Father Chuy of the Sagrada Familia

August 17, 1976 by Naira Mushtaq. Image courtesy of ArtChowk Gallery

When I first met him in February of 2015, Jesús Alonso Gamiño Torres, or “Father Chuy,” as he was commonly known, was awaiting trial at the Brockhurst Super-Maximum Security Prison in Littlefield, New York. The reader is almost certainly already acquainted with the principal details of Chuy Gamiño’s life. He was thought to be responsible for some 35,000 murders, including the assassination of dozens of Mexican politicians, during his tenure as head of the Sagrada Familia (a name, incidentally, that manages to evoke both the Biblical holy family and the Italian mafia). He had amassed a well-organized army from among the nation’s disenfranchised and disaffected: indigenous guerilla fighters formerly under the command of Subcomandante Marcos in the south, jobless youth, and, surprisingly, a number of women. Victor Rodriguez Romo, one of the old guard of the previous leadership (then known as the Moderno Cartel), gained his own notoriety under Father Chuy when he infamously dispatched his former boss, José “the Scientist” Peredo, by disemboweling him alive.

Chuy Gamiño twice escaped police custody in his native country (the first time he was wheeled out of a maximum security institution in the lower compartment of a food cart) before at last being extradited to the United States in 2015 to stand trial. Before his capture, Forbes listed him as one of the most influential figures in the world, with a higher ranking than the presidents of several first-world countries.   His net worth was estimated at more than a billion dollars.

But curiously, in the six months during which I met with Chuy Gamiño on a biweekly basis at Brockhurst, this cold-blooded assassin and drug supplier to most of the Western Hemisphere did not leave me with an impression of brutality, a characteristic I knew well from extensive contact with prisoners. There was a softness about him, a diffidence, that contrasted sharply with the stereotype of the super-max prisoner. In the particulars of his personal life, too, there was little that corresponded to the image of a drug kingpin; far from having a beauty queen wife (or wives, like other cartel bosses), Chuy Gamiño had never married, and though he kept his two sisters in luxurious mansions, by all accounts Chuy himself lived a spartan existence in spite of his tremendous wealth. Thus the moniker “Father Chuy.”

Indeed, in his country of origin Chuy Gamiño continues to inspire the type of fanatical devotion usually reserved for religious saints. The preponderance of items bearing his likeness is staggering: clothing, backpacks, coffee mugs, pens, baseball caps, Rosary beads, prayer cards, saint statues, even acrylic fingernails. In León, the city of his birth, a popular baguette sandwich formerly known as the guacamaya had been renamed the Padre Chuy for at least a decade prior to his capture. Many Mexican homes possess altars to Father Chuy where the family gathers to pray, in addition to the public shrines–the best estimates I can find number them in the thousands–erected in his honor across the country. It’s no exaggeration to say that, in Mexico, Chuy Gamiño is a bigger religious celebrity than the Pope himself.

And it’s not for nothing that his countrymen feel such reverence for the rags-to-riches cartel leader. In his home state of Guanajuato there are no fewer than twenty-seven hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, and orphanages attributed to his endowment. He distributed coats to the indigent in winter and toys to children at Christmas, and testimonials abound of his having financed such disparate medical procedures as cataract removal, limb amputation, appendectomy, and chemotherapy for dozens of cancer cases. To refer to Chuy Gamiño as a Mexican Robin Hood has become something of a cliché, but given his proclivity for profiting off the rich for the sake of the poor and the number of popular songs detailing his exploits–more than three dozen in several genres and at least four languages (almost as many as are extant about Robin of Locksley)–I think the comparison is warranted. Like many following the news from abroad, I watched his extradition and subsequent events–protests in the streets, a social media revolution, and indeed, a near uprising against the Mexican government–with fascination. I doubt if any other figure of our time has inspired such devotion among an entire race of people.

As onstaff clinical psychologist at Brockhurst, I had access to all the official information, much of it still classified even now, about the prisoner’s life. I could trace the line from point A (an impoverished childhood) to point B (gang involvement as a teenager) to what I suppose can only be called point Z (the end of the line here at Brockhurst). But the records were lacking, I felt, to forming a proper understanding of how the mild creature who sat before me three hours a week could possibly be the monster of public record. Nor did Chuy himself provide any clues. Though I had known him for several months, our sessions had never been what you’d call revelatory; indeed, every effort I’d made to delve into his past had been fielded with a good-natured change of subject. Chuy’s demeanor was polite but aloof, and he seemed completely uninterested in counseling as such, though he did like to talk about topical issues in the news and seemed gratified both by my knowledge of international events and my ability to speak Spanish.

If anything, Chuy’s reticence about himself only heightened my curiosity. I couldn’t shake the conviction that there must be some event along that A-Z continuum that, once I’d discovered it, would shed a light on how such a person could have entered upon such a life. Such was my hypothesis, and, as we neared the end of our afternoon session on Thursday, August 20, 2015, I told Chuy as much.   He’d been commenting on the paucity of meat substitutes among the prison fare–he’d recently had himself reclassified as a vegetarian–when apropos of nothing and rather abruptly, I burst out with the question that had been tormenting me for weeks: “But why are you even here?”

Chuy seemed taken aback but lost nothing of his habitual courtesy or restraint. He merely looked at me mildly, the hint of a smile playing about his eyes. I think it was those eyes–grave, honey-colored, with a long scar above the right one–that had first impressed upon me just how different he was from the men with whom I was accustomed to working. There was shrewdness there, intelligence, but this didn’t surprise me in the most famous Mexican autodidact since Frida Kahlo. I myself had seen him reading Shakespeare, in translation, in his free time. What caught my attention was something deeper: a haunted look of profound sadness.

“What is it that you want to know, exactly?” Chuy asked me softly, leaning forward in his chair.

“What I want to know is what got you into this life,” I began. “How it is that you came to be the head of the world’s largest criminal organization instead of a teacher or a journalist or a washing machine repairman. It just seems to me that something must have happened to you somewhere along the way that changed the course of your destiny and made you who you are today. You just… well… you don’t seem like the right man for the job,” I finished lamely.

For a moment Chuy didn’t answer, and I wondered if I had offended him. Perhaps after all, like so many others, he subscribed to an image of himself as a public benefactor. He sat in silence, lips pursed, rubbing his left temple with two fingers and looking past me, as if thinking of something far removed from his present surroundings.

“Alright,” he finally said.

“Alright?” I repeated.

“Alright,” he said again, with a slow nod of his head. “Está bien. I’ll tell you.”

I can’t deny that I felt a marked excitement at the prospect of hearing his story, but not, let me emphasize, because I sought to exploit or profit from a knowledge of Chuy Gamiño’s past. On the contrary, had events not played out as they did, I would not now be bringing this information to light. The truth is that I sought only to satisfy my own curiosity in the matter, to reconcile my cognitive dissonance between Jesús Gamiño the man and Father Chuy the legend.

Unfortunately, however, our session that day was at its end, and as I had other obligations, I knew Chuy’s story would have to wait until the following Tuesday. I took my leave of him reluctantly, recapping my pen and gathering my papers more slowly than usual. As I left the cell, I took a final look back. Chuy remained immobile in his chair, still looking–but not seeing–in front of him. Those eyes, clear and brown, always soulful, had taken on a look of great suffering. It reminded me of nothing so much as Foret’s Crucified Jesus.

That was the last time I ever saw Chuy Gamiño alive.

I did not learn of his death upon my return to work on Monday morning. Like the rest of the country, and perhaps the world, I learned about it via the national news within an hour of its having taken place. Jesús Alonso Gamiño Torres–Father Chuy of the Sagrada Familia–had taken his own life on Sunday, August 23 at approximately 5 o’clock p.m. He’d fashioned a makeshift noose from a bandage he’d been given for back pain and hanged himself with it in his cell. My sadness and disappointment were acute.

It wasn’t until several days later, near the end of that black week, that I received the folder from one of the day wardens. Across the top, in neat black letters, I saw my own name, and inside I found a collection of ragged-edged notebook papers in the same deliberate hand. I reproduce them here with no alteration beyond their translation into English. As to a final assessment of the infamous drug lord Chuy Gamiño, I’ll leave that to the reader. For my part I can only say that I wept to read these pages.

Daniel Santos

Littlefield, New York

December 26, 2015                                                 

The place where the boy came from was a wide, low dale encircled by a sierra of mountains that jutted heavenward like the pikes of a fortess, separating los guanajuatenses from the vast, desert-like country around them. If the boy had ever flown in an airplane he would have seen those mountains, like a contingent of august sentinels, their hoary locks and craggy faces giving character to the flat, dry landscape from which they rose. But the boy had never gone anywhere. The closest he’d come to flying was riding a rickety bus, the American school name long ago painted over, up the steep and winding road to the statue of Cristo Rey every December on pilgrimage.

The old people of that place told how it had once snowed on the low ground, a razor-thin veneer of white over the terra-cotta earth, like a powdered doughnut, and how the people, in response, had prostrated themselves on the frigid ground like los moros and prayed, filled with the grim conviction that the world was coming to an end. Over time, the day of the snowfall had taken on a legendary significance: the day when the wrath of God was averted. But in the boy’s time there had never been snow, or even the faintest hint of frost. The defining characteristic of the boy’s world was dust. For three-quarters of the year, the houses and shops and churches baked in the searing sun under a thick coat of dust that rose up from the surrounding lands–sembradillos of yellow corn and blue agave–and settled over the city like the sandman’s prodigious powders over the closed eyes of sleeping children. The women waged their individual wars against it, wetting down their tiles and front walks with buckets of half water, half crisp-smelling Fabuloso and tickling the figurines of fat clay mariachis or beatific saints or grinning cats with feather dusters. But the dust, like the relentless sun, was inevitable.

Then, in the summertime, the city was transformed. The rains came, hard and steady, soaking the low ground into flash floods and bringing spectacular lightning storms over the cerro. The dust was washed away by the confluence of a thousand little streams and rivulets all leading to the malecón. The malecón was their salvation, for the great concrete riverbed caught the whole accumulation of rain each season for drinking water, lest the people and animals of that place perish in the nine hot, rainless months to come. Sometimes–at least once a summer, it seemed–a drunk fell into it and was drowned.

The boy’s state was Guanajuato, the place of the frogs in the old language, for with the rains came a horde of tiny transients who made nightly serenades and perched, inert and Buddha-like, on low garden walls and bus stop benches. His city, too, was an animal, and a statue of its namesake stood, majestic, atop the great stone arch at the city’s old entrance, as if daring invitados to approach. By the boy’s time the arch was in the middle of the city and was surrounded by Lupillo’s Pizza, a XXX movie theater, and the Bara-Mart, but the sleek grandeur of the lion remained undiminished. In the evenings after school, the boy liked to sit with a book on the cobblestone promenade below, imagining with awe all that the statue must have seen in its more than three hundred-year vigil over its eponymous city.

So much, then, for the place where the boy was from.

*****

The boy himself was not a happy child. He couldn’t remember ever having been happy, though he suspected that he had been once, in that time before memory when his family was complete and lived in the little blue house on Avenida Oriol. He knew the place because his mother pointed it out to them with a sigh every time they walked past it on their way to the plazita or the panadería or Tía Carmen’s house. He looked at it with a mixture of longing and curiosity, as if, like an amnesiac, he might be able to jog some memory of that other, forgotten time just by a sufficient scrutiny of its azure stucco and brick window arches. The house had been theirs, but now it was only an itch the boy couldn’t scratch.

He knew what it was that had brought them–him, Maria Eugenia, Maria Antonia, and their mother–to the house that was not theirs. To Uncle Guillermo and his family, four more empty stomachs to fill in a house with too many already. He had heard the one-word explanation for why they lived in a single room with a concrete floor punctuated by a round drain. A room that had been a back patio until they came and where, in spite of cans of noxious spray, they were plagued by rats and cockroaches and scorpions because there was no wall on one side, but only a faded blue tarp stretched out taut with fraying yellow cords. The reason was Thirst.

When the boy was small, the word denoted for him some horrible sickness of plague-like proportions, a fatal condition that could strike even a strong, handsome man in the prime of his life. The same man whose rugged, sun-browned countenance kept watch over them from a shiny gold frame beside the bed where they slept, the boy and his mother facing the doorway, the girls turned opposite, their tiny bodies wedged between to keep them from falling out of bed. Your father died of Thirst in the Sonoran desert.

When he was older, the boy learned that it wasn’t Thirst after all but only thirst, the same kind that made baby Toña pull at the neckline of their mother’s blouse to pedir teta or that he felt after fútbol. He learned that thirst unsated kills, but first it tortures, wracking the body with cramps and slurring the speech and shutting down the organs, starting with the kidneys. He learned that one of the last things thirst does is to poison the brain with madness. When they found his father on the Arizona side of the border, his body had been stripped of clothes and his neck was criss-crossed with deep red lines where he’d clawed at his throat in desperation. There were clumps of his own curly hair still clutched in the bloody palms of both hands. That body, the repository of half the boy’s genetic material, lay buried somewhere in el norte because his mother hadn’t had the money to have it shipped back to them, half a country away.

There was an old song where the boy came from:

Beautiful León, Guanajuato

with her carnival and its games.

One gambles with his own life there;

respect is what the winner gains.

There in my León, Guanajuato,

where life means nothing at all…

Such was the machismo, the desperate bravado, of the men of his city, but in the boy this fierceness in the blood lay dormant for almost a dozen years before, quite suddenly one summer evening, it awoke. He’d been watching an old episode of Miami Vice–dubbed into Spanish, with an audio track that didn’t quite sync up to the movements of the characters’ mouths when they spoke–and when it ended, a documentary program took its place on the screen. His cousin Mario tried to change the channel, but the boy stopped him. He’d seen enough to know that this program was of imminent relevance to him. It was about the sunburnt, day-and-night-trekking, river-crossing, muro-climbing, trunk-of-car and airless-trailer-truck immigrations that people like him, from places where life meant nothing at all, undertook to get to that vast, extravagant, obscenely wealthy land to the north of them. Mario, bored, disappeared behind the curtain splashed with flaming poinsettias that hung year-round in the doorway, but the boy stood up and walked closer to the 19-inch television set that sat atop a thick board on cinderblocks in the front room of his uncle’s house. He wanted a better look at these güeros rancheros.

They were mostly fat-bellied old men in flannel shirts and wide-brimmed campesino hats, though there were a few younger, thinner ones among the group. The words they spat into the camera about the brown people on the other side of their border were harsh and gutteral, words that the Spanish subtitles at the bottom of the screen seemed powerless in their melodiousness to correspond to. The boy watched a group of them, their eyes as clear and cold as the eyes of cats, make a swaggering patrol of the lifeless borderlands with the somber intensity of boys at play. Then the scene shifted, and the men–they were all of them men–were working in pairs to lift up the back ends of big blue barrels that humanitarian groups and Catholic churches left for immigrants. They were emptying the water out of them. Time seemed to slow down for the boy as he watched a stream of that water sparkle in the bright sunlight then melt into the hot Arizona dust until only a dark stain marked the place where it was swallowed by the desert.

The boy had known resignation. He’d eaten and breathed it and sweated it from his pores for as long as he could remember. He had not known fury, and the magnitude of it frightened him. If he could have razed the entire country of moon-faced gringos to the ground at that moment he would have, and left a scorched trail of earth in his wake, like Zorro’s Z, as undeniable, gloating proof of what he’d done.

That was the beginning.

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.

“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.

A new young man in fatigues patted them down in the driveway. Two others ushered them into the house through a side door, one in front of them and one behind. They all wore the same dark glasses and carried the same weapons, as alike and anonymous as the knock-off brand G.I. Joes the boy and Mario had played with as children. After passing through a hallway–dark after the bright sunlight outside–they emerged into one of the expansive, sun-drenched rooms of the middle section of the house. The first guard extended an open hand toward three richly upholstered leather sofas that formed a rectangle bordered on the fourth side by a wide fireplace and stone hearth. They sat down on the closest one. The mahogany-colored leather felt cool against their skin even through their pants. The first guard took up a place by the door, standing at attention as the other one disappeared up a spiral staircase at the back of the room. His footfalls rang out on the marble, as efficient and evenly-spaced as the clicks of a metronome. Neither Don Victor nor the boy spoke.

The boy did, however, look around the room with interest. On every side of them a menagerie of animals stared sightlessly out of glassy eyes: the somber heads of deer from the walls; a jaguar poised on the table before them, its mouth open mid-hiss; ducks rising in motionless flight, their lifeless wings outstretched; a small alligator–or was it a crocodile?–its lacquered scales gleaming in the sunlight. Three magnificent deer antler chandeliers hung at intervals from the vaulted ceiling.

After several minutes, two sets of muted footsteps announced the guard’s return. He and the Scientist stopped at the landing and the latter called out heartily, “Don Victor!”

The older man, already standing in anticipation, now squeezed the boy’s shoulder, and together they crossed the room.

“Good to see you, amigo. How’ve you been?” The Scientist’s voice was low, his words clipped, as though he were expending the least possible energy to communicate. He extended his hand to each of them. “Is this your boy?”

“Yes. This is Chuy.”

“A pleasure.”

The Scientist was dressed in jeans, an American brand t-shirt, and a pair of Converse tennis shoes. He had an intelligent face–he was really a scientist, they said, and had studied in el norte–with penetrating black eyes under thick brows. There was an ageless quality about him that made it hard to determine how old he might be, but the dusting of gray in his hair put him, the boy thought, somewhere between forty and fifty. He was taller than average, but otherwise so unremarkable that the boy was reminded of something he’d once heard Father Chuy say, how Christ Himself was so like other men that Judas Iscariot had to identify Him with a kiss.

They crossed the room then sat back down on two of the sofas. A girl was summoned, a lithe, long-legged creature with hair to her waist, wearing a maroon skirt so short that the boy quickly looked down at the patch of sunlight at his feet. She returned with a silver tray upon which sat a Buchanan’s Scotch bottle, a bottle of Coca-Cola, tumblers with ice, and a stack of glass plates. Another girl followed, this one shorter and wider with the round, ruddy face of the campesino. She was dressed in the same dried blood-colored attire. As the first girl poured the drinks, the second one set a tray of food on the thick marble table before them–cueritos, ceviche, tostadas, tacos dorados–then both left the room as soundlessly as they’d come in.

The two men talked business, but in a kind of elaborate code that prevented the boy’s making out the meaning of their words. As he couldn’t follow the conversation, he renewed his attention instead to the room around him. Figures of deer frolicked on leather lampshades. A billiards table stood in one corner, its base of ornately carved wood. Then the boy noticed something he hadn’t seen before: a large, round orb, almost as big as a soccer ball, on a small table on at the other end of the room. The milky glass sphere–it must be a lamp, the boy thought–was resting on a base of what looked like human hands. The boy squinted into the corner, determined to see the object more clearly. Yes, they were hands, four pairs of them, from what he could tell, the fingers outward and cupped slightly to hold the globe. The differing tones of the flesh–from light tan to a dark, sun-baked brown, left no doubt as to their authenticity. The boy laid his plate on the table so hard it clanged. Don Victor turned and raised his eyebrows, but the Scientist seemed not to notice.

“Got a couple men on the Sagrada Familia job,” he continued briskly. “It’ll be tonight. That padrecito just doesn’t seem to understand.”

“Be hard to catch that one alone, I’d think,” Don Victor observed, turning back to the Scientist and taking a bite of ceviche. “They’re out the doors at every Mass there.”

“At the parish? No, it won’t be anywhere near there. At the rectory, afterward. The other priest’s away. He doesn’t go around sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong, that other one. No reason to include him.”

The boy now stood abruptly. There was a faint layer of sweat on his upper lip, Don Victor noticed. The old man looked at him fixedly, but the boy avoided his gaze.

“Sir, can I– I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Tadeo, take Chuy to the bathroom.” The Scientist spoke without turning around.

When the boy had lain for several minutes with his face against the cool floor tile of the palatial bathroom and felt that he could move again without vomiting, he slowly stood and leaned toward the mirror. His eyes were watery, his face yellowish, under the fluorescent lights. He turned on the tap and splashed water onto his face, catching sight as he did so of his two cupped hands, so like the hands on the table outside. He closed his eyes with a shudder.

When the boy emerged from the bathroom, the men were gone. Tadeo led him back through the house and out a back door, where at a distance he could see the figures of Don Victor and the Scientist standing near a big dog on a chain. The animal pulled wildly at its tether, black fur bristling. As he approached, the boy saw that the creature was much larger than it ought to have been, with overlong legs and an incongruously huge head. It looked surreal, a yellow-eyed monster from a horror movie or nightmare.

“Look, Chuy, half wolf. Isn’t that something?” Don Victor looked questioningly at the boy, but again he averted his eyes from the old man’s face.

“Can’t get near it. No one can. The guy who takes care of it throws the meat over there, within its reach. Raised it from a pup, but it’s too wild now, even for him.” The Scientist’s staccato words now had a new sound. The boy recognized it as the tone of parents about their children, coaches about their winning teams; he was proud of this aberration of nature.

Together they walked back around the house toward the Suburban, the two men still deep in conversation, the boy distracted by his own thoughts. He took a last look back at the house, still brilliant in the somewhat diminished sunlight, then turned definitively away. Before they left, the Scientist pressed a handful of silver coins into the boy’s hand with a wink, “for a Coca-Cola.”

“I’m not here to confess, Father.”

“What?”

“I’m not here to confess–“

“Chuy?”

“Yes. Listen to me. I’m here to warn you. You have to listen to me.”

“I don’t need to be warned, Chuyito.”

“It’s now, Father! It’s tonight, after the Mass. If you go now, you can still get away. You can’t go home after the Mass. Do you hear me, don’t go home!”

“Chuy–“

“No, Father! God put me there. I saw the Scientist, I heard him say the words. God put me! This is what I was made for.”

“Chuy, if I don’t go home tonight it will be tomorrow. And if I don’t go home tomorrow it will be the next day, or the day after that. I won’t run, mi hijito. This is what I was made for.”

“Father– please!”

“‘The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many.’ Am I better than Our Lord, Chuyito, that I dare to hope for a different fate? The blood of martyrs is the seed from which the Church grows.”

The boy groaned. He could hear Father Chuy’s voice, calm and patient, as if he were explaining something to a child, but the words sounded far away to him now, incomprehensible. The boy burst blindly from the confessional and stumbled out into the night. It was darker than when he went in, and colder. At the edge of the field he lurged forward and vomited, then, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, he began to run. He ran away from the church as he’d run toward it–could it have been only minutes ago?–but wildly now, through the field of weeds, recklessly and without purpose. Unheeding of the voice calling his name behind him.

*****

Like León’s one snowfall, afterward, Father Chuy’s death took on a legendary significance. In the months after their priest was buried in a plain white cassock, his restrained energy at rest at last, there were those who claimed he’d appeared to them. Little Gilberta saw him under a palm out back of the church at twilight, a wistful smile on his face as he looked up at the stone building. He came to Don Ramiro in a dream and cured his angina. Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, he told Doña Agustina, it cannot bear fruit. It was one of the passages he’d read that night, the night he officiated his own requiem. That Mass at the Sagrada Familia was at the center of the legend. Weeknight services were usually sparsely attended, a score or so of the palsied and pious, yet it was difficult, afterward, to find anyone who hadn’t been there that Monday. They told how Father Chuy wore a blood-red chasuble, not the purple of the liturgical calendar, and how his voice rang out as they sang, a cappella:

Into Your hands
I put my life, Lord.
Into Your hands
I give myself to You.

I must die in order to live,
And my life is what I give…          

For the first time in all their memory their priest, even more grave and solemn than usual, said a Mass all his own, not that of the Missal. No one read la lectura. No one sang the aleluya. Was he paler than usual in the candlelight? Did his voice tremble as he spoke the words, Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it? Did his hands shake as he held up the Host before them? It was hard to know afterward what was memory, what imagination.

But of that Mass, the boy knew nothing. Not even the light emanating from the stained glass windows of the Sagrada Familia touched him where he lay, supine by the roadside in the field full of weeds, convulsed by agony and choking on his own hot tears, the handful of silver coins spilled alongside him like so many seeds in the fallow soil.

*****

On Friday the boy put on his red windbreaker and walked down the main thoroughfare to the Casa Municipal. He stood outside for more than an hour, hands in pockets, watching the branches of a big tree opposite toss in the wind, throwing dark arabesques on the pavement below. The rains were coming. He could already taste the wetness in the windy air and feel, like a vibration, the low rumblings over the cerro.

The boy didn’t go in. If he had, he’d have had to sign in at the lobby and state his business, and this was off the record. He waited, let her come to him. The boy knew how it worked from his evenings of reading under the great stone arch. Someone brought the car around front, and Barbi Botello emerged from the building. It was just a matter of timing, and the boy timed it right.

She looked, if possible, even more glamorous up close. For one moment, before her impeccably shadowed eyes and lipsticked mouth, her pushed-up breasts and tight skirt, the boy even hesitated, unable, in the fog of her perfume, to find the words he wanted. Women always intimidated him, and this woman in her forties was so self-consciously beautiful, so powerful and confident, that for an instant the boy stood dumbstruck. Then the words were back, spilling out of him, warm and liquid as the impending rain.

“Señora, there’s something you need to know. I can tell you where to find the Scientist. He lives here, in Guanajuato, just a few hours from León, up past the Cañada Rosal. He’s responsible for the death of Father Chuy of the Sagrada Familia. I could take you there– show you where he lives, if you want. I’ve been there…”

But as he watched the mayor’s face slide from surprise into amused condescension, the boy’s words tapered off, ending with a flat, atonal finality. “You already know.”

“Not at all!” Her tinkling laugh rang out and was met by the deeper laughter of the driver who stood alongside the black car, holding the mayor’s door open for her. “Listen, corazón, it’s just that it’s Friday. We all have plans. Why don’t you come back on Monday and we can sit down and sort all this out calmly?” One stilettoed heel was in the car even before she’d finished speaking.

When Barbi Botello had gone, the boy stood frowning after her in the deepening gloom until a loud voice startled him from behind.

“¡Ya, basta! It’s over. Go home.”

“What?”

“It’s over, kid. Who do you think pays the goddamn bills around here? I said go home.” The guard stepped down from his post and picked up a stone, holding it aloft menacingly.

“Chinga tu madre,” the boy growled, turning to go.

Almost at once a white-hot pain exploded in his right shoulder, the force of it propelling his body forward a step. He was turning around when a second stone caught him just above the eye, knocking him, disoriented, to the cobblestone. The boy lay for a minute observing the stone disinterestedly, its shape and contours, as if it had nothing to do with him. It was a perfect oval, smoothed into submission long ago by a river somewhere, so white it glowed in the twilight. There were dozens like it edging the little garden in front of the building like the gleaming teeth of a wide-mouthed monster. At once an image appeared in the boy’s mind–a vision, almost–of Saint Stephen at the moment of his stoning: the saint stood praying, wrapped in golden light, a rapturous expression on his face. But the boy clenched his teeth and shook his head against the image.

“God damn you,” he spat, enunciating every syllable with deliberate force. “God damn every one of you to Hell.”

Then, wiping the blood from his eye with the back of one hand, he struggled to his feet. Over the dark cerro, lightning danced erratically. A sudden gust of wind caught the flag above the building, whipping it wildly. It made a sharp flapping sound, as though the eagle at its center had come alive and was locked in a mortal struggle with the serpent. A portent, it seemed to the boy. A harbinger of things to come.

April Vázquez, a native of the North Carolina foothills, holds a B.A. in Literature and Language from the University of North Carolina at Asheville and an M.A. in the Teaching of English as a Second Language from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She currently lives in León, Guanajuato, Mexico, where she homeschools her daughters Daisy, Dani, and Dahlia. April’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Windhover, The Fieldstone Review, Eclectica, Foliate Oak, Ghost Town, New Plains Review, and others.