Happy Families (21 page)

We’re an army a hundred thousand children and adolescents running free

Alone without a family in the streets

Stuck on the street

Do they want to get away from the street?

There’s no place else

Some came to the street

Others were born in the street

The family is the street

We were born to the street

Your mama aborted in the middle of the street

They kicked her in the middle of the street until the fetus dropped out

In the middle of the street

Because the street is our womb

The gutters our milk

The garbage cans our ovaries

Don’t let yourself be tempted bro

Fucking packing for a super Fucking cleaning windshields

Fucking peddling

Fucking guy who wipes the windshield asshole

Fucking kid for falling-down drunks

Fucking damn pimp beggar

Refuse bro

Live on air on alcohol on cement

Better to go dying like a damn cockroach

In streets tunnels garbage cans

Than think you’ve been defeated

The Father’s Servant

1. This town is suffocating. One would say that at an altitude of over three thousand meters, the air would be purer. This isn’t true, and one can understand it. The volcano is a priest with a white head and black tunic. It vomits the same thing it eats: ashen solitude. The proximity of heaven oppresses one here on earth.

The legend insists on repeating that Popocatépetl is an alert warrior who protects the nearby body of the sleeping woman Iztaccíhuatl. They didn’t tell Mayalde the story that one has known since childhood. The priest brought her up here to live, in the foothills of Popocatépétl, on the same day the girl had her first menstruation, and he said to her: “Look. It’s the sacrilegious stain. We have to go far away from here.”

“Why, Father?”

“So you won’t sin.”

“Why would I sin?”

“Because you’ve become a woman. Let’s go.”

They left the sacristy of Acatzingo with its beautiful Franciscan convent and came to live here, where you look at snow and breathe in ash. It was the isolated spot closest to Puebla, and since no one wanted to come where one was, they gladly sent him.

“Are you taking your niece, Father?

“Did you think I’d abandon her? She depends on me. Without me, she’d be a poor orphan. She owes everything to me.”

“Ah!”

“Though let me clarify, Bishop. She isn’t my niece. Don’t burden me with that old story.”

“Ah! Your daughter?” the bishop asked with raised eyebrows.

The priest turned and left the bishopric.

“That man is turning into a recluse,” remarked the prelate. “He doesn’t know how to get on with people. He’s better off going to the mountains.”

It wasn’t that Father Benito Mazón had sought out a parish in the foothills of a volcano to isolate himself from people. The fact is people withdrew from him, and this suited him perfectly. In the end, he came out ahead. No matter how disagreeable Don Benito was, God was not only agreeable but indispensable. Only Father Mazón, with his eyes of an uneasy wolf, iguana’s profile, and paper-thin habit, had the ability to administer the sacraments, baptize, sing a requiem, and certify a death. People in the village depended on him in order to live with a clear conscience. And he depended less on one. Even if nobody attended the miserable little adobe church on the edge of the volcano, Benito would receive his stipend, and of course, the same village that distrusted him for being disagreeable would not let him die of hunger. One.

Well, the fact is that we parishioners—one—feel animosity toward Father Benito Mazón. He seems to live indifferent to one. One reproaches his hypocrisy in introducing the girl Mayalde, who is sixteen years old, as his goddaughter. One knows that goddaughters tend to be priests’ daughters. Should he be given credit for the charity he has shown in putting a roof over the girl’s head? Or must one display indignation at the hypocrisy?

One does not have easy answers. In the end, habits follow their own course, with or without complete explanations. One suspects. One intuits. One fears. In the end, one shrugs one’s shoulders. One.

“It’s worse to have bad habits than to have no habits at all,” Father Mazón whispered in outrage to our most devout woman, Doña Altagracia Gracida, during the act of confession.

“And where does the girl sleep, Father?”

“Be careful, woman.”

The parish in the mountains was barely a house, made of adobe bricks, with a wood-burning stove, a small living/dining room, a bedroom, and an outdoor bathroom. The church was just as modest. But the adjoining chapel was a small, richly decorated Baroque delight, almost as splendid (almost) as the lamented Acatzingo. This was how it should be. Father Benito worships God because he believes that God is horrified by the world.

Mayalde’s beauty created a small storm of indecision in the village. She was a fresh, lovely girl, comparable in her look of purity to the snow that crowns the mountain before it is obliterated in ash. A lightskinned brunette with very large black eyes, as if she wanted to see beyond the frame of her oval face and then immediately, as if conscious of the vanity signified in using beauty to gain happiness, she lowers them to attend to her tasks in the humble house that scrapes the sky. She is used to it. She doesn’t expect anything else from life. One might think that the priest always treated her badly in order to treat her well. That is what he always told her:

“If Our Lord Jesus Christ suffered, why shouldn’t you?”

Then he sat her on his knees. “Do you think I don’t suffer, Mayalde, seeing you suffer?”

All manual tasks were her responsibility. When Father Mazón walked by and saw her washing clothes, making the bed, or dusting polychromes in the church, he would say things like:

“You’d like to be a lady, wouldn’t you?”

“I spoiled you too much when you were little. Now I’m going to get rid of all that spoiling.”

“Clean the church. It’ll do you more good. I’m going to check each holy vessel as if you were drinking my milky cum from it.”

Then he sat her again on his knees. She feared these moments of affection because Father Benito agonized so much to be good and then treated her badly to compensate for the failing of tenderness.

“You’re a mule. A sterile freak. But you work very hard and endure the cold of the mountains.”

She didn’t smile openly for fear of offending him. But the damn priest made her laugh inside, and she mocked him as she tended to the birds in their cold cages, gathered scarce mountain flowers and put them in water, went to the market and came back, humming, with baskets full of vegetables, pigs’ feet, warm tortillas, and serrano chiles.

“The girl is simpleminded,” we would say in the village.

She knew that this way, by being so obliging, she provoked Father Benito. She wasn’t a good-for-nothing. And she wasn’t a beast of burden. When she went down to the market, one admired her cadenced walk, the lightness of her flowered dress, the guessed-at feminine forms, firm and rounded. Mayalde was, for one, the elusive magic of the village. She smiled at everybody.

“She’s simpleminded.”

One thought, however, that her coquettishness was fidelity to Father Benito Mazón. That was what one told oneself.

One day Father Benito broke the flowerpots and freed the canaries. She remained very still, staring at the priest and imagining that she, if she decided to, could change into a flower or fly like a bird.

Father Benito did not want to admit that nothing defeated Mayalde. He felt like telling her, “Go on, my girl. Go back to your mother. Tell her to treat you well and that I remember her. You know I’m no good at being your father. We’ll see if she even bothers to see you. Though I doubt it. You should have seen how glad she was to get rid of you.”

For her part she thought, I make him angry because I love things, I love the flowers, the birds, the markets, and he doesn’t. I serve him, but he doesn’t enjoy it. He’s a sour old man with vinegar in his blood.

It was clear to Mayalde that Father Benito wanted to enjoy things. She bathed outside under an improvised shower in a small courtyard, and she knew the priest spied on her. It amused her to play with the schedule. Sometimes she bathed at dawn; other times she bathed at night. The priest always spied on her, and she soaped her sex and her breasts before pretending alarm at being caught, covering herself quickly with her hands and laughing without stopping as she imagined the confusion of the priest with the narrow eyes of an uneasy wolf and the iguana’s profile.

“Put aside evil thoughts,” the priest would tell her when she confessed. And he would add with growing exaltation: “Repeat after me, child. I am a sack of foul-smelling filth. My sins are an abomination. I am pernicious, scandalous, incorrigible. I deserve to be locked away in a cell on bread and water until I die.” And rolling up his eyes to heaven: “My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.”

Mayalde observed him with a smile, convinced he had lost his mind. The girl shrugged in amazement and kept her own counsel.

Father Mazón would sing these damn hallelujahs that have been repeated in Mexican churches for the past five hundred years and eventually move away from Mayalde, the object of his recriminations, and conclude by praising himself, remembering what they had told him at home when he disclosed his ecclesiastical vocation:

“Benito, there’s nothing theological about you.”

“Benito, you look more like a scoundrel.”

“Benito, don’t tell us you’re not pretty horny.”

He agreed with the last two propositions but decided to put them to the test by subjecting himself to the disciplines of the first: entering the priesthood.

His relationship with the beautiful Mayalde joined together his three temptations: the divine, the worldly, and the erotic. How far had it gone? In the village, one didn’t know for sure. The situation itself—priest with supposed goddaughter or niece who, in the end, turned out to be secret daughter—had occurred so often it couldn’t withstand another version. The strength of the tradition obliged one to think certain things. It also allowed us, a few of us, to propose the exception.

“That only happens in old movies, Doña Altagracia. Let’s say she really is his niece or an orphan or whatever all of you like and prefer, and the priest simply and openly exploits her as a maid without enjoying her as a concubine.”

Some said yes, others no. One, who tries to be fair, would not admit baseless gossip or unproven suspicions. But when Mayalde came down the mountain to the market, a melancholy silence surrounded her. The village smelled of wet dog, of lit hearth, of roasted food, of burro dung, of ocote pine smoke, of untouchable snow, of unpardonable sun. She moved as if she weren’t touching the ground. She was pursued by the evil thoughts of some, the suspicious silence of others, the ambiguous solitude of everybody. Was Benito Mazón a man of God or a damned sinner? In any case, only he dispensed the sacraments in this forgotten village. And if he gave us the host and extreme unction, what wouldn’t he give to the pretty girl who lived with him?

A few of us had been educated and did not believe the falsehoods of the Church. But nobody—not even one, who is an atheist, to tell the absolute truth—dared challenge the weight of religious tradition in the villages. The sky would fall down on us. Centuries and centuries of proclaiming ourselves Catholics has its importance. Being an atheist is almost a failure of courtesy. But one thinks that what the believer and the indifferent ought to share is charity and compassion. It isn’t justice that unites us. One knows Christians who go out of their way to be unjust. To inferiors. To children. To women. To animals. And who, beating their chests, proclaim themselves Christians and go to Mass on Sunday.

One is not like them. One tries to be sincere with the world and with oneself. One wants to be just even though one is not a believer. One thinks that even if one is not Catholic, justice is the most Christian thing there is. Because of justice, one helps others, and mercy is only a little medal they pin on us afterward.

Because of simple charity, then, one pretends not to see and lets him pass at night as one observes from the darkened window the limping young man who looks around in distress without knowing which way to go until one comes out in the midst of the silent ringing of the Angelus and directs him:

“Go up the mountain a little way. Follow the bells.”

“What bells?”

“Listen to them carefully. Up there you’ll be received with charity.”

I sent him away from the village because one knows very well who one’s neighbors are. The boy, his leg injured, with dirty bandages around his knee, torn clothing, and muddy boots, was going to be suspect, no matter who he was and where he came from. One is not accustomed to the sudden appearance of people one doesn’t know. One is predisposed against the stranger. Even more so in a village of less than a hundred souls lost in the volcanic heights of Mexico, a village of ash and snow, icy air, and numb hands. A village enveloped in a gigantic gray serape as if in a premature though permanent winding-sheet.

But if the stranger seeks refuge in the house of the priest, it means he has nothing to hide. The Church blesses those it receives. The boy could climb down from the church to the village without arousing anyone’s suspicions. What he couldn’t do was appear like this, hurt, confused, and exhibiting a youthful beauty as somber and dazzling as that of a black sun.

“Climb the hill. Take refuge in Christian charity. Ask for the priest. Find an explanation.”

“I was mountain climbing and I fell,” Félix Camberos said simply, for that was the name the boy gave when Father Benito Mazón opened the door as dawn was breaking.

“It’s very early,” the priest said disagreeably.

“Mountains are overcome early in the morning.” Félix Camberos smiled, for better or worse. “Just like piety.”

“All right, Mayalde, see to the stranger,” said the priest, feeling strangely trapped in a contradiction he did not understand.

Benito Mazón had seen the figure of the boy, and in his heart, he had reasons for charity as well as suspicion. They merged in the figure of Mayalde. Who would tend to the injured boy? Why not the priest? Because he would have to kneel before the injured man in a posture his arrogance rejected. He would have to display humility to a man younger than himself. And above all, handsomer. The priest caught Mayalde’s glance when Félix appeared. It was the face of a voiceless moon expressing everything by means of waxing and waning movements, as if a tide from heaven had carried the stranger to this desolate place.