Mexican Gothic

Francis gives Noemí a ride into El Triunfo, where Noemí once again goes to see Marta. Marta fills her head with even more lurid stories about the Doyles. At first the town was happy when the Doyles came in 1885 to reopen an old Spanish mine. It meant jobs and work. That happiness shifted to anger and fear after a mysterious sickness killed many of the miners and the Doyles treated their workers brutally.

Noemí learns that the cemetery at High Place does include graves of Mexican workers, but they are unmarked, as if their deaths were of no note. Marta also tells Noemí the story of Aurelio, a local mine worker who grew tired of the Doyles’ abuse and organized a strike. Like most enemies of the Doyles, Aurelio turned up dead, his face drawn in a death stare that made it look like he’d died of supernatural fright.

Marta also claims the Doyles are an incestuous lot, with cousins marrying first cousins. Ruth, Howard and Alice’s daughter, killed most of her family because she did not want to marry Florence’s brother Michael, the son of her uncle Leland Doyle. Ruth was in love with Benito, a Mexican man and Aurelio’s nephew; Benito tended the plants at High Place. Howard forbid his daughter from marrying a local man, and Benito simply disappeared. Ruth dosed the entire family with a sleeping draught and shot them one by one before her wedding to Michael could happen. Howard somehow managed to survive.

All this death and violence has weighed High Place down with the mal de aire (“bad air,” a supernatural miasma that haunts a place marked by death or violence) that is sure to sicken or even kill people who stay at High Place. Marta gives Noemí a bracelet to wear on her wrist against the evil at High Place. Noemí secures the medicine Marta prepared for Catalina and departs, then she goes to see Dr. Camarillo about an odd band-shaped rash on her wrist and her bout of sleepwalking. She ends her excursion by buying cards and posts a letter to her father about Catalina’s need for a psychiatric consultation. She leaves out her rash, sleepwalking, and nightmares as “superfluous details” (134).

When Noemí is back in the car with Francis, she questions him closely about the appalling tales Marta told her. Noemí is shocked when Francis responds by telling her that no one can ever leave High Place and that “Ruth ought to have burnt High Place to the ground” (137). He refuses to say anything else about the history of the Doyles.

Eager to cheer up her cousin, Noemí plans a secret girls’ night of card games with Catalina and to give her the tincture from Marta. The night goes off the rails almost immediately when Catalina takes four teaspoons of the medicine and has a seizure. The Doyles call in Cummins, who accuses Noemí of nearly poisoning Catalina by giving her access to a tincture of opium, a drug that can be deadly in high doses. Noemí refuses to tell the Doyles and Cummins where the medicine came from.

In a separate conversation Virgil is initially aggressive and reminds Noemí that her cousin has depression. Much chastened, Noemí agrees that she will stop interfering with Catalina’s care. Virgil relents and tells Noemí that he feels personally harmed by Noemí’s actions as he nearly lost his wife. The expression of love and protectiveness is at odds with the repellant aggression Noemí is coming to recognize as an essential part of Virgil’s nature.

The next day Noemí tries to settle her mind by reading Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande, an anthropology textbook, but the textbook is all about the meanings of dreams, which sometimes “foretell events” (148) or (in the case of ones with ghosts) “inform people about happenings among the dead” (149). She returns to the cemetery and notices for the first time that the statue commemorating Agnes lists “mother” on it, even though only Alice ever gave Howard living children.

Francis shows up and comforts Noemí, who feels devastated that she may have harmed her cousin with her meddling. Francis tells her that Catalina has taken Marta’s potion before and in such quantity that she was likely attempting to kill herself. The last time Catalina took the medicine, she had a bad reaction as well. Francis agrees to take Noemí back to town. In fact, he warns her that she should go to town and leave High Place and El Triunfo entirely while it is still possible to do so.

With this ominous warning on her mind, Noemí has another of the golden dreams that night. She is in the cemetery, and while there, she watches in perfect calmness as an unnamed woman gives birth to a tumor that is full of golden mushroom spores that seed the ground and the observers of the birth. A little girl and an old man observe this birth, and as it happens, they intone the words “[d]eath, overcome” (156). The little girl completes this rite by smothering the woman who has just given birth, and the man looks directly at Noemí as he repeats this phrase. The man’s gaze finally rouses fear, “revulsion and horror” (157) in Noemí. Noemí wakes up to discover that she is at the base of the stairs leading from her room to the first floor. She is sleepwalking again.

The next day Noemí goes back to El Triunfo to demand answers from Marta about what was in Catalina’s medicine, but Marta is not at home. Noemí then decides to talk to Dr. Camarillo, who seems to know Marta. Dr. Camarillo tells her that poppies do not grow anywhere near El Triunfo, so it is unlikely that Marta had access to opium, which is derived from poppies. More spookiness arises when the doctor asks to examine the nasty rash in a band around Noemí’s wrist. He is shocked to discover that the rash is completely gone.

When Noemí returns to High Place, she is immediately forced to have an audience with Virgil. Virgil is displeased that she has once again gone into town. He surprises Noemí by apologizing for the fierceness of his reaction to Catalina’s episode the previous night. He reveals personal details about his marriage to Catalina by explaining that the marriage is a failed fairytale. His marriage to Catalina is his second. His first marriage was to Cummins’s daughter, who divorced him after the reality of Virgil’s obligations to Howard and High Place swallowed everything up.

Noemí takes this moment to press her advantage by explaining that it now looks like Catalina has made multiple suicide attempts; it is neglectful not to secure psychiatric care for Catalina. Virgil counters this accusation by reminding Noemí that both he and Cummins told her from the beginning that they thought Catalina suffered from depression. The conversation ends with a truce of sorts. A conciliatory Virgil promises to get Catalina help when the time comes, and Noemí reiterates her desire for there not to be conflict with Virgil.

When Noemí heads back to her room, she bumps into Francis, who eavesdropped on the conversation and appears upset about what he heard. The dispiriting night ends with a conversation with Florence, who tells Noemí that having Francis chauffer her to town is taking Francis away from his house duties and that she simply cannot figure out what it is that Noemí wants from the Doyles.

Noemí manages to get into Catalina’s room for a visit, but Mary, one of the maids, refuses to leave the two cousins alone. Despite having a chaperone, Catalina cleverly manages to direct Noemí’s attention to a book of poems (fittingly by Sor Juana de la Cruz, the Mexican proto-feminist nun from the Baroque era) in which Catalina has hidden a page of Ruth’s journal. After returning to her room, Noemí reads the page. Catalina has written on the edge of the page that it provides proof of her suspicions about the oddness of the Doyle family.

Ruth claims in her journal that High Place is haunted and that Howard is a monster who beat Ruth after she refused to give up Benito and participate in some act that she finds disgusting. Ruth swears that she will never have children and explains that she has a plan (likely the massacre that she carried out) to put a stop to the Doyles’ disgusting actions. Noemí is stunned by what she reads. She uses her reason to conclude that Ruth’s journal entry is proof that the dreams, voices, and hallucinations that she and Catalina experience have a natural (if not supernatural) explanation.

Noemí takes the journal entry to Francis because she thinks he might be able to help her. He welcomes her into his room, which smells of ink, books, and paper, and is covered with the Doyle ouroboros motif. As she talks to him, Noemí feels a moment of such tenderness and desire that she is forced to resist a powerful urge to kiss him. When she shares her theory that the house feels haunted but there is likely some scientific explanation for these supernatural effects, Francis grows fearful and switches the conversation to Spanish for privacy. Francis tells her she should leave immediately and that in a sense she is right. He refuses to divulge more. He tells her that he wishes Howard would die because the man is a monster and that Noemí’s insistence on staying at High Place is dangerous.

Worn out by these developments, Noemí returns to her room and decides to take a bath to relax. It is implied that she removes the bracelet, her only protection against the evil air, before stepping into the bath. Noemí’s ability to perceive reality slips in this moment. Soaking in the bath, she becomes aware that Virgil is in the room with her. Virgil touches Noemí all over her body, including between her legs.

As in the other dream, Noemí responds with desire, seemingly not of her own volition. Above the bath is yet another image of the ouroboros, this time with the snake emerging from and reentering an egg-shaped mushroom. The image comes alive; the serpent writhes above Noemí’s head. Noemí recalls that this ouroboros is much like one she sees repeated over all the furnishings in Francis’s room.

Noemí’s senses are overwhelmed by a golden light and the sound of bees buzzing. Reality shifts once again, and Noemí finds that she is now trapped in a coffin, having been buried alive. Noemí once again hears a voice—Ruth’s voice—telling her to wake up and resist the voices in the wall, which have the power to make her do things against her will.

Noemí does wake up. When she comes to, she is in an open robe and standing in Virgil’s room. Virgil insists that she sleepwalked to his room. He plies her with wine and tells her to stay longer when she moves to return to her room. Noemí is confused. She believes he is somehow responsible for her presence in his room. He asks if what she really wanted was to walk into Francis’s room, with the implication that she wished to seek Francis out for sex. He then asks her what she dreamed this time, and the sexual nature of the dream makes Noemí feel shame. Virgil is amused by her response. Noemí tells him she had a nightmare.

The exchange convinces Noemí that Virgil is a malicious liar who is toying with her. When she asks for the lamp so she can find her way back to her room, he initially refuses. She brusquely tells him to go back to sleep, and he relents. She is angry and confused when she returns to her room. Virgil, despite his claims about a truce, is no ally. He is a dangerous man.