Absent a Miracle

by Christine Lehner

  "Adios, Alice. Hasta luegito, amorcita"

  And that is more or less it. One second we are talking and everything is normal, and the next second the connection is severed and I am on a coffee farm in a Third-World country best known for revolutions and assassinated dictators, and Waldo is in our home in VerGroot where I can visualize everything in its place and yet still have no idea what Waldo is doing and even less what he is thinking about. And missing him is a physical pain, a sharpness in my chest akin to the pain when you have swallowed ice water too fast and you have to breathe slowly and shallowly in order to bring in warmish oxygen, fast.

  The house is trembling. My sheets rustle like waves. Earthquake. It must be an earthquake. Fuck, fuck, fuck. This is not the earthquake of my imagination. In my imagination I am the opposite of the naked American millionaire in the Managua pyramid, in druggy denial; I am alert and watching it all transpire. I am ready. In my imagination it is visual, it is the earth cleaving asunder in front of my eyes. I remain untouched. I need to find Ezra. I am not decent. Technically, I am not decent. But once I have located and pulled on my robe, Ezra is in front of me, awake and vivid.

  "It's just the wind, Mom. It's the hurricane. Named after you," he says. "Just kidding."

  Of course he is right. The trembling of gale-force winds is altogether different from the trembling of the earth's crust as it shifts and cracks open beneath you.

  For the third morning in a row, there are pastel-colored mints all over Ezra's room. So much happens after I go to sleep. He must practice different techniques to improve both distance and aim. One day he will be an excellent golfer, but for now he does very well with a spoon of Taxco silver and imported French mints. He has not sleepwalked once since arriving in Nicaragua.

  I miss Waldo like a finger, shocked to realize how essential even that small finger is, how much I rely on the ability to grasp an object and bend at my knuckles.

  For the third morning in a row, Ignacia, the maid from Sutiaba, the indigenous town just outside of León that is even older than León, sweeps and tidies the room. She holds the broom with her fingertips, like a lover. She moves back and forth in a pattern both fluid and fixed. I suspect that she has swept up catapulted mints before, though not in this bedroom. Ezra has never had someone to clean up after him like this, and I would hate for him to grow accustomed to such a luxury. No, he will not. He is a Fairweather, and Fairweathers are independent, to the extent of preferring their messes untouched, their papers untidied, their noses unwiped, and their socks unpaired.

  Why am I sleeping so far away from Waldo's warm flesh, from his smooth back, his furry chest, his energetic penis?

  Why isn't Henry here being a know-it-all, a smarty-pants, a Mr. Knowledge, a Factoid Ferdinand? Whatever made me think it was possible to come down here without them? Without them, belief is not possible. Without Waldo to question everything and Henry to know the facts of everything, how can I believe in Tía Tata?

  I have no idea where Ezra is. In an asymmetrical and pale room unconnected to anything else, I find about a dozen old leather suitcases with stickers from European hotels and spas. One has been energetically nibbled by an animal. A broom leans into an opposite corner. But the best part in here is this: a life-size statue of Saint Theresa of Ávila. She is dressed Carmelite style, in shades of black and white and gray. She is holding an arrow pointed at her chest from which the yellow paint is peeling off.

  Dangling cuticles, canker sores, peeling paint: they all beckon me to fiddle, pull, worry. I do not resist. I flick off two larger pieces of loose yellow paint—thwip, thwip. This is probably art. I am defacing art.

  Theresa Sanchez Cepeda Davila y Ahumada died late on October 4, 1582, but her feast is celebrated the next day, October 15. It happens that on October 5, 1582, Pope Gregory enacted the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian system and moved the entire calendar forward ten days. There was no October 5, 1582, nor was there an October 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, or 14. Gone by papal fiat. The day after she died, Theresa's heart was removed from her body and found to have evidence of transverberation. It was pierced, just as Theresa had imagined herself pierced by the blinding arrow of Christ's love. Here in Nicaragua Rubén Darío's heart and brain were removed from his body, but no one seems to know exactly where they ended up.

  And in the midst of the gully-washing rain, Lalo is quieter than the santos. He is sitting in a rocking chair mere inches inside the protective roof of the courtyard, but he is not rocking. I want to slide into his presence without a ripple and be part of the stillness. What do I care about a dead aunt who refused to marry? I don't. I care about Abelardo. I think that if Abelardo could be the agent of Tristána's canonization, then...? Then he would be satisfied. Then he might perceive me differently. Then we could go on to the next thing.

  No resolve of mine to be silent has ever lasted more than moments. "So tell me more about Tata." (Distract me! Distract me!) "I'm having trouble when I think of her." (I'm having trouble not thinking about you.) "What did she do when it rained this much? Did she mind when her clothes were never entirely dry?"

  "She was born here."

  Lalo gets up from his motionless rocker and stands next to a wooden armchair lined with faded striped cushions, indicating that I should sit there. I have never looked at his face before. Have I? The squared-off chin, the feminine smoothness of his skin, the aquiline nose, the almost black eyes, and the vast anarchic eyebrows. It is something I would paint if I knew how to paint, or mix colors.

  Just a few feet away the rain is hammering at the grass and pummeling the flowers of the courtyard. It is roaring down the chains and spewing from the drainpipes. Gargoyles would be very happy here, hunchbacked iguanas and harelipped cara blanca monkeys, spitting out streams of tropical rain. Lalo may lament the havoc it is wreaking on the countryside, but he does not mind his own proximity to the rain. I mind the proximity. I move my chair back toward the interior.

  How long has it been since I last saw Ezra?

  "What did she do all day? There has to be something I am missing. Because if the holiest thing she ever did was refuse to get married, well, if that's the case, then I think we have a problem, Captain."

  Lalo smiles a smile of secret knowledge.

  "It is true she refused to marry, but that was only in order to free herself for God's work."

  So Lalo tells me how Tristána, after refusing all offers of marriage and refusing to behave like the wealthy young woman she was, agreed to stay here on the farm, Las Brisas—back then it was over ten thousand hectares of cattle and coffee and sugar—but only if she could live in a small worker's shack on the other side of the beneficio, the one he showed me. She dressed like a young man, in loose cotton trousers and a cotton shirt. There were stories that she wrapped long bandages around her breasts to flatten them, but Lalo says they are apocryphal. Every month she cut her own hair with her sewing shears. She was still beautiful. Perhaps in men's clothes and with inelegantly chopped-off hair, she was even more beautiful. She did not revisit the tight leggings of a matador that caused such longing in the heart of Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida.

  I say, foolishly, "Hubert was a fount of information about the cross-dressers. Hildegund went on a crusade in 1106 dressed as a boy. Euphrosyne called herself Smaragdus, and lived in a solitary cell. He especially liked Saint Marina, who called herself Marinus. When she was accused of knocking up the innkeeper's daughter, even then she didn't reveal her true sex. She accepted her superior's punishment—like the saint that she was—and lived outside the monastery walls looking after the fatherless child. Only when she died was the truth revealed and her innocence declared."

  "Hubert must be a wonderful man."

  "He certainly has his qualities."

  The constant drumming of the rain changes just this instant from a cacophony of individual raindrops to a vast sky-size bucket of water being emptied upon our heads, upon the roof, upon the village and the farm. The volume of water increases thr
eefold or tenfold—who knows the exact multiplier? Perhaps one hundred times, which is the number of times I've thought about Lalo in the last hour. More or less. The sound is louder than anything else. To talk is folly.

  And then the noise abates just enough for Lalo to continue.

  She lived alone in that shack on the other side of the beneficio. It was not really a shack as in a ruin, just a shack as in a humble abode. Lalo wants me to understand the poverty and simplicity of Tristána's life, but also to know that the workers on the Llobet farm do not live in decrepit buildings. It is a fine line, but that is why we are here, because we want to draw a fine line all the way from this coffee farm to the Vatican's inner sanctum sanctorum sanctotum. Like the humble people, Tata ate fruits and vegetables, rice and beans.

  The church of Santa Irena predates the current beneficio. It predates the advent of gourmet coffee. The parish priest was a young man from Nicaragua's Atlantic coast, named Oscar Felipe Franklin. Like most people on the Atlantic coast, Oscar Felipe was descended from Englishmen and English-speaking blacks, as well as Miskitos, and all his life he spoke Spanish with an English accent. Because of his popularity and because of the length of his tenure at Las Brisas, the campesinos to this day pronounce certain words with that same English accent: almohada, ferrocarril, aguacate.

  When Tristána moved to the shack behind the beneficio, the one who was most uncomfortable was Padre Oscar Felipe. He had never heard of a young woman of good morals living alone on a farm. Especially a young woman of such a family. In all his life he had never been alone in a room with a beautiful woman, and here was Tristána, waltzing in and out of the tiny rectory he shared with a serving boy, Hugo. She alerted him to the material and spiritual needs of his flock, and questioned, again and again, the validity of coerced baptisms. That became a bee in her bonnet, and a thorn in his side. She'd read in a history book of all the Indians forcibly baptized by the Spanish friars and found it troubling. She dreamed of villages precariously clinging to the slopes of volcanoes, overrun with iguanas and inhabited by Indians who wore scapulas round their necks, prostrated themselves before the cross, and yet believed that milk and honey flowed from the veins of Jesus Christ. As soon as she woke from these dreams, Tristána rushed across the plaza to the rectory, awakened Padre Oscar Felipe, and asked him, again and again, what should be done about these poor Indians. The modest padre took to sleeping in his clothes. He was not much of a theologian, he told her. He preferred to leave such thorny questions to the Jesuits. As long as his flock didn't beat their wives too badly and kept all the saints' days and believed in the intercessory powers of the Virgin, Padre Oscar felt well satisfied with them.

  Have I mentioned that Lalo has ridiculously long eyelashes?

  "Alice," he says and leans toward me. How long have I been holding my breath? "Where is the irony in this? Tía Tata rejects all suitors, stays on the farm, tends the sick, and attends funerals. Then she dies and miracles occur. One miracle that we are "

  Is he referring to the hiccups or to Rubén Zamora's sister? Surely not the nympho Grace? I say nothing.

  "It is the pattern of countless virgin saints—the ones you read about."

  I chant, "Dympna, Werburga, Winifred, Begga, Paula the Bearded, Uncumber, and—"

  Lalo stops me. "But something is missing. Some element of transcendence. You teach literature, do you not?"

  "I used to. But only to high school girls." Hold on, Lalo. How does he know all those obscure saints that I thought Hubert was the only person in the world to know?

  "You taught them about irony, did you not?"

  "We grappled with irony every day. But we didn't always call it that."

  "What did you call it?" What did we call it? Was it ironic that instead of performing exegeses on assigned texts we listened as the girls cataloged the horrors and indignities they had suffered at the hands of the men in their lives?

  "Everything but," I say. "We called it afternoon study hall, or senior proms, or family dynamics. I don't think that's what you mean, or what you're after."

  "I'm after what makes a saint."

  Irony, shmirony, I want to say. Let's go sit under a palm tree and eat a mango. Let's be tropical, we two. But I do not.

  The rain inhabits my skull. Record-setting rainfall is turning my cerebellum into unrecognizable dampness. The rain seeps out from the back of my eye sockets and coats my eyeballs, so I see everything through this film of an internalized tropical downpour. Rain, rain, go away, come again another day, when we are far, far away, when donkeys bray, when lizards relay, their heartfelt thanks. Lalo is the only thing I can see clearly in this courtyard. He alone is as exact as a Leonardo drawing. I say, "If you follow the Hubert hagiological curriculum, you will end up thinking that most saints are so called because of the times they lived in. There is this spectrum of behavior—and it's not linear—and depending on what the times are, the zeitgeist, if you will, if you exist in a certain place on that spectrum you get defined as a saint. All those hermits and ascetics and stylites who lived on water and pigeon droppings for thirty years while sitting on top of a pole: they would be diagnosed as asocial anorexics. And Christina the Astonishing, who levitated from her own coffin and ranted and raved about the revolting smell of humans? She's just like the bag lady who used to live in the doorway of St. Thomas's on Fifth Avenue. Or the bag lady was like her. What about Rose of Lima, who rubbed her face with pepper to disfigure herself? What was so holy about hating your body? And what is so intrinsically holy about refusing to get married? Or to get married and then essentially abandon your children, the way Saint Hedwig did, in order to start a bunch of convents? I think what I am saying is that sometimes a woman passionately spouting visions will be burned at the stake, and sometimes she will be sanctified, and other times, ours, as it happens, she'll be diagnosed and medicated."

  He is leaning forward in his wooden chair, the rocking chair that stays still. "I had no idea you felt so strongly about this."

  "Neither did I." It would feel wonderful right now to weep and wrap myself in towels. Dry towels.

  "Tristána did not starve or whip herself. Not that we know of."

  "No hair shirt? No cilice? Just a teeny-weeny barbed chain?"

  "Alice, Alice. No, none of that."

  "Right. She just refused to get married, and refused to dress according to her class." Too bad. A little kinkiness, some playful S & M, could be very appealing just now. At the very least, it might illuminate my foggy brain.

  Lalo is elsewhere in his thinking. He says, "She went to funerals. She offered solace."

  It is time for the rain to stop. There has been more than enough rain. Perhaps I will go to sleep and when I wake up the sun will be out again, and it will be possible to touch someone without being confronted with the essential liquidity of our bodies. I will wake up from a dream in which the hurricane takes place inside a house and then in a room and then inside smaller and smaller rooms until it is just a disturbance in a teacup on a chipped table.

  "You don't think she can be a saint, do you?" Lalo says.

  "I don't know what it means to be a saint, at this exact moment."

  "To have a profound effect of goodness on other people. And then, of course, to have miracles occur when you are prayed to."

  "She was an upper-class beauty. Men fell in love with her," I point out.

  "That wasn't her fault."

  The rain angles across the sky and into this courtyard where it smacks the tiles and the grass. Ezra walks by with Carmen. She glides more than she walks, and her left hand rests lightly on Ezra's shoulder, as if she were blind. Ezra is carrying a terra-cotta pot incised with abstract shapes. "Pre-classic period, circa A.D. 900," he says. "Probably made by the Nicaraos. It was found on the upper farm about thirty years ago when they were planting new coffee."

  "Don't drop it," I say.

  "Carmen says the farmers are always digging up pots. It can be a problem if they're not careful. She has tons with three
legs, and some with anthropomorphic designs." Ezra looks over his shoulder at Carmen, rapturously.

  "Not tons," Carmen corrects. "The Llobets have always valued the arte pre-Colombiano"

  "I like touching things this old," Ezra says.

  Carmen's silk garments rustle audibly as she walks. Or they would were it not for the oceanic crashing of the rainfall. Today her jewelry is green. She is wearing a jade pendant in the shape of a jaguar, and jade globes hang from her earlobes. She never wears bracelets. I presume this is connected with Olga's habit of rubbing salt into her wrists and forearms.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Nowhere," Ezra says. Carmen extracts a long brown cigarillo and lights it. She does this in slow motion, shielding the flame from actual and imaginary winds. She inhales, and for a brief moment her face is entirely blank. Finally, she exhales and says, "It is so sad about the Cubans."

  Carmen and Ezra walk away, connected, bearing ancient pottery, leaving us the quasi-fetid scent of her smoke.

  Lalo leans back in his chair. His fingertips lightly touch each other, thumb to thumb, index to index, and so on. I make a physical effort to not imitate his gesture. The urge to do so is powerful. My fingers ache and twitch.

  "The Cubans?"

  He sighs. "There was a Cuban in her past."

  "Where is he now, this Cuban?"

  "Incinerated," Lalo says. "He was a volcanologist and one day he miscalculated and got too close to the crater."

  "You're joking."

  "He was with a group of Cuban scientists—we had a lot of Cubans here during the Sandinista period—you must know that?"

  I nod, mendaciously.

  Have I mentioned how long and thin Lalo's fingers are? They are still outlining the upper half of a ball, the dome of a cathedral. I wouldn't object if he chose to place them over my head, like a helmet.

  A door slams. Graciela and Francia, the cook's helpers, run across the courtyard. They make no attempt to stay out of the rain, but they are running fast. Behind them is a chicken. Chasing them.