The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez Read online

  Today, Amalia and the old priest sat on the circular bench about the small waterless fountain in the courtyard. The Madonna in its center was pensive. Despite his age, Father Ysidro was an ample man. He spread his cassock on the bench about the rim of the fountain. He extended his hand to Amalia. She kissed it reverently, the way she had been instructed to do from childhood, the way Teresa insisted must still be done, in the true religious manner of times past. Amalia noticed that in the sun Father Ysidro’s bald pate gleamed like a halo. Immediately she felt close to God.

  “Father, I have to confess—” She had rehearsed exact words.

  “M’ija, you know that confession is held properly inside the confessional in the church.” He patted her hand briefly to reassure her.

  She loved to be called m’ija—“daughter”—and by this holy old priest! “I mean,” Amalia said quickly, “that I have to confess that sometimes I don’t understand God.”

  “M’ija/” The old priest seemed as apprehensive of what she might say as he seemed delighted.

  “Father,” she embraced the designation. “Father, I do know, of course, that He works in mysterious ways.”

  “Very mysterious,” the priest agreed.

  “But Bernadette—” She decided this was an easier subject than the matter of divorce. “I saw that movie about her, Father.”

  “A reverential film, although I understand from Father Esteban, the new priest, that it was made by people not of our faith. God’s ways—” he acknowledged with a shrug. “Of course, it’s not in color.” He seemed to adjust something privately.

  “But, Father, why does witnessing a miracle have to make a person so miserable? Bernadette even had to leave her handsome boyfriend.”

  “Our Lady requires sacrifices to find us worthy, Amalia. Especially of those she honors with her divine revelations.”

  “But Bernadette’s life wasn’t all that happy to begin with. Her family was poor, and she—”

  “You have to earn God’s miracles, m’ija”.

  “What if she really didnt see her, just thought so?”

  “In her heart, Our Lady gave her the confidence to know.”

  “But why in so many riddles?”

  “God’s language.”

  “But why didn’t everyone who went to the shrine become cured?”

  The old priest formed his words precisely, as if he had arranged them carefully, spoken them often, perhaps sometimes to himself—for seconds he looked down at his clasped hands: “The real miracle is in bringing hope to the desperate, m’ija. Perhaps all they have are moments of hope out of their despair, through renewed faith. And hope provides us with the strength to continue.”

  “Just that?”

  “Amalia!”

  “I’m sorry, Father, it’s just that miracles are—”

  “—among God’s most mysterious ways,” Father Ysidro tried to end that. But he spoke aloud, as if to himself: “Why, once, the Sacred Mother asked that a chapel be built in a swamp.” He seemed, himself, bemused by that, thoughtful for seconds.

  Amalia decided it was best to pretend he had not spoken that aloud. She was confused enough. She glanced toward the sacristy. She saw, at the door, the new priest, young, with a face not unlike those of the saints inside the church. Why would a handsome man like him commit himself to chastity? She curbed her thoughts, because she had also thought he looked romantic. Nearby, she saw an old woman bustling, cleaning the church steps. A beata, the kind of woman who thinks of nothing except the church, working fiercely in order to be near the holiness of priests. Did they feel that put them closer to heaven?

  Amalia bowed her head because at that moment the new priest walked by. Would he be a real “savior”? Such thoughts! “Does God understand everything, Father?” she broke the old priest’s reverie.

  “Everything.”

  Amalia looked up at the sky and said to God: And so you’ll understand that I’m a divorced woman and I’ve lived with men I’m not married to because I need help and even more now for my child. But of course You know all that, just as Father Ysidro assured me just now, and he’s a holy man; Your priest. She made a sign of the cross and breathed easily. “Well,” she said aloud to her ally, “God wouldn’t be God if He didn’t understand everything, would He?”

  “Indeed not!” Father Ysidro said and touched her hand in affirmation.

  Amalia breathed even more easily. She spoke very clearly, for God to hear exactly, “It makes it all bearable to me, to know my church doesn’t turn its back on anyone.”

  “No one, no one,” the old priest emphasized.

  “Bless me, Father, please,” Amalia said and took a scarf she had brought for this encounter and placed it over her bowed head.

  “En el nombre del padre, del hijo…” The old priest made a slow sign of the cross before the pretty young woman.

  Amalia kissed his hand again. When she left the courtyard—Father Ysidro was nodding in the warm shade now—she glanced back to see whether the new priest was around. Was he looking at her? He was standing at the gate with his hands loosening his white collar.

  Amalia hurried out of the courtyard.

  That same week, she went to confession—at another Catholic church—and saw no reason to mention her divorce nor the men she had lived with, and certainly not that she intended soon to find a good man. All those matters had been resolved very clearly between God and the Holy Father Ysidro. When she took Communion that Sunday, at her regular church and during Mass presided over by the old priest, she was certain the Blessed Mother was watching in approval, and she was almost certain that Father Ysidro smiled when he placed the holy wafer on her tongue.

  Teresa left her husband and moved in unannounced with Amalia. She brought her few clothes, her rosary, her worn missal, her endless sighs, and her weeping Mother of Sorrows. She looked at Manny and said, “He’s a pensive child, already worried.”

  “He is not,” Amalia denied.

  “We’ll see.”

  Amalia continued to leave Manny with Mother Mercedes when she went to work.

  Concepción, a neighbor, became Teresa’s instant friend. Every weekday afternoon she came over to watch “Queen for a Day.” Although hardly forty, she had cataracts growing daily She would lean toward the television, straining to be able to see the women who were paraded before an audience to tell stories of relentless deprivation and sadness. Based on applause for the greatest misery, one would be crowned Queen for a Day.

  Today, the Queen, a heavy woman in a print dress, was being draped in the glittery robe, crowned with the glittery crown. Arriving home early, Amalia watched. Crowning sorrow? The weeping queen was given some electrical appliances Amalia thought, And what later? Queen for only one day.

  Concepción announced, “I asked Miss Rise, the social worker, how to get on that program.”

  “She told you?” Amalia’s mother expressed her own interest.

  “Yes. You have to have a really horrible life,” Concepción said. She rubbed her eyes, clearing her sketchy vision. “I would tell them that my youngest son was stabbed in a gang fight and that the doctors at the clinic say I’ll lose my sight entirely before long.” She sighed. “I deserve to win.”

  Only when, weeks later, Teresa returned to her husband did she accost Amalia: “I’ve known about your men, you’re divorced and living in sin.” She made an angry sign of the cross. A week or so later she was back, with her Mother of Sorrows.

  “The reason things are going so wrong for me,” Teresa told Amalia one Saturday, “is that you’re arousing bad spirits—mal humores—with your life. I’ve spoken to Father Emilio, and he’s coming over.”

  Amalia winced. Father Emilio was well known in the projects for his euros, his “spiritual cleansings” not sanctioned by the Church. These old curandero-priests exist, combining Catholicism and witchcraft, wherever Mexicans converge.

  The priest went about the house thrusting water at everything as if this evil required extra measu
res. The water streaked walls and furniture.

  “Spray it on her!” Praying Hail Marys, Amalia’s mother groaned to emphasize the efficacy of the spraying. “Get her to confess to you, Father Emilio.”

  Water ready, the man said to Amalia: “Do you want to confess your sins before God?”

  “I have no sins to confess to you. I confess only to Father Ysidro,” Amalia said. And to God and His Mother, she added.

  “Is this a child of sin?” He pointed to Manny, who was watching curiously. The curandero-priest raised his bottle of water over him.

  Amalia yanked Manny into her arms, away from the incensed priest. “Don’t get close to my child.”

  She did not give the priest the required donation. When he left, after chanting and quivering at the door, Amalia dumped the abandoned vials of water into the toilet.

  “Sacrilege!” Teresa gasped.

  It was the time of another war and there were many soldiers in the city. There were demonstrations by civilians, sometimes even joined in by soldiers. There were arrests in San Jacinto Plaza. Students marched with placards. Teresa went back to her husband.

  And Amalia fell in love with Gabriel. A good-looking soldier from New Mexico, he wore a dashing blue scarf, allowed by his unit; and he bloused the pants of his uniform over cordovan-waxed boots. His shirts were tailored to fit his proud body; and he had eyes that looked greener because of his brown skin. He was stationed at Fort Bliss. He laughed a lot.

  On the day she met him—as they both watched one of the demonstrations in the old plaza—he told her she was beautiful and that he loved her.

  She told him she loved him.

  A week later she married him in a civil ceremony.

  “Now you have a father,” she told Manny.

  The boy sat on the floor, playing with a small car Amalia had brought him. He seemed not to want to listen to the man who was offering to be his father.

  “He wants to be,” Amalia told her son, who would not look at Gabriel, kept his large eyes on her. “He really wants to be your father.” Daily her child looked more like an angel to her, like the part of Salvador she thought she had seen at first.

  That year—when Gabriel returned home to visit his family—Amalia got to dress her son as an angel.

  Every Christmas there occur in El Paso the Posadas, a procession that for seven nights duplicates Mary and Joseph’s hunt for an inn. Dozens of men and women, sometimes hundreds, follow the man and woman playing Joseph and Mary as the holy couple walk up to a designated home. They say, in Spanish:

  “Hay lugar para que mi hijo nasca aquí?”

  “No,” the person chosen to play one of the innkeepers answers, “there’s no room in this inn for your child’s birth.”

  On the final night, the procession reaches another chosen dwelling.

  “Yes, there is room in my manger.”

  Children precede the procession, especially chosen, as a reward, for this occasion. Dressed vaguely like angels, in loose shirts that attempt to simulate robes, they carry candles. In the chilly Texas night, their faces float within the dark. Their voices waft the cold with sweetness.

  Hiding him beside her, Amalia had taken Manny with her to the corner where the procession would begin. She had sewn him a beautiful costume—secretly—because she had not wanted to invite Gabriel’s reaction. She made small wings with snips of cloth. She gave him a candle. At a turn in the block, she urged him to join the chosen children. “Quickly!”

  He did.

  Among the hundreds of other spectators, she followed him, watching him, proud, thinking he was the most beautiful and looked the holiest. She even imagined that she had been asked to play Mary—she was certainly much prettier than the woman who was supposed to be the Holy Mother, and she would have made a truly beautiful robe, with sewn—not attached—stars; and, blue, it would have been, just like the Madonna’s in church.

  When the woman playing Mary pronounced the last words of supplication—

  “Give us shelter!”

  —Amalia spoke them aloud, too, and she looked at her wondrous child:

  “Give us shelter.”

  It had all been so beautiful that she did not stay for the festivities that followed, with mariachis, buñuelos—sweet dough stretched to translucent thinness—piñatas for blindfolded children to swing at, hit, sprinkle the ground with trinkets.

  Gabriel was discharged, and he moved in permanently with Amalia. Sex with him was like with the others, something expected of her; and like the others, Gabriel didn’t even notice that…Amalia loved this: Throughout the night, he held her tenderly.

  He continued to try to coax Manny to play some improvised game, but he gave up soon after because the boy was constantly looking for his mother, as if afraid without her. Privately, Amalia had turned that same fear into a game between her and her son. She would pretend to hide and within full view assert that he could not possibly see her—and then he would run directly to her, delighting in having “found” her.

  Often at night Gabriel would wake up in a violent sweat, screaming about the friends he had seen exploding, the people he had seen burning in Vietnam. Amalia assumed that that was what his laughter, which had diminished, had concealed.

  Quickly irritated now—and drinking sporadically—he lost his job as a roofer’s helper, and then was quickly fired from a lens-grinding factory. He ignored Manny. More and more, he stayed out overnight.

  A woman came to the apartment asking for him. “Who are you?” Amalia demanded.

  “His girlfriend.”

  “Lárgate.” Amalia ordered her away.

  To tell Gabriel good news she had learned earlier one afternoon, news that would change him back into the man she had first married, Amalia put a flower in her hair and wore her lowest-cut blouse.

  “I can’t afford a child,” Gabriel told her.

  The next day he packed his clothes.

  “You can’t leave me,” Amalia said. “You promised to be a father to Manny. Now you’ll have a child of your own.”

  “You’ll find someone else,” he said.

  She would miss him, she knew before he even left, miss his holding her at night. “You can’t leave,” she said.

  “Mira, ‘Malia,” he sat down and said to her, “I can’t cope with the thought of a kid. It makes me—” He shook his hands, pretending to tremble. “Lose it if you want, I’ll give you the money, I’ll get it somewhere. Come on, chula, kiss me. I’ve been thinking of going to Los Angeles. I’ve got a job lined up in Torrance, airplane factory. Good money. You can join me later. Come on, kiss me.”

  “You’re a cabrón, maldecido,” she cursed him. A terrible desolation was crawling over her.

  Manny stood near her, watching.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Gabriel said.

  Amalia was surprised to see real sadness in his look.

  Gabriel went to her. “I’m not a good man, I sleep with lots of women. You’ve known that, never accused me—because you’re a good woman, better off rid of me. You’ll find someone else better. You’re one hell of a good-looking woman. Look at your breasts. Gorgeous. And your hair—beautiful.”

  She touched the flower she had placed there for him.

  He took it and kissed it and put it back in her hair. “If you wanted to, with your sexy looks, you could really make something of yourself,” he said.

  “I’m not a puta.” She pulled out the flower.

  Manny looked at it on the floor.

  “I’m not the first man you’ve been to bed with.” Gabriel walked toward the door.

  “No, but you’re the worst one.” She knew that would hurt him.

  His face turned dark. He seemed about to move toward her. He stopped. “Maybe I’ll miss you so much I’ll come back right away.”

  “Go to your putas,” she said. Soon she would not be able to speak anymore—the hint of violence had chilled her.

  Gabriel sighed. “My women. Yes, I need my women.” He looked a
t her seriously—“Because I don’t feel complete.” He explained earnestly as if to clarify a riddle, perhaps have her answer it for him: “It’s like something was taken from me long ago, I don’t even know what—so I go looking for it in a woman, lots of women.” He seemed saddened by his own confused words. “Maybe now I wouldn’t recognize what I’m looking for even if I had found it, maybe in you, Amalia.” He frowned, and then he laughed at his own seriousness—and was silent until he walked out with his clothes.

  Amalia stared at the door. Manny picked up the fallen flower. He coaxed his mother to lean down. He ran his fingers through her hair. He put the flower back in. “For my pretty ‘amita” he said, “my pretty mother.”

  She held him tightly to her. “How beautiful,” she said.

  He had already begun to call her “‘Amá” short for “Mamá,” but more often now he called her “’Amita,” his special word for “mamacita” little mother. She would answer, “Mi’jo”—my son. Those became such precious moments to her that sometimes, when he sat quietly intense, doing nothing, she would say, “M’ijo”—just so he would answer, “’Ama, ‘Amita.” … “My son.” “Mama, little mama.” It became a private bond between them, an expression of their special love, just theirs.

  The next few days Amalia kept remembering her father. Had he sighed like Gabriel?—those cruel, drunken times when he sobbed his remorse about something unknown, lost.

  Gabriel’s son was born. She named him Juan, a name she liked and that had no connection with anyone else in her life. Five years old at the time, Manny peered at the new child in his mother’s bed. Then he looked at Amalia in surprise.

  With her two children, one clutched to her in the same seat so she would not have to pay an extra fare, the other held in her arms, Amalia traveled by Greyhound bus to Los Angeles—to Torrance—to find Gabriel, to show him his son so he would love him.