A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García

by Rick Collignon

  “No one ever knew what truth there was in what Magdalena Varela had said. Maybe Moises had hid the infant somewhere in that house or maybe he gave it to the Indians who sometimes passed by the village. As far as anyone knows, Guadalupe is the last of the Garcías and she carries in herself all that they have ever been. No one in this valley ever wanted to have anything to do with her or her family. Father Joseph, at times, did what he could, but there are some things nobody can change. I’ll tell you three boys something that happened to her when she was little,” and then Rosa had gone on to tell them the story of when Guadalupe García saw the village on fire.

  Again, Rosa tossed a small stone at her grandson. “Did Delfino just disappear?” she asked.

  “I think he went home,” Felix said.

  Halfway through Rosa’s story, at the part where cows were screaming and children were choking on smoke, Delfino had stood up quickly. Then he had backed away and run all the way to his house, his short legs pumping like crazy. Flavio and Felix had remained behind, listening to Rosa as if they had become accustomed to hearing stories such as these, which, in truth, they had.

  “That was a sad story, Mrs. Montoya,” Felix said.

  “Thank you, Felix,” Rosa said.

  “Do you know any more?”

  “I know a whole bunch of them.” Rosa smiled and looked back at Flavio. “And what’s wrong with you, hijo?”

  “He gets this way sometimes,” Felix said, leaning back on his elbows and crossing his legs at the ankles. “Whenever he asks a question, he ends up hearing too much. But it doesn’t bother me.”

  It had begun to seem to Flavio as if Guadalupe García was all around him. While that was partly his own fault, it was also true that whenever he asked a question, the depth of the answer never failed to startle him. On top of that, every time he now left his grandmother’s house, his eyes were drawn to the García house and to the cottonwood tree shadowing the church. At night, just before sleep, he would picture Guadalupe García wandering through the empty rooms in her house. He would see her stumbling across things she had never seen before: a small nicho hidden in a dark corner holding a faded image of a saint, a fragile piece of paper in the dust beneath a bed, a small gold ring hung on a nail. He would lie in his bed and think that Guadalupe lived in a graveyard where not only did the dead still breathe, but they also left their things lying about.

  One afternoon, he and Felix had even hunted among the junipers along the creek for the blackened end of the branch that Cristóbal had cut to make his santo. But, it was one thing to daydream about such things or hear Guadalupe tell her stories, and another to listen to his grandmother. What he had thought while Rosa was speaking was that she could just as easily have been Guadalupe García.

  Flavio raised his head and looked at Rosa. There was dirt on her face, and the scarf tied around her forehead was damp with sweat. She was still smiling, and for a second, with her gray hair covered and her skin pulled smooth, she seemed like a younger woman, as if beneath the life he had known her to lead was another far richer. From inside the house came the sound of his brother crying and then he fell still.

  Rosa reached out and touched Flavio’s hand. “Guadalupe García’s life,” she said, “is not yours, hijo.” And with her words, she became who she always had been.

  “Eee,” Felix said. “I would never want to have her life and live in that house. The walls are made of bones.”

  “Just in one room,” Flavio said.

  “That’s what she says. Maybe her whole family is buried in there. Maybe the little baby is there. I would never want to be buried in a wall and stay standing forever and not be able to sit down.”

  “You would be dead,” Flavio said. “It wouldn’t matter.”

  “How do you know? If I was dead, I would want to lie down like everyone else. You can stay standing and see what happens.” He pushed off his elbows and sat up. “But, I would sure like to see those bones.”

  Flavio picked up the small stone in his lap and flicked it off the side of Felix’s head. “I’m never going back there,” he said.

  “That’s what you always say,” Felix said. “And stop throwing stones at me.”

  “Did she tell you whose bones they were?” Rosa said.

  Both boys fell quiet for a few seconds, and then Felix said, “She told us they were some bandit’s bones. But she didn’t say why he was in a wall.”

  “Emilio García, the bandit,” Rosa said.

  “Grandmother,” Flavio said, “is it true that they used to hang people at the church?”

  “Many things have happened at the church,” Rosa said slowly, which wasn’t quite the answer either Flavio or Felix had expected to hear. “And so many priests have lived there, if only for a little while. Who’s to say what has happened there? But of all the priests that have been here, it was Father Joseph who tried to make this place his own. He was here in the years the church forgot about us and left us to ourselves. He was here so long that when he died, he was almost like one of us.”

  ONE DAY, NEAR THE END OF FATHER JOSEPH’S LIFE, he stood before a tall, narrow window inside the empty church. The only sound in the room, other than the sound of his own breathing, which had become slow and heavy with age, was the occasional creaking of the vigas high overhead. It had finally grown light outside and the sky was the flat color of ashes. He could see the foothills to the east, hazed slightly from the soft rain that had fallen in the night. And just up the slope from where the church had been built nearly two hundred years before, he could see the García house.

  Each morning, Father Joseph would rise while the day was still dark. He would dress slowly, feeling the stiffness in his joints. Then, he would start a small fire in his cookstove to boil water. He’d make himself a cup of coffee that was always too strong and burned. Then he’d go into the church and stand quietly before the same window, staring out at the darkness and waiting for daylight. As had been the case for almost as long as he could remember, when morning came he would see Guadalupe García step outside her door.

  In the last few years, she had worn the same nightgown each morning. It hung loosely against her body and came to just below her knees. Her black hair was knotted from sleep and fell far down her back. The priest would watch as she moved her hair from her face and looked out at the village along with him. In the winter it was no different, and he would wonder how it was she did not fall ill. Then he would realize that if she did there were few who would know and fewer yet who would care.

  Father Joseph took a sip of coffee and watched as Guadalupe wrapped her bare arms tight across her chest. Smoke drifted from a few stovepipes and hung low over the valley, seeming more like mist than anything having to do with the village itself. The priest wondered what both he and Guadalupe looked for, staring out at the village each morning. He took in a deep breath and thought that later in the day, Telesfor Ruiz would be coming to the church to help him do repairs on the roof. Even the thought made his bones ache.

  “I remember you when you were a little girl,” Father Joseph said aloud, his words dying in the empty room. “And then, too, we would stand here together.”

  When Guadalupe was small, she would sometimes step outside with her mother, Maria. Guadalupe would wander a few paces away from her mother and crouch down to study something on the ground or play in the sage with what she had left out the evening before. Her hair was long then, too, and it would hide her face from the priest. Maria would watch her daughter for a little while, and then she would cross her arms around her chest and stand stiffly, staring out at other things.

  “Your mother was a hard woman, hija,” Father Joseph said. “And I’m sorry for that. You deserved better.” He watched as Guadalupe raised her arms and ran her hands through her hair. She was a woman now, almost twenty years old, and though the priest couldn’t see her body, nor did he wish to, he could almost feel it beneath her nightgown. She dropped her arms and then turned and looked down the hill at the church. F
or a second, Father Joseph felt as though she could actually see him standing behind the glass. Then she turned and walked back inside the house, leaving the door open behind her, as she always did.

  He had been inside the García house only three times in all his years as priest in Guadalupe, and each time had been a disaster. It seemed to him now as if his whole life in the valley had somehow been separated into stages that ended or began with a visit inside that house. The first time had been when he was a young man, full of his own pride, and looked upon the village as something shared between himself and God. He had walked to the García house after being told about a sick infant. There, after one look at Moises García’s face, he knew that whatever he had come to stop had already happened. The second time had been when Guadalupe had seen the village on fire.

  He brought his cup to his mouth and drank. The coffee had grown cold, and his fingers were numb and cramped from holding the cup. He bent over and set it down on the wide sill. The sky outside was now tinged red, and the color fell onto the foothills. The priest folded his hands together before him. His eyes were heavy and his heart felt knotted in his chest. The vigas overhead creaked gently as if from the weight of footsteps. The priest closed his eyes, and he remembered the last time he had been inside that house. For all the good he had done in this valley, it was possible that it had come to nothing.

  “That house,” Father Joseph said softly, “has been only bad luck for me.”

  …

  “MURDERER,” WAS WHAT PERCIDES GARCÍA had said to the priest on the night she died.

  Father Joseph had smiled in confusion and thought that whatever it was Percides had just uttered couldn’t have been what he thought he had heard. Then she said it again. This time, though her voice was little more than a harsh whisper, the force of her words startled the priest.

  “Murderer,” she said. “With your empty robes and your prayers you are no more than a thief.”

  Moises García had come for Father Joseph in the middle of the night with word that his grandmother was dying and that before she did, she wished to see him. The priest had been awakened from a deep sleep, and at first he had no idea who this man was standing in the darkness outside his door. Moises had aged severely in the years since Father Joseph had last seen him. His hair was long and knotted and had turned white, and his face was drawn and seamed deep with creases. An odor of dust and grease came from his clothes.

  “My grandmother is Percides García,” Moises said.

  The priest shook his head to clear it of sleep. “Moises,” he said. “Give me one moment.” While he dressed, he realized that he could not even remember the last time he had seen Percides García, and that for all he knew, she had been dead for years. A vague misgiving came over him, but he shook it away as if it had more to do with fatigue than anything else. As he walked up the hill in the darkness behind Moises, he found some comfort in the thought that even Percides could, at the time of her death, seek some understanding of her life.

  If Father Joseph had not known the woman on the bed was Percides García, he would never have recognized her. She lay as still as stone, and though the heavy blanket that covered her came to just below her breasts, the priest could see that she had shrunk with age and seemed not much larger than a child. There were no pillows under her head, and her hair, white and sparse, fanned out about her face. Her skin was thin and fragile and as delicate as parchment, and she stared up at the ceiling, her eyes wide open, as if she wished to see whatever was to come. The taste in the air was brittle and dry and stale.

  A kerosene lamp was lit on a small table beside the bed. Next to it stood a carved santo. It was only a foot high and so old that it had faded to a dull black. Gashes from a knife covered the Lady’s body, and the wood on her face was rubbed smooth from being touched over so many years. Father Joseph sat on a chair beside the bed and then looked across the room at Guadalupe, who was lying on a narrow banco built out from the wall.

  When the priest had first entered the room, he had thought that Guadalupe was asleep. But in the brief time he had been there, she would sometimes move her legs up to her chest or drop her hand to the floor, her fingers drawing on the hard-packed mud.

  “In the cold you hung him,” Percides said.

  “With rain in his eyes,” Guadalupe suddenly chimed in, looking up at the priest.

  “Hush, Guadalupe,” Father Joseph said. “You should be with your mother. This is no place for you to be.”

  “My mother’s asleep.”

  Moises had led Father Joseph to this room and then, without a word, had turned and left him. There had been no sign of Maria. Percides García has been dying for years, he thought, and it was possible everyone had grown tired with a such a long death. But still, this house should be full of the odor of food cooking and the sound of hushed voices instead of silence.

  “If you are to remain here,” he said to Guadalupe, “then lie down and close your eyes. This is a time to be quiet.”

  “Murderer,” Percides hissed.

  “Be still, Percides,” Father Joseph said softly, “and think of other things.” He reached out and lay his hand on the bed. “No one has been murdered.”

  “My great-grandfather was,” Guadalupe said, and she raised her head again and looked at the priest. “You hung him from a rope until he was dead.”

  Not for the first time Father Joseph thought that something was drastically wrong in this house. He had no idea what it was—something so large that he couldn’t comprehend it, or a thing so small that it was just beyond his grasp. He felt as if everything here was one heartbeat off from the rest of the world.

  “Your great-grandfather,” he said, “was a gentle man who died in an accident long before you were born.”

  “No,” Guadalupe said, shaking her head. “That was someone else. My great-grandfather was Emilio García, the bandit.”

  “Who has told you these things, hija?”

  “My grandmother,” Guadalupe said.

  ONE DAY, WHEN GUADALUPE was six years old, her great-grandmother, Percides García, began talking, and she didn’t stop until her death five years later. It had begun on a summer morning that was gray and damp and too cold for the season. Guadalupe and her grandmother had been alone together in the kitchen. Guadalupe’s mother had left the house earlier in a black anger, and her father was, as usual, gone doing the things he never spoke of.

  The door to the kitchen was closed that day, and the room was lit only by the dull light that came through the small window and a lamp that was burning too high, staining the chimney black. Guadalupe sat beside her grandmother printing words in a tablet that looked not like words, but like strange drawings of trees. At times, she would move her arm to show Percides what she had written. But her grandmother would stare straight ahead and nod and say nothing.

  It began to rain outside, and when Guadalupe looked up from her tablet all she could see was mud and water running down the glass of the window. She wondered if her mother was still out walking by herself in such a downpour. Then she thought that she would try to print the word porcupine. It was at that moment that her grandmother placed her hand over the paper and said, “Hija, the only man I truly loved was Emilio García. He was my first cousin and they hung him on a day like this from the tree beside the church. With rain in his eyes and his clothes wet and cold.”

  From that moment on, Percides García never stopped talking. She talked while cutting garlic and mixing flour for tortillas. She talked while sweeping the dirt floors and cleaning the counters of the dust that always fell from the ceiling. She talked to the back of Guadalupe’s head in a low, calm voice while she brushed her great-granddaughter’s hair. Even in her sleep, she would mumble, and finally her voice became only a harsh whisper, a sound that, after a while, seemed to come not from her but from the house itself. She told of Emilio García and of her family and of thoughts that would come into her head and then vanish. She spoke in a monologue that lasted five years. Even a
fter her death, it seemed to Guadalupe that still she could hear the sound of her great-grandmother’s voice.

  Finally, Guadalupe’s mother, who barely spoke at all and had little patience for anything, moved Percides to a room far from the center of the house. There, she would sit by herself, and Guadalupe would bring her food and the things she needed.

  “Emilio García,” Percides would say to Guadalupe or to no one at all, “was lost from my life …”

  “… AND HE WAS THE ONLY MAN I EVER LOVED,” she now said to the priest. “He was hung at the church by the priest and the people of this village. And on that same day, you also took from me my grandfather, Cristóbal García.”

  “I don’t know these people you speak of,” Father Joseph said, confused. “The church would never harm anyone. Nor would it steal grandfathers.”

  The only husband Percides ever had died years and years before, just after Father Joseph had arrived in Guadalupe. The priest realized that he could not even remember the man’s name. He had been a small, reserved man who had gone alone to mass every Sunday and who seldom spoke to anyone. He had cared for his cows and irrigated his fields and had even done repairs on the García house. One day, while cutting juniper posts not far from the village, he had fallen into an arroyo, breaking both his legs. He was not found for a number of days, and when he was no one was sure if he had died from his injuries or if he had lain among the rocks, his legs twisted beneath him, staring at the sky until his breath stopped. I can remember this man’s death, the priest thought, but not his name.

  “Please rest now, Percides,” Father Joseph said, and his hand patted the bed gently. “Soon this night will be over.”

  Percides turned her head slowly. She looked at the priest. “I’ve waited all my life to say these things to you,” she said. “Why else do you think you’re here?” In her eyes, Father Joseph could see a clarity so hardened that he knew for all the reasons he had come to this house, none was why he had been called.