RETURN TO THE FOLD

 

This is an excerpt from my as yet unpublished novel entitled The Process.

It is a passage from Chapter 5 – Return To The Fold.

 

On my twenty-eighth birthday, Doña María presented me with a Miraculous Virgin Medal. It was decidedly elegant—a small, meticulously engraved oval shield, with the image of the Virgin, arms outstretched as if gesturing her flock around her, to the shelter of her flowing robe. The medal was made of fine silver and hung from a strong but exquisitely crafted Paraguayan silver chain. The gift was to be worn, she made it clear, not shut away in a drawer somewhere.

I remember being  grateful and moved by the gesture, knowing as I did what sharing her faith meant to Doña María. But at the same time, I felt called upon to have a lengthy discussion with her concerning all the reasons why I should not wear a Catholic religious medal. I was, I explained, born of a Protestant family that would be hurt to see me using a Catholic symbol. Since when, she wanted to know, did I worry about my family's happiness. If I were so concerned about it, I would be living in the United States, not thousands of miles away.

 I went on to say that the long and the short of it was that wearing the thing—although I appreciated the thought more than she would ever know—meant that I believed in what it stood for, the organized Church, that I had faith that the Virgin was capable of guiding and protecting me. I explained that I simply wasn't convinced that this was true. To start with, I wasn't even sure I could believe in something as unlikely as the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth.

At first she listened with patience and urged me every so often to make an effort to believe until I actually did. But this last statement she considered an affront to the Virgin and she wasn't about to tolerate it.

“¡Basta! ¡Basta!” she hissed. I'm in no mood for blasphemies.”

Realizing I had upset her, I placed my hand over the back of hers where it lay on the glass-topped coffee table in the patio. It was there, over a demitasse of her deliciously strong coffee that she had presented me with the gift.

“Doña María,” I said, “please try and understand. I'm not a complete heathen. I believe in...I don't know...something. Cosmic forces, the release of some spiritual energy into the universe when we die. Ectoplasm or whatever. I think I may even believe in contact between mortals and spirits that have crossed over into another dimension. I believe in the forces of good and evil and the power of the spiritual over the physical. But I just can't translate those beliefs into something as imperfect and intrinsically corrupt as organized religion and certainly not into a system as authoritarian, repressive and narrow-minded as Roman Catholicism.”

 “You make it sound so monstrous! For me, my church is such a beautiful, wondrous place. Do you know the comfort religion can bring? The strength it can offer? The shelter it can provide? Why, I think I'm beginning to feel sorry for you. Don't make me pity you, Carlos!”

“I'm not un-spiritual, María,” I offered rather condescendingly. “I'm not anti-religion either. That's precisely what I'm trying to tell you. Religion is whatever works for you, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. What works for me is all very personal and intimate and yet somehow universal because I think that the different expressions of religion, as suggested by the hundreds of varieties of organized congregations, are all signs of belief in one and the same thing—the existence of something superior to us, or rather something superior to this existence as such.”

“Of course, but an organized church with studious leaders provides a vehicle for learning, an authority to instill discipline. We can't go around thinking ourselves so smart and superior that we can guide ourselves.”

“And you'd entrust that job to somebody else, just because he wears his collar backwards.”

“No. Because he has the studies and knowledge I don't.”

“You don't really believe that, do you, María? Why, you must be one of the most well-read and intelligent people I've ever met. I'm sure you know more about your own faith than the majority of the priests you've known. You must question many of the things they try to blindly feed you, don't you?”

 “Such as?”

“Such as, such as all this business about an idyllic heaven, a fiery hell and that universal waiting room called purgatory. You can't really believe it! Not an intelligent, worldly woman like you. It's just a lot of cock and bull made up by the ancient high priests to scare the ignorant into doing the will of the Church and the will of the kings of those times.”

As I spoke, ranting on about the domination of the ignorant through the corruption of religious beliefs at the service of politics, she sat shaking her head sadly, almost imperceptibly. When I had finished, she sat, hands folded on the patio table and looked me in the eyes.

“Carlitos,” she said, “Everybody knows that many priests are corrupt and ignorant. It is up to each one of us to separate the grain from the chaff, to seek out the ones who are truly called to their vocation, to find the ones who are capable of leading us, elevating us to a higher plane, understand?”

I nodded but started to protest saying, “But what about...”

She held up a staying hand. “Listen Carlitos,” she went on, “Everybody knows that the government of the Church is not always on the level, that there are clerics that steal and cheat and defraud and break their vows by abusing the confidence of their followers and failing to maintain themselves aloof of the weakness of their own flesh. But they are no more the Church than I am. The Church stands alone, perfect and indestructible, no matter what a handful of bad priests may do. Because the Church is the expression of the Trinity and the priests, no matter how high some of them may reach, are no more than mortal beings, who, like all of us, will answer for what they do when they meet their Maker. I go to church to establish communion with the Church itself not the priest, you see?” Then she wagged her finger in my face and sternly admonished me, “As for that business about not believing in heaven, hell and purgatory, young man,” she warned, “I hope, for the sake of you and your immortal soul, that you are not in for a terrible surprise! In the meantime, make me happy, Carlitos, humor me. Wear the medal, for me.”

I stood up and went around to the other side of the patio table, bending to kiss her cheek.

“No. I won't wear it for you,” I said. “I'll wear it for me, because you gave it to me, and because it is charged with all the love and good luck I know you wish for me as your daughter's husband.”

She smiled up at me, squeezed my hand and said, “I wish those things for you because you are my daughter's husband, but also because you have become my son, Carlitos.”

It was not, of course, the last time we would clash over religious beliefs. One such encounter was caused by my insistence on treating the Miraculous Virgin Medal as no more than a good luck charm. It wasn't as if I went around rubbing it in on purpose. But it was obvious in at least one thing I did, which, for Doña María, was unforgivable. I had long worn a charm on my key chain. A footloose and much-loved great-uncle had given the charm to me when I was twelve. He claimed he had gotten it from an Indian diablero in the Arizona desert and although I sometimes found that hard to believe, it was a story that charged the little figure with adventure and psychological power. The charm was made of silver and turquoise. It was a totem of some sort, used, my uncle claimed, in the famous sun-dance ceremony of certain southwestern tribes. But for me it was loaded with something else—the magic that would never let my uncle settle down, the itch that kept him moving, the energy that made him yearn to know what lay over the next rise or around the next bend in the road. Every time I looked at it I thought of my uncle the incurable wanderer, switchblade in his hip pocket, duffel on his shoulder, making his way as best he could, from one strange place to another, trying to soak up a commonsense education in the backwater towns, hard-living waterfronts, wide-open countryside and adobe pueblos, from coast to coast, across America, back and forth, to and from wherever his cash for a bus ticket would take him, or as far as a hitched ride lasted. It was a beautiful little piece of jewelry—simple, small but weighty for its size, pleasing to the eye.

I had always worn it on my key chain because I had never worn anything around my neck. But the Miraculous Virgin was to be worn, as per the giver's instructions, as a necklace, so that the medal hung close to one's heart. It sounded logical enough, and I thought I might as well concentrate all of my good luck in the same central location. So I slipped the little totem onto the chain with the Virgin and hung both around my neck.

At first the chain was a constant presence that at once comforted and irritated me. But it wasn't long before the necklace with its two amulets became so much a part of me that I would have felt naked and unprotected without them. It was many weeks after my birthday, when the medal and totem were as familiar to my body as a mole or a birthmark, that Doña María noticed for the first time that the Virgin was no longer alone on the chain. It was a particularly sultry Sunday forenoon and I was sitting shirtless in the patio wading through the Clarín's weekend supplements as María, Mo and Magda made ñoquis con tuco in the kitchen. About half an hour before time to eat, María brought me an appetizer of salted anchovies, hard cheese and a glass of ice-cold white wine to tide me over. It was as she was setting the snack on the glass patio table and I was thanking her for her thoughtfulness that she saw the totem hanging with the Miraculous Virgin from my neck.

“¿Qué es eso?” she asked sternly, the pleasant, motherly smile of a moment before draining from her face.

“What?” I asked, oblivious to the now familiar amulets and wondering if perhaps there weren't an ugly spider or a cockroach crawling on me, given the look of disgust on my mother-in-law's face.

“¡Eso!” she hissed, pointing at the charm on my chain.

I tucked my chin and followed the tip of her finger to my chest. I picked up the charm between my thumb and forefinger and held it out toward her.

“This?” I asked, as she visibly recoiled from the totem.

“Sí, eso.”

“It's an amulet, a good luck charm. My favorite uncle gave it to me when I was just a young boy.”

“Take it off.”

I stiffened. “Why should I?”

“Because it doesn't belong there.”

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn't.”

“But it means a great deal to me.”

“It has no place there next to the Virgin.”

“It's a religious symbol.”

“It's a pagan image and it's a sacrilege for it to be there with Her.”

“This totem was as much a symbol of strength and power for the Indians as the Virgin Mary is for you.”

“¡No digas estupideces!  Take that trinket off my chain.”

“Your chain? I thought this was a gift. If it's borrowed, I'll give it back.”

“Don't be an idiot, Carlos. Just do as I say before your disrespect comes back to haunt you.”

“Oh come on, María. Let's not start with the hocus-pocus because I don't believe in it and you know it.”

“Then you don't need that macumba around your neck.”

“Right. I don't. Not either one of them.”

“¡Basta!”

“But I like them there because two people I love gave them to me and because I think they'll bring me luck.”

“¡Basta! ¡Basta! I had that chain and medal blessed and took them to the image of the Virgin myself and I think I deserve better than to have them associated with a pagan image.”

“What makes the Indian religion any less respectable than Catholicism?”

“¡Basta!”

“What's going on here? Stop it you two.” It was Mo. She was standing in the kitchen door looking out into the patio as if she were a stern mother come to break up a fight between two squalling children.

“Pero nena,” her mother cried, “look what he has on that chain with the Virgin!”

“Hey,” I said throwing up my hands, “if she wants her medal back, she can have it.”

“¡Cállense los dos! Mamá, mind your own business. You gave him that medal, now it's his to do with as he pleases.”

“But nena...”

“But nena nothing. Te jodés for giving it to an infidel.”

“Look,” I began, “I don't mean to hurt anybody's feelings, but...”

“And you shut up too, Chaz. Why do you have to be such a big baby? If you see that it bothers Mom for you to wear that stupid totem on the same chain with the Virgin, what would it hurt you to take it off?”

Doña María and I sulked a little at the beginning of lunch, but I had my shirt back on so that the totem was out of sight and soon we were back to normal. To save face, I continued to wear the two amulets together under my shirt, but took off the totem any time I went shirtless where Doña María might see me.

I soon began to realize that by wearing the Miraculous Virgin Medal I was becoming part of a kind of secret order, an unchartered, unspoken union of souls including Doña María and a number of her oldest and dearest friends, all of whom wore the Miraculous Virgin around their necks and believed fervently in its special powers. Although María had a myriad of wallet-size reproductions of saints of every sort under the glass of her night-table and desk, in her purse and in small frames on top of her chest of drawers, the Miraculous Virgin was the only one with which she appeared never to be offended, discouraged or down-hearted.

Doña María's own Miraculous Virgin Medal was a heavy gold one, oval-shaped like mine, but about the size of an American fifty-cent piece. It hung from a thick golden chain around her neck. The medal had been a gift from her father-in-law to see her through when she was carrying Mo. It was a difficult pregnancy, the last few months of which she spent nearly bed-fast. She nearly died in labor. The idea of the gift her father-in-law had given her was to make sure that she didn't die and María was convinced from Mo's birth on that it had, indeed, saved her life. If it hadn't been for the Miraculous Virgin then, Doña María once reminded me, I wouldn't have had a nagging mother-in-law to worry about, but then neither would I have had a wife, since Moira had come with the cord around her neck and probably would have suffocated before they could save her.

Doña María lived the last twenty years of her life troubled by cardiac insufficiency, a condition which, other than being somewhat careful not to overexert herself, she did relatively little to remedy. She liked her wine with meals and she wouldn't hear of cutting down on salt or red meats, although she had always been moderate in the amounts of everything she ate and drank, since she was more than a little vain about her ever-trim figure.

About five years after Mo and I were married, Doña María had a massive coronary. She was, fortunately, at home with Magda and Alfonso at the time and they were able to get her to the hospital quickly. By the time they got to the emergency room, however, the doctors could hold out no hope for her survival. When Mo and I arrived at the hospital, we were told that Mo's mother was not expected to last the night. One whole wall of the heart had been destroyed and it had not been a strong heart to begin with. Doña María was in such bad shape that even her closest relatives had not been permitted to see her, despite the boisterous protests of her three children.

Seventy-two hours after she was admitted to intensive care, we were still in the waiting room awaiting word of a turn for the worse while praying for a miracle. Most of that time, the Miraculous Virgin was warm in the palm of my hand and a silent prayer kept running through my head: “If you're real make a miracle. Do it for her, the one with the faith, not for me.”

At one point we got Alfonso and Magda to go home, telling them that if there were any change we would let them know right away. Shortly after they left, a nurse came to my exhausted wife and said her mother had asked repeatedly to see her.

“I'll let you in,” the nurse said, “but you have to promise me you'll only stay a few seconds. The doctor ordered no visitors and it could cost me my job if they find you there.”

Mo grudgingly nodded and followed the nurse down the corridor. When she returned she was sobbing softly and said, “She doesn't even think of herself when she's dying. She asked if we were eating all right and said we should go home to sleep, that it made her nervous to think of us out here all the time.” Then she added, “Go in, Chaz. She didn't even ask about Alfonso and Magda. She just insisted on seeing you.” I looked around for the nurse. “Go on,” Mo said firmly. “She knows what's good for her. Go see her. She's asking for you.”

I had to duck the nurse twice before I could get down the passageway and into the room. But there was no observation booth looking into the room as in some of the more modern intensive care wards. It was just a small, hospital-green, cell-like, private cubicle with a bed and a monitor and nothing else to get in the way of the cardiac team in the highly likely event that they should have to respond to an emergency.

The patient looked very small and frail in the high-mattressed bed, which was rolled up so that she was in a semi-sitting position. The monitor's fluorescent-green face shone from a little shelf over Doña María's head. It blinked with comforting regularity and bleeped softly each time it blinked.

Despite her reported condition and obvious pallor, María's head snapped enthusiastically toward me as soon as I entered her room.

“¡Hola, Carlitos!” she chirped cheerily, as if she were seeing me walk right into her own patio, where she was just about to serve up a few strong mates.

I smiled a restrained, concerned smile and placed my hand over hers where it lay in a loosely closed fist outside the starchy white hospital sheet on her stomach. A heavy golden chain spilled out of the fist and meandered over hill and dale of the sheet like some volatile, auric liquid that had escaped her grasp.

“Listen to me, Carlitos...” she began, but I put a finger to my lips to silence her.

“You should be resting,” I whispered, giving her hand a gentle squeeze, my mind inescapably tuned to every nuance of the monitor's bleeps.

“I'll have plenty of time to rest once they've nailed me into the box,” she snapped. “Listen, Carlos,” she said, and I listened, although all I could really think of was the doctor saying she could die at any moment, “I'm worried about you and Moira.”

“Worrying about everybody but yourself is how you got here,” I said.

“Bueno, basta,” she said, “I'm in no mood for lectures from upstarts. I only asked for you to come in because I want you to take Moira home.”

I was looking at the patient with real amazement now. This was a woman with what the doctors described as a semi-destroyed heart. A woman who was expected to die of coronary thrombosis and infarct at any moment. And yet, her voice and manner carried the same matriarchal authority as ever and her eyes were clear and sharp and willful. This didn't sound like somebody at death's door and I was beginning to feel that my usually skeptical view with regard to doctors and their prognoses was well founded. I had expected to find someone hanging onto life by her fingernails, fighting for breath and filling the room with the eerie sound of her death rattle. Instead I found the same strong woman as always, her fears and pain under control, her act together, directing family business even from her sickbed.

“They told me that Alfonso and Magdalena had gone home to rest and that relieved me somewhat,” Doña María went on, “but now I want to know what you and my Moira are still doing here.”

“We're just here in case you need us,” I whispered.

“Need you? Why would I need you? Are either of you doctors? Ha! I wish one of you were a doctor. Maybe this family would have a chance to generate some wealth for a change.”

“You're exerting yourself, María. I'm leaving now.”

“Yes. Do, and take Moira with you. Go home. Eat. Rest.”

“You're the typical cardiac patient, María. Always fretting about something or someone. Why don't you try to clear your mind for a minute or so and get some rest yourself?”

She cast her eyes downward in a little-girl-shy gesture that was typically contradictory in her. She was at once stubbornly authoritarian and coquettishly coy in dealing with others—a carrot-and-stick ploy that helped her impose her will.

I bent and kissed her forehead and turned to leave the room, but her stern voice stopped me at the door. 

“Carlos, “she called, “take Moira home right now! Do you understand?”

I smiled weakly and shrugged.

“Carlitos, please. If you want me to get well, take her home. She doesn't look good at all. I'm worried about her. She needs to eat and get some sleep.”

Still I didn't say anything.

“You won't miss it, I promise,” she said with an ironic grin.

“Miss what?”

“My death,” she said good-humoredly. “I promise I won't die until you've both rested, bathed, eaten and come back, and I don't want to see either of you here until at least tomorrow morning. I'll still be here. You have my word.”