forget all about this night.”
When she left the kitchen, her smell hung in the air and slowly faded away to nothing.
Teresita could not believe you wore a nice pink dress to bed, and she was startled by the underdrawers. Huila had made her sponge herself off, and had made her pay special attention to her nalgas