“Who built this mission?” I asked Tío, my voice barely above a whisper so as not to disturb the majestic simplicity of the place.
“The Spaniards,” Tío said. “The descendants of the same people that crossed from Spain into your world.” And finding the door to the church locked, he rang the bell.
I waited for the clear sound of the bell to die in the distance and then spoke again, “I thought Spain was far from here.”
“So it is, Andrea.”
“But then how—”
Just then the door opened, and a man dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt stood in the doorway. The man smiled at Tío; they shook hands and exchanged greetings. After Tío introduced him to me as the director of the mission, he motioned us to come inside.
The church consisted of a single rectangular room. Pictures topped by crosses hung along its whitewashed walls, and in two places, roughly in the middle, frescos painted in green and pink and blue depicted flowers surrounding a religious scene.
Two rows of wooden benches faced the main altar from where the image of Santa Inés watched over us. The brass candelabra, hanging from the wooden beams in the shape of a wheel and full of candles, would have felt at home in my father’s castle.
We left the church and entered the cloister, a gallery of arches built around a square courtyard. A fountain sat in its center. The murmur of the water singing in the stillness of the morning filled the air, while the neatly kept hedges reminded me of the queen’s garden back in my world.
As we walked under the arches, our steps unexpectedly loud on the tiled floor, I noticed that the windows that opened to the cloister were blocked with iron bars. And yet the place didn’t feel like a prison to me, more like a sanctuary, a refuge out of time.
Tío and his friend excused themselves as they had things to discuss and left me alone. And as I sat by myself on one of the benches against the wall, I had the sudden feeling of being watched, the feeling that all the people who had ever lived in the mission were still here in some other dimension, and that if I moved my eyes ever so slightly, I would be able to see them, and if I listened hard enough, I would be able to hear their steps. The steps of the Spaniards who had built this place, the descendants of the people who were also my ancestors. And then the bells tolled, and the spell was broken.
Tío returned and we went inside, into a room plainly furnished with a long wooden table and benches, where we shared lunch with his friend.
Later in the afternoon, we drove away toward the rolling hills, and the mission receded again into the distance, a speck of white lost in the valley.
We reached the mission of Santa María early in the evening. At least that’s what the sign by the side of the road indicated. But this time, instead of buildings to welcome us, only a bare landscape of shrubs and broken earth mounds was visible when the car stopped.
“Here we are,” Tío said, holding open the car door for me.
I stared at him.“We are where? I mean, where is the mission?”
Tío pointed up the hill and nodded. “There. Those walls were once the mission of Santa María.”
I could not believe we had driven all the way here to see . . . nothing. Surely Tío was joking.
But he was not. He just stood there holding my door open. And when he spoke again, his voice was pressing. “Come on, Andrea. We have to set up the tents and start a fire before sunset. It gets cold quickly here. And I want you to see the ruins beforehand.”
We were going to sleep here? Was Tío out of his mind? Not knowing what else to do, I got out of the car and followed him up the hill.
“Why didn’t you tell me this mission was in ruins?” I asked him as I ran to keep up with him.
Tío shrugged. “I thought I did.”
He was not being entirely forthright. Somehow I knew he did not want me to know the mission was in ruins until I had seen it. But why?
9
The Conquest
All that was left of the mission were some broken walls and a solitary arch holding up the sky. There were no stones around the ruins, either. Had later peoples stolen them to build their houses?
“No, Andrea,” Tío told me when I asked him. “There were no stones. The mission was built with adobe bricks. Bricks made out of earth and dried in the sun.”
“But what about the rain . . .”
“It doesn’t rain much here, Andrea. As you can see, there is not much water, either.”
“Why did they build a mission then, if there is no water?” My kingdom being a land of green mountains and running streams, I had trouble imagining a world without water.
“The Spaniards knew how to build aqueducts to bring water down from the mountains,” Tío explained. “This was once a rich valley. They grew crops of olives and corn, peppers and almonds.”
As Tío talked, I heard Don Alfonso’s voice in my mind. The Arabs who overcame King Roderic were said to possess the knowledge of converting a desert into a garden. And nothing would please my brother more than to give water to our desert lands.
I shrugged the memory away. “Is Spain dry,Tío?” I asked, as that would explain their expertise in transporting water from place to place.
Tío nodded. “The southern part is. And remind me when we get back to Davis to find you some books about Spain. You’re supposed to be from there.”
“But not from the south, okay? I don’t know anything about deserts.”
Tío smiled. “All right, then. We’ll say you are from Asturias. I did the research for my dissertation there, searching for remains from the time when your ancestors left Spain.”
“Did you find any?”
Tío was so lost in his own thoughts, I had to repeat my question.
“Find what?”
“Remains from the time of my ancestors.”
“Yes, I did. But no proof of your ancestors crossing to another world. Of course.”
He did not say more and I did not press him. But I knew there was something else he was not telling me. I wondered what he had found there that still gave him such a faraway look after all these years.
“What happened?” I asked Tío later as we sat around the fire. “Why was the mission destroyed?” We had erected the tents already, farther down the hill from where the mission once stood, under the protection of an ugly modern compound my uncle explained held restrooms and showers for summer field courses held there.
Tío sighed. “It is a long story. Do you really want to hear it?”
I nodded, and Tío smiled at me in a sad kind of way. Eyes deep in the fire, he started talking.
“After your ancestors left Spain, the Spaniards wrested their country back from under Arab control. It was a long process that lasted over seven hundred years. And when they were done, well, I guess they were used to the conquest, so they crossed the ocean and came to America to continue.
“First they conquered the Aztec empire south of here, in the country that is now called Mexico. Then they traveled north and west and eventually came to California. The first Spaniards to arrive here were the padres, religious people who didn’t want to conquer, but to convert the natives to their own religion.
“The Native Americans, at least in this particular area, were peaceful. They didn’t fight the foreign people. Some even volunteered to help the Spaniards build the missions and, when they were finished, came to live in them as well.
“But the Native Americans were not happy. They were not used to living in closed spaces. They hated the bells tolling throughout the day, telling them when to rise, when to pray, when to eat, and reminding them of their lost freedom.
“Then things got worse. The Spaniards were defeated by the new elite that had evolved in Mexico, and the new government stopped paying the soldiers garrisoned in the missions. The Native Americans had to feed the soldiers who were supposed to protect them from a danger they couldn’t fathom. So eventually, they rebelled against the soldiers and burned the missions down.”