50 pages • 1 hour read
Isabel CañasThe Hacienda
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 15-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary: “Beatriz”
When Andrés returns, they set up the charcoal circles in the parlor again. Andrés tells Beatriz that no matter what happens, she must not leave the circle that he draws around them. Andrés calls to the spirit in the house to come into the circle, which will allow it to pass into another realm, but the house rebels. An unseen force flings Andrés out of the circle, and he collapses. Ignoring his order, Beatriz runs to him and breaks the circle. She begins to choke on blood in her mouth, and two teeth fall into her hands with the gums still attached. Despite the horror of what she sees, she forces herself to crawl to Andrés and sees that he is alive. Beatriz stumbles out of the house with Andrés and finally makes her way to the chapel, where she knows they will be safe. Once there, Beatriz realizes that she is not covered in blood and that her teeth are still intact. Beatriz helps Andrés into his bed and watches over him while he sleeps. At one point, she feels the darkness from the house creeping around outside, and she yells at it to leave them alone. It recedes in response.
Beatriz wakes up the next morning to Paloma knocking at the door. She frantically tells them both that Ana Luisa is dead.
Chapter 16 Summary
Andrés and Beatriz accompany Paloma to the servant’s quarters to see Ana Luisa’s body. Paloma thinks that her mother’s heart gave out. Ana Luisa’s body lies in her bed with her features frozen in fear and her arm pointing at the wall. The wall that Ana Luisa’s corpse points at is empty, but Beatriz sees a cross lying broken on the floor as if it had violently fallen off the wall. Beatriz knows that something was in the room last night and frightened Ana Luisa to death.
Beatriz suggests that breaking the circle may have caused Ana Luisa’s death, and Andrés agrees that they set the spirit loose. Juana approaches Beatriz with a letter from Rodolfo telling her that he will visit for a few days. She warns Beatriz to put Andrés’s “native superstition” to rest before Rodolfo gets back.
Beatriz feels the house watching her as she cleans the parlor before Rodolfo arrives. Andrés appears at the doorway and points at the wall. She turns and sees the name “Rodolfo” written repeatedly in blood across it. Andrés wonders if María Catalina’s spirit did it. From Andrés’s description of her, Beatriz realizes that María Catalina is the woman from her dream. She tells him that Rodolfo is returning in a few days, and Andrés thinks that she is in danger.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Andrés”
This chapter takes place in 1821, two years earlier. Andrés visits San Isidro for the first time since his return from Guadalajara. At San Isidro, Paloma tells him that Rodolfo raped her friend, Mariana, one of the other maids. Mariana is pregnant and wants to abort the fetus because she is engaged to another man and does not want to ruin her reputation. Paloma asks Andrés to help Mariana with the abortion. Andrés needs to pray about it, but Paloma tells him that “prayers are empty talk” (180).
Andrés visits his grandmother’s grave. He remembers a time when he went with Titi to visit a sick child. Andrés asked her why she tended to the child when it was clear that he was going to die. Titi told him that her presence soothed the child and tended to the mother’s sorrow. This, Titi told him, was their purpose.
Andrés reflects on his father, who came to New Spain from Sevilla to seek his fortune. His sister came with him. Andrés did not know his aunt Inés well, but the night before she left to return to Spain, he found her hiding something in the floorboards of their house. She told him that she was leaving behind his inheritance. After she left, Andrés found a book of glyphs, incantations, and spells in the floorboards. He took the book to Titi, and they learned the spells together. When he was 16, his father found the notes for the spells hidden under his mattress and kicked him out of the house, telling him that he would burn in hell. Andrés ran away to San Isidro and never saw his father again. Titi arranged for Andrés to go to the seminary in Guadalajara to fulfill his mother’s wishes, which was the last time he ever saw her.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Beatriz”
After Ana Luisa’s burial, Andrés tries to close the circle again, but he fails because he cannot remember the rest of the incantation. When Beatriz turns around to look at the wall, the writing in blood is gone.
Beatriz and Paloma cook in the kitchen together. Paloma tells Beatriz that Rodolfo forced himself on the female servants and sometimes got them pregnant. When María found out, she was furious and said that she would never allow his illegitimate children to live at the hacienda. María murdered the women her husband raped to ensure that no children were born. Despite Rodolfo’s political views encouraging women’s rights, he is a hypocrite and only promotes such ideas so that he can stay in power. Beatriz believes Paloma and dreads Rodolfo’s return.
Chapter 19 Summary
The next morning, Andrés suggests that they go to María Catalina’s grave to see if he can sense anything from her. Andrés does not sense a body in the grave, which means that María is the one buried in the walls of the house. Since María is the angry spirit, Andrés knows how to close the circle. Andrés asks Paloma to speak to him in Mexicano, an Indigenous language, to jog his memory about the incantations. In the parlor, Andrés tries again and recites the incantation. A scream breaks through the house and then abruptly stops. Andrés tells Beatriz that he completed the incantation correctly and has confined María Catalina’s spirit to the house again.
Chapter 20 Summary
Beatriz must sleep alone in the house the night before Rodolfo returns because it would be improper to sleep in the same room with Andrés. Andrés is worried about Beatriz, and she asks him to stay with her anyway. Beatriz has a nightmare about María Catalina attacking her, but when she wakes up, Andrés comforts her. Beatriz knows it is a sin, but she realizes she is in love with Andrés.
In the morning, the servants line up to greet Rodolfo. As Beatriz goes outside with them, she hears a voice telling her that she will die in this house. Rodolfo arrives, and Beatriz cannot stop thinking about the things that Paloma told her about him. He tells her that her mother refused to see him, but he left Beatriz’s letters for her anyway. With everything she knows about Rodolfo, Beatriz realizes that her mother was right: She married a monster. Rodolfo tells Beatriz that the hacendados are coming for dinner. Beatriz remembers the comments they made about her skin color and decides to powder her face like María Catalina that night.
Chapters 15-20 Analysis
Cañas builds suspense in this section when Andrés and Beatriz break the circle and set María’s spirit loose in the house. Andrés’s inability to remember the words to the incantation signifies how deeply he has separated his cultural heritage from his identity. Though he is not shown performing Catholic rites, there is an implied contrast between his work as a priest and his forgetting these incantations, which his aunt calls his “inheritance.” Although he fears unleashing his power, he knows that it is the only way he can protect Beatriz and the rest of the servants from María Catalina’s vengeful spirit. When Paloma begins speaking to him in Mexicano, he reconnects with his cultural identity and figures out how to close the circle. This moment foreshadows how Andrés will eventually need to fully reconnect with his cultural heritage and accept his identity as a witch to save Beatriz.
This section reveals the truth about Rodolfo and María Catalina’s characters through Andrés’s flashbacks. Rodolfo is a man who feels entitled to the female servants in his house as if they are his property. Here, gender and class hierarchies become explicit. Mariana’s assault and pregnancy have ramifications for the rest of her life, even if Rodolfo refuses to take responsibility for his crimes. This is why Paloma tells Andrés that Mariana needs more than prayers: “[S]he needs help” (180). This predicament causes Andrés to reflect on Titi’s words when she said that there are some “illnesses we cannot cure […] Others we can soothe. Sorrow is one of these. Loneliness is another […] Tending to lost souls is our vocation” (182). André is torn between choosing what he should do based on his identity as a priest or as a witch, representing a tension between his Indigenous and colonial identities. His fear of exposure comes from his father’s verbal abuse when he discovered his son was a witch. He told Andrés that they should burn him at the stake, which makes Andrés retreat further into himself out of fear of abandonment. Despite his fear of discovery, Andrés knows that it is his responsibility to help Mariana when no one else will. Along with him helping Beatriz, his actions here reveal his heroic role.
Beatriz’s ability to cook shows Paloma that she is not an enemy like María Catalina. The fact that Beatriz worked for Tía Fernanda for years causes Paloma to confide in her about Rodolfo’s history of sexual assault. Paloma becomes another ally, and Cañas again stresses the value of solidarity and community when fighting oppression. This discovery allows Beatriz to grow closer to Andrés as she realizes that he is the safest man she knows. She lets Andrés sleep in her room with her because he comforts her, even though she knows that “it [is] a sin” (215).
When Rodolfo arrives, his role as an antagonist grows even clearer. Beatriz feels disgusted by his touch. She cannot help but remember how Paloma told her how he treats “their dogs better than” the servants (217). Rodolfo’s comment about how she must not be wearing her hat because her skin has grown darker from the sun shows how he sees her as an object rather than as a person. His comment, along with the fact that the hacendados will be at dinner, makes Beatriz so uncomfortable that she chooses to powder her face to appear more like María Catalina. While she and Andrés can be themselves around each other, she must disguise herself around Rodolfo to keep herself safe.
