The Killing of the Saints

by Alex Abella

  "Wait a minute. You mean to say Mr. Valdez had no choice regarding his god?"

  "No, because when the saint descends, when he takes over his follower, you're in a trance, you're supposed to be the god's horse, his caballo, because he's mounting you. Well, at that point, you have no control, no choice."

  "What do you mean? Can't you say, no, I won't let that happen to me?"

  De Alba laughed. "You can no more stop the god from coming than you can stop the sun from shining."

  "It is a force of nature, then?"

  "Yes. What's more, when that happens, and I have seen it myself many times, when that happens you are not yourself. You do things that you would never suspect or imagine and when you come to, you do not remember a thing. Because you see, it wasn't you who was doing all these things, it was the god through you."

  Now ram it open, tear it down!

  "Does that mean the person possessed does not know what is happening, that he is not in possession of his faculties like a reasonable human being?"

  "That's correct, you are not yourself, it's the god who is in you. You are not there. It's like you were dead or asleep, your own personality is not there. You have no conscience, no awareness of anything that has happened."

  Done. The breach is wide enough to march an army through. If they believe her.

  "So do you believe Mr. Valdez was in possession of a god while these murders were committed?"

  Phyllis rose, a red beacon of righteousness.

  "Objection, Your Honor, assumes facts not in evidence, goes beyond the expertise of this particular witness."

  Reynolds scratched his ear, seemed to chew on an imaginary bone in his mouth. "Well, Counsel, I think the facts are evident enough. Mr. Valdez is here on trial for murder. As regards the testimony, well, Mrs. de Alba is here as an expert witness and I certainly feel she is entitled to give her opinion as to what happened. The jury should remember that it is an expert opinion, subject to the limitations that appertain, and that they should give that opinion the weight that it deserves. Objection overruled. Proceed."

  "Your answer, Mrs. de Alba?"

  "Yes. In my opinion, he acted as a man in a trance following the actions that a vengeful god would take."

  I was about to ask the follow-up question when a loud crack was heard in the room.

  "What was that?" Reynolds asked.

  "It's the wind, Your Honor," said the bailiff. "It's blowing very hard outside the building."

  "It must be blowing mighty hard when we can hear it all the way in here. Well, proceed, Mr. Morell. But no, wait a minute, you don't mind if I interrupt?"

  "Not at all, Your Honor."

  "Mrs. de Alba, I have a question. You have this altar here and you talk about honoring the gods and all that. Now, I wonder, just how is this worship conducted?"

  De Alba turned to the judge and offered him her warmest smile.

  "If Your Honor wishes, I could give you a demonstration. I have several priests in the audience who would gladly do it."

  "Objection, Your Honor," cried Phyllis, but Reynolds shook his hand impatiently at her.

  "Overruled, Ms. Chin. I believe it's proper in this case. Why, sure, why don't you call your friends up here if you want. Been meaning to see one of these for some time now. Always heard about them."

  "My pleasure."

  Reynolds glanced at me benignly. So this was his secret weapon, his gift to the prosecution. This was the reason why Phyllis had made no effort to get her own expert witness on religious cults. All the trial long Reynolds had been leaning toward the prosecution, making rulings that could never be appealed but that ever so subtly swayed the case Phyllis's way. Now we faced the final, brilliant stroke. He had maneuvered us into staging a ceremony that would reveal Santería to be a noisy farce, a sham, a sorry substitute for a real religion, a mask of hollow gods.

  It doesn't matter, I hear, amidst the pounding of drums. We are ready. Let us in.

  De Alba stepped down from the stand and then quickly spun around.

  "Just one thing, Judge. Is it OK if they smoke?"

  "As long as it ain't pot, it's all right by me."

  Everyone laughed. I whispered to de Alba as she walked past, "Is this all right? Here?"

  "No te preocupes, chico," she said in Spanish. "Don't worry, this has all been foretold."

  The seven white-clad santeros in the front row, five men and two women, listened eagerly as de Alba explained what the judge desired. Then, all seven nodded their heads yes and stood up.

  "May we begin, Judge?" asked one of the men, tall, black, with a pockmarked face.

  "Go right ahead. Just make believe we're not here, folks. Make yourselves at home."

  The man opened a duffel bag at his feet and took out a long batá drum, adorned with white and purple beads, while another man took out a gourd, also covered with beads. The tall man tapped his fingers lightly on the drumhead and received a rhythmic reply from the gourd. A third man, short and compact, took out another drum and also played a short riff, which the two others answered.

  "This is called a güiro, Your Honor," said de Alba, pointing at the gourd. "It's a hollowed-out gourd used to invoke the presence of the gods, in this case, the patron saint of Mr. Valdez, Oggún."

  "Maybe we shouldn't be doing this, Judge," said Phyllis, but the rat-tat-tat of the drum drowned her out. The man with the güiro let out a cry in Yoruba:

  "Oggún niye o Oggún aribó

  Oggún niye o Iya ki modé

  Oilé abé re Oggún de Oggúndé ban bá

  Owa ni yere ko ma se O Iyaó

  Awa ni ye Oggún arere ko ma se Iyá"

  One of the women went before the altar and prostrated herself on the floor. The drums picked up a roll and lifted it to a swelling crescendo of percussion, as the man continued:

  "Oggún ma kué akué kué kué

  Oggún ku ere o

  Oggún orilé fe re gun

  Kon ko su o aná ló."

  De Alba shouted over the pounding of the drums. "She is now paying obeisance to the god, honoring him. There is no guarantee he will visit us, of course."

  "Of course" I could read on Reynolds' disdainful lips, but his words were drowned out by the singing.

  The drums rattled on, the güiro shaking in contrapuntal fashion. One of the men handed out a bottle of rum, out of which all seven drank.

  "That is rum, Your Honor!" screamed de Alba. "It's to honor the god! Like wine in Mass. Now comes the invocation!"

  The blare of the drum and the chanting and shaking of the gourd was a wall of sound, a ladder of notes being raised to a higher unknown plane. I glanced at Ramón, who sat calmly in his chair, only his hands tapping along to the rhythmic beat of the drum.

  "Oggún areré alawó

  Oggún areré alawó

  Oddé mao kókoro

  Yigüé yigüé

  Oggún areré alawó

  Oggún areré alawó."

  In a few moments the drumming picked up in intensity as the santeros began to stir according to the way their particular god moves. One of the women was the first to be entranced. She gave a great cry and fell down to the ground, then swept herself off and swayed back and forth like the goddess Yemayá, her long hair slashing the air like the waves of the ocean, then the other woman also fell into a trance and moved around the court thrusting her pelvis forward like the virile god Shangó, then the men too started showing the symptoms of possession, one of them hobbling about like the ephemeral Babalú Ayé, as though he were lacking a leg and were chased by hounds, and all the while the music kept pounding, the drums tap-tapping a pattern of unconscious thought as some people in the audience, not knowing how the miracle of mass psychosis manifests itself, also rose and started dancing, shimmying and shaking as though they were being ridden by gods or devils who wanted their presence felt by even the most hidebound unbeliever and some in the jury box began pounding the bar to the beat and then the movements of the dancers became even more agitat
ed as the group fell into the true iron grip of the saints and Shangó mounted his horse with full spurs and the woman saluted and pranced around the room and greeted everyone with wide open eyes and beat her chest with her fists and then one of the lights in the courtroom went out then another then another until all of the available light emanated from the candles but the electricity wasn't all gone it kept on going but in ways no one imagined as the reporter turned on her computer and the cursor dashed across the field of green making concentric and curlicued patterns and she looked up and asked, "What's going on?"

  A sound like a thunderbolt was heard in the court, like the tearing of a veil. The walls seemed to shake, the seal of the state of California flapped back and forth on the planked redwood walls, the glass of the window in the jury room shattered. A howl of wind came into the room and a light like Saint Elmo's fire danced over our heads. The doors of the courtroom were flung open as Pimienta burst in, jumped the bar and leaped on the counsel table, shouting louder than any human being possibly could, louder than the roar of the wind, louder than the roll of the drums that now heralded his undeniable arrival:

  OGGÚN,OGGÚN

  ERERE NA NA NILE

  OGGÚN,OGGÚN

  He somersaulted across the room and landed by the bailiff, slamming him against the wall and knocking him out, while the other saints, Ochún, Yemaya, Babalú Ayé, greeted each other by slamming right shoulder into left. Mrs. Gardner rose from her seat, her eyes rolled up blank. At first she spoke gibberish, but then she cried, with a man's deep anguished voice, "What is this tragedy you visit upon my children in the halls of injustice?"

  She passed out and fell down as a howling rain-driven wind lashed the room as though we were in the dipping prow of a vessel sailing stormy seas. Phyllis, recalling the last natural disaster, took refuge under the table while Judge Reynolds hid behind Curtis's desk. The gales buffeted the courtroom, tumbling pictures, overturning files, sending upward, spiraling in a flurry of paper, probation reports, police reports, case files and prison records then suddenly Pimienta howled and ran out of the courtroom and he was never seen again and the dancing ball of fire dwindled into nothingness and the lights came back on again and all the santeros dropped to the ground and the wind died out and a great quiet descended on the court, the quiet of exhaustion, the quiet of peace, the quiet of death.

  22

  the jury filed in quietly, almost religiously, as though in a procession carrying invisible tapers, silently taking their places in the box. It had been several weeks since the storm of possessions. Everyone's first thought had been to declare a mistrial, but then the reality of gathering the witnesses for a second trial sank in. Remigio, the parking lot attendant, was gone, as was Vlad, the jewelry salesman, and Bongos, the radio DJ, all out of town or out of reach; even Pimienta seemed to have vanished and investigators had no idea where any of them could be found. There had been no prints lifted off the weapons and there were no survivors, so what else could Phyllis do except keep the jury? A second trial would have been impossible for the prosecution.

  I argued for a mistrial. I figured that notwithstanding the pyrotechnics, the jury would vote to convict, if for nothing else out of a sense of shame and ridicule, in a process of denial whereby our own dark drives would be hidden and the episode in court forgotten.

  Reynolds refused to grant the mistrial and ordered that all records of the demonstration be wiped out, as if they had never existed. He cited a number of legal reasons-lack of foundation, no question pending, beyond the scope of examination-but they all amounted to the same thing-fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the dark, fear of something alien that had ripped the books of justice and scattered its pages. Since all the TV cameras had stopped working the moment the lights went out, there was nothing left but our memory of the event, an impression of a moment that all wanted to forget.

  Even the reporters who witnessed firsthand what had happened refused to believe, refused to admit that their senses had been right and the impossible had indeed transpired. So when the papers said that a local atmospheric disturbance had created an unusual tornado which had swept down the Civic Center and broken windows at the Criminal Courts Building and the Hall of Justice jail, creating panic and confusion ineffable and unexplainable, we all believed it. And when the judge said that the events of that demonstration had been nothing but mass psychosis, a case of suggestibility and hysteria, that those few people who thought they were possessed were santeros and therefore professional fakers, we nodded and assented, not wanting to admit that our reality was only a fragile scrim over a storm-filled void.

  "It's just like in the jewelry store, chico," croaked Ramón at the jail, his voice barely above a whisper. "We were all there and we all saw it and now everybody is saying it didn't happen. Nobody ever wants to know the truth."

  But would the jurors also feel the same way? I had called no further witnesses and neither had Phyllis. We went straight to our arguments, Phyllis mentioning time and again the deliberation of Ramón's actions, the guns he had taken with him, the oath of vengeance he had sworn when the bangles were taken. In all her arguments she avoided the words altar and religion and gods, but the words and the facts were a gaudy backdrop that hung, visible but unmentioned, behind her words.

  My own argument had been brief. I had pledged myself to defend him and I proceeded to do so in the best way I knew how-by stating that no one knew what had happened inside that store. All the witnesses were either dead or tainted, and there was no objective account of the tragedy. The tree had fallen and no one had heard it fall. I toyed briefly with the idea of arguing that even if Ramón had committed the murders-and he had, God forgive me, he had- Ramón himself was not to blame for he had been in the grip of a force far, far greater than any of us. But I didn't say it. The unsaid was more convincing than any argument, than any flight of oratory I could have concocted. Instead I had simply read them one of the very first sections of the California Penal Code.

  "It reads as follows, ladies and gentlemen. 'Title One. All persons are capable of committing crimes except those belonging to the following cases.... 'It lists some exceptions, then comes to the one that concerns us, the fifth exception, quote: 'Persons who committed the fact charged without being conscious thereof.' End of quote. Conscious thereof, ladies and gentlemen. That is the key and it cannot be denied. That is the law. If you have no awareness, no consciousness of your actions, no matter how heinous the crime, how repugnant or unconscionable, you are as innocent as a child, as pure as a spring lamb. Without knowledge there is no crime- or sin."

  For two weeks the jurors deliberated, trudging in and out of the jury room during their appointed breaks like Benedictines off to take their meals before recommencing prayers. Now their answer was about to be revealed.

  Reynolds turned to the jurors. I looked at Ramón, staring at the judge, and at Phyllis, and the bailiff, everyone in the court avoiding the eyes of the triers of fact whose terrible verdict would soon be rendered. A row of santeros with the white and purple beads of Oggún sat in the back. I heard the humming of the TV cameras.

  "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I understand you have reached a verdict in this case. Will the jury foreman please rise."

  Mrs. Gardner stood, one hand gripping the bar, another firmly grasping the verdict forms.

  "Have you reached a verdict?"

  "Yes, we have."

  "Please turn it over to the bailiff."

  Gardner handed the sheaf of papers to the deputy, who brought the forms to Reynolds. He glanced at them, going through the sheets rapidly, then looked up and stared fixedly at the jurors. Mrs. Gardner glared back. Reynolds took a breath, waved the papers.

  "Bailiff, please give these to the clerk to read."

  The bailiff carried the fateful papers to Burr.

  "In the City and County of Los Angeles, Superior Court District, State of California ... "

  I looked at Ramón-tightly reined concern, eyebrows gathered together,
lips pouting in defiance.

  "Case number A875-4316, the People of the State of California versus Ramón Valdez, defendant-"

  Burr must have read ahead for he stopped, blinked, cleared his throat and proceeded in a higher, nervous pitch.

  "We, the jury in the above titled action, find the defendant, Ramón Valdez, not guilty of violation of Section 187a of the California Penal Code, murder in the first degree, as alleged in count one of the complaint."

  Not guilty! rang in my head. NOT GUILTY! NOT GUILTY! NOT GUILTY!

  With the first verdict, the court broke into a maelstrom of cries and curses, while in the back the santeros stood and cheered. Reynolds looked for his gavel to bang but not finding it, he banged his coffee mug on the desk and ordered the restless crowd to keep quiet, but with each succeeding verdict-NOT GUILTY! NOT GUILTY! NOT GUILTY!-the clamor rose higher and higher until at the end the tumult was practically uncontrollable. Burr read all the thirty-two counts against Ramón with the answer invariably the same in every instance-NOT GUILTY! NOT GUILTY! NOT GUILTY!

  I sat fixed to my seat, chilled by the success of my efforts, feeling I personally had fired the shots that killed each and every victim.

  "Is this your verdict, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, so say you one, so say you all?"

  The jurors answered firmly. "Yes, YES, YES!!!"

  Then came the real clamor as the audience, certain now that the last act had closed, rose as one and clapped and cheered and whistled and booed and fights broke out among the spectators and sheriff's deputies arrived from other courts to break up the factions as Phyllis and Samuels escaped out the side door with the jury while Reynolds ordered the bailiff to set Ramón free so the tumult would end. The moment his chains were off Ramón gave a great cry, "Victoria!" then jumped into the crowd, his followers carrying him aloft out of the courtroom. I sat in my chair, ignored by all, as the commotion swerved around me, feeling the weight of my acts press down upon me. You were too good, Charlie, too good the wrong way.