Seven
THE RITUALS OF MASS, familiar to me from childhood, were simple enough to perform. Writing the sermon, however, was a completely different question, and as I delivered it, I felt keenly the small errors of phrasing and the greater errors of content and tone. Even this effort, however, soon came to seem insignificant. The afternoon of the first service I began taking confession, and the confessions released—in a trickle and then a wave—concerns that would sweep me away, nearly obliterating my original purpose in Río Roto. At first the confessions struck me as only further instances of failed comprehension, but as they began to repeat themselves, not in their specifics but in their general contour, they came to suggest a meaning I couldn’t ignore.
Because on that Sunday the first woman who came for confession, Carmen, began by talking about the sermon, I was distracted at the very moment when the nature of the confessions first made itself apparent. Only later, when I considered it in light of other confessions, did I consider the significance of what she’d said. Carmen’s braided white hair coiled over her forehead, giving the impression of a dented crown. She held her hands with her bent and callused fingers curled in her lap. The dress she wore still bore the stiff creases of the packaging, though it had been ironed; from its pocket she pulled a white handkerchief embroidered with blue flowers.
“Father, I’ll leave this for you,” she said. “You might ask Claudio to tie it around your thumbs.”
“Thank you. I hadn’t thought of that.”
She nodded. “My sister used to be incredibly clumsy. We’d tie her thumbs together. But next time you won’t be as nervous.”
I looked down at my knees. “I hope so.”
“You shouldn’t be. You can’t expect us all to understand it.” She smiled. “I’m so slow, myself.”
I looked at her through the screen. She folded and refolded the handkerchief and then spread it out over her knee. I didn’t know what to say.
She looked up at me briefly and smiled. “You must be very intelligent.”
“Not in the least. I’m sorry, I’m not always as clear as I mean to be.”
“I’ll have to try harder next time,” she said.
I wasn’t listening as she started her confession. I began going over the sermon in my mind, trying to remember certain parts of it. I would have to ask someone about it—perhaps Estrada. And yet I thought I hadn’t made any obvious mistakes. Most of the collected sermons I’d brought with me were of no use: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Clancy. They were philosophical tracts, and reading them before writing the sermon had evidently not put me in the correct frame of mind. I did have the two John Perry volumes you’d picked up at a garage sale in Oakland. I’d only brought them because you’d made some notes in the margins, but now it seemed worthwhile to read them through. From the little I’d read of Perry, however, it seemed I would be incapable of writing anything like his sermons.
I looked up, hearing Carmen pause. She seemed unable to go on. I hadn’t heard any of her confession. “Go on,” I said.
She put the handkerchief against her mouth and her lips turned faintly white. I was surprised to see tears in her eyes. “Father,” she said.
“Yes?”
“I’ve been very ill.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. I had the impression that she’d finished confessing and had gone on to speak of something else. “I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.
She sighed deeply. “I have headaches. They start at the back near my neck. Then they spread out, filling my whole head. I have to close my eyes. If I don’t, I see a blinding light around the edges. Everything I try to look at seems far away. Very far away, and then the light puts them out completely. Sometimes the pain goes on for hours. The longest one lasted two whole days. My daughter puts a cold towel on my head and I sit against the wall. Lying down makes it worse.”
She waited for me to speak. I said the first thing that occurred to me. “How long have you been having them?”
Her voice shook. “For many years.”
“Isn’t there anything you can take?”
She glanced at me, surprised. “I’ve tried everything. Nothing helps.” I waited, hearing in her silence that she expected me to say something else, but I couldn’t think what. After several minutes she spoke again. “Forgive me my sins, Father.”
When Carmen left I thought nothing much of it, but her confession struck me as I listened to Luz, who was waiting to confess afterward. Luz had never gone farther than the door of the sacristy and she rarely spoke to me. She purposely collected the dishes and laundry when she thought I was out. When she left my meals, she knocked twice and then slipped away, so that no matter how quickly I got to the door she’d always reached the street by the time I opened it. At confession, she seemed more at ease. She spoke unhurriedly. I noticed a ring on her finger and corrected myself; I’d only ever seen her in the house across the street with her mother.
“Father,” she said, after a long pause, “I’ve been very ill.”
I was silent for a moment, feeling a pang of surprise and waiting for her to continue, but she didn’t. “I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.
She looked at me curiously and I knew I’d said the wrong thing. Then she dropped her head. “I feel nausea and pain in my stomach. It happens suddenly, at any time of day. Most often when I go to bed. But sometimes when I’m in the middle of something. Then I have to stop what I’m doing and curl up until it stops.”
“How long does it last?”
“Sometimes just a few minutes. Sometimes an hour or more. Just as suddenly the pain’s gone.”
“Have you seen the doctor about it?”
“No.” She paused. “He doesn’t know what it is. I was with my mother walking to the bus stop once and the pain came over me suddenly. It was raining out, hard. As soon as the nausea hit me I dropped my umbrella and fell to the ground. My umbrella rolled away. My mother stood over me, trying to cover me with her umbrella. Everything was an inch under water. All my clothes were soaked. When I got home they were so heavy I could barely lift them off. I threw up in the bathroom. I coughed up rainwater and gravel. It looked like the water that runs in the sewers, but I couldn’t have swallowed so much water so fast.”
I struggled with what to say. None of the formulaic responses I’d prepared seemed adequate, and the discordance between her words and her tone left me entirely at a loss. “I’ll have to talk to the doctor,” I said.
“Don’t, Father.”
“I didn’t—I meant for myself.”
She paused. “You’re sick?”
“I’m sorry—that’s not what I meant to say.”
She looked at me in silence.
“When was the last time you felt this way?” I asked.
“Thursday.”
I looked at her hands and noticed that her knuckles were raw. “I saw you on Thursday.”
“Yes,” she said quietly.
“You were sick then?”
“Yes.”
I loosened my collar. The air stifled me. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
Luz glanced at me and hesitated. Then she sighed deeply. “Forgive me my sins, Father.”
Of all the people who confessed that afternoon, nearly half spoke to me of illnesses. I had no idea how to consider their confessions, much less how to respond adequately to them. The only thing that came to mind was how a few years before I moved to Oregon, when you’d already been diagnosed but were still in the early stages of the disease, you sometimes spoke to me on the phone of certain changes, or, more accurately, you confessed them. I could never tell what, if anything, you meant to communicate to me, because Mamá was always on the phone. In admitting things to me, you were really apologizing for them to her, and as I listened—to your apologies and her responding protestations—I always felt as though I was somehow eavesdropping. You had, for instance, told me about going to the shopping center once; Mamá had gone to do her own errands and returned to find that you’d left without her. You confessed it ashamedly: not because you’d done anything intentional, but because it had inconvenienced her so much, and no amount of assurances from her could make you think of it otherwise. But the confessions in Río Roto were altogether different: they didn’t seem to be confessing the burden of their illnesses upon others; they were rather confessing the illnesses themselves, as though sickness itself were a sin.
I HADN’T SEEN Aurelio after our visit to the cemetery, and I’d been meaning to walk down to see him again. As it turned out, he came to me on Monday after I finished taking confessions. I was working in the office of the vestry, and Xinia had directed those who wished to request prayers to see me there. No doubt she had some idea of what would occur, because she arranged a row of folding chairs in the corridor and placed a table with a pitcher of water and plastic cups next to the door of the study. I watched her and said nothing. When she was through she came to the door and said, “If you get tired, I don’t mind taking over.”
“Thank you. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
She hesitated. “You know you can ask me for help with whatever. If for the sermon—” She paused.
“Thank you. I don’t need help with the sermons.”
She nodded and went to the back room. I looked at the things on my desk and pushed them around and then stacked them and then spread them out again. I took a pen out of the desk drawer. A moment later the first person arrived. He’d written a list of five names on a slip of paper. Without speaking—he nodded solemnly and held his hat against his chest with his left hand—he handed the paper to me and stood waiting. “Thank you,” I said. “Are your loved ones ill, or are they far away and in your thoughts?”
“Deceased,” he said, with some difficulty.
“I’ll be sure to say a prayer for them during the service.”
He stood uncomfortably, waiting. “You’re to write them in the book,” he said.
“Yes, of course. I’ll do that before Sunday.”
He looked at his feet, his expression anguished. Finally he took a deep breath. “Would you write them in?” he said. “So I can see.”
I stared at his down-turned face. “All right. If you’d like.” I took the bound journal that Xinia had given me—the pages at least twice the size of letter paper—and opened it. I’d looked at it earlier, when Xinia first told me of it, with the idea of looking for people with our name. I found your first name repeatedly and Mamá’s twice, but the name “Amán” never appeared. What appeared were hundreds of other names, which I hoped, in some way, to make sense of. Almost half the pages in the ledger were full. The names were written in a careful, tiny hand: first names alone or first names and last names, rows and rows of names, four columns per page. Every few columns a date interrupted them. The most recent entry had been in August of 1990. I turned to the first empty page and wrote the date. Then I wrote the five names on the man’s slip of paper: Otilio, German, Felix, Angel, Luis. When I looked up I realized someone else was already waiting at the door. She sat on the chair Xinia had set up, holding a piece of paper, looking in expectantly. The man standing before the desk nodded his thanks and left. Then the woman came in and handed me her list. Three names, all women, all deceased, she told me when I asked. I wrote her names down and she thanked me.
I couldn’t see the line from where I sat behind the desk, but every time I looked up, the chair by the doorway was occupied. I took names from half a dozen people before noticing something unusual about the lists. Though they hadn’t been at first, they all now bore the heading “deceased,” underlined and in capital letters. And they were all written in the same hand; the A’s were little triangles. The man standing in front of me had given me two names. I wrote them down and handed the piece of paper back to him. He stared down at me coldly. He wore canvas pants and a machete in a sheath strung around his waist. His shirt was stained under the arms. I looked at his face and down at his list again and neither one made any sense to me. I assured him the names would be read, and he nodded and left the room.
It was as he left that I realized the next person in the chair was Aurelio, and I saw his face only briefly because then the man’s back blocked it. The moment passed very quickly. As the man with the machete reached the doorway, Aurelio stood up to enter, and then—I was certain of it at the time—the man spat at his feet and turned the corner. Aurelio walked into the room, his face blank. He smiled at me briefly and handed me a piece of paper.
“Aurelio?” I asked, searching his face. I would have said something more, but his expression stopped me.
“Father Amán,” he said, staring hard at the ledger in my hands. “The cemetery is looking better.”
I glanced down at the paper he’d handed me, feeling unsure. “I’ve been meaning to go see it,” I murmured. The paper read “deceased,” and listed the names of two men. I wrote them in carefully and handed the paper back to him. He looked me in the eye and smiled. “You’ll see the fountain’s running,” he said. Then he turned to go. At the door he stopped to thank me.
I stood up from my desk and walked to the other side. The woman who’d been waiting in the chair stepped into the room. From the doorway, I could see Aurelio disappearing down the corridor in the direction of the back room. The folding chairs in the hall were full. The people sitting there nodded when I came out and a few of them wished me a good afternoon. The line, as far as I could tell, extended into the back room and around the corner toward the door. I walked down the hallway and stopped when I reached the narrow back room. The line went out the door and onto the grass. I couldn’t see where it ended. Xinia sat in a folding chair by the sink, holding a notepad and a pen. Everyone past her in the line had a slip of paper and everyone behind her didn’t.
“Xinia,” I said.
She looked up. “Yes?”
“You’re writing the names?”
She looked at me. There was an uncomfortable silence. Everyone around us looked back and forth from me to Xinia. “Some people are unsure of their handwriting,” she said.
I stared at her. A woman standing in line ahead of her laughed lightly. “Some people.”
“Well,” I said, looking around us, “couldn’t you just say the names to me?”
Xinia’s face clouded over. She stood up. “I have to get another pen,” she said. She walked down the hallway toward the study and I followed her. The woman I’d left behind stood by the desk with her hands clasped on her belly. When we walked in, Xinia said something to her in K’iche’ and the woman left, closing the door behind her.
Xinia looked at the ledger and I waited. “You’re doing very well,” she said.
“Why do it twice?”
“Father Amán, not everyone knows how to write.”
“I know. That’s why I’m saying—they can just tell me the names.”
Xinia frowned and turned the ledger toward her. “They will. Eventually.”
“All right.” Her attempt to encourage me had left me tongue-tied. I didn’t know what else to say.
“When they know you better.”
“All right. I understand,” I said, trying to make it seem so. I took the ledger and I walked back to the other side of the desk. “Thank you, then.”
She left the room, the next woman came in, and I took her names. After two hours, the line dwindled, and by dinnertime, only a few people remained. I’d filled two pages of the ledger and written more than two hundred names.
A MAN named Oscar who’d agreed to be the sexton walked with me to Murcia the following day for the first service there. When he told me he was a carpenter, I asked him if he worked with Xinia’s brother, and Oscar said, after a pause, “He was an artist.”
I looked at him. “He was?”
Oscar shook his head. “Died years ago.”
I looked at him. “How?”
“He got sick.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said. “He must have been quite young.”
He nodded without saying anything more and we walked past the abandoned dairy in silence.
Oscar pointed at a flattened piece of scaled skin in the road and began telling me about the snakes he’d seen on the way to Murcia, warning me that the one with scales like black velvet had a poisonous bite. He described the snakes that slept beneath the coffee shrubs, waiting for anyone who picked coffee barefoot, and the come-caballo, a spider rumored to crouch inside a horse’s shoe and eat away at its hoof. We walked south, in the direction I’d taken to reach the Malvinas, but instead of turning up to the right we continued on the main road, which joined with the other that ran parallel to it through town so that we walked alongside the river.
I told Oscar I’d been to the Malvinas, and he agreed that it was beautiful. When I told him I’d seen someone up there, who kept cattle near a shack, Oscar nodded. “So you met Hook.”
“I didn’t know his name.”
“We just call him that. I hope you didn’t talk to him.”
We’d paused by the side of the road. Oscar took a drink of water from his thermos and offered me some. I drank and handed it back to him. “No,” I said, “I didn’t. Why?”
“Best not to.”
“Why’s that?”
He shrugged.
“It did seem,” I said, “that there was something funny about the air there.”
Oscar laughed. “There’s something funny in the air anywhere he goes. Poor man.”
The path took us closer to the water and Oscar walked quickly. I was having difficulty hearing him. “Why?” I asked.
“He’s completely lost it, that one,” Oscar said, raising his voice.
“What do you mean?”
“You didn’t talk to him?”
I struggled to catch up so I could hear him. “No.”
“Well, that’s best.”
We’d reached the footbridge. Buried in weeds by the foot of the bridge stood what looked like a twelve-inch cocoon made of stone. Oscar tapped the top of it: a statue with bunches of decaying flowers strewn at its base. “Some people fell off the bridge years ago,” Oscar said.
“What was it?”
“What was what?”
“The statue.”
“I don’t remember. A Virgin Mary, maybe. Or San Antonio.”
The bridge trembled as we walked across the river; it was narrow, and I held on to the wires at either side. Even though it hadn’t rained heavily for days, the brown water churned violently, eating at the roots along the banks. On the opposite side a narrow path ran alongside the river. Murcia was far above us, embedded in the hill, beyond what seemed like an impenetrable wall of sugarcane. Oscar wandered off to the left and peered into the cane, as if trying to see something through it. “The entrance is here somewhere,” he shouted over the water. I walked along the edge of the narrow path in the other direction, staring into the cane. Moments later, Oscar gave a shout and waved and I met him at the entrance of a tunnel barely wide enough for a single person that cut upward through the cane. “It’s fastest this way,” Oscar said. “The flatter path takes hours.”
The stalks grew far above us—the sun was still out, but setting, and only the surface created by the cane a foot above me received any light. Oscar walked quickly; he said that after dark it would be impossible to see and that we would have to take the long route or ask for a light. Smoothed by water and the passage of the cane-cutters’ feet, the path wound blindly through the tall cane. After a few minutes Oscar outpaced me, and I walked on without catching sight of him. The blades overhead shone dully in the orange sunlight, though at their base they already lay in shadow. I could no longer hear the river. I had the sense that I walked in place and that the film of light above me would remain long after the sun had set. Without stopping, I glanced to either side of me into the cane, transfixed by how its dense stalks obliterated everything in every direction. The steepness of the path began to affect me; I breathed heavily and the sweat ran off my chin.
We reached Murcia as the sun was finally setting. Below us, the cane stretched toward the river in what seemed, from that vantage point, like a scant half mile. Fewer than a dozen houses, all recently painted, were scattered on the flattened side of the hill. The chapel was the largest building and well maintained, though as far as I knew it hadn’t been used for years. There were only about twenty people in the pews, but I nonetheless found myself feeling nervous.
I’d decided to try something different with the sermon, after coming to the conclusion that another performance like Sunday’s would raise questions. The sermon I’d read to the congregation in Río Roto had quoted Scripture, but it was correct only in this particular; its style, argument, and structure were more suited to a college English paper than a sermon. In preparing the sermon for Murcia I’d tried first to read the Reverend John Perry’s sermons and then to formulate something in his style. But with the text beside me, I found it difficult to think beyond his limits. He’d pinpointed precisely the most pertinent meaning of each reading; all my attempts to improvise beyond him resulted in poorly phrased renditions of his ideas. In places you had translated or underlined some of Perry’s metaphors; reading them I was surprised by their lucidity and power. I couldn’t resolve the question of why or whether it should be, but there was no doubt that Perry’s turn-of-the-century stringency could speak more truly, more directly to the congregation than anything I could write. The idea of having to use his sermons chilled me. The difficulty wasn’t that anyone would notice the plagiarism or, much less, recognize Perry—who would? Translated into Spanish, he would be all but unidentifiable. Rather the problem would be with knowing: standing there, reading someone else’s words, knowing that I had the capacity to pretend they were mine. I had told myself that with the smaller congregation at Murcia it would be easier to try the Perry sermon for the first time.
I was distracted during the service by a pale green insect that appeared on the lectern halfway through the sermon. As long as my forefinger and with delicate, veined wings like the leaves of a sapling, it stood on the corner near the edge of my papers. I inspected it as I spoke, watching the thin line of its belly, a ribbon of green and white stitching, rise and fall with its breath. Several times I lost my place in the sermon, looking to see whether it clung to me or perched somewhere nearby.
When the service ended I pointed it out to Oscar, who scooped it up and held it in his palm until the daughter of the woman who gave us dinner asked to see what he held, and she exclaimed in delight at the good-luck omen, taking up the esperanza carefully and holding it aloft in her cupped fingers. Two men with flashlights guided us back through the cane to the bridge, and then Oscar and I made our way back to Río Roto in the moonlight. The flashlights of the men, walking back uphill, were entirely swallowed up by the cane, and the houses above seemed to have already extinguished their lights. The angle of the road on our return gave us a view of Río Roto, and as we approached, the few lights that guided us disappeared gradually, until only one remained. Oscar entered his darkened house on the southern edge of town, and I walked on toward the church, disoriented by the stillness of the evening. Though we’d returned before nine, the town was already sleeping.
I remembered as soon as I saw it that I’d left the bulb by my front door burning. At first I couldn’t make out the peculiar shadow that darkened the front of the house—something corrosive had apparently bored through the door and the ceiling around the bulb and the walkway, leaving a black, irregular hole—but after coming to myself and walking on I realized that every insect in the valley had been drawn to the bulb, the last one to go out. The writhing swarm that covered every illuminated surface seemed to be not crawling over but devouring the entrance of the sacristy. It carpeted the ceiling around the bulb so thickly that I could make out no single insect; they formed an undulating mass of legs, wings, and glittering eyes that emitted a dull murmur. Beetles the size of my open hand crawled on the walkway; a green insect I’d never seen with a long body and spidery legs dangled from the doorknob; dozens of moths with enormous wings wavered or rested by the bulb. A desperate fluttering sounded from the moths, like the pattering of fingers on a closed door. Their eyes glinted metallically in the light and their furred bodies collided against one another recklessly. Before the door and facing outward, as if on guard, crouched a harlequin beetle as big as a sewer rat. Its legs spread easily to the edges of the doorway. The other insects moved around and under it, insensible to its size. I stared at it in horror, thinking that it might not be real, until its immense left antenna jerked upward and I stepped back, repulsed. A dozen other insects clung to the chain for the light, dangling perilously as they crowded against one another. As I stood watching, a giant moth with wings as wide as my outstretched hands flew out of the entryway and toward me. I ducked down and batted my arms wildly, feeling its wings everywhere at once. When I was able to stand calmly once more I rounded the house and checked the windows, which I’d locked. Then I checked the door to the vestry, which Xinia had locked. I thought of going to her for the key but felt immediately that I would prefer to sleep outside. The sight of the insects had filled me with disgust; I felt the urgent need to leave, not caring where I spent the night. I walked out to the road and looked at the house from the street.
It was difficult to tell, because the house lay in darkness, but I thought I saw the curtain in the front room of Luz’s house fall. A moment later, the light by her door went on. Within seconds, a moth flitted across to it, batting at the bulb. I waited, but she didn’t appear. I heard Luz’s voice from the front window. “Turn your light off,” she called out.
I looked at the chain, still covered with insects. “Thank you,” I whispered toward the window. Taking the sermon out of my bag, I laid the papers flat over the insects in a row, as far as possible from the harlequin beetle. The bodies underneath the papers cracked and gave way under my feet as I moved forward. I held the rest of the sermon in my hand and swatted at the chain, batting the falling moths away from me, until only a few remained. Still holding the papers I curled them around the chain and pulled, feeling the insects breaking under my fingers. The light went out. I shuddered and jumped away; perhaps I imagined that the insects would rush past me, as one, to the light across the street. In fact it took nearly half an hour for them to fill her front door, and when I finally forced myself to light the bulb of my house again, there were still a few stragglers. But the harlequin beetle had gone. I turned the light off and got inside as quickly as I could, checking to see how many had followed me into the house. There were none.
Though it drew them to the glass, so that I heard their hard patter on the window, I felt unable to turn out the bedroom light. I wouldn’t have been able to sleep regardless. Instead I sat in bed reading until the sky lightened behind the curtain.
The walkway was clean in the morning when Luz knocked with the breakfast tray. I thanked her, and she smiled and told me I would get used to it. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I threw your papers away.” She looked down at my feet as she said it. I thanked her again, and she waved me off as if it had been nothing. “And someone left these for you.” She handed me a plastic bag with oranges, their navels marked with crosses.
A MAN I RECOGNIZED from the day I’d written names in the ledger came to confession that morning and spoke with me. It seemed he often had difficulty with his right arm. “It’s sudden,” he told me. “There’s no warning—it goes limp. I can still feel it, but I can’t move it. I think about moving it, and nothing happens. But when I pick it up with my left hand, it feels my fingers on the skin.”
He spoke with embarrassment, his eyes on the ground. I asked him whether he’d ever injured it. He held it out and rolled up the sleeve. “Do you see anything?” he asked. I shook my head. “I don’t either,” he said. “A few weeks ago at the market I was unloading crates of tomatoes and suddenly—limp. I had to pull it out from between the crates with my other hand, and then it just hung there.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t lift the crates with one arm. Everyone knows it happens sometimes. So I just stood by the truck, watching everyone else do the work, while I waited for my arm to come back.”
“How long does it last?”
“Sometimes just a few minutes. Sometimes more than a day. Once I went a whole week without it. I’ve gotten used to doing things with my left hand, but it’s not the same.” The muscles in his arm moved slightly. He sighed. “What bothers me is that I can still feel with it. When I touch it with my left hand, or when it brushes against something, I can feel it. But since I can’t move it, it feels like the arm isn’t mine. It feels like I have someone else’s arm.” It occurred to me, listening to him, that you must have experienced something similar when we moved you from chair to chair and propped you up at the kitchen table: as though you were suddenly accountable for an entire body that you couldn’t control. The man shook his head and held his right hand up in front of him, comparing it with the other hand. “Then when it comes back to normal it’s a little slow, remembering how to do things. I’m clumsier than usual.” He half-smiled sadly. “Whoever it belongs to when it’s not mine must be careless.”
The man who came to confession afterward and introduced himself as Oso was shaped like a barrel. His hands and arms were covered with thick hair, and during confession he tucked his shaggy head down to whisper, bent as if expecting a blow. It didn’t happen to him very often, Oso told me, but when it did he was useless for days. His feet would swell, puffing up slowly until they resembled loaves of bread. Then he had to sit back and wait for them to shrink.
“The first time it happened,” he told me, “I thought it would only last a second. I was wearing rubber boots. I felt my feet swelling, and I thought they’d fallen asleep. I’d been sitting still for a while, milking, and when I stood up I realized something was wrong. My feet pressed against the sides of the boots. I couldn’t move my toes. I tried to take the boots off to see what was wrong with them, but it was too late. The boots wouldn’t budge. With my feet like that I limped back to town—it was like wearing iron casts—and when I got home my wife cut the boots off with a pair of shears. She got blisters cutting through the heavy rubber. Then she cut my socks off with scissors. My feet were the color of egg-plants. My toes stuck out like stiff little teats on an udder; my foot and ankle were just a pulpy mass. For days they stayed that way. I tried soaking them in cold water, hot water, salt water. The pain was steady, but not intense. It wore me out. Just before they finally began to shrink I thought the pain would drive me crazy, like a toothache. As soon as I feel the swelling now I pull off my shoes and socks and sit there, waiting for them.”
Another woman had told me about a similar swelling that took a more unusual form. She was slow to get started. In her hands she held a handkerchief, which she folded over and over again. She hunched forward in her seat, her ankles crossed, rocking herself agitatedly when she described the painful aspects of her illness. It seemed that she had, some years earlier, begun to feel a violent pain on the skin of her back. At first she only recognized it as a burning tenderness—she couldn’t lean back in her chair or lie on her back; she had to sleep on her stomach. It felt as though the skin of her back were on fire. She stood under the cold water of the shower for some relief, but it eventually burned through the water, too, so that the abatement of pain was only ever temporary.
It didn’t occur to her at the beginning to look at her back, so only on the third occasion did she take off her shirt, hold a small mirror in her hand, and look through it over her shoulder at the larger mirror behind her. What she saw caused her to drop the mirror, and it took her a while to pick it up and look again. She told me, in a whisper and on the verge of tears, that long red welts covered her back. She’d never suffered an injury that might produce them and she had no idea what caused them. The pain eventually died away; she awoke some days later lying on her back and she looked in the mirror. The marks were completely gone. Each time it occurred in the same way—the pain began, the red welts appeared, and then they vanished.
THE CUMULATIVE WEIGHT of the confessions, the names of the deceased, the absence of any defined date or event, and the mention, here and there, by Xinia and Oscar of people who had succumbed to illness all suggested that some contagious sickness—a plague, an outbreak—had swept through Río Roto in the recent past. What I’d heard combined with what I’d read—books describing the contagions visited upon the Americas by the Old World in the sixteenth century—suggested that the town struggled with some kind of repeating epidemic. I couldn’t help but think, as I heard the confessions, that an old sickness was once again returning. I say this so you understand that I honestly never tried to blind myself to what lay behind the illnesses; on the contrary—I believed I’d hit upon the explanation by bringing my observations and my reading knowledge to bear.
“You’re ill?” Xinia asked, when I told her I was going to see the doctor.
“No, I’m just going to visit him.”
She studied me. “He’s really out there, you know.”
“Yes, I know what you mean,” I said.
“Really. He lives in a different world.”
Her emphatic tone surprised me. “You think so?”
She shrugged. “He thinks it’s the rest of us who are crazy. See what you think.” She told me he lived on the north side, in a field near the road to Los Cielos. “You’re still going?” she asked.
“Do you not want me to?”
She gave me a look and seemed to lose interest. With a wave of her hand she walked down the corridor.
I left for the doctor’s and found his house as Xinia had described it. The porch ran halfway around the building. The doctor sat in a wicker chair by the door, smoking. He waved to me as I walked up to the house and smiled when I reached the steps.
“Sick already?” He grinned.
“I’m just saying hello.”
“Hello, then.” He pushed himself out of his chair. “I’ll get some lemonade.” I sat in the other wicker chair and he disappeared into the house, coming back a few minutes later with two bottles of beer and a glass of lemonade. “I changed my mind,” he said. “You’ll want the lemonade.”
I hesitated. “Yes, thanks.”
I took the glass and leaned back in the chair. The porch had a view of the hills beyond the town where the Malvinas lay. The house closest to his had a hexagon of laundry line strung up in back. A chicken coop littered with hay stood by a stump with firewood stacked next to it. We drank and looked out over the field. I held the glass against my forehead and felt it grow warmer.
“Dr. Estrada,” I said, “I’m worried about how many people seem to be sick.”
The doctor took a swig of beer and swallowed loudly. “Are they?”
“They tell me in confession—they have all kinds of illnesses.”
He grinned. “The privacy of the confessional is sacred, Father.”
“Yes.” I flushed. “I won’t say anyone in particular. But I wondered if you knew.”
“That they talk about being sick in confession?”
“That so many people are sick.”
The doctor didn’t answer me right away. He drank his beer and looked out toward the hexagon of laundry. After a while he put his beer down and said he would be right back. He went into the house and came back carrying a guitar. He smiled at me, sat down, and ran his fingers absently over the strings. I’d stopped drinking the lemonade and I stared at him, thinking about what Xinia had said. Soon his strumming revealed a discernible melody and he said, “Father Amán, tell me.”
“Yes?”
“Anyone told you about an illness came through here—ten years or so ago?”
“I’ve heard something about it, I think.”
He nodded and continued playing the melody, something in the minor key that unraveled quickly. “Anyone in particular they said?”
“Who died?”
“Yes.”
I’d thought about it before going to see the doctor, but I waited a moment before saying anything. “Xinia’s brother, I think. Oscar told me he got sick.”
The doctor nodded, ended his melody, strummed twice, and began another tune. I took a sip of the warming lemonade. “Vicente,” he said, playing slowly. He spoke rather than sang, as if the words and the music were unrelated. “Grows orchids in a greenhouse. Drinks rainwater from his boot.” The doctor’s beady eyes blinked slowly. He smiled to himself. “Vicente”—he strummed—“twenty-four.” My stomach lurched and I took another sip. “Vicente makes cabinets and furniture. Pews for the church. Saints for the wealthy. In the city. Eleven years old, he goes to the dreamer. The dreamer in Los Cielos, in a house built himself. Three floors. Balconies on every floor. Wooden gargoyles on every corner. A garden full of statues. Varnished so they wouldn’t spoil. Over the door the sign says, ‘House of the Dreamer.’ Vicente’s his only pupil. When the dreamer gets old, it’s only Vicente. Working, working. Chiseling, carving, sanding. The dreamer does nothing but miniatures. A crèche that fits in his palm. A rosebud the size of a fingernail. Eyes, you know, good to the end. You can go see the house. Still there.
“Last time I saw Vicente alive, he was coming back from the Malvinas with a bag full of orchids, wrapped in wet towels. The day was dry. He was covered with sawdust. Where did I see Vicente next?” He looked at me.
I swallowed and shook my head.
“He was a statue. A statue at the dreamer’s house. The dreamer gone without a trace. Vicente a fallen statue. No varnish for the rain. Lying in the grass, arms at his sides and his legs curled up. A statue of infancy. Of youth, perhaps. Of death, certainly. Gone almost a day. And yet no way to know. Only mark on him, apart from the calluses, the blisters—always forgot to wear socks—were small cuts. Tiny cuts. Little cuts in his mouth, on his lips. Like he’d bitten into a glass. A mirror, maybe. His sister said go ahead. I opened him up. What did I find?”
I stared at him.
He smiled. The melody he was playing tinkled to a close. “Two meters of barbed wire, coiled up in his stomach, all the way up his esophagus.” He raised his eyebrows. “Two meters. Amazing.”
My hands were trembling. I put the glass on the floor and held my hands together.
The doctor looked up at me. “You don’t like my playing?”
“You’re very good,” I said.
“I saw it myself,” he said softly. We looked at each other. He laughed, suddenly. “Peculiar illness, don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
“Peculiarly contagious, I’d say.” He laughed again and struck up another melody, tapping his heel on the wooden floorboards.
I listened to him for a while, trying to make out what he was playing. “Does anyone know why he did it?”
He played on, smiling at me. “Did what?” He laughed. “You think he got hungry?”
I stared at him.
“He didn’t get to pick the menu.” He chuckled to himself, shook his head. “Poor Amán,” he murmured. “Thinks he gets to pick the menu.” He looked at me and winked. “But you don’t, do you?”
“Don’t what?”
“Pick the menu.”
“No, I guess not.” I reached distractedly for the glass, and looked at it and took a sip.
“That’s right,” he nodded. “I give you a lemonade. Drink it. Luz at the door. Eat chicken. Eat rice.” He shook his head again. “Poor Amán. Poor Amán.” He sighed. “I bet in the States you got to pick the menu.”