Of all the converted mineshafts that cut through the ore-beds beneath Guanajuato, this one — Tunel de San Roque — is my favorite. It dates back to the late 1600s, a hand-mined shaft so narrow that Nick and I have to walk single file, shoulders brushing the rocky sides. The ceiling is low and strung with lights that dangle in our faces, forcing us to squint and duck every six or seven paces. Water sweats out of the rock, dripping loudly and puddling on the gravel floor. Meetings with other tourists are comical, an awkward ritual of squeezing aside, struggling past, and finally gasping in relief. Especially when we encounter fat Americans who fill up the entire tunnel.

The converted mineshafts that run under Guanajuato are usually bustling with Mexicans. But not the Tunel de San Roque. We’ve never encountered a Mexican in this tunnel, not even one. When I ask Nick why, his first reaction is to laugh. The noise echoes weirdly off the rock and follows the dangling lights. Then he explains that locals avoid this tunnel because it’s haunted. Hundreds of Indian slaves died carving this mineshaft for a silver-hungry Catholic bishop. Their ghosts wait to take revenge on any Mexican Catholics who remind them of the bishop.

I follow Nick’s broad shoulders, ducking when he ducks, straightening when he straightens. The ghost story lingers in my mind, and before it his dismissive chortle. “Why did you laugh at first? Because you don’t believe the superstition?”

“Because I know the real reason no Mexicans come down here. It’s too fucking cramped.” He slaps the sides of the rock, a wet sound. “They leave this tunnel to the tourists.”

Eventually we exit into the blinding daylight of Calle Baratillo, a steep ascent through the pastel topography of Guanajuato. The blocks look trendy and upscale to me, but touristy to Nick. His profile is on dull smolder. Pedestrians of every nationality choke the twisting street. Sunburned Americans dressed like walking billboards for Gap and Old Navy and Abercrombie & Fitch. Germans chattering in their fog of harsh consonants. Diminutive Japanese weighed down with electronic devices. As we climb ever-higher, the mountains shut us into steep alleys with latticed balconies soaring overhead. The streets become long shafts of cobblestone falling toward the valley floor.

My gaze snags on an unmistakable building, bright orange and royal blue with white trim. “Hey!” I exclaim to Nick, tugging him toward the Baden-Powell Institute. “That’s where Beto works!”

We cross the street and peek through the barred windows. The first two windows are filled with nothing much — an unoccupied office, then a modest library. The third window looks into a class in session. Beto stands in front of a dusty blackboard, lecturing tiredly. Bored semester-abroad students loll at their desks. Nothing happens to their poses until I rap on the glass.

“Why the hell did you do that?” Nick complains, grimacing through the window. He waves unconvincingly at the curious students, and some wave back.

Beto turns to see what the commotion is about. An unreadable look passes between him and Nick. Then he shifts his dark gaze toward me — and winks, making his hand into a gun with thumb and forefinger. Bang. The gesture reminds me that I don’t understand boys.

“Let’s get out of here,” Nick snaps, yanking me back into motion on the cobblestones.

I glance over my shoulder at the vanishing gaudiness of the Baden-Powell Institute. “If I’d gone to college, that could’ve been me.”

The words are first one and then a million sliding doors in my head, each opening on a different Nooshin. I envision myself on a semester abroad, my reward for straight A’s in a degree program like Accounting. No wait, make it Pre-Law, because all my professors have told me I’d make a brilliant lawyer. But for this semester I’m like the students Beto is teaching, studying too little and partying too much. Maybe I’m flirting with all the cute Mexican boys I meet in Guanajuato, or maybe I have a boyfriend pining at home. Maybe both.

Then I wilt a little, considering the gulf between that Nooshin and the real me. That Nooshin has never been married, never fled her husband. That Nooshin isn’t pregnant with her new boyfriend’s child. That Nooshin’s family doesn’t hate her, and her in-laws don’t want to kill her to regain their honor.

“I don’t know how Beto does it,” Nick is saying. “I could never teach in a semester abroad program like that, not even for $24,000 a year. Can you imagine me chaperoning kids around? Babysitting? I could barely stand being a TA.” His head is on a swivel, the Kangol hat turning beneath the sun. “That’s gotta be it, over there. Looks like a converted hacienda, doesn’t it?”

He’s referring to a high-walled compound that clings to a steep street. The wall itself is old and multiply-patched and rubbled with talus — unwedged stones and broken bricks — at the base. We follow it around a corner to an entryway. Beneath its wide gate are wrought-iron letters that spell MUSEO DE LA INQUISICION — Museum of the Inquisition.

Nick explains the Inquisition as the Catholic Church’s office for orthodoxy, a small army of fervent priests who tortured “confessions” of heresy from Jews and intellectuals and native Indians, then meted out grisly punishments. The Inquisition was especially bad in the New World, where distance from Spain gave rise to terrible atrocities. He describes an unfathomable laundry list of horrors, including the immolation of entire Indian families at the stake. Meanwhile I’m thinking of the paradoxical Jesuit friars, who built the majestic University of Guanajuato — and the torture chamber for the local Inquisition.

Inside the mood is spooky and grim. We clack across wooden floors in near-darkness, moving from one display case to the next. Holding hands we stare down at backlit antiquities that are terrifying in their mundaneness. A parchment letter of execution in swooping script. Bibles fashioned into torture devices. The broom used to sweep up bone chips and blood. Neither of us says a word.

The showpiece display is a recreation of the actual torture chamber. We grasp the iron bars and peer into the dismal stone room, decorated with a torture rack and skeletons in rags and guttering electric candles. I try to imagine what kind of person would equate this depravity with God’s work. A monster. A blind believer.

Nick yawns next to me. “This would’ve been your fate if you lived back then. They would’ve killed you because of your evil eye.” He points at an iron handle sticking out of the simulated fireplace. “An Inquisitor would’ve put out your mal ojo with a red-hot poker, then strangled you.”

I feel my skin pimple into goosebumps. Suddenly I’m imagining another Nooshin stretched across the rack until her joints break. Her crooked eye is jerking in terror as the red-hot tip of the poker approaches, her mouth gapes in a scream…

“Do you think it really looked like this?” drawls another American, looming beneath a ghostly white cowboy hat. “Because I gotta say, this looks just like every crappy horror movie I ever saw at the drive-in growing up.”

“Sure this is realistic,” Nick says breezily. He reaches a hand through the bars and waves at various features. “Thick stone walls to dampen the screams. Straw on the floor to soak up blood. And the candles really flickered like that, because the airflow was so shitty. The oxygen would get used up, you know?”

“Hmmm,” says the cowboy’s wife, as if not really believing Nick.

Back in the courtyard we sit on a wooden bench, scarred and splitting with age, and stare up at a stubby belltower. This is where the first hanging in Guanajuato was carried out. Not a heretic, but a 500-pound bell from Mexico City, which rang an insurrectionist call-to-arms when Hernan Cortez was away. The legendary conquistador had the bell publicly flogged and its tongue ripped out, and ordered the captured rebels to drag it over the Sierra Madres to Guanajuato, where it was forbidden to ring.

“Cortez was crazy like a fox,” Nick laughs, finishing his story. “That’s why he was able to conquer this country with 400 men — and hang onto it afterward. Stunts like flogging and silencing that bell? The story must’ve spread like wildfire. It was viral marketing in the 16th century.”

I sit tightly against him even though there’s plenty of space on the bench. I close my eyes, enjoying the softness of his bare arm touching mine, the friction of his pistoning knee. Nick begins telling me another story, the gonzo kind that I already know will end in his favorite refrain — “Only in Mexico, man!” Meanwhile I slide a palm under my t-shirt hem and splay fingers across my scrawny washboard stomach, trying to feel if the contours are rounding into smoothness yet. Trying to feel our baby.