“But not Santa Inés?”
“They burned Santa Inés, too. They burned the barracks that housed the soldiers. But when the church caught fire, they put down their weapons and helped the padres save it. Then they disappeared into the wild. They never lived in the mission again.”
I stood still, gazing into the flames.
“Why did the Spaniards come in the first place,Tío?”
Tío bent over the fire and grabbed a branch, stirring sparks into the night air. “Some came for gold,” he said, “some for glory. But I think the padres, the men who founded the missions, were not interested in gold or glory. They were “holy fools.” They really believed they were saving their souls by converting the Native Americans to their religion.”
A coyote cried in the distance, and I looked up. But I couldn’t see it. The night was dark; the moon was not to rise until midnight.
I bent closer to Tío. “You think the Spaniards shouldn’t have come, don’t you,Tío?”
Tío looked at me and smiled. “On the contrary. If there had been no missions, I wouldn’t have a job, would I?”
We remained in silence for a while, watching the flames dance in the wind. And then, when the fire died, we went inside our tents. And for the first time ever, I slept in the open, only a thin canvas separating me from the stars.
The next day, Tío wanted to visit another mission. Fearing another disappointing bunch of ruins, I demurred. But La Purísima, Tío reassured me, was fully restored, by which he meant it had been rebuilt after its destruction.
“I promise you’ll like it,” Tío said.
And he was right. La Purísima had been constructed by a stream against a red-sand hillside covered with trees and, like Santa Inés, was unbelievably beautiful in its simplicity.
But Tío had not told me everything. He had failed to mention the fact that the mission was inhabited. And not only by tourists like us, wearing jeans or shorts and bright shirts, but by men in the brown robes of the padres and women wearing white loose shirts and long skirts with handkerchiefs over their heads. I could also see men dressed in peasant clothes, working in the fields or attending to the cattle and sheep grazing in the enclosed pastures behind the whitewashed buildings of the mission.
“They are not for real,” Tío said as he led me to the main door that opened to the cloister where a small crowd had gathered.
“What do you mean they are not for real?”
“I mean they are people pretending to live as if they were at the end of the 1800s, when this mission was first established.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see,” he said. He signed me for a tour. But he excused himself to go speak with the director of the mission.
And so I found myself following a cheerful middle-aged woman, who was split in two by a red scarf around her waist, through different rooms where people in similar attire performed different tasks, such as grinding corn on flat stones for tortillas, making candles and soap, or spinning wool and weaving the yarn into colorful blankets. And all these chores, our guide explained, closely mimicked life as it had been when the Spanish padres had lived there.
Everyone in my group seemed to enjoy the visit, but for reasons I could not understand, I found it unbearably sad, and when the guide led us out of the church, I fell behind. I strolled along the fiery red wall that started to the right of the church until I found a wooden double door that opened into the old mission graveyard.
I walked about the tombs, reading the windswept gravestones, and again and again I found the same year inscribed on them.
“Did they die when the Indians attacked the mission?” I asked Tío when he finally found me.
Tío shook his head. “No. Yesterday I didn’t tell you the whole story. These people didn’t die by the sword. They were killed by one of the diseases the Spaniards brought with them. The Spaniards had become resistant to various illnesses over the years. But the natives, having never been exposed to them, died by the thousands. Millions, if you consider the whole continent.”
Unable to grasp the enormity of what Tío was saying, I turned my eyes to the stone sitting at my feet: 1818–1820, I read. The girl or boy lying here had been only two years old. And for a moment, the red walls I had found soothing before seemed painted in blood. I felt sick.
So this is what would become of my world, I thought, if Tio’s ever learns about it. A graveyard for the dead, a museum for the living.
I looked up. “This is why you brought me here, isn’t it? So that I’d agree to go back to my world.” It wasn’t a question.
But Tío shook his head. “No, Andrea. I brought you here so you would understand why. So you would understand how dangerous it is for your world to be discovered, and so you would never again tread lightly between your world and mine.”
I nodded. “I won’t,Tío. I’ll go back to my world when the moon grows full again and stay there.”
And despite all the beauty of the place, I felt like crying.
By the time we headed back to Davis, my resolution TO return to my world had started to dwindle. Yes, I knew our worlds should never meet, but at the thought of passing another uneventful winter, not to mention the rest of my life, in the company of my mother’s ladies, I felt half-dead already. Surely there had to be a flaw in Tio’s careful reconstruction of the destruction of one way of life by another. To start with, how was he so sure what had happened in the missions these two hundred years past? Tío was old, but not that old. He could not have been there in person.
My uncle laughed at my suggestion. “Of course I wasn’t, Andrea. And no, we can’t ever be one hundred percent sure we got the facts right. But there are ways of getting close to the truth. That’s what archaeology is about: the study of cultures and people long gone.”
“But how? I mean, could you teach me how to learn about the past?”
“And why would you like to learn that?”
“So that I could study the Xarens back in my world.”
Tío smiled. “To study the Xarens? Now that is actually an old dream of mine.”
“Is that a yes,Tío? Will you teach me now, and then, when I’m back in my world, will you ask my parents to let me study the old cities of the Xarens?”
Tío shook his head. “Sorry, Andrea. But I don’t think your parents would approve. As you know, in your world, ladies do not roam the countryside in search of ruins.”
I scowled. “I’m not a lady.”
Tío laughed. “So you say.”
I sulked. But not for long. I knew Tío was interested in studying the Xarens, and as he could not stay in my world for long due to his responsibilities in his own world, it would be in his best interests to allow me to help. He just needed a little convincing. And I knew just how to tempt him.
“You know, Tío, that the king of Suavia has a collection of Xarens’ texts?”
Tío turned to face me, his eyes eagerly bright. “Really?” he said, the car swerving briefly out of its lane and crunching into the shoulder. “How do you know that?”
“Don Alfonso told me. I could ask him to let me see them.”
Tío laughed. “I see. And is it the Xarens or Don Alfonso you want to study?”
I blushed. I blushed even though there was nothing to blush about, as I found the thought of a romance with Don Alfonso nothing short of appalling. I was about to tell Tío this when it occurred to me that if Tío thought my interest in the Xarens was just a way of getting a boyfriend, a prince of my world no less, he might be more inclined to indulge my learning. And besides, if Tío thought I fancied the haughty prince of Suavia, he would never realize I liked John and thus would not think of preventing me from seeing him.