The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (7 page)

Kelsey and I walked to the second row, and took our
seats at the table we shared.

“By the way, I think Demetrio’s
nice, too, in his own way,” I said, trying to keep my voice low
enough to be discreet. “But he told me he was in a gang. He
actually
said
that. He also said that he was in big trouble for killing
someone or something.”

Kelsey, who was possibly the
single most sheltered and rebellious person I knew, looked
intrigued. “Really? That is so
cool
!”

“Yeah, okay, whatever.” I started to unload my
notebook and pencil case onto the table.

Yazzie set down the slide she was inspecting, and
flashed her airy-fairy smile at me, still ignoring my friend. She
arose, and glided over to me.

“I had a dream about you,” Yazzie told me, in her
new age, touchy-feely way. “I woke last night and spent hours on a
sculpture that tells your story.”

I didn’t know how to answer this, so I just smiled
awkwardly, aware that Yazzie had a reputation at Coronado Prep for
being just a bit off her rocker, albeit talented. The reputation
was justified as far as I could tell, though Yazzie’s sculptures -
soft-looking little Storyteller-type people doing active things in
miniature - were charming, if weird, and very valuable.

“Did it involve rabid coyotes
tearing Maria’s limbs off?” asked Kelsey, trying to be funny but
also, I realized, jockeying for validation from a teacher who
didn’t care whether she existed.

Yazzie grew concerned, and stared
me down, as she often did. I hated it because it felt as though she
could read my mind. At least she hadn’t brought her pet crow to
school today. Sometimes she did, and
it
stared me down, too.

“No,” Yazzie mused. “No coyotes.” Her eyes snapped
over to Kelsey, for the first time today. “Why do you ask, miss,
uhm...?”

“Conner. I’m Kelsey Conner. I’ve been in your class
for four months.”

“What about the coyotes?” asked Yazzie.

“There are no coyotes in your class,” said Kelsey,
obnoxiously.

“Maria’s dream, I meant,” said
Yazzie, missing the humor.

Kelsey shrugged, and didn’t seem
at all uncomfortable the way I did. “Maria’s been having a
recurring nightmare since her car accident Friday, about coyotes
eating her for lunch.”

“More like dinner,” I said, trying to lighten the
mood. It didn’t work. Yazzie’s eyes burned through me again.

“That must be why your energy is off,” she told me
thoughtfully. “It makes sense.”

“I’m just tired. And cold. Sick of the snow.”

“No, it’s not that.” She frowned at me, and felt my
forehead the way a mother might if you told her you wanted to stay
home from school sick. “There’s something else. Something in your
etheric auric body feels agitated. You have brown in your aura for
the first time. Are you confused about something? It feels tangled
and unruly.”

“Nothing a little heavy-duty conditioner can’t
cure,” deadpanned Kelsey.

“Conner, hush,” said Yazzie, holding up a hand to
block her view of Kelsey altogether. “This is serious.”

“Wow! You know my name!”

“I’m fine,” I insisted to Yazzie. I didn’t know what
an etheric auric body was, and did not feel like finding out.

“My
dream,” Yazzie told me, her eyes widening. “I’ve only now
remembered it. You were with Masewa, in the Cochiti story of the
Arrow Boy.”

“Sounds kinky,” said Kelsey.

“Stop,” I said to Kelsey.

Yazzie instantly, crazily, switched moods, perking
up and traipsing with girlish glee back toward her desk.

“We’ve got a fascinating topic
today, Maria,” she called out to me. “
Sin
. You think it’ll go over well
with high school kids?”

“Abso-diddly-lutely,” said Kelsey.

I said nothing because I was horrified to be singled
out again, and was conscious of the sympathetic snickers and rolled
eyes of my classmates.

Soon, all 14 students in the class were seated.
Yazzie forgot to take attendance, as usual, and immediately began
instead to “read the energy” of the room, floating on the balls of
her feet between the rows of desks, chanting to herself, before
closing the shades on the windows, lowering the overhead lights,
firing up the projector, and flipping hastily through the slides
until she landed on one she liked. Most of her classes were of this
type, random slides and lectures on whatever she liked at the
moment, with a flexible chronological thread connecting them.

“Class,” she said, “I’d like you
to take a look at this oil painting. It’s pretty famous, some of
you might be familiar with it if you’ve been reading ahead. The
title of this painting - which is done on three wood panels and
which hangs in the National Art Museum of Antiquities in Lisbon,
Portugal - is, and you might want to jot this down,
The Temptation of St. Anthony
.”

I inhaled sharply at this,
remembering the little laminated prayer card Demetrio had given me
at the cafe. I’d stuffed it into the side pocket of my backpack. I
dug for it now, pulled it out and checked the name. Yep.
Saint Anthony of the Desert
. I slid it over to Kelsey, who responded with a surprised
face that seemed to echo my sense that it was a strange
coincidence.

“That’s a little weird,” she whispered.

“This is like the third thing like this that’s
happened since the crash,” I whispered back.

“Girls,” said Yazzie, looking at us. “Is there
something you wish to contribute to our discussion?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, conditioned to use the
honorific by my somewhat formal mother.

“Then may I continue without your help?” asked
Yazzie. “And don’t ma’am me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Kelsey, mocking me.

“The artist,” continued Yazzie, ignoring Kelsey as
usual, her eyes on fire with passion for art, “is Hieronymus Bosch.
You might recall from previous discussions we’ve had that Bosch was
a Dutch painter who worked in the 1400s and 1500s.

“Bosch often worked in a form known as the triptych,
which is a painting in three panels, like the one we observe here
now. The middle panel is usually the largest, with the side panels
being smaller and related. It was a popular form for religious
painters in the Middle Ages in Europe, given the obvious reference
to the holy trinity. Of the painters from that time who used this
form, Bosch is the best known.

“Now, it might surprise some of you here to know
that yours is not the first generation to be concerned with sex and
violence. A closer look at this painting reveals some pretty racy,
horrible things. The panel on the left shows lots of physical pain
and punishment. The one in the center is a black mass, while on the
right we have the temptations and sins of food and sex.”

A few of my classmates giggled about this.

“The Bosch is notable,” Yazzie continued, “because
like many of his paintings, it focused on the corruptible nature of
human beings, and replaced cheerier earlier images of religious
figures with highly troubling, even disturbing, images of the
people those figures sought to save from themselves.

“The left wing of the painting is the Flight and
Failure of St. Anthony. Here we see a desert, and demons within in.
Horrible flying fish and strange monsters engaged in hideous acts.
This all seems surreal to us now, but back then the Flemish told
folk tales that featured all of these creatures, and they would
have been as familiar to the average person then as stories about
La Llorona are to New Mexicans today.”

Kelsey slid a piece of paper to
me, with writing on it.
I think it’s a
sign that you need to apologize to the sexy gang-banger for
treating him like crap.

I kept my eyes on the slide, and
scribbled back as discreetly as I could:
I
don’t have any way to reach him. And he’s not sexy, though you’re
probably right about Logan trying to one-up him. He’s very
competitive.
Which, I added to myself, was
a good quality in a boy or man.

Kelsey responded by removing her iPhone from her
jacket pocket, and Googling “Demetrio” and “Golden, NM”. I rolled
my eyes at her in annoyance, and returned my attention to Yazzie’s
lecture.

“The center panel tells of the
saint’s actual temptation. Here again we see the flying ships and
monsters, almost a sort of premonition of airplanes and flying
machines. We see a village burning, people trapped and tortured.
And in the middle of it all we see the saint himself, in a burst of
light amid the darkness. The right wing, St. Anthony in meditation,
also shows horrible things, stabbings, misery, naked women, but it
also shows us a figure in the middle of it all, with a book in his
hands, contemplating sorrowfully the sinful nature of his fellow
man, removed from it but still surrounded by it, defined by it, his
face showing that he is horribly, tragically
aware
.”

I looked closely at the painting, and felt goose
bumps rise on my arms and legs. I didn’t know why, exactly, only
that the piece moved me - and almost to tears. I loved art, and
painting, but both of my parents thought of it as a hobby, not a
way to make a living. In Yazzie’s classes, I always felt like art
was more than a hobby, though I’d never admit this to anyone I
respected.

Kelsey touched my arm, and when she had my
attention, pointed to the screen on her iPhone. It was a white
pages listing for a Demetrio X. Vigil, in Golden, New Mexico, a
phone number and street address.

“Sexy gangsta,” she whispered, proud of herself.

I nodded, amazed that she’d found
it, but I was
not
about to agree to his obvious and unsettling sexiness - not
openly, anyway. Kelsey copied the information down on the sheet of
paper we were using to communicate, folded it up, and stuffed it in
the pocket of my jacket.

“At least get the dude a thank-you card,” she
whispered in my ear. “Emily Post would approve of that.”

I tried to ignore the way my heart raced at the
thought of calling Demetrio, hearing his voice again, maybe even
seeing him again. There was no reason to be nervous, I reasoned. It
must have been that I associated him with the crash, and all the
drama of it. Maybe, I reasoned, it was like when you’re kidnapped
and end up falling for you captor just because you’re dependent
upon him for your survival the way a baby is dependent upon its
mother. By that logic, we all loved our parents only because they
were our original captors. Made sense.

Yazzie carried on. “The story of St. Anthony’s
temptation has been a ripe subject for artists and writers for a
long time. The basic story, for those of us who are not familiar
with it, is that St. Anthony the Great made a lonely trip through
the Egyptian desert, where he was tempted by many sinful things but
through sheer will power and conscience, was able to transcend
them. This idea that fallible human beings are able to rise above
their own banal nature, to aspire to greater things and greater
beauty in spite of their cravings, lusts, desires and wants, is an
enduring theme.

“You see this same mythology play out in works by
painter Salvador Dali, composer Paul Hindemith, Michelangelo. The
famous French author Gustave Flaubert -”

“Ooh! Gussie Flubber,” whispered Kelsey, who thought
calling Flaubert by this name was high comedy.

Yazzie continue, “...who many of you will be reading
and discussing this year or next, wrote a novel about the
temptation of St. Anthony, and it is said to be his best work, a
book that took him his entire life to complete.

“It’s all there - the seven deadly sins, martyrdom,
god, science, lust, death, monsters. And transcendence through
self-denial and moral self-control. Incredible transcendence,
through self-imposed isolation. Human beings have an unquenchable
thirst for hope in the face of despair, for the faith that no
matter how bad things get, there will always be a way to pull
ourselves back toward the good, the just, and the right.”

Yazzie paused now, as she often did, and hummed a
few notes of a melody that only she knew. She had explained to us
that this was her way of connecting with her spirit guides on a
higher plane. We’d grown used to it, and simply waited for her to
flutter back to earth and resume her professorial duties.

Yazzie stared dreamily at the painting in silence
for a moment, then carried on.

“As dreary and frightening as this Bosch is at first
glance, it is ultimately a work of a man I believe had great hope
for people, and for our ability to rise above greed, avarice, sin.
It is an optimistic painting. Now, let’s hear what you think. I
always love hearing your thoughts. This is a great group, with
curious minds. Starting with the left panel, and the lower left
corner. We see something hatching from an egg. What might this
mean?”

And so the discussion with the class began.
Thirty-five minutes later the bell rang. Kelsey and I were about to
leave when Yazzie called me back.

“Yes?” I asked, standing at the side of her desk.
Kelsey waited for me in the hall.

Yazzie burrowed through a desk drawer, and tugged
out a yellowed, half-torn sheet of paper with pale photocopied text
on it. Most of her notes looked like this. She handed it to me.

“Before I forget, I wanted you to read this when you
have a moment. I would suggest you read it soon. Today. But I know
how you girls are with your time. It’s busy.”

I looked at the paper. It was a Cochiti Indian myth.
Yazzie was forever handing me things like this, myths from the 19
Indian Pueblos of the Rio Grande River valley in New Mexico, and I
had long ago stopped reading them too carefully because most of
them didn’t make any kind of sense to me.