RAMIRO WOULD TELL YOU HIMSELF he was just another slum kid from El Cartucho. He lived in a one-room apartment with his mother and another family of seven who let them take up a corner. They’d come from Pereira with Ramiro’s father when Ramiro was just beginning to walk, but his father got stabbed beneath his ribs while shining shoes in front of the Palacio de Nariño and Ramiro and his mom had to find their own way. He’ll tell you his story like he was some kind of miracle, not getting into basuco like every other kid in the sector. He was business-minded, he said. Even before Los Neros tapped him, he was hunting in dumpsters all over the zona for good garbage to bring back to the recyclers in El Cartucho; tins and shoestrings, or maybe he’d get lucky and find a whole rubber tire or a pair of shoes they could put back together to sell or trade.
Most of the people in the barrio were lost in a high or busy with a hustle, but Ramiro said living in El Cartucho wasn’t so bad. People looked after their own and did a good job keeping everyone else out, throwing junk at outsiders who wandered in or just warning them they had five minutes to disappear or the people of El Cartucho would do it for them. Police never patrolled there and didn’t even bother coming if called. At most, they’d show their faces in El Cartucho for a few minutes—acto de presencia—but leave quick before anyone had a chance to ask for their help. It wasn’t unusual to see a dead body or two on his walk home, Ramiro told me, and I never questioned whether any of what he said was true. Vagabonds with old dogs at their sides, shriveled by the Andean wind, basuqueros killed by their last hit, or someone sunken to the pavement by bullets. It was like the war of the angels in there, he said, with no shortage of weapons. People used to joke El Cartucho was where the paramilitaries came for their guns. Any fool could buy or rent a pistol or a machine gun. Same for bazookas or grenades. You’d never know it by how miserably its inhabitants lived, Ramiro said, but El Cartucho was a real money factory. This was a long time ago.
It was Renata, one of the girls he grew up with in the apartment, girls he felt so close to he called them his sisters, who introduced Ramiro to Los Neros. She made some cash padding her baby’s stroller with drugs or money, whatever Los Neros needed to get out of El Cartucho into a car waiting along the Avenida Caracas. Ramiro was just twelve at the time. He didn’t want to be one of those kids carrying knapsacks of dealers’ merchandise because those kids got regularly jumped and killed by lesser pandilleros in competing gangs. He wanted a more secure position so Los Neros made him a messenger. All he had to do was relay coded phrases from one gang member to another on opposite ends of El Cartucho, and they’d keep him flush with pocket money and bonuses like a nylon parka or new jeans. He did this for years until they promoted him to collector, and then Ramiro’s job was to go around warning debts needed to be paid or Zaco, the rarely seen head of Los Neros, would be very unhappy.
On the news, politicians called El Cartucho a national disgrace, a dangerous and filthy boiling point just steps behind the presidential palace that needed to be victoriously extinguished like they’d finally done when they filled Escobar’s body with bullets. When it got flattened into the park of El Tercer Milenio, most of Bogotá thought that would be the end of El Cartucho. The inhabitants, already desplazados, would just melt into the population, go back to the villages and valleys they came from, or, what the public really wanted, would disappear altogether. But the entire community just moved a few blocks south and, like the seven-headed dragon whipping stars from the sky with its tail, waiting to devour children, El Bronx was risen, becoming everything El Cartucho was and so much more.
That’s where I met Ramiro for the first time. Though I never knew his name. I noticed the way he watched me standing behind my father, who was begging Ramiro’s boss for a discount on perico. My father found the only way he could stop drinking was by replacing it with something else. He wasn’t dumb enough—or poor enough, he’d say—to start on basuco like some degenerado de la calle. Cocaine was less grimy, he told himself—of the land even if it was cut with petrol and bleach. I was thirteen. Ramiro, seventeen. I wouldn’t have remembered him all those years later, but he remembered me, said I had the same face now that I had then, unchanged, like I’ve been both a little girl and a grown woman all my life. I would have thought I was special, but Ramiro told me Los Neros were the ones who trained him how never to forget a face, even those of children because they are often the most vicious and vengeful.
It’s in the eyes and the brows, he told me. Una mirada revela más que una huella dactilar.
A look reveals more than a fingerprint.
Ramiro was Padre Andrade’s assistant, meaning whatever the priest asked, Ramiro had to do. It was a condition of his release. He’d gotten exempt from doing prison time again because some social worker recommended him for a service program, and Padre Andrade agreed to take him on in his church. Padre Andrade was notoriously compassionate, not like the other priests in San Ignacio’s parish or serving in other churches in the area who really didn’t want to get their hands dirty with the people. He told us he’d started as a monk but soon felt called to serve beyond monastery walls. He never had a bad thing to say. Not even after he got robbed at knifepoint in his own church.
I ended up at San Ignacio’s after I’d been thrown out of another school for not showing up enough, and my father, having now replaced all his vices with religion, convinced the nuns to put me to work at San Ignacio’s or he’d have no choice but to send me to a facility for bad girls like he’d been threatening for years, or worse, tell my mother how mala I was so that she’d never bring me up to Los Estados to join her like she’d always promised. But the only work I ever found myself doing at the church was cleaning alongside Ramiro.
“If you wanted me to be somebody’s maid you could at least let me get paid for it,” I told my father. But he insisted this work was to be an offering to God. Some kind of cleansing of the soul.
I spent my days mopping the cold marble church floors, dusting pews around the homeless who came to sleep on them. Ramiro vacuumed the rectory and offices, washing and ironing Padre Andrade’s and the other priests’ vestments. When he wasn’t housekeeping, Ramiro got to sit at the front desk and answer phone calls, booking baptisms and funerals, taking down the names of the newly dead.
He was short and skinny, the way of just about every kid from El Cartucho, undernourished, raised on motorcycle exhaust and industrial fumes. He had small eyes that disappeared when he smiled, twisted teeth and black hair that sprouted into spikes when he took too long to shave it down. I wasn’t tall but still taller than him, which meant he had to tilt his chin up to talk to me in a way that didn’t make him seem diminutive, and when I looked down, I often notice he’d pushed himself up to his toes.
The first time we were left alone together in the rectory he asked me how I got to look so healthy, and how a comemierda like my papi managed to raise a daughter with such pretty white teeth.
“Don’t call my father comemierda, malparido.”
He grinned, apologizing, said he meant it as a compliment. It wasn’t just the quality of my teeth that impressed him, which he insisted could only come from a childhood of regular milk-drinking, but that I had straight legs, knees faced front, not at all angled inward; the sort of build and stature only a parent with money can buy.
I didn’t want to tell him, because my father told me it was our family secret, the money came from my mother who’d stayed in the United States after my father was deported. After my birth in a place called Virginia, she’d sent me back to Bogotá with a friend who left me with my mother’s mother until she died and my father convinced my mother to let him have me until she returned to Colombia or was ready to bring me north. It was supposed to be a matter of a year or two, but every Christmas she’d say it wasn’t yet time. She never failed to send the money though. She kept us living in a nice enough apartment and kept us fed when my father took long breaks from working as a chauffeur for rich people on account of his drinking.
“Don’t ever tell anyone you’re a gringuita,” my father warned. “They’ll attach themselves to you.”
Instead, I’d be still as death when Ramiro would take a piece of my hair and rub it between his fingertips as if it were made of sugar, inhaling deep. He liked the smell of my shampoo, he said. Expensive. He’d finger my earrings. Tiny gold hoops sent to me from my mother for my quinces, telling me I looked good in gold but not as good as I could look in emeralds. And my shoes. Short leather boots my father had bought for me at El Andino because, even if he was mad about some trouble I’d gotten myself into, and even if he wore the same suit to work almost every day, he liked for me to have nice things. Ramiro looked down at my feet, shook his head, said nothing, yet I felt embarrassed. But then, one day when we were both helping at one of Padre Andrade’s Sunday lunches for the poor, Ramiro, serving heaps of frijoles onto the plates of dozens who came to eat, let a big spoonful slip out of his grasp and onto my shoes. He didn’t even say he was sorry.
Every evening around six, when the equatorial night drove the city into complete darkness, I took the TransMilenio home while Ramiro ate dinner with Padre Andrade and the other priests, then went to sleep in a small room they’d made for him behind the kitchen. For the first six months, he wasn’t allowed to leave the church property, but then Padre Andrade started taking Ramiro with him when he’d go to hospitals to anoint the sick and give last rights. I think he wanted Ramiro to get a more human picture of those who were ready to die. Ramiro was never accused of killing anyone, and he’d deny it if you were to ask, saying sicarrio jobs are for kids—the expendables with no parents and no brains—but it wasn’t out of the realm of reason to think he might have taken on some killing vueltas. Even I knew when you were in with Los Neros, you did what you were told. But Ramiro insisted it required wisdom to stay alive in his business. Half the kids he grew up with in that apartment in El Cartucho were dead now and when talking about them, he’d huff his nostrils and mention whatever dumb thing they’d done to deserve it.
“Just like the church has its rules to obey,” he said, “El Bronx has its own commandments too. We all have to pay for our sins.”
Sometimes he’d talk about the day my father took me with him to buy drugs, which had made a big impression on Ramiro. He remembered my father’s look of desperation. He was a guy who still had a good face, not sunken and contorted like the other junkies drifting like zombies through the barrio. Ramiro and his boss could tell my father was a guy on the verge, who could still avoid the trap of total addiction, not yet like those other men, far more distinguished, former professionals, educated, even upper-class men who somehow ended up sleeping next to piles of waste, talking to themselves, begging for pesos to get their basuco to make the time pass easier.
What a lowlife, Ramiro had thought, bringing a child to a place full of degenerados and pecueca, when he could just buy his little bag of coke from any dealer in El Centro.
“Your father doesn’t deserve you,” Ramiro told me one afternoon in the rectory. “If I were him, I would guard you with my life. A daughter should be cherished, not used for sympathy to get a better deal on drugs like that band of beggars who sit on the sidewalks of La Zona Rosa with doped-up sleeping babies in their laps.”
“Your papi looked down on us,” Ramiro added after a moment. “But I remember thinking he was the real piece of scum.”
Many years later I’d regret that as Ramiro went on insulting my father that day, I did nothing to stop him.
After one morning on a hospital visit with Padre Andrade, Ramiro came back to the church looking shaken in a way I’d never noticed in him before. We didn’t have the habit of asking after each other. He’d eye me like I was someone’s silly pet he had to tolerate, and I’d just listen to whatever he wanted to talk about—mainly how he’d rather be in prison where at least he could watch TV, smoke cigarettes, and talk shit, than here in a church living like a Franciscan and ironing the underwear of old priests.
He sat at the front counter of the rectory. Madre Naty had gone to the chapel for a few hours of Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, so Ramiro was in charge of the phone and was supposed to help me assemble hundreds of pamphlets offering help to unwed pregnant girls.
“You should have seen this vieja,” he told me while I stapled the papers together and he watched. “Padre Andrade’s putting the oils on her and she looks like she’s already mostly dead. Then she opens her eyes, sees me standing by the door, and screeches loud as a fucking parrot, ‘¡Mi hijo! ¡Mi hijo!’ She waves for me to come over, and Padre tells her, ‘No, señora, that’s not your son, that’s my friend Ramiro,’ but she keeps crying, ‘My son has come home to me! My son!’ And just when I start walking over to her, in less than a breath, in not one second, she’s gone, like nothing, like we’re all going to be one day. Nada. Gone.”
The phone rang, but he didn’t pick up and gave me a stare so I wouldn’t either. When it stopped, he took the phone in hand, dialed some numbers, and then I heard him greet his mother and I could make out the high hum of her voice coming from the other end. She never came to visit him at the church. I never knew why. But he could call her as much as he wanted. He told me he’d saved enough money over the years to support her living in an apartment with other older ladies who had no families.
“When I get out of here I’m going to buy a house for her and me,” he said, as if the world were full of such possibilities. “You can come live there too if you want. If you want to get away from your father.”
“No, thanks.”
“What are you going to do when you get out of here, Chana?”
“I’m going to go be with my mother in New York,” I said quick, without thinking.
He laughed. “Sure you are.”
“It’s true,” I said again, in reflex, since I don’t like to be contradicted.
He smiled.
“Okay. But when you go, don’t forget to take me with you.”
We’d both been at San Ignacio’s about nine months when the guys started showing up to see Ramiro. It wasn’t so obvious at first. I’d notice one or two of them in the church, not looking like they came there to pray or to sleep, but like they were waiting for someone, which wasn’t so unusual either, since a church in between Masses is a great place to conduct a shady negocio. But these guys stood out to me. Then they started coming into the rectory, and I heard one of them, while I was on my knees organizing the file cabinets, ask Rosalia, the volunteer who was on the desk that day, if there was a guy who worked around here by the name of Ramiro.
“He’s out with Padre Andrade,” she said. “Would you like to leave a message?”
“Tell him Juancho was here. And that I’ll be back.”
“Are you a friend?” Rosalia asked, because all of us had been warned Ramiro wasn’t allowed any contact with his old crew. His visits had to be approved.
“I’m his cousin.”
I wasn’t there when Ramiro got the note that he’d had a visitor. But I was there when Juancho came a second time. Ramiro was in the sacristy, cleaning the chalice, which took more than an hour given it was enormous and plated in gold and had to be polished with extra care since it held the body of Christ. Padre Andrade normally did it himself. He didn’t even trust other priests with that chore, but for some reason, he trusted Ramiro.
“He’s busy working,” I told Juancho, who was small like Ramiro and kept his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, looking all around as if he were afraid of someone touching him.
“Go get him for me.”
There was no one else around, and something about Juancho made me reluctant to tell him no. I told myself no harm could come of telling Ramiro he had an unannounced visitor just this once. Besides, Padre Andrade was always making exceptions for him.
I went down the hall that connected the rectory to the church, the sacristy in between, and stood by the door because seeing all the relics normally used in Masses like simple objects in a storage space made me uneasy. Ramiro was surprised to see me there. Even more surprised when I said there was a guy named Juancho waiting to see him. The chalice was in his hands, so I knew he was still supposed to be in a state of reverence and shouldn’t speak. He nodded at me, and I slipped back out, catching Juancho fingering the pregnancy pamphlets stacked in racks in the rectory, since we’d finally finished putting them together.
When Ramiro came out, he and his friend greeted each other with an elaborate handshake.
“Parcero,” Juancho began, “I only came to tell you the dog has started barking again. The veterinarian says he’s almost cured. We can start taking him for walks like we used to.”
“Oh, really,” said Ramiro. “That’s good to hear.”
“We just need to find the right medicine now. So he can keep getting better.”
Ramiro nodded. “I’ll see if I can think of something that will help him.”
They shook hands again and Juancho then extended his palm toward me, but I was too slow to react and he seemed to take it as an insult and brusquely slipped it back in his pocket as he turned away to leave.
My mother didn’t know I was working at the church. She thought I was still in school, and when she called on Sundays, her only day off from cleaning houses, she’d always ask how my studies were going.
“Wonderful,” I’d lie.
And my father would help, lying too, “She’s the top of her class.” He’d trained me from the time I learned to speak to tell my mother how much I loved my papito and never wanted to leave him. I had no memory of knowing her, but she still spoke to me like I was her baby, telling me her plan was for me to join her in the United States and I’d learn English and go to a real American high school one day.
In the early years, it was true, I had been a good student. But around fourteen I started to change, sneaking out of the schoolyard and into the cars of the boys I’d met at the bowling alley, who’d wait for me outside, take me back to their apartments up in the hills, to fincas out in the savanna, guys who ran favors for men with money, who taught me to drink, to smoke, to take off my clothes, how not to feel anything. But they didn’t need to teach me to lie. That, I learned at home.
Over the phone, my father and I gave our best performances.
I was all achievement. A dream of a child. It was to keep her money coming in those monthly chunks. It was wrong, I know. But my loyalty was to my father because, even if she was my mother, she was still a stranger, a woman my father resented because, when he got deported, rather than wait for him to find his way back to her, she divorced him. She had a boyfriend she lived with now, and sometimes that made my father jealous, even though he’d brought several different women to live with us over the years, though none had stayed too long, always fed up with his drinking, his depressions and crying and moaning through the night, and his blame on the US government for forcing him back to this place to start over.
I was out looking for my father one night after I returned home from the church and didn’t find him where he usually was, waiting for me to cook him dinner so he could start his evening routine of television and a half dozen beers. That didn’t bother me. It just relaxed him and didn’t send him into a frenzy like aguardiente and whiskey did. Those benders were less frequent but I sensed this night, with its thick fog and wet wind, was one of those in which I’d have to go hunt for him. I started at the bar on the corner where the owner had the good sense to cut him off when he became too unruly, calling me to come for him. But my father wasn’t there. I went to two more of his usual spots, but still, no sign of him. I was close to giving up, on the edges of San Bernardo, ready to head home and just wait it out because he’d have to return anyway, for money, for food, for a shower, for sleep, when I saw a familiar face across the avenue.
There was Ramiro, free as a dog out on the street.
He didn’t see me. His attention was fixed on the two guys he was with. He stepped under a streetlight long enough for me to be sure it was him. Plus, I recognized his jacket, black with long white stripes down the sleeves, and his shoes, a battered pair of loafers; Padre Andrade said no sneakers in the church because their soles squeaked against the marble.
My father didn’t come home that night. When I was already on my way out to the church the next morning, I found him sleeping in the hall outside our door. A neighbor had left a prayer card to the Virgin of Chiquinquirá on his shoulder. I shook him awake and helped him inside, then to his bed. I called his boss to say my father wouldn’t be in today because he was home with a flu. My father watched me through one eye as I lied for him.
“Good girl,” he said, then fell back asleep.
“Why don’t you have a baby?” Ramiro asked me. “A girl your age should at least be thinking about it by now.”
“I’m only sixteen,” I said. Plus, one of my father’s girlfriends, Zoraida, had taught me how to count my days as soon as I got my first period.
We were folding more pregnancy pamphlets. These were advertising a home where girls could go live while they were waiting to give birth and for a while afterward, where they could take classes in sewing, cooking, and computers.
“Sixteen is old enough,” he said. “You should see the things I was doing by sixteen.”
“You don’t have any kids though.”
“Who said I don’t?”
“You never said you did.”
“My sister Claudia—she’s not my real sister, you know—she’s been saying her son is mine for years. I doubt it though. I heard parents can recognize their baby by smell, and to me he smells like any other kid.”
We could hear Padre Andrade in his office talking to some parishioner about her marriage problems, whether or not this lady could forgive her husband’s affair. It was easy to eavesdrop, since Padre Andrade’s office had a frosted glass door. Padre was insisting she at least try, since we’re supposed to be all about forgiveness as children of God, and Ramiro looked to me, whispered my name, and waited until he had my full attention to say, “I’ll give you a baby, Chana. We can make one, you and me.”
I stared down at the papers in my hands.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said.
“I’m not embarrassed. I just think it’s a stupid thing for you to say.”
“It’s not so stupid. I like you. Most guys can’t stand the mothers of their children.”
I kept to my folding and stapling.
“Are you afraid of me now because I said that?”
“No.”
“You should be. At least a little afraid. You don’t know who I used to be before I got here. You only know what I told you. And I only told you the easy stuff so you won’t think I’m a monster.”
He came closer to me. I was leaning on the counter, and he leaned beside me so our hips were almost touching, and I felt his breath flow upward against my chin and over my lips.
“I’m not afraid of you.”
He watched me, maybe to see if I’d move away, stir under his closeness.
“Good,” he said finally, and stepped back to his end of the counter. “I like that.”
Sometimes, when he was at his drunkest, my father would say my mother didn’t want for me to be born. He was the one who insisted on my birth. They slept in a car in those days and only washed in bus or gas station bathrooms. My mother said they could barely feed themselves and a third mouth would leave them to starve. When my mother sent me away, she wouldn’t let my father have me. She said a borracho like him would be dangerous around a baby. She forbid him from coming by my grandmother’s house to see me, but Abue relented every time he showed up at the door and let him in.
I remember long before she became ill, before the headaches, before the fainting spells that left her in bed for most of the day, before her body started to shrink and I held myself against her in her bed; once, after my father had sat with us for dinner at her table and promised me he’d take me to a carnival that weekend, we watched him descend the narrow stairs from my grandmother’s apartment to the street, where he’d left his flimsy motorbike, and my grandmother said solemnly, “Your father is not a good man, Chanita. It’s not his fault.” I never doubted her.
When she became sick, it was my father who came most often to visit her. We thought she had a passing illness. Even the doctors said she would recover. She had been strong all her life. Nobody thought she would die.
She and my mother had made no plans for my care, so my father took over.
If I mentioned my grandmother at all to my father, he would say, “You were only three when she died. It’s impossible that you can remember her at all.”
“But I do remember.”
I’d describe her apartment, the market where she worked a stand next to a spice vendor who made sweet teas for me to keep warm within the damp warehouse walls.
“Those aren’t memories,” my father would say. “Those are stories I’ve told you.”
I remember, I’d insist, if only to convince myself.
It was Padre Virgilio who discovered the chalice was missing. It was a Tuesday morning. During preparations for the eight o’clock Mass, he’d gone to the sacristy and noticed it was gone. They’d used a spare steel one that was nowhere near as beautiful as the golden chalice that had been gifted to the church by some rich family years earlier. It was worth something, though Padre Virgilio wouldn’t say how much when the police came to make the report and investigate the robbery.
Padre Andrade was traveling in La Guajira. Every year he made the trip with other priests to visit rural communities and churches that were little more than a few benches arranged in the sand. There was no way to get in touch with him.
Padre Virgilio sat Ramiro and me down in his office to ask what we knew of the chalice’s disappearance. I’d never even seen the thing up close, I told him. And I never saw anyone besides the priests, the alter servers, the nuns, or Ramiro set foot in the sacristy.
Padre Virgilio turned his attention to Ramiro.
“I don’t know what happened to it, but I assure you, I will do all I can to find out,” Ramiro said. He told us he’d spent so much time caring for the chalice and cleaning it and felt a true divine presence every time he touched it. His voice became stilted, and he paused to catch his breath.
Padre Virgilio seemed moved by Ramiro’s words. There was no thread of doubt in that room, even if the police were encouraging suspicion since one of the crimes Ramiro had been charged with before turning up at San Ignacio’s was grand theft.
My father had his own theories.
At home, he’d made progress. Hardly drinking, attending more of San Ignacio’s nightly meetings for alcoholics.
While I prepared our dinner one night, weeks after the robbery had turned up no leads of any kind, my father said, “I bet you it was one of those little nuns. How easy for a monjita to commit a robbery when you’ve got a criminal from the basurero living there for everyone to suspect first.”
“You don’t think it was Ramiro?”
“I don’t think he’s stupid enough to take the chalice. He’d do better stealing from the poor box.”
Back at work, the only thing Ramiro ever said to me about the missing chalice was that whoever took it must have really needed it because it’s no small thing to smuggle something that large and shiny out of the church and into the city.
“We may know the miracle without ever knowing the saint,” he said, so certain of his words that I believed him.
By the time Padre Andrade came back, people had started to accept the chalice was gone forever, and Ramiro even had the idea to start up a special collection in order buy a new one. Padre Andrade said God was with us whether we had a beautiful chalice or a humble one, like the people he’d been with up in La Guajira who used cups carved out of wood to consecrate the body and blood of Christ.
But people around the parish still whispered, turning suspicions from one of the volunteers to Ramiro, or even to me, wondering who’d been the real thief.
The recyclers of El Bronx turned over the chalice some months later. A boy, probably a messenger-in-training, had brought it to them, they said, telling them his patrón wanted a good price for it since he knew they could break it apart and use both its metal and its gold. But the recyclers considered themselves faithful believers, and they knew that somewhere there was a church missing this chalice, took it out of El Bronx hidden in a banana crate and brought it to the nearest police station.
It wasn’t long before they located the original kid who brought it in and pulled in another pandillero who started talking, revealing the trail to Los Neros, saying the chalice was sourced from none other than Ramiro, who still had debts to pay as a consequence of his arrest.
The police came for Ramiro on a Thursday when he and I shared the work of cleaning all the silver plates used for distributing Communion. The police didn’t say much as they took him away. Padre Andrade was in confessions, so he didn’t hear a word of it until he came back to the rectory, a startled expression on his face when Madre Naty told him Ramiro had been arrested and taken away.
“They know he did it,” she said. “There are witnesses.”
But Padre Andrade only shook his head. He went into his office, shut the door, and from the other side, there was no sound. Through the frosted glass of his doorframe, I could make out the shadows of his body, see him support himself on the edge of his desk, and lower himself to his knees to pray.
I wasn’t surprised they’d found Ramiro to be the one. I’d always gotten the feeling, when I saw Padre Andrade leading him around, an arm around his back as if he were his long-lost son, that Ramiro was uneasy in this holy space. The rectory felt quiet and empty without him. I missed doing my mopping, my sweeping of the church aisles with him near me, but I knew it would eventually come to this. Just because they’d made a place for Ramiro in the church didn’t mean he belonged there. He would find a way to ruin it, I was sure; it was a quality I recognized from watching my own father.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the fact that Padre Andrade, after prayers and reflection, had gone to the police station and told them there had been a mistake. Ramiro couldn’t possibly have stolen the chalice. And when they’d asked why not, Padre Andrade said Ramiro could not have stolen the chalice because it was Padre Andrade himself who had entrusted it to him to watch while he was away in La Guajira. He’d personally asked Ramiro to take it for a professional polishing so that it would look more lustrous in time for the winter fiestas.
“But, Padre,” the police said, “You know Ramiro is not supposed to leave the church grounds as part of the agreement for his sentence.”
“Yes. That part is my fault. I’m the one who sent him out. The one you should punish in this case is me.”
Padre Andrade insisted Ramiro had been robbed. One of his old associates had seen him and jumped him. Ramiro, out of loyalty and shame, had remained quiet about the assault.
“Ramiro is innocent here. If you need to blame someone, blame me.”
They asked Ramiro if this was true, and Ramiro looked to Padre Andrade, who gently blinked his eyes.
“It’s true. Padre Andrade trusted me.”
All this is what Ramiro told me later, when he returned to the church, because once again, the police released him to Padre Andrade’s care and supervision.
But something changed in Ramiro the day he saw Padre Andrade lie for him. I noticed it the moment he walked through the rectory doors, more ruminative than as if he’d seen yet another person waiting to die as Padre Andrade gave them their last rites.
Everyone came out to witness his return to San Ignacio’s. The other priests shook his hands because they could tell that’s what Padre Andrade wanted them to do, even if their eyes still held bitterness for his betrayal. The nuns also welcomed him back, stiffly, and the volunteers stood on the edges of the rectory, looking even more skeptical of him than before.
I only waved at him. But when we were alone together later, cleaning out the wax residue in front of the statue of the Virgin and Child to make room for yet more candlelit prayers, Ramiro said to me, “It’s going to be different now.”
“What is?”
“I’m never going to leave here again.”
I thought he meant they’d be keeping even more of an eye on him now, or that maybe it was easier to just stay on the church grounds and avoid bad company.
“But everyone knows you’re here. They found you once, they can find you again.”
“They might come looking but they won’t find Ramiro. I’m someone else now. You’re going to leave here one day, but I never will.”
I didn’t say anything because it seemed like he was just trying out the words for the first time, and I wanted to see if there was anything else behind them.
“You know what I like about the church, Chana? They’ll take in anybody. Poor, homeless, shamed, desperate, addicts, criminals. Society’s worst, and most sinful. People who’ve used up all their chances. Even screwups like you and me. In those ways, the church has got a lot in common with El Bronx and El Cartucho.”
For a few more months, the days went on just as they had before the chalice was taken. Ramiro and me in our rhythm of work, until Madre Naty told my father she thought I’d graduated from my penance and I could stay to work there if I wanted, but maybe now I was ready for something else. She could see I’d learned about commitment and responsibility. She would write a letter so the school would let me back in, and they did, though I’d lost a full year. If I did extra assignments, they’d help me so I wouldn’t fall further behind. This made my father happy, and it made it easier to lie to my mother when she called and asked how school was going, at least for a while, until I started skipping classes again to go off with the boys and my father finally made good on his promise to send me to a place for problem girls that was more like a prison.
But before I knew of his plan, before two thick men showed up at our door and my father watched as they forced me to pack a bag and pulled me by the arms out of our home, down the stairs, into a van waiting on the curb while I cried for my father to give me one more chance to be good; before that afternoon, we were at Mass together one last time, at San Ignacio’s, where I didn’t mind accompanying my father because I could tune out the gospel and watch Ramiro in his new role as altar server, looking almost righteous in his white robe, the wooden cross Padre Andrade had brought him back from La Guajira hanging from his neck. He’d grown his hair so that it fell into a neat side part and with new peace in his eyes, he somehow seemed younger to me than ever before.
With the choir voices vibrating against the stone pillars and the marble floor we’d cleaned so carefully together so many times, I’d recall our days in the rectory, the way he used to look at me, the way I would try not to look back. I’d study him there in his seat at the end of the altar until he sensed my stare, turned his head, and spotted me within the first pews beside my father and among the old veiled widows, our eyes fixing on each other for a breath or two before he turned his attention back to the Mass and to the priest.
But that Sunday, Ramiro wasn’t at San Ignacio’s.
When my father and I went to greet Padre Andrade by the church doors after the final blessing, I asked where Ramiro had gone.
“We won’t be seeing him for a while,” Padre Andrade said. And then, as if I should not be surprised, “Our Ramiro has finally answered his calling.”
“What do you mean?”
I was worried he’d disappeared back to El Bronx or something worse had happened to him.
“He’s gone to the seminary. Ramiro is studying to become a priest.”
My father let out an exaggerated gasp. “You really did God’s work on that kid, Padre.”
“And you, Chana?” Padre Andrade placed a hand on my shoulder, nudging me out of my stunned silence. “What will you become?”
“I don’t know.”
I had no idea, as my father wished Padre Andrade a good day and watched as the priest gently traced his finger over my forehead in the lines of a cross, that he’d already arranged to have me taken away. They would come for me hours later as I lay on my bed trying to remember Ramiro’s face, thinking that like him, I too might be able to break away and change everything about my life, that I could start right now instead of waiting for that distant day when my mother might finally send for me. That Sunday morning, on the church steps, for reasons that seem foolish to me now, even though I had no answer to Padre Andrade’s question of what was ahead for me, with Ramiro on my mind, I was full of hope.