13 Teresa, Cartago, 1995
Teresa found herself watching the channel broadcasting prayers. It distracted her from thinking about Gabriel. Teresa was a lukewarm believer, at best, her Catholicism a mug of coffee left out for a little too long on the table. Whenever she needed a spiritual boost, she sipped from it, regained a bit of energy to keep going. Her grandmother bestowed upon her this habit—she hadn’t believed in organized religion, but God was forever present in her life and guided her hands as she concocted elixirs for housewives. Fanatics could say that type of belief was convenient, a selfish extraction. Drawing from the well without replenishing it. But her grandmother always said, ¿Who is arrogant enough to believe they can replenish God’s Will?
Why could one not simply do as they pleased, please God in the way He wanted, and not in the way priests commanded? Bishops, nuns, popes—the hierarchical ecosystem of the church; fish eating smaller fish. And at the bottom of the food chain: money from believers’ pockets. Oh yes, gold-encrusted altars were indeed the fruit of faith.
Cartago, Teresa thought. The basilica and its gold-encrusted altar to the Virgin Mary. Perhaps a small communion with Her could answer yesterday’s overwhelming question: Why the vision of the Río Celeste, her parents and grandmother, and her reliving the first time she’d faced death and run?
Cartago, the holy city, was just a train ride away—if anything, it would get her out of the house, even if she had to venture through a hurricane. After forcing on her too-tight rain boots and periwinkle windbreaker, Teresa set out into the rain. At the Atlantic Station wayfarers, bent on making it to Cartago’s famous basilica for perhaps the last time, sat in files along the station’s steps, their umbrellas black mushroom tops in the rain. A quivering, fungal mass of believers desperate to perform the sacraments they had left: children for Communions, couples for marriage, elderly widows preparing to collapse dead in the middle of the aisle. Teresa leaned her shoulder against a stone pillar, listening to their prayers waft over the wind. At this angle, she felt envy.
The train finally pushed through the waterfall crashing from the station’s roof, and Teresa paid the ornery ticket vendor and grabbed a window seat toward the back. A young man, no older than Juan Julián had once been, took up the aisle seat next to her and immediately turned on his portable television to catch the second half of a fútbol game. Teresa had never seen one before: the device had the appearance of a walkie-talkie, antenna and all. Unable to look away, Teresa watched it from the side of her eye. Two teams were playing in an open field, its grass transforming slowly into an archipelago (their contracts didn’t exclude hurricanes). The young man tensed his body with every attempted goal and sucked his teeth at each one missed. Teresa saw him cross his chest once; she, too, noticed that the players appeared to be walking on water.
INSIDE THE BASILICA of Cartago, down the marble aisle flanked by dozens of rows of chestnut pews made soft by pilgrims’ behinds, past the red pulpit, and on a splendid golden altar that reached up to the octagonal dome, the statuette of the Virgin of Los Ángeles peered out from her prison, finding this whole arrangement a little ironic. For almost two centuries, the Mother of God had been enclosed in this tight-fitting sarcophagus, unable to scratch her nose or fix the hem of her dress. This had all really gone a bit too far. While, yes, La Virgen did appear to that young Indigenous girl three hundred years ago, it was merely as a suggestion for the correct site for the basilica’s construction (all others would crumble because of earthquakes—divine, random, or otherwise). So, La Virgen materialized as a stone statuette to the girl, who in turn brought an interpreting priest in a panic, all the while hoping the fools would take the hint. But basilica after basilica fell, and when they finally followed the obvious clues La Virgen had laid out, they built it on the correct spot and opened it to the public. But then, without warning—or logic, as far as La Virgen could tell—they locked her away in a coffin. An iron maiden made of gold.
That wasn’t—and had never been—the plan.
Daily, palmers crawled from the basilica’s portal to the foot of her encased mannequin. Sometimes on their knees. Sometimes not. Women who had buried firstborns, men who were cheating on their wives, the best friends of said wives, priests, divorcees, nuns, reprobates, government contractors, and one time a man who crawled after losing his legs to a mining accident.
The holy and the unholy.
The blithering masses who looked to her for forgiveness.
But until these fanatics released her, La Virgen would forgive not a damned thing. Not a wish, or a miracle, or any sort of blessing (not even in disguise). Until the day of her release, she would sit, petulant and bored inside her compact, jewel-encrusted box. This fate was, without a doubt, the closest the Virgin Mary had ever been to Hell.
Teresa did not arrive at the basilica on her knees. Instead, she slipped into the eastern side entrance, almost tripped on a bicycle, and followed the flower tiles to the very last pew in the back. As she got comfortable, a steady procession of pilgrims and charlatans entered on all fours. Their taut, penitent faces soaking wet and grumbling from the pain, all in hopes that La Virgen would take notice and answer their pleas: a cure for emphysema, a convenient death for an uncle with a large inheritance. But most of all, an end to this godforsaken storm. One by one they passed Teresa as she mouthed the words the priest howled over the footsteps. Sparrows constructed flimsy nests in the upper parts of the dome. The tempest beat the windows, rattling the birds. A chick fell into a basin of holy water. Baptized, at least, before drowning.
“Teresita,” an almost-forgotten voice said, “¿is that you?”
“¿Alice?” Teresa said without turning around. “It can’t be.”
“Oh my Lord.”
Alice cupped Teresa’s cheeks. Her scent, coconut mixed with the salt of a sea breeze, brought her back to the day they’d first met in DC: Teresa roaming like a phantom, crying for change and a chance to get back to her daughters; Alice saving her, delivering her to the warm embrace of Doña Eralia. It really was her. People on the pews turned to Shhh them; they hissed and pointed to the door with their lips. Alice stuck out her tongue and forbade Teresa from apologizing. “What just happened was miraculous,” Alice said to a squinting old man. “What you just witnessed was an act of God.”
They linked arms and Alice guided her through the rain to a café across the way. She chose a corner table toward the back, beneath a COORS LIGHT sign. “It used to be a bar,” Alice laughed. “I asked the owner once, and he said we must honor the past by keeping at least one thing as it was.” Alice motioned for the barista to bring two coffees.
“I live just a kilometer away. I come here when I need to think and study lines.”
“¿Lines? ¿Like a script?”
Alice nodded, thanked the young man, and ordered two pineapple jelly empanadas.
“So you’re an actress. Just like your mother was when she was a girl.”
“I started after she died.”
“¿When was that?” Teresa asked solemnly. She wished to say a prayer but felt foolish.
“She lasted another five years after you left. I buried her, sold the house, and rented an apartment uptown. My neighbors were all actors and directors, and when I told them my mother had been one, too, they convinced me to try it out. My first role was Yerma.”
“The lead,” Teresa smiled. “You must have been so proud, the lead in a García Lorca play.”
“We even built a theater company—the first bilingual one in DC. It was a beautiful undertaking, but I had a falling-out with one of the organizers.”
“¿What happened?”
“He hit on me, and I slapped him.” Alice laughed. “I’m my mother’s daughter—he didn’t know.”
“¿When did you move here to Costa Rica?” Teresa asked into her cup of coffee.
“Five years ago. I decided to open my own theater company in San José. We’ve put on ten plays. Some original, some adaptations.”
“¿Shakespeare?” Teresa asked.
“You remembered. You remembered how much my mother loved those tragedies.”
Again, the mention of Doña Eralia made Teresa melancholic.
“It’s all right, Teresita,” Alice said. She touched Teresa’s hand. “She loved you. She never stopped talking about you.”
“¿What did she say?”
“Only that you were the quietest girl she ever met.” Alice brought out Teresa’s smile with her own. “She said you were a well, but instead of water you cradled secrets deep down in you. She told me about your daughters. Well, what you had mentioned of them. ¿Are they all right?”
“I lost one,” Teresa said.
“I’m so sorry. ¿And the other?”
“I haven’t seen her in a long time.”
“My daughter’s distant, too, Teresita. Nothing out of the ordinary for girls to be that way. My Charlotte stayed in DC to study. Anthropology at Howard University. She’s such a smart girl. I miss her.”
“Mine too. Lyra is her name.”
“A beautiful one. A song of a girl, I bet.”
“¿How do we get them back?”
“Shit, Teresita. If I knew, I’d never have let Charlotte leave the house. I tried everything: being nice, keeping my tongue in my mouth, driving her friends everywhere, cooking her favorite food, letting her have a boyfriend. Everything in my arsenal, but not a budge. I’m sure you went through the same thing too.”
“Something like that.”
“¿And their father, Teresita? My mother never brought him up.”
“José María,” Teresa said. “Gone.”
His name. That well Alice had spoken of trembled, the water within Teresa rippling. The bucket had been dropped; the mention of José María, the idea of him, the memory that he had indeed existed, yanked up to the surface, pulled with a burning, painful thirst.
“He’s probably still out there,” Teresa said halfheartedly.
“Mine ran out on me too,” Alice said nonchalantly. “Left me for one of the other actresses. Younger, bigger tits,” she said. “They’re all the same. Devils, the sons of bitches.”
“That’s true.” Can he still be out there?
“¿And what?” Alice said. “¿We’re supposed to float around like the Virgin Mary? Reserved, and merciful, and perfect. They’re the devils, ¿and we have to take the high ground? Fuck that, Teresita. I’m no saint. I’m not forgiving a damn thing. And you shouldn’t either. They left, and it’s their loss.”
“¿What do we do then?”
Alice fiddled around with the leftover empanada crust, breaking it apart with little cracks until the dry dough became dust. “We keep going, keep trying to win back our daughters. Charlotte will come around, and so will Lyra. We just need to be patient.” Alice winked. “You and I are stubborn, like my mother. So of course our girls took after us. After her. I wouldn’t have it any other way, to be quite honest.”
“I owe you and your mother everything,” Teresa said. The nostalgia of Doña Eralia in her kitchen, yelling at the milkman, singing at the church services down the street, the cane she wielded like a sword, centered Teresa like a deep breath.
Alice sucked her teeth. “You don’t owe us anything, Teresita.”
“¿What are you doing on Friday?” Teresa asked.
“¿You mean tomorrow? Who knows if we’ll make it till then, Teresita. They say the storm is only going to get worse. But now I’m curious. ¿Why do you ask?”
“There’s a party. For my birthday.”
“¿Your birthday?” Alice shrieked, clasping her hand as if catching a fly. “I don’t think I can miss that, Teresita. We never threw you a birthday, because you never told us the date. We tried for years to shake it out of you.”
“Now you know,” Teresa said.
“So, you’re an Aquarius,” Alice said suspiciously. She looked to the barista, made the sign for the check. “¡That makes so much sense! Now I get it,” she said, looking back at Teresa. “Now I get it. Write down the address, Teresita. I’m there, even if I have to build an ark.”
“They call this serendipity,” Teresa said. She jotted down the directions to Cristina’s house in Barrio Ávila as Alice paid the bill.
“Just like an Aquarius to say that. ¿Will your daughter be there, Teresita?”
“I don’t know,” Teresa said. “One can only hope, ¿right?” She put on her windbreaker and cocked her umbrella like a shotgun. “Friday afternoon,” she said. She and Alice kissed each other on both cheeks, embraced each other long enough for the barista to make three cappuccinos for other customers.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” Alice said.
Teresa set out into the solid wall of rain. It had indeed been serendipitous—this encounter with Alice after so long. What a treat after so many years of sorrow. What a welcome gift on a Thursday. A sympathetic party would now be arriving at her birthday—at least one guest who held no ill will toward her. Someone in her corner in case this party turned into what Teresa was suspecting since Cristina proposed it: an intervention. One of her fantastical inventions of healing, reconciliation, et cetera. The drama that Cristina filled her days with, because Desiderio couldn’t keep her occupied.
Teresa had always kept what happened in DC secret, but Alice represented those radiant moments with Doña Eralia. That gumdrop eyesore of a house off Pennsylvania Avenue. Perhaps it was time to share in that delight again, reconnect those years of her life with the rest of it. If Lyra miraculously showed up at the party, perhaps Alice could win her over, convey to her that Teresa had missed her and Carmen. That she hadn’t forgotten about them, even if she’d abandoned them. It was her own choice, yes, but not because she liked it. She had to. Alice would convince Lyra of that. Teresa needed her to.
Teresa found herself at the basilica’s portal. Its gargantuan structure gray and white, reaching high enough that it almost blended into the swirling clouds. Instead of entering, Teresa walked to its southern ramp, which led to the original site of La Virgen’s statuette, the same rock on which she had appeared to the young Indigenous girl, where fresh, drinkable water flowed out of rusted pipes, filtered and purified, scientists speculated, by the nearby volcano. Teresa descended the spiral path to the rock and its holy water. Above, Psalm 42:1 read in gilded letters,
As the deer pants for streams of water,
So, too, my soul pants for you …
Teresa washed her face of mascara and foundation. She pressed the holy water to her temples, chin, forehead.
So, too, her soul panted for him …
For the first time in many years, Teresa considered José María’s whereabouts. The hopeful question she had so desperately submerged in that deep well of water within her surfaced for air.
AMERICAN FRUIT COMPANY
GENERAL OFFICES, 588 20TH STREET NW, WASHINGTON, D.C.
CABLE ADDRESS
AMERIFRUITCO { D.C. N.Y.
JOHN AUGUSTUS SMITH JR.
CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD
BOARD MEMBERS
COSTA RICA DIVISION
SAN JOSÉ, COSTA RICA
February 2, 1968.
Dear Board:
I have just received a preliminary medical report from Dr. Vincent R. Smith, and his findings are very similar to DOW’s. There is much room for argument in future court proceedings, and we must pressure Legal to continue casting doubt regarding the nature of Nemagon in Costa Rica. I believe Vincent’s initial conclusions to be mere coincidence. I don’t trust DOW, H. D. Doan or his cronies, and especially his phony medical examiners. Shame on them for baiting us with a miracle chemical and switching it at the exact moment the Company is doing well. It would not be surprising if UFC has a hand in this sudden study of Nemagon.
And what if Vincent’s findings are true? I do not personally see any problem with the situation. While involuntary sterility caused by a manufactured chemical may be bad, it is not necessarily so. After all, there are many people in the United States who are now paying to have themselves sterilized to assure they will no longer be able to become parents. Why not extend that same option to the Costa Ricans? How many of the workers who have become sterile were of an age that they would have been likely to have children anyway? How many were past the age when they would even want to? These, too, are important questions. If sterility is such a big concern, couldn’t workers who were old enough that they no longer wanted children accept such positions voluntarily? They would know the situation and it wouldn’t matter. Or could workers be advised of the situation, and some might volunteer for such work posts as an alternative to planned surgery for a vasectomy or tubal ligation, or as a means of getting around religious bans on birth control? There are pros and cons to every situation.
I propose a vote in two weeks’ time as to the continued use of Nemagon. This will give you all enough time to review my nephew’s reports to properly inform a decision. Please confirm receipt, and we will convene on February 16.
Very respectfully,
