by Don Winslow
She has on a thick white terry-cloth bathrobe, and a towel wrapped in a turban around her hair, and she plops down on the sofa, puts her feet up on the coffee table and picks up the letter.
She asks, “Are you going to?”
“Am I going to what?” Parada asks as her question pulls him out of the sweet reverie of the Coltrane album playing on the stereo.
“Resign.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I suppose so. I mean, a letter from Il Papa himself . . .”
“But you said it was a request,” Nora says. “He’s asking, not ordering.”
“That’s just a courtesy,” Parada answers. “It amounts to the same thing. One doesn’t refuse a request of the Pope's.”
Nora shrugs. “First time for everything.”
Parada smiles. Ah, for the careless courage of youth. It is, he thinks, a simultaneous flaw and virtue of young people that they have so little regard for tradition, and even less for authority. A superior asks you to do something you don’t wish to do? Easy—just refuse.
But it would be so easy to accede, he thinks. More than easy—tempting. Resign and become a mere parish priest again, or accept an assignment to a monastery—a “period of reflection,” they would probably call it. A time for contemplation and prayer. It sounds wonderful, as opposed to the constant stress and responsibility. The endless political negotiations, the ceaseless efforts to acquire food, housing, medicine. Not to mention the chronic alcoholism, spousal abuse, unemployment and poverty, and the myriad tragedies that spring from them. It’s a burden, he thinks with full realization of his own self-pity, and now Il Papa is not only willing to remove the cup from my hands, he’s requesting that I give it up.
Will, in fact, forcibly rip it from me if I don’t meekly hand it over.
This is what Nora doesn’t understand.
One of the few things that Nora doesn’t understand.
She’s been coming to visit for years now. At first, it was short visits of a few days, helping out at the orphanage outside the city. Then it turned into longer visits, with her staying for a few weeks, and then the weeks turned into months. Then she would go back to the States to do what she does to make her money, and then return, and the stays at the orphanage became longer and longer.
Which is a good thing because she’s invaluable there.
To her surprise, she’s become quite good at doing whatever needs to be done. Some mornings it’s looking after the preschool kids, others it’s supervising repair of the seemingly endless plumbing problems or negotiating with contractors on prices for the new dormitory. Or driving into the big central market in Guadalajara to get the best deal on groceries for the week.
At first, each time a task came up she’d whine the same refrain—“I don’t know anything about that”—just to get the same answer from Sister Camella: “You’ll learn.”
And she did; she has. She’s become a veritable expert on the intricacies of Third World plumbing. The local contractors simultaneously love and hate to see her coming—she’s so beautiful but so relentlessly ruthless, and they’re both shocked and delighted to see a woman walk up to them and pronounce in butchered but effective Spanish the words “No me quiebres el culo.”
Don’t bust my ass.
Other times, she can be so charming and seductive that they give her what she wants at barely a profit. She leans over and looks up at them with those eyes and that smile and tells them that the roof can’t really wait until they have the cash—the rains are coming, don’t you see the sky?
No, they don’t. What they see is her face and body and, let’s be honest, her soul, and they go and fix the condenada roof. And they know she’s good for the money, she’ll get it, because who at the diocese is going to say no to her?
No one, that’s who.
No one has the balls.
And at the market? Dios mío, she’s a terror. Strolls through the vegetable stands like a queen, demanding the best of this, the freshest of that. Squeezing and smelling and asking for samples to test.
One morning a fed-up grocer asks her, “Who do you think you’re buying for? The patrons of a luxury hotel?”
She answers, “My kids deserve as good or better. Or do you disagree?”
She gets them the best food at the best price.
The rumors about her abound. She’s an actress—no, a whore—no . . . she is the cardinal’s mistress. No, she was a high-priced courtesan, and she is dying of AIDS, she has come to the orphanage to do penance for her sins before she goes to meet God.
But that story loses credence as a year goes by—then two, then five, then seven—and still she comes to the orphanage and her health hasn’t declined and her looks haven’t faded and by that time the speculation on her past has pretty much ended anyway.
She does enjoy the meals on her visits to the city. She eats herself into a near stupor, then takes a glass of wine into the big bathroom with real tiles and soaks in hot water until her skin is a glowing pink. Then she dries herself with the big, fluffy towels (the ones at the orphanage are small and practically transparent), and a maid comes in with the clean clothes that were being washed while she was in the tub, and then she rejoins Father Juan for an evening of conversation, music or movies. She knows he’s taken advantage of her bath to go outside in the garden and sneak cigarettes (the doctors have told him and told him and told him and his response is, “What if I give up the smokes and then get hit by a car? I will have sacrificed all that pleasure for nothing!”), and then he does this funny thing of sucking on a mint before she comes back, as if he’s fooling anybody, as if he needs to fool her.
In fact, they’ve come to measure the length of her baths by cigarettes—“I’m going to have a five-cig bath,” or, if she feels especially grimy and tired, “This is going to be an eight-cig bath”—but he still goes to the trouble to deny by silent implication that that’s what he’s doing, and he always sucks on the mint anyway.
This game has been going on now for almost seven years.
Seven years—she can’t believe it.
On this particular visit she came, unusually, in the morning, having spent all night bringing a sick child into the city hospital and then sitting up with him. When the crisis had passed she’d taken a taxi over to Juan’s residence and availed herself of a bath and a full breakfast. Now she sits in his den and listens to the music.
“Where has it gone?” she asks him as the Coltrane solo rises to a crescendo and then falls again.
“Where has what gone?”
“Seven years.”
“Where it’s always gone,” he says. “Doing what there is to be done.”
“I suppose.”
She’s worried about him.
He looks tired, worn down. And, even though they make a joke of it, he’s lost weight lately, and he seems more susceptible to colds and bouts of flu.
But it’s more than his health.
It’s also his safety.
Nora’s afraid they’re going to kill him.
It’s not only his constant political sermons and labor organizing; for the past few years he’s been spending more and more time in the State of Chiapas, making the church down there a center for indigenous Indian movement, infuriating the local landowners. He’s been increasingly outspoken on a range of social issues, always taking a dangerously left-wing position, even coming out against the NAFTA treaty, which, he argues, will only further dispossess the poor and the landless.
He’s even railed against it from the pulpit, angering his superiors in the Church and the right wing in Mexico.
The writing is, literally, on the wall.
The first time she saw one of the posters she angrily went to tear it down, but he stopped her. He thought it was funny, the cartoonish drawing of him with the legend EL CARDENAL ROJO—The Red Cardinal—and the announcement DANGEROUS CRIMINAL—WANTED FOR BETRAYING HIS COUNTRY. He wanted to have one copied and framed.
It doesn’t scare him—he assures
her that even the right-wingers wouldn’t kill a priest. But they murdered Oscar Romero in Guatemala, didn’t they? His robes didn’t deflect those bullets. A right-wing death squad marched into his church as he was saying Mass and gunned him down. So she’s afraid of the Mexican Guardia Blanca, and of these posters that encourage some lone nut to make himself a hero by killing a traitor.
“They’re just trying to intimidate me,” Juan told her when they first saw the posters.
But that’s just what scares her because she knows that he won’t be intimidated. And when they see that he won’t, what will they do? So maybe the “request” to resign is a good thing, she thinks. Which is why she floats the idea of his resigning. She’s too smart to overtly bring up his health, his fatigue and the threats against him, but she wants to leave the door open for him to walk away.
Just walk away.
Alive.
“I don’t know,” she says casually. “Maybe it’s not such a bad idea.”
He told her about the argument when the papal nuncio had summoned him to Mexico City to explain his “grave pastoral and doctrinal errors” in Chiapas.
“This 'liberation theology,’ ” Antonucci had started.
“I don’t care about liberation theology.”
“I’m relieved to hear it.”
“I only care about liberation.”
Antonucci’s little finch-like face darkened as he said, “Christ liberates our soul from hell and death, and I would think that would be sufficient liberation. That is the good news of the gospel, and that is what you are supposed to deliver to the faithful of your diocese. And that, not politics, should be your main concern.”
“My main concern,” Parada said, “is that the gospel becomes good news to the people now, and not after they starve to death.”
“This political orientation was all the rage after Vatican Two,” Antonucci said, “but perhaps it has escaped your notice that we have a different Pope now.”
“Yes,” Parada said, “and he sometimes gets things backwards: Everywhere he goes he kisses the ground and walks on the people.”
Antonucci said, “This is no joke. They’re investigating you.”
“Who is?”
“The Latin Affairs Desk at the Vatican,” Antonucci said. “Bishop Gantin. And he wants you removed.”
“On what grounds?”
“Heresy.”
“Oh, ridiculous!”
“Is it?” Antonucci picked up a file from his desk. “Did you celebrate Mass in a Chiapan village last May garbed in Mayan robes, replete with a feathered headdress?”
“Those are symbols that the indigenous people—”
“So the answer is yes,” Antonucci said. “You were openly engaging in pagan idolatry.”
“Do you think that God only arrived here with Columbus?”
“You’re quoting yourself now,” Antonucci said. “Yes, I have that little tidbit here. Let me see. Yes, here it is, 'God loves all humankind—’ ”
“Do you have an objection to that statement?”
“ '—and therefore has revealed his “Godself” to all cultural and ethnic groups in the world. Before any missionary arrived to speak of Christ, a process of salvation was already there. We know in truth that Columbus did not bring God aboard his ships. No, God is already present in all these cultures, so missionary work has a whole different meaning—announcing the presence of a God who is already there.’ Do you deny saying that?”
“No, I embrace it.”
“They are saved before Christ?”
“Yes.”
“Sheer heresy.”
“No, it isn’t.” It’s pure salvation. That one simple statement, Columbus did not bring God with him, did more than a thousand catechisms to launch a spiritual revival in Chiapas as the indigenous people began to search their own culture for signs of the revealed God. And found them—in their customs, their stewardship of the earth, their ancient laws on how to treat their brothers and sisters. It was only then, when they had found God in themselves, that they could truly receive the good news of Jesus Christ.
And the hope of redemption. From five hundred years of slavery. Half a millennium of oppression, humiliation and dire, desperate, murderous poverty. And if Christ didn’t come to redeem that, then he didn’t come at all.
“How about this, then?” Antonucci asked. “ 'The mystery of the Trinity is not the mathematical riddle of Three in One. It is the manifestation of the Father in politics, the Son in economics, and the Holy Spirit in the culture.’ Does this really reflect your thinking?”
“Yes.”
Yes, it is, because it takes all of that—politics, economics and culture—for God to reveal himself in all his power. That’s why we’ve spent the past seven years building cultural centers, clinics, farming co-ops and, yes, political organizations.
Antonucci said, “You would reduce God the Father to mere politics, and Jesus Christ His Son Our Savior to the level of a chair of Marxist Theoretics in some third-rate economics department?! And I won’t even comment on your blasphemous connection of the Holy Spirit to local pagan culture, whatever that even means.”
“The fact that you don’t know what that means is the problem.”
“No,” Antonucci said, “the problem is the fact that you do.”
“Do you know what an old Indian man asked me the other day?”
“Doubtless you’re going to tell me.”
“He asked me, 'Does this God of yours save just our souls? Or does he save our bodies, too?’ ”
“I tremble to think how you might have answered him.”
“You should.”
They sat there across a desk, staring at each other, then Parada let down a bit and tried to explain, “Look at what we’re achieving in Chiapas: We have six thousand indigenous catechists now, spread through every village, teaching the gospel.”
“Yes, let’s look at what you’ve achieved in Chiapas,” Antonucci said. “You have the highest percentage of converts to Protestantism in all of Mexico. Only a little more than half of your people are even Catholic anymore, the lowest percentage in Mexico.”
“So that’s what this is really about,” Parada snapped. “Coke is worried about losing market share to Pepsi.”
But Parada instantly regretted the quip. It was immature and prideful and killed any chance for a rapprochement.
And Antonucci’s main contention is true, he thinks now.
I went to the countryside to convert the Indians.
Instead, they converted me.
And now this NAFTA horror would throw them off what little land they have left, to make room for the more “efficient” large ranches. To open the way for larger coffee fincas, mining, lumber operations and, of course, oil drilling.
Must everything, he wonders, be sacrificed on the altar of capitalism?
Now he gets up, turns the music down, and searches the room for his cigarettes. He always has to look for them, just like he has to look for his glasses. She doesn’t help, even though she sees them sitting by a side table. He’s smoking way too much. It can’t be helping.
“The smoke really bothers me,” she says.
“I’m not going to light it,” he says, finding the pack. “I’m only going to suck on it.”
“Try the gum.”
“I don’t like the gum.”
He sits back down across from her and says, “You want me to get out.”
She shakes her head. “I want you to do what you want to do.”
“Stop handling me,” he snaps. “Just tell me what you think.”
“You asked,” she says. “You deserve some kind of a life. You’ve earned it. If you decide to resign, no one will blame you. They’ll blame the Vatican, and you can walk away from all this with your head up.”
She gets up from the sofa, walks to the sidebar and pours herself a glass of wine. She wants the wine, but mostly she wants to avoid his eyes. Doesn’t want him looking at her as she says, “I’m sel
fish, okay? I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you.”
“Ah.”
The shared, unspoken thought hangs heavily between them: If he were to resign not just the cardinalate, but the priesthood itself, then they could . . .
But he could never do that, she thinks, and I wouldn’t really want him to.
And you’re being an exceptionally foolish old man, he thinks. She’s forty years your junior and you are, when all is said and done, a priest. So he says, “I’m afraid I’m the one who is being selfish. Perhaps our friendship is keeping you from seeking a relationship—”
