by Norman Lock
“What is it you wished to tell me?” you asked, coming to a standstill. A waif of a girl, you held me fast, like an anchor, nonetheless.
I could not have moved to save myself from a leaping catamount, so gravely did your hazel gaze transfix me. In such a moment did a still-reticent Vesuvius contemplate Pompeii.
“It has been on your mind all afternoon while I’ve been fidgeting.”
I suppose you’d read my mind. You had the keen perceptions of a mentalist even if you did not always choose to exercise the faculty, which is only an unnatural degree of sympathy. To be too much in other people’s minds can turn a person’s wits.
I shook my head and said, “Nothing.”
“I have been selfish and beg your pardon. I ought to have asked about your many months away and the awful war. But it makes me nervous, Robert, to imagine men as beasts, no matter how noble the cause for which they flay and slay one another. Was the cause a glorious one for you?”
You looked into my eyes, and I into yours. The ice that had packed the chambers of my heart thawed, so that I had to turn my gaze away, or else you might have seen my tears. And then you astonished me by taking my hand and holding it in yours, while silence dropped its gentle rain over us like mercy.
“I don’t know,” I replied, peering through the trees toward Mill River, which I heard but could not see. It was uttering syllables with the gravity of Daniel Webster. It was a New England river, after all, and could be depended on to speak solemnly.
“You are a good man.”
“No——”
“Yes, you are, for I think it is only good men who cannot make up their minds. Bad men have only one thought: the evil that they do. A good one revolves around an issue like a top.”
“And if he should come, at last, to rest in error?”
“We are all errant.”
“A clergyman ought not to be.” It was a vainglorious thing to say.
Something Lieutenant Pearson had said about the Seminole War rose from the obscurity in which my mind was mired: how the marines had fought the Indians and their black allies from boats as they made their way slowly through Florida’s mangrove swamps. “It was not the enemy that scared us, but the tangled immensity.”
“To be human, he must be lost,” you concluded. “Otherwise, he is a wooden Jesus on a varnished cross.”
With the strain of emotion, my breath had been making ghosts in the cold air. In spite of your art of persuasion, which I considered often specious, I was not convinced. I tried to recall what I had believed on leaving the seminary and what I’d thought on the journey to Mexico with the expeditionary force. In my memory, I saw only a callow young man, who imagined himself a Joshua, victorious before the walls of Chapultepec Castle, in Mexico City. “. . . and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city.”
“Won’t you tell me about the war?” you asked with a sympathy I accepted as if it were love, for I guessed that you could bear me no stronger kind of affection. At least it was not idle curiosity on your part.
“No,” I said sadly. “Thank you, no,” I added wearily.
I had itched all day to tell you of the stirring events I had lived through since we’d last been together and how—in the presence of mortal danger—I had neither shirked nor cowered. But I no longer had a taste for it—no longer saw the danger as a gold watch with which to dazzle you into a mesmeric trance.
“If you should need an ear, you’ll find mine not made of flannel,” you said, with an easy cleverness you could not help.
I smiled, in turn, picturing a moppet’s cloth ears. Seizing the moment—most men in love are opportunists, despite the bridle of affection, which partly reins in their egotism—I asked if you ever thought of marrying. Do you remember?
“Oh, I don’t think I shall marry on this side of heaven. Once there, I’ll have my pick of suitors, who will not mind a plain face. In fact, I will have no face at all, nor will they, if we are to believe the stories we are fed like porridge. We will wear shining raiment and new shoes, and I’ll think back on what a strange thing a serape was, unless, to put me at my ease, the Almighty dons one to dim the painful radiance of His glory.”
“There are many who would marry you now,” I said both doggedly and sheepishly.
“My dowry is worthless in men’s eyes.”
We left the woods and walked into town. You had given me the serape to carry, “so as not to excite gossip among the bonnets.” On Main Street, you remembered an errand with which your father had charged you that morning: to buy a tin of Cavendish. We went inside the spiced and fragrant gloom of the tobacconist’s. I yielded my bruised sensations to its balm and briefly felt at peace. You gave me a tin of perique “in gratitude for friendship’s gift,” which I accepted as I would have your love.
“You forgot the relish for your aunt,” you said when we were once again outside in the cold, which had increased with the lengthening shadows.
“I’ll get it another time.”
“Please come tomorrow, Robert!” you said in a frightened voice that surprised me. “Say that you will come to me tomorrow.”
–3–
JORGE LUIS MANZANERO HAD SKIN THE COLOR OF ADOBE and hair as black and lustrous as wet slate. He belonged to General Scott’s Spy Company, recruited by Lieutenant Colonel Hitchcock to gather intelligence behind enemy lines and, when possible, assassinate its leaders. Manzanero had once been a highwayman on the road between Mexico City and Veracruz. To my surprise, I found him genuinely remorseful when I was sent to give him the spiritual comfort of my office.
Mexico is a Catholic country, but Manzanero was raised in the Protestant faith by a German couple who had emigrated from Pennsylvania in 1825, after the overthrow of Iturbide’s empire and the founding of the Mexican Republic. He spoke German and English as well as he did his native tongue. After Santa Anna abolished the Constitution in 1834, Manzanero’s meager holding, which he’d farmed with the help of a cousin and a mule, was expropriated by one of the dictator’s minions. Homeless and destitute, Manzanero had briefly been a thief and twice cut a rich man’s throat before joining the insurgency in the Yucatán.
I met him in Perote—that would have been in June 1847. He was waiting for me at a table in the back room of a ramshackle bodega. I remember the dust in the air. The table was covered by a thin layer of it, in which he had been idly tracing the outline of a horse. When I stepped into the room—it was all one shadow and smelled musty like a cave—my mouth was dry, and I spat a brown jet of spittle into a dented spittoon with the carelessness of a desperado.
“¡Hola, Padre!” he said, knowing me by my buttons and hat.
He wiped the dust from the table with his sleeve and nodded for me to take the chair opposite. I sat, and for a long moment we regarded each other. I felt uncomfortable, knowing something of his history. Doubtless he had misgivings of his own. I did not cut an impressive figure, nor did my face, which was boyish and open, inspire confidence in a man who had lived meanly and violently. My eyes did not look as though they could search his soul without coming away trembling and appalled. I knew this at once and felt the sweat start on my forehead, as it had often done when, a seminarian at Gettysburg, I would sit for examinations. (There, in 1863, 8,000 men would fail the challenge to their longevity.) What was I doing in a bodega smelling of sour wine, stale tobacco, and sweat? I might have made a nice living in New England. I’d been offered a pulpit in Granby and also in a small Ohio town, but I had chosen to go south with an army of hardened hearts and intemperate souls.
“What is wrong, Padre?” asked Manzanero. “You look as though you might cry.”
I grew furious and spoke rudely to prove that I was a man. “I have gotten dust in my eyes, coming to this miserable hole. What is it you want? I’ve better things to do with my time than sit he
re picking fleas from my beard!”
“But you have no beard!” replied Manzanero, roaring with laughter and smiting the table with the flat of a rough brown hand. It was thickly matted with black hair, and I felt disgust rise in my gorge.
I must have looked as the steer does the moment the sledgehammer is brought down on its head.
“That was some joke, friend!” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “More wine!” he shouted to the barkeep. “No, we’ll drink tequila—me and the padre. We will drink to our acquaintance and then to our friendship, and by the third drink, we’ll have forgotten who we are.”
If I were to save his soul, I knew I must drink with him, even at the risk of my own. He was important to the prosecution of the war. After Manuel Dominguez, the first Mexican to be recruited into the Spy Company, Manzanero was the most daring. They would ride into Mexico City on burros, like any other peasants from the countryside hoping to sell apples and onions in the marketplace. While there, they would purchase intelligence concerning the garrison from their informants. Captain Walker, whose inglorious death lay four months in the future, had sent me to dissuade Manzanero from leaving the company. He had expressed “doubts concerning his soul.” He was ill—perhaps mortally—but he could still be useful, the captain had said. Walker had ordered me to “offer him the hope of heaven if he’ll continue to work for the Americans, who are doing God’s work in Mexico.” I was dubious, but I did as I was ordered.
The barkeep brought our drinks, and I prepared to immolate myself with the juice of the blue agave plant.
“We should talk first,” I said, setting my glass aside. “I’ve been sent to advise you——” I almost said “my son,” but I knew how fatuous the phrase would have sounded in the presence of a man who had had no real father and who, if he wished, could stretch out his hand and crush my windpipe as easily as a ripe pear. I coughed, as though his fingers were already around my neck.
“Drink up,” said Manzanero, who then followed his own advice. “It’s hot out. Where is the rain? There should be rain this time of year.”
I swallowed the harsh liquor and put my glass down on the table in a manner that signified resoluteness.
“No more. I’ve come to comfort you.”
“Go ahead.” I couldn’t decide whether he had meant to encourage or to challenge me. He leaned back in his chair and waited for me to speak.
“I will not talk of sacred matters in a barroom.” The rebuff had sounded grand, and I was pleased with myself.
“Hombre, you are right! We must go to church.”
He threw a handful of coins onto the sticky table, shouted a few words to the barkeep, and led me outside into the intense sunlight, which not even the dust in the air could lessen.
His manner changed as we walked along the street, empty of people at the siesta hour. He’d become thoughtful, and the swagger was gone from his walk. In the bodega, I had thought him to be a man in his early middle age, but now, in the unmerciful light, I saw that he was older. Without the bravado, he seemed tired and melancholy. He led me to the porch of a small church built of adobe bricks and terra-cotta roof tiles.
“This is a Catholic church,” I said.
“¡Sí, sí! I know what it is, Padre, and for sins such as mine, I need the help of the saints and the forgiveness of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”
“I understood that you were a Protestant.”
“I am, señor. But when I was a very small child, my mother—the one who brought me into this miserable world—would take me to a church much like this one, where I would pray to the statues, beg for forgiveness, and weep with her at the Stations of the Cross.”
“I am a Lutheran minister, not a priest. I have no authority here, no . . . power to absolve sins, except in a general way. It would be a blasphemy for me to attempt it.”
I was angry for reasons more complicated than my lack of suitability.
“You are one of God’s ministers,” said Manzanero reasonably.
“One of His Lutheran ministers.”
“In Mexico, there were many gods. Now there is only one.”
“I don’t know what words to say.”
“Come, Padre, and God will whisper them in your ear.”
I followed him into the church. What else could I have done? We walked across the nave, which was cool and cast in a twilight comforting to the senses. He stopped at the altar rail, genuflected, crossed himself devoutly, and got to his feet again, as if he were once more a boy standing beside his mother. He looked at me expectantly, and, embarrassed, I did as he had done. The gesture was not without reverence—because I was afraid. The God of the papists was, for me, a stern, unloving father. I trembled in His presence.
Manzanero led me to the confessional booths at the back of the church and nodded for me to take my place in the priest’s cabinet, and then he entered the penitent’s compartment and shut himself in behind a tarnished velvet drape. I found it pleasant, sitting in the dusk. I closed my eyes and wished that I might fall asleep and wake to find myself somewhere else. My masquerade made me uncomfortable, as did the nearby presence of a murderer. A pastor is rarely presented with a sin blacker than adultery or covetousness. The idea of the Spy Company also disconcerted me. Espionage seemed unworthy of a democracy and a country of frank, fair-dealing men and women. It seemed medieval—a heinous practice of the Inquisition. Worse, I felt like a spy in the house of God, desecrating it by my unlawful usurpation of the priest’s role, no matter how much I detested it.
Through a wire grille between us came a polite cough, which lengthened into a catarrhal hacking. I opened my eyes and applied my ear to the lattice.
“What do you want to tell me?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
“I want to make my confession, Padre,” replied Manzanero, who appeared to be willing to overlook my ignorance of Catholic ritual.
“Do you do so freely?”
“Sí.”
“Continue.” I gestured imperiously, as I had often seen the bishop do, though I had no audience in the cramped cabinet with its sour odor of mildew.
Manzanero began a lengthy recitation of offenses and villainies. His breath, so close to my ear, moistened it and produced in me a feeling of revulsion, which shamed me. Now and again, his breathing grew rapid while he told of some transgression that especially troubled him. The close air of the cabinet, the smell of spiced meat on his breath and of stale tobacco in his heavy mustache, the enormity of his actions and of my own—all combined to bring me near to fainting.
Suddenly, I pictured myself as an Aztec priest scooping out Manzanero’s heart with my hands and tossing it rudely on the altar, the way a butcher does a handful of tripe. I had defiled God’s house, and so I began to pray—not for the miserable sinner on the other side of the wall, but for myself.
Can you forgive my terror, my weakness, my self-pity? If anyone can, it is you, Emily.
“I forgive you, Robert.” There, I’ve said it for you. I think I need your blessing more than God’s.
Drone, drone, drone—Manzanero’s penitential voice filled the confessional with waspish syllables. The booth was furnished with a prie-dieu; I knelt on its small bench and supported my head with my hand, the elbow on its little desk.
Do you know what the “Little Ease” was, Emily?
It was—and may still be—a prison cell in which one can neither lie down nor stand. It must be an exquisite torture. It was much in use by the priest hunters during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. I would be frivolous to compare my quarter of an hour in the confessional to the hours and days spent inside the Little Ease by the recusants. Yet I am often guilty of frivolity, and I tell you, Emily, I felt a fearful cramp while I sat inside my compartment—a cramp in the soul, whose cause I knew to be that divine faculty’s weakness in me.
While I did not follow much of what Manzanero said, I attended to a crime that, to him, was more flagrant than the rest. I’ll write it as I remember it, and you can peruse
it if you wish. I’m aware of your curiosity concerning “the careless sleeve of Death,” in the words you once intoned over a fox, its leg half gnawed, dead in an iron trap. I stood unmanned while you looked with ferocity at “another trespass of the accursed race of Adam.”
From the other side of the wall, Manzanero said, “Captain Walker ordered me to break into the home of one of Santa Anna’s puppets—a grandee who gave el presidente gold in return for the protection of his house and person. There are many such men in my country, if you can call them ‘men.’ Maybe also in yours.”
I made no reply.
“The house—a fine hacienda—was at Santa Rita, near Veracruz. I broke into it through a patio window, after giving the dog chained up outside some poisoned meat. The family was asleep upstairs. It was very dark—there was no moon that night, and a heavy mist from the Gulf covered everything, so that my boots were wet from the grass. I lit a candle and was startled to see myself in a mirror hanging above a fancy carved chair that looked like a throne. Maybe Santa Anna sits in it when he comes to Santa Rita to receive his tribute of gold pesos, I thought before I spat on it.
“I went up the staircase with cuidado—with great care, you understand—testing each footfall on the carpeted treads before putting my weight on them. In other words, Padre, I went like a thief, only I had not come to ransack el señor’s valuables, but to take his life.”
He paused to collect himself, and I heard how labored his breathing had become while he relived his dark passage through the sleeping house, which was also one through a soul with its chancel light put out.
“Continue,” I said and hoped that he would not. The poisoning of the dog had shaken me, and I hated Manzanero for that unspeakable cruelty.
“I crept into the bedchamber and saw the man I was to kill asleep next to his wife in a big carved bed. In their nightclothes, they looked like two ghosts, if ghosts sleep. I drew my knife—a knife such as butchers use to flay a carcass—and drove it into the man’s heart. The blood came . . . a great deal of blood that quickly soaked the sheet and the nightdress of the woman next to him. She woke and, seeing my face above hers, screamed. She screamed once, for I had already cut her throat before she could think of screaming a second time. I hurried out of the room and, at the top of the stairs, I encountered a young man, also wearing a nightshirt. The scream had awakened him. He stood there with sleep in his eyes—I saw them clearly by the light of my candle. He looked surprised—no more than that—to see me coming from his parents’ chamber. Without thinking, I drove the knife, soaked with their blood, into his gut, and he fell backward down the stairs.”
