A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García Read online

  “My sister,” Flavio said, “painted these paintings. You remember Ramona, Felix? She would paint like there was nothing else to do—even as a young girl, when we were children. And every painting was a painting of this village.” Felix’s head had begun to shake slightly, and again Flavio wondered how this man who could barely sit up had come wandering out of the hills.

  “I don’t know why she did this either, Felix,” Flavio said and looked back at the painting of the alfalfa field. For a brief second, he almost knew who the two men and the small boy were, but then, like a breath, the memory left. “It’s true, though,” he went on. “She painted the church and the cemetery and old twisted juniper trees and even once I remember she painted a painting of mud. A whole road of mud she painted and not even one flower or a blade of grass.”

  For the most part, Flavio thought that what his sister chose to put on canvas was foolish. One painting after another of a tired village that not only had seen better days, but was a place Flavio saw only with familiarity. But at other times, if he stared at her paintings longer than he should, he could almost hear the creaking of vigas or smell the thick odor of dirt on the blade of a shovel.

  Moving his eyes across the rest of the paintings on the far wall, Flavio thought that this house was too full of his sister, as if she had just walked off one day and forgotten to return. He grunted softly and lowered his eyes. It was then that he saw the seven santos standing like shadows in the corner beside the door.

  Flavio had first seen the santos thirty-five years before. They had appeared in this house as if from nowhere, and seeing them now standing in the corner made him suddenly feel as if they were the only remaining members of his family. Unfortunately, of all the family that had passed through his life, these were not relatives he had ever been fond of. They were too old and too coarse and seemed to hold secrets that Flavio knew in his heart he hadn’t the slightest inclination to hear.

  “I’d forgotten they were here,” he said. He turned his head to look at Felix, whose eyes were now closed, beads of saliva at each corner of his mouth. “Don’t look at them, Felix, if they bother you. They are only things Ramona used to have.”

  Flavio had walked into Ramona’s house one day and found her washing dishes in the kitchen. It was not long after the death of their brother and not long after their brother’s son, Little José, had come to live with her. Behind his sister, crowded together on the small table, were the carved figures, one of which had been merely touched with a knife. All stood with their hands at their breasts, and they stared straight ahead without a smile. One was older than the others, the wood split with age, the paint on her gown and on her face cracked and peeling. Flavio had suddenly felt awkward, as if he had interrupted a conversation between people he did not know.

  He had stopped just inside the kitchen, and eventually he had scraped his feet nervously on the floor. When his sister turned to look at him, he had waved his arm and said, “What are those things, Ramona?”

  “They are santos, Flavio,” Ramona said and turned back to her dishes.

  “I know what they are. What are they doing here?”

  “They’re not doing anything here, Flavio,” Ramona said. “I found them and brought them into the house.”

  “You found them?” He looked at the figures again. He thought that they resembled small children who had grown far too old. “They were lost?”

  “No, Flavio,” Ramona had said, and in her voice had been the same tone he remembered hearing often as a child. “I found them in the crawl space above the ceiling.”

  Flavio walked over to the table. On the one that was only partially carved, he could see fresh markings on the wood. At her feet were curled splinters as thin as paper. “This one’s just been carved,” he said.

  “Yes,” Ramona said. “That one is Little José’s. He works on it a little each day.”

  “José is making a santo?” Flavio said. Then he reached out and touched the oldest of them, and a chip of paint flaked off and fell to the surface of the table. Where the paint had been, the wood was smooth and black. He looked up at the vigas overhead.

  “How did they come to be in the ceiling?”

  Ramona wiped her hands on her pants and turned to face her brother. For a moment she said nothing, and then she smiled. “I don’t know, Flavio. I only know that they were there for a long time.”

  It occurred to Flavio that through all the years he had been in this house, just above his head had stood these seven Ladies, cloaked in cobwebs. He looked back at them and wondered what they had been doing up there all that time. Then he realized that this, too, might be something that he would rather not know.

  “What made you look up there?” he asked.

  Again Ramona paused before speaking. “To see,” she said finally, “what was behind the door grandfather had nailed shut.”

  Flavio turned to her. She was leaning back against the sink, her arms folded beneath her breasts, a slight smile still on her mouth. Flavio thought that though his sister was answering his questions, she was saying nothing.

  “What are you going to do with them, Ramona?”

  Ramona closed her eyes and shook her head gently. “I don’t know, Flavio,” she said. “I only know that I’ll keep them here.”

  The santos stayed with Ramona, usually out of Flavio’s sight, until she died. And after that they had remained in the house by themselves. How they had come to be in the space above the ceiling or why Ramona had thought to look there was something Flavio and his sister never talked about. Flavio had almost come to think that the seven Ladies had stopped for coffee one morning and chose, for their own reasons, never to leave.

  Flavio could feel that Felix’s weight had shifted against him and that the old man’s breathing had slowed. There wasn’t a sound in his sister’s house, and he thought that if he didn’t get up soon, he would fall asleep and all of this day would be lost.

  “We should go, Felix,” he said. “To find your son who is probably worried sick.” Through the open door he could see the cottonwood trees where his truck was parked and, beyond that, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that sat still and dusty in the heat.

  “How can it be so hot?” Flavio said to no one. “I can never remember it like this.” Then Flavio felt Felix move his hand and reach over and cover his own.

  In a voice harsh and low and unused, Felix said, “Flavio, I can see Guadalupe dancing in the snow.”

  Two

  GUADALUPE GARCÍA WAS CRAZY and even Flavio, who was nine years old, could see that. Worse, she was crazy and old. Flavio wished that he and his friend, Felix, were anywhere else than in her kitchen eating stale tortillas that went down his throat like dirt.

  “Sometimes,” his mother had told him not so long ago, “there are people and places that are not what they seem. While it’s true, hijo, that the García house is no more than mud and sticks like ours, it’s also true that the spirits of her whole family are seeped into the walls, and not one of them was ever in their right mind.” His mother had been lying in bed, a pillow propped behind her head. She had reached over and taken his arm in her hand. “If some of the children in this village want to throw rocks through the windows of that house, that’s their business. You, Flavio, are never to go near there. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mama,” Flavio had answered, without a second thought. He was a boy who knew instinctively that there was an easy way to go through this life, and disobeying either of his parents, or anyone else for that matter, was not a thought that occurred to him. Besides, even looking at the García house from a safe distance made him feel as if he were standing in shadows.

  The house Guadalupe García lived in was the same house in which her great-great-great-grandfather, Cristóbal García, had once lived. It was built, as Flavio’s mother had said, of mud and sticks and sat on the hill not far from the church. The roof was dirt and—if there was enough rain in the spring—weeds and grasses and even small apricot trees would gr
ow atop the house. Although the walls were thick and the corners of the house were buttressed to the earth, with its small canted doorway and few windows and the way it leaned with the ground, it often seemed to Flavio as if the house was not only on the verge of falling over, but was secretly thinking about leaving the valley.

  The house was not only the oldest in the village but also the largest. It sprawled over what seemed to be an entire acre. Rooms branched everywhere off the original structure as if not one of Cristóbal’s numerous descendants ever wished to leave home, but just built their own rooms, attaching them haphazardly wherever they liked. There was no semblance of order to the place, and to Flavio it looked as though it had been built by children with whom he would not have had one thing in common.

  “There are rooms in this house that I have forgotten,” Guadalupe said, looking at Flavio. “If you come back, I’ll show you. I’ll show you the room where my great-grandmother, Percides García, was kept. When she died in her small bed, the priest left this house and never came back.”

  Flavio lowered his head and looked down at the table. The surface was built of heavy wood and it was rough and scarred and, in places, burned black. The floor it stood on was hard-packed adobe, and Flavio could see the shape of large rocks beneath it. After so many years of sweeping, the earth itself was being uncovered. He glanced back up at Guadalupe. She was sitting across from him and Felix, and again Flavio thought that he was in the house of a crazy woman. If his mother could have known that, he would have been beaten. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been his Grandmother Rosa who had sent them here.

  “Take this, hijo,” Rosa had said, handing Flavio a burlap bag of halva beans. “I want you and Felix to go to Guadalupe García’s house and give these to her.”

  Flavio’s eyes had widened. “But …”

  “I know what you are going to say, hijo. That your mother would not have wished this.” Flavio’s mother had died gently in her sleep the previous winter, and now he and his little brother, José, spent much of their time with Rosa while their father worked.

  “Don’t worry yourself, hijo,” Rosa had said. “Your mother would have understood.”

  “But Guadalupe García is crazy.”

  “So?” Rosa had said, and then she had gone back to the dishes in her sink. “Now go.”

  Guadalupe was sitting with both her hands on the top of the table, smiling in a way that made Flavio feel uncomfortable. Her hair fell far down her shoulders and was white—not gray like Flavio’s grandmother’s, but white, the color of snow, the color of clean paper. But her face was clear and smooth and her eyes were too wide, as if she were an old woman and a young girl at the same time. She was wearing a nightgown that fell to her knees and her arms were bare. There seemed to be so much of this woman that Flavio wished he were outside with grass and sky around him.

  Guadalupe moved a strand of hair away from the side of her face. Then she leaned back in her chair and folded her hands in her lap. “I can tell you boys something that no one else knows,” she said.

  “What?” Felix asked. He was sitting close beside Flavio and staring at Guadalupe, his mouth full of tortilla. His foot kicked against one leg of his chair.

  “It’s a long story,” she said, staring over the boys’ heads and out the open door. “Have you the time to listen?”

  “We’re not doing nothing, are we, Flavio?” Felix said, and Flavio, who knew that what Guadalupe had asked was more than a question, lowered his head and half closed his eyes. Deep scratches were etched on the table, and with his eyes squinted he thought they looked like rivers that ran everywhere and nowhere.

  “My great-great-great-grandfather was Cristóbal García,” Guadalupe said. “He was the first man to ever set foot in this valley. And with him came Hipolito Trujillo and Francisco Ramírez.”

  HIPOLITO TRUJILLO STOOD AMONG THE LOOSE ROCK and dwarf piñon on the slope of a foothill that overlooked the valley below. Standing beside him was his first cousin, Francisco Ramírez, and behind the two of them, his arms wrapped around his stomach, his shoulders slumped, was Cristóbal García. All three were thin and unshaven. Their hair was long and matted. They wore wide-brimmed hats pulled low on their foreheads, and their clothes were stained with dirt and sweat and the fat of small animals they had killed and butchered. Their raw and blistered feet were wrapped in cloth and strips of leather.

  “All we could ever wish for is here,” Hipolito said. He looked at his cousin and the two men smiled. Then they lowered themselves to their knees and bowed their heads, their arms hanging slack. “By the blessed virgin,” Hipolito went on as his eyes filled with water, “this will be our home.”

  Cristóbal García looked over their heads. Although the valley below was bathed in a soft light from the setting sun and the air was still and warm, he felt chilled, as if the world had turned to ice. We have come too far from where we belong, he thought, and this place does not want us here.

  They had set out from the village of Las Sombras twenty-eight days before in search of a place where they and their families could begin a new life. They had left on foot with Francisco’s burro to carry their supplies: flour and dried meat, blankets, and a few tools. The burro, which had never been named, was small and so old it slept lying down and had to be hit with sticks each morning to stand. And, as it had gone blind years before, it was led by a thin rope.

  At first, they had traveled slowly along the base of the mountains, thinking that surely in a land so empty it would not be difficult to find what they were looking for. “After all,” Hipolito had told Francisco and Cristóbal just before leaving Las Sombras, “beyond each ridge lies a valley untouched and waiting for us.”

  They had stopped in each place they thought held the possibilities of enough water and shelter and pasture. But each time one thing or another was lacking. The creeks, running full in the mountains, suddenly disappeared beneath the ground or became dry, dusty arroyos, or the foothills lay flat and bare, offering no protection from the cold and wind. In one small valley, they had found markings that the Indians had left behind, pots full of colored powder, the hides of deer and bear stretched between trees, and circles of stone with strange clay figures propped up in the center with sticks. Though there had been no sign of life there, they had left quietly and quickly, leaving no trail behind them.

  After ten days, they began to wander aimlessly. They would find themselves walking through old snow high up in the mountains or far out in the valley that stretched forever to the north and held only cracked earth and spindly grass.

  We are lost, Cristóbal would think, stumbling behind his companions, in a land that cares nothing for us. When they would stop for the night, he would sit huddled close to the fire and voice his fears to Hipolito and Francisco.

  “You cannot get lost,” Hipolito would say, “where no one has been.”

  “That is what lost is,” Cristóbal would answer.

  “To find our way back, we need only to return the way we came.” Cristóbal would shake his head and look into the fire. “We have been walking in circles for days. To go back the way we’ve come would only bring us here.”

  Hipolito would lean toward Cristóbal and place his hand on his shoulder. “With luck,” he would say, “tomorrow will be the end of our journey. You must have faith, my friend.”

  But whatever faith Cristóbal once had was now gone. He didn’t know what he was doing in the middle of a vast wilderness, especially with two men who spoke to him as if he were a child and who shared none of his fears. Worse, he could barely remember what had prompted him to leave the safety of Las Sombras in the first place. All he truly wanted was to be in his small house surrounded by his eight daughters who loved him dearly and his wife whom he had known all his life and who cared for his children and was never out of sorts. How could a man, he thought, who had so much, give it away for something that couldn’t be found?

  Each morning, the three men would wake in the cold, their blankets sti
ff with a thick layer of frost, and again, as he had the night before, Cristóbal would begin to complain. Francisco would look at him is disgust, as if there were little difference between his burro who refused to rise without being beaten and Cristóbal, who sat hunched and motionless by the fire, his blanket wrapped tightly around his shoulders. Hipolito would begin to talk as if Cristóbal had forgotten his past and what had happened in it.

  “They were killing the priests,” Hipolito would say. “That is why we left, my friend.”

  And each morning, his head bowed, Cristóbal would stare at the smoldering fire and answer the same. “There are too many priests.”

  Francisco would grunt and shake his head and feed small sticks into the coals. “They were shot with arrows, like animals,” he said. “Then they were beaten with rocks and their clothes were stripped from their bodies and thrown in trees. How could you have forgotten all this, Cristóbal?”

  “It is the fault of the priests. If they would leave the Indians to themselves, none of this would have happened, and we would be home in Las Sombras where we belong.”

  “The priests will never leave the Indians alone,” Hipolito would say softly to Cristóbal, and although Hipolito knew that what Cristóbal had said was true, this was the closest he or his cousin would ever come to speaking out against the church.

  The village of Las Sombras was at the end of a long trail that wound and twisted and sometimes disappeared altogether south, far into Mexico and beyond. The village sat, with its small, mud plaza and scattered ranchitos, just a few miles west of a large Indian pueblo. Even though they were so near each other, other than chance encounters while gathering wood and the sporadic trading of meat or cloth or seed, there was seldom any contact between the two. It was as if each village had somehow come to believe that the other did not exist, and that if it did, it was in everyone’s best interest to ignore that fact. And Cristóbal was right, whenever problems did arise, it always seemed to stem from the doings of the priests.