“Did I? No, Señor Velázquez. That’s what I enjoyed about our adventure. I don’t know whether I went to bed with an impostor or a ghost. The other possibilities don’t interest me. Ciao.”
She walked down the street like a black pantheress, lustful and pursued.
“Is she the nun?” Felix asked the concierge.
“No, the sister had a different face.”
“But you’ve seen this woman before?”
“Oh, yes.”
“When?”
“She spent the night here about a week ago.”
“Alone?”
“No.”
“Who was she with?”
“A man with sideburns and a moustache and a face like a ripe tomato.”
“Do you remember the date?”
“Of course, señor. It was the same night the lady was killed in 301. How could I forget?”
35
IT WAS EXACTLY ten o’clock. As Rosita entered the Café Kineret, Felix, with an expression of excessive religious zeal, was biting into a bagel with cream cheese and lox.
He had no time to speculate about the absence of Emiliano or about the girl’s extraordinary attire. Rosita didn’t seem to realize — or perhaps intentionally ignored — that her perennial miniskirts and laddered stockings gave her a slightly dated look, but styles always arrive late in Mexico City. By the time they’re accepted in Lomas de Chapultepec and bubbling on the back burner prior to being accepted in the Colonia Guerrero, light-years have passed and Ungaro is showing his new Siberian or Manchurian line. Today, however, the girl with the head like a woolly black lamb was dressed in the coarse, long, flowing habits of a Carmelite penitent, with a scapular flowing over breasts hidden for the first time.
She had washed her face and was carrying a black veil and a white breviary and rosary. She didn’t give Felix time to speak. “Hit it, Feliciano. The taxi’s waiting.”
He left a hundred-peso bill on the table and followed Rosita to the corner of Génova and Hamburgo. As they entered the taxi, Felix peered into the rear-view mirror to see if he recognized the driver. It was not Memo, of recent happy memory.
“The maestro didn’t take the plane,” said Rosita as the taxi pulled away.
“Where is he?”
“Don’t worry. Emiliano’s been following him ever since he left his house.”
“When did he leave?”
“Very late. He’d never have made his plane.”
“Where are we going?”
“Ask the driver. Where would you go, Felix?” Rosita’s smile was gloomy.
“To the Shrine of Guadalupe,” Felix directed the driver.
“But, yes, señor,” the driver replied. “The sister already told me, the Sanctuary of Our Dark Lady. I can’t go any faster.”
Rosita didn’t preen herself in her triumph. She pretended to read her breviary, as Felix caught a glimpse of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, enclosed in a glass oval, swinging back and forth over the taxi driver’s head. He burst out laughing.
“You know something, Rosie? The first time I met you two, I said to myself the chief’s picked himself some strange assistants.”
“Right-o, Feliciano,” said Rosita. She kept her eyes glued to the pages of her breviary and thrust her rosary under his nose. “See how well-strung the beads are? No loose ends.”
They pushed their way through the throngs that came daily from all parts of Mexico to the place that, along with the National Palace (and perhaps even more than that seat of more or less transitory political power), is the fixed center of a country fascinated with its own navel, perhaps because its very name means “navel of the moon,” a nation anguished by the fear that its center, and the pinnacles of that center, the Virgin and the President, might be displaced and, angered like the Plumed Serpent, might flee, leaving us bereft of the protection only that Mother and that Father can provide.
They walked among the slowly advancing penitents, many of them on their knees, their arms spread wide in a cross. Little boys hoping to earn a few centavos kept ahead of them, placing newspapers and magazines under their knees to protect them from the rough pavement. Some wore crowns of thorns and cactus leaves upon their breasts; many were simply there for the sights, and because you had to visit the Virgin, whether or not she’d answered your prayer made back there in Alcámbaro, Acaponeta, or Zacatecas. Sweethearts were drinking Pepsis, and families were having their pictures taken before canvases painted with the image of the Virgin and the humble Indian to whom she’d appeared. Native dancers attired in plumed headdresses and sandals with Goodrich-tire soles were playing Indian flutes; hawkers were selling holy cards, medals, rosaries, books of devotions, votive candles. Rosita purchased a yellowish, short-wicked votive light, and Felix preceded her into the flying saucer anchored in the center of the plaza, the new glass-and-cement basilica that had supplanted the small, slowly sinking, red volcanic-stone church with baroque towers that stood to one side like a poor relation.
Emiliano saw them enter. He jerked his head toward the altar with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe miraculously imprinted on the coarse fiber cape of a credulous Aztec gardener whose faith was rekindled at the sight of a handful of roses blooming in mid-December; and suddenly the millions of pagans subjected by the Spanish Conquest were converted to Christianity, hungering more for a mother than for gods: Madre pura, Madre purísima, Purest of Mothers, intoned by the thousands, the humble, as faithful as the first believer in the Dark Virgin, Juan Diego, the secret model of all Mexicans. Be submissive, or pretend to be, and the Virgin will shelter you beneath her mantle; you will never know hunger or cold, nor will you be a son of Cortés’s whore Malinche, but a son of the immaculate Guadalupe.
Bernstein was kneeling before the altar. He lighted a candle and, still on his knees, approached a retable covered with hand-painted ex-votos, prayers granted, thank you for saving me when the Flecha Roja bus went into the barranca in Mazatepec, thank you for returning the power of speech to my little sister mute from birth, thank you for the big one in the lottery; covered, too, with offerings to the Virgin, religious medals, Hearts of Jesus in silver and in tin, rings and bracelets and necklaces. As Bernstein reached out to pluck the ring hanging from a hook among the other offerings, Felix seized his soft, flabby arm.
“I didn’t recognize you without your skullcap and Talmud,” said Felix.
Bernstein’s fingers curled as his fingertips brushed against the ring with the stone clear as water. “Welcome to our sacred Beaubourg, Felix,” the professor replied with forced good humor. “Release me, please. We are not alone here.”
“I see that. There must be three thousand people here.”
“And one of them is named Ayub. Release me, Felix. You’re a Jew like me. Don’t betray us to our enemies.”
“My enemy is Harding’s murderer.”
“It was the cambujo. I told him I didn’t want any blood. Stupid idiot.”
“The captain was a good man, Professor.”
“That’s beside the point, Felix. Something more important is at stake.”
“Nothing is more important than a man’s life.”
“Ah, at last you’ve found your father. You’ve been searching for him for years, as long as I’ve known you. First it was I, that’s why you became a Jew; then Cárdenas, that’s why you defend nationalized oil; then whoever happens to be President, that’s why you became a government official…”
“And you found a mother in the Guadalupe, right?”
“Release me…”
Bernstein’s vanilla-ice-cream face was melting down the drain of a false smile. A Carmelite penitent with a black veil over her head and a lighted candle in her hands was approaching the Retable of the Miracles on her knees, crooning and repeatedly crossing herself. She paused just long enough to take the ring, and still murmuring, “Oh, María, madre mía, oh my comfort and my joy,” Rosita buried the ring in the candle wax—“oh, protect me, give me shelter, and conduct me to the Lord’s celestial court”—rose to her feet, and moved away from the altar, head lowered, the candle in her hand.