Guillermo slept extra soundly as the armies in his bloodstream engaged. He’d contracted the virus from a unique body that birthed eight octillian viral cells every day. An Episcopalian priest and a corpse-removal-team volunteer, Guillermo had come upon this extraordinary body by accident, in a pleasant little courtyard with terra-cotta tiles and rubber tree plants. Guillermo accepted a bottle of water from this body in thanks for helping the man put ointment on his flagellated back.
A microscopic battle began when Guillermo took the water. For unbeknownst to him, the extraordinary body had spit in the bottle and resealed it. The viruses in the water were Generation One, right from the epidemic’s source. But the vaccine in Guillermo’s blood had a key, a code. It bore a sequence of codons that gave the body a fifty-fifty chance of grabbing this virus by its shell and cracking it into harmless pieces.
That’s how the T cells could identify and kill these viruses. They attached themselves to the invaders, lysing them with cytotoxins and eradicating them from the tight, closed system of the body.
Guillermo slept a deep, black sleep as his body rallied its energies to seroconvert, turning this deadly, viral infection into nothing more than a swarm of T cells. His mother did not know what was happening to her son when she stuck her head into his room at the end of the day.
But the chickens noticed.
As well as a minister, Guillermo was a public-health volunteer. Accordingly, he was fitted with the universal, antibody-monitoring chips that medicos jokingly called “gallinas” (chickens), or universal antibody reports. Along with tens of thousands of other capitalinos, the chips relayed information regarding mass seroconversion to a ring of i.a.’s in the National Institute of Public Health. The i.a.’s translated the information into a landscape of the city’s pathogens and the population’s responses to them.
Along with a small handful of others who’d fought off the most potent generation of virus, Guillermo’s immune response appeared on the antibody report, like this:
<1%: Unknown IgG: viral: retro: max virulence.
They destroyed the virus with their own bodies and the aid of the naked DNA vaccine. This destruction was too late to help the rest of Ascensión, of course, but the universal antibody report did its part, displaying the information that the dying cell had displayed to the T lymphocyte, like a dead victim still clutching the murderer’s kerchief.
The Joint Operations Coordinator, a Dr. del Negro, did his part, too, reading the universal antibody report with care and deducing what the American Task Force Coordinator was up to.
SUNDAY, MAY 22. 5:36 P.M.
“SISTER, IF WE could begin? I must leave within the hour in order to deliver a speech at the University of the Americas.”
“Santa Domenica is busy,” Sister Evangelista said. A stiff, little wire of a woman, she was Domenica’s self-appointed bodyguard since Friday night, when the young nun arrived in La Alta. “Give her a moment, she is watching—”
“Shh,” the nun hissed. “Just wait! Wait a minute both of you!”
The netmonitor showed a stage. The spotlight was so bright and harsh that it seemed to crackle when it hit the corpulent baritone’s white, ruffled shirt and blue squire’s hat. He stepped forward to deliver the most famous aria in contemporary opera, his pouting lips parted, his chest thrown out, and he unleashed the shearing note that Domenica wanted to hear. He unleashed the word creo and with it, Sancho’s and the audience’s passion for the Don. It was Sancho’s moment. He had betrayed Quixote by helping him, by turning him over to the priest who wanted to cure him. But the question remained, did Sancho believe in the Don’s imaginary world of the Glorious Quest, of righting the wrongs committed by giants and sorcerers? Creo. The word swelled out of him in that magnificent note, high in the baritone’s register, painful, crying out in equal parts regret and conviction.
But it disappointed Domenica. She desperately wanted to share Sancho’s catharsis and declaration of faith, but only felt her distance more keenly, the passions of the opera remote, the monitor a wall between them. The Order of Guadalupe’s dining hall suddenly echoed with quiet mediocrity now that the hyperbole of El Quijote was over. “Compared to the pilone, the netmonitor is a very sad medium for opera. I can’t feel it,” she said, struggling for words. She placed her hands on her heart, then her stomach. “Here. Where the music should be.”
Dr. Benito was just as insistently curious as Sancho, but not nearly as delightful. “I’m sorry to rush you, but may we please get on with my inquisition?”
Inquisition. Has he no shame?
The three were in the candlelit refectory where the Sisters of Guadalupe took their meals, sequestered from the crowds in Our Lady of the New World Church. Beef stew and red wine still sat on the communal dining table where Evangelista had set them. Domenica poured two small glasses and asked the older woman to leave. “I’ll be fine, señora, I promise.”
Mother Superior Evangelista was a small, brittle abuelita with the air of an attack-dog trainer. But in just two days, the severe Evangelista had fallen in love with Domenica, calling herself the nun’s jefa. Mom. “I’ll wait over here and watch the television,” la jefa said. She was old enough that she still called netcast “the television.”
Dr. Benito said, “Please wait outside, Mother Superior.”
Evangelista departed with a sniff and a slammed door. She would wait just outside, Domenica knew, and ladled the psychologist a bowl of soup. “What do you want to ask me?”
Benito fussed with his robes of black and red as he sat at the knifenicked wooden table. He had a strapping build that the robes couldn’t hide, but his movements were surprisingly small and rodentlike. “Do you remember me, Sister?”
Domenica knew who this man was. While she and Pirate were hiding out in the hot zone, trying to find a way to connect with Old Antonio and his street fighters, she’d seen this man on netcast, telling Mexico that Domenica wasn’t Domenica, that the nun was really an actress. “I know who you are.”
“Yes,” the psychologist said, “but do you remember me?”
It was hard to say. Domenica wasn’t sure of what she remembered anymore, which of her two childhoods was hers, or which identity, Chana or Domenica, she should identify with now. She looked at him hard. His face was familiar—she thought so the first time she saw him. “I might.”
Benito began stammering, then he stopped and started over, though he still sounded nervous. “I’m the doctor who coordinated your case—the Antigua Method—we performed it on you thirteen years ago. The faith-realignment procedure.” Benito watched her carefully. When Domenica said nothing, he continued. “I would like to understand what happened to you after the surgery, Sister.”
“My visions.” Domenica nodded. “You want to know about my visions.”
“Yes.”
“So do I,” Domenica said, sniffing the steam from her bowl. “It doesn’t make sense, does it? If I was the actress Chana Chenalho—”
“You were Chana Chenalho.”
“Then did you give me my visions?”
The man pursed his lips for a moment. “I don’t know, Cha—Domenica. I don’t know. That’s what I want to find out.”
Domenica had long avoided talking about her visions, even with Pirate—she didn’t want them questioned or lessened in any way. But this man had clues about her two identities that she would need if she was going to build normalcy into her life—now that she’d left Los Hijos, now that the visions were over.
After a spoonful of stew, she said, “It was after vespers, about twelve years ago.”
Dr. Benito tapped something on his memboard, then tilted back his head to look through his old-fashioned bifocals. A light on the side of the memboard blinked, indicating it was recording. He nodded to Domenica. “Had anything like it ever happened to you before?”
Domenica stopped eating and thought about that. Of her two distinct sets of memories—one of a wealthy, white Mexico City upbringing, a childhood under strict a
dherence to the Roman Catholic Church; the other set, rural, indígena, with parents who loved her and encouraged her to pursue acting in the capital city. The first set of memories belonged to Domenica. The second was apparently Chana Chenalho’s. “I think that was the first time ever.”
Benito’s tone became fatherly. “Tell me about the first time, then.”
“One Friday morning, after vespers,” Domenica said blithely, though she had seldom told this story, “I was dressing, when it seemed the sunlight was brightening on the floor of my cell. It got warmer, too, as if a more powerful sun were shining outside.”
That mountain nunnery had been the most peaceful place that either Chana or Domenica had ever experienced. The air, clean. The sunlight, milky and pure. She had loved sitting in her window and watching the shadows of clouds sweep over the amber valleys and desert plains below. That morning, Domenica had gone to her east window feeling flushed and heady, wondering why the sun seemed so bright. She looked out over the shoulder of the distant peak and saw a crown of light surrounding the sun like the directions of a compass drawn on an ancient map.
“I saw this strange light in the sky and thought I could smell roses, so I turned away to see where the smell was coming from,” Domenica told Benito. “That’s when I saw a middle-aged Indian woman sitting on my bed.”
“Una indígena?” Benito frowned. “Who was she?”
Domenica said, “The Virgin of Guadalupe.”
Benito repeated himself, clearly incredulous. “An Indian woman? The woman in white is Indian?”
“Yes. Her dress was like something my—something Domenica’s great-aunt would wear—cotton gauze. Her sandals were cut from old tire treads. I asked who she was, if she was lost.”
Domenica recalled how sweetly the woman in white had smiled at her. “Sweet girl. No. I—am not lost. You lost—me—but in Mexico,” the woman said with a halting Nahuatl accent, “things don’t stay—buried forever.”
Domenica had turned away for a moment to look at the sun and was trying to figure out how the woman had entered the room unnoticed. “Excuse me? What did you say?”
The woman laughed at her and pointed out the window. “See that?”
Popocatépetl, the volcano, was in clear view, its white faces shining beneath the crowned sun. “Popo? Yes, I see it.”
“It will—tip—and pour,” she said, cupping her hands around her mouth and pronouncing each word with care, as if she were in a loud, crowded room and wanted to be sure that Domenica understood her perfectly. “Warn the people—who have ears.”
“Warn them about what?”
The woman in white lifted her hand. “You—you are interfering with me—don’t interfere with me. I have—I have three—important things to tell you. Three of them.”
Domenica gave an obedient nod, willing to hear what this poor indígena had to say.
“First, I tell you—that death is on that volcano. That—death is there. Tell those with—ears.”
“Is it going to erupt?”
“Stop that! Stop interfering, I said! Three hundred and twenty. That’s how many—the volcano wants. Three hundred and twenty.”
Domenica shook her head, irritated that the woman in white didn’t say what she meant. “Three hundred and twenty deaths? Is that what you mean?”
The sun dimmed. Her cell darkened. Domenica looked out her window but saw no clouds, no morning, mountain haze. The corona folded itself into the sun, and the smell of roses drove itself into Domenica’s head. She held her forehead in her hand, and when she looked up with watery eyes and running nose, the woman in white was gone.
Her first Marian migraine, as Pirate later called them.
To Benito, Domenica said, “I was convinced. Immediately.”
“Of what?”
“Of her identity.”
“But she was an indígena,” Benito said. “Why would you think she was Santa Maria?”
“The Virgin of Guadalupe was considered to be indígena. Father Hidalgo rallied the people for Mexican independence under the banner of the Virgin because she looked like them: native; dark.” She allowed a bit of scolding to enter her voice. “It’s you in the Holy Renaissance who turned her into a European.”
“I’m not—is that what you intend?” Benito asked. “To rally the people under a banner?”
He sounded neutral, not hostile, but Domenica supposed this was the real reason for this meeting. The Holy Renaissance was analyzing her, an outsider, an insurgent, who had entered the pure Federal Cloister. Even if they weren’t going to disappear her, they at least had to determine Domenica’s political motives. Her ties to Old Antonio and Los Hijos were too valuable and had been widely reported, no doubt by that Malinche Rosangelica. “I wouldn’t be in La Alta if I wanted to rally the people, Doctor. Wealth kills revolutionary ferment.”
“I don’t know about that,” Benito said with a wry smile. “What kills the indígena kills Mexico.’ Your words are uttered all over La Alta, now, all across Orbegón’s empire. I saw that painted across a poster of Emil the Damned up in the orbit launches at the top of Cuauhtémoc.”
“Dalliances of the rich and bored, I’m sure.” Domenica pulled her braid from beside her neck and let it fall straight down her back. “If the wealthy of this country truly wanted to do something about the well of poverty in which las indígenas have been thrown, it would have been done decades ago. Los altadores don’t have ears, as the woman in white would say.”
Benito seemed grateful when Domenica brought up the woman in white again. “What did you do after that first visitation?”
“I tried to tell my sister nuns about Popo erupting,” Domenica said. “I told them I had a dream. But they paid no attention. So I went to the village that supplied our cloister with flour and shoes. I found a bicycle repair shop, and spoke with a young indígena boy who might believe my story. I told him that the Virgin of Guadalupe had come, warning me about Popo. About a week later, I got news on the pilone saying minor shock waves indicated an eruption of Popocatépetl. That night, Popo’s top exploded, and a campesino village was caught unaware. Two hundred and ninety one people were killed.”
“So,” Benito said, a mix of relief and disbelief in his voice, “her prediction of the death toll was wrong.”
“Well, later, when the woman in white came back to deliver the Guatemala prophecy,” Domenica said, “I asked about that. ‘The volcano only took 291,’ I told her. ‘You said it wanted 320.’”
Dr. Benito leaned forward, a hunger in his eyes, and Domenica realized that this is what he was looking for. Details. Evidence. Proof. “And what did she say?”
“The Virgin said, ‘Twenty-nine people had ears.’”
Benito’s face went placid for a moment, then he tilted back his head as if savoring that detail upon his tongue. Finally, he looked back at Domenica, and said, “And what do you believe, Sister? Why does the woman in white come to you?”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe.”
He reached for her hand as if she were slipping away from him. “I think it does.”
She gave him a probing look, and he took back his hand. This wasn’t about what she believed, Domenica realized. This was about him, the psychologist, and what he wanted to believe. “Why does it matter to you?”
Benito gestured quickly, like an accountant trying to explain an error in his books. “Is the woman in white just a woman from your family, as my colleagues have posited? Or did I create you? I mean, your visions?” He calmed his hands, folded them, and his voice grew heavy. “There are people in Ascensión who put up their guns or go to war at your command.”
“Do you feel guilty about my visions? Is that it? You want to know if you created Mexico’s civil war?” Domenica said.
“No, not per se, but—” He fell quiet. Then he said, “But look at you. You’re a walking conundrum. You could be either mestizo or indígena, Sister.” Benito’s jaw was slack and his head shook slowly, side to side. “What are your
visions, in light of the fact that you might not be yourself?”
Domenica wondered what it would mean if she answered that question with any sort of honesty. She had no doubt that this “inquisition” would determine her level of freedom for the rest of her life, so her words mattered now more than ever. Am I really Chana? She wanted to ask him. I have Chana’s desires for audience and theater, for justice and equal treatment for Native Mexicans. I have her memories, a mother who wanted something more for Chana than campesino life. I remember a house with tin cans rolled flat to cover bullet holes in corrugated metal. Was that me? Am I indígena? If I think that I am, is that enough?
Domenica stirred her soup. If she was Chana, then she was merely playing the role of white, visionary nun—a lifelong act of street theater. If so, then what was to be made of her Catholic school memories? The nuns who encouraged her to sing in front of her classes, who saw in her a bride of Jesus Christ, who spared mestizo Domenica the punishment that her indígena classmates so often received? Was that life a lie instilled in her by Mexico’s “restorative psychologists” and later whispered to her by her own mind?
The Antigua Method, Benito had said in his netcast interview, merely corrected faulty wiring in these underdeveloped regions of the brain—these faith centers.
“Tell me, Domenica,” Benito said. “Tell me what everyone wants to know.”
After spa, Benito had said, Chana joined the Order of Guadalupe nuns, changing her name to Domenica. This is all thoroughly documented for public examination.
She felt her ears burning so hot that she wanted to cover them. “If you don’t know, then I don’t know either, Doctor.”
Another barrage of questions seemed to well in the psychologist’s eyes. His face, she imagined, was a mirror of her own, a visage of wonderment and quandary. Finally, he said, “I came here because I have to make a decision about whether or not to give you something.”
The Patron Saint of Plagues Page 31
