Father Chuy of the Sagrada Familia

The most important moment of the boy’s life came when he was fourteen. He recognized the moment for what it was. He knew that that moment was the reason why he first came bawling into the world one dreary night in autumn. It was why his mother had nursed him until his fat little body dimpled and creased and his cheeks shone pink with good health. Why his older body, longer and thinner now, like an image stretched downward by the cursor on a computer screen, was nourished on a diet of staples: the earthy flesh of beans, piquant chilies, bland, wholesome tortillas, and, rarely, sweets or meat. He knew that it was for this that his mother took him, every Sunday for a dozen years, to the Sagrada Familia, for this his three years of service as altar boy. For as long as the boy might live, there would never be another moment in his life as important as this one.

It was God who put him here, in this place, at this time, for the sole purpose of doing what he was even now, any second, going to do. God had brought him here and made this happen, because it pleased Him to choose the least likely, the least worthy, the least expecting. Didn’t Moses beg Him to look elsewhere when He spoke to him from the bush? Didn’t Jonah flee over water? The boy was like them, uncertain at first, then more certain than he’d ever been of anything. And now he was here, where a single closed door lay between him and his destiny.

The boy was alone in the narthex of the church but for two aged women who sat talking quietly on a bench. His gaze swept past them to the painting that hung on the opposite wall. It was of the martyrdom of Saint Stephen; the saint, enveloped in golden light, stood with his hands clasped, praying earnestly for the crowd who encircled him, their own hands already heavy with stones. Then the wooden door opened with a sound like a deep, muffled snore. A gnarled old body brushed him as it shuffled past, but the boy felt nothing. A single thought buzzed in his brain: this was it, the time was now.

He stepped into the confessional.

*****

Ten minutes before the most important moment of his life, the boy was gasping for breath. He’d been running for several minutes already, traversing the long, dusty, uphill road to the Sagrada Familia with his pulse pounding in his ears and his lungs on fire. He didn’t have a watch, but before he stepped off the bus onto the dusty earth, la doña in the seat next to him had told him that it was twenty-to. There was time, if he ran. So he’d begun the ascent at a trot, conserving his strength at first, then working his way into a faster stride. The closer he got to the stone church at the top of the hill, the more quickly he ran. Rather than tiring, he was strengthened by the momentum of his body, propelled onward by the urgency of his objective. He would get there on time.

I’m going to make it. I’m going to make it. The words beat themselves into his mind in time to his footfalls. The boy trampled the phrase into the dust of the road as he moved closer to the spire that stuck up into the darkening sky like the spindle of a spinning wheel, the kind that in storybooks sent princesses into a hundred-year slumber. It seemed to beckon the boy with a similar magic. Somewhere nearby a brush fire burned; the smoke-tinged air stung the boy’s eyes and throat, but he hardly noticed. What mattered was the phrase that throbbed in his temples, that resounded to each beat of his heart, the consolation to all his effort: I’m going to make it. I’m going to get there in time.

*****

An hour before the most important moment of his life, the boy lay as still as a corpse under the last weak rays of afternoon sun. With his legs stretched out, his body angled downward toward the empty bed of the ravine, and his baseball cap over his face, he looked like a drug addict sleeping it off on the sun-warmed concrete of the malecón. The boy, however, had never used drugs in his life. Whatever his other failings, he liked his mind clear.

But the clarity of mind the boy prized was eluding him completely today. He was in an anguish of indecision. All his life he’d watched other families around him, comfortable in their sameness. The boys who sounded so like their brothers that you weren’t sure who’d answered the phone, the girls who buried their faces in their mother’s sweaters with abandon when they skinned their knees. He would have liked something like that, or at least to be a junior. A second.

His cousins made up a family, the girls as fox-faced as their mother, Mario thin like Tío Guillermo, with the same hooked nose and kinky hair. The boy’s uncle took his son with him in the pick-up full of cleaning supplies–dark purple Fabuloso; cloudy, urine-colored bleach; bright blue glass cleaner, as cheerful as Kool-Aid–that sloshed around in ten-gallon jugs as the two of them made their way up one street and down another, hawking their wares with cries of ¡el cloro! When his cousin had his appendix out one summer, the boy accompanied his uncle for the six weeks of his convalescence. He memorized the routes–six in all, one for each work day–and was even beginning to learn which señoras bought which products, but then the boy’s cousin was well again, and although he let the liquids ooze out over the funnel rim and slicken the bottles, and gave the ladies Pinol when they asked for Vanish, and couldn’t remember how much his father charged for scouring pads, it was Mario who rejoined Tío Guillermo in the cab of the pick-up, and the boy was left at home.

He had his sisters, Gena and Toñita, of whom he was fiercely protective. But his mother had died having her gallbladder out a week before his thirteenth birthday. She ran a fever for two days, went to the Seguro Social to have it checked out, and was dead before lunchtime on the third day. The only trace of her he had left was in the faces of his sisters.

Two men had stepped into the vacancies in the boy’s life, and these men now represented the two sides of his dilemma, in the same way that on cartoons, an angel and devil on either shoulder of the protagonist personified difficult decisions. On one side was Don Victor. He had known the boy’s father when he was still in the navy short-pants of the Benito Juárez Primary School. Later, when his father walked alone down the cactus-lined thoroughfare every Saturday to watch his heroes bend physical laws and single-handedly overcome armies in the ten-peso theater, he’d stopped by Don Victor’s afterward for a game of dominó or a dish of Doña Lupe’s mole.

In the son’s younger years, Don Victor was known to be on the periphery of something you didn’t ask about. Then the Scientist took over–everyone heard the rumors–and something changed: Don Victor became important. The boy watched as he rose through the ranks of that shadowy organization, first adding on to his house, then buying a second house, a street over, for his daughter. He drove nicer, newer cars than anyone else in their colonia, but he was the same Don Victor the boy had always known. What had changed was that the Scientist, when he reorganized, knew how to appreciate a man who never behaved precipitously and who kept his business to himself.

Don Victor had always been there. Because he’d loved the boy’s father, he loved the boy. He had no son of his own to keep in pocket money or teach to play soccer or take to the cerro to hunt the abundant quail and hares that lived in the scrubby brush there, and the boy was glad of something like a father. When the older man began to take him along on business, it was just another step in a natural progression. Anyway, the boy’s part was minor; as Don Victor’s protégé, he was shielded from anything dangerous.

If the boy’s uncle was uneasy with this surrogate sonship, he didn’t interfere. Don Victor was a man to be reckoned with, and Tío Guillermo treated him with a wary deference. But there was another man in the boy’s life who openly opposed Don Victor’s influence. It was he whom the boy lay remembering in the dying light of day.

Father Chuy had come into his life when the boy was eight years old, with the terrible vitality of an angelic messenger in scripture. He was young–not yet forty–and had a lean, athletic body full of restrained tension, as if there weren’t sufficient outlet in the entire world for all his fierce energy. He reminded the boy of Bruce Banner on the dubbed reruns on Canal Cinco, a creature who at any moment might transform his mortal coil into something miraculous and impossible. Father Chuy wasn’t like Father Juan at San Nicolás, where the boy’s cousins went to church; he didn’t make jokes or talk about soccer or wear jeans and tennis shoes under his robes. Everything in the priest’s bearing was soaked with the solemnity of his calling. His every movement and word were deliberate, purposeful. There was no time for anything but the transcendental.

What Father Chuy gave the boy made him feel like singing as he walked the dusty road to Mass every Sunday. He thought about becoming a priest himself someday. He felt his vocation, his chosenness, in the very marrow of his bones. Then his mother died on the operating table of the Seguro undergoing a routine surgery and the boy’s world collapsed around him like a cornfield he’d once seen after a hailstorm, a waste of battered and broken pieces. He hadn’t been to church since.