The Son, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book Two

by Leonard Foglia

  “No, no, no,” the old woman was whimpering. “It mustn’t be allowed to happen. The hard work can wait no longer. It is God’s will and it has to be obeyed. I should be the one to do it, not you, but the devil has cursed me by chaining me to this bed. So you will have to take my place.”

  If Sally hadn’t known better, she would have sworn another person was in the room with Miz O.

  “I have always known this could be the case. But our purpose is the same. You and I are one. You are my right hand, my sweetheart, my angel. What you do, I do. And what a glorious task it will be. How fortunate I am to have you. How fortunate is the world.”

  Then there was – or a least Sally thought there was – a beep, like the sound of a phone being clicked off. Was it possible Miz O was talking to someone? If so, it was a first. But whom would she be saying such wild things to?

  A rustling of papers followed, then more mumbling. Sally stepped back from the door and retreated down the stairway. There was no telling how long the old woman’s ranting would continue. It seemed particularly intense today. Miz O was slipping. Maybe her son was right: it was time to look for another job.

  “Sally! Come up here. Now!” The old woman’s voice cut short any further musings.

  “Can I get you anything?” Sally asked, as she entered the bedroom. “You must be hungry. It’s nigh on to three o’clock.”

  “I don’t have any appetite,” said the old woman. All the strength seemed to have drained out of her. Her head lay limply on the pillow and the rumpled bed covers testified to a great struggle. “I’d just like you to take care of this.” She gestured to the brown envelope by her side, then removed a chain with a key on it from around her neck. “You know where it goes.”

  “Yes, m’am.” Sally took the key and opened the wooden chest at the foot of the bed. It already contained several dozen envelopes like the one Sally lay dutifully on top. What was in them, she wondered, that provoked such a strong reaction from the old woman? As she closed the lid, curiosity got the better of her. On an impulse, she rattled the key in the lock to give the impression it was securely shut, before handing the key back to Miz O. Sally didn’t know how she’d ever manage to examine the contents of the trunk, but theoretically they were at least accessible for the time being.

  “If you don’t mind opening the window to let in some fresh air, then you can leave me alone. I think I’ll take a little nap. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Maria arrived a little after six p.m., as was her routine.

  “Miz O’s sleeping,” Sally said. “She had a pretty rough day.”

  “What do you mean ‘rough?’ Did something happen?”

  “No, she’s fine. Just…a little more agitated than usual. But she’s tuckered out now, so she shouldn’t be much bother tonight.”

  “Thank goodness for small favors.”

  Sally put on her coat and left by the front door. The evening was calm. She stood on the sidewalk for a minute and glanced up at the bedroom window, where Miz O slept. All at once, the curtains began to swirl furiously, as if whipped by a fierce wind. Yet elsewhere the street was still and Sally could feel no breeze. Only the curtains billowed and swelled. They reminded Sally of the robes that Miz O wore in the dream, the swirling robes carried by the long fingers of a dozen devils. She wondered what her son would say if she told him about the unlocked trunk and all the envelopes inside. “What are you sticking your nose in some crazy lady’s business for!” is what he’d say. So she wouldn’t tell him.

  Then suddenly, the window slammed shut.

  Sally walked briskly to the bus stop.

  2:18

  Upon leaving the Meson Santa Rosa, the young man turned left and took a series of side streets that led him the Avenida Corregiadora. Dodging groups of schoolchildren and mothers with clusters of babies, he made his way, past the roasted chicken stands, the one-counter specialty stores that sold light bulbs or blue jeans, leather cleaners or computer components - in defiance of the large supermarkets on the outskirts of town where one could buy all that and more under the same roof - past the luncheonettes and cheap jewelry emporiums, until he finally reached the Alameda. All the while, he tried to keep his mind clear, concentrating only on avoiding the pedestrians who, like squawking fowl on a country road, seemed unaware until the last minute that anyone or anything was coming toward them. It was all part of the eternal hurly-burly of Mexico; somewhere there was order under the disorder, awareness behind the apparent obliviousness, although to the uneducated eye, it all read as chaos.

  The comments had begun as far back as he could remember. Strangers noting how different he looked from his parents. Or his siblings. Lots of children looked nothing like their parents, but he seemed to come from different stock altogether. His Mideastern cast warred with their American wholesomeness. They were open-featured; he was closed and mysterious. “Either he’s a throwback to the black sheep of the family or he’s adopted,” he’d heard one of his father’s friends say once. His father had pointedly ignored the remark. Like every child, he’d actually entertained the notion for a while that he was adopted before dismissing it as an adolescent fantasy. Instead of trying to explain the differences, he had come to accept them, as his parents accepted them. He was, as they put it, his own person, and they encouraged him to take pride in it. But Dr. Johanson had complicated the picture, muddied it, as if he were not a throwback or an exception, but a … a … an experiment! He had been engineered somehow. He wasn’t just different, he was a freak.

  There! He’d said it - the word that had terrified him all his adult life.

  In booths at the entrance of the Alameda, black marketers sold everything from the latest Hollywood movie to fake Vuitton bags for a fraction of the price of the real thing. Business was brisk. He broke free of the ambling shoppers and entered the park, immaculately groomed and inexplicably empty of people. He’d never understood why. This was one of the greenest corners of Querétaro, a shady refuge with wide paths and generous vistas. But other than the occasional pair of lovers, people stayed away. Maybe the Mexican soul needed the milling animation of the plazas and zocolos, he thought. The Alameda with its cool tranquility, invited an introspection that was not part of the Mexican temperament. But his own thoughts had been profoundly stirred by Dr. Johanson, and this was where he wanted to be for now.

  He took a place on his favorite bench, opposite a concrete turtle pond, and gave himself up to the reflections he had tried unsuccessfully to suppress during the quick walk. The sense of apartness had been with him for as long as he could remember. Not because he felt superior or stronger or taller than his peers. But simply because he found so few similarities with them and took little comfort in their company. He played their games and talked their language, and in a pick-up soccer match, he was one of the first to be chosen. But it was always as if he were the outsider, being momentarily let in.

  He was - Dr. Johanson had confirmed it – of different provenance.

  There was nothing normal about him, other than his parents’ dogged insistence on treating him normally. For the rest of the world – those who’d seen him pulled from a lethal mudslide or those seated around the table at the Meson Santa Rosa – he was a creature apart. To be reverenced, perhaps, but not to be clapped on the shoulder or invited to share a beer or even kissed by a girl. Suddenly, he felt irremediably alone, and possessed by an overwhelming need to mourn his solitude. He leaned back his head and closed his eyes. The sunlight filtering through the trees registered on the inside of his eyelids as dappled green shapes that formed, then broke apart, then recombined again like restless microbes in a Petri dish. How long he sat there, he could not say.

  When he finally stood up, the light in the Alameda seemed white. Momentarily blinded, he found he had to grab the back of the bench to steady himself.

  As he waited for the dizziness to pass, he saw an old peasant lady in the distance coming toward him. Her skin was dark brown, her black hair in braids, and on her bac
k she carried a child swaddled in an orange shawl. Her head bowed, she appeared to be scouring the ground for something dropped or lost – a peso or a key or even part of a discarded sandwich. They were the only people in the park. When she reached the bench, she lifted her head. Her eyes were milky and lacked focus. How much could she see, he wondered.

  “Una caridad?” she asked pitifully. “Alms? For the love of God. Please senor, help with a small gift.”

  “I have no money,” he mumbled apologetically and started toward the exit. But the woman was undeterred. Following him, she kept up her supplications. “My son has not eaten all day. If not for me, por favor, una caridad for him. So I can buy him milk. Have pity senor.”

  Was this what the world wanted from him? He thought angrily of the visionary words of Dr. Johanson and his cohort of devotees. They talked better than the woman with the milky eyes, they were better dressed, but they were all the same. They, too, were beggars in their fashion, wanting something from him, feeding on the fact that his eyes were not pale blue like his sister’s, and his hair was not blond like Little Jimmy’s and he was not openly gregarious like his father, but different from them all.

  Their neediness overwhelmed him. He had nothing to give them. He had nothing to give anyone.

  Behind him he heard the crunch of gravel and turned to see that the woman had fallen to her knees. The child on her back was crying. “Please, Señor, charity in the name of God,” she continued to wail, her voice a nasty whine that rattled his nerves. “Have pity on us. At least, have pity on my child. Help us!” Then with a claw-like hand, she reached up, grabbed the tail of his shirt and yanked it, as if it were a lifeline. As he twisted instinctively to shake free of her clutches, the cloth ripped across his back, exposing his lean shoulders to the late afternoon sun.

  “Help yourselves!” He spat out the words in disgust.

  Undiscouraged, she reached up again, this time her dirty fingernails piercing his flesh and tracing blood-red furrows down his back. They looked like the mark of the lash.

  Click.

  2:19

  Night fell. The street lamps came on and the frosted glass windows in the living room at Venustiano Carranza spilled a cold white light onto the sidewalk. That meant only one thing: Hannah and Jimmy were waiting up for their son. Normally, the family lived in the back part of the house, away from the street. The living room was the one place where the inside and outside worlds overlapped. Sometimes festively, sometimes sadly. Tonight the lights betrayed concern.

  Hannah worked fitfully, mending a pair of Little Jimmy’s jeans, but her attention wasn’t in it. “Jimmy, what if what we did was wrong, after all?” she said.

  “You don’t really think that. And neither do I.”

  “But you must have thought about it. At least once or twice. We’re human. Humans make mistakes.”

  “Our children are not mistakes.”

  “I’m not talking about Teresa or Little Jimmy.”

  “None of our children is a mistake,” Jimmy insisted, his voice stern. Hannah wondered if the sternness was directed at her. Jimmy’s strength had always been quiet and unassuming. Tonight he seemed uncharacteristically nervous, ready to swing out, break something to release the tension.

  “Are you angry with me for saying that?”

  “Angry? No. Just surprised, I guess.” Jimmy reached out and ran his forefinger along her cheek, as if tracing the fine bone under the flesh. But the gesture that usually calmed her failed to dispel her anxiety. She turned away so that Jimmy wouldn’t see the tears that had formed in her eyes.

  “I have never doubted our actions for a minute. Separately and together, as a family.” Jimmy’s voice had lost none of its sternness. “We made a choice – it was not forced upon us - and we have dealt with the consequences justly. It’s not been easy, but it was never wrong.”

  Hannah tugged insistently at the thread. “Do you ever think what would have happened if I had fulfilled my contract … not interfered? What if I had gone along with them, as I promised I would, what would have happened then?”

  “He never would have had a chance at a normal life?”

  “Does he now? Now that they’ve found him?”

  Jimmy reflected for a while. “He’s a man now and he can make up his own mind. He can judge them for who they are, as well as judge us for what we’ve done. That’s what we’ve given him – the freedom to decide for himself. That’s all any parent can give a child. They never would have allowed it.”

  “So we were right, after all?”

  “I’ve told you what I think. If you want another answer, I guess you’ll have to ask him, when he returns.”

  “If he returns…”

  “No, he’ll come back. They may have confused him or even frightened him with their stories. He has to sort things out. Like it or not, we’re part of the sorting out.”

  It was ten o’clock before he finally returned. Except for the two oblongs of light on the sidewalk, the neighborhood was dark. Hannah had abandoned her sewing and settled into a fretful silence. She realized there was nothing she and Jimmy could do, other than tell the truth, free of apology and regret. They had no other defense.

  The hinges of the front door moaned. Hannah sat up with a start and Little Jimmy’s jeans slid off her lap onto the floor.

  “That you?” called out Jimmy.

  The young man who entered the living room looked haggard, old beyond his twenty years. He kissed both parents’ on the cheek, as was customary, and sank into a leather chair, his youthful body drained of energy.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Out…thinking.”

  “We were worried for you, son,” said Jimmy.

  Scarcely a second passed. “Am I? Am I really your son?” Jimmy took a deep breath, as if preparing to plunge into unknown waters.

  “Legally, you are. You bear my name. Your birth certificate lists me as your father, just as it lists Hannah as your mother. Biologically, your origins are more complicated. We do not know who your real parents are. We were given information at the time, names, dates, told stories, but we’ve come to believe that very little of what was said back then was true.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Presumably, your real mother was unable to carry a child to term. Hannah was hired by the woman and her husband to be a surrogate mother. The woman’s fertilized eggs were surgically implanted in Hannah’s womb. Hannah was young and healthy at the time and you developed normally inside her, as if you were her child. But genetically, no, you are not related. Hannah nurtured you, she did not conceive you.”

  “And my real mother?”

  “Perished before your birth in a car accident.”

  “What about my father? You said the woman had a husband. So he was my real father?”

  “We don’t know. Your paternity is a mystery. The doctor who supervised your pregnancy—-“

  “Dr. Johanson?”

  Hannah winced perceptibly at the name.

  “Yes, the same doctor who came here searching for you,” Jimmy continued. “He claimed your DNA came from the blood on a holy relic in Spain, a cloth that had supposedly covered the face of Christ in his agony. He believed that his genetic engineering would result in the second coming. We couldn’t accept that. Dr. Johanson is a dangerous man. That’s why your mother and I vowed to give you as normal a boyhood as we could. We would not allow you to be the plaything of fanatics.”

  The young man had a vision of the faces around the table at the Meson Santa Rosa, all fixed upon him as if he had the secret to life, not just the directions to the Museo de la Ciudad. Obviously, they had not abandoned their experiment, he had simply been forced to delay it. Their zeal, frustrated for twenty years, was all the greater now.

  “Why didn’t you tell this to me before?”

  “Tell you what? How?” Hannah intervened. “When would have been the right time? Besides no one can ever know for sure the origins of your DNA. As a young woman, I f
ell into a trap. I didn’t know any better. I was just a waitress in a diner. Your father helped me, helped us get out. Afterwards, we made a decision: We would raise you. We would give you your values. We, not Dr. Johanson and his followers, would help you become a man.”

  The young man let silence fall over the living room. Outside in the street, a stray dog barked at a cat or a shadow. Hannah cast down her eyes, waiting for a reaction. Jimmy reached out again and instinctively ran his finger along her cheekbone.

  “I’m sorry for any pain we’ve caused you,” she said.

  The young man got up and went to her side. She kept her head low, not wanting him to see her tear-streaked face. But she took his hand in hers and pressed it softly. Then Jimmy took both their hands in his, so that the young man’s was sandwiched between those of his parents. He realized how much their future happiness and sorrow now lay on his shoulders. They had protected him. Now he was an adult and he would have to protect them. It was the eternal seesaw of the generations, when the older cedes its power to the younger. They were no longer his caretakers.

  “I love you both very much,” the young man began quietly. “So I hope you will understand when I say that I need to go away for a while.”

  Jimmy released his son’s hand.

  “Not with those people!” Hannah cried.

  “No, of course, not. I need to go away to think. To find out what I am.”

  2:20

  Shadows were no longer passing as frequently in front of the oblong windows. She told herself that once the living room lights went out, she would give up her watch. It was already late and it was unlikely that the young man would re-emerge from the house at this hour.