• • •
As a farmer resigned to the even-handedness of God will accept the seasons as they come, so the cura of Ibarra accommodated himself to the succession of priests who were delegated by the bishop to assist him. After two years Padre Raúl was succeeded by Padre Ignacio.
“What is His Excellency thinking of?” the cura said to his aunt and housekeeper, Paulita, as she set a third place for midday dinner. “He has sent us a man who would ransom his soul for a pullet cooked in cream and butter.”
“A servant of the church who satisfies his appetites in good conscience,” said Paulita, and neither she nor her nephew spoke of Padre Ignacio’s overnight stops at the rancho of La Emancipación. The assistant priest traveled to this spot once a week to celebrate mass in a lavender-domed chapel that stood intact among the outbuildings of a gutted hacienda and cast its shadow over the adobe huts crowding the broken walls.
To reach La Emancipación where it lay prostrate on the bank of a dry stream bed, Padre Ignacio borrowed the cura’s Dodge pickup truck. But he seldom returned to Ibarra the same night, and the cura and his aunt and their neighbors would hear the old Dodge at sunrise, bouncing over the ruts and hitting loose stones on the washed-out street that led down to the church.
The cura and Paulita did not remark on this to each other, but if they had they would have said, “It is all for the best that Padre Ignacio has discovered a girl in La Emancipación rather than in this town. Rather than Paz Acosta, for instance.” And they would have conjured up in their minds the image of Paz, who had burst into beauty at twelve, borne an infant at thirteen, and now at fourteen, still single and radiant, sat in the front row at mass.
Soon after Padre Ignacio’s arrival the cura took him to meet the Americans.
“The señor Everton is the operator of the Malagueña mine,” he explained to the other priest, “and a contributor to the restoration of the old monastery, ransacked by revolutionaries during the war of 1910.”
But Padre Ignacio was already inspecting the North Americans’ house. He discovered six portraits of holy apostles and a dozen representations of saints and martyrs painted on tin that was already rusting through. In addition to these things he noticed on a red leather chest a wooden religious figure, ravaged irreversibly by time and the infestations of termites.
“So you are North American Catholics,” said Padre Ignacio, “come to live in a Catholic country.”
“No, we are not,” said Richard.
“We are nothing,” said his wife, and Padre Ignacio turned the two black buttons of his eyes upon this woman so quick to deny the fact of her own existence, the existence of her husband, and of that deity through whose grace they lived and breathed in spite of themselves.
Beyond the window of the sala where they took their refreshments was a rock wall and in this wall a stone plaque, carved in low relief, of the Virgin and Child.
“My favorite,” said Sara, her eyes following Padre Ignacio’s glance.
There is much to be explained here, the new assistant said to himself, and he held out his glass for more rum.
That evening at supper the cura said to the new priest, “These two Americans are confirmed in their agnosticism. To them purgatory and hell hold no threats and paradise no promise.” Then he said, “But think of this. Better heretics than Baptists.”
Padre Ignacio served Ibarra from one spring to the next, although toward the end of his mission it seemed that he spent more time in La Emancipación, on the outer margin of the parish, than he did in its center. Frequently he would be off and away in the pickup truck for days and nights at a time. Then the cura had to make his rounds alone from the church to the nuns’ school to the monastery chapel, and sometimes to the graveyard, with the uneven hem of his habit dragging in the dust and collecting weeds.
When Padre Ignacio’s single year in Ibarra was almost up, a scandal occurred. Occurred and became known, though no one in Ibarra could have made clear to an outsider how news could travel in less than an hour over twenty kilometers of harsh countryside where the road was lost to cactus and mesquite more often than not.
At eleven o’clock in the morning Padre Ignacio was seen to alight from a bus in the plaza. By twelve o’clock there was nothing left to hide.
It turned out that the padre, whose ruddy face and stout form had been absent from Ibarra for half a week, had suffered an accident in the cura’s Dodge. At some time during the previous night the assistant priest had attempted to drive without lights across the dry arroyo that bordered La Emancipación, spun his wheels in the sand, and impaled the truck on a pointed rock that immediately pierced the oil pan. There was no remedy but for Padre Ignacio to seek help in the darkened settlement. After knocking on a dozen doors he found two mules, one belonging to a maguey farmer, the other to the blacksmith. By the time the two owners had assembled this team and led it to the truck, the milky light of dawn had begun to reveal the outlines of everything—hilltops, cornstalks, and the animals’ morose faces. This light made it easy to hitch the mules to the Dodge. Also to see its occupant, María de la Luz, who was the farmer’s niece and the blacksmith’s goddaughter.
“Why did not this Marilú run away to hide?” asked the people of Ibarra as soon as they heard the news. “And thus protect the reputation of the padre.”
“He surely must have told her where to hide,” they said. “Or led her to the hiding place himself. But this Marilú, in her arrogance, chose to defy the very man who might have saved her soul.”
It took one month to complete the repairs to the pickup truck and during all that time the cura wore out his shoes trudging the rough lanes of Ibarra. As for Padre Ignacio, he was granted a vacation and at the end of this vacation was called to the parish of Todos Santos, one hundred kilometers away. To the people of Ibarra this place might as well have been situated on the map of another country.
• • •
Within a month, the bishop sent the cura an assistant priest so old and frail that he seemed to be standing at the very threshold of heaven.
When the cura first brought him to visit, Padre Javier had sat silently on the Evertons’ porch no more than five minutes when a hound, separated by two or three pounds from being a skeleton, trotted up to him, sniffed the skirt of his habit, and dropped at his feet. At first it appeared that the dog had come to this spot to die. He lay on one side with a single fang protruding from his mouth, his legs still bent in pairs as if he had been struck down in the middle of a race.
“Whose dog is that?” said Sara. “It needs a bath, for mange.”
But none of them, the new padre, the cura, or Richard, could identify the hound.
Padre Javier was so old that it seemed he might decide at any moment to carry his body about with him no longer and discard it wherever he happened to be. On his cot at night perhaps, or at noon on the stones in front of the altar. Or here this afternoon on the chair where he sat, gazing at who-knows-what horizons beyond the actual horizon of mesas, hills, and mountains that was visible to the rest of them. Padre Javier had white hair which strayed in wisps and eyes so pale that the original color could only be guessed at. Had they once been hazel, brown, or gray? Now they were the color of wood smoke seen from so far away that no one could tell whether laurel was burning, or oak, or pine.
When it was time to go and Padre Javier stood up, the hound stood up, too, and walked close to the old man’s heels down the drive. Halfway to the gate the two priests were intercepted by another dog, as tall as a mastiff, as gaunt as a coyote.
“That’s the tax collector’s Duque,” said Richard. “We’re about to see a fight.”
But El Duque merely fell in next to the hound, and the two animals followed Padre Javier side by side like two cardinals behind the pope.
“His Excellency the Bishop has sent us another mouth to feed,” said the cura’s aunt, “and two hands so frail that they c
annot drive your truck nor toll the bells for mass. And tell me if you can why the padre carries his plate of food with him from the table to his room.”
Then the people of Ibarra began to notice that, in addition to the street mongrels, more and more of the dogs that had masters were chewing through ropes and clawing footholds in adobe walls to be with Padre Javier. First they saw El Coronel, the grocer’s watchdog, escape through the storeroom window to run after the old priest, then La Mariposa, the baker’s bitch, then El Bandido, who lived under the counter of the post office, and then five others all named Lobo because they looked like wolves.
The Evertons, awake at six to meet the morning train in Concepción, caught sight of Padre Javier striding toward the abandoned monastery of Tepozán as if he were a much younger man. Eleven dogs accompanied him in a dignified manner.
“Why does he spend so much time at the monastery?” the Evertons asked each other. “Masses are said there no more than once a month.”
The cura, posing the same question to himself, drove up one day to find out. Six enormous ash trees shaded the courtyard that was bordered on one side by a stone balustrade, on another by the ruined and roofless monastic cells, and on the third by the chapel that had survived the Revolution. On the steps outside lay a dozen dogs of variously mixed breeds. A few lifted their heads to watch the parish priest open the door a crack, look in from the threshold, close the door again, and drive away.
“He goes to El Tepozán to pray,” the cura told his aunt. “The animals are left outside.”
But some old women started to pray there, too, perhaps because they remembered all over again how Christ, soon after the Conquest, had appeared in a tree at that spot and said, “Build a chapel for me here.” Or perhaps they were curious to know if Padre Javier prayed out loud and, if so, to discover the subject of his prayer.
These old women came through the heavy door one by one and each gave it a push behind her. But their arms were like dry sticks and their fingers like brittle twigs, and by the time three or four had entered the door would be standing ajar.
So the animals who had waited outside until now began to enter the chapel and, after they had examined the place, made themselves at home there. They lay under the pews near the altar where the padre knelt or sometimes stretched themselves out on the closest benches or curled up against the wall under the statue of María la Dolorosa or the statue of María la Purísima. When the old priest left the sanctuary they paced respectfully behind him without slashing with their teeth at one another or balancing on three legs to scratch at fleas.
Only a month had passed since the government veterinarian last visited Ibarra to inoculate the village dogs against rabies. “Now there’s nothing to worry about,” Sara said to her husband.
“Unless he missed a few,” said Richard, and they remembered the scene on the baseball field, the doctor with his needle, the animals struggling against pieces of rope, lengths of wire, and an occasional leather belt.
“I must have the name of the dog,” said the doctor, whose superb courage, like a suit of chain mail, protected him from mortal wounds.
And many dogs, nameless until this moment, were christened on the spot. El Capitán became their name, or El Conejo, or La Paloma. In those cases where nothing else came to mind they were pronounced to be El Lobo or La Loba.
On that day eighty-four dogs were immunized against rabies. And for every animal the owner was given a metal tag to attach to the collar he did not intend to buy.
One summer day after a rainstorm Sara Everton walked up the road, under the washed leaves of the ash trees, past the row of weather-streaked cells, and into the chapel of Tepozán. Through a window shaped like a rose and paned with clear glass, a column of sunlight slanted down on Padre Javier. Except for the dogs he was alone, without the usual congregation of midwives and crones. Although he spoke audibly, the American woman could not separate one word from another.
That evening she questioned Lourdes. “For whom is Father Javier praying?”
“For the souls of all Catholics living and the repose of all Catholics dead.”
“There were twelve dogs in the chapel, occupying the seats closest to the altar. Remedios Acosta’s Tigre was in the front row.”
Lourdes was slicing an onion in the palm of her hand. “Padre Javier has looked so long in the direction of God that he has ceased to notice what is around him.”
But the cura found out that even the Americans, who attached no importance to the customs of the church, were talking about the motley company that padded everywhere after the old priest and realized that the matter must be put before the bishop in Concepción.
“I will try to see His Excellency next Monday morning,” the cura told his aunt.
“I believe those animals are eating the food I cook,” said Paulita.
The events of that weekend, however, made it unnecessary for the parish priest to call upon the bishop. A few days earlier the potter’s cousin had moved his family to Ibarra. Besides his wife he brought five children, a few chickens, a goat, and a listless dog with yellow teeth and one tattered ear. This dog was already sick but on Friday he went mad; and before he could be cornered and caught he bit two of the inoculated dogs and one who had not been present on the baseball field, a liver-spotted mongrel who was one of Padre Javier’s Lobos.
This Lobo was not among the animals that trailed after the old padre to Tepozán on Sunday. But Padre Javier had not been long on his knees or the dogs settled down on the pews before the frenzied animal burst through the door of the chapel with half the men of Ibarra after him waving axes and clubs. Here at the altar, under the unfocused stares of the two Marys, this Lobo sank his teeth into the bowed shoulder of the priest.
To everyone’s astonishment, Padre Javier did not die of the savage attack. The cura, without wasting a second, drove the old man to the city hospital of La Merced, where Padre Javier, in spite of his age, survived not only the shock of the assault but the agony of the treatment that followed.
After the violence in the monastery all the people of Ibarra prayed for Padre Javier. But the old priest was never seen to pray again, neither in the hospital of La Merced, nor later on in the hospice where he lived out the short span of the rest of his days.
“On whose behalf was the padre’s last prayer in the chapel of Tepozán?” the people of Ibarra asked one another.
But it was impossible to know whether Padre Javier had prayed on that day for believers or heretics, blasphemers or saints. Or whether he prayed then, or had ever prayed, for those creatures who run across the latitudes and down the longitudes of earth, bent on errands of their own, unsuspecting of God.
7
THE RED TAXI
Ibarra was a town of a hundred burros, half as many bicycles, one daily bus, and two automobiles. One of these cars belonged to the Evertons, the other to a former mayor. But the mayor set his Studebaker up on blocks outside his door after the tires and some engine parts were stolen.
The cura made the rounds of his parish in a Dodge pickup and the Malagueña mine had a pickup, too, as well as the ore truck that jolted down the mountain once a week with its load of dripping concentrates and climbed back empty a day later.
Except for the drivers and passengers of these vehicles, everyone here traveled from one place to another on the bus, or on a bicycle or burro, or on foot. And until Chuy Santos conceived his plan, no one in Ibarra understood that what the village had lacked was a taxi.
• • •
Chuy Santos was not the sort of man who would kill his two best friends in order to own a car. The part in his hair was too straight, his glance was too direct, and his voice was the voice of an archangel.
On Christmas, Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and his saint’s day Chuy attended mass in the parish church of Ibarra, having confessed the previous day to his transgressions of the intervening months.
The cura, on his side of the curtained screen, listened absentmindedly to Chuy’s accounts of lust and avarice and said to himself, This man is Jesús Santos Larin, who should have been singled out as a boy and guided to the seminary. Such a voice should properly be an instrument of God. At the end of the confession the priest recovered himself and told Chuy to sin no more.
When the idea first came to Jesús Santos that he might establish a taxi service between the village of Ibarra and Concepción, he was the proprietor of a side-street café of four tables and twelve chairs. Here his wife knelt every morning to scrub the floor with a fiber brush while her hair fell over her shoulders into the greasy suds. Then she would cook tripe on a stove in the corner and set out twelve earthenware plates as if they might attract twelve diners.
Chuy did not confide to his wife his ambition to own a taxi. He only said, “This café might as well be situated at the entrance to the graveyard.” Or occasionally, “I should have married a beautiful woman or a good cook, one or the other.”
• • •
But when Chuy made these complaints he had already been to Concepción to visit a certain weedy piece of ground that was partly a used-car lot and partly a junkyard. He had only to walk two minutes along the ruts, stepping around rusty axles and inserting himself between crushed fenders, before he discovered the car that was to be his. It was a twelve-year-old Volkswagen with patched tires and a windshield so splintered that through it the sky and two huisache trees in full yellow flower and all the accumulated wreckage surrounding it appeared as fragments of precious gems. Chuy pulled open a door that hung loose from its hinges, sat behind the steering wheel between two coiling springs, and leaned from left to right. This motion caused the appearance and disappearance before his eyes of emeralds, amethysts, rubies, and a mosaic arch of sapphires over it all.
Stones for Ibarra Page 7