ALSO BY LAURA RESTREPO
No Place for Heroes
Delirium
Isle of Passion
The Dark Bride
Leopard in the Sun
A Tale of the Dispossessed
The Angel of Galilea
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2013 Laura Restrepo
Translation copyright © 2015 Ernesto Mestre-Reed
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published by Planeta Publishing in 2013 in Spain. Translated from Spanish by Ernesto Mestre-Reed. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2015.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477827598
ISBN-10: 1477827595
Cover design by David Drummond
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014919896
CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
1
They didn’t know what would happen to them once they were inside, but they had gone there alone and on foot along Route 285, something absurd in and of itself, this having to walk through southern Colorado at this point in their lives. The older of the two, Greg, was twenty-six, the younger one barely thirteen, a child really, known as Sleepy Joe in school because he fell asleep in class.
“I’m not sleeping, I’m praying,” he’d protest to his teacher, who shook him whenever she caught him with his eyes closed.
Wendy Mellons thinks they must have looked more like father and son than brothers walking along the shoulder of that long highway that traverses three states. No one spends almost three hours like they did on a trip they could have easily made using their father’s pickup truck.
“They were following orders,” Wendy Mellons explains. “They’d been told that they should arrive alone and on foot.”
After walking most of the way on 285, they took the old road leading from Purgatory to New Saddle Rock. Once they’d crossed the dry riverbed of Perdidas Creek and trudged through a field of weeds, they climbed through the barren terrain until they saw the small white adobe house, separate from any other structure and hidden by a billboard for Coors Golden Beer.
“I’m thirsty,” the younger one said, standing in front of the billboard. “We should have at least brought some water . . .”
“Maybe we just shouldn’t have come,” the older one responded.
Neither of them said much more, each trapped in his own thoughts, wondering what it would be like to walk into that house, what awaited them inside. About fifty yards from the door was a stone cross, which they knelt before, although they were worried about getting their already dirty pants even dirtier; after all, they were wearing their Sunday best—linen suit, shirt and tie, and black socks and shoes. No one in the adobe house opened the door or cracked a window. Perhaps no one had noticed their arrival, but they had been told to wait by the cross and so they did. More than a few minutes passed before an old man came out of the house. He walked toward them so slowly that the younger boy almost lost his patience and told him to hurry up. The old man told them a few things they did not understand, and then returned to the house with the same deliberateness as before. Then the real wait began for the boys. Just when their knees could no longer tolerate the rocky ground, the door opened again and three men came out and approached them.
They wore black robes, their faces half-hidden by the hoods, but even then the boys could recognize two of them: Will, the gas-station attendant, and Beltrán, the one who sold souvenirs at the UFO Gift Shop. Both were lifelong neighbors of theirs, but there was something off, something weird; the eccentric getups and the exaggerated mannerisms made those neighbors into strangers—strangers who announced that they’d now be their godfathers and who blindfolded them.
“Mine’s too tight, Will,” Greg said.
“Don’t call him Will,” Beltrán cut in. “If you want to address us you should call us the Penitent Brothers.”
“So, can you loosen my blindfold, Penitent Brother?”
They were guided to the door of the Morada, which is what the Penitent Brothers, who it seemed were renaming everything, informed them they should call the adobe house. Blindfolded, the two boys stumbled forward until they were told that they should knock for permission to enter. The password was a string of words they had learned. They’d spent days repeating it and trying to memorize it, though with great difficulty, according to Wendy, because Spanish wasn’t their first language, and English really wasn’t either; more likely it was the Slovak spoken by their parents, who came from the Banská Bystrica region, a pair of immigrants, who even though they were white were as poor and as Catholic as the gente, which is what the longtime Hispanic inhabitants of San Luis Valley in southern Colorado call themselves.
“Who knocks on the door of the Morada?” a male voice demanded from within.
“It’s not the door of the Morada, it’s the door of my conscience, and we come full of remorse and begging for mercy,” the boys half muttered, tripping on the words and getting through it only with the help of the godfathers, who whispered in their ears those words that for them meant nothing.
“Ask for penance then,” the response came through the closed door.
“Penance! Penance! We come looking for salvation,” they said.
“Who lights my house?”
“My father Jesus.”
“Who fills it with joy?”
“My mother Mary.”
“Who keeps my faith?”
“The carpenter Joseph.”
Their mistakes were overlooked, and they were allowed to enter. Even though they were blindfolded, they knew they had walked into a small room because of the heaviness of the air and the smell of enclosure. They were ordered to shed their clothes, and since they seemed reticent, various hands did it for them. In exchange, they were each handed a long coarse blanket with a hole in the middle to put their heads through, and a rope that they were to tie around their waists. They felt totally helpless, blind, and naked amid the invisible people surrounding them; and Sleepy Joe remembered the hatred he’d recently felt when a nurse at the Samaritana Medical Center had forced him to take off his clothes and put on a green robe to take X-rays. Now too he felt he was wearing a ridiculous costume and wanted to laugh, but such an urge was quickly dispelled by the gust of fear overtaking him. They were handed various lit candles and told to prepare body and soul, for they were about to enter the quarters of the Penitent Brothers of the Sangre de Cristo. The moment had come.
“What happens here stays here.” They were made to repeat this three times, with the warning that if the secret were to be revealed, the price was death. Nevertheless, all of this eventually came from the mouth of Wendy Mellons.
“Maybe I should just be quiet from now on,” she admits.
When the two boys crossed the threshold, they removed the blindfolds and found themselves in a large room poorly lit by candles and
saturated with the thick smell of copal. There were men in brown robes—the Illuminated, or Brothers of the Light, according to the godfathers—and others in black cloaks, the Blood Brothers, or the Brothers of Passion, also known as the Penitent Brothers. In the middle of the room was a table on which were four or five of what the gente call “the figures,” wooden carvings of saints and other sacred images.
Greg regretted that they had taken his wristwatch in the previous room. He wished he could glance at it now, because maybe he could then get the hours moving again, or at least confirm that all this would end soon. The copal smoke stuck in his throat, and he began to choke for lack of air.
They put the two of them, the only ones with fair skin, right in the middle of the crowded congregation of mostly dark-skinned folk and ordered them to lean their heads back and focus on the cross hanging from the ceiling. Meanwhile the group formed two semicircles around them, brown robes on their right, black cloaks on their left, chanting hymns that reached the two boys from afar, as if through mounds of cotton, drowned out by the banging of their own hearts resounding in their ears.
“Repeat after me these words of forgiveness to Brother Picador,” one of the Brothers of the Passion said.
“Brother Picador, I forgive you, I give you thanks and at the same time beg of you that your hand doesn’t move with a vengeful or resentful spirit,” the boys tried to repeat.
By that point, Greg was trembling so violently that the melted wax from the candle he was holding rained in thick drops on his bare feet. In contrast, the younger one kept his composure. Another Brother approached them holding an open metal box, and they could see that inside there was an embroidered cloth wrapped around what seemed to be some gem or other valuable object. They might be precious stones, Sleepy Joe thought. Picador, the only one with his face entirely covered, removed the cloth and pulled out of the box a dark amber object sharpened like a shaving blade. Some of the other Brothers pulled the boys’ robes down from their shoulders so that the cloth hung from the ropes around their waists.
“We are going to break the Seal,” one of the Illuminated announced, and they ordered the two to lean forward and hold their breath.
Greg felt how the blade sliced into the skin of his back, three cuts on each side of his spine near the shoulder blades, and then turned his head to see what they were doing to his little brother. When he noticed the amount of blood coming from the cuts and soaking the robe, he tried to stop Picador by grabbing the blade, but the three godfathers held him back by force.
“I’m fine,” Sleepy Joe said, his eyes closed tight as he withstood the punishment.
Afterward, the Brothers gave each of the boys a whip soaked in water to make it heavier, and ordered them to lash their backs over the area of the incisions—one side first, then the other. On a horn and drum, two of the Brothers played a funeral dirge, slow at first, then increasingly faster.
“Keep the beat! Keep the beat!” they ordered, so that the thrashings would accompany the banging of the drum. As the boys complied, the whips became soaked with blood, growing heavier, and tore at the skin, until Greg fell to the floor, unable to withstand it any longer.
Sleepy Joe, however, seemed transported. After a certain point he became something outside of himself, committed to the task of ripping open his back with an unusual vigor, or perhaps conviction, or a kind of brutality. And when the music began to slow down, indicating that he should do the same with the whip, he seemed not to hear it anymore, so lost in the savagery of this self-flagellation that he paid no mind to one of the Illuminated Brothers who was ordering him to stop immediately.
“The child was in such a frenzy, whipping himself like that!” Wendy Mellons recalls.
Meanwhile, the others were standing there, not knowing what to do—Illuminated and Penitents equally frozen, seeing how the little demon had made the situation his own, beating the shit out of his back, assuming a dominant role, so enraptured that not even his own brother dared stop him, fearing he’d get a lashing if he crossed the perimeter of the whip, which snapped and hissed like a mad serpent.
A week later, each of the boys was given a small stone wrapped in a tightly bound handkerchief, with directions to open it in private. If the stone had a white cross painted on its face it would mean he was admitted. If there was no cross, it was a categorical rejection and there would be no second chance. Greg wasn’t surprised when he untied his handkerchief and found that there was no cross on his stone. He had been expecting this and deep down he was relieved.
Sleepy Joe had been acting strange all that week, reclusive, not eating, and not allowing anyone to change the bandages on his back or tend to the wounds, not even his older brother, whom he cut off when he tried to talk to him about what had happened in that place. Even between them, the episode was never mentioned again, as if it had never happened. With his stone still bound and held tightly in his hand, Sleepy Joe climbed a steep hill to a point named Eye of the Horse. He moved with the resolute step of someone who understood that from that point on he had an obligation, something to live for, a mission to accomplish: he’d be the most devout and selfless of the Penitent Brothers of the Sangre de Cristo. He didn’t undo his handkerchief until he had reached the top, when night had begun to fall. He was puzzled not to see a cross on the stone, and anxiously scrutinized it one side and the other, convinced that there had to be one somewhere. Perhaps it was a very small cross that he had missed, or maybe the excitement of the moment or the meager twilight was preventing him from making it out. But no. There was no cross on his stone either.
2
Interview with Ian Rose
Thirty years later, in a hardwood forest in the heart of the Catskills Mountains in southern New York State, a man named John Eagles, a dog-food deliveryman, was murdered, his face torn off and exhibited in what seemed to be a ritual crime. The person who discovered the body was the young Cleve Rose, a neighbor who was the author of a serial graphic novel, The Suicide Poet and His Girlfriend Dorita, and the teacher of a writing workshop for the inmates of Manninpox State Prison. Cleve was riding his motorcycle home when he discovered Mr. Eagles’s pickup on the side of the road in the middle of the forest. He stopped to investigate and noticed a red cloth attached to what he at first took for a mask. After several moments he realized that the awful visage, with its vacant eyes and hair matted with blood, might well have belonged to a human being. And if it was Mr. Eagles’s pickup, perhaps the face was his as well.
“Cleve told me that he felt so sick at that point that he puked in the ditch,” says Ian Rose, Cleve’s father, a hydraulic engineer specializing in irrigation systems, the owner of a house not far from the scene of the crime. “Afterward, when he had composed himself and dared to look directly at the hideous mask, he thought that despite everything it still bore a resemblance to poor Mr. Eagles. It was the Halloween version of Eagles’s face, Cleve told me, or the apocalyptic zombie version. That’s exactly what he said. I remember perfectly. My son wrote graphic novels, and if you ask me, the Suicide Poet series is very clever and entertaining, but of course I’m biased. I was the number one fan of almost everything my son did, almost everything, I say, not all: certain things made my hair stand on end. But, in general, I was very proud of him that he dared to go far where I had always fallen short. Without a doubt, his graphic novels were very good, a bit gory, sure, full of stories of the walking dead and such things, you know. But the day he found Eagles in such a state, he was very affected. And so was I. I felt that it was an omen, a kind of warning. In the end, that was what the murderer had intended with the staging of such a scene: to warn us. Forecasting a horror that began that day and has yet to end.
“Cleve called the police, and some hours later they identified the body they had found a few steps away in the brush, and confirmed that it was Mr. Eagles. He was a good man, I can assure you, with no enemies to speak of. That’s what the widow said when they question
ed her: Eagles did not have any enemies, and she didn’t know of anyone who would want to exact vengeance in such a savage manner. He was on his way back from my house, where he had dropped off a pair of packages from Eukanuba that I had asked him to bring over when I spoke to him on the phone the day before. Although he was a strong man, they said he didn’t seem to have put up a fight against his murderer, or murderers. He was alone when he came to my house. Emperatriz, the woman who helps me around the house, assured the police that she had seen no one else inside the pickup when he got out to give her the packages. Apparently, on the way back, Eagles had stopped, possibly to pick up the murderer, who perhaps had been hitchhiking. There is no other way to explain how the person, or persons, got inside the truck. People around here are not suspicious, you know, there’s no reason to be. If Eagles saw someone on the side of the road, he’d simply pick him up and give him a ride at least to the highway. That’s not unusual around here. Once inside the pickup, the murderer garroted him from behind so that Eagles could not defend himself, and then he did what he did, that horrifying stuff with the face.”
Although Ian Rose doesn’t tell me at first, I know that he had not lived with his son, Cleve, since he had separated from the boy’s mother many years before. And now that they were finally alone, their spaces were clearly delineated in their mountain home, an old, large house with two floors and an attic, where they had established an independence from each other as if they lived in an apartment building: the two floors for the father; the attic, sacred space for the son. The truth was they didn’t spend much time together and hardly spoke to each other; they had just begun to get to know each other more in depth, and it still wasn’t easy for them to communicate. Not that it much bothered either of them. Living together had been easier than they’d imagined. They shared their fondness for the woods and isolation, but Ian was pragmatic and grounded, while Cleve had a bit of the artist from his mother. So they had little in common except for one fundamental trait Cleve had clearly inherited from his father: both were dog lovers. The three dogs, Otto, Dix, and Skunko, were the central figures in the house. The humans came and went, and big parts of their lives transpired outside the house, so they were no more than transitional elements there. On the other hand, the dogs were always there, filling the place with their antics, running back and forth, and when they lay by the fire, they seemed to be there just to protect the humans. So much warmth and affection came from those dogs that knew everything about the house and protected it with their sharp sense of smell and their barking. Of course, great balls of dog hair had to be swept out of the house, the furniture smelled like dogs, the upholstery was frayed from their teeth, and the yard was crisscrossed with tunnels dug by the animals. In return, the dogs made the property practically impenetrable; with that trio on guard like Cerberus night and day it wasn’t easy for anyone to trespass. In a word, the dogs were the house, and for Cleve and his father, coming home meant reintegrating into the pack.
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