Father Chuy of the Sagrada Familia

“How are you, Chuyito?”

“I’m okay.”

“Are you?”

“I guess.”

“We miss you at church.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“Busy like this? Lying in the malecón?”

“I feel better here.”

“I hear you’ve left school too. Chuy, you were first in your year. You can’t just give up on school.”

“There’s nothing for me there. Not now.”

“They tell me you’re living with Don Victor?”

“Yes.”

“And your sisters?”

“No, they’re still with my uncle.”

“Don’t you think your uncle might want you to come home?”

“He might.”

“And your aunt?”

“No. My aunt no.”

“What makes you say that?”

“All my aunt sees when she looks at us is what we eat, what we need. What else they could buy with the money we cost.”

“Then it falls to you to be an example for your aunt. Remember Saint Stephen. Remember our Lord, who prayed for his enemies even as they took His life.”

“I’m not like Him!”

“None of us is like Him. That’s why He had to come. Look at me. Chuyito, look at me. Did you know that my mother died giving birth to me? I never knew her. We all have burdens to bear in life. Our dignity comes from bearing them with grace.”

“Why does God do this to people?”

“He doesn’t, Chuy. God doesn’t do it.”

“Why doesn’t He stop it, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, it’s too much. It’s too much for me.”

“We can help you, Chuyito. Come back to us.”

“I’m with Don Victor now.”

“Don Victor is a part of something evil, Chuy. Something blood-soaked and black and rotten–“

“He knew my father.”

“I know he cares about you, mi hijo. Don Victor isn’t a bad man. But what he’s involved in is. You weren’t made for that.”

But the boy was silent. He didn’t know what he was made for.

*****

Five hours before the most important moment in his life, the boy and Don Victor were winding their way up the cerro above León. He knew the area, having been here several times before on hunting trips, and he knew whose mountain it was; Don Victor had mentioned el jefe in passing a few times as they’d tramped through the weeds in search of game. But today was different. Today they carried no rifles or camouflage knapsacks full of provisions. This time they were going to see the Scientist himself.

The Suburban crested the hill and began its descent down the other side, new territory to the boy. They hadn’t met another car for more than half an hour. This was a place peopled only with the poor, and that sparsely, a squat block house here or there along the ridge like a mole rising up on the bare skin of the mountain. The campesinos who lived in the houses didn’t own cars; they walked the several kilometers to the main road each day, where a bus picked them up and carried them to their work at the sembradillos.

The boy looked down over the ridge at the sembradillos now, a patchwork of field and pasture. He felt good. There had been no true happiness in his life since his mother’s death, but he felt, at least, a kind of muted satisfaction making its warm way up from his stomach into his chest. He watched the mesquite trees and cactuses blurring past him with a feeling of possession, as if they existed solely for his pleasure. He was here, this close to the Scientist’s home. The Scientist. It was like nothing that had ever happened to him.

At last the Suburban came to a stop before a tall iron gate. Don Victor was identified and waved in as the boy stared into the stone gatehouse at the skinny youth–he couldn’t have been much older than the boy himself–in dark glasses and fatigues, a machine gun at his waist, who spoke into a radio. The gate swung open. This road, more recently paved than the public road up the mountain, was as sleek and black as his sister’s hair ribbons. The trees, taller here and more numerous, pressed in on either side of the road as if they too had been trained to offer their protection.

The visit had come as a surprise to the boy. Don Victor, never a man of many words, had said nothing to him until that morning, after a leisurely breakfast under Doña Lupe’s watchful eye. Once his wife had gone and Fatima, the servant girl, set to work on the dishes, Don Victor stood up from the table and closed the beveled glass door to the dining room.

“Chuy,” he began, sitting back down at his place at the table and smoothing down his thick gray moustache with his thumb and forefinger.

“Yes, Don.”

“I have to go to the cerro today, on business. Would you like to join me?”

For a fleeting moment the boy wondered if he was being asked to witness–perhaps to participate in–an assassination.

“Business?”

Don Victor’s clay-colored brow furrowed. “El jefe has asked me to come. To his house.”

“Sí, Don. I’d like to come.”

The brow unfurrowed. The boy thought he detected a hint of pleasure on Don Victor’s leathery face. “You know how to keep your mouth shut. This is just a reminder.” Then the old man smiled and, laying a hand on the boy’s shoulder, he stood up. “We’ll leave at noon.”

As the Suburban swung round a sharp bend in the road, Don Victor broke the silence by clearing his throat. He hadn’t spoken since they stopped at the edge of town for gas almost three hours ago. Now he looked over at the boy with something approaching tenderness and said tersely, “Not a word, remember. Only if he speaks to you.”

They rounded another wide curve and the house came into view. Even on television, the boy had never seen anything like it. The façade jutted outward and upward like the prow of a ship and was composed almost entirely of window panes. The afternoon sun glinting blindingly off the glass gave the house the look of a diamond castle in a fairy tale. Stonework, not rough-hewn cerro rocks but identical stone bricks, filled the spaces around the windows and adorned the two adjoining sections, each of them much larger than an ordinary house, that flanked the glass façade on either side. There were two outbuildings of the same stone–servants’ quarters, perhaps, or garages. It was less a house than a compound, the boy thought wonderingly. A battalion of autos–Hummers, a red convertible Mercedes, another black Suburban like Don Victor’s–crouched in the driveway. Don Victor came to a stop behind one of them and turned the motor off, leaving the keys in the ignition. “Vámonos.”

The boy wiped his damp palms on his jeans, leaving dark steaks down the blue fabric, then they opened their doors.