“We've been following the same route for almost five hundred years, and we're not going to change now so that they can stop at the hotels!”
“But that's where the tourists are, Father. The hotels will give more financial support to the processions if we pass in front of them …”
The stewards were prosperous merchants and professionals. In earlier years they had tended to be very devout, observant gentlemen, but since the end of the war they had demonstrated more interest in the hospitality industry than in the preservation of traditions. As he listened to their discussion from the waiting room, the prosecutor thought of an impresario from Huanta who had proposed the previous year that the celebration be extended to an entire Holy Month with different processions each day. He had calculated that this would multiply the influx of tourists. And money.
The stewards came out of the office visibly annoyed. The Associate District Prosecutor preferred to wait a moment before going into the office. When he finally did, Father Quiroz was preparing to go out.
“I hope this will be brief, Señor Prosecutor,” said the priest, without inviting him to sit down. “This is the most complicated week in the year.”
“I understand, Father.”
“How are things? Do you have another burned body to investigate?”
“No. Not a burned body. I have Justino Mayta Carazo. Do you remember him?”
The priest seemed to make a slight effort to remember as he looked inside his briefcase. He replied as he closed it:
“Ah, yes. What happened to that little thief? Did they find him?”
“Yes, but dead.” The priest froze. The prosecutor wondered if his words had not been too abrupt. “I mean … They found him on Acuchimay Hill, eaten by buzzards. It happened early Friday morning.”
The priest crossed himself. He seemed to whisper a few rapid words, perhaps some formula for those who rest eternally in peace. Or not. The prosecutor did not know how corpses rest.
“Was it an accident?” the priest asked.
“No.”
“Was it the same … the same as last time?”
“We think so.”
“Come with me.”
They went to the eating hall for the poor of the Church of the Heart of Christ, which was half a block away. The Associate District Prosecutor wondered if he would ever succeed in talking to Father Quiroz while they were sitting down. When they reached the eating hall, they found a long line of beggars sitting on the sidewalk in front of the door. The beggars immediately surrounded the priest, who avoided them with an amiable gesture that indicated broad experience of this kind. The prosecutor and the priest went inside, where a short dark nun was waiting anxiously for Quiroz's arrival.
“How are we, Sister?”
“We have a new donation of milk, Father, but it won't be enough. There are too many,” she added, pointing outside.
“We'll do what we can. Divide the servings in half, and when that's finished, then it's finished.”
“All right, Father.”
The nun hurried to give instructions in the kitchen and then returned to the door. She opened it. Dozens of beggars pushed their way in. Some had been disabled during the time of terrorism, others were simply campesinos who had come to the city for Holy Week but could not pay for food. They sat at four enormous tables. The nun, with two other sisters, served pieces of bread, glasses of milk, and a thick soup in deep bowls.
“Your killer seems like a very devout man,” the priest remarked, returning to the subject.
“What do you mean?”
“The burning … the buzzards. He seems to be trying to destroy the body so it can't be resurrected … if you'll permit me a mystic interpretation.”
“No … that possibility had not occurred to me.”
“Hmm. It's curious. We humans, Señor Prosecutor,” the priest began to expound, “are the only animals who have an awareness of death. The rest of God's creatures do not have a collective experience of death, or they have one that is extremely fleeting. Perhaps each cat or dog thinks it is immortal because it hasn't died. Do you follow me? But we know we will die and are obsessed with fighting death, which makes it have a disproportionate, often a crushing presence in our lives. Human beings have souls to the exact extent that we are conscious of our own deaths.”
Some diners came over to the priest to ask for his blessing. The priest stopped speaking to trace signs of the cross in the air, as if he were tossing them carelessly in every direction. The prosecutor tried to recapitulate what he had just heard. Some words seemed familiar, but taken together their meaning escaped him. Perhaps it was the subject of death that was absent from his thinking. How could he think about death or know what it was? He was not dead, at least he did not think he was. The priest continued:
“We live the experience of death in others but don't assume it in ourselves. We want to live forever. That is why we save bodies for resurrection. Burying them is saving them. Etymologically, ‘burial ground’ or ‘cemetery’ are not words that refer to death but to repose, the body's rest until it is rejoined with the soul. It's beautiful, isn't it?”
The prosecutor did understand those words but did not understand what was beautiful about them.
“Yes, very nice.”
Quiroz stopped for a second to bless one of the diners, a man without legs who came to him, pushing himself along with his fists. The priest gave him the blessing on his forehead, and the man returned to his table, satisfied. Quiroz continued speaking:
“Some pre-Columbian cultures buried their dead with all their implements so they could use them in the afterlife. Right here, thirty kilometers from what is now Ayacucho, the Wari even buried important people with their slaves. Except that the slaves were buried alive. They were a warrior culture.”
They were brought two glasses of warm milk with cinnamon, a nonalcoholic version of punch. The prosecutor did not want to ask if they had mate. As he felt the first swallow revivifying his body, the Associate District Prosecutor thought of the meaning of the word “Ayacucho”: “Place of the dead.” For a moment, he thought of his city as a great sepulcher of slaves buried alive. The grave that he himself had chosen and decorated with old mementos of his mother. He tried to change the subject:
“And the blood? Justino's body was found without any blood. Does that mean anything?”
The priest shrugged.
“If you start looking, everything has a transcendental meaning. Everything is an expression of the mysterious will of the Lord. The blood may have a more pagan significance. It could be the blood of sacrifice. In many religions, the sacrifice of animals is intended to offer to the dead the blood needed to maintain the life ascribed to them. Draining someone's blood is draining the body of life in order to offer all that life to a different soul.”
The prosecutor tried to take a drink of milk before answering, but the speckle of cinnamon looked like a bloodstain to him. Without knowing why, he remembered the words: “Ye shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh; for the life of all flesh is the blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off.” He said them aloud. The priest specified:
“Leviticus 17:10–14. I see you keep up with your Bible reading.”
“I don't know where I heard it. I suppose I remember it from some Mass I went to when I was a boy. I used to go with my mother. And the seven daggers in the chest of the Virgin of Sorrows? What do they represent?”
“Seven silver daggers for the seven sorrows that the passion of Christ produces in his mother. Are you investigating a case, Señor Prosecutor, or do you want to take first communion?”
“It is just that the two deaths seem to have something to do with Holy Week: Ash Wednesday, Friday of Sorrows … it is … too much of a coincidence, isn't it?”