“Something like that.” He lowered his voice. “When she was little, she lived here on the plantation, but when your mom found out who she really was, she sent her and her mother away. I don’t know why they returned and didn’t come to see me.”

I remembered something Elisa had once said, weeks ago.

“Elisa said her grandmother was sick. Maybe that’s why they came.”

“Yes. Maybe.” He patted my back. “Now go play, will you? I need to get some work done.”

“But Papá, you’re going to help me with Mamita, to make all of this stop?”

“I’ll try.”

I walked away, both relieved and disturbed by my conversation with my father. I couldn’t believe Elisa was my sister! In a strange way, I was delighted with the news. I had another sister, one that I liked very much, and one who played with me. She even helped me up there, on that hill, where all those people surrounded me expecting to see the Virgin. But what good was it to have another sister when she was gone and might never come back? On the other hand, it felt good to tell someone the truth about the Virgin situation, but somehow that didn’t stop the fear that crept through me ever since this big lie had begun.

CHAPTER 25 - Puri

CHAPTER 25

Puri

April 1920

I shut my father’s journal, stunned by what I’d just read. It was after midnight, and I’d snuck out of my room and into the study after everyone had gone to bed. What a relief it had been to find that the door was unlocked.

I put away the notebook where my father had confessed that he’d had another child out of wedlock, a daughter named Elisa, whom he’d only met as a young child. She was the daughter of one of the housemaids, a campesina who had seduced him—that was the word he used: “seduced.” Séduit in French.

When his wife, Gloria, had found out he was the father of the maid’s child, she’d demanded that the woman leave. “It’s me or her,” she’d told him. At first, he’d denied everything, saying people loved to gossip around here and she shouldn’t listen to that nonsense. He’d laughed the whole thing off. But Gloria didn’t speak to him in four weeks, and that drove him crazy, he wrote, so he’d acquiesced to her demands.

My father gave the maid a big sum of money and she left. Once in a while, he would receive letters, reports if you will, about Elisa’s well-being. What she was like, what was she doing. But these letters were sporadic, he said, because the maid didn’t know how to read and write and had to rely on others to write the letters for her. And then one day, the letters stopped coming.