MY FAVORITE CHAPTER FROM 'BEST OF FRIENDS'

It was the kindness. Kindness has always undone me. It’s my secret. Few people have discovered it. The priest upon whose doorstep I was left, no doubt in horror and then pity choosing such a name, help, it means, an appropriate entreaty – or offering – from Our Lady of Mercy; Father Miguel of the dusty robe and sunburned head, the huge callused hands of a peasant, unwrapping my rags and his lion’s heart quailing at the sight of my misshaped body – Father Miguel treated me kindly, and was rewarded for it by a loyalty which burns in me like piñon and juniper.

Not from me will anyone learn how Father used to sigh, late at night, over the pictures of that statue – look, Socorro, there’s genius, see the marble, can you believe a man could shape a stone so, it’s David, look, I’ve never been to Italy, no, little one, never left Mexico, muchacha, but you should come with me one day, we’ll travel on a boat, we’ll see the ceiling this man painted on the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the colors, dear God, this Michelangelo, truly an angel, Socorro, no? 

And his lips would quiver, my dear padre, the only father I ever knew, and I would imagine us setting out together on his big white mule, over the mountains toward the rising sun, my haunches bruised from the crude saddle but my heart shrilling like a cicada: away, away, we’re going away..! Ah, we never did...

Not from my lips will anyone hear of the pain like cactus spines in his face as he watched the acolyte with the face of an angel, fourteen-year-old Ramon Todos Santos Garcia, thinking himself unobserved, staring, starving in a dusty corner behind the screen, his hand moving violently under his robe, his lip bitten white. I know how to repay kindness.

Where was I? Kindness, that was it, as little as I’ve received, you become hawk-eyed for it, the least crumb is a feast to people like me. Like blind Pablo straining to hear his grand-daughter’s voice, her footsteps, sitting outside his casita all day, every day, the sun falling uselessly on the milky globes of his eyes. He once told me he loved to sit out in the rain: then he could hear the shapes of things, the hollow tiles of the roof singing, the drops falling on the leaves of the fig-tree, the gutters roaring. It took the rain to delineate his landscape; the rest of the time he sat in emptiness. Kindness is like that for me.

We’re grateful for the rain, here: it doesn’t come often. Sometimes the maize shrivels before harvest, like my body. The bones of the mountains stand revealed, unclothed in soft grass or trees: bare rock, raw and unforgiving, only the light to take pity and turn their harshness to violet and lavender and pigeon-wing grey. 

I once watched him paint them, the teniente I mean, I couldn’t believe how the tint went from the blueing ranges into his eyes and came out through his brush onto the paper. I thought God must do the same thing from hour to hour until dusk fell and the bats came out. Whenever I passed with an armful of laundry or a pitcher of water I stole a glance. His face was inward, not shuttered exactly but intently purposeful, looking from the horizon to his paintbox and down to the dazzling wet white paper. He could have been praying, except for his open eyes.

That was before the Señora seduced him. I can’t really blame her. What a challenge! He walked around with an ache you could feel just from standing near him, and he didn’t even know it. Luminously virginal, this thin dark-haired Lieutenant – teniente – of the Army of Los Estados Unidos, the gentlest representative of an occupying force you could ever imagine. I know.

I listen at keyholes, that’s how I know; my life has been lived emptying the chamberpots of the Señora and preparing her food, mending her linen and changing her sheets. There’s not much I don’t know. The padre loved old books, they were his weakness: whenever he traveled over the Sierra to see the bishop he would return with saddlebags of someone else’s books, with someone else’s name or coat of arms in the front, from the library of some hidalgo, with the spots and must of their previous life between the pages, even dead butterflies or dried flowers, and the dealer’s price penciled in the back. Second-hand, the padre used to say: nothing wrong with that.

 Second-hand, like my clothes and the food on my plate and my life. Someone else’s leavings. So you understand about the keyhole.

He didn’t know what to do, the teniente. I could tell. I’ve watched plenty of them who did, or thought they did; you can’t fake that sort of innocence. He was taken completely by surprise. The officers clustered round my Señora like bees to honey, no, to some musky perfumed huge-petalled flower. There was something desperate about her, a dark red hibiscus in a hedge of pink oleander. They gathered in the evenings, she held musical soirées and fed them: delicacies I’d labored over all day in that kiln of a kitchen, so she could dispense them graciously – goat-cheese and sweet red peppers seared in the fire, wrapped and fried in individual tiny tortillas. Slices of mango and papaya, avocado and banana, my cracked fingers smarting from the lime-juice, arranging them so neatly on a large oval platter with basket-work edges. What company, after the stifling society in our town! Their voices rose like starlings in the courtyard. They all wanted to get her between the sheets.

I don’t think he did. That’s why she went after him. Pursuit she was used to, it was old hat to her. I was her maid even before she married and was widowed and miscarried her child. I joined her household as her personal maid when I was eleven, after padre Miguel died. 

Her wide black eyes would melt you. She never lacked for admirers. Her family married her off at fourteen, quickly, while the bloom was still on her, fearful of all those hot young hands all over the town desperate to rub it off.

Now to be fair, she adored her husband. He was a little man, older than her by quite a bit, and he used to give it to her every night. When she got her period he would hang around with a hang-dog expression, you’d think he didn’t know how to do it for himself like poor Father Miguel, waiting till the last of her rags were clean and folded up and put away in her chest for next time (my job, of course) – then he’d go in to her as if he’d been on an ocean voyage for six months, out of sight of land and the moss between a woman’s legs.

He’d gobble her like a dog, too. I saw him once on his knees, begging her to let him. There, there, she said afterwards: there, there. Outside their door I put my hand in my wet crack and rubbed it up and down till the hungry wolf inside me stopped howling.

I could tell you every splinter, every crack in that door, the panels carved into birds and flowers, a long split through the heart of a lily: when they were inside going at it the light burned out like a fiery streak in the dark old wood beside the glimmering whitewashed wall, with the handforged hinge and latch; the noises coming through the key-hole: grunts, squeaks, her little yips like a puppy, her husband’s entreaties, and, later, his farts – her giggles – and his snores.

My poor Señora. When they told her he was dead, found already stiffening in a welter of his own bloody excrement in an inn-room between here and the coast, gone just like that, poor man, all alone on a business trip with no-one to tend him or even to close his eyes — when she heard that, she had hysterics. A funny little man, her senior by two decades, balding, but she genuinely loved him. She shrieked and collapsed and lay screaming on the floor, her arms and legs flailing about like the idiot in my village who had fits. 

I called the coachman to help pick her up. She kept thrashing around. Her shoe hit me in the mouth and cut my lip. Together we carried her to her room. ‘Go away,’ she raged. ‘Leave me alone! My life is finished. Over! Ah, God, blessed Virgin, take me too, take me! Take me!’

No wonder she lost the child, with all that carrying-on. Not a thought did she give it. Calm yourself, Señora, I begged her, think of the child, por favor, eat a little, don’t tire yourself out so. She drummed her fists and howled till she was hoarse. When the pain doubled her over she had no voice left to cry out. It slipped out in a brief gush of dark blood, the poor tiny unformed thing, may God bless its little immortal soul. I held it in my hand for a while. It was the saddest thing I ever saw.  Why couldn’t that be me, I asked God.  Why did You take that life and spare mine, that should have been aborted? I wrapped it in a handkerchief and buried it under the jasmine-bush in the courtyard. I did that at night, so no-one would see me say a prayer over it, unbaptised as it was. I said the same prayer poor Father Miguel used for himself, after he had lost his self-control: Miserere, Domine – Lord, have mercy. He always said it with such depth of feeling, that’s why it sticks in my mind. The Mass on Sunday was a grand celebration, a spectacle, a public sacrament, holy and filled with awe. This – those two words, Miserere Domine, Have mercy, Lord – this was private, humble, agonized. I know if I were the Lord God which one I’d listen to.

PARTS 1, 2 & 3 LINKED BELOW