Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (52 page)

“Take me back to my mother!” I demanded.

“Neil, you cannot go back.”

“Take me back
now!
” I yelled and burst into tears. He pulled over to the side of the road and idled the engine. He sat with both hands on the steering wheel as I sobbed. “You must go forward”, he said quietly.

“To what! To what!”

“You must go forward into your life.”

“No, I will go back. I will go back, and I will find the killers. I will destroy them!”

“If you kill the killers, you too will become a killer.”

“No! I will bring justice.”

“Justice? What do you think is justice?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. But I will make them pay for what they did. ”

“Only you will pay—it would destroy
you
, not them.”

“I hate them. Truly,
Papa
, I hate them. I will hate them all my life.”

“Do not hate them. They do not know they are evil. They are blind. If you hate them, if you kill them in your heart, they will not die. They will rise up again and again within you, and they will kill your heart.”

“I will make them suffer!”

“
You
will suffer. And your mother and me will suffer too.”

“There is no other way!”

“There is another way, Benigno. I will show it to you.” What did he show me? He showed me a ruin. A ruin within ruins within ruins.

We drove on into the brightly lit city, which was filled with speeding cars and happy laughing people on the sidewalks, the noise of bars and dancing halls, and billboards with 3D advertisements for beautiful people living beautiful lives. I hated it all. I hated every passing face. As we navigated slowly along a street called Alameda, young men and women in expensive cars sneered at us as they roared past at high speeds, and some of them made rude gestures. All around us towered new office buildings and hotels. We turned off this main thoroughfare onto a side street and went north. The whole block looked like a junkyard of rubble and machinery for demolishing buildings, with a few standing structures that looked very old.

My father turned left into an alleyway and parked the car. We got out, and he led me across the street into the maze of ruins.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“The cathedral once stood here, San Francisco de Asís, where for centuries men worshipped God. They have torn it down to make a grand hotel.”

I had never entered a church before. I knew what they were because from childhood onward I had read about them, heard stories about them, and seen their ghostly forms from a distance. I had been baptized by Fray Ramon in the plaza of our village, and had worshipped all my life at the tail gate of his pickup truck. When I was a little boy, my father had sometimes taken me to remote adobe missions in the hills, but these ancient buildings did not have priests in residence and were boarded up, locked with police seals, or enclosed behind barriers erected by historical preservation agencies. Whenever we visited one, we would kneel in the dust and pray, then quickly leave before we were seen.

“We are trespassing in our own home”, my father now said to me, in a voice just above a whisper.

His solar flashlight lit the way ahead of us a few steps at a time. We climbed over piles of concrete, crawled under barriers, squeezed through fence slats, and came to a shadowed building of large yellow blocks. The beam of light played over the doorway, the padlocks, the police notice, the other signs warning us away. Undeterred, my father led me around the building and into what looked like a yard full of wheelbarrows and stacked stones. Beyond these, we came to a wooden shack leaning against a high chain-link fence.

“We will speak to the watchman”, he said.

He knocked on the lintel of the low doorway, for only a blanket covered the opening.

“
Mi amigo
”, he called in a low voice.

An unseen hand pushed aside the blanket, and the light of an oil lamp flowed out to greet us. Then a man stepped out into the dark. I could not see his face, but I could tell by the way he embraced my father that they knew each other well. As they whispered together, I could not hear their words.

The man took us through a canyon of construction materials, and led us deeper into the shadows behind the building we had first examined. There my father pointed his flashlight at a spot on the wall close to the ground, and I saw a wooden trap door, white with cement dust. The watchman lifted it, crouched down, and went inside, with my father and me following on his heels. I could see next to nothing as I climbed a few rickety wooden steps behind the men. At the top, the watchman opened a door with the sound of squealing hinges and scraping wood, and I found myself standing inside a low-ceilinged room that contained only a countertop along one wall and cupboards with open shelves. The smell of mice was strong. I heard the hooting of an owl somewhere above my head. Broken glass crunched beneath my shoes, and I dragged my bad leg through it carefully, fearing that I would fall and cut myself.

Next we passed through an open doorway into a larger space.

“I will make a light”, said the watchman. He took two candles from his pocket and set them on a table at the near end of the room. When they were lit, their glow illuminated the immediate area, and I saw that the table was a slab of flat stone upon two stone uprights. It was cracked in several places, with pieces broken off, and covered with spray-painted graffiti. The surrounding walls had been defaced in the same way.

“The light might be seen”, my father said.

“No, we are safe. After vandals broke the glass, the windows were covered with plywood until a decision is made.”

“So there is still hope?”

“
Un poco
, a little. The government wants it razed to the foundation. The historical agency wants it restored. A museum, they say. Perhaps they will save only the work of San Jose.”

“If they try to save it by taking it elsewhere, will it not be destroyed?”

“
Sí
, this is a danger. It is very old, and no one can explain why it stands. No one has ever been able to explain it. Yet it is not indestructible.”

Turning to me, my father said, “This is my son. His name is Neil Benigno Ruiz de Hoyos. Neil, this is my friend. I cannot tell you his name.”

The nameless man extended his hand to me with a smile. I shook the hand and dropped it. Now I could see that he was in his fifties, with a toil-worn face haunted by a lifetime of troubles. In the flickering shadows of candlelight, he seemed furtive to me, repugnant. Yet there was kindness and intelligence in his eyes, and I wondered why I was not permitted to know his name.

“So you have brought him here to see the gift?” said the man.

“He has need of it now”, said my father. “Will you show him?”

“Of course.”

The man took the candles from the table and carried them into the darkness. We stepped off the low platform onto a brick floor and followed him. I halted abruptly and gave a yelp of fright when out of the shadows came a huge red shape like a monster opening its jaws to devour me. My father took my arm, drawing me closer.

He played his flashlight over the great beast.

“It is a fire engine”, he said. “Once this was a station where men defended the city from fires. In the old days, houses were made of wood, and sometimes they burned down and people died. No one has driven this machine for many years.”

Now we stood before the front of the vehicle. It was like a truck with a huge head and long body. It sat upon concrete blocks, its tires missing. It was something like a modern car with two glass eyes, but its front was not flat like our cars. It bulged forward with an open mouth and broken metal teeth. Above the teeth was an iron motor with wires sticking out of it, and a completely shattered windshield. There were seats inside with torn fabric and coiled springs.

“A little farther”, said our host.

As we walked toward the end of the room, I saw that the ceiling was far above us, and that, directly ahead, the space behind the truck contained a high balcony. On the left side was a structure of some kind, rising from the floor to the balcony.

I peered at it curiously, for never before had I seen anything like it It was a staircase spiraling upon itself, with many wooden steps and a railing. It seemed to hang there in space, for there were no beams holding it up.

“What is this?” I asked, amazed.

“Would you like to hear its story?” the watchman asked. “Yes”, I said curtly.

“About two hundred years ago, some nuns came to Santa Fe mission to build a school for poor children. They themselves had nothing, only their faith. In time, the school was built and generations of children were taught here. Of course, the school and convent were destroyed during the persecutions—before you were born, when your papa was a boy. This building was the school’s chapel. It was called the Loretto Chapel. It was not destroyed because the staircase was considered a marvel by local people. The government closed it eventually because they said it encouraged superstition. Later, they turned the chapel into a fire station. Even so, no one had the heart to destroy the staircase.”

“What is a nun?” I asked.

My father and the watchman looked at me and furrowed their brows, struck by the sudden realization of my ignorance. My father was especially embarrassed, since it was he who had neglected to teach me all that I should have known about life.

“They were holy women, dedicated to God and full of love”, he said.

The watchman continued: “The sisters asked an architect to design the chapel, to make it look like a famous chapel in France, which was a very beautiful one. But the architect made the design with a serious flaw. He forgot to make a staircase to the choir loft.”

“What is a choir?” I asked.

“A group of people who sang songs to God during the holy Mass. For hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, there were such lofts in many churches. Construction of this chapel was begun in the year 1873 and was completed in 1878.”

“I have always wondered why the sisters did not think about the part that was missing”, my father said.

“Yes, it is a puzzle why they did not notice it immediately”, the other replied. “Were they and the architect blinded to the omission for a purpose? We do not know. But I think it is a happy fault.”

“What happened then?” I pressed, for I wanted the story and not their conjectures.

“The sisters were having many troubles financially. They begged for money and materials. They prayed, and God always answered their prayers, though sometimes slowly. Beautiful glass windows were sent to them by sailing ship from France to the port of New Orleans, and then by paddle boat to St. Louis, Missouri. There the windows were loaded onto wagons, pulled by oxen and horses, and taken along the old Santa Fe Trail to this place. A long journey. A long, long journey.” The watchman’s face clouded momentarily, and he shook his head in sadness. “So far, so far they came, only to be demolished all these years later by rocks and machine gun bullets.”

“Even so, Pedro,” said my father, forgetting that I shouldn’t know his friend’s name, “even so, thousands of children prayed in the light from those windows. They looked at all that beauty, and perhaps they felt God’s warmth in it.”

“Yes, this is true”, said the man. Then he continued, “When the sisters realized their mistake, they asked builders in the region to install a staircase to the loft. But all of them said they could not do it, because a staircase would take up too much space in the chapel, and it would make all liturgies uncomfortable.

“The sisters began a novena to San José the father of the Holy Family and the patron saint of carpenters, asking him to intercede for them, to find a way through their impossible problem.”

I opened my mouth to ask another question, but the man anticipated it.

“A novena is a series of nine days of prayer, Neil. And their prayers were really an act of faith, because they had no more money, and they did not know where they would find a carpenter who could build a staircase that would not fill their chapel with steps, leaving less room for people. So they prayed and prayed and trusted in our Lord’s generosity and the care of the saint.

“On the final day of the novena, a man came to the door of the convent. He was very poor, with only a donkey and a toolbox and the goodness in his heart. They could see he was a good man. The nuns in the old days, they knew these things. He asked them if they had any work for him. He told them he was a carpenter and could build wooden things and repair even badly broken things. They asked him if he could build a staircase that would be safe for the
niños
to climb, and small enough so it would not crowd the chapel, and would last a long time. Those sisters, they really knew how to ask for the impossible.

“So the carpenter went to work with only a hammer and saw and T-square. It took him six months to complete it. He designed the staircase himself, and made every part of it, great and small; he carved even the wooden pegs. There are no nails in it, only pegs. On the morning after the day he finished, the sisters went to pay him, for they had found some money by begging. But he had already gone. He never returned. They knew nothing about him.

“Over the years, many engineers have come to look at this staircase, and they cannot understand why it does not collapse. There is no central support beam and according to their rules this staircase should collapse. But it stands. Sometimes I go up and down on it when I am alone here. I am never afraid. It is strong, and no one can explain its strength. Then and now, the best minds do not understand it. It is two perfect spirals of 360 degrees—a helix, they say. It has thirty-three steps. We cannot tell what kind of tree this wood came from; it is not like any wood in our region. There are no records of how such wood came to be here.”

He looked at me and smiled. “Would you like to climb it, Neil?”

“No”, I said quickly, for it did not look strong at all. It looked like a dream hanging in the air.

“I have climbed it”, my father said. “And I weigh twice as much as you do.”