The Return: A Novel (26 page)

Some more shouting back and forth ensued, until Marder walked into the room.

He took in the scene and asked Amparo what was going on. She told him, and when Lourdes tried to butt in, Marder stopped her with a look.

“Lourdes, I suggest you go back to your room until dinner. We’ll talk about this later.”

Statch watched as Lourdes transformed into a little girl under Marder’s gaze and left the kitchen without another word.

In the silence that followed, Evangelista, who had been working invisibly throughout, said, “Señor Marder, when would you like supper and how many will there be, please?”

Statch stared at her father, surprised and a bit dismayed. The familiar, gentle, humorously casual New York liberal dad she’d known all her life seemed to have vanished and been replaced with a Mexican patriarch. She was not at all sure that she liked it.

*   *   *

On Sunday they all went to church; Skelly joined them, and drove too. Amparo and her family rode in the back of the camper, and the red truck led a convoy of rattletrap vehicles, all of them jammed with people in their best clothes. Front and rear, the convoy was guarded by Templo gangsters in pickup trucks bristling with automatic weapons. Of the inhabitants of Casa Feliz, only Pepa Espinoza declined worship. Statch almost did the same but forbore in memory of her mother, who, though scarcely a believer, had brought her two children to church on every required occasion, out of love for Marder. Statch expected only the usual and predictable tedium, but in the event discovered three surprising things.

The first was the church itself. On the outside, San Ignacio was an ordinary, somewhat clumsy whitewashed adobe shell, but inside it was unlike any church that Statch had ever seen. Instead of the lugubrious nineteenth-century statues and paintings she had expected, the interior walls shone vivid with color. Murals in the local folk-art style depicted Biblical scenes peopled with Indians in the white cotton clothes, straw sombreros, and striped serapes of a former age, and the statues were hand-carved, brightly painted suffering saints and prophets made by people who understood suffering: a pietà, a San Sebastián stuck with arrows, and—huge, behind the altar—an enormous crucifix with the body of Christ hideously twisted, nailed to a heavy, raw-wood cross with great cast-iron nails, spouting pints of gore from the Five Wounds.

The second surprise was Skelly, placed on the other side of her father, going through the usual motions, making the required responses with every indication of sincerity, although she knew for a fact that Skelly was as pagan as a Viking and an aggressive mocker. She couldn’t quite understand it: again, perhaps something in the water, or was he, like herself, just deferring to her father?

The church was about two-thirds full with women and children, but there were men too, hard-faced guys with tattooed teardrops on their faces. That was interesting, she thought, and wondered briefly about what the spiritual life of killers might be like.

As was her habit on the few recent occasions when she’d found herself in church, Statch let her mind drift away from the ritual to the contemplation of herself and her affairs. She thought she might be having some kind of breakdown, the sort of collapse that sometimes affected driving, hyperambitious people. She knew former classmates, people who’d propelled themselves through high school into top-flight colleges, then into the best grad school programs, and then, in what should have been the epitome of their careers, simply vanished. One girl had hanged herself; others had taken off for communes in the country, or for India, or gone sailing around the world. And here she was, living with her father, who had gone nuts in some way she couldn’t quite figure out yet (but she would, it having become a point of pride), in the middle of a kind of civil war, in her mother’s hometown. How weird was that?

The priest was talking about the prodigal son. He said most people identify with the bad son, the runaway, because it’s easy. You do bad, you get forgiven. But most people aren’t like the bad son—they’re like the good son. They want to know how come the wicked prosper, how come
they
get to eat the fatted calf. They’re full of resentment against the father and full of envy, and their danger is much subtler, because the bad son knows he’s bad and seeks forgiveness, but the good son thinks he’s good and doesn’t, and so the devil gets him.

Statch was attentive to the homily, although its message went in one ear and out the other, because she did not believe in any morality beyond you-can-do-what-you-want-as-long-as-you-don’t-hurt-anyone. The priest looked rather different in his green robes and his sacerdotal face, but it was clearly Miguel Santana: the third surprise.

*   *   *

“You didn’t tell me you were a priest,” she said to him in mock accusation as he stood at the door of the church after the service.

“You didn’t ask,” he said, “but you must have known, or else you wouldn’t have made such a good confession.”

“I wasn’t
confessing.
Aren’t you supposed to be sorry for your sinful behavior and promise to refrain from it?”

“And weren’t you?” he asked, giving her a peculiar look that made her drop her eyes and change the subject.

“That’s quite a church you have there. Whatever happened to the weepy old statues?”

“Burned in the revolution. The priest back then, Father Jimenez, was something of a genius, I’m told. He let the revolutionaries have all the bad-taste stuff, then turned the church into a museum of folk art and organized the people to decorate it with traditional designs and sculpture. He opened a sort of craft school too, and when the agriculture collapsed and people were starving, he got local people who retained the traditional crafts to teach kids. That’s why you’ve got so many people in your
colonia
who produce excellent work. By the time the secularists caught on, the place was a national treasure, and after the revolutionary zeal died down, Father Jimenez quietly started to hold services, and here we all are.”

He seemed about to say something else, but Statch drew his attention to a ragged man standing in the doorway of the church, clearly waiting for the priest to finish. The man wanted to have a rosary blessed. Father Santana solemnly performed the small rite; the thin brown peasant thanked him briefly and then vanished.

“It must be nice to have supernatural power,” Statch observed.

“One would think so,” said Father Santana, smiling again, “but one would be mistaken. I’m sure you know enough theology not to make an error like that.”

Marder walked up and shook the priest’s hand. He complimented him on his homily and added, “It must be hard to be a priest in a region where murder, torture, and kidnapping are the order of the day. How do you handle it?”

“I don’t, usually. I perform services for the dead.”

“You don’t speak out against the violence?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Are you afraid?” asked Statch.

“Not personally, no. But if I did speak out, I would be assassinated instantly, and then for a long while there would be no one to perform services for the dead. I see you’re disappointed. Well, the fact is that the Church spent most of its history working in communities where murder and rapine were far more common than in Michoacán today. Any of the Angevins or the Sforzas, not to mention the average conquistador, could have eaten La Familia for breakfast. You may have noticed that the church was full of Templos and their families, whereas La Familia’s religious orientation is somewhat different.”

“Some kind of muscular Christian cult, I understand,” said Marder.

“Christian only in that they still murder people in the name of God,” said the priest, snuffing out his smile. “And may God forgive us all.”

11

The ride to the airport was uneventful, probably because Marder’s camper truck was accompanied by two SUVs and a pickup full of heavily armed men. El Gordo was delivering protection, which made Marder feel a little less like a fool. Lourdes was chattering away without letup to Statch, who was being more tolerant of this babble than Marder would’ve credited. Pepa was also chattering nonstop but on her cell phone, clearly delighted to be at long last back among the airwaves of civilization. The plane Skelly had chartered, from one of the apparently limitless legion of “guys he knew,” was a King Air 350, a twin-engined turboprop that would make it from Cárdenas to Mexico City’s Juarez International Airport in a little under an hour, and was apparently innocent of any association with La Familia. The plane was configured for twelve; they were five—Marder, his daughter, Skelly, Pepa Espinoza, and Lourdes Almones—and so they were able to sit where they pleased. Marder pleased to sit in the wonderfully luxurious seat next to Pepa Espinoza.

“What are you writing?” asked Marder. It was twenty minutes into the flight, and while he had attempted the usual conversational gambits, he had received nothing but short, impatient answers.

“A book,” she replied, tapping skillfully at the keys of her laptop. He sighed and looked past her face at the terrain below, the green-clothed mountains of the Sierra Madre del Sur. They were at twelve thousand feet or so, far too high to make out any detail, but the country seemed devoid of any human mark. It was similar in that respect to the mountains of Vietnam. It looked like an uninhabited, unbroken green cover but was deceptive, for below the undulating emerald duvet lay a whole civilization and armies at war.

“What’s it about?” he ventured.

“It’s about the nastiness and perfidy of your country, Mr. Marder. It’s what every book written by a Mexican must necessarily be about. It is our one miserable, inescapable subject.”

“Which aspect of the perfidy? There are so many.”

“The drug wars. Are you aware of how this monstrous business began? No? Of course you aren’t; you are bathed in righteous innocence, like all your nation.”

“Why not tell me? It would pass the time and abash me.”

Again that almost smile. Charming! She said, “Fine. Well, when the Second World War broke out, the Japanese cut off your supplies of opium from the Far East. The American government prevailed on Mexico to establish vast plantations of poppies to supply the morphine needed in the war. After the war there was no need for the Mexican opium, and all the farmers in Sinaloa and Michoacán would have been ruined had they not begun to grow for the illegal trade. And, naturally, as in all of Mexico, what is illegal is a source of profit and political deals. The eternally ruling party, the PRI, came to an understanding with the drug lords. The
caciques
of the party each had his relationship with the local mafias. Things barreled along very well until your government became
shocked
by the flow of heroin to the United States and put pressure on the Mexican government to suppress the opium farmers, so all the fields were sprayed, using equipment generously supplied by the gringos. The peasants were ruined, but the gangs went on to other things, importing and transshipping cocaine and meth and, of course, tons and tons of marijuana. Now, at around this time,
El Norte
became displeased with the state of Mexican democracy. A one-party system? It assaulted the fine sensibilities of Washington. Other parties were encouraged, secretly or not, and so the PRI state collapsed and now we have in half the country a regime, or series of regimes, based on murder, extortion, and kidnap, funded by money from the United States and armed with automatic weapons courtesy of your constitutional right to bear arms. That’s what my book is about, Mr. Marder.”

The color had risen to her cheeks as she spoke, and her hazel eyes were sparking. He had heard all this before, from his one beloved, and so it was more like a love song to him than the diatribe she intended.

“I have nothing to do with the drug policies of the United States. I deplore them, in fact. And, as I think I’ve mentioned before, I consider myself just as much of a Mexican as I am an American.”

“No, you are a gringo of the purest type. Who asked you to come down here and interfere with the lives of our people? I see you organizing, directing, bullying, spreading dollars around so you can feel good about yourself: Oh, look at me, I’m
helping
!”

“Are you sorry I helped
you
?” he asked mildly.

She opened her mouth to reply, snapped it closed, and her face darkened again, but not in anger this time.

She took a breath and said, avoiding his eyes, “Yes, I’m being a bitch. I beg your pardon. I
am
grateful, but…”

“It irks you to be beholden to an American?”

“Yes. It irks me very much.”

“If I may say so, that seems uncharacteristically illiberal for someone of your cast of mind. You surely don’t approve of Americans generalizing about all Mexicans. And as I told you, I consider myself as much a Mexican as I am an American.”

“That’s ridiculous. You’ve never really lived here.”

“On the contrary. I spent the last thirty years living in a Mexican home. It was in Manhattan, but as soon as the door shut it was Mexico. We spoke nothing but Spanish. We ate mainly Mexican food. We watched Mexican media and went to church in Spanish. I have a very substantial familiarity with Mexican culture, including literature and poetry, almost all of which I’ve read in the original. My children are perfectly bilingual and bicultural. It’s true that I’m not
profoundly
Mexican; I’m not a tortilla and
pulque
peon, I’m not a
pelado
in a barrio, but neither are you. In fact, I’d venture to say that if we sat down and had a
ranchera
-singing contest, you might not win.”

“Fine, you’ve convinced me. You’re a Mexican. Just as a matter of curiosity, did you beat up on your wife and run around with younger women?”

“I was unfaithful, yes. Once. But no beating. We were insanely in love for nearly the entire time we were together.”

“Maricón!”

Marder laughed. “So you don’t care for Mexican men either. A bad experience?”

She shook her head, shuddering like a horse, and now she looked him in the eye. “Look, Marder, what do you want from me? I said I was grateful for what you did, and I am. But we don’t have a
relationship
. That thing about if you save someone’s life you’re tied together forever is only in the movies, okay?”