One old man brought a sack of dirt over his shoulder that was crawling with ants and caterpillars. When he marched to the altar, all the women in smart hats leaned away from the aisle, their long strands of pearls all swaying to one side as if the deck of a ship listed beneath them. The priest in his clean hems backed away from the altar as the farmer heaved his sack onto it and black ants swarmed all over. “Go on, make these pests into Christians!” the farmer shouted. “I’ll take them home to convert the others, so they’ll stop chewing on my crops and leave me a living.”
Cienfuegos came with Manjar Blanco on his leash. The ladies did not know how to pray for a Christian lizard. Their little dogs are probably still barking about it.
31 March
School or a job is the only choice, Mother says. So it’s school again, murderous. Today there was a body! Draped in black cloth, lying across four wooden chairs lined up side by side in the administrator’s office. The administrator was still out having his lunch when the Penitent was sent in for a minor infraction involving spittle, and had to wait there a long time, examining The Body. Its feet stuck out from beneath the drape, plainly the feet of a dead person. Man or woman, it was impossible to tell, but nothing was breathing under that cloth. No scent of corpse gas either. Detective novels often mention that. But perhaps it was recently dead and hadn’t had time to decay. Or perhaps there was corpse gas, the whole school smelled of piss, and it might be similar. The hour passed horribly, measured in held breaths.
Twenty minutes. It couldn’t be Señora Bartolome under that black drape. Too slim. And not the administrator—everyone saw him leave for his lunch. What kind of school punishes boys by making them sit in a room with a corpse?
Fifty minutes. Outside in the sun the Holy Mother stood on her pedestal in the garden, sorry but unsympathetic. The usual position of mothers.
Fifty-eight minutes: the administrator returned in a high mood, smelling a little of pulque. At the sight of the Penitent he fell into his chair, abruptly depressed. Lately he can summon little courage for the beatings. “Oh, it’s Shepherd, our troublesome foreigner. What is it today?”
“Reading in the class again, sir. And participating in a contest of sorts.”
“Of what sort?”
“Of spitting to hit a mark on the floor, sir.”
“Anything that might improve your character? The reading, I mean.”
“No, sir. Booth Tarkington.”
The administrator leaned so far back in his chair, it appeared he might fall out of it, or else begin a nap. He made no mention of the draped form. Who could it be? It seemed taller than the stunted type of boy inclined to this school. But hard to judge, lying down.
“Sir. Is it possible to ask, has any of the teachers been ill?”
Sitting near enough the body that he could reach over to box its ears, the administrator replied, “All as hale as can be expected for women of their age and temperament.” He sighed. “Which is to say, probably immortal. Why do you ask?”
“One of the students, then? Has any boy turned up, well, dead?”
The administrator now seemed unlikely to nap. “Dead?”
“Perhaps subjected to an overly long punishment by accident, and perished?”
The administrator now sat up. “You are an imaginative boy. Are you also a suspicious one?”
A glance at the feet that poked from under that drape. “No, sir.”
“You should write stories, boy. You have the disposition for a romantic novelist.”
“Sir, is that a good or bad disposition to have?”
The administrator smiled and looked sad, both at once. “I am not certain. But I’m sure of one thing, you don’t belong in this school.”
“No, sir. That seems certain to me also.”
“I’ve spoken of it to Señora Bartolome. She says your competence at learning the Latin lessons has surpassed her competence to teach them. It isn’t fair to the others, for her to teach so much. They struggle with conjugating their shoes and stockings.”
A long pause.
“We discussed a transfer to the Preparatoria next year.”
“Sir, the entrance examinations are murder. At least, for anyone who’s missed learning everything they teach after the sixth-grade primary.”
“Indeed. How did that happen to you?”
“A drastic home life, sir. Something like a novel.”
“Well, then. One can only hope you are writing it all down.”
“No, sir, only some of it. On the interesting days. On most of the days it’s along the lines of a bad novel with no character learning any moral.”
The administrator placed his elbows on the desk and touched his fingers together, making his hands into a flower bud. The unanswered question of the corpse still lay beside him. This was more of an interesting day.
“Back to the classroom with you then, young Shepherd,” he said, finally. “I will tell Señora Bartolome you have my permission to read adventure novels as much as you like, in preparation for your writing career. But I’ll advise you to pay attention during the maths. They could turn out more useful than they seem.”
“Yes, sir.”
“One thing more. We are aware your attendance is casual.”
“I had a bit of work, sir. But lost it again.”
“Well, I expect there is little I can do about keeping you here. But please come on Friday. Before we dismiss for Easter week, our school will be leading the processional down the street to St. Agnes. We need six of our older boys for carrying the Santo Cristo. You may be the only one who can remember which way to walk.”
“For carrying the what?”
The administrator leaned out from his desk and yanked the silk drape from the corpse, exposing a bloody head and naked shoulders. “Our crucifixion figure. We’ve just had it cleaned and varnished, ready to carry into the chapel.”
“Oh. Indeed sir, corpus Deum. He lives.”
School is closed for Holy Week, but Mother is in an unholy frame of mind, due to the predicted collapse of the Mexican oil industry. According to P. T., production has fallen to less than a quarter what it was when the Americans first came in. They thought they were tapping a deeper vein, he said.
“So did I,” Mother says.
In a jam, she asked the doctor’s wife for guidance. As usual, it was suggested that God might provide, so Palm Sunday mass at the cathedral is part of the plan. The place was a forest of palm leaves standing upright, swaying in the windless air, held up by villagers with pleading eyes and hungry children. Mrs. Doctor was dressed up in a silver fox stole like Dolores del Rio. She pulled Mother toward the front pews, away from the odors of poverty. The kneeling lasted hours, but Mother wrestled through.