My skepticism concerning all notions of reconquista is skepticism toward the view that history is restorative. I get older but I do not grow wiser. It is only by shedding skin, by turning pages, by ordering stronger spectacles, by having my hair cut, that I seem to be restoring myself to a circular pattern, that I seem to progress toward youth and capability, though my progress is actually a decline.
I seem to be forgetting something as my eyes weaken and my patience sharpens into a desperate, childish hunger: I am forgetting that one must become as a little child. (To reach the kingdom of Heaven, in Jesus’s formulation. Or to apprehend an intuition of that kingdom—surely that is to believe in circularity?)
I seem to be missing rooms and days, days so tall I could not see an end to them. I miss persons who no longer exist.
• • •
Oh, c’mon, Frank, at least leave it up till New Year’s Day.
What miracle of neuron and synapse allows one to laugh out loud in remembrance of a moment so long past? I see Frank (with my mind’s eye); I hear Frank’s sugar-cured voice. Frank is my landlord. How he amuses me! I watch Frank pluck a red bow and a pert artificial bird from an evergreen wreath and then dump the wreath into a trash bag.
I’ll tell you something, Richard: There’s nothing so over as Christmas. (December 26, perhaps 1985.)
Twenty-five years later, this same Frank woke to see his adored older brother, Cassius, standing in the doorway of the hospital room where Frank was taken after his last bedroom fall. Cassius was in his air force uniform, looking exactly as he had that summer morning in Birmingham, sixty years earlier, when Cassius paused in Frank’s bedroom doorway before he turned and left for the war. Cassius? Are you here or am I there? But Cassius could not see Frank, or, if he could, he could not speak.
On a television documentary I watched last night, a Chilean astronomer said that the calcium in our bones is made of stardust. He was not speaking metaphorically.
Those who are old claim the advantage of far sight. The older you get, the more you remember; the more you forget, the more you regret. The more you sift. There remains the problem of reliability. My friend Florence: Florence is ninety-two. She cannot remember what she had for lunch or even . . . she looks at her watch . . . she supposes she must have had lunch by this time. Yet her mind can recall a day in 1925, a spring day: the back door is standing open because the kitchen is too warm. She can see a quarter moon with a pointed chin on the page of the calendar as she opens the back door for her mother, who is too warm; her mother preparing the Sabbath meal. The meal is going to be spoiled because her father and her eldest brother will quarrel; their father will leave the table. Florence shrugs. She forgets what point she was illustrating with the calendar, the too-warm kitchen, the anger of men.
• • •
I catch a glimpse of my mother through the doorway of our kitchen. I am just about to leave for school; it must be cold—I am zipping up my jacket, my binder between my knees. “See you later, Mama.”
Ojalá, my mother calls.
My mother appended ojalá to every private leave-taking; my father never did. I heard the Spanish expression pristinely—I had heard it all my life. Ojalá meant ojalá. If I’d had the best friend I dreamed about, someone who would follow me about, who would want to know what everything meant, I would have told him ojalá means something like I pray it may be so—an exclamation and a petition.
Growing up, I thought the American expression God willing and the creek don’t rise to be a variant of my mother’s ojalá, which it is. I learned only this year, however, that the expression refers to Creek Indians, rather than to a swollen waterway.
In fact, the name of Allah was enshrined in the second and third syllables of my mother’s ojalá. I doubt my mother knew that, though maybe she did. I didn’t. The expression is a Spanish borrowing from the Arabic commonplace prayer Insha’Allah—God willing.
• • •
The nun stands apart as the women coalesce about my mother’s wheelchair after Mass; she waits for the miasma of parrot-colored blouses to clear before she approaches. The nun’s job is to minister to the elderly of the parish. She knows every old person by name; she knows their children’s names. She knows my name. I remember to ask after the health of her brother, who is ill in a town in southern Italy.
Not so good. I hope to visit him this winter.
Four months later, at the hospital where my father lay sunk in a coma, the Italian nun, whose brother had somewhat improved, stood at the foot of the bed, next to where my mother was seated. “We remain optimistic,” my mother implored the nun. My desperate mother.
Leo is dying, Victoria, the nun said.
My mother tried to remove her hand from the nun’s hand. The nun would not release her.
We need to pray for Leo, the nun said.
Oh, my poor mother. Proud as a mare, fiery as a mare, and now as frightened as a mare, my mother relinquished her spirit to the nun’s calm instruction; she bowed her head and prayed like a schoolgirl for the old man who had been her husband for seventy years.
• • •
A year later, my mother died.
As many as four thousand Spanish words derive from Arabic. In 1492, when Columbus sailed the blue, when the Moor and the Jew were, by order of the Crown, expelled from Spain, Barbary already peppered the tongues of Spaniards.
Spaniards took Arabic words, or variants of remembered Arabic words, to the New World and salted the raw backs of Indians with them or whispered them in lust. So that, five centuries later, my Mexican mother, as a sort of reflex, would call upon Allah to keep the expected structure of her world intact. Ojalá, Mama. If the department store sale is still on. If the fog lifts. If it doesn’t rain. If the results are negative. If we are all here next Christmas.
• • •
A characterization I have heard in recent years, at academic conferences on the Middle East, is that Christianity is a religion of guilt; Islam is a religion of grievance. Difference among the desert religions, rather than commonality, is the point drawn.
The argument proceeds: The theoretical Christian is weighed down by the knowledge of Original Sin. (If I were a young man, I would swear to you that I have never met a Christian who is weighed down by the knowledge of Original Sin. At my present age, I will tell you I have never met any human being who is not weighed down by the knowledge that men and women must fail.) The theoretical Christian inclines toward self-recrimination, which is reckoned a good thing, because self-recrimination is a corrective to anger. The theoretical Muslim knows no such fetters in his theology. The Prophet Muhammad rejected the notion of Original Sin. In the version of Islam that Western academics dispense at conferences, jihad is holy in the Koran and grievance can be expiated only by retribution.
Political theorists at secular academic conferences largely refrain (in my experience) from characterizing Judaism, though both Islam and Christianity are fractures of Judaism, glosses on Judaism, branches of Judaism—Judaism the root.
I must tell you: As a Christian, I am not flattered to hear academics describe the readiness of Christians to accept their guilt as a superior asset for living among people of disparate beliefs. It seems to me that Christians have inclined often enough, in our history, to harbor grievance. But it makes me uneasy to hear any academic assessment that implies that Christians are better equipped to live in a secular society than Muslims. As an American, I have never found an easy rhyme between my religion and my patriotism. Indeed, my religious life—born Mexican Catholic and raised Irish Catholic—has often been at odds with my American faith in new beginnings. Even that wonderful phrase, “new beginnings,” seems to me less a redundancy than a kind of tonic baptism, like Coca-Cola.
New beginnings: Grandma Moses said that if she ever got so down on her luck she couldn’t make ends meet, why, then, she’d rent a church hall on credit and make pan
cakes. Maybe charge fifty cents. I don’t know what it is about pancakes, she said, but if you make them, people will always come.
America is a faith, perhaps pancakes its sacrament. Opportunity comes to those who put away the disadvantages of family or circumstance and entrust themselves to the future. The point of the American story is simple enough for a child, particularly an immigrant child, to grasp: The past holds no sway in America.
Complicating my American faith, however, was the circumstance that Catholics—like high-church Protestants and like many Jews—describe themselves religiously by reference to the past and to the Old World. Regardless of any national variant of Catholicism (like Irish or Mexican), we are universal in faith—Roman Catholics, my Church taught me to say.
Don’t you think it curious that so many Americans characterize their religious lives with reference to foreign allegiances? We are Dutch Reform; we are the Russian or the Greek Orthodox, or the Armenian or Syrian; we are the Russian, or the Galician, or the German, Jews; we are German Lutherans; we are Anglo Catholics; we belong to the Church of England! Even those Puritans of old who so famously sailed away from the intolerable Church of England ended up on the windy shore of Massachusetts, clutching their cloaks about them, gazing forlornly from history books that name them “English Puritans.”
Richard Rodriguez wanted no accent in his voice, no ethnic shadow to his progress. Nevertheless, his Church educated Richard to imagine himself connected to a past much older than American optimism.
The odd thing is how well I remember my Roman youth, how well I remember the first of my Popes in the 1940s and ’50s. That would be the forbidding Pope, Pius XII, with the beautifully molded head, the hook nose, the spectacles, the pewter complexion—all the more forbidding when he was laid out dead in the pages of Life magazine. He was a historical enigma, my first Pope. After more than fifty years, I am filled with the same dread looking at those photographs of him, and with a kind of heartsickness, for I think I really did love that dark man.
Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI—the roster unrolls with the century. My American childhood passed from Harry Truman to Dwight D. Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy. Castel Gandolfo was as much a part of my imagination as Camp David.
Americans experience time in two distinct ways—as religious people and as people of no religion. Just so, we experience ourselves as a historical people and as people who are not implicated by history.
Being an American and being religious did not, early on, seem a conflict to me; these were two distinct ways of being, like school and summer. I read fewer lives of the saints than I read books about American heroes—inventors, presidents, explorers. I read the life of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux as well as the life of Louis Pasteur, her contemporary, her countryman. I assumed pasteurized milk was a boon to humankind. I assumed Saint Thérèse was praying for us, as she promised she would: I will spend my heaven in doing good upon earth.
With Mark Twain, I wondered at the incomprehensible ways of foreigners—myself an altar boy, a familiar of Latin prayers and incense and candles and images. I was still a number of years away from the more complicated versions of American innocence to be found in the fiction of Henry James, whose American heroine in Europe “blushed neither when she looked . . . nor when she felt that people were looking at her.”
On my first day at college, a sophisticated young man, a Belgian, wandered into my dormitory room like a prince in a play, noticed the crucifix my mother had pinned to the lining of the suitcase I was unpacking, said: I suppose you are a Roman.
I was going to say my parents came from Mexico, but then I saw what he meant. Yes, I said, a Roman. And I realized it was true—that I had had an ulterior life for as long as I could remember.
I grew up during the changeover to Technicolor. Behind Auntie Mame and Three Coins in the Fountain, behind the draperies of scarlet and gold of the Second Vatican Council, lay the deserts of the Nuclear Age—the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the Soviet Gulag.
The recesses of my late-adolescent mind were black-and-white deserts—foreign films—for I grew up in the aftermath of the war, the Age of Pasolini, Bergman, and Fellini. The human face—Humanity—was a projection on a screen. Utterances from the face were sometimes inane, wreathed with smoke, discontinuous, lapsed (in foreign films continuity was not always an important consideration). The voice confounded the movement of the lips; the translator confounded the voice. After two wars, humanity was desperate to account for its survival.
I reached my majority in the Age of Freud, Joyce, Beckett, Auden, Eliot, Nabokov. The “New Criticism” was taught in colleges—the technique of approaching a work of literature as though literature exists in its own sphere, removed from history, biography, jealousy, the smell of the river. I prized artificiality over life—I had a great hunger to experience the portrayal of life, in books, in theater.
I grew up in the Age of Existentialism, whereby Man, capital M, is alone and free but without recourse to a crucifix that fills the sky. And yet all this café seriousness—you will have noticed—came from the Catholic world, from Europe. I was raised without much sense of trespass. Saint Thérèse easily coexisted with Samuel Beckett. Both spoke French. Both were harrowed by a world empty of God. One reinvented drama to accommodate an absence of meaning. One waited patiently as, in her own simile, a sparrow in a hedge waits for the fog to clear, for the sun to be revealed.
Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I . . . it became the habit of John Paul II to address the history of the Roman Catholic Church with contrition. The old man issued over ninety formal apologies—virtually a chronicle of Western civilization. He apologized for the Church’s persecution of Galileo. He apologized for the Spanish Inquisition, for the persecution of Jews, for the mistreatment of Martin Luther, for the denigration of women; he apologized for the colonial mistreatment of Native peoples in the Americas; he apologized for violence against Orthodox Christians. John Paul II apologized to the Muslim world for the sacking of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204.
The Pope’s penitential impulse coincided with a time in the history of the Church when fewer Roman Catholics, particularly in Europe and North America, were availing themselves of the sacrament of Penance. Penance is a sacrament out of line with the postmodern sensibility, for it seeks to alleviate sin—a word we no longer employ. In secular America, the holistic mode of self-forgiveness, self-dispensed, prevails. The pop-psych revivalism of afternoon television involves “owning” one’s destructive behaviors; one embarks on a “healing path”; there follows a pledge, many tears, a commercial break. We are a Bathetic Age.
The U.S. government has apologized lately for a number of historical offenses—from slavery to the incarceration of American citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II. But the truth is that we Americans are too individualistic to huddle together under a collective apology or a collective guilt. We don’t understand what it means to apologize for the sins of a past generation. The American disclaimer: I wasn’t even born yet!
As a Roman Catholic, I am prepared to say I am sorry for the Crusades. As an American, I hear some Jihadist curse American Crusaders—in English—as he passes in front of a BBC camera, and I am astonished because he implicates me.
As a Roman Catholic, I confess a past I had no part in, a past to which I adhere, a past that is shameful. But as soon as the old man sitting in the yellow plastic chair in the no-man’s-room at the airport in Toronto starts going on about Crusader dogs, I think to myself: Get over it, old man; you weren’t even born yet!
• • •
The two temples of my youth—of Rome, of America—were not unrelated. The first was my parish church—Sacred Heart Catholic Church, at 39th and J streets, in Sacramento. Sacred Heart Church remains one of the few figments of my dream life that survives and that I am able to revisit without disappointment. Within and without, the architecture is Romanesque—a Roman arch set with
mosaic rises above the altar. The Harry Clarke Studio of Dublin City, Ireland, glazed the colored windows in the late 1920s.
My last year of grammar school coincided with the opening (again in the pages of Life magazine) of the Second Vatican Council and the desire of the “universal” Church to become, in the Pentecost metaphor of that era, “a Pilgrim Church on earth.” The Church would henceforth speak in all the languages of the earth. My life became less Roman, thereby. The grandeur of the Latin Mass was lost to me; my rhetorical exception from the naive American novel dissolved. At an early age, therefore, I experienced nostalgia. Nostalgia remains specific in my imagination: the Latin mass, the windows painted by the Harry Clarke Studio in Dublin, the German music favored by Anton Dorndorf, the parish’s choir director. My nostalgia was for Europe.
It never occurred to me with any intellectual or emotional force until 2001—odd, because I had seen every Bible movie released between 1951 and 1964—that Christianity, like Judaism, like Islam, is a desert religion, an oriental religion, a Semitic religion, born of sinus-clearing glottal consonants, spit, dust, blinding light.
The Christian calendar has two “deserts”—Advent and Lent—two penitential preludes to the great feasts of Christmas and Easter. Though Christianity has sojourned so long in Europe that the penitential seasons are now imagined as seasons of gaunt—winters of the soul, rather than deserts. These expanses of cold time are symbolized by an ecclesiastical weather of purple cloth.
Which brings me to the second temple of my youth. The Alhambra Theatre in Sacramento was constructed in 1927 to resemble a tall white Muslim fortress. The Alhambra belonged to the generation of exotically themed movie houses that rivaled the fantasies people gathered to enjoy in them. In midsize towns and county seats across America, alongside the five-and-dimes and the Greco-Roman banks and the two-story department stores, there were neon-lit palaces, many with romantic themes derived from Spanish Arabia—the Alcazar, El Capitan, the Valencia, the Granada. Such palaces featured velvet proscenium curtains, wrought-iron balustrades, frescoes, starlit skies.
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