Riordan walked back to the plaza, under high cirrus colored molten orange by the sunset, and paused by the bandstand to admire the church. It was an architectural mongrel yet as eye-pleasing as a purebred, or, as an old guidebook put it, “a harmonious blend of Moorish, Byzantine, baroque, and Mexican Renaissance architecture.” Looking at its balanced façade—the twin domed bell towers, the tall oak doors flanked by baroque columns—soothed him; and thinking about its history gave him heart. Priests from his order began building it in the 1780s, after the Spanish king expelled the Jesuits from Mexico. They accomplished the feat with Indian labor and no machinery, while protecting their converts from plundering Spaniards on the one side and wild Seris and Apaches on the other. Was he less than they? If they could triumph over all that, why couldn’t he shield his flock from both the Brotherhood and Valencia’s paratroopers? The good shepherd does not run from the wolves.
He crossed the plaza, passing near a young couple necking on a bench. Really going at it, so lost in their passion that they weren’t aware of him. Pretending not to notice them, he quickened his pace; but he wasn’t quick enough to avoid glimpsing the girl’s jeans, as tight as leotards, and the delectable S traced by her back, hips, and legs as she leaned into the boy’s arms. A needle of lust jabbed him and expelled the serenity he’d felt just seconds earlier.
Keeping celibate had always been a struggle for him, and he’d lost it once. Not long after his ordination, he’d tumbled into an affair with a translator from the U.S. embassy in Rome, when he was studying at the North American College. Marcella Allegretti. Long, light brown hair, a straight nose above half-smiling lips, large gray-green eyes, a distant look in them—she could have been a model for Botticelli’s Primavera. Owing to her work and his somewhat cloistered life, they did not see each other very often; but the infrequency of the assignations heightened their intensity. He went to confession every Friday, vowed to sin no more, and within minutes of leaving, plotted how and when he could do exactly that. He almost left the priesthood over her. In the end, he chose his vocation, telling Marcella that he could not fully devote himself to her with a divided heart. “Then by all means give your heart to your church, see if embracing a stone statue is the same as embracing me,” she had replied. After the breakup, feeling both devastated and relieved, he confessed yet again. By this time, his confessor recognized his voice. “Don’t tell me you’re still screwing her,” he sighed before Riordan could finish saying, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Such was his guilt that he was disappointed by the priest’s mild penance and imposed a sterner one on himself. During the summer break, he made a pilgrimage to Spain, walking the Camino de Santiago from the Pyrenees to Saint James’s tomb in Santiago de Compostela. Five weeks, five hundred miles, all on foot. The journey did not entirely purge Marcella from his system. For years afterward, just when he thought he had forgotten her, she would gate-crash his memory, as she was doing right now.
She sang to him as he entered his room to change out of his biker’s outfit, back into his habit. Vicino mare / facciamo amore / a core a core, pe ce spassá. Seated at the piano in her flat near the Campo de’ Fiori, dressed in nothing more than her bra and panties, Valentine red. The fantasy produced a bulge in his own underwear—drab cotton boxers. For I acknowledge my transgressions; and my sin is ever before me. And there it was, a Pinocchio’s nose poking out from between his legs. This is ridiculous, he said to himself. A fifty-two-year-old priest getting a wanger over a woman he hasn’t seen in a quarter of a century. The Angelus bells tolled in the twilight. He pulled the coarse brown robe over his head; it concealed his erection nicely. To eliminate it, he prayed the Angelus in Latin while pinching the third knot, which signified chastity, in the five-knotted cord girding his waist.
It seemed that in the contest between will and desire, desire had the upper hand. Semitumescent, he walked down the corridor to the parish office to attend to the business he’d neglected all day.
The room was cozy and quaint. It held a kiva fireplace, a large, if rickety, wooden desk, a couple of ornately carved chairs with cracked leather seats, a tall bookcase crammed with theological and philosophical works, two volumes of canon law, several Bibles, and leather-bound commentaries by church fathers. His eighteenth-century predecessors would have felt at home here, though they would have been puzzled by the steel filing cabinet, the overhead fan with electric light fixture, and the desktop Mac (at five years old, an antique by computer-industry standards). He sat at the desk, upon which Domingo Quiroga, the parish secretary, bookkeeper, and office manager, had laid out the water, electric, and gas bills, with blank checks attached; a proof of next week’s parish bulletin; and an engineer’s report on needed repairs to the church and rectory buildings. Riordan signed the checks, made a few minor changes to the bulletin, typed a schedule of visits to shut-ins. The dull administrative tasks succeeded where will and prayer had failed. Better than an ice-cold shower, he thought, skimming the engineer’s report. Some rusty pipes in the rectory had to be replaced, a crack in the masonry dome over the altar had to be patched. Sergio Ramírez, María the cook’s husband, was an all-around handyman who did odd jobs for the church. He could repair the plumbing, but the roof would require a professional. Finding one willing to come to San Patricio for an affordable fee would be difficult. He wished that faulty plumbing and cracked roofs were the only serious problems he had to deal with.
Domingo had also left him two notes. “Mr. García telephoned, asking for you. He wishes to make an appointment,” read the first. Domingo and his brother were partners in Quiroga’s bakery; his position in the church was voluntary. Even so, was it too much to ask for a modicum of competence? Which Mr. García? There were four García families in the parish. And why had Domingo failed to get a phone number? The second note—“Someone slipped this under the door”—was paper-clipped to a sealed envelope, which Riordan slit with a letter opener. It contained another note, written in a loopy schoolgirl’s hand: “Dear Padre Riordan: I cannot meet with you at three o’clock tomorrow. I can only meet with you at four o’clock. I am sorry for causing you inconvenience.” It was unsigned, but he knew it was from Cristina Herrera, a seventeen-year-old high school girl. He also knew the reason for the meeting, though it had never been stated. She was coming in for counseling; a little more than a month ago, she had been raped.
* * *
Dinner was served promptly at seven-thirty in the rectory dining room, which wasn’t much bigger than a good-sized pantry and was sparsely lit by low-wattage bulbs in a cast-iron, hoop chandelier that had once held candles. Exposed wires snaked up one wall, crawled along a beam, and slithered down the chandelier’s chain, threatening to electrocute anyone changing a bulb should the insulation fray. María, a tree stump of a woman, rolled in from the kitchen, bearing a bowl of Spanish rice and a platter of flank steak in chipotle sauce. Another trip to the kitchen produced a basket of fat, warm tortillas. She went round the table, filling each plate. Riordan bowed over his, inhaled theatrically, and tugged the single gray braid hanging down María’s back like a bell cord.
“María!” he said, with an exaggerated roll of the r: Mah-r-r-r-ree-ah. “No one makes a chipotle like you. If I were not a priest, I would marry you.”
“I do not think so,” she replied gravely. “I am already married. A problem, no?”
He slapped his forehead. “I forgot!”
“Be quiet and eat.” She laughed an indulgent laugh, like the mother of a mildly naughty son. “You are a disgrace.”
After she left the room, Father Hugo scowled to let Riordan know that he considered the flirtatious banter no laughing matter—it really was disgraceful.
“I’m only trying to cheer myself up,” Riordan said. “Our roof is cracking, our plumbing leaks, and only a few hours ago I was lying in the dirt with a paratrooper standing over me with a gun.”
They said grace. Father Hugo minced his steak, slicing it horizontally, then vertically into kibble-sized bites. “Your discussions with the military did not go well?”
Riordan had told the vicar he was going to see Captain Valencia.
“I have had more cordial conversations,” he said.
“You must tell us everything,” the vicar demanded, in the way of a housewife eager for gossip.
Riordan abridged the account as he had with César. He wasn’t sure why. His listeners, assuming the Old Priest was listening, could be trusted to keep a confidence. Scruples again? Somehow he felt too ashamed to speak of Valencia’s and the Professor’s proposition, as if merely listening to it had been an offense.
“So this captain’s grandfather…?” Father Hugo began.
“Great-grandfather.”
“He was an iconoclast?”
“Quemasanto was the word he used. I think it means the same thing.”
“It does. In the nineteen twenties, Los quemasantos broke into churches to destroy the statues of saints, to burn pictures of Our Lord and the Virgin Mother.”
“He said his great-grandfather did more than that.” Riordan popped a piece of tortilla into his mouth. “That he burned priests. Hanged them and shot them.”
“Yes. The soldiers of President Calles’s army would string priests up from telegraph poles along the railway lines to make examples of them. That was in the Cristero War. Terrible times.”
“Ojo, Padre Tim!” the Old Priest said suddenly, pronouncing his name “Teem” and pointing at his own faded eyes with two forked fingers. Droplets of chipotle sparkled in his pewter-gray beard. Riordan wanted to motion to him to wipe his mouth, but then thought better of it.
“What should I watch out for?” he asked.
“For the things you are asked to do.”
“It’s dangerous for a priest to meddle in politics,” Father Hugo elaborated, as if the Old Priest were incapable of explaining himself. “A foreign priest especially. Article 33.”
This was the article in the Mexican Constitution prohibiting foreigners, under pain of deportation, from taking part in the country’s political affairs.
Riordan speared a chunk of steak, swirled it in the tangy sauce, and washed it down with the tempranillo Lisette had brought down from her last trip to Tucson.
“I prefer to see what I did as a humanitarian gesture, not political,” he said.
“It makes no difference how you see it,” said the vicar. “For excrement to roll downhill it must first roll uphill. The captain goes to his colonel and says, ‘I have this priest, a norteamericano, interfering with my military duties.’ The colonel brings the complaint to the general, who brings it to the governor, who brings it to a judge, who orders the North American priest to appear at a hearing, where he is charged with violating Article 33. Now the excrement rolls downhill. To be charged is to be guilty. In no time, the priest finds himself returned to his native country.”
Riordan studied Father Hugo’s face, from the high forehead down to the rounded cleft chin, and wondered if his vicar had not given a warning but expressed a hope. The gringo interloper sent packing.
“I spoke to Díaz this afternoon. We agreed it was a mistake for me to go. Let us talk about something else.”
Father Hugo dipped his head and spread his hands. There was in these gestures the annoying impression of an authority figure granting a request.