The Crying of Saints

The house had been dying longer than any of the sisters had been alive. It stood in the highlands above Popayán where the clouds came down to graze in the courtyard like slow white cattle, and the walls sweated a mineral damp that tasted, if you pressed your tongue to the plaster, of iron and guava leaves. The roof tiles had the color and texture of old blood. The foundation stones, brought up from the Cauca River two hundred years before by enslaved men whose names had been replaced with saints’ names, shifted a quarter-inch each decade toward the east, so that doorframes hung crooked and windows could only be closed by force, and then only on Tuesdays, for reasons nobody remembered but everyone obeyed.

Fernanda was the eldest. Soledad was the middle sister. Inmaculada was the youngest, and the only one who could hear the house breathing.

Their grandmother, Perpetua Esperanza Llorente de Caicedo, had died seventeen years before the night that changed everything, though she continued to appear in the kitchen on mornings when the barometric pressure dropped below a certain point that could not be measured with any instrument manufactured after 1953. She wore the same housecoat she had worn in the last decade of her life — faded cotton printed with small blue birds — and she smelled of wood smoke and the particular sweetness of piloncillo dissolved in black coffee. She never spoke during these visits. She merely sat at the table and peeled oranges with her thumbs, leaving the spiraling rinds in a pattern that, if you studied them long enough, resembled a map of the property as it had existed before the river changed course in 1941.

It was Inmaculada who found the notebook.

She found it in a wall. Not behind the wall — in it, pressed between the adobe and the plaster like a letter slipped inside an envelope. She had been scraping mold from the corridor outside the room where no one slept, the room that smelled of wet chalk and oleander, and her knife broke through into a hollow the size of a fist. Inside: a notebook bound in goatskin, the pages stiff with age, the ink the rust-brown of old blood.

The notebook was written in Perpetua’s hand — that cramped, furious script that leaned so hard to the right it seemed to be running from itself. It described, in meticulous detail, a ritual for bringing children into the world when the body would not cooperate. The instructions were specific. You needed midnight rain — not the rain that fell at 11:47 or 12:03 but rain that began at the precise moment the church bells struck twelve, and in Popayán in those years the bells still struck, pulled by a sacristan named Epifanio who had no sense of time and operated entirely by the pressure in his knees. You needed three saints: not statues, not paintings, but saints. The notebook did not explain the difference. You needed the crying of those saints, which would come — the notebook promised — if the rain was right and if the woman who wanted the child stood barefoot in the courtyard mud and recited a prayer that was not a prayer but a list of every name the family had ever carried, living and dead, all the way back to the first Llorente who had stepped off a ship in Cartagena with nothing but a compass that pointed south.

Fernanda had been trying to conceive for six years. Her husband, Aurelio, was a patient man who sold typewriter ribbons in a city that was quickly forgetting how to type, and his patience extended to this matter as he extended it to all things — with a stillness that could be mistaken for indifference but was in fact a form of grief so compressed it had become structural, load-bearing, like the beams in the ceiling of the old house. Fernanda had visited doctors in Popayán and Cali and once in Bogotá, a specialist whose office smelled of formaldehyde and whose diplomas were framed in wood so dark it looked burned. Each doctor said something different. Each prescribed a different regimen. None of it worked.

When Inmaculada brought her the notebook, Fernanda read it once, closed it, and put it in the kitchen drawer beneath the wax paper and the rubber bands.

She read it again that night.

She read it a third time by candlelight while the rain that was not yet midnight rain tapped at the windows with the patience of something that had been waiting a long time.

Soledad, who believed in nothing except the specific gravity of bread dough and the unreliability of men, said the notebook was nonsense. She said this while grinding corn on the stone metate that had belonged to their mother and their mother’s mother and a woman before that whose name had been worn smooth by use until no one could say it. She said it with the authority of a woman who had already raised and buried a son — Tomasito, dead at three months of a fever that came on a Thursday and left on a Saturday, taking him with it — and who did not believe that the universe owed her anything, least of all an explanation.

But Fernanda stood in the courtyard the next night the rain came at midnight.

She stood barefoot. The mud was cold and red and worked its way between her toes like fingers. The rain was warm. She could feel each drop separately — not as water but as a series of small, precise impacts, each one carrying a slightly different temperature, as though the sky were crying with several voices at once. She opened the notebook and began to recite the names. She started with Perpetua Esperanza and worked backward: Dolores, Consolación, Refugio, Angustias, names that were prayers and sentences both, names that tasted of ash and altar candles, names that had been given to women who were expected to become the meaning of the word they carried. She reached the name of the first Llorente — Sebastián — and as she said it, the plaster saints on the courtyard wall began to weep.

Not metaphorically. Not in the way that statues in churches sometimes developed condensation that credulous parishioners mistook for tears. The saints wept. Their tears were warm and tasted of salt and something else — Fernanda would later say it was like licking a copper coin, like pressing your lips to the skin of someone who has been running — and they fell in heavy drops that made small craters in the courtyard mud, and each crater held, for an instant, a tiny reflection of the moon.

Inmaculada, watching from the corridor, saw it and was not surprised. She had always known the house could do things.

Soledad, who had come to the doorway to call Fernanda inside before she caught her death, saw it and crossed herself, which she had not done since Tomasito’s funeral, and then uncrossed herself, because she did not want to give God the satisfaction.

The child came nine months later with such ease that the midwife, a woman named Amparito who had delivered every baby in the barrio for thirty years, said she had never seen a birth so quiet. The baby did not cry. It opened its eyes — dark, enormous, with the depthless quality of water seen from a great height — and looked at each woman in the room with an expression that was not curiosity but recognition.

They named him Sebastián, after the first.

He did not age.

This was not immediately apparent. For the first year, he grew as babies grow — learning to grasp, to roll, to pull himself upright against the leg of the kitchen table. But the growth stopped. At fourteen months he was the size and weight of a fourteen-month-old child, and at twenty-four months he was still the size and weight of a fourteen-month-old child, and at thirty-six months, when the doctor in Popayán examined him and found nothing wrong — all his organs functioning, his reflexes sharp, his eyes tracking — he was still fourteen months, preserved in that moment like a photograph of himself.

By then, Soledad had also stood in the rain.

She had resisted for a year and four months. She had watched Sebastián fail to grow with the same compressed expression she wore when kneading bread, her jaw set, her eyes fixed on a point slightly to the left of whatever she was looking at, as though the truth were something that could only be seen peripherally. But on a night in October when the rain came precisely at midnight — the sacristan Epifanio, whose knees had worsened, pulled the bells late for the only time in his life, and the bells were right — Soledad went out to the courtyard in her nightgown and bare feet and recited the names, all of them, from Perpetua back to Sebastián, and this time she added Tomasito, which was not in the notebook but which she had earned the right to say.

The saints cried. The mud opened its small craters. The moon repeated itself in miniature.

Her daughter arrived eight months later — early, impatient, already screaming, a child so alive that the furniture vibrated when she entered a room. They named her Dolores, after the great-great-grandmother who had survived three civil wars and a husband who gambled away the coffee plantation, and whose portrait in the hallway showed a woman with the same heavy-lidded stare the baby wore in her first hours of life. Dolores, like Sebastián before her, stopped aging — but at a different point. She froze at the age of two, in the full fury of the word no, and she remained there, a perpetual refusal, a child stuck in the moment of first rebellion.

Dolores spoke in tongues.

Not the glossolalia of Pentecostal churches, not the ecstatic babble of the Holy Spirit’s alleged descent. She spoke in Spanish from the previous century — the formal, rotunda Spanish of land grants and viceregal decrees — and occasionally in a language that Inmaculada, who had studied briefly at the Universidad del Cauca before the money ran out, identified as Quechua, or something near it. She spoke of things that had not happened yet. She described a flood that would come in March — and in March the Cauca rose and swallowed the lower road. She described a woman in a yellow dress who would knock on the door — and a census taker arrived in a yellow dress so bright it left an afterimage on the retina, a yellow that persisted for hours in the corners of the room like a scent.

Sebastián also spoke, though less. His utterances were rare and delivered in a voice too deep for his body, a man’s voice emerging from a fourteen-month-old throat. He spoke only of the past. He described the construction of the house — the stones dragged up from the river, the blood mixed into the mortar, the name of the first woman who had died inside its walls. He described a fire in 1847 that had consumed the east wing and the books inside it. He described the river before it changed course, when it ran silver through the valley and the fish were so plentiful you could hear them in the current, a sound like small bells or like a woman whispering in a room you had just left.

Inmaculada was the last to go to the rain.

She waited three years. She waited because she was afraid, and she waited because she was the only one who understood what the house was doing, and she waited because she loved a woman named Pilar who lived in Cali and who came to visit on holidays and who smelled of anise and motor oil and whose laugh was the sound of something breaking in a way that made you glad it was broken. Pilar could not give her a child, and Inmaculada did not want one. But the house did.

The house wanted.

It had begun to change. Not the slow settling of centuries, not the predictable entropy of adobe and lime, but something else. Rooms appeared. A narrow corridor behind the kitchen opened one morning onto a chamber that had never existed — a room with blue tiles and a window that looked out onto a garden Inmaculada did not recognize, a garden where the roses bloomed backward, from red to bud to green stem to bare thorn, as though time in that room were a sentence being unwritten. Fernanda walked into the corridor one evening and emerged in the courtyard, though the corridor did not connect to the courtyard, had never connected to the courtyard, and the distance she had walked was, she said, no more than thirty steps, but the thirty steps had taken her past rooms she did not remember, rooms that smelled of woodsmoke and old paper and something sweet and animal, like the breath of a child just waking from sleep.

The house was growing. It grew the way a family grows — by accumulation, by the slow accretion of rooms that were also memories, corridors that were also years. The children did not age but the house aged for them, adding rooms for each year they failed to occupy, so that by the time Dolores had been two for seven years the east wing had acquired a library, a sewing room, a nursery with a crib that rocked itself in the absence of wind, and a long gallery lined with portraits of people no one in the family recognized but who bore, in the set of their jaws and the darkness of their eyes, an undeniable resemblance.

The garden bloomed backward. The bougainvillea shed its color first, the purple draining from the petals like water from a basin, and then the petals themselves retreated into the bracts, and the bracts withdrew into the stems, so that by evening the garden was a lattice of gray-green wood that looked, Soledad said, like the skeleton of something that had once been beautiful. By morning it had bloomed again, the cycle reversed, the purple returning with such intensity that it left traces on your fingertips if you touched the walls nearby.

The rain came more often. Not the midnight rain of the ritual — that still arrived on its own schedule, unpredictable, governed by the sacristan’s knees — but a different rain, a rain that fell only in the courtyard, a rain that tasted of copper and salt, a rain that was, Inmaculada finally admitted, the tears of the saints, falling continuously now, day and night, a soft, warm, mineral weeping that kept the mud perpetually soft and left small craters that reflected not the moon but other things — faces, hands, the outlines of rooms that did not yet exist.

Inmaculada stood in the courtyard on a night in November. She did not recite the names. She stood in the warm rain and said nothing, and the saints wept harder, and the mud opened beneath her feet, and she felt something shift inside her that was not a child but the possibility of one, a space being made, a room being added.

Her son arrived seven months later. They named him Epifanio, after the sacristan, who had died that winter with his hands still curved around invisible bell ropes, his knees swollen to the size of grapefruits, his face wearing an expression of perfect punctuality. The boy Epifanio was born old. Not aged — old. He had the face of an infant and the eyes of a man who has seen something he cannot describe and has stopped trying. He did not speak in past or future. He spoke in a tense that did not exist in Spanish, a tense that Inmaculada spent years trying to conjugate, a tense that described events that were happening and had happened and would happen simultaneously, as though time were not a line or even a circle but a room, a room you could stand in and see all the walls at once.

The years passed. Or they did not pass. It became difficult to tell. The sisters aged — Fernanda’s hair went white at the temples, Soledad’s hands grew thick with arthritis, Inmaculada’s eyes needed glasses and then stronger glasses and then a magnifying glass she wore on a chain around her neck — but the children remained fixed. Sebastián at fourteen months. Dolores at two. Epifanio at the ageless age of a child who had never been young.

The house now contained forty-seven rooms, though the number changed depending on who was counting and what time of day the count was made. Some rooms could only be entered by children. Some could only be entered by women whose names ended in vowels. One room, at the end of a corridor that Fernanda swore had not existed that morning, contained nothing but a chair facing a window that looked out onto the courtyard as it had appeared in 1847, the year of the fire, and if you sat in the chair long enough — Soledad once sat for six hours, her bread dough rising untended in the kitchen — you could hear the fire, smell the smoke, feel the heat on your face and arms, and see the books burning, their pages curling like fists.

Aurelio had left. He left on a Tuesday — the day doors could be closed — carrying his sample case of typewriter ribbons and wearing a hat that had belonged to his father. He said he would come back. He did not come back. Fernanda accepted this with the same lack of surprise she had shown when the saints first wept. Men left. This was what men did. They carried their fathers’ hats into the world and did not return. The house sealed behind him. His room — the room where he had slept beside Fernanda for eleven years, the room that still smelled of his hair oil and the particular dusty sweetness of typewriter ribbon ink — became unreachable. The door was there, the handle turned, but the room behind it was now a different room, a room with yellow walls and a cradle in the corner and a window that faced a direction that did not exist on any compass.

Pilar still came on holidays. She brought anise candies and motor oil for the generator and her laugh that broke things in the right way, and she held Inmaculada in the kitchen while the midnight rain fell in the courtyard and the saints wept their warm copper tears. Pilar never saw the impossible rooms. She walked through the house and it was a house — old, damp, too large for three women and three children who did not grow, but a house. Inmaculada understood this. The house showed itself only to those it had claimed.

Dolores, at the age of two (which she had been now for eleven years), said something that made Inmaculada put down her magnifying glass and sit very still. She said it in the archaic Spanish of the viceroyalty, in a voice that was not the voice of a child but the voice of a woman who had lived so long she had begun to sound like a building settling.

She said: The house is the spell and the spell is the house. You cannot break one without losing the other. And you cannot keep both without becoming the house yourself.

Inmaculada looked at the walls. The plaster was wet. It was always wet now. She touched it and it gave slightly, like skin, like the belly of a woman in the seventh month. The wall was warm. The wall smelled of piloncillo and wood smoke and the particular mineral sweetness of midnight rain.

She understood then what Perpetua had known when she hid the notebook in the wall. Not behind the wall. In it. The notebook had not been hidden. It had been planted.

On the last night — though whether it was truly the last is a matter of which sister you ask and in what tense — the three women sat in the kitchen while the rain fell in the courtyard. The children were elsewhere. The children were always elsewhere now, in rooms that appeared and disappeared according to a logic that was not logic but something older, something that preceded reason the way the river had preceded the house and the house had preceded the family and the family had preceded the names.

Fernanda said they should leave. She said it calmly, as though she were suggesting they go to market.

Soledad said leaving would kill the children. The children were the house. The house was the children. You could not separate what had been joined by rain and names and the tears of saints.

Inmaculada said nothing. She was listening to the house breathe. She had been listening for twenty-three years and the breathing had changed. It was faster now, shallower, the breath of a woman in labor, and Inmaculada felt a contraction move through the walls, a tightening that rattled the cups on the shelf and sent a crack running through the kitchen floor, a crack that smelled of river mud and old stone and the ghosts of fish.

The courtyard saints wept. Their tears pooled on the kitchen table in the shape of an orange rind, a spiral, a map of the property as it had existed before the river changed course, before the house was built, before the first Llorente stepped off a ship with a compass that pointed south. The tears tasted of copper and salt and something Inmaculada had never tasted before, something that was not a flavor but a direction, a coordinate, a place in time where all the names converged.

Soledad picked up her metate. Fernanda closed the notebook. Inmaculada took off her magnifying glass and set it on the table, where it lay among the saint-tears like a small, round, necessary eye.

They did not break the spell.

They did not surrender to it.

They did what the women in that house had always done, what Perpetua had done and Dolores before her and Consolación before her and Refugio and Angustias and every woman whose name was a prayer and a sentence both. They got up. They went to the rooms that needed them. They opened windows that could only be opened on Tuesdays, and it was, it had always been, it would always be Tuesday. The rain fell. The saints cried. Somewhere in the house, in a room that had not existed yesterday and would not exist tomorrow, a child who would never age spoke in a tense that had no name, describing a night exactly like this one — three women, a kitchen, a decision that was not a decision but a continuation, a refusal to choose between the possible and the impossible — and the house, listening, added another room.