one, dated November 7, 1990, was inscribed on yellow legal paper in my brother’s backward slanting hand and mailed from his new post in Chiapas, where he’d been sent, at his own request, as soon as he was ordained. I held the sheet in my hand for a moment, thinking that Stefan had written this. I was surprised at what the thought of him sitting at some dusty desk in southern Mexico did to the back of my throat.
Dear Jonah,
I’m not sure whether I should say thanks or not for the date nut cake, which was waiting for me at the rectory of Iglesia de Guadalupe when I arrived last Tuesday. It was smashed flat. But it reminded me of you and the kitchen and the barrel of brandy, and how hard I used to work at pulling bookstore duty so I didn’t have to chop dates anymore.
Knowing you, you’re waiting for a rundown on my new home, so I’ll start with the city itself, which is famous in the guidebooks as the jewel of los altos, the highlands. Downtown, where all the tourists go, it’s still sixteenth-century Colonial. The first impression you get is that you’ve arrived in a Europe transplanted to the mountains of Mexico—all those monumental old Spanish edifices, like the Cathedral and the governmental palace. But woven in and around the relics of Castilian Spain are the colors of los indigenas, the vibrant blues and purples and yellows and oranges of the Tzeltales, Tzotziles, Zoque, Tojolabales. You see them in the huipiles, on sale everywhere, and in the flowerpots and on the painted wooden doors. They remind me of Sherpa women’s dresses in Nepal.
My church was built in the 1830s on top of a steep hill overlooking the city. You have to hike up seventy-nine steep steps to get to it, but the view from the top is worth it. I stay in a small house in one of the neighborhoods below. Everybody here let me know right off the bat that I’m filling some pretty big shoes and not doing a very hot job of it. The last priest, Fr. Carlos, keeled over with a heart attack at fifty-one, and nobody’s gotten over it yet. I sleep in his bed.
Jorge is the deacon here. He’s local, grew up in Barrio el Cerrillo, a neighborhood built in the mid-1500s to house the Indian ex-slaves of the Spanish. He speaks all three of the Mayan dialects you hear most often in San Cristóbal, even though after four hundred years there are probably more ladinos on the family tree than pure indigenas anymore. His father was shot by robbers when Jorge was five; his mother died of pneumonia when he was sixteen. Since he’d been an altar boy for years at one of the biggest churches in town, the congregation there split the kids up between them. He was allowed to live in the rectory with the priests and eventually got a couple years of seminary under his belt. In spite of the Dickens story line, he’s your basic, normal guy.
The head priest is Fr. Martin, sixty or so, a sad survivor of the Salvadoran nightmare. He hasn’t talked to me about it yet. Jorge filled me in the day after I arrived. He was a friend of Rutilio Grande. I’m sure you’ve read about all that. Another priest friend, one of his closest, was tortured for days. And three of his own catechists were run off a mountain road. He was supposed to be with them. The congregation here, almost all indigenas, seem very protective of him. Some of them know firsthand what he’s been through, and not because they’re Salvadorans or Guatemalans. I’m talking about right here in Chiapas.
So, I promised you an explanation. And now it’s been almost six years since I left the Hermitage and went gallivanting off to seminary, not to mention Mexico, and I still haven’t given you one. So I’m going to try.
All my life I’ve been a coward. Or maybe that’s not right. All my life I’ve been afraid. It started when I was a little kid, this weird blank nothingness interposing itself between me and everything else, and it hasn’t fully lifted off since, though I’ve gotten used to it. When I was fourteen, my grandfather died under somewhat strange circumstances, you could say, and things got a lot worse. As in, I started obsessing about getting rid of myself. But that was probably just teenage drama—who knows? Pot helped, at least for a while.
Actually, there’s a lot more to this story—a lot—but I’ve never told a soul and I can’t tell you yet either. Not till I tell it to Eva. It’s our family, hers and mine, and I owe it to her, even though I can’t imagine when she’s going to hear it. Sorry, Jonah. Nothing to do with you.
I don’t know when I figured out what I was really dealing with. For a long time I thought this death cloud was my own creation, that it was coming from some putrid place inside me, and that what I needed to do was get strong enough to push it back. But then I got to be friends with that priest in Chicago I told you about, Fr. Anthony, and somehow he knew what was going on with me. He’s the one who put me in touch with Fr. John in Nepal. Said I needed to be in a place where I could learn about love. In a “school of the Lord’s service,” as Benedict would say. So I went. And three years of tending the dying made the blankness lift a little. Enough, anyway, to get me past the crisis point. Enough to get me into college, to begin tackling this thing as a philosophical or religious question rather than as my own personal problem—i.e., what is the nature of evil?
I’m out of time. I’ll keep this going in the next one. But that’s why I’m here. Because of evil and because I’ve been so afraid of it.
Sorry to make this so heavy, but you asked.
Yours,
Stefan
Evil. Yes, I’d read that on the plane, but impatiently, trying to get to the facts, and the term hadn’t really registered. Not, at least, like it was registering now. My brother, my brat, that sweet kid with the big horn-rims, had been obsessed with evil, had thought that he himself was some festering source of it, had even thought about offing himself. While I was busy feeling slighted. While I was passing judgment, Bruno-style.
And what was he talking about, the family secret I didn’t know? Had Djed been murdered after all? It was not beyond the realm of possibility.
I swallowed, then looked up. Jan was still frowning at his journal, Rikki still asleep. I pulled out Letter #2, written April 1, 1991.
Dear Jonah,
Hello, and hope you are well. Life goes on at Iglesia de Guadalupe. Every morning I get up for Vigil with Jorge and Martin. We don’t hold it in the church, but in a small back room of our house. It’s a good time: dawn just breaking, a chill in the air, the town still asleep. I started it; they’d never done it before, but when I described our schedule at the Hermitage, both of them thought it would be good. Sometimes we have to wait ten minutes for Martin. He seems to have lost a lot of sleep over the years.
At 7:00 I celebrate Mass in the church, and there’s usually a crowd. You would like our altar. It would appeal to the snob in you that secretly prefers Florentine architecture to the 1950s stucco at the Hermitage. Guadalupe is your standard old Mexican iglesia, complete with fully decked-out statues and a murky oil of Our Lady on the wall. Tourists love it, but little do they know. This place—really, most of the San Cristóbal diocese—is up to its eyeballs in controversy, which is exactly (I know this will surprise you) why I requested placement here.
Basically, it’s the old story: a few rich latifundistas (large landholders) hoarding all the wealth, while the peasants (mostly Maya subsistence farmers clustered in small villages throughout the mountains) live in crushing poverty. It’s feudal, and the colonial mind-set that still reigns here requires that the power remain in the hands of the landholders. Any protest on the part of the indigenas is automatically labeled Marxist and brutally suppressed. But it’s not just the official cops and army at work. Many of the latifundistas fund their own private police (they call them the Guardia Blanca here) who specialize in terror tactics—kidnappings, torture, beheadings, massacres.
Our bishop, Samuel Ruiz García, is the bane of their existence. He’s a powerful force here, and not afraid to mix it up with the PRI-istas who run
