The afternoon had grown late, but turquoise-trimmed windows and painted gate still shone in bright sunlight, and rounded adobe walls encircled the house in smooth, pale ivory. Deliberately, I put everything else from my mind and thought of painting, of color. Ivory wasn’t right. Flesh? No, that was too pinky. Pale apricot, perhaps? If I painted any of this I would try earth colors—red and yellow ochers and Venetian red. Perhaps a touch of viridian green for the shadows. Eleanor’s voice brought me back from the thought of painting, made me stiffen for the next test.
“Has our adobe put you into a trance? Come along and I’ll take you to Aunt Clarita.”
We went in at the front, by way of the turquoise gate. The house seemed low and not particularly impressive—small to house a family—but that was its deception. I was to learn later that it had grown by addition to addition over the years, so that it ambled into many rooms and passageways, gaining its own individuality and character, as well as a sense of secrecy—of concealment behind closed doors and outer walls.
Eleanor led me across a narrow yard, through a carved wooden door and into the Cordova living room. I had come home to my beginnings, and I had no feeling now that there would be welcome for me here. Instead, adobe walls seemed to close me in tightly, shutting out sunlight, enveloping me in a cool gloom, holding me prisoner.
I tried to shake off such fantasy as I stood looking about the room. Nothing imprisoned me. I was quite free to walk away any time I wished. It was foolish to feel a faint prickling up my spine—as though there were something in this house for me to fear. Something hidden deep in old memory.
IV
The room was long and cool, with white painted walls and the contrast of dark wood. Overhead, the bare pine beams that supported the flat roof, and which I would learn to call “vigas,” were dark brown stripes against the white ceiling, each ending in a wooden corbel where it met the wall. Navajo rugs, black, crimson, and gray in their striking patterns, were scattered across a polished red brick floor. The corner fireplace was adobe, rounded and smooth like the outdoor walls, with a crude, narrow mantel. Beside it along one wall stretched a built-in banco, a typical fireplace bench, piled with cushions of henna and pine green. Beside the chimney hung a long strand of red chili pods, drying and decorative, and within the firebricks of the hearth white piñon logs were piled, waiting to be lighted. Two dark leather chairs had been drawn up before the fireplace, with Indian rugs tossed over their seats and backs. All the furniture had a dark, Spanish look, with considerable use of leather and deep carving. From the center of the ceiling hung an ancient wrought-iron chandelier on a chain, casting a soft light in the cool, dim room.
All around on shelves and small tables were skillful wood carvings of desert animals. Probably they had been created by Juan Cordova, but they were not like my amusing little road runner. Each seemed to be performing some cruelty, however natural to the species. A horned toad had a half-eaten winged creature in its mouth. The tarantula looked fearfully alive. I turned my attention quickly to a painting of the Sangre de Cristos that hung upon one wall, the high snow peaks shining in the sun, and a girdle of evergreens climbing the slopes below. Here there was no threat of death by a predator.
My impression was of a room wholly southwestern in character, yet I recognized nothing about it except for some vague haunting of disquiet which existed in me. I tried to tell myself that I had come home. Very soon I would meet my mother’s sister, my mother’s father. Eleanor and Gavin did not matter. I waited not only for some greeting, but for a recognition within me that did not come. There was no easing of that barely perceptible pulse of anxiety that seemed to beat at the back of my mind, carrying in it something close to fear. There was some memory here, after all, but I did not know with my mind what it was my senses remembered.
Eleanor said, “She’ll have heard us. She’ll be here soon.”
Doorways with carved wooden arches led off from this central room, and in one corner were steps that mounted to a little balcony at half-level, with a closed, recessed door beyond it. As I glanced toward the door it opened. A woman came out on the balcony and I saw Clarita Cordova for the first time.
She was tall and very thin, not having turned to plumpness with the years, as many Spanish women do. She was dressed almost wholly in black, even to her stockings and black buckled shoes. Only at her throat fine ivory lace in a modern ruff offered relief and threw reflected light into her narrow face. Her hair was as black as mine, and she wore it pulled severely down from a center part and wound low at the base of her neck. From her ears hung an unexpected touch of color in dangling turquoise and silver that danced whenever she moved. She looked wholly Spanish. If my grandmother Katy’s blood had come down to her, it did not show outwardly.
It was not her appearance, however, which made the most impression on me, but the manner in which she stood on her small balcony and stared at me with narrowed eyes, as though she weighed and judged me—for whatever reason I could not tell. I was reminded of the manner in which Sylvia Stewart had stared at the airport, measuring me. All of them questioned me silently, resented my presence, and held secret their thoughts about me. I tipped my chin, staring back, resisting the strange sense of some mental pressure this woman put upon me. I would not be downed by these Cordovas. It was my grandfather who wanted me here. And I wasn’t Spanish—I was from New England. Perhaps that was one of the things I would discover about myself.
Almost gleefully, Eleanor let the moment grow long before she spoke. “Aunt Clarita, this is Amanda. This is your sister Doro’s daughter.” There was something overly dramatic in her tone, as though she meant to torment the older woman in some way with my presence.
Clarita gave me a slight nod of recognition and then looked at Eleanor. It was a strange look—both affectionate and despairing, as she spoke to her in Spanish. Eleanor shrugged her indifference and answered in English.
“I chose to go away. I’d had enough of all of you. That’s all there is to it.”
Clarita came down the steps into the room. “We will talk later,” she said to Eleanor, and her attention turned again upon me. Once more I felt that sense of pressure, a sense that something I did not understand was required of me. “So you are Doroteo’s daughter?” She held out her hand to me, though the gesture did not seem wholly welcoming.
“And you are my mother’s sister,” I said, taking her hand. It was thin, with jewels on the fingers, and it released mine at once.
A pretty young Spanish-American girl came into the room and Clarita spoke to her.
“Rosa, you will take Miss Austin to her room, please. Your luggage is there waiting for you, Amanda.”
The girl smiled at me with a flash of white teeth and stood waiting.
“You are tired, Amanda?” Clarita said. “You would like coffee—something to eat?”
“No, thank you. Just to wash and rest for a little while. My grandfather—how is he?”
Clarita’s dark eyes were large and placed deeply beneath the bony structure of her brows. When her heavy lids closed over them, the sense of pressure upon me seemed to lighten.
“He is not well today. Eleanor has disturbed him. It is best if you do not see him at once.”
I was no longer impatient to see him, but all too willing to postpone the meeting until I felt rested and stronger. The experience of meeting Clarita had further dampened any eagerness I might have felt. My father had been right Nothing about this house or family reassured me. There was something ominous in the very air—some warning that was part of the walls and dark vigas, of those omnivorous carved creatures my grandfather had made.
“Go with Rosa then,” Clarita said, gesturing toward the maid. “There is time” to rest before dinner. We have given you our one upstairs room. It belonged to Doroteo when she was young. Eleanor, I wish to speak with you.”
I went with Rosa through an arched doorway into another room that seemed an extension of the living room, except that a passageway toward t
he rear of the house branched off from it, evidently leading to bedrooms, and at one corner a flight of narrow stairs rose toward an open doorway above. Rosa climbed the stairs, and I followed.
Here was welcome contrast to the dark room downstairs. This was a high place of windows—windows on three sides, set deep into thick adobe walls. A bright room with white walls, overhead vigas, and a splash of color where a Navajo blanket hung against the white. Over the small, rather narrow bed was a framed painting of mesa country—rather good. I liked the shadows across the sunny land, the chiaroscuro of light and dark. Had that picture been here when my mother was a girl? I thought not—its execution was too modern. The very brush strokes belonged to today.
Yet this was my mother’s room. It had known her as I did not. The views from the windows were those she had seen. I moved from one window to the next, looking out, and a whisper of familiarity went through me again. Perhaps long ago someone had held me up to those windows and I had delighted even then in the beauty they framed. The Sangre de Cristos with snow on their crests were visible from one side, the more distant Jemez Mountains which I’d approached with Gavin that afternoon were on the other. A third window looked out upon the surprise of a large patio behind the house, and gave onto a vista down the hillside into an arroyo. Something quivered in me, like the kindling of old fear. What was it everyone expected me to remember?
Rosa motioned to where my bags and painting gear stood near a wall. “All is ready for you. This is best room. It is better than downstairs.” Her smile wavered and she gave an odd little shiver.
“I’m sure it is,” I said. “Thank you.”
Perhaps I understood what she meant. Up here I was above those outer walls that sealed in the Cordovas. Up here I was free—except when I looked out toward the arroyo. That was when something stirred that led to horror. I didn’t want to recapture that feeling, whatever it was, and I turned quickly away.
Rosa went out of the room, leaving uneasiness behind her. I tried to shake it off. I mustn’t give in to some absurd and unhealthy haunting.
The bathroom was in a passageway near the foot of the stairs, and when I had taken a few things from a bag, I went down to freshen up. From the door to the living room I could hear the murmur of voices, speaking in Spanish again, and I suspected that Eleanor was being reproached for her escapade. I could imagine how casually she would dismiss any lecturing from Clarita. Yet her aunt, in spite of her severity, had seemed to show an affection for my cousin.
The bathroom had been remodeled and it sparkled with decorative Mexican tiles. There was a wide mirror over the wash basin and I looked into it as I brushed my hair and recoiled the knot at the back of my head. Cool water freshened and rested me a little, and I felt better with a touch of lipstick to make me look courageous. Now I would lie down on the bed that had been my mother’s, and see if I could renew myself before the ordeal of dinner. But I was not to do that right away.
When I climbed back up the flight of stairs to my room and went through the door I had left open, it was to find Eleanor standing in the center of the room, obviously waiting for me. She had changed from wrinkled jeans and pullover to violet linen that matched the color of her eyes. Her windblown bangs had been fluffed, and her hair had been brushed to a smooth sheen and hung down her back nearly to her waist, longer than mine. I had no wish to see her, but here she was, and I was aware that she appraised me, just as I did her.
“You’re all Anglo, aren’t you?” she said. “In spite of all that black hair. Juan won’t like it.”
“What difference does it make? My mother was his daughter.”
“Just as my father was his son. But I’m the one who is all Spanish in temperament, in spite of the fact that I’m fair. Juan knows that Spain is in my blood and he’s proud of that.”
I found it hard to carry on any sort of conversation with her. “Does he permit you to call him by his first name?”
“Permit? What is that? Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. Oh, don’t think I call him that to his face. Not the hidalgo. We all have to play to his delusion.”
I wished she would go away. I had no desire to discuss our grandfather with Eleanor Brand. But I might as well find out all I could if she wanted to talk.
“What delusion is that?”
She shrugged lightly. “That he comes down straight from the conquistadores—a son of old Spain. He forgets the children of Montezuma with whom the conquistadores mated. Don’t expect to find this a typical Spanish-American family, Amanda. Chicano is not a word that is used in this house.”
“And does Clarita share this—delusion, as you call it?”
“She’s Spanish to her fingertips. You’d never guess that Katy was her mother. But it doesn’t get her anywhere with Juan. He thinks she’s a poor thing for a Cordova.”
I hadn’t thought her a poor thing. I’d sensed a good deal of Spanish pride in the woman, as well as some dark force that I didn’t understand.
“Why did you come to my room?” I asked Eleanor.
She moved about gracefully in her violet frock, glancing at the picture over the bed, looking out the window toward the arroyo. When she turned back to me, I thought for a moment she meant to say something pertinent, but she only shrugged again.
“Go away, Amanda. Don’t stay here. No one wants you. Not even Juan. He’ll only use you if you stay. He’ll play with you—the way those carved monsters downstairs play with their victims. He’s carnivorous, really.”
“Aren’t you being melodramatic?” I said.
Her eyes narrowed a little as she looked at me and her mouth had a tight, drawn set that had a hint of cruelty. I wondered if that was a trait of Juan’s too, revealed in those carvings.
“We’re a melodramatic family,” she told me. “We are always at stage center. Go away before we hurt you.”
“Whether I stay for a while or not is between Juan Cordova and me,” I told her. “It’s being made perfectly clear by everyone else that I’m not wanted here. But it’s my grandfather who asked me to come. And he’s the one I want to see.”
“You may harm yourself by staying.”
“Harm myself? How?”
“You’d better remember all that wild Spanish blood that flows in the veins of the Cordovas. It’s better if you don’t find it being used against you. It will do you no good.”
“But I have some of that Spanish blood. It surfaces at times.”
She looked at me as though I had said something significant. “Then you do have it too? The blood of our legendary dwarf?”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded.
But she had finished with her purpose in coming here. With a flick of her fingers she turned away and went out of the room, moving as gracefully as a dancer.
Until she had gone lightly down the stairs, I stood quite still, looking after her. Then I went to close the door. There was no bolt or key, or I would have locked it. When it was shut, I flung myself upon the bed, longing for rest and quiet and a stilling of the throb that had begun in my head.
Dwarf—there was that frightening word again. But I didn’t know what it meant, and I must not think of it now. I closed my eyes and tried to drift into nothingness. I didn’t want to think about the lack of welcome for me in this house. And I didn’t think of it. With my eyes closed I saw—unexpectedly—Gavin Brand’s face, with its marked cheekbones and straight mouth, his fine head crowned with thick, fair hair that grew to a point at the back of his neck. And then I remembered that same face a moment later when he had turned cold and remote and ready to dismiss me as someone he did not care to know.
But I didn’t want to think about Gavin either. I didn’t want to think of anything. I could only wait and see how events developed. I could only wait for the meeting with my grandfather. It was he who had sent for me, he who wanted me here. I must have faith in that fact. None of the others mattered. I had already given up my fantasy of a close, warm relationship with my family. I couldn’t im
agine any genuine warmth between me and Clarita. Nor with Eleanor. Of them all, I really liked Sylvia Stewart best. But she too had warned me away, and apparently her husband was engaged in a writing enterprise that was stirring up the Cordovas, and which concerned me because it concerned my mother. I was being plunged into some strange maelstrom that seemed to have surfaced at my coming. My mother was involved, and something hung over this house which had not died with her death. Juan Cordova must tell me what it was.
My thoughts stopped surging at last, and I fell wearily asleep. When I awakened, Rosa was tapping at my door to tell me that dinner would be served shortly. Daylight had faded and the lights of what must be Los Alamos twinkled against distant mountains. The breeze that came in the windows was cool.
I rolled off my bed, found a light switch and went to look in the dressing table mirror. It was an old mirror, its silvering marred, and I knew my mother must once have looked at herself in this glass. Strange that a mirror and the spaces of a room which had known a human body intimately could bear no trace of what was gone. There was a yearning in me to reach out to the woman who had borne me and find her again in this house where she had grown up. She would not have set herself against me or tried to send me away. But I could only find her through those who remembered her. That was my mission now. To discover her, to penetrate the mysteries, the shadows, and find my mother, whatever she had been. Only then would the odd feeling of terror subside, and I’d be free to go home when I pleased.
I unpacked a few things hurriedly and hung them up. The wrinkles weren’t too bad. I put on a cowrie shell print with a coral belt and was ready to go downstairs.
The big dining room was at the far end of the house from the living room, on a horizontal plane with the street, and kitchen and pantries opened off it. I followed the sound of voices into a room that had the usual dark vigas overhead. A long, linen-covered refectory table was set with heavy silver and fine crystal, and the Spanish chairs had dark leather seats and tall backs, ornate with carving. Against the white walls hung several good paintings. I recognized one of John Marin’s floating landscapes, and two others belonged certainly to the private world of Georgia O’Keeffe—sand and bones which suited this country where she had made her home, not far from Santa Fe.
The Turquoise Mask Page 5