The Power Of The Dog (50 page)

Adán can’t go on those visits.

Can’t accompany his wife and daughter on their sad, futile trudges to specialists at Scripps in La Jolla or Mercy in Los Angeles. He sends Lucía with written notes, written questions, stacks of medical records, histories, tests results. Lucía takes Gloria by herself, crosses the border under her maiden name—she’s still a citizen—and sometimes they are gone for weeks, sometimes months, when Adán aches for his daughter. They always return with the same old news.

That there is no news.

No new miracle has been discovered.

Or revealed.

Not by God or the doctor.

There is nothing more they can do.

Adán and Lucía comfort each other with hope and faith—which Lucía possesses and Adán feigns—and love.

Adán loves his wife and daughter deeply.

He’s a good husband, a wonderful father.

Other men, Lucía knows, might have turned their backs on a deformed child, might have avoided the girl, avoided the home, made a thousand excuses to spend time away.

Not Adán.

He is home almost every night, almost every weekend. He’s in Gloria’s room the first thing every morning to kiss her and give her a hug; then he makes her breakfast before he goes off to work. When he comes home in the evening his first stop is to her room. He reads to her, tells her stories, plays games with her.

Nor does Adán hide his child like something shameful. He takes her for long strolls in the Río district. Takes her to the park, to lunch, to the circus, anywhere, everywhere. They are a common sight in the better neighborhoods of Tijuana—Adán, Lucía and Gloria. All the shopkeepers know the girl—they give her candy, flowers, small pieces of jewelry, hairpins, bracelets, pretty things.

When Adán has to go away on business—as he is now, on his regular junket to Guadalajara to visit with Tío, then to Culiacán with a briefcase of cash for Güero—he calls every day, several times a day, to speak with his daughter. He tells her jokes, funny things that he has seen. He brings her presents from Guadalajara, Culiacán, Badiraguato.

And those trips to the doctors that he can go on—all of them except in the United States—he goes. He’s become an expert on cystic lymphangioma; he reads, he studies, he asks questions, he offers incentives and rewards. He makes large donations to research, quietly inveighs his business partners to do the same. He and Lucía have nice things, a nice home, but they could have much nicer things, a much bigger home, except for the money they spend on doctors. And donations and pledges and Masses and benedictions and playgrounds and clinics.

Lucía is glad for this. She doesn’t need nicer things, a bigger home. She doesn’t need—and wouldn’t want—the lavish and, frankly, tasteless mansions that some of the other narcotraficantes have.

Lucía and Adán would give anything they have, any parent would, to any doctor or any god, every doctor and every god, who would cure their child.

The more science fails, the more Lucía turns to religion. She finds more hope in a divine miracle than in the hard numbers of the medical reports. A blessing from God, from the saints, from Our Lady of Guadalupe could reverse the tide of those numbers in the blink of an eye, in the flutter of a heart. She haunts the church, becomes a daily communicant, brings their parish priest, Father Rivera, home for dinners, for private prayer and counseling sessions, for Bible study. She questions the depth of her faith (“Perhaps it is my doubt that is blocking a milagro”), questions the sincerity of Adán’s. She urges him to attend Mass more often, to pray harder, to give even more money to the Church, to talk with Father Rivera, to “tell him what’s in your heart.”

To make her feel better, he goes to see the priest.

Rivera’s not a bad guy, if a bit of a fool. Adán sits in the priest’s office, across the desk from him, and says, “I hope you’re not encouraging Lucía to believe that it’s her lack of faith that prevents a cure for our daughter.”

“Of course not. I would never suggest or even think such a thing.”

Adán nods.

“But let’s talk about you,” Rivera says. “How can I be of help to you, Adán?”

“Really, I’m fine.”

“It can’t be easy—”

“It isn’t. It’s life.”

“And how are things between you and Lucía?”

“They’re fine.”

Rivera gets this clever look on his face, then asks, “And in the bedroom? May I ask? How are the connubial—”

Adán makes a successful effort to suppress a smirk. It always amuses him when priests, these self-castrated eunuchs, want to give advice on sexual matters. Rather like a vegetarian offering to barbecue your steak for you. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that Lucía has been discussing their sex life with the priest; otherwise, the man would never have had the nerve to raise the subject.

The fact is that there’s nothing to discuss.

There is no sex life. Lucía is terrified of getting pregnant. And because the Church forbids artificial contraception and she will do nothing that might indicate anything other than a total commitment to the laws of the Church …

He has told her a hundred times that the chances of having another baby with a birth defect are a thousand to one, a million to one, really, but logic has no traction with her. She knows he’s right, but she tearfully confesses to him one night that she just can’t bear the thought of that moment in the hospital, that moment when she was told, when she saw …

She can’t bear the thought of reliving that moment.

She has tried to make love with him several times when the rhythms of natural contraception allowed, but she simply froze up. Terror and guilt, Adán observes, are not aphrodisiacs.

The truth, he would like to tell Rivera, is that it isn’t important to him. That he’s busy at work, busy at home, that all his energies are taken up with running a business (the specific nature of that business is never discussed), taking care of a very ill, severely handicapped child, and trying to find a cure for her. Compared with their daughter’s suffering the lack of a sex life is insignificant.

“I love my wife,” he tells Rivera.

“I have encouraged her to have more children,” Rivera says. “To—”

Enough, Adán thinks. This is getting insulting. “Father,” he says, “Gloria is all we can care for now.”

He leaves a check on the desk.

Goes home and tells Lucía that he has spoken with Father Rivera, and the talk strengthened his faith.

But what Adán really believes in are numbers.

It hurts him to see this sad, futile faith of hers; he knows she is hurting herself more deeply every day, because the one thing Adán knows for certain is that numbers never lie. He deals with numbers all day, every day. He makes key decisions based on numbers, and he knows that arithmetic is the absolute law of the universe, that a mathematical proof is the only proof.

And the numbers say that their daughter will get worse, not better, as she gets older, that his wife’s fervent prayers are unheard or unanswered.

So he puts his hopes in science, that someone somewhere will come up with (literally) the right formula, the miracle drug, the surgical procedure that will trump God and His useless entourage of saints.

In the meantime, there is nothing to do but keep putting one foot in front of the other in this futile marathon.

Neither God nor science can help his daughter.

Nora’s skin is a warm pink, flushed from the bath’s steaming water.

She has on a thick white terry-cloth bathrobe, and a towel wrapped in a turban around her hair, and she plops down on the sofa, puts her feet up on the coffee table and picks up the letter.

She asks, “Are you going to?”

“Am I going to what?” Parada asks as her question pulls him out of the sweet reverie of the Coltrane album playing on the stereo.

“Resign.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I suppose so. I mean, a letter from Il Papa himself …”

“But you said it was a request,” Nora says. “He’s asking, not ordering.”

“That’s just a courtesy,” Parada answers. “It amounts to the same thing. One doesn’t refuse a request of the Pope’s.”

Nora shrugs. “First time for everything.”

Parada smiles. Ah, for the careless courage of youth. It is, he thinks, a simultaneous flaw and virtue of young people that they have so little regard for tradition, and even less for authority. A superior asks you to do something you don’t wish to do? Easy—just refuse.

But it would be so easy to accede, he thinks. More than easy—tempting. Resign and become a mere parish priest again, or accept an assignment to a monastery—a “period of reflection,” they would probably call it. A time for contemplation and prayer. It sounds wonderful, as opposed to the constant stress and responsibility. The endless political negotiations, the ceaseless efforts to acquire food, housing, medicine. Not to mention the chronic alcoholism, spousal abuse, unemployment and poverty, and the myriad tragedies that spring from them. It’s a burden, he thinks with full realization of his own self-pity, and now Il Papa is not only willing to remove the cup from my hands, he’s requesting that I give it up.

Will, in fact, forcibly rip it from me if I don’t meekly hand it over.

This is what Nora doesn’t understand.

One of the few things that Nora doesn’t understand.

She’s been coming to visit for years now. At first, it was short visits of a few days, helping out at the orphanage outside the city. Then it turned into longer visits, with her staying for a few weeks, and then the weeks turned into months. Then she would go back to the States to do what she does to make her money, and then return, and the stays at the orphanage became longer and longer.

Which is a good thing because she’s invaluable there.

To her surprise, she’s become quite good at doing whatever needs to be done. Some mornings it’s looking after the preschool kids, others it’s supervising repair of the seemingly endless plumbing problems or negotiating with contractors on prices for the new dormitory. Or driving into the big central market in Guadalajara to get the best deal on groceries for the week.

At first, each time a task came up she’d whine the same refrain—“I don’t know anything about that”—just to get the same answer from Sister Camella: “You’ll learn.”

And she did; she has. She’s become a veritable expert on the intricacies of Third World plumbing. The local contractors simultaneously love and hate to see her coming—she’s so beautiful but so relentlessly ruthless, and they’re both shocked and delighted to see a woman walk up to them and pronounce in butchered but effective Spanish the words “No me quiebres el culo.”

Don’t bust my ass.

Other times, she can be so charming and seductive that they give her what she wants at barely a profit. She leans over and looks up at them with those eyes and that smile and tells them that the roof can’t really wait until they have the cash—the rains are coming, don’t you see the sky?

No, they don’t. What they see is her face and body and, let’s be honest, her soul, and they go and fix the condenada roof. And they know she’s good for the money, she’ll get it, because who at the diocese is going to say no to her?

No one, that’s who.

No one has the balls.

And at the market? Dios mío, she’s a terror. Strolls through the vegetable stands like a queen, demanding the best of this, the freshest of that. Squeezing and smelling and asking for samples to test.

One morning a fed-up grocer asks her, “Who do you think you’re buying for? The patrons of a luxury hotel?”