* * *
Three hours later, hot, dusty, and besmirched with clay, Statch went back to Casa Feliz. As she passed the front of the house just beyond the gate, she saw a line of people waiting patiently in the scant shade of the ornamental trees. Amparo and a young man she hadn’t seen before were talking to the first man in the line, an indio in worn jeans and a clean but ragged T-shirt. He was showing Amparo a wooden carving. Statch waved as she passed into the house, and Amparo waved back distractedly. The young man looked up, smiled, a flash of white against dark skin, and then wrote in a notebook.
Statch went to the kitchen to get a cold drink. There was a large, middle-aged woman, another stranger, stirring a pot, from which entrancing mole-ish smells arose. Her name, it turned out, was Evangelista, and she was a cousin of Amparo’s, brought in from Apatzingán to help with the housekeeping, since Amparo was now too busy with setting up the comuna de los artesanos to keep up with it all. Statch commented favorably on the sauce, grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, went to her room, took a fast shower, and donned a tank suit.
She swam. She had to do twice as many laps, because this pool was shorter than standard Olympic size, something of a pain but at least she got to practice more turns. She recalled the last time she swam so, back at MIT, and how she was thinking about her father and what he’d been up to; now she knew, but she was more concerned about him than she had been in her ignorance. Coming here was strange enough, but what he was doing here, the engineering specs behind it all, were still obscure, as were, she now realized, her own reasons for staying on. She’d seen him; he was healthy and no crazier than he was before. He was shooting people and getting shot at—not the usual plan for a midlife crisis—but it was his life. She was not ever going to be the kind of daughter who infantilized her parent out of some misbegotten guilt.
She did a hundred laps, not bothering much about her time, focusing on perfecting the turns. After the final lap, with her limbs burning and her breath coming in gasps, she slid in her usual dolphinesque way up on the edge of the pool. As she sat there, recovering her breath, someone handed her a towel.
It was the young man who had been standing with Amparo at the gate. She took the towel and wiped the water from her face and looked at him again. He had, she now observed, a young man’s look and carriage, but there were fine lines on his brown face that indicated he was not quite as young as he appeared. He was wearing worn jeans and a white short-sleeved shirt, and he had sunglasses pushed up over his crow-black coarse indio hair. He smiled delightedly at her and said, “That was quite a performance. I’ve never seen anyone swim like that.”
“Well, I practice a lot,” she replied. “Do I know you?”
He held out his hand. She took it. It was warm and rough. “You do now. I’m Miguel Santana.”
“Carmel Marder,” she responded.
She noticed he was looking intently at her, but she didn’t pick up what she normally felt when an attractive man stared at her, as, for example, Major Naca had. Santana was looking at her face and not her nipples, which the cooling of evaporation had caused to berry out through the thin nylon of her Speedo suit. She stood and wrapped the towel around her and sat on the side of one of the lounge chairs. He followed and perched on the edge of another.
A moment later Pepa Espinoza walked onto the pool deck, wearing a short terry robe and a bikini that was remarkable for both the brightness of its colors and its exiguous dimensions. Statch thought that women of Señora Espinoza’s age should not wear such outfits, but she had to admit that she carried it off well. The reporter nodded briefly and went off to the other end of the pool. She took a cell phone out of her straw bag and tried to make a call. Statch noticed that Santana’s eyes had not followed the reporter’s progress across the deck. Gay, perhaps? Or only polite?
“Was that you I saw with Amparo a while ago?” she asked. “Out by the gate?”
“Yes. With all the people coming in here from the countryside and La Cielo, she’s a little swamped.”
“So you’re like the administrative assistant?”
“Something like that. I’ve got some experience managing things, and she asked me to help with assigning homesites and registering names and figuring out who can do what. I mean the crafts. There’s actually a strong craft tradition in the area. The Tarascos were fairly isolated until recently, and their traditions are more or less intact. And we have a number of migrants from Oaxaca.”
“The Tarascos are the Indians?”
“Yes, including me, as a matter of fact.”
“No kidding? You know, I’m embarrassed to say this, but you’re the first Indian I’ve ever met. I mean aside from the ones from India, who’re all over the place where I come from. But you got an education.”
“I did,” he said, but in a tone that did not encourage inquiry.
Pepa Espinoza let out a vile curse and tossed her cell back in the straw bag. She had discovered the unreliability of cell service at Casa Feliz. She pulled a laptop out of the bag and began to type.
“And what do you do when you’re not organizing a craft commune?” Statch asked.
“I work at San Ignacio.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s the church. Here in Playa Diamante?” He grinned at her. “You’re not a Catholic, I’m assuming.”
“Oh, but I am. Baptized, confirmed, and everything. My father’s a pillar of the Church.”
“But you’re not.”
“No, I ditched it when I was thirteen. I decided to believe in facts.”
“Yes, that too is a very ancient religion. What do you do when you’re not in our beautiful town?”
“I’m in grad school at MIT. I’m an engineer.”
In Statch’s experience, this admission tended to stop conversation, except if the other person was similarly engaged in engineering. But Santana’s faced flashed an interested look and he said, “That’s wonderful! It must be a terrific thing to be able to do, build and design things. What kind of engineering are you studying?”
She began to talk and, amazing herself, she kept on talking: about her work at MIT and Schue and her team, and her problems with the Escher machines and her gigantic breakthrough and what it meant and how she had apparently thrown it away to come here, and why she stayed and watched manufacturing by hand and how it made her feel. And she talked beyond that, about her life, and the swimming, and why she didn’t have the champion’s edge, and what that meant, and about her emotional life and why that didn’t seem to be working out so well either. And about her family, her dead crazy mother and her father, and how she felt that there was something she had to do so that her father didn’t go down the crazy tube too. She hadn’t had an intimate conversation in Spanish for a long time, but she used to all the time with her mother, and she found herself telling him things she could not have readily articulated in English.
The sun crossed the terrace as she talked. Pepa Espinoza swam briefly and left. The children came home from school. Amparo brought out a tray of taco chips and salsa and a tin bucket filled with ice and local beer, and still Statch talked, now beyond embarrassment, pouring it all out into the remarkable, depthless black eyes of Miguel Santana. Throughout he had asked few questions and had not (remarkably, him being a man) offered a word of advice, yet she found herself wishing for his approval and feeling, as she recounted some of her life’s more outrageous incidents, an unfamiliar sense of shame.
When the sun began to dip behind the roof of the house, Santana looked at his wristwatch and said, “Unfortunately, there is something I have to do.”
“Throw up from boredom?”
He didn’t smile. She felt a brief embarrassment at the remark and reflected upon how often she did this, made a silly joke to dispel the burden of sincerity. “Not at all,” he said. “I enjoyed hearing about your life. It’s so different from my own experience. I have four sisters, and all are married and living within a few kilometers of where they were born. You’re a r
emarkable young woman.” He held out his hand and she shook it. “Well, I expect I’ll be seeing you again.” He smiled. “In church perhaps.” He left.
She went back inside the house, changed into shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, and followed the sound of voices to the kitchen. The voices were loud and angry and belonged to Lourdes and her aunt. When Statch walked in, she saw that Epifania and Ariel were sitting at one end of the long table, apparently doing homework, in the extreme quiet mode that children adopt when their elders are behaving like children. Amparo and Lourdes were standing by the kitchen doorway, clearly in the midst of some confrontation, flashing eyes and flushed faces much in evidence. They fell silent when Statch entered.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Lourdes said, “She says I can’t go on Monday. She’s stupid!”
“I’m stupid? I’m not the one who’s failing in school.” Amparo turned to Statch. “The school called me today. She hasn’t even been going half the time.” She made a helpless gesture with her hands, and Statch saw that she was close to breaking down. “I can’t do all these things, all these new things, and keep up with her.”
“Who asked you to?” shouted Lourdes. “You’re not my mother. And when I’m on television no one will care if I can do geometry.”
Some more shouting back and forth ensued, until Marder walked into the room.
He took in the scene and asked Amparo what was going on. She told him, and when Lourdes tried to butt in, Marder stopped her with a look.
“Lourdes, I suggest you go back to your room until dinner. We’ll talk about this later.”
Statch watched as Lourdes transformed into a little girl under Marder’s gaze and left the kitchen without another word.
In the silence that followed, Evangelista, who had been working invisibly throughout, said, “Señor Marder, when would you like supper and how many will there be, please?”
Statch stared at her father, surprised and a bit dismayed. The familiar, gentle, humorously casual New York liberal dad she’d known all her life seemed to have vanished and been replaced with a Mexican patriarch. She was not at all sure that she liked it.
* * *
On Sunday they all went to church; Skelly joined them, and drove too. Amparo and her family rode in the back of the camper, and the red truck led a convoy of rattletrap vehicles, all of them jammed with people in their best clothes. Front and rear, the convoy was guarded by Templo gangsters in pickup trucks bristling with automatic weapons. Of the inhabitants of Casa Feliz, only Pepa Espinoza declined worship. Statch almost did the same but forbore in memory of her mother, who, though scarcely a believer, had brought her two children to church on every required occasion, out of love for Marder. Statch expected only the usual and predictable tedium, but in the event discovered three surprising things.
The first was the church itself. On the outside, San Ignacio was an ordinary, somewhat clumsy whitewashed adobe shell, but inside it was unlike any church that Statch had ever seen. Instead of the lugubrious nineteenth-century statues and paintings she had expected, the interior walls shone vivid with color. Murals in the local folk-art style depicted Biblical scenes peopled with Indians in the white cotton clothes, straw sombreros, and striped serapes of a former age, and the statues were hand-carved, brightly painted suffering saints and prophets made by people who understood suffering: a pietà, a San Sebastián stuck with arrows, and—huge, behind the altar—an enormous crucifix with the body of Christ hideously twisted, nailed to a heavy, raw-wood cross with great cast-iron nails, spouting pints of gore from the Five Wounds.
The second surprise was Skelly, placed on the other side of her father, going through the usual motions, making the required responses with every indication of sincerity, although she knew for a fact that Skelly was as pagan as a Viking and an aggressive mocker. She couldn’t quite understand it: again, perhaps something in the water, or was he, like herself, just deferring to her father?
The church was about two-thirds full with women and children, but there were men too, hard-faced guys with tattooed teardrops on their faces. That was interesting, she thought, and wondered briefly about what the spiritual life of killers might be like.
As was her habit on the few recent occasions when she’d found herself in church, Statch let her mind drift away from the ritual to the contemplation of herself and her affairs. She thought she might be having some kind of breakdown, the sort of collapse that sometimes affected driving, hyperambitious people. She knew former classmates, people who’d propelled themselves through high school into top-flight colleges, then into the best grad school programs, and then, in what should have been the epitome of their careers, simply vanished. One girl had hanged herself; others had taken off for communes in the country, or for India, or gone sailing around the world. And here she was, living with her father, who had gone nuts in some way she couldn’t quite figure out yet (but she would, it having become a point of pride), in the middle of a kind of civil war, in her mother’s hometown. How weird was that?
The priest was talking about the prodigal son. He said most people identify with the bad son, the runaway, because it’s easy. You do bad, you get forgiven. But most people aren’t like the bad son—they’re like the good son. They want to know how come the wicked prosper, how come they get to eat the fatted calf. They’re full of resentment against the father and full of envy, and their danger is much subtler, because the bad son knows he’s bad and seeks forgiveness, but the good son thinks he’s good and doesn’t, and so the devil gets him.
Statch was attentive to the homily, although its message went in one ear and out the other, because she did not believe in any morality beyond you-can-do-what-you-want-as-long-as-you-don’t-hurt-anyone. The priest looked rather different in his green robes and his sacerdotal face, but it was clearly Miguel Santana: the third surprise.
* * *
“You didn’t tell me you were a priest,” she said to him in mock accusation as he stood at the door of the church after the service.
“You didn’t ask,” he said, “but you must have known, or else you wouldn’t have made such a good confession.”
“I wasn’t confessing. Aren’t you supposed to be sorry for your sinful behavior and promise to refrain from it?”
“And weren’t you?” he asked, giving her a peculiar look that made her drop her eyes and change the subject.
“That’s quite a church you have there. Whatever happened to the weepy old statues?”
“Burned in the revolution. The priest back then, Father Jimenez, was something of a genius, I’m told. He let the revolutionaries have all the bad-taste stuff, then turned the church into a museum of folk art and organized the people to decorate it with traditional designs and sculpture. He opened a sort of craft school too, and when the agriculture collapsed and people were starving, he got local people who retained the traditional crafts to teach kids. That’s why you’ve got so many people in your colonia who produce excellent work. By the time the secularists caught on, the place was a national treasure, and after the revolutionary zeal died down, Father Jimenez quietly started to hold services, and here we all are.”
He seemed about to say something else, but Statch drew his attention to a ragged man standing in the doorway of the church, clearly waiting for the priest to finish. The man wanted to have a rosary blessed. Father Santana solemnly performed the small rite; the thin brown peasant thanked him briefly and then vanished.
“It must be nice to have supernatural power,” Statch observed.
“One would think so,” said Father Santana, smiling again, “but one would be mistaken. I’m sure you know enough theology not to make an error like that.”
Marder walked up and shook the priest’s hand. He complimented him on his homily and added, “It must be hard to be a priest in a region where murder, torture, and kidnapping are the order of the day. How do you handle it?”
“I don’t, usually. I perform services for the dead.”
&nb
sp; “You don’t speak out against the violence?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Are you afraid?” asked Statch.
“Not personally, no. But if I did speak out, I would be assassinated instantly, and then for a long while there would be no one to perform services for the dead. I see you’re disappointed. Well, the fact is that the Church spent most of its history working in communities where murder and rapine were far more common than in Michoacán today. Any of the Angevins or the Sforzas, not to mention the average conquistador, could have eaten La Familia for breakfast. You may have noticed that the church was full of Templos and their families, whereas La Familia’s religious orientation is somewhat different.”
“Some kind of muscular Christian cult, I understand,” said Marder.
“Christian only in that they still murder people in the name of God,” said the priest, snuffing out his smile. “And may God forgive us all.”
11
The ride to the airport was uneventful, probably because Marder’s camper truck was accompanied by two SUVs and a pickup full of heavily armed men. El Gordo was delivering protection, which made Marder feel a little less like a fool. Lourdes was chattering away without letup to Statch, who was being more tolerant of this babble than Marder would’ve credited. Pepa was also chattering nonstop but on her cell phone, clearly delighted to be at long last back among the airwaves of civilization. The plane Skelly had chartered, from one of the apparently limitless legion of “guys he knew,” was a King Air 350, a twin-engined turboprop that would make it from Cárdenas to Mexico City’s Juarez International Airport in a little under an hour, and was apparently innocent of any association with La Familia. The plane was configured for twelve; they were five—Marder, his daughter, Skelly, Pepa Espinoza, and Lourdes Almones—and so they were able to sit where they pleased. Marder pleased to sit in the wonderfully luxurious seat next to Pepa Espinoza.
“What are you writing?” asked Marder. It was twenty minutes into the flight, and while he had attempted the usual conversational gambits, he had received nothing but short, impatient answers.
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