To say goodbye to me, my father ordered a funeral Mass, since it wasn’t a matter of wishing me luck but of reminding me of our dead mother and in this way burdening me with the responsibility to honor her memory with my future priesthood. The Fiftieth Psalm was recited, intercession for the departed soul was prayed for, the mother of the forsaken was invoked, and then there was a huge ranch fiesta where everybody raised their lemonades and I was sent off with a variety of popular exclamations.
“Don’t bump into any tarts, Marcos.”
“Don’t let your asshole pucker up in the city.”
“Listen, Marcos, before you become a priest, break the cherries of a couple of girls.”
My father gave me a snakeskin belt lined with silver pesos and newly coined morelianos. “So you don’t ask me for more. Manage it carefully. There’s no need to write to me. Don’t think about me. Think about God and your dead mother.”
And so I left behind my home village with a sound of barren rock and abandoned tools (which pursued me).
3. When I came back for a visit three years later to celebrate my twenty-first birthday at home, my father, filled with pride, ordered the church bells rung and boasted that now it was Juan’s turn to go to the seminary, too, because he was almost eighteen, and then Lucas, seventeen, would follow in his footsteps and little — or not so little anymore — Mateo, who was fifteen.
I arrived dressed in black — suit, tie, shoes — and a white shirt but without a high collar, in order not to attract too much attention.
With a certain pleasure I recognized the herds and the cornfields, the roads and tools of my childhood, and prepared to hear again the exploits of the Cristero War during supper with my three brothers, my father presiding as always with the key in his hand and the patriarchal chair set over the metal door and the forbidden basement.
“Well, well,” my father murmured. “Look, boys, at how they’ve sent your brother back to us so correct. You can really see his correctness, don’t you think?” He laughed out loud. “As they used to say in my day, politicians and lawyers are bigassed creatures. You can really see”—he gave me an apocalyptic look—“that Marcos has grown wings and that the discipline of seclusion and frugal meals has made his spirit thin and enlarged his soul.”
I imagined that my father would take these virtues for granted, without too much inquiry and almost as the work of the Holy Spirit.
“Well, Christian, what do you have to tell me?” my father, Isaac Buenaventura, said familiarly.
“Nothing,” I replied very seriously. “I study a great deal and never go out.”
“Learn something, boys,” he said to my brothers. “And get ready, it’s Juan’s turn now to go to Guadalajara to become a priest, and then you, Lucas, and you, Mateo, will follow.”
I dared to interrupt the old man, more wrinkled than a glove. “Tell me, Father, when the four of us are priests and you find yourself at the side of God, who will take care of the ranch?”
It was clear he wasn’t expecting this clairvoyant question. It was evident he was perturbed: He squeezed the keys to the basement more furiously than ever and, something unheard of in him, stammered and didn’t know what to say. It took him some time to find the words.
“What God gives us, God takes away. Think of your sainted mother.”
“Which means?” I insisted.
“That the lands will be for Holy Mother Church.”
“Why?” I asked with absolute relevance, I think.
“That’s what I promised my sainted wife. ‘Don’t worry. The lands will belong to the Church. Die in peace, Angelines.’ ”
“And what about us?” I asked, this time with audacity.
Now the old man didn’t hide his anger. “There are provisions in the will. Do you think I’m going to leave all of you out on the street?” He choked. “Insolent,” he concluded and, for the first time, stood and left the dining room.
Then Lucas stirred the fire in the living room, and the four of us sat down, certain the old man was already in his room.
“Do you really want to be a priest, Juan?” I asked the brother who was next to me in age and destiny.
Juan said no.
“What, then?”
“I want to be an agronomist. That way I’ll manage the ranch and make it prosper.”
“I think it’s dumb to go into the Church,” said Lucas. “It’s like going back to the rule of — what do you call it—”
“Mortmain,” I said mildly. “And you, Mateo?”
The impetuous fifteen-year-old didn’t restrain himself. “I want to get married. No priest, no nothing. I’d rather be an idiot in an asylum than a priest. I like skirts, not cassocks. I’m a man now. But damn it, if I tell Papa, he’ll tan my hide.”
I looked at the three of them slowly.
Juan with his face like a turkey egg, saved by large eyes as green as a volcanic lake and red hair very carefully groomed, as if he were afraid of himself in front of the mirror.
Lucas with his face of a psychic reader of tea leaves, very wise with his short brown hair and the tremulous ears of an amiable bat.
And poor little Mateo with pimples on a skin that promised to clear up as soon as he gave the green light to his recent appetite for women.
And in the three of them, the poorly disguised frustration of having to follow in my footsteps and go to the seminary.
“How well you look,” Lucas said to me. “You’ve lost weight and gained some polish at the same time.”
“It’s obvious the seminary has agreed with you,” added Juan.
I looked at them with amused eyes. “No seminary. I’m studying law. I’m going to be an attorney.”
There was a stupefied and at the same time joyful silence.
“But Marcos!” Lucas exclaimed.
“Forget it. Brothers. Listen to me. I’m offering you a way out.” One by one I observed them. “You, Juan, come this year to Guadalajara, enroll in engineering at U.G., and then you, Lucas, say nothing until it’s your turn and follow me to Guadalajara because I have a feeling your field is economics and not mortmain. And you, little brother, don’t give away the game with your impatience. Make love to the girls in the village; here, I’m giving you my supply of condoms, and you go have yourself a time in the brothels here in Los Altos. Then tell me where you want to study, and I’ll arrange it for you.”
I looked at them very seriously. “But it’s our secret, agreed?”
And the four of us, on that unforgettable night of brothers, swore like panthers promising one another not to press the law and to let everything happen without wearing out our luck.
4. Years later, Don Isaac Buenaventura opened the padlock on his trapdoor and went down to the basement. There he knelt in front of the perpetual lights that illuminated each portrait. That of Angelines, his wife. And that of his father, the Cristero Abraham Buenaventura.
And then he said to them, “Don’t blame me as if I were guilty of something. The fires have gone out, and the dogs no longer are barking. Well, before you eat the taco, you have to measure the tortilla. Am I remembering a past that never was? You are my witnesses. That past did exist. The good Christian does have a rosary around his neck and a pistol in his hand. Death to the impious, the sons of Lucifer, the teachers who are tarts. Now who will defend us, mother of the forsaken, father of all battles? And against whom do I defend myself? Are there any Masons left out there, or Communists? My life has been in vain? Ah, no, it hasn’t, I deny it, now I realize that thanks to Marcos and Mateo, Juan and Lucas, I, Isaac Buenaventura, became a rebel again like my father because I prepared the rebellion of my sons, I told them, ‘Let’s see who has the balls to rebel!’ And the four of them were rebels, the four of them were better and more independent than me, the four of them deceived me and left me like Policarpo in the song, who doesn’t roll over even in his sleep. . . . . . . . . . . . . A crucifix of steel. Dogs that bark at the moon. Fires that have gone out. The Church a great corpse. And I, Isaac Buenaventura, with the scaly mustache and a face more wrinkled than a glove and the pride that my sons turned out rebellious, exactly the way I wanted them to be. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Long live Christ the King who performs these miracles for me, for the ways of the Lord are mysterious, and not in vain, Angelines, did I make the sign of the cross on your breasts with the blood of your newborn son Mateo. And not in vain, Father Abraham, did you refuse to drink water before you were shot. . . . . . . . . . . . And let the grates creak, the dogs bark, the bells in the village ring in alarm, and the mares in heat and the mares giving birth all moan, because I’m still here guarding the earth, proud of my sons who didn’t allow themselves to be manipulated by their father and took charge of forging their own destiny, dissident in the face of life. . . . . . . . . . Now I’m going to have a drink and sing a song.”