by Selva Almada
That afternoon, the Preacher spoke of choosing Christ over everything, and deciding to change the rest of one’s life. A lot of it went over the boy’s head: he was still little; there were words he didn’t know. But it made a deep impression on him: the sermon, the way the words were arranged, and the different effects they had on the audience.
For example, a woman came running from the back and threw herself face down in the mud of the riverbank, reaching out to the Preacher’s feet and crawling up to kiss them.
A man cried out that Jesus was coming into his heart; he could feel a burning inside him, as if he were having a heart attack. He tore off his shirt and started spinning around with his arms outstretched, like a human windmill, striking whatever came into his range, whirling and shouting: “Jesus has taken me! Praise him!”
An old man who seemed to have seen it all before began to shout that the Preacher was a liar, a false prophet, and that he could prove it. But that was all he got to say, because he was attacked by a group of believers, including women, who beat him with their purses or whatever they happened to be holding.
After all those strange outbursts, the Preacher called the faithful to order and addressed himself to those who were not yet saved but ready to welcome Christ into their hearts. He asked them to form a line. A group, no doubt made up of his assistants, began to sing beautiful songs while marshaling the crowd.
He saw that his mother had joined the line.
When everything was ready, the Preacher retraced his steps, walking back into the river until it was up to his waist. Suddenly, the boy felt his feet go into the water and he was afraid. He looked for his mother again, but this time he couldn’t see her in that mass of heads lined up one behind the other. He began to struggle and kick at the Preacher’s bony hips. The man told him, softly, to keep still, then gripped him under the arms and held him aloft. Up in the air, he kept flailing his limbs and his eyes filled with tears. The next thing he knew, his whole body was plunged into the dense, black water. All he could do was shut his mouth and hold his breath. It could only have lasted a couple of seconds, but still, in that time, he thought he would die. And then, all at once, he was out again, coughing and spitting. Someone took him and carried him to the beach. He was left lying face up on the dirty sand that smelled of rotten fish, looking at the leaden sky, his clothes soaked and his body chilled, a stream of warm piss running over his legs.
Other bodies started dropping beside him, soaking wet, with their hair slicked down. Some just lay there; others sat up and wrapped their arms around their knees, shivering and singing.
He got up and started walking through the crowd. They all looked like the survivors of a shipwreck. Finally, he found his mother, coming out of the river with the help of two women, coughing and pale; she was scared of the water.
He ran to her and threw his arms around her waist.
14
Tapioca crawled into the shell of a car. He felt the springs sticking into his back and shifted on the seat until he was comfortable. Whenever he wanted to be alone and think about things, he got in among the wrecks. It was a habit that went back to his first days there. When he was ashamed to let the Gringo see him crying because he missed his mother, he would hide in one of the old cars. Sometimes not even the dogs could find him.
Now he wanted to think about everything the Reverend had said. Not all of it was new to him: when he was little, his mother had told him about God and the angels; she had even taught him some prayers, which he’d forgotten since. In the room where they slept, they had a picture of La Difunta Correa, with a light inside, and at night his mother would switch it on so he wouldn’t be afraid of the dark.
Over the years he had often thought of that picture. When he first came to live with the Gringo, he would shut his eyes, alone in his bed, and the memory of that little image would appear, with its tiny light no brighter than a firefly. It was like having his mother there, because La Difunta was a mother too; she had a baby attached to her breast; she was already dead but the milk kept coming to feed her little child. Years later, at the beginning of his adolescence, the image came back to him again, but without the child: the woman stretched out on the ground with her breasts exposed. Afterward, he felt dirty and full of shame.
It might not have been as clear or precise in Tapioca’s mind as what the Reverend had said, but for some time now he had been feeling something similar. He couldn’t explain it and would never have dared to tell anyone, but he could often hear a voice. It wasn’t coming from outside. And it wasn’t just in his head. It was a voice that seemed to surge up from his whole body. He couldn’t make out what it said, but every time it happened he felt comforted.
Thinking things over now, he realized that it was a voice like the Reverend’s, filling him with confidence and something else he couldn’t yet name. Was it possible that Pearson had been speaking to him from a distance, sending a message to say he was coming, on those nights when Tapioca couldn’t sleep, and was overcome, as he lay there in the dark, by a feeling of peace and plenitude?
He didn’t know. After hearing that nocturnal voice, he would wake up in the grip of an inexplicable happiness. He had never mentioned any of this to the Gringo. His boss might not have understood, but the real reason the boy kept quiet was that he felt he had something of his own for once. It frightened him sometimes, too. Something so big and powerful and impossible to explain: What was he meant do with it?
The Reverend had ended up there for a reason. He had come to help. Tapioca could tell him his secret.
He found himself wishing the Gringo would never fix the car, so that the man and his daughter would stay with them forever. What would become of him when they left? He wasn’t a little kid anymore; he wasn’t going to run after their car and howl, like he did when the truck took his mother away.
“Take me for a spin?”
Leni’s voice startled him. He saw the girl’s head appear on the passenger side of the car. He felt the blood rushing to his face, as if he had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Without waiting for an invitation, she crouched down and eased herself onto the busted-up seat. Her knees were level with her chest.
Two dogs crawled in through the gap where the rear windshield had been and settled down on what was left of the back seat.
Soft yellow grass grew under the chassis. Leni took off her shoes and plunged her feet into that cool mat.
Around the frame of the front windshield, there were still some pieces of shattered glass. The wipers were suspended in midair. They looked like the antennae of a giant insect whose head was hidden under the hood.
There were other wrecked cars in front of them, some in worse shape than the one they were in. Leni felt like they were stuck in a traffic jam of phantom cars, on a highway leading straight to hell.
She told Tapioca, but he wasn’t amused.
“I wouldn’t like to go to hell,” he said seriously.
“Where would you like to go then?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Heaven, maybe. What you said at the table, about heaven, it sounds like a beautiful place, doesn’t it?”
Leni stifled a giggle.
“But you have to be dead before you can go to heaven. Do you really want to die?”
“No. First I’d like to see my mother.”
“Where is she?”
“In Rosario.”
“Why don’t you go and see her? Rosario’s not that far from here.”
“I don’t know where she lives. Do you know Rosario?”
“Yes. My father and I go there sometimes.”
“Is it big?”
“Sure is. A big city, with tall buildings and lots of people.”
Tapioca rested his arms on the steering wheel. It seemed to Leni that he had grown sad; maybe he was thinking that he’d never be able to find his mother in such a big place. She thought about telling him that she too had lost her mother, to comfort him, but her father wouldn’t have
liked that, and it would have made her sad as well.
“Do you know what happened to this car?” she asked, to change the subject.
“Yes, a head-on smash on the highway, with another car. The other one crumpled up like an accordion, you should have seen it. It was brand-new. They make them out of plastic these days. This one wasn’t so badly damaged because it’s an old model; they’re tougher.”
“And did someone die?”
“I don’t know. They might have been lucky.” Tapioca paused. “If someone dies suddenly, in an accident, say, do they go straight to heaven?”
“I guess so, if they were good.”
The two of them sat there in silence. Leni rested her arm on the window frame and leaned back in the seat. She could feel the springs pressing into the sweaty skin of her back. She closed her eyes.
One day she would get in a car and leave it all behind for good. Her father, the church, the hotels. She might not even look for her mother. She would just drive straight ahead, following the black ribbon of asphalt, putting it all behind her forever.
15
The Reverend stopped walking and wiped his neck and chest with his handkerchief. The wind, blowing hot as the Devil’s breath, gave no relief at all. He sat down on the roadside embankment. Dry grass stems pushed through the fabric of his trousers and into his soft flesh. He stretched out his legs and rested his hands on the ground.
With Tapioca, everything would be different. The Reverend would not abandon the boy as the Preacher had abandoned him. He would be a true guide, forging the boy’s character in accordance with the will of Christ, not the will of the church.
Over the years, he had sown the seed in the souls of many men. Good men like Pastor Zack, who did their best, which was often far more than he had imagined they could do. But they were all men with a past, and each one had his weaknesses. Day after day, the Reverend knew, they had to struggle against temptation. With Christ’s help, they resisted, and carried on, but everything always seemed to be hanging by a thread.
He loved those men, God bless them; without their help, his work could not have prospered. He had gone behind the church’s back and trained his own pastors. He had sought them out in places that were barely marked on the map, where nobody else dared to venture, in the small communities forgotten by the government and organized religion.
He had taken those men from their human misery and raised them up to Christ. He trusted them, but he remembered where they came from. They had all been stray sheep, in the grip of sin; each one of them had been through his own personal hell on earth. Jesus was running in their veins now. Their minds, their hearts, and their hands were clean. They were bearers of Christ’s word and they knew their responsibilities. But whoever has been tempted once by the Devil can fall back into temptation. Sin is a tumor whose growth can be slowed; it can even be cut out. But once it has colonized a body, there is always a chance that it has left a little root somewhere, waiting to grow again when conditions are right.
Tapioca, on the other hand, was as clean as a newborn child; all his pores were open, ready to take Jesus in and breathe him out again.
Together they would turn the Reverend’s work, which was still just the sketch of a long-cherished dream, into something concrete and monumental.
Tapioca, José, would not be his successor, but what the Reverend had failed to become. Because Reverend Pearson had a past too, as he knew better than anyone else, and in that past there were mistakes, and those mistakes came back now and then to haunt him like a vague but persistent cloud of buzzing flies. There had been no Reverend Pearson to guide him. He had fashioned himself as best he could. But the boy would have him. With Reverend Pearson on one side and Christ on the other, José would be invincible.
With difficulty, he got to his feet. He brushed the earth and dry grass stems from his trousers and his hands. He needed a bath and clean clothes and a soft bed. But there would be time for that, later on. Now he had to convince Brauer to let him take the boy with them to Castelli. Just a couple of days, he would say, and then I’ll bring him back. He would find some way to bring the mechanic around.
A couple of days would be enough to show the boy the magnificent destiny that Christ had in store for him.
This is the moment to change your lives forever. Many of you, I’m sure, go to bed each night thinking: Tomorrow it will all be different; starting from tomorrow, I’m going to take the bull by the horns, I’m going to do all those things I’ve been putting off for years. Tomorrow, yes, tomorrow I’ll change the course of my life. Tomorrow I’m going to fix the window that has been broken for years now, letting in the cold and rain in winter, and in summer the heat and the flies. Tomorrow I’m going to weed the yard and plant seeds so we’ll have vegetables to eat this year. Tomorrow I’m going to leave this man I have for a husband, who does nothing but abuse me and my children. Tomorrow I’m going to make peace with my neighbor; we haven’t spoken for decades, and I can’t even remember why we fought. Tomorrow I’ll look for a better job, and find one. Tomorrow I’m going to stop drinking. Tomorrow. In the evening, we are all optimists. We think that when the light of a new day fills the sky above us, we will be able to change everything and begin afresh. But the next morning we wake up exhausted, tired before we start the day, and we leave it all to tomorrow again. And tomorrow is no longer twenty-four hours long. Tomorrow ends up being years and years of the same misery.
I say to you: Tomorrow is now.
Why let time pass, winter with its frosts, summer with its storms? Why keep watching life go by from the edge of the road? We are not cattle watching it all from behind a fence, waiting for the truck to come and take us to the slaughterhouse.
We are people who can think, feel, and choose our own destiny. All of you can change the world.
You might be thinking: Reverend, my back is broken from working so hard to scrape a bit of money together and feed my family. Or: Reverend, I have grown old from bearing so many children, from so much sweat and strain. Or: Reverend, I am ill and I can’t even look after myself. Reverend Pearson is a fool; what he’s asking us to do is impossible, that’s what you might be saying to yourselves. The Reverend comes here and talks to us and fills us with hope, and then he goes off and leaves us alone and we have to deal with our lives.
And that’s where you’re wrong. You’re not alone. You will never be alone if you have Christ in your heart. You’ll never be tired or ill again if you take Christ with you. Christ is the best vitamin you can give your body. Let Christ live in you and you’ll have strength and energy and the power to change the direction of your life.
Together we are going to change the world. Together we are going to make the earth a fairer place where the last will be first. And we’re not going to wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow is today. Today is the big day. Today is the day to make the big decision in your life.
Open your hearts and let Christ in!
Open your minds and let his word in!
Open your eyes and see the wonderful life that begins today, here, right now, for all of you, God bless you!
16
The reddish-yellow dog sat up suddenly on his hind legs. He had spent the whole day lying in a pit dug early that morning. Cool at first, the hole had gradually warmed up under his sprawling body.
Yellow was a greyhound cross, with the elegance, the height, the vigor, and the quick, slender legs of that breed. From his mother’s or his father’s side he had inherited a coat of coarse, longish yellow fur and a little beard that covered the end of his muzzle and gave him the air of a Russian general. And he was sometimes called Ruski, but only because of the color of his fur. Decades and decades of interbreeding had perfected his sensitivity. Or perhaps it was unique to him, an individual trait, why not? Why shouldn’t animals have them too? He was, in any case, a particularly sensitive dog.
Although he had barely used his muscles, lying still all day, the blood that went on coursing through his body had made the pit
so hot not even the fleas could stand it anymore: hopping like bears on a plate of hot iron, they had quit this dog for another, or the dirt, where they lay in wait for a more amenable host to come along.
But it wasn’t the fleas deserting him that made Yellow sit up suddenly. Something else had roused him from his dry, hot drowsiness and brought him back into the world of the living.
Yellow’s caramel-colored eyes were full of sleep, clouded still by a fine film that distorted his vision. But he didn’t need his vision now.
Without shifting from the pit, he raised his head slightly. Two or three times, in rapid succession, the sensitive nostrils at the tip of his pointed snout sampled the air. He lowered his head, waited a moment, and then began sniffing again.
That smell was many smells together. Smells that came from far away, which had to be teased apart, identified, and recombined in order to reveal what it was, that smell made up of mixtures.
There was the smell of the depths of the forest. Not its heart but something much deeper, the bowels, you might say. The smell of the earth’s dampness under the excrement of animals, the microcosm seething there beneath the dung: tiny seeds, minuscule insects, and blue scorpions, the lords and masters of that little dark plot.
The smell of feathers rotting in abandoned nests, along with sticks and leaves and animal fur.
The woody smell of a tree struck by lightning and burnt to the core, invaded by tunneling grubs and termites, and woodpeckers puncturing the dead bark to eat any living thing they could find.
The smell of big mammals: honey bears, foxes, pampas cats; in heat, or giving birth, or rotted down to skeletons.
From beyond the forest, out on the plain, the smell of the anthills.
The smell of musty shacks, full of vinchuca bugs. The smell of smoke from crackling fires under the eaves, and the smell of the food being cooked on them. The smell of the cakes of soap that women use for washing clothes. The smell of wet clothes drying on the line.