Looking for Mary

by Beverly Donofrio

  I fasted on bread and water on Wednesdays and Fridays (I’d asked Father Freed if I could change it to a juice fast for the sake of good health and he’d said no). I prayed my three rosaries (on my way to work, on my way home, and in bed at night), but most of the time I was disappointed in, even disgusted with, the priests, especially a particularly good-looking young one I soon learned to avoid at Saint Augustine’s. In an attempt to let us know that he was just a regular guy, not so different from the rest of us, during his homily, nine times out of ten, he managed to fit in a mention of how “I was Rollerblading the other day”—followed by some lame observation like, “and I remembered the knock-knock jokes. Remember—‘Knock knock,’ ‘Who’s there?’ Well, praying is a little like that. If you knock, God always answers. Thank you.” I knew, as a good Catholic, I was not supposed to criticize priests, but with a priest like this it was hard not to snort, especially when he winked at a beautiful young girl as he walked back down the aisle after Sunday mass and said, “Smile.”

  I searched all over LA for a good priest, but in the end I needn’t have looked any farther than my own office backyard, because I never found a priest I liked as well as Father Michael Santori, also of Saint Augustine’s. Santori was my age, portly, a composer, and like most artists, a little crazy. On occasion, caught up in his homily, he let slip a mention of his therapist. He knew Scripture and history. He loved God and Jesus, who, as far as I understood it, were one and the same—and so was the Holy Spirit. It’s all so confusing, and I loved it for that. Reason had done nothing to take away the misery in my life; I was only too happy to leave reason at the church’s door.

  I read that there were those in the Church who believed the Holy Spirit was Mary. It was the Holy Spirit that lit the little flames on the heads of the apostles: inspiration, awareness, faith. It was Mary who’d lit the little flame for me.

  Faith was Father Michael’s favorite subject. The first homily I heard him give was after the reading in the Bible where Jesus returns to his hometown and has trouble performing miracles because people have so little faith. Father Michael walked to the top of the aisle and said, “‘Amazed’ is not a good word in the Bible. The apostles were always amazed. They didn’t get it. If you are amazed, then you don’t have enough faith, and without faith you won’t have God. Remember Peter walked on water until he stopped for a moment, couldn’t believe he was doing it, got scared, and started to go under? ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ Christ said. If you don’t have faith, it’s impossible for God to show himself. Jesus went back to his hometown. He was the carpenter’s son; who was he to proclaim such powers? Who was he to perform miracles? And so because they didn’t believe in him, he could do nothing. Your heart has to be open for God to come in.”

  I tried to keep my heart open, and on the plane to Mexico City to see the Virgin of Guadalupe, I asked God to show me his will, then pictured Mary leading me by the hand. The last time I’d been to Mexico, I’d been in love with Kip, the only man I’d thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. That had been nine years ago, and I hadn’t been in love since. Just smelling the Mexican air could trigger unwanted romantic memories and throw me into a pit of despair in which I would believe I’d never find love again.

  Everywhere I went, Mexican men asked, “You are alone? Where is your husband? Have you no children?” I felt like an aberration of nature; I even considered wrapping a baby doll in a shawl and posing as a mother. I had rented a room in the historic center of town and took a stroll my first evening, weaving through the street vendors crowding the sidewalks. I felt something poke my behind ever so slightly and dipped into a doorway to let whomever had bumped me pass. As I did, I looked at the person. It was a young man holding a huge penis. “That’s disgusting! You fucking ass-hole !” I screamed at the top of my lungs. The boy’s face fell and he looked as if he might cry. For a second I felt sorry for him. I went back to the hotel and turned on the television. But that huge penis loomed too large to concentrate—some sign I should interpret? How did it make me feel? More alone.

  The celebration of Guadalupe’s day actually begins the night before, when a string of performers starting at seven in the evening serenade La Virgen. The big show, anticipated by the entire country, begins at eleven, with Mexico’s biggest musical stars performing in an extravaganza; then, at midnight, there is a mass. The whole thing is broadcast on TV and watched all over Mexico. One million people were expected at the basilica. I was falling in love with Mexico because it so loved Mary.

  I decided I would arrive at the festivities at five to be ensured a seat. I was very worried about having to go to the bathroom, which was highly likely, not just once during the evening but two or three or four times. I would be sitting there for at least eight hours. Then what would happen to my seat? And where would the bathrooms be, how long the lines, and how disgusting? I said a Hail Mary, remembering Padre Pio’s dictum “Pray, don’t worry.”

  The basilica was like New Year’s Eve at Times Square times two. Groups with outfits that looked like running suits with the names of their towns and CLUB GUADALUPANA written in a circle on their backs came from all over Mexico. Many of them were walking or riding bikes; others crowded onto the backs of trucks. Old ladies walked on their knees up the avenue to the basilica. People carried VIVA LA VIRGEN banners and had strapped huge Guadalupe pictures on their backs. They held them aloft as they marched down the middle aisle of the cathedral, which had been left open for this purpose, a constant stream of Mary worshipers thirty people wide and a hundred people deep. They stopped only to kneel at the front of the line while two priests with tireless arms sprinkled them with holy water. As it grew dark outside and the crowd denser, smoke billowed into the air and a deep, loud drumming rumbled like a threatening earthquake. It did not feel holy and peaceful but pagan and scary. I was grateful for my inside seat.

  A woman, who was probably younger than I but looked like she was sixty, sat next to me with two little girls, around two and three. The smaller one had on a turquoise dress with white patent-leather shoes and lacy socks, all dirty. The girl cried, not loudly but piteously, her body shaking and tears shiny on her cheeks. Every once in a while she’d see me looking at her and force a wide toothy smile while still crying. What would it be like to have that child, to pick her up and soothe her? The woman in front gave her a roll; the woman in back, a cookie. Her sister patted her head, but it did no good. Finally, after a few hours, she stopped. I gave her a piece of paper and a pencil and she drew. Then she climbed over me and crawled under the pew into the next aisle. The mother never once seemed the slightest bit annoyed. She brought out their dinner, which was sweet rolls, and wrapped the little girl in her rebozo, cradled her in her arms, and tried to get her to sleep. I thought how courageous that woman was to be alone amid this mob with two little children, to come out on this night with her girls to honor the Virgin.

  Performer after performer, their backs to the audience, facing the painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, sang their hearts out—campesinos all in white, down on one knee, their sombreros over their hearts; choruses of girls in Catholic-school uniform singing “Ave Maria”; mariachi bands in their studded pants crooning in their whiny plaintive voices. And then, shortly before eleven, three hundred priests filed into seats on the huge horseshoe-shaped altar, and a performance that could have been the finale of the Ice Capades began. With the last bombastic strains of the serenading, I realized we were going to have mass, and those three hundred priests were going to attempt to give communion to a million-plus people. The Blessed Mother would certainly love for me to stay and have communion, but I was too cowardly. There would be a mass exodus after it. It was already past midnight, and it might take till two to fight my way to a holy host. At the homily, I made my exit, squeezing myself down the aisle and out of the church, then joining first one stream, then another, a moving current through the ocean of people. I had no idea in which direction I should be walking, so I just followe
d the crowds. Two hours and a few miles later, I was able to flag a cab to my hotel. For the first time in ten hours, I needed to relieve my bladder. A miracle.

  The next day, I visited Morelia, the lovely colonial town where Kip and I drove every week to shop and go to a movie. It was in the Morelia cathedral that I’d sat and wept for the first time about my aborted baby. I wanted to reclaim the place. I wanted Mexico back in my life, and not have it be defined by my failure, not be redolent with hurt. I’d never planned to stay away from Mexico for so long. As I walked the streets and revisited the market, I remembered what I had felt like back then, being part of a couple, and could feel a hole opening back up in me, one I’d thought I’d filled with Mary, filled for good.

  The center aisle in the cathedral was lined with huge bouquets of white roses in celebration of Guadalupe. I sat and closed my eyes, remembering when I’d lived near this cathedral. I thought of Labor Day, 1989, almost ten years ago, and how I’d finished my first book and mailed it to my publisher, then threw all the previous drafts in the garbage. Then Kip and I left town to celebrate. We drove five hours to San Miguel de Allende, which is Mexico’s equivalent of the Hamptons; its nickname is Gringolandia. We counted the things we could do there: drink cappuccino, have ice in a drink without worrying about the turista, hear jazz, dance salsa, maybe even (dare we dream it?) eat a hamburger. Kip had been working harder than usual, and I was due back in New York to research a magazine article. The weekend was a combination vacation, farewell-till-we-meet-again-statesideat-Christmas, and celebration because I’d finally finished my book.

  It was late in the day on Saturday when we brought our bags into the hotel room. I wanted to look through the shops at all the tin and ceramics, but Kip didn’t want to shop. So we arranged to meet at a restaurant at eight-thirty. I looked through a few shops and bought some tin Christmas ornaments, then went to meet Kip.

  La Fragua was down some stairs, where candlelit tables surrounded a courtyard. I took a table toward the back and watched a large group of ten or so young Mexicans in front of me. By the stylish way they were dressed I guessed they were weekending from Mexico City. Three men with guitars stood on a little platform in the middle of the courtyard and began playing Beatles songs. I ordered a margarita and leaned back, taking it all in.

  By the time Kip arrived, apologizing for getting tied up, looking at some horse farm on the outskirts of town, I was on my third margarita. Kip sat and ordered his own margarita and smiled at the beautiful Mexican women in front of us, not at me. I waited for him to look at me, which did not happen till he opened the menu and said, “You know what you want?”

  I couldn’t stop myself. “Did you kiss another woman before I came to Mexico?” I asked.

  I couldn’t bring myself to say “sleep with,” “fuck,” or “make love to.” If he answered yes, I would die.

  Kip put on a look of forced patience. “Beverly,” he said, “don’t ask questions you don’t want to hear the answers to.”

  “YOU DID.”

  “You really do not want to have this discussion.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “Where’s this coming from? Because I didn’t want to go shopping?”

  “YOU DID.”

  “I finally have time to relax, take a little vacation, to feel romantic, and you ask that question now?”

  “And when would it be right? Back at home at breakfast? When I first arrived in Mexico? I never asked before because I thought it would be insulting. I can’t believe it. You kissed someone.”

  “It was nothing. It was only once. I wasn’t going to stay home seven nights a week for six months. The guys go out and dance. That’s what I did. I danced, I talked to girls. I never took a phone number or saw a girl again. One night I kissed someone. No big deal.”

  “I wanted you to be mine.” I was barely audible. I collapsed on his shoulder in tears.

  “Bev . . .” He stroked my head. “It was innocent. I didn’t sleep with her. It meant nothing.”

  I removed my head from his shoulder.

  “Look. Give me some credit. I told you the truth. I didn’t have to. There was a lot of temptation.”

  “And now I’m leaving again. And you’re going to go dancing and kissing girls?”

  “No, I won’t. I swear to you. Besides, you don’t have to go. I can support you.”

  “I have a career.” I would not allow a man to support me again, and I’d committed to writing a story about a high school for pregnant and parenting teenage girls on Long Island. Besides, Mexico was Kip’s thing, not mine. “You danced with a beautiful woman all night.” The image was so richly torturous I couldn’t let it go.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “Fine.”

  I ordered ravioli in a red cream sauce made with vodka and didn’t eat it. Back in our hotel room, we made love and it was shamefully delicious. As I fell asleep, I wondered where my anger had really come from. I decided I was going to try to be adult about Kip’s flirting. Or European. It was only a kiss. I would let it go.

  In the morning, I was awakened by a brass band and the church bells clanging riotously. I figured it must be a religious feast, because there was a religious feast every other week in Mexico.

  Kip said he’d join me when he was more awake, and I walked down to the central plaza to see what was happening. In procession in front of a truck, men wearing white campesino outfits with sombreros beat drums, while others in feathered headdresses and clacking seed pods, tied in clusters to their ankles, hopped and twirled in circles. In the truck bed stood a statue of the Blessed Virgin holding a bleeding heart. She was dressed in white edged with gold. Her deep-brown hair was long and thick. The truck went round and round the central garden, the statue wobbling in back. I moved a little closer. The Virgin’s eye blinked. Oh, my God—the Virgin Mary was not a statue but a live young woman tied to a rod, posing as a statue, and the heart she held was real.

  I had no curiosity about the life of the real young woman posing as Mary. What interested me was that a woman could look so like a statue, and that a statue could actually be a woman—that Mary could look artificial and be real, be real but look artificial. This woman statue in the bed of that truck suddenly seemed the sum of all I’d secretly known about the Virgin all along: a heart beat just beneath the surface; a real tear could drop at any moment; one’s own image could be reflected in the pupil of her eye.

  For a moment I felt as I did when I was a child and had fallen asleep in the car. I’d wake up as my father lifted me and I’d feel a flutter in my heart, so thrilled to be nestled against my father’s chest, safe and warm and bobbing in the sky, hoping he would never put me back down.

  That Sunday evening, as we drove back home down the potted dirt road to our village, I saw something white tangled in the trees. As we drove closer I realized it was my book—all my drafts on the long scroll of paper I’d thrown in the dump. Some kids had no doubt run with it—a long dragon tail behind them, twisting over bushes, wrapping round fences, hanging from trees. My book—the memoir that had been so important to me, the result of all the sacrifices and choices I’d made to be able to accomplish it, the thousands of words I’d thought defined me—had actually given pleasure and left its mark. Somehow it seemed appropriate that my “mark” looked like a roll of toilet paper attacked by a litter of kittens.

  As I sat in the cathedral in Morelia, smelling the sweet roses with my eyes closed, it seemed to me that Mary had been appearing to me all of my life, more than I’d ever noticed. I had taken home with me the Guadalupe throw that covered my computer in Mexico. It had been the first Mary in my Orient house.

  I’d gone looking for Mary because I felt unloved and unlovable and was filled with an unquenchable longing. I’d hoped that if I could feel the love of God, or Mary, the longing would stop. I’d hoped that once God filled me with love, it would overflow onto others.

  Back when I lived in Mexico, I d
id not believe that Kip loved me. I never believed any man loved me—after Ray. I didn’t trust him, and I anticipated the worst. And that’s what I got. When Kip came back, a few months later, to live with me in the States, I discovered he’d been having an affair with a twenty-four-year-old virgin. I’d left him and moved to Orient. It was the worst hurt, because it was the last time I’d been hurt by love, and this hurt carried the weight of every disappointment I’d had in love in my life. I’d suffered deeply, and it was only then, in my desperation, that I was able to let Mary in.

  After I left the cathedral, I called the veterinarian who’d been Kip’s sponsor and sort of a friend.

  “Come to my house,” Guillermo said.

  As we sat down for comida with his son Raúl, who’d been fifteen when I last saw him and was now twenty-four, Guillermo said, “You just missed Kip. He was here for his daughter’s baptism.”

  I must have turned white, because Guillermo said, “You knew he married. . . .”

  I’d heard from one of Kip’s college friends that Kip had married the woman he’d been seeing while he was still with me. They lived first in a trailer in Texas, where he’d been the vet at a game preserve; then they’d moved to Africa, where Kip ran another wild-game preserve.

  “We went to the celebration at her family’s,” Raúl said.

  “How did Kip look?” I asked, but what I wanted to know was, Is he happy? I wanted to be a good Christian and to want happiness for him, but I wasn’t sure I was being sincere.

  “He looked good. The same,” said Guillermo.

  Raúl drove me back to my hotel, and I invited him for a beer on the terrace. Raúl told me that he was quitting his job in a couple of months to travel for a year. He said it was difficult for him because his friends were all Mexican (Raúl had a German mother) and didn’t understand. They were only twenty-four and most were already married with children or engaged. They didn’t know that there was a whole world out there, that they could travel and see things, have adventures; all they knew was what they’d been exposed to: family. “Look at Kip,” he said. “His wife cries all the time. He has to bring her home once a year.”