“And they mutilated the animals,” Isaac said, lowering his voice behind his wet, scaly mustache.
He sat at the head of the refectory with five keys — very large ones — in his hand and his chair set on the metal plate that leads to the mysterious basement where no one else but he can go because it has five padlocks and he is master of the keys.
He looks at us, his four sons, Lucas, Juan, Mateo, and me, Marcos, so named, my father said, to move from the Old to the New Testament once and for all. Otherwise, he advised our mother, Angelines, he would have had to call us Esaú, Jacobo, and right there the problems began, since Jacobo had thirteen sons and my father only four. His decision to change Testaments saved me and my three brothers from being named Isacar, Zebelún, or Zilpa.
Long live the New Testament, I said to myself and wondered from the time I was a boy why there was no Third Testament. What happens next, what’s the Present-day Testament?
After the war, the agrarian laws of the Revolution were gradually set aside or punched as full of holes as a colander. There were no more haciendas. Now they were called ranchos. And all you had to do was put together small properties with names of various owners to have, at the very least, a mini-estate. And sometimes recreate a real old-fashioned land holding.
My father was in an intermediate position with his property, Los Camilos, thanks to the benevolence of successive municipal presidents, governors, and dignitaries of the official party, the PRI, the great political umbrella for all ideological postures, from ultraconservative Catholics to simulated Marxists. The latter were radishes — red on the outside, white on the inside. The former, from holy cross-bearing families, had an obscene popular appeal.
Perhaps, for my father, the legacy of the bloody religious war was the obligation to restore the lands of Los Altos and wipe out all vestiges of faces and walls equally marred by disease and machine guns.
And that was what he did. The honor fell to my father of recovering his wealth without renouncing his faith. From the time we were children, he would take his four sons to visit the lands of the Los Camilos ranch, named in honor of the congregation founded in Rome in 1586 to care for the dying. “Because this land was dying, and only with reborn faith was the land reborn.”
Herds of cattle. Extensive cornfields. Land without tenant farmers, all of it belonging to Isaac Buenaventura and his four sons. From the Sierra del Laurel to the border with Aguascalientes, there was no ranch more productive, better run, and with more certain boundaries than this property of Los Camilos, land that only the sons of Isaac and the grandsons of Abraham would share one day.
My father had us — Juan, Lucas, Mateo, and Marcos — learn about every corner of Los Camilos, the herders and the cornfields, how to tend to the mares about to give birth and how to count acres, but finding out as well that here the hail was severe, and there were snakes and huisache cactus, and the great organs of nopal were like the sentinels of our land.
For this was our land, and its miracle, to my young eyes, was that nothing had killed it, neither war nor peace, since both can suffocate life that isn’t the extreme of violence or of tranquility but the object of constant attention, a state of alert to avoid falling into destruction or abstinence. It was enough to see and love this land to re-create in the soul a vigorous equilibrium typical of complete men, conscious of possible mistakes and reluctant to accept premature glory. Nature in Los Altos de Jalisco is frugal, parsimonious, sober, like the appearance and speech of the inhabitants.
And still there was a latent power in the herds and cornfields, in the clouds of slow urgency, in the wind trapped in the caves that didn’t allow me to live absently, without ambition and even without rebelliousness. When the mountain approaches and the wheat rises, the brambles retract and the beeches grow until they reach their dense green coronation, a man is transformed along with nature and the senses are nourished by the smells and tastes of the countryside, smoke and tar and stables and sometimes the flashing passage of half-seen butterflies, more fragile than a rainbow, that blinded me with their rapid flight, as if saying, Follow us, Marcos, come with us, let yourself go. .
But my father was anchored to this land and even more so to his place at the head of the refectory, sitting there with the keys to the basement in his hand and looking at us with severity when he said that if our Cristero grandfather died for religion, it was up to his son and grandsons to pay homage to Abraham’s sacrifice by dedicating ourselves to God.
“That is why I have determined that each one of you, when you turn eighteen, will go to Guadalajara to begin your studies at the Seminario del Eterno Enfermo in order to enter the priesthood and dedicate your lives to the service of Our Lord.”
His patriarchal glance cut off any response, protest, or personal opinion.
“The first to go will be you, Marcos, because you’re the oldest. I’ve noticed you have a vocation because you fast so often.”
I didn’t disillusion him. If I fasted, it was not because I had a priest’s vocation but because I was fat and wanted to diet to attract the girls in the settlement. But I didn’t say anything. I bowed my head in acceptance and allowed my father to continue his heroic evocations.
“Grandfather Abraham’s final wish was that they not give him anything to drink for an entire day before they shot him and allow him to piss before he stood against the wall.”
He looked at us with a singular, terrible meaning. “You, Marcos, and then Juan and Mateo and Lucas, are going to the seminary the same way, without pissing your pants.”
He made a Jupiter-like pause. “Grandfather Abraham died for religion. You must pay tribute to his sacrifice by dedicating yourselves to God.”
If one of the four of us was tempted to yawn at the table upon hearing the same old song for the thousandth time, our astute father immediately brought into play the memory of our sainted mother, Doña Angelines, who died giving birth to Mateo and on whom, to assure her going to heaven, our father — he recounts it brutally — painted a cross on her breast with blood from the birth.
“Remember it, boys. Remember it, Mateo, when it’s your turn to go to the seminary. You were born under the sign of the bloody cross, and only your dedication to the Lord Our God and His Holy Apostolic Roman Catholic Church will save you from the sin of having caused the death of the one who gave you life.”
I dared to look at my little brother, barely twelve years old and terrified, mortified, disoriented by my father’s words. I listened with my head held high. I looked at Mateo, lifting it even higher, encouraging him in silence, Mateo, don’t bow your head, up, Mateo, up.
Right after that my father skewered us: “If all of you don’t become priests, the ghost of Grandfather Abraham will haunt you.”
That was why at night, all of us lying in the same large bedroom in accordance with another of my father’s maxims (“This way you’ll keep an eye on one another”), we spoke of our fear that the ghost of our grandfather, Abraham Buenaventura, would appear to us if we disobeyed our father, Isaac. We were frightened by the movement of the trees, the creaking of the grate, and the terror that into our room would come the Cristero parade of starving children clutching at their mothers’ skirts, the marred faces of the soldiers, the corpses wrapped in sleeping mats, the dogs barking at the moon.