River of Angels

by Alejandro Morales

  Philip cried as he drove south into the land of the mongrels, the land of the half-breeds, mestizos whom he had hated. “Save me from this hell,” he called to them silently as he drove east from San Diego along the border to Mexicali. At the border, he humbly smiled at the Mexican guard who waved him on as the voices guided him south to the valley of the dead. There, the voices whispered, he might find salvation, a new life and perhaps freedom from the massive exhausting weight he lugged around, that soaked him in sweat, at times vomit. That afternoon as the sunlight slowly disappeared and night came, Philip cried, afraid of the relentless darkness. He cleared the tears from his face as he parked his truck in front of the Hotel Fronterizo.

  While he checked into the hotel, he welcomed the thought that he could be cleansed of the evil thoughts and the terrible fears he had toward these dark-skinned people. He asked for this in hopes that, by fulfilling this cleansing, he would end his suffering. Death he considered a blessing, and Philip resolved to do nothing to prevent it. Let it come, he thought, I’m ready. He paid with a large bill, aware of his coaxing anyone who saw the large roll of bills in his hand to rob and, worse, to kill him. He would not resist. Here no one cared who he was or where he came from. There would be no one to contact, so he would be buried in a common grave in a potter’s field marked by a wooden cross that soon would crumble and become dust. He deserved nothing less than complete annihilation from memory, as if he had never existed. He ate dinner, drank tea, went to his room and waited for his three companions to appear that dreadful night.

  Philip Keller kept driving. The days were bearable, but during the nights—when he tried to close his eyes, rest, sleep—two bloody bodies and one blue dead man with open bulging eyes poked, pushed and touched his mind with their faces screaming, whispering and waking him up in a profuse sweat, as if he had been running for hours. He awoke startled and gasping for breath; there was no oxygen in whatever room he slept. Philip often grabbed at his chest, feeling a sharp pain. Finally a massive heart attack would end this living nightmare. Night after night the pain came, but Philip still woke up every morning, alive.

  On a hot afternoon, he was sitting in the central plaza of a Mexican town when he heard a group of people speaking English. He sat a little closer to hear what they were saying, but could only catch pieces of their conversation. The women mentioned a mission and a priest that offered help for people in terrible distress. The group got up and went to an ice cream vendor. They started to talk again. Enjoying their ice cream cones, they finally mentioned the location. Philip understood Valdelupe, but he was not sure. He braved it and approached the group.

  “Hi, I heard you speaking English. I’m wondering if you can help me find a place. I think it’s nearby. It’s called Valdeelupe, Valdelupee?”

  The women laughed at the pronunciation. “You’re real cute, mister. You mean you overheard our conversation. I watched you move closer to us and follow us over here. You want an ice cream?”

  “You heard wrong, mister. It’s the Valle de Guadalupe, the Valley of Guadalupe.”

  “What’s it known for?” Philip asked with a smile. For the first time in years, it seemed, he had smiled.

  “For its old grape vines and its wines. But nobody really knows about it.”

  “And for a priest who treats the troubled. Lots of Americans go there for that reason.”

  “Where is it?” Philip called to the group as they walked away.

  “Go south, and when the road splits, go left, southeast into the valley. When you see lots of vineyards, you’ll know you’re there. Hey, take water, plenty of water.”

  “Good luck, old man.”

  Philip could not help looking at the gas station attendant’s scarred face. While the man filled the pickup and three ten-gallon containers with gas, Philip bought bottles of water and apple cider and ice for the large ice chest that he carried in the truck bed. The attendant noticed the amount of gas Philip had purchased and what he had placed in the ice chest. He asked where Philip was headed and slowly repeated directions. The man spoke a little English, but made himself understood more by his hand gestures. Philip clearly understood that at the fork he had to go left, down into the valley for a couple of hours. Philip wondered what had happened to the man’s face and pointed the pickup south.

  The road was dusty and in places very rough. If he didn’t make it, he would die. If he did, he was convinced he would get help. Philip then remembered the attendant’s optimism, sure that he would make it with plenty of sunlight to spare. On the road, Philip kept thinking about the man. He would be hard to forget. He was slim, arms like cables, appeared to be very strong, and his face was filled with deep blue and purple scars that seemed decorative. The Mexican was right. It took about three hours. Philip parked his truck in front of the entrance to an old church in the middle of a large dry square. He entered and made his way to a bench in the middle row of the church. In a while his companions sat on each side of him. Philip looked into their faces and cried quietly, but no one came to help him, to ask him what was wrong. No priest was in sight. He walked to the altar, gazed at the crucified Christ alone on the cross. Nobody came to help him either, he thought. Following children’s voices through a back door of the church to where children played on the hard-packed earth, there he found three long narrow white wooden buildings placed on three sides of the playground. A few children stared at him, several nuns called, and the children went into the classrooms. Philip found himself in the middle of the playground. As he turned to leave, he saw a tall brown-robed priest.

  He’s not Mexican, was Philips’s first reaction. They shook hands under the Valle de Guadalupe sun. Philip kicked the dusty white ground while the Franciscan talked. It was a one-way conversation as Philip kept nodding his head, affirming most of what the priest said. They shook hands again. They got into Philip’s truck, drove around the church buildings and down the main bumpy road for almost one hour. The road was like driving over a washboard, rattling the truck constantly and at times so intensely that Philip was forced to reduce speed to ten miles an hour or less. Not much was said inside the truck, while outside the terrain became vast. The environment changed from hard dusty earth to dark long rows of grapevines heavy with red grapes. The parcels of land seemed to go for miles. At last the Franciscan asked Philip to turn onto another dark earthen road. They were now driving toward the mountains. Up ahead a large red-tiled-roof house loomed high on a slow-rising hill. Two large warehouses and a delicately gaudy church were located in back of the house. The priest pointed to the church. They left the vehicle behind, and the priest made the sign of the cross several times before entering the sanctuary. He led Philip to a room behind the altar.

  “Here you will sleep. This is the shower, the toilet. You can put your clothes in the closet. At seven, come to the house for dinner. You will eat with the brothers.” The priest headed out of the room.

  “Thank you. What can I call you? Sir?”

  “Not ‘sir.’ You can call me Father Mark.”

  The food was good. The brothers and the workers were polite. At first he did not like eating with people he considered inferior human beings, but the Mexican workers treated him well. They called him güero, for the light color of his skin, and began to instruct him on working in the vineyards. Over the months, they taught him about the earth, the soils, the vines, the grapes, the weather, the different temperatures’ effect on the grapes, and the precise time and art of harvesting. What fascinated Philip most was the chemical process of making wine. The winemakers showed him their storage methods and their ancient technique of constructing oak wine barrels for fermenting and aging.

  More months went by following the same routine day after day. At least my three companions don’t visit as much anymore, Philip lay in bed thinking, waiting for the bells to start ringing in the morning. If anything bothered him, it was living in the room behind the altar and the part of his job that required him to clean the church. He swept, mopped, scrubbed
, polished, repaired and placed wherever the brothers indicated benches, candle holders, vases, paintings and figures of Christ, Mary and all the saints, angels and archangels.

  Every morning at four forty-five he assisted the priest as he dressed for Mass. Father Mark trained him to serve at Mass. Those who worked at the church and the vineyard and winery took time to attend Mass before starting work. Philip did not like being up at the altar with Father Mark in front of the brothers and the workers. It bothered him that the Mexicans stared at him, el güero, for such a long time, that maybe they were judging him, and that they knew what he had done. Philip did not understand why or how he had ended up at the altar in a church in the middle of the Valle de Guadalupe.

  He had been at the winery for almost a year when Father Mark, after Mass, approached him. “Here, use these,” he said, as he handed Philip a notebook and pen.

  Philip had no idea what to write in the notebook, but he started to put down his thoughts, what he saw, what he thought about the people he worked and lived with every day. After listening to the Mass in Latin every morning, he studied the Daily Missal and began to write down the Latin words, phrases and prayers that Father Mark sang. He repeated the Mass word for word every day for years, and he learned to make the sign of the cross when he was in or when he passed the church. The rituals became part of his daily existence, part of his day-and-night routine. The words, the physical gestures, the signs, the icons found a safe place in his memory. He didn’t know when this had happened, but he simply accepted the rituals as comforting elements of this new life he was experiencing. Although he did not understand it all, he welcomed the words and gestures of the Mass more and more, realizing that repeating the Mass at night kept the nightmares from coming and kept away most of the visits by Sol, Albert and Oakley. His heart twisted with the mere thought of their names. The prayers created a space for him to sleep, to rest his mind and body, made it easier to carry the weight of the guilt for the lives he had destroyed. Finally he was able to sleep through the night, but he could never forget. When he opened his eyes every morning, his first thoughts were Sol, Albert and Oakley. He could not stop them from greeting him every morning. As he wrote more in his notebook, he noticed that he spoke less and less. Eventually, he only spoke when it was absolutely necessary. Listening carefully, working hard, praying the Mass, listening to silence developed in him the discipline and practice of silence. In the silence he found a kind of peace and blissful state he had never experienced before.

  This state was broken by gentle Spanish words—spoken by the woman who made the daily meals for Father Mark and the workers—asking him to please light a candle for someone in need of God’s light and to say a prayer for her while he served at Mass. Philip listened to the woman’s requests. He smiled and nodded yes. After so many years the language that he heard daily had slowly claimed his understanding and moved his lips and tongue to pronounce its sounds, its words. Understanding the language, the Spanish compelled him, unaware, to enter the speakers’ hearts and open his. He broke the silence only with Spanish words, began seeing the world differently from the perspectives of English and the little German that he had learned. He was comfortable in the world of Spanish. The woman thanked him with a warm abrazo. From that time on, she greeted him in the morning with “Mi güero” as he arrived for breakfast and “Adiós, mi güero” when he left for work.

  On a cold windy day, Philip draped a poncho over his shoulders, ran into Father Mark as they both headed to the church from opposite directions. They met as one turned right and the other turned left. Father Mark did not hesitate—maybe he had been thinking about this question for a long time.

  “Felipe, why don’t you say your confession? You’ve been with us enough time now. You should take communion, don’t you think?” Father Mark and everyone only addressed him in Spanish now.

  “Padre, todavía no puedo.”

  “Felipe, your sins cannot be that great.” Father Mark insisted that Philip go to confession. “I have never asked if you were baptized, but I will allow you to go to confession. Here we administer the sacraments as needed, when they will do the most good. You should confess and accept Jesus Christ as your Savior. Do this in thanks for all the Lord has given you. Do this because you will go forth and do good in his name.”

  The very next day, at morning Mass, Father Mark and all the winery workers and house staff gathered around Philip. Before he understood what was happening, Philip Keller had been baptized and confirmed into the Catholic Church. He did not reject the rituals because he knew the ceremony made everyone happy. “Thank you” were his only words. On Saturday afternoon he went to confession and took communion at the Sunday morning Mass in which he served.

  Antonia, the woman who worked in the kitchen, went to the church while Philip was cleaning the holy statues. In the kitchen, in the church, in the gardens they had seen each other many times. He often assisted Antonia by taking baskets of wet clothes into the house, by picking vegetables in the garden and fruits from the orchards. She always called on him when she needed any kind of help. That day in the church they were both alone in the silence of the sanctuary. The only sound she heard was her heart pounding. He acknowledged her, continued cleaning, then he felt her body directly behind him.

  “Felipe, necesito tu ayuda.”

  Philip saw tears in her eyes. Antonia took his hands and held them together and moved closer to his chest, whispering: “Felipe, ayúdame con esto, entiéndeme, Felipe, ¡con esto!”

  Antonia embraced him, rested her head on his shoulder. Holding her, Philip felt at peace in mind and body. He had found a blissful existence in which the warmth and love of a woman or a man was absolutely not essential. He came to believe that human beings were capable of surviving through the loneliness they were born into. To comprehend this, all they had to do was stand still long enough to listen to their condition at any point in their lives. If they were perfectly still and listened long enough, they would hear how lonely they were. Very few people discover this in their lifetime; they just rush and rush into death.

  THE BELLS OF the church rang louder and longer than usual. Philip got up to see what the commotion was about. He hadn’t heard the bells clang so loudly during the time he had lived at the mission. He washed, dressed quickly, made the sign of the cross, walked through the church, opened the doors and stepped outside into the rays of the Valle de Guadalupe sun breaking through the clouds, and watched Father Mark and several of the house workers set up a small table for water, wine and a pot of coffee, cups and sweet bread. He returned to his room, took off his leather slippers and put on his work boots. As he walked out to the church again, the bells ceased clanging. Later that morning Philip was called to the library. He did not recognize two cars that had been parked under the carports at the side of the warehouse. All the fuss must have been about visitors.

  Before he went into the library, he walked by the kitchen. Antonia served him a small cup of coffee. He looked at her and smiled. Philip wondered about her. He was puzzled as to why a woman like her was even attracted to a much older man. Or was it even attraction? Maybe it was something else, some other need he might fulfill. She wasn’t a young woman by far, but she was attractive. Antonia’s graceful mannerisms, her easy smile, her arrogant nose, her lips and chin; for the first time, he began to discover this beautiful woman. Antonia returned to her work. Through two large windows, he caught sight of two horsemen leading a dozen horses to the water trough. As for the feelings stirred by Antonia, were they the same as those he had felt for lovers he’d known? Philip worked to suppress these kinds of thoughts. He did not need a man or a woman in his self-imposed solitude.

  He had never been in the library before, but had seen the library from outside and from other rooms in the house, and now, for the first time, he realized that the library served as a hub connecting several rooms of the house. It was furnished with heavy antique wooden pieces: large chairs and couches covered in soft stretched leather, e
xquisitely carved tables and high cabinets. On delicately carved tables sat colorful cut-glass lamps, on the walls were tapestry and curtains pulled back to let the sun warm the room. Father Mark and another priest were sitting deep in the library surrounded by tall bookcases next to a dark mahogany desk. Two glasses of red wine waited patiently on a small serving table. Father Mark motioned to Philip to take a wooden straight-back chair. Seconds later Antonia set a third glass on the table and filled it with red wine. She left the bottle in the midst of the three glasses.

  “Philip, this is Father Charles Espelete. He has come from Southern California to talk to you.”

  Father Charles raised his glass and waited for Father Mark and Philip to do the same. Father Mark noticed Philip’s hesitation.

  “Just a bit will be fine.”

  “Thank you, Father Mark, as your reception of me is, as always, very generous. Your generosity is a blessing to all of us.”

  Father Charles studied the books above him. He seemed very comfortable. Philip contemplated his glass of wine. Outside the wind stirred several glass chimes. In the kitchen a woman called out instructions to her helpers.

  “Philip, you have done very well here at the mission. Father Mark says you do quality work and have many skills. You do fine work with your hands, in carpentry, and you know much about plants, trees and cultivating gardens for harvesting. And he tells me that you have mastered the science of winemaking.” Father Charles leaned forward, took a sip of wine.