Dr. Brinkley's Tower (18 page)

— Señora Cruz, the doctor said. — There's something I would like to speak to you about. Something I'd like to speak to you both about.

He glanced at Violeta, who felt her heart start to pound. Malfil Cruz smiled and sat on the teetering chair. Violeta backed up and sat in the middle of her mother's hammock, obliging the doctor to sit on the one good chair. After a moment's hesitation, he reluctantly did so and began speaking.

— Last night, Violeta guessed the exact number of gumballs in that glass sphere. Well, not quite the exact number, but pretty darn close.

— Sí? said Violeta's mother.

— It really was most remarkable. In fact, it made me wonder if … 
Well
 … This is most awkward, as it sounds rather eccentric, I'm afraid. But it made me wonder if Violeta has abilities that not all of us have. Abilities of a … how do I put this?… a psychic variety.

Malfil Cruz giggled. — Oh no, doctor, you are …

— Sí, Violeta interrupted. — I do.

—
Qué
? asked Malfil.

— Sí, Violeta said again, not believing the words coming from her mouth. — Often, I get a feeling about things that are going to happen. Sometimes I'll be thinking of nothing at all and I'll get a … a …

— A tingling? Brinkley interjected.

— Sí. I get a tingling.

Brinkley laughed. — I thought that might be the case. Tell me, Violeta, do you speak English?

Her mother answered for her daughter. — Of course she does. Violeta is a very good student. She speaks English very, very well.

— In that case, I have a proposition. One of the more popular forms of entertainment these days are radio mediums. Do you know what a medium is?

Violeta and her mother shared a glance.

— No, said Malfil.

— It's a person, usually a woman, who has psychic abilities, not unlike Violeta. Through a marvellous new technology, something involving patch lines or trunk lines or the like, believe me when I say that electronics has never been my forte, listeners can actually call in and describe their problems on the air. The medium then does her best to help. As I say, it's getting very, very popular. XEX in Villa Acuña has one, as does XED in Juárez, and they are both doing very, very well. In fact, during their medium hours, I practically have to pay people to listen to my station.

The doctor grinned at his own witticism and looked at both women. — Do you understand what I am proposing?

— Not really, said Violeta's mother.

— I would like to hire Violeta to be XER's medium. She would broadcast every Saturday afternoon, from five to six o'clock. I think it would be a very positive experience for her.

Violeta's heart raced. She glanced at her mother, who for some reason looked fatigued by the request.

— Señor Brinkley, uttered Malfil. — I don't know … She is still a young girl, and she has a lot of homework and chores, and without a man in the house it's hard enough already for me to get things done.

— Señora Cruz?

— Sí, doctor?

— You'd be able to
hire
someone to do her chores.

Malfil Cruz looked at him, her face trembling with incomprehension. — You mean … you'd pay her?

— I would pay her seventy-five silver dollars per month. Not paper. Silver.

Violeta's madre took a deep, shuddering breath. Her eyes turned glassy with tears.

— Doctor, she said tearfully. — This is the answer to all of our prayers.

— No, señora, he said with a satisfied grin. — It's simply a business proposition, one that will hopefully prove beneficial to both parties.

JUST AS THE GOOD DOCTOR WAS BEING DRIVEN BACK
across the splintering bridge between nations, Father Alvarez emerged from his one-room casa. He walked along the avenida, waving away every homeless beggar asking him for a few pesos, his only intention to reach the cantina and spend a tolerable afternoon quaffing cerveza with his amigos. Yet just as the father reached the side street upon which the town saloon was located, the cantina owner's wife, Margarita Hernandez, emerged from an alleyway and spotted him. She headed his way, her face flushed, a corner of her white blouse revealingly untucked, her bountiful dark hair in a telltale disarray. She held a forefinger in the air, as if testing the direction of the Coahuilan breeze.

— Father! she called. — I need to talk to you.

— Please, Margarita, he answered. — You know the law. I am Father no longer. Just call me Alvarez.

Margarita was the sort of person who ceased taking in information when excited about something, and this was
such a moment. Ignoring his request, she began to babble.

— The radio station, Father. Have you listened to it?

— A little, he answered.

By this he meant that he was pretty sure he'd heard XER playing in the background the last time he'd been in the cantina. As far as he could remember, Brinkley's station seemed inoffensive enough, little more than the tedious drone of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” interspersed with lectures regarding health and good welfare, all of which promoted Hinkley's clinic in Del Rio. Mind you, the father had never really listened, if only because the station broadcast entirely in English, a language he had to concentrate to understand. When others had the option of studying the gringo tongue in high school, he'd been conjugating Latin verbs in a México City seminary.

— So then you know!

— Know what, Margarita?

She leaned towards him. — The programming, Father. Much of it is … is … salacious in nature.

— Salacious?

— Sí.

— Margarita, por favor.

— I was listening last night. The language, Father. Particularly during the health report.

Father Alvarez sighed. — As long as parents don't let their children listen at certain hours I don't see what the problem is.

— But that's not all! Much of the content is religious.

— What I used to do is religious, Margarita. We can hardly blame John Brinkley for living in a country that hasn't yet lost its soul.

— But, Father! Have you listened closely? Have you heard the sermonizing? It starts most nights around seven …

— Seven o'clock is my dinnertime, Margarita.

— So then you
don't
know! Father Alvarez … the ministers on the radio station … they're Baptists! There's one who is a … 
Pentecostal.
They're demons, Father, snake-handling degenerates. And they go on for hours!

Alvarez felt a stab of revulsion and loathing. He commanded himself to breathe deeply, and reminded himself that the revolution had taken away his vocation, a situation he could do nothing to remedy, and that it was none of his business what tripe Brinkley chose to air on that ostentatious radio station of his. Margarita, meanwhile, was oblivious to the colour draining from Alvarez's face.

— The Pentecostal … he speaks in tongues! He has a segment in which people telephone the station and he puts them on air and they're howling like monkeys or roaring like lions or — she took a deep, shuddering breath —
speaking dead languages.
The other day a child called up and afterward they said he'd been speaking Sumerian. In México, of all places! I'm asking you, Father. What are we going to do?

Again he did not respond: the ground was swaying a little beneath his feet, and he found he needed all of his energies just to maintain his equilibrium.

— I'll tell you what
I
think we should do, Margarita continued. — I think we should talk to Miguel Orozco. He is the mayor, after all. It's his town. He should be able to talk to Dr. Brinkley and demand that all religious programming of an unsuitable nature be banned from any radio station on our soil.

— Miguel? Alvarez said weakly. — You want to talk to Miguel?

— If it were up to me, I'd have the whole station taken off the air. It's disgraceful, all this talk of men's problems and goat glands and … Dios mío!… 
the vitality of the reproductive organs.
Can you believe that, Father? That they're talking about these things on a radio station broadcasting from our good town?

Margarita sped off, the father now succumbing to a wave of frustration and despair. It was simply too much, this fresh knowledge that Pentecostals — practitioners of a faith that was guttural, adolescent, and completely lacking in nuance — had access to a radio station whose signal apparently reached all the way to Russia, while
he
, a father in the Roman Catholic Church, had had his profession thrown into the sewer like a spoiled armadillo carcass. He strode to the saloon and flung open its doors, startling the cantina owner and the mayor, both of whom were enjoying their second glass of cerveza while discussing whether or not they might indulge in a jigger of tequila.

— Father, said the mayor. — Qué onda?

Alvarez ignored him and marched up to the cantina owner. — Carlos, I need to borrow your radio.

The cantina owner looked at him quizzically.

— I need it, repeated the father.

— Okay, okay. Take it, it's behind the bar. The battery, though, is a little low. Do you want a cerveza too?

Alvarez claimed the radio and, instead of joining his friends for a drink, headed towards the swinging wooden doors. He stepped into the laneway, where he was bathed
by white sun, and walked along Avenida Hidalgo until he reached the sagging one-room adobe row house where he lived. It was neat as a pin, solely because young village daughters now came once a week and cleaned up. While the Father appreciated this, the arrangement also meant he could never find anything. His newspaper, his reading spectacles, his wallet, the slippers he wore in the early morning and late evening … they all seemed to disappear into the wasteland of orderliness that the muchachas left behind every time they visited.

As with many homes in Corazón, a hammock stretched along one wall. Alvarez climbed in, the motion causing the ceiling beams to groan. He came to rest and pressed a few buttons on the radio. A weak light appeared on the tuning dial. This was accompanied by a man's voice, speaking in English. Alvarez had to listen intently, for the light on the dial kept fading and the voice kept rising and falling in volume. And though Alvarez couldn't understand all that was being said, it seemed there was nothing distasteful reaching his ears beyond the nasal pitch of a farmer discussing soybean prices. The voice faded in and out for another minute, at which point the dwindling light coming from the dial ceased being a light at all. Father Alvarez shook the radio, causing nothing more than brief snippets of sound to come from the infernal box.

He sighed, climbed out of his hammock, and surveyed the room, his eyes scanning each clean surface, each uncluttered stretch of floor, and each dust-free piece of furniture. Finding his wallet was no simple matter; it required a degree of concentration that he had once reserved for spiritual questions. First of all, he had to remember which señorita had
come yesterday — they all had their own methods of cleaning and their own spots for hiding away his possessions. He could barely picture her; he seemed to recall black hair and a halo of freckles across the nose. Of course, this described pretty much every young female in the town of Corazón de la Fuente. To be truthful, whenever he gazed upon a girl poised to become a woman, it was her youth and nothing but her youth that made an impression — it trumped eye colour, skin tone, distinguishing birthmarks, or whatever particular loveliness the girl happened to possess.

Finally it came to him — it was the girl who had a lisp, the one they called the Little Spaniard. He could hear her, clear as a bell:
Buenath tardeth, Father.
Her real name was Rosita (or Rosana or Rosaura or Rosalita), and she was the one who never failed to put his wallet and reading spectacles in the little hutch that greeted visitors as they stepped inside the front door. He rushed towards it, opened the squeaky hinged door, and, gracias a Dios, saw his wallet sitting atop his slippers and an unfinished tripe sandwich he'd told her not to throw away. A second later he was out the door, his wallet in one hand and the cantina owner's radio in the other, heading for the store run by the hirsute Zacatecan.

A bell chimed when Father Alvarez walked into the dark, crowded store. Fajardo came out from the back and greeted him. A stand of tomatoes, avocados, jalapeños, cilantro, and onions separated the two men.

— Father, said Fajardo. — Can I help you with something?

— I need a battery.

— What type?

— Whatever type this damn thing takes.

The father held up the radio. Fajardo nodded; he knew the model for the simple reason that he had sold it to the cantina owner in the first place. He ducked behind the counter. Upon surfacing, he passed over a heavy battery.

Father Alvarez paid and shook the store owner's hand, a moment of contact that would have given him pause a few years earlier but that he didn't think about now. Like most residents of Corazón de la Fuente, he had long ago decided what Fajardo looked like beneath his insulating layer. Now his eyes automatically subtracted the fur, revealing a wiry Mexican man who worked hard, lived with his condition with grace, and contributed greatly to his community.

The father retraced his steps through Corazón. At home he lay in his hammock and put the radio on his stomach. He switched it on. The voice of an announcer filled the room. Though he was fairly sure it was Dr. Brinkley speaking, he wasn't certain. Any characteristics of Brinkley's voice — the quiet self-confidence mixed with his quaint Appalachian slang — were lost behind the barrier of a foreign language. Alvarez listened intently, and in so doing he extracted many words and phrases that were more or less the same in Spanish, including
impotencia
and
la función de la próstata
and, of all things,
los secretos del bedroom.
Despite the grim amusement these words caused him, he soon grew bored with listening, if for no other reason than the words between these phrases formed an indistinguishable blur. He put the radio on the floor next to him, concluding that Margarita must have been exaggerating.