Mexican Gothic

After a long train ride north, Noemí arrives in El Triunfo. The landscape surrounding El Triunfo is brutal and wild, and the massive forests that surround it are far different from the magical fairytale forests Catalina and Noemí read as girls. Francis, Virgil’s cousin, gives Noemí’s a ride to High Place.

After traversing a precarious road that winds up a mountain side, Noemí sees High Place for the first time. It is shabby, huge, and grim; the cold welcome from Florence, Francis’s mother and household manager at High Place, does not help matters. The Doyles are stuffy English people who are obsessed with England despite generations of living in Mexico as silver barons in El Triunfo. Francis tells Noemí they only speak English at High Place; fortunately, a childhood spent learning English means Noemí should have no problem conversing.

The state of the house—it lacks consistent hot water and electric lighting—makes it clear that money is now in short supply. Florence takes every opportunity to impress on Noemí how inconvenient her presence is. Florence hands down a list of rules: no smoking in the house, no wandering alone in the surroundings, and no disturbing the two invalids in the house, Catalina and Howard Doyle, the old patriarch of the family and Virgil’s father.

Noemí sees Catalina for only five minutes. Catalina is withdrawn. She apologizes for sending the letter and explains that she wrote it while she had a very high fever. She claims to have tuberculosis. Florence cuts the visit short to give Catalina medicine for her cough.

That night Noemí has dinner with the family in a cavernous dining room. Initially, just Francis and Florence show up to eat the tasteless English food. When Noemí attempts to make conversation by asking if the many pieces of silver (all tarnished) in the surrounding cabinets came from the Doyle silver mines, Florence hands down yet another rule—no talking at dinner. Francis plays the good host and explains that it did. Florence interrupts him when he begins explaining that the mines closed after a strike and some mysterious event that is apparently a forbidden topic.

Partway through dinner, Virgil and Howard join them. Howard is a very pale, very old man whose icebreaker is to remark that Noemí has much darker skin than Catalina. Howard is delighted when Noemí engages him in a debate about the vigor and beauty of the offspring of superior and inferior races, but Noemí finds his presumption of English superiority repellant.

She coldly informs him that she has direct Indigenous ancestry—hence the darker skin—and shows off her knowledge of current anthropology scholarship by pointing out that natural selection probably made her Indigenous ancestors superior to the European people who colonized their lands. Amused by her response, Howard informs her that he was really paying her a compliment; he implies that her beauty bears out the anthropological theory that hybrid offspring are more beautiful than their (presumably ugly) and inferior parent. He leaves after this announcement.

After dinner, Noemí withdraws to Virgil’s mold-riddled sitting room to talk about Catalina. Virgil serves her more of the sleep-inducing red wine from dinner that night. Virgil is dismissive of Mr. Taboada’s concerns but agrees to allow Noemí to talk with Arthur Cummins, the doctor treating Catalina. As the conversation winds down, Virgil heavy-handedly insists that Noemí have a second drink. She demurs, and he seems titillated by her refusal. He walks her to her room. Noemí feels increasingly suffocated by her hosts and the house.

As Noemí settles in, she notices some odd things about High Place. For one, the servants are completely silent and avoid interacting with her no matter how much she attempts to engage with them. She explores the house, starting with the library.

In the library she discovers rotting books and racist anthropology journals. One journal even includes a highlighted passage about the physical vigor of the offspring of people of color and the so-called superior races, echoing Howard’s offensive conversation the night before. Noemí notices a strange decoration on the floor of the library. It is an ouroboros (a serpent eating its own tail, a symbol for infinity), and its repeated presence in the house suggests that this is the house of Doyle’s heraldic symbol.

Later that day Noemí takes a walk with Francis. He takes her to the family cemetery, a neglected and gloomy place that includes a marble statue of one Great Aunt Agnes and many gravestones that are all dated 1888. Francis explains that in 1888 a mysterious illness killed most of the workers. The gravestones in the cemetery belong to the imported English workers who died in the mines. Apparently, the Mexican workers are buried elsewhere.

Francis shifts the conversation to talk about how trapped he feels in High Place. He longs to have the mobility of Virgil, who travels abroad at times. Francis has never been farther from High Place than the El Triunfo train station. Even this peek into the outside world ended with the death of Richard, Francis’s father, when Francis was a boy. Looking at Francis, Noemí cannot help but note that Francis is a sickly, pale shadow of Virgil, who is vigorous and handsome.

Noemí returns to the house for another silent meal. Dinner that night is on a tray in her room and includes tea with a slightly sweet taste. Noemí is bored. She looks at the hideous, moldy wallpaper and thinks about the stories of English people who accidentally poisoned themselves when the fungus in their arsenic-laced wallpaper paste produced arsine gas. Even though she has only been at High Place for a short while, she feels some creeping uneasiness coming on.

The next day Noemí visits with Catalina, who only becomes animated when she begs Noemí to go to El Triunfo to get her medicine from healer Marta Duval. When Noemí tries to ask questions, Catalina shushes her and claims that some nameless “they” lives in the walls and is eavesdropping on them. Catalina, it seems, is deeply disturbed. Dr. Cummins, the English doctor, visits Catalina that day and afterward supports Virgil’s belief that Catalina has tuberculosis, is a depressive, and can receive adequate care at High Place.

Afterward, Virgil discusses Catalina in a cold, uncaring manner that alarms Noemí, but he agrees to allow Noemí to secure a second medical opinion if she can find one in a backwater like El Triunfo. Noemí’s insistence surprises him, leading him to tell Noemí she is just as Catalina claims—a woman who must always have her own way, especially when it comes to men.

That night, Noemí dreams of a golden woman made of golden mushroom filaments that invade the house and threaten to do the same to Noemí. She is so spooked by the dream that when she wakes, she wonders if Catalina’s belief that something is hiding in the walls is true after all.