Читать книгу A Land Without Sin - Paula Huston - Страница 10

It took me six days to figure out an interesting fact, which was that not every photograph I took was equally important to my boss. In fact, three-quarters of my work seemed entirely extraneous. After a while, I could tell pretty easily when we were just shooting and when it was a very big deal. The same old glyph—the four-petaled k’in symbol—night after night, but never the same reaction out of our leader.

I also noticed another thing. He spent a lot of time writing things down, usually in the morning before Rikki and I crawled out of our tents to cook breakfast. He wrote in a large, bound journal, often with an open book beside him, which he would study from time to time before writing some more. I know this because I was studying him through the open flap of my tent as I lay in my sleeping sheet with one arm crooked behind my head.

It was the strange similarity between him and Stefan that fascinated me. Once I made the connection, I could not shake the thought that there was something I could learn about my brother if I just watched Jan long enough. Jan was older, of course, and weighted down by cares probably having to do with his mysterious marriage and who knows what else, while Stefan was, in contrast, less burdened by worldly matters, or at least less burdened than he’d been for so many years after Djed died, finally letting that grief slip from him. They also did not resemble each other physically. Stefan looked like a male version of me, tall and slenderly built, his prodigious nervous energy masked, like mine, beneath an air of studious calm, while Jan came across as the Dutchman he was, slow-moving and rock solid. In spite of his old demons, Stefan had managed to retain his sweet, abstracted smile—at least he still had it the last time I saw him—while Jan seemed sunk beyond where happiness could reach. But in some important way—maybe in the focused way they tackled life, or how they were both at home with silence—they shared some common ground that, on first blush, you wouldn’t think to look for.

As it turned out, Bruno was dead wrong about Stefan’s drug dealing, or, for that matter, all other aspects of his alleged debauchery. I was wrong, too. I figured my brother must have found shelter in one of his pothead friend’s garages when he got kicked out. Instead, he was quietly taken in by one of the priests at St. Silvan’s, Fr. Anthony, yet another postwar immigrant, the very guy who’d baptized both of us and who apparently understood everything there was to know about our family without having to be told. Priest or not, he was streetwise enough not to flaunt what he was doing in front of my parents. He made sure Stefan ate, slept in an actual bed, found a night-shift job at a grocery store stocking shelves, and got enrolled at the local public high school, from which, by some miracle, he actually graduated on time.

I learned all this when I caught up with Stefan a few years later in Nepal. My leaving Chicago was preordained. Not only had my brother advised me to get the hell out as soon as I possibly could, I’d also managed to embroil myself in an increasingly dicey liaison, my first venture into the dangerous thickets of erotic love, during my senior year at St. Silvan’s. Alexander was his name. Urgent were his hands. Perilous was my lot. It was time to flee.

Over the years, I’d gotten sporadic postcards from Stefan, sent not to the house but directly to St. Silvan’s and mysteriously passed on to me, who never figured out the identity of our cagey postman, Fr. Anthony. I knew that for the past three years, Stefan had been living in Kathmandu, but I assumed—thanks in part to Bruno’s self-confident, made-up accounts of what Stefan was up to—that he’d probably been hanging out somewhere my tata had never heard of: on the infamous Jochen Tole, aka Freak Street, just another pilgrim on the long and winding hippie trail. As it turned out, he was taking care of terminal TB patients at a hospice run by—you guessed it—Catholics. Or one Catholic, at least: a Yoda-like priest from India called Fr. John.

At first, though Stefan seemed happily shocked to see me, we were a little shy with one another. It had been so ridiculously long. And we had both changed. I was no longer the little girl who’d sobbed into his T-shirt during that final, agonizing farewell. And after years of nothing but dal bhat and endless cups of chai, he himself was almost unrecognizable. Clothed in your typical Newari villager garb—loose white pants, loose white shirt, woven skull cap, and Goodrich tire sandals—he didn’t even look American anymore. But slowly, in the warm glow of Fr. John’s benevolent presence, we started to relax. At Fr. John’s insistence, Stefan took a few days off to show me the countryside.

And this is where, in the car-less streets of medieval Bhaktapur, in the shadow of the Himalaya, I caught a glimpse of the future, which was that I would be a photojournalist. I’d go to crazy places and meet people I’d never meet except in the boonies. Life would be a thrill instead of the boring grind my parents had inflicted on themselves. And I would do something with it, though it was hard to say, even to myself, what that meant. I tried to explain all this to Stefan, who nodded wisely (all that time with Yoda) and said he could see it. That I was brave and tough and willing and smart—I took this with a large grain of salt—and already a good photographer. That all I needed to do was take myself seriously.

Then we indulged in some tender reminiscing about our long-ago visit to the Art Institute. He’d known right then, he told me, which was why he bought me the Brownie 127.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “that I broke into your room that day. I was so jealous of you and Djed . . .”

He waved me off, and I could see he was not yet ready to talk about our grandfather. So I held myself back from quizzing him about the mysterious locked box.

After we parted with a vow to stay in better touch, I kicked around on my own for a bit, testing out my wee new wings. Riding third-class buses into the mountains, venturing down into the Terai, the grasslands and jungles of southernmost Nepal, then taking the trains to South India, everywhere snapping pictures like a madwoman. When I finally ran out of money and it was time to catch a flight back home, I could not bring myself to do it. So I headed to London instead, got myself a job at the front desk of a twee hotel, and on my days off, started hanging around the Magnum office, hoping to meet a world-class photographer or two. Not only did I meet one, I got offered six unpaid hours a week as a volunteer file clerk, the official start of my brand-new life.

For Stefan’s part, three years with Fr. John at the hospice must have taught him whatever it was he needed to know, because shortly after I headed for London, he flew to California, enrolled himself in college, and, smarty-pants that he always was, set out to earn himself degrees in philosophy and theology. Back in London, I was grappling with an unwelcome revelation: not everything gets learned through osmosis. Like the celebrity photographers among whom I so diligently filed, if I were serious about the craft, I needed to hie me to photography school. And the only good one I could afford was in Southern California, which turned out to be a mere six-hour drive from where my brat was beavering away at the university.

I glanced through the tent flap. Jan was still frowningly absorbed, and Rikki slumbered on in his happy teenaged coma. I pulled out the packet of letters Jonah had given me before I flew to Guatemala. Though I’d skimmed them on the plane, understanding very little, it was time to read them again, slowly.

The first 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 the country. His friends call him one of the best advertisements for liberation theology in Central America. His enemies, including Televisa, the media network that dominates Mexico, refer to him as the “Red Bishop.” Two years ago he established a non-denominational, ecumenical human rights center here in San Cristóbal called Frayba, after Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, a sixteenth-century friar who became the first bishop of Chiapas. There’s a lot of similarity between Ruiz and de las Casas, who spent fifty years trying to overthrow the colonial encomienda system that kept the Mayas and other indigenous people enslaved.

But the Church is in a very tricky situation here. Political developments over the past few years have been devastating for the subsistence farmers. The twentieth-century reestablishment of their right to commonly owned village land (the ejido system) is currently under attack, and everyone’s convinced that soon there will be a constitutional amendment in favor of the big private landholders and/or foreign investors. Plus the forces arrayed against small farmers are not just local but international—the new NAFTA treaty spearheaded by the U.S., if and when it goes into effect, will flood the Mexican market with cheap corn, essentially wiping them out.

So as you would expect, guerrilla movements are afoot. There’s one located in the Lacandon Selva nearby that everybody seems to know about and nobody’s mentioning. From the perspective of the powers that be, anything that looks like it’s raising the political consciousness of the indigenas, including the Christian base communities (small family or village Bible studies and worship groups) that have any ties to our diocese, should be scrutinized with great suspicion. Over and over, the bishop and even the Vatican are having to emphasize the firm dividing lines between these small Christian communities and de facto political organizations, especially armed groups. But the situation is volatile.

So what am I, a would-be monk, a lover of the desert fathers and contemplative prayer, doing in the middle of this hotbed? Good question. But once again I’m out of time. Just know that it’s got to do with the same old issue and my inability to let it go till I work it out.

Stefan

A rabble-rousing bishop. A guerrilla group parked in a nearby jungle. Private police forces roving around looking to behead people. None of this sounded promising concerning Stefan’s disappearance. He could have run afoul of any variety of thugs, including the Catholic ones, though I had to admit that this Ruiz character did not sound like your typical episcopal spin doctor. And my sense was that if Ruiz even remotely suspected Stefan had been kidnapped by the bad guys, he’d be raising all kinds of hell about it. Yet the diocese had been almost totally silent on the subject of Stefan’s vanishing and professed to have no idea whatsoever where he might be.

That seemed extremely weird to me. Stefan worked for them. He had a superior. Somebody must be reporting to somebody on this, or at the very least the Church rumor mill had to be operating overtime. Nothing, however, was leaking out. The official word was that they did not consider him to be a missing person, though they did not know his whereabouts at the present time. This part had Jonah truly rattled, because according to him, it could only mean one thing: Stefan had gone off on his own. For whatever reason, whether to protect the hierarchy or to defy it, he’d cut himself out of the group and headed off on his own personal mission. And Jonah and I both knew that nothing in Stefan’s personality would give him one ounce of real help if he had launched out on some such heroic, harebrained venture.

Musing hard, I cast another fierce glance out the tent flap, only to meet the cold blue stare of my boss, who’d clearly been watching me for a while. Quietly, without dropping my eyes, I folded up the letters and slipped them under my sleeping sheet. But I could tell by the look on his face that his naturally suspicious nature, at least when it came to me, had been stirred back to life.