He also has no love for his family, no loyalty to them. You have all heard the story of how the soldiers and Federal Police occupying his pueblo wantonly killed his nephew and another young man. They were shot down for no reason. What action did this parasite take? Did he demand that the murderers be punished? No! He begged the soldiers’ commander to allow his militia to fight alongside them. What can you say about a man who bends his knee to make an alliance with the murderers of his own flesh and blood? Has he never heard the words of Emiliano Zapata? “It is better to die fighting on your feet than to live on your knees and be humiliated.”
No member of the Brotherhood would behave in this way. We are all pledged to defend our families to the death, for the family is the rock upon which a just society is built.
A final word, brothers and sisters, about the soldiers and police who occupy our state instead of defending it as they should. They call us criminals, though they are themselves criminals. They who promise you justice bring only injustice. We of the Brotherhood also promise justice, and we keep our promises.
* * *
CHAPTER SEVEN
She knocked at the rectory door minutes after he’d finished meeting with the middle-aged ladies who were to decorate the church for Advent, coming in less than two weeks.
“Cristina?” he said, his voice rising to a question because he almost did not recognize her when he opened the door. At first, he thought it was the eye shadow and lipstick and the way she was dressed, as if for a fiesta in a bright red blouse, a striped, ankle-length skirt, and wedge sandals that made her three inches taller. But those externals were not what had changed her appearance; it was the expression in her eyes. They reminded him of Sean’s when he’d come home from Vietnam forty years ago: coated, as it were, in a hard finish that had cracked, like old lacquer, allowing an underlying sorrow to bleed through. Just as it had with his eldest brother, that look aged her, as though she’d leapt from seventeen to thirty in a matter of weeks.
“Please, come in,” he said, and ushered her into the parish office, where, at his invitation, she took one of the two visitor’s chairs. He sat in the other, opposite her, and composed a benign smile to put her at ease. The wooden chairs, with their high, straight backs, were unfortunately not conducive to making people feel comfortable, but they were all he had. She sat stiffly, her knees locked, her hands folded in her lap. She was a handsome rather than a pretty young woman, part Yaqui, with sharp cheekbones and a fall of charcoal-black hair.
“Well, Cristina, how are you feeling?” he inquired, maintaining his smile.
“How do you suppose I would feel?” she said, with a boldness that matched her mature look and threw him a little off balance.
“Do you mean you are nervous?”
“No. Should I be? I am angry, after what was done to me.”
She sounded it, her voice, though subdued, whetted as a knife.
“You have every right to be,” he said sympathetically. It seemed he was the nervous one, uncertain as to where this was going. Rape counseling was not what anyone would term his strong point. “Would you be willing to talk about that—what happened to you?”
“I want to ask you if I will be excommunicated and will burn in hell,” she said, with a direct, challenging look in her wounded eyes. “I have heard my mother say that about another girl.”
“That she was to be excommunicated because she’d been…?”
“Violated,” Cristina said.
Her mother, Paulina Herrera, went to Mass daily and made a great show of her devoutness, bowing more deeply than anyone else, genuflecting on both knees rather than one, spreading her uplifted hands a yard wide when the Lord’s Prayer was recited. The Very Pious Señora Herrera was the title he’d privately conferred on her. But the view just expressed seemed too extreme even for her.
“You must not have heard correctly, Cristina. Your mother could not have said that.”
“This girl was pregnant…” She hesitated and turned her glance away from him, toward the bookshelves. “She…” Her rigid posture slackened somewhat; there was a softening in her stern composure. “To say this to a man … a priest…” she stuttered; then came an unintentional play on words: “Esto es embarazoso. Estoy embarazada.” This is embarrassing; I am pregnant.
He had thought as much. “You’re certain?”
“I saw the doctor.”
“Dr. Moreno?”
Her nod was so quick and shallow he almost didn’t see it.
“Does your mother know?”
The negative movement of her head was likewise hurried.
“And you’re sure … This is difficult to ask, but I have to—”
“Yes! No one else!” she interrupted with a flash of anger. Her shoulders convulsed and, her whole façade collapsing at once, she began to sob. Riordan’s instinct was to envelop her in a consoling embrace, but such a gesture was out of the question, given the ongoing scandals in the church and the chance that it would be misinterpreted. Instead, leaning forward, he rested his palms lightly on her shoulders.
A man named Jesús Delgado, a Brotherhood mule, drove mota to remote points on the border, where other mules backpacked them into the United States for further distribution. (To college kids, Riordan thought, and to hard-core potheads and bourgeois baby boomers reliving their counterculture youths, none of whom knew, or cared, that they were sucking Mexican blood into their lungs.) This Delgado had abducted Cristina while she was walking home from school with her friends. Narcos could do things like that with impunity, confident that witnesses would plead sudden blindness if asked about the crime. Delgado took her to his village, Mesa Verde, and raped her for three days before she escaped, with a villager’s help. When she recovered from the ordeal—physically, that is—she went to the San Patricio police to file charges against Delgado. Remembering what had happened to their chief and fellow officers, they told her to go home thanking God that all she’d lost was her virginity.
“I am terribly sorry,” Riordan said to her. “But you must know that you’re not going to be excommunicated or burn in hell because of what happened to you. If that is your mother’s idea, I cannot imagine where she got it.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of a hand. Reaching over to his desk, he handed her a tissue.
“She said … about this girl … she knew her when she was young.… This girl was excommunicated because she had an abortion and her soul would burn in hell…”
He braced against the back of the chair. “I see. So you were a little confused about your mother’s words.”
Cristina shrugged. “You must help me, Padre Tim.”
“In whatever way I can,” he said, and felt an unpleasant prickling up and down his arms.
She canted her head slightly backward and drew in a breath, marshaling her resolve, her nerve. His heart going out to her, he decided to make things as easy as he could for her. And for himself.
“Did you come here, Cristina, to ask about having an abortion? If it would be permissible?”
“I don’t know … yes”—squeezing the damp tissue into a ball—“I … This child is…”
“You know I cannot tell you it is permissible.”
“Why?”
“Because the church teaches that even a child conceived from rape is innocent, that to abort it is to meet violence with violence—”
“Innocent! Innocent!” she cried, her black eyes glittering. “This child is the devil’s child. If you had had done to you what that man did to me, you would know that he is the devil,” she went on in a furious rush. “It is his seed in me! Jesús Delgado. Jesús! What a name for a devil!”
“He’s a bad man,” Riordan said, in a level tone. “A criminal, but a man…”
It was a good thing that Delgado was not in this room with him, for he felt an urge to pummel him to within an inch of his life. At the same time, on another floor in his mind, he wished that a theologian, one of those whey-faced cardinals in the Roman Curia, w
ere here, so he could pose the question: If this girl’s pregnancy was intended by God, did that imply that God also intended the rape that caused it? Which wasn’t possible, as the source of all goodness cannot intend evil, any more than He can square a circle.
“Why will I be excommunicated and burn in hell if I wash the devil’s seed from my body?” Cristina asked, not so much speaking as vomiting the words. “That is why I have come. To find out why. Do you not preach that we should get rid of the devil in ourselves? Well, that is what I want to do. Why should I be sorry for that? Do you know what will happen to me if I don’t? No man will ever want to marry me. I will be, you know, mercaderías averiadas. Damaged goods with a rapist’s baby. That is what my—”
She stopped herself.
“That is what your mother told you?”
Her silence acknowledged that this was the case.
“So you weren’t telling the truth? Your mother does know?”
“Yes,” she weakly replied.
“And then she told you that you would be excommunicated and go to hell if you have an abortion?”
“Yes.”
He decided not to ask if the Very Pious Señora Herrera had found out from her daughter or in some other way, while he pondered the contradictory counsel that had addled the poor girl’s mind.
“Cristina, you should know that the church—”
She cut him off: “Yes, yes, yes, I know. I must have this child, I must learn to love it.” Defiant now, impudent even—he was having trouble keeping up with the kaleidoscopic shifting of her moods. “How, Padre Tim? How can I learn to love the devil’s child?”
“Cristina! Stop it! It is his child, but he is not the devil!” He paused to collect himself. “I was going to tell you before you interrupted me that the church makes allowances for girls your age. Girls under eighteen who have an abortion. There is no excommunication for a young girl who has been forced or frightened into it.”
“So it is not a mortal sin?” Hopeful.
“I didn’t say that. It is. A very grave mortal sin that would have to be confessed,” he said, aware of how fine a moral line he was walking, all but giving her license. There was her mortal body to consider, as much as her immortal soul. “Please don’t do anything without—”
Again, she cut him off: “It is legal in Mexico for someone like me. Who has had done to her what was done to me. It is legal. My friend told me that. I can go to a public health clinic and—”
“Did this friend tell you that you have to show a police report, and a doctor’s report certifying that you were raped?” he said, interrupting her in turn.
“Eduardo. Eduardo López. He looked it up on the Internet. It is legal.”
“Oh, then it must be true,” Riordan said, abandoning any attempt to come off as kind and understanding. Pity without action is sentimentality, he thought. “I am counseling you not to have an abortion because the police did not report a crime. They should have, but they didn’t. A doctor did not examine you. One should have, but he didn’t.”
She hesitated, her mouth opening a little as if she were about to speak. Whatever she’d meant to say, if anything, she thought better of it.
“Without documents from them, public health won’t do anything for you,” he said. “You will have to go somewhere else, and that could be dangerous. That is what I am trying to tell you.”
She turned her gaze once more to the bookcase, crammed with the accumulated wisdom of two thousand years.
“You are not doing anything for me, either, Padre Tim. You are of no help to me. None.”
Moments later, she was gone. He got to his feet and, looking out the office window, watched her cross the plaza. Slumping into his desk chair, he felt drained, and overcome by a sense of his own inadequacy. He had failed her, as he had César. She was going to go through with it, and his hope was that it would not be in some back-alley butcher shop in Hermosillo or Ciudad Obregón—or anywhere. His mind flying back to Luis Gonzalez, someone else he had failed, he prayed God not to withhold His mercy from a girl with a heart and spirit so battered.
CHAPTER EIGHT
She haunted him for the rest of the day and that night, and when he woke the following morning, he struck a bargain. If You look out for her, I will fast for the next month. To show the Deity good faith, he started straightaway, restricting himself to tea and toast at breakfast, clear broth and bread at lunch. As he was about to lie down for the afternoon siesta, Lisette phoned with an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner at her place. “You’re the only other gringo in town,” she said, which he would have taken as a mild insult if he hadn’t known her better. He’d forgotten that today was Thanksgiving! He’d been in Mexico too long.
“Well, I’m on a fast,” he said, but with a certain indefiniteness in his tone. “I can allow myself only one full meal a day, like we do at Lent.”
“A little early for Lent, isn’t it?” she replied. “But Thanksgiving dinner should qualify as your full meal.”
Her son would be there, she went on, along with a friend, a painter who had done restorations for museums and who might be willing to tackle the work that needed doing in the church. “She’ll be down here for the spring and summer, so she’ll have the time.”
He was dizzy with hunger when he rang Lisette’s bell at five p.m. The heavy oak door swung open into the interior courtyard. She said, “So glad you’re here right on the button.”
She was all done up by the standards of San Patricio: a skirt and low-heeled pumps, silver bracelets on her wrists.
“So glad you invited me,” he said. He caught the smells floating out of the kitchen. “I am famished.”
“We’ll take care of that if you can wait half an hour.” She gave him a wet kiss that smeared lipstick on his cheek. “There’s salsa and chips to take the edge off.”
She motioned at the table, set with colorful plates beside a bubbling fountain and overlooked by an electric heater on a pedestal—a cold front had moved down from the north.
He denied himself the salsa and chips but accepted a glass of red wine from Lisette’s friend, Pamela. The subject of Lisette’s sexual orientation had seldom come up, not because Riordan objected but because she had an aversion to talking about herself. “Where I come from,” she had said, “people don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves.” At any rate, he knew Pamela had to be more than a friend, and it was easy to see why. His father would have described her as “a looker”: tall, blond, stylishly dressed in black slacks, a pale green silk blouse, a pearl necklace—and the pearls looked real. His first impression was of an aloof fashion model a little too aware that she was gorgeous; but after a minute or two of light conversation, he saw that her detached air was a disguised shyness. He tried to put her at ease with questions about her painting. Stupid questions, like “Are you into abstract or representational?” She responded civilly enough, while making it plain that she preferred to talk about something else. He checked his pantry of topics, could find nothing beyond the weather, and so turned to Nick, asking him stupid questions about college.
Cell-phone and wireless service in San Patricio being spotty at best, Nick could not flee into his smartphone, which lay idle on the table, and was forced to answer. When he and Riordan fell into male default mode—sports—Pamela picked up her wineglass and went into the kitchen, carrying herself as if she were on a runway. Nick said that he played first base on the University of Arizona baseball team, and Riordan admitted to being a lifelong Cubs fan. He gave an embarrassed smile, as if that were a character flaw.
“I feel sorry for you,” Nick remarked. “That’s gotta be tough.”
“Oh, there’s a certain masochistic pleasure in it,” Riordan said. “My dad used to bring all us kids to Wrigley Field for the Crosstown Series against the White Sox. I was five or six the first time. Can’t remember if the Cubs won or lost.”
“I’d bet my car they lost,” said Nick.
He was a big, enthusiastic kid, seemingly as u
ncomplicated as a single-celled organism. Uncomplicated, but not an idiot. After they had exhausted the topic of baseball, he mentioned that he was taking an introductory astronomy course and had been to the Kitt Peak observatory with his class. Through its thirty-six-inch telescope, they had seen the moons and bands of Jupiter, Saturn’s rings, the Andromeda Galaxy. Riordan said he envied him the experience. His own observations of the cosmos had been limited to the naked eye or binoculars.
Nick was captivated by the phenomenon of archaic light. When he’d looked at Andromeda, 2.5 million light-years away, he’d seen it as it was 2.5 million years ago, right? Right, Riordan answered. A telescope was a time machine, in a manner of speaking. It took you out into space, backward in time. Nick speculated: “Let’s say that last week, or last month, or even ten years ago, some really huge disaster wiped out the Andromeda Galaxy. So that would mean that it’ll take two and a half million years for people on Earth to see the explosion and realize that the galaxy no longer exists, right?”
“Right, again,” Riordan said. “Assuming there still are people on Earth by that time.”
“But for two million years or so, they’d be seeing it like we do now,” Nick said with an undertone of complaint. “So would it or wouldn’t it? Exist, I’m asking.”
Riordan felt like a parent who has been asked Why is the sky blue, Daddy? and can’t find an answer.
“Well, objectively speaking, from God’s point of view, so to speak, it would have ceased to exist,” he said, taking a stab. “But from our point of view, it … it would be like … what? A fossil. Archaic light is called that sometimes, fossil light. The galaxy we now see would be like that preserved mastodon carcass they found in the Arctic ice some years back. Not a perfect analogy, but…”
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