by Michel Stone
When the officer finally returned to the phone, he said, “If this child was a baby then she may have landed at Casa de Esperanza. This place is for orphaned babies, and it’s not far from here.” He paused. “This is all I can tell you. You must understand, we have plenty of car crashes around here, and we have even more orphans. Good luck, Padre.”
“Do you have a number for this place?” the priest asked in a rush, afraid the police officer would end the call. “Perhaps a name of the priest or person in charge there?” The policeman on the other end of the line sighed like he had a thousand more important obligations than reconnecting some child from a far away village to her irresponsible parents.
The officer asked the priest to hold the line again and after another equally long wait he returned to the phone with a number. The priest wondered if the officer were a godly man and if he took satisfaction from helping others.
He thanked the officer and hung up. The priest sat smoking his cigarette, watching the shadow thrown onto his desk and floor from the large banana tree outside his open window. Somewhere a horse whinnied and a cock crowed. The priest sucked the last sweet smoke then crushed his cigarette on the concrete floor beneath his shoe.
Because his office had one of the few telephones in Puerto Isadore he was often asked to make calls or to allow others to do so. He understood and accepted this as part of his job, and he didn’t mind this too much. He was certain Armando down at la farmacia, also in possession of a phone, greatly enjoyed listening in on patrons’ phone calls, which is why many preferred to visit the priest for their telephone needs. He was such a gossip and a busybody, that Armando.
The priest stared at the pack of smokes on his desk and considered lighting another one. Instead he put the pack in his breast pocket and closed his eyes. His next call would be either the end of a long journey or the beginning of one. He supposed the journey began that day nearly four years ago when he presided over Alejandra’s baptism. Soon after that he’d sat with Lilia in her home during her grandmother’s wake. He recalled comforting her that evening for two passings: the old woman’s passing to the afterlife, and Héctor’s passing across la línea into el norte. That time, as today, seemed to be a crossroads for Héctor and Lilia’s family. Looking back now, the priest realized the intersection of those two losses in Lilia’s life ignited her interest in leaving Puerto Isadore, in getting to el norte.
He pulled the pack of cigarettes from his pocket and shook one into his palm. He reached into the drawer and withdrew a lighter. He’d known Lilia since her birth and had presided over both her quinceañera and her marriage to Héctor. In ways she’d been an orphan herself, having never known her father or mother, the first and only child of her unmarried parents. Ah, but Crucita, he thought, what a good and strong woman she had been, a wonderful grandmother turned mother after Lilia’s mama died in childbirth.
The priest put his head in his hands and prayed before picking up the receiver to make the second call.
“Dear Father in Heaven, please guide me as I call this place in Matamoros, this place for lost children, and help me ask the correct questions, guide me to the right person who can help me reunite this lost child to her parents. If she is out there in this world somewhere, Father, help me locate her, and help me get her parents reunited with her. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
Then, to Saint Nicholas, the wonder-worker and patron saint of children, he uttered, “Please, continue to guard this child Alejandra. Amen.”
And to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, he prayed, “Please guide my efforts on behalf of Héctor, Lilia, and little Alejandra. Amen.”
After praying he dialed the number. If the staff at this orphanage had no recollection of a child fitting Alejandra’s description and story, the story of a girl named Ernesto arriving there more than three years ago, then perhaps the door on this sad situation would be closed, and his role for Héctor and Lilia would be to help them move along with their lives and their other children’s lives. He could not think of another course.
On the fifth ring a woman answered the phone, and the priest cleared his throat and sat up in his chair.
“Yes, hello. Good afternoon. To whom am I speaking, please?” he said, uncertain how else to begin.
“This is Karolina. May I help you?”
“Yes, I hope you can, please, Karolina. I’m calling you from Puerto Isadore. In Oaxaca. My name is Jesús Benitez. I’m a priest in search of a child, a particular child,” he said. When the woman offered no reply but “Uh-huh,” he continued. “She is the child of a couple in my village, and they have reason to believe she may be there. This story is long, but the point is this: She would be almost four years old now.”
“Certainly I’ll try to help you, Padre, but we have many children here,” she said.
“This girl was in a car accident, and the others in the car with her perished. The parents have recently discovered that their baby, her name is Alejandra, survived that accident. Only she had papers stating her name to be Ernesto.”
“Ernesto?”
“Yes, it’s a long story as I said. She would be nearing her fourth birthday. She is a beautiful child. I christened her,” he said with pride and with emphasis to show that he had a bit of personal interest in her recovery. Perhaps that would help.
“Alejandra, but Ernesto. Okay, and when would she have arrived here? Recently?”
“Ah, no, no. The accident was in Matamoros about three, maybe three and a half, years ago. So you see she would look a bit different now than when we last saw her.” He listened to silence on the other end of the line. “Hello?”
“I’m here,” she said. “But you say three and a half years ago, Padre? You understand that is a long time. We have here children from newborns to four years old. We are a home for little ones only. After the age of four, or as close to four as we can estimate, since we can only guess at many of these children’s ages, we send them to other places. So…” Her voice trailed off as if the priest were expected to follow her line of thought.
“So,” the priest said, “maybe she is there among your children?”
“That’s a possibility, but if she had obviously fake papers, we wouldn’t know her name to be Alejandra, if she came here at all. And if she did arrive here that long ago, she may have been adopted. And if she came here but was not adopted then maybe she is still here, or maybe if she is close to the age of four she has already left us to go to one of the other orphanages or homes where we send our older ones. Understand me, we are a place especially for the babies. We don’t keep them when they are school age.”
Now the priest sighed, unsure how to proceed. “Many ifs,” he finally managed to say.
“Of course, and surely this news doesn’t surprise you. Three and a half years is a long while.”
“Have you worked there many years?” he said.
“No, Padre. I’m here just six months, and the lady before me, she was here two years,” Karolina said. “You’re far away, down in Oaxaca. Do you know much about our orphanage and about Matamoros?”
“Only what you’re telling me. I’m sorry, but I’ve never been that far north,” he said.
“The poverty here is significant. So many people hungry and without jobs. We have more babies here than most orphanages elsewhere, I suspect. The garbage dump for many surrounding towns is located here, and it covers a vast expanse. Many children live in the dump with their mothers and usually no fathers. Many have lived in the dump their whole lives.”
“This is terrible,” the priest said, wondering if this could be true.
“And the people who live in the dump, they wait on the trash truck to arrive, and they fight over the trash, and a whole system, a pecking order, exists among these people. The men fight for who gets to pick through the trash first, then the prostitutes come in and service the men in order to get their cut of the food the men have picked from the trash. The children live in dirty diapers if they have d
iapers at all, and they are malnourished, and so are their mothers and fathers, too, if the fathers are there.”
The priest prayed for these people of the trash. “My God,” he said.
“So we get babies from this dump and from our streets and of course from situations as you describe involving accidents. Abandoned babies are common here. We’re a busy place.”
“Okay,” he said, thinking. “Still, Alejandra may be there,” he said more to himself than to the woman. “I suppose her parents should go there, to visit your orphanage. If they see their daughter they will know her.”
“Yes, certainly they may come here. We’d need proper documentation. We’d need to know more of the circumstances of this long story you refer to, but, yes, sure. We love to reunite children with loving families, but I must tell you the chances of this girl being here…I just don’t know.”
“And one last question,” he said. “When your babies there reach the age of four, where is this place you send them?”
“Oh, that’s not so simple. They could go to one of many places. We have many orphanages for school-age children all over northern Mexico. Tracking her after her departure from here would prove very difficult, I suspect.”
“Then her father needs to get there soon, before she’s sent away with the four-year-olds. And if he gets there, and she’s been sent away, then…then what?”
“Then if he wants to continue searching the other orphanages, he may be here for a while. Their records are not so great on children whose names we never knew.”
“Alejandra’s father’s name is Héctor, Héctor Santos, and he will be coming to you as soon as he can get there.”
The priest thanked Karolina and replaced the receiver onto the phone. He smoked the remainder of his cigarette and decided he would go home for a beer and sleep and would tell Héctor and Lilia the news tomorrow, which felt like little news at all.
On his walk home he thanked God for the beauty around him, for the goats grazing on weeds in the cemetery, for a squealing piglet and the chickens he passed in the old widower’s yard, for the bountiful sea and the fruits and vegetables available to him. His people were not wealthy by any standard, but this community could eat food they grew and caught and prepared. Only the poorest among them asked for handouts, and even then, the village took care of these people. He prayed for the children of the dump, and wondered how such a thing could be.
Chapter 12
Héctor
They stood away from the swelling crowd of norteamericanos but close enough that Héctor could see the jagged rocks and hear the rush of water in and out of the gulch far below them. The foam sizzled, an almost melodic sound, as the waves crashed repeatedly against the dark volcanic rock. As rapidly as they’d burst forth, the waves would retreat, shrinking back into the sea with equal violence.
In certain circumstances perhaps the rhythm of ebb and flow could lull a man to sleep, but not today. Héctor watched the tourists, their skin white like the underside of fish, as if they lacked some important nutrient. Bulky cameras dangled from some of their necks, while others among them clutched shopping bags of souvenirs or held smaller cameras to their sunglassed faces, filming the jagged cliffs, the crashing white foam, and the divers who readied themselves high atop the opposite crag, beyond the gulch. The two cliffs, split by the lapping tongue of sea that separated Héctor, Emanuel, and the herd of tourists from the divers, seemed alive, like the mouth of a hungry beast, as if the world itself were licking its lips, anticipating a taste of the men about to dive into the gorge. Héctor shook his head.
“That’s a long way down,” he said, jutting his chin at the churning surf below.
Emanuel nodded, but because his eyes revealed no hint of concern for the divers, Héctor decided not to voice his alarm. Yet as he watched the water drop six or eight meters before it rushed in and refilled the gulch, he wondered about the timing of it all. How shallow was that strip of water when the tide dipped to its lowest? And how deep did it rise at its height?
“They know their business, you know?” Emanuel said, pointing toward three divers scaling the gray- and rust-colored rock face as if they were not men at all but rather some primitive species of monkey at play, their hands and feet making light work of what surely required greater strength and a strain of bravery mere men did not possess.
“They watch the water then they leap as the gulch fills, landing so they don’t hit bottom.”
Héctor had not noticed the balcony of the hotel behind them, now filling with more spectators, until Emanuel turned and said, “See them all there? They eat this shit up like sweet cake. They all, of course, secretly hope to see blood. To witness a miscalculation and a head splattered on stone, or a body crumpled in the shallows.”
“Does that ever happen?” Héctor said, trying to imitate Emanuel’s coolness.
“Maybe today,” Emanuel said, smiling. “That’s Diego there, the one in the red suit.”
Way up on top of the cliff a dark-skinned man made the sign of the cross before swinging his arms wildly in wide circles as if to loosen his shoulders or to take flight with the frigate birds that drifted on currents high above them, occasionally swooping down to skim an unfortunate fish who’d risen too close to the surface.
“Diego the Magnificent?” Héctor said, studying the man’s small stature, his sun-blackened skin, and his narrow waist. Héctor’s bowels turned liquid at the thought of jumping from such a height.
“Yes,” Emanuel said, his smile wider still, as if he were in on a secret or a joke Héctor couldn’t understand. “He’s the man. He’s been doing this since he was a boy.”
The crowd of spectators had thickened and their excitement and impatience seemed to intensify as men checked their watches and women tinkered with their cameras and jostled restless children.
As Héctor studied the onlookers, something in their collective demeanor changed, and Héctor shifted his gaze back to the opposite cliff top where two men in matching black swimsuits raised their arms in unison.
They lowered their arms, then as they raised them a second time, they bent their knees and together sprang from the cliff, plummeting thirty-five meters like arrows shot into the foaming surf below. Queasiness rolled through Héctor’s stomach, and he’d not realized he’d held his breath until he exhaled as the men popped through the water’s surface. He could not believe what he’d just seen. Oh, to be so brave! He pumped his fists into the air, cheering along with the throng of sunburned strangers.
“How can they do that?” he said to Emanuel.
“Practice,” Emanuel said, pointing. “Diego’s next.”
Diego stood between two men. He looked at each of them, nodded, then, as if commanded by the voice of God that only they could hear, the three men plunged forward in harmony. The two on the outside dove like seabirds who’d spotted the silver flash of a rising fish, but Diego somersaulted through the air between them, churning like a greased wheel before straightening and darting into the narrow inlet with the slightest splash, a whisper of an instant after the other two divers disappeared beneath the white foam.
“I’ve got to meet this guy,” Héctor said, clapping. “He’s magnificent, indeed!”
“Come, we’ll get a beer and wait for him to finish.” Emanuel turned and walked up the hill.
The first two divers were nearly halfway up the craggy face, climbing to the precipice, perhaps for another dive.
Not wanting to leave the show, but eager to set the process in motion for finding Alejandra, Héctor trailed behind Emanuel. He glanced back at the churning water below from where the great diver had emerged. Diego had already climbed several meters up the jagged rocks on his return to the top of the cliff. Now that Héctor had seen Diego, had witnessed his strength, his bravery, and the crowds of strangers who’d come to see this man, Héctor’s hope took shape where for years only a weak shadow had flickered.
Héctor had never seen the famous wrestlers of Mexico City, but he’d read
about them in comic books since he’d been a young boy. Those wrestlers had inspired Héctor in his youth; they were so strong that lesser men quivered in their presence and crowds gathered to witness their strength and bravery. Perhaps Emanuel’s friend, this diver, would prove to be like those wrestlers.
This powerful man, Diego the Magnificent, would help Héctor make the money he’d need to proceed to Matamoros, enough money for bus fare, meals, and lodging if necessary. Enough money to pay for Alejandra if the orphanage forced Héctor to adopt back his own child. Enough money to line the pockets of corrupt officials if he had to do so. Héctor couldn’t imagine what such profitable work would entail. Surely Diego wouldn’t want Héctor to dive from the cliffs.
He and Emanuel left the cliffs and the balmy sea winds and wound their way down a hard path behind the hotel. The cooling breeze gave way to humid heat and the stench of the hotel’s garbage bins. A blackbird worked a gray scrap from the trash and flapped up to the roof’s edge to devour its find.
In the rooftop’s sunlight, the bird’s yellow eyes revealed its undeserved arrogance, and its feathers exposed a purplish and green sheen not visible in tree shade. It gobbled the scrap and squawked at the men as they passed. What a nasty bird, spending its life among bits of hot, smelly trash when the vast beautiful sea and seashore lay so nearby. If Héctor were a bird, he would be a frigate bird or a shearwater, snatching fish and small turtles from the surface of the sea for nourishment. He considered Diego the Magnificent, whom he would soon meet, and he knew that if the hand of God were to reach down and change Diego into a bird he, too, would be a great-winged bird of the sea, and nothing like the greasy blackbird with its harsh shriek and diet of discarded refuse.
The three of them sat at a metal picnic table, its paint chipped and faded a green not unlike the color of the sea foam beyond the cliffs. They sat in the sun because the shaded tables were occupied and too close together, and Emanuel seemed to feel this discussion should be held away from listening ears. Héctor and Emanuel had waited nearly forty-five minutes for Diego, their beers long gone, and sweat rolled down Héctor’s neck.
