CONFESSION

CUCA’S SALOON, LATE NIGHT CHRISTMAS EVE: THE SAFEST place he could think to go. He certainly did not believe Doña Cuca could look into his eyes and order her men to harm him, especially not in front of a Christmas crowd, whose thirst may have been less than spiritual but was a great festive thirst nonetheless. The chaos of the saloon felt safer than his cramped home, where his unhappy wife looked as if she wanted to tear him apart with her strong little fingers.

He took comfort in the promise of the saloon’s slatted doors and how, once he’d pushed through them, the girl could be counted on to shake off whatever body she was with and come to his side instead. She was sweet and fawning, he was happy and rich; these illusions worked well for both of them. She also never had to do much. He paid her and never once took a room, never left the safety of the table and the pretzels and the reassuringly drunken crowd.

Cuca ignored him as he came through the door and he didn’t have the wherewithal to approach her. The girl took his coat and brought him a drink, and as a passing inner voice asked how long it would be before his credit was completely cut off, the girl sat on his lap. Her bottom was bony, her stale taffeta was ripped, and her face was marred by a welt of a birthmark smack in the middle of her forehead, but she smelled like something untried and untasted and after two bourbons tossed back in hasty shots, he buried his face in her warm neck and all but took a bite. The sound of her giggles was muffled by her heavy hair—about a quarter of it was pinned up, but the rest was endless. It fell darkly around him like a skinned hide, like the walls of a cave; it kept him confined before he finally had to come up for air.

“Buenas noches, El Guapo.” There was a gap between her two front teeth and whether or not this had something to do with the fact that she rarely spoke was unclear, but when she said something—even something as predictable as this greeting—he felt a foolish thrill. She was seventeen or twenty, depending on when he asked, she had the tilted black eyes of a half-breed, and her name was Gregoria, which didn’t suit her at all. The first night he asked her name (after she’d been bringing him drinks in the corner for hours), he gave her a few centavos and attempted not to slur his words. He said he’d be her friend, but he’d be calling her Lucia or Maria or Florita—anything he damn well felt like—but not her Christian name because whoever had named her had got it all wrong. Who named you, girl? he’d asked. But even though his Spanish was good and he could tell she understood every word, her only response was to smile and put the money in her red shoe. And even though he had stayed true to his intoxicated word and called her something different every time he came around, she always responded to whatever he invented; it came to feel like a game.

“Conchita,” he whispered on Christmas Eve, after leaving his lovely wife to sweep shards of broken glass. She would leave him soon; she would find a way to do it, especially when she found out just how deeply in debt he was. Cuca’s men would come for him and Meyer would discover that he’d not only stolen a crate of silver shortly after he’d returned from fighting in the war, but that he’d also been the one taking the money from under the floorboard little by little all along. “Conchita, take me to a room.”

Though this was the first time he’d made this request, she didn’t seem at all surprised, and she rose from his lap and took his hand, as if he were a blind man. As he passed through the black doorway with its tacked up swath of pink silk (a not-so-subtle promise of what happened behind the door), he thought he heard a few whistles and jeers, but he was drunk now, drunk for real, and he couldn’t be sure what he was hearing—this happened sometimes—whether it was gunshots or foot stamping, singing, or screaming; there was sudden potential menace in everything from horse hooves clomping along in the dirt to the silence down a dark hallway. For it was truly dark back here, and unfamiliar dark places were always that much darker.

The cramped hall seemed too small to lead anywhere, and as the girl lit a lamp and his eyes adjusted, he had the gradual sense that everything was contrived, that Doña Cuca would appear at any moment, trailing her fingers along the peeling wallpaper—fingers rife with sunspots despite all her time indoors—and detail exactly how he could expect to be punished. He could envision it happening and yet he still continued to follow the girl, as if by following her he could reject his intuition. His eyes trailed her hips, how they hardly swayed at all but rather moved straight ahead like a wagon in the night, racing west from state into territory. He wondered if this girl was not unlike the wagon train driver he questioned late one night on a dizzying flight across the plains, whose reasons for pressing on couldn’t have been clearer when the driver answered brusquely—while maintaining an eerie focus—that he was frankly too terrified to stop.

The girl stood before him, taller than Eva—taller and so much more substantial. His wife’s touch was initially always a little indistinct, as if it took his hands to wholly bring her down to earth with her feet in the dirt like everybody else. This girl stood before him with her poor posture and gaping smile, which seemed to dip and rise with boredom and expectancy. She seemed that much younger when she unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse; the forward gesture seemed born less from a desire to seduce than a longing to be more comfortable in a constricting costume that someone else had chosen.

He reached out suddenly and touched her waist and when his hands crept upward, she opened the door to one of the three rooms. “Not yet,” he snapped, retracting his hands like a child though he was in fact nearly desperate to rip through the fabric and clutch her skin, which he imagined to be exactly like the skin of a Spanish woman he had learned to dance for long ago, a woman he had loved in California—a landowner’s ambitious daughter who’d made it clear she would never marry him and then proceeded to teach him dirty words in the secret rooms of her father’s hacienda. He stood now watching this girl’s slanted black eyes and imagined her skin to be just like his memory, though sometimes he doubted whether such a memory was authentic because if it was, if he really had made it to California, with its somehow more sophisticated freedom, he had a difficult time believing that he ever would have left. But he had left, and he knew why. He had wanted more and he had found it in a spoiled little woman from Berlin.

Those slanty black eyes flashed matter-of-factly, and he felt them travel from his shoulders to his belly, from his calves to his toes with a definite promise, but also as if he consisted of nothing but gold and she might like to hack off a piece of him. He came closer and put his hands on her full breasts, still constrained under crude whalebone and cheap fabric, and he felt hot breath from her thinnish lips as she mumbled words—either prayers or seductions—he couldn’t understand. When he closed his eyes it was only Eva that he saw, and maybe it was the liquor, and maybe it was his father’s dead spirit—so moral and infectious—but instead of withdrawing from the girl again, this time he lifted her up and pinned her to the wall and drove himself inside of her until he opened his eyes and saw nothing but a strange Mexican whore and he couldn’t hear his father’s voice anymore. And then he ran away. He ran scared through the dark, papered hallway and through the black door, until he was swallowed by the crowd’s leather-bourbon sweat and spat back into the night.

He continued to run from Cuca’s without a destination, until he heard no shaky piano or raucous laughter and he was doubled over, unable to catch his breath, as if Cuca’s brutes had pummeled him after all. He sucked down cold air laced with piñon and the salt-smoky remnants of this feast night, and as he grew bitter cold, even while remaining very drunk, he realized he was right outside the church, listening to the echoes of the midnight mass. He didn’t remember ever standing this close to the adobe church; he was used to seeing it at a distance, how the tawny structure appeared to grow straight from the red-ocher hills like a bigger, stronger tree. He saw, at that moment, no need for the bishop’s elaborate plans for a new cathedral. The French architect from Toulouse, the very fine stonecutters—it all seemed pointless. This adobe church was noble and good; it stood up to its setting, which was, at turns, ruddy and gold in square daylight or livid with the violet of oncoming storms, or how it was just then on this winter’s night with the sky first dark as a warning and then lighter as the snow began.

Instead of heading home as he knew he should, he took refuge from the weather by stepping inside the church, where he slipped right in without provoking even a shudder of commotion. He imagined doing this in Berlin, and was ashamed to feel his stomach flip with fear. To enter a midnight mass—it felt as provocative and illicit as having just bedded a whore. He looked around at so many people clustered together, their focus unwaveringly toward the painted altar, where Bishop Lagrande lead the service. It was as if the bishop were the moon itself—brighter and stronger than all of the candles illuminating the church. Abraham took comfort in crowds, which always came as a small surprise, and he couldn’t deny being uplifted by the sense of a common purpose. Though the women looked like prostitutes in their heavy rouge and gaudy adornments, and the men looked strangely dull with their heads uniformly bowed, Abraham felt the strangest sense of amity. He allowed himself the rare acknowledgment that his wife might well be barren, and then he came as close as he could to prayer.

Just this evening—within the border of luminarias outlining the plaza—some of these same somber individuals wore masks and played out a ritual dance in which the young women held hollow eggshells filled with scented liquid and chased after men they fancied, smashing the eggs upon their heads with a mix of flattery and mockery. Though, while watching the spectacle, he’d laughed when an Eastern general took the occasion to quip: What a perfect display of Catholicism in New Mexico, Abraham had privately thought the general a puritan and had even regretted laughing.

He was not a religious man, it was no more or less than fact, but as he saw this sea of dark eyes trained on the bishop, when he saw what kind of power his Gallic friend possessed—he couldn’t help but admit a sense of wonder. Here was Jesus, wooden on the cross, vermillion paint for blood. Here was an alien church, strange in every way but for its faint echo of taunting Catholic schoolmates and distant relations who, much to his father’s horror, had chosen the way of conversions. His father had been so deeply against conversions at a time in Germany when it was commonly seen as a necessary step to truly move up in society, and because Abraham respected his father more than he could measure (or even, for that matter, justify), all he ever thought—all he ever permitted himself to think on the matter of conversions—was what his father had repeated again and again, up until his death: Nothing good will come of this. But now here he stood in a new world, where society was measured not by titles but by greenbacks, and he had already polluted the possibilities.

Snow blew through the crack in the doorway, and he imagined the vaulted roof blowing straight through the stars, and this room, this flock, blanketed with snow until nothing was left of this particular rite but the silence between prayers.

         

WHEN THE SISTERS FIRST ARRIVED IN SANTA FE, THE BISHOP GAVE them his own substantial quarters so that they might have convenient access to the cathedral, but he’d kept two rooms there for himself until he’d found other arrangements. His new home ended up being a ways out of town, and though it sat on many hectares of fertile soil (the bishop counted extensive gardens among his many aspirations), it was not only Abraham who wryly speculated that its generous distance from the good Sisters must have figured into his final decision. In any case, the temporary rooms had not been altered and he made use of them on nights such as these when it was too late and unsafe to ride. This was where Abraham followed Bishop Lagrande after the penitent crowds had dispersed, and as he trailed the skinny man in the long, dark cassock through the heavy falling snow, he felt the absurdity of his behavior, the inappropriate hour, but still he didn’t question why he was drunk and heedlessly freezing, instead of warm (if guilty) and in bed with his wife. As the bishop let himself into the ground-floor room, Abraham hid behind an empty wagon, trying and failing to light a brittle cigar.

Minutes later he knocked at the door—he was sure he knocked—but he also couldn’t have denied letting himself in. When he stepped inside, the bishop was already asleep. Abraham knew that he needed nothing so much as to leave, but all at once he was incredibly cold and suddenly exhausted. As the bishop breathed deeply from a single cot, Abraham noticed a square opening in the wall, which hosted a pile of kindling. Because he never went anywhere without matches in every pocket, the temptation was too great, and within seconds the piñon caught quickly.

“Why are you lighting a fire?” the bishop asked simply, in Spanish.

“I am not lighting a fire,” Abraham heard himself say, and remarkably, the bishop continued to sleep. Abraham turned slowly from the flames, and as they warmed his back, he looked in the direction of the bishop, whose creased face was occasionally revealed by the orange-blue light. As his eyes adjusted, Abraham looked around the jail-like space and saw the long, dark cassock draped over a simple chair. He was tempted to put it on, for warmth as much as for the humor of it, but he resisted the temptation, only to do something far more stupid.

“Give me my goddamn money,” Abraham said, but the bishop didn’t even stir. Abraham felt for the revolver at his hip—an additional bit of cold, dark weight, heavy with reassurance. “I need my money,” he repeated, with an unfamiliar and ugly lack of restraint. And still the bishop slept.

Abraham meant, he did, to beg. He meant to say that he was overextended, that he’d never had the right to hand over the money, that it wasn’t really his to give. He meant to come clean and beg the bishop’s forgiveness and ask for his money back. He needed to do this but what he did instead was what he had been doing all night. He ran.

In The New Mexican there were headlines: Attempted Murder, Narrow Escape, Gracias a Dios. The articles explained how, on Christmas Eve, Bishop Lagrande had smelled smoke and woke in the middle of the night, just in time to see an unidentified man racing out of the room; he’d also seen the glint of a gun. In these articles the bishop expressed only concern for the mystery vagrant. What a wretched soul, the bishop said. He must have been very desperate.