[This story is found in American Gospel, a collection of stories by Robert Paxton.]
Claudia Noraima Neria
Montufar, a young Honduran woman who had arrived in the US unceremoniously (and
without permission) two years ago, was about to become Claudia Barnes, wife of
Jeffrey Barnes. Those around her that
Sunday morning at the tiny, Catholic church in Carlson, Arizona thought that
this must be the happiest day of her life.
The Americans present, largely Jeff’s family, smirked inwardly as they
thought this and glanced at her swelling abdomen. The Mexicans and other undocumented
individuals present envied her. Most of
them had false papers with varying levels of believability. Some had none at all and lived every day in
fear. Claudia was going to become legal,
join herself officially to the great machine of sustenance that was the United
States.
She would have liked to feel
good about her wedding. She would have
liked to feel good about anything.
Claudia’s barely kept secret, unknown even to her friends and certainly
unknown to her future husband and the father of her child, was that she was
insane, and had been so since she crossed the border into the U.S.
This insanity she had
managed to submerge in constant activity, any job she could take, any act she
could perform. This had carried over
into her sexuality when she met Jeff. At
first, before she got pregnant, before he perceived that his life had been
ruined and began to drown slowly in liquor until his death in a car accident a
few years later, Jeff had joked with his friends that he’d found a nympho.
But Claudia, unlike real
nymphomaniacs, did not want frequent sex because she confused sex with the love
and affection which she starved for.
Claudia liked sex because it felt good and it took her mind off the
awful thing she had done that drove her crazy, the terrible deed that haunted
her dreams, the gruesome ordeal she remembered every morning when she woke and
plunged into madness again, her mind filled with the screams that she had
stifled. She had held them inside as she
did it and now she heard those screams all day, every day. “Twenty-four seven,”
Jeff had said to her once, about her sexual needs. She knew all about twenty-four seven.
The church was simply a
house with one large room devoted to mass.
The Catholic community in Carlson considered itself small, consisting
mostly of retirees, snow birds from the East and the Mid-West come to enjoy the
weather as they faded away. There were
many young Catholics in the area, but they were Mexicans or Central Americans
and felt unwelcome in the church where no one spoke Spanish and there was an
insignificant shrine to the Virgin hidden in a back room, like an old, mad
parent. They only came for baptisms,
marriages and deaths. So they had come
in large numbers, standing in the dining room because the pews were full, to
see one of their own make it to safety.
Claudia hoped, without
really hoping, that God would bless her and erase her memory, take the screams
from her head. She had confessed it all
the very next day, two years ago in El Paso, only to learn that it was not a
sin. The young American priest, in slow,
awkward Spanish, had said that yes, there were sins involved in her story, but
that which truly weighed on her was not a sin.
“You were forced to do it.”
The priest said, “Besides, she was already dead.” Then he had told her about
the team of South American soccer players who had survived a plane crash in the
Andes only by consuming the flesh of those who had died. That was not a sin, either, he
explained. God understands.
Why couldn’t it be a sin so
that she could be forgiven?
So here she was two years
later, pregnant, at mass in a strange church in stranger land, with a man she
didn’t love and could barely understand beside her, ready to be married. Yet those two years were a series of blurs,
scenes barely noticed as she struggled to distance herself from the horror inside,
the other scene, the never-ending scene that played again and again in her
memory. That struggle continued right up
to the present. Even a sane person could
not have kept from thinking about it.
A large crucifix hung on the
wall behind the altar table, Christ’s tortured carcass nailed to it for
eternity.
During the homily that she
couldn’t understand, Claudia got up as discreetly as possible and went through
the door to the dining room. Rosa Maria
Rivas, a friend from the hotel where they both worked as housekeepers, lifted
an eyebrow at her.
“Voy al bano.” Claudia said as she passed.
“Nervios.” Quipped Rosa Maria, smiling and winking at the other
Mexicans standing in the dining room, listening without comprehension to the
priest they could not see.
In the bathroom, running
cool water into her cupped hands before applying it gently to her face, it was
no better. It had happened in a
bathroom. She looked into the mirror at her
dull, terrified face and remembered doing the same thing in a filthy bathroom
in El Paso after passing the last condom filled with cocaine and cleaning the
feces off them in the sink. She also
remembered the sound of Veronica’s body hitting the floor in the other stall,
and the sound of someone gurgling. These
thoughts drove her from the church bathroom, her face still moist from
ablution.
But walking back to mass
through the dining room Claudia could not fend off images of Veronica’s
quivering flesh and the foam dribbling from the corner of her mouth. Claudia had known right away that it had
something to do with the drugs inside them, their tickets across the
border.
When she resumed her seat,
everyone was standing. The priest and
the white people sang hosanna and it was time to kneel. She knelt as she had knelt on that filthy
floor in the El Paso bathroom to lift Veronica up onto the empty commode, as if
she could will the condoms out of a dead body.
But soon Veronica was still and silent forever, the condoms trapped inside,
the angry gringo in the bar outside getting angrier.
As she rose for communion,
Claudia recalled the great depth of her fear thinking about that furious white
man who only knew enough Spanish to tell them to go to the bathroom and take a
shit. She hadn’t seen any weapons, but
she knew that he wouldn’t need one to hurt her or kill her. When she finally had the courage to walk out
of the bathroom, sit next to him in the dark corner and tell him, she nearly
fainted when he pulled out a knife.
After he handed it to her she remained confused for a moment. Using gestures, the gringo explained what he
wanted.
It was the wound in His side
that did it, that pushed her past her limit.
Approaching the priest, she tried not to look over his shoulder at the
gaping wound in Christ’s abdomen. It took
her right back to the moment she had spent two years trying to erase from her
memory, the moment that had haunted her dreams, the moment when she cut into
Veronica’s belly and sliced through a length of intestine to search for the
condoms. She had told herself that it
was no different than removing an animal’s entrails back home, and used her
memories of butchering to guide her hands through Veronica’s guts.
When the priest offered
Claudia the body of Christ, the initial scream escaped her lips and her knees
buckled. She remembered gently squeezing each length of intestine with
trembling hands until she found a lump and pushed it toward the opening she had
made. As Claudia fell prostrate before
the priest, hiding herself from Christ’s diffident agony, she remembered the
pile of shit and swollen condoms in a pool of blood beside Veronica’s body when
she was done, and counting them until there was one less than there should have
been because one had broken and killed the Mexican girl.
Her cries were so horrible
that Jeff’s family left the church, decanting into the parking lot. Here and there clusters of people stopped and
looked back, apparently considering their return. Then a new shriek would pierce the calm air
of a small town Saturday and they would continue their flight. A few of them, the older ones, remembered the
squeal of hogs being slaughtered on the farms they grew up on. The rest remembered horror movies.
Jeff himself did not flee
but only retreated to the door way and watched her from there. The priest had retreated to behind the altar
table with his dish full of wafers, one hand held protectively over them. Claudia screamed until Jeff, ignoring
entreaties from his mother to come out into the parking lot, returned to her
side, remembering the picture of the ultrasound showing his son.
Claudia rose to her feet
with Jeff’s aid, eyes and mouth shut, holding in her breath like a drowning
woman, tears darting down her cheeks along routes that would someday turn into
wrinkles. Eventually, the priest came
out from behind his shelter and served Eucharist to the man and the woman as
the others crept cautiously back into the church.
The wedding ceremony began
shortly afterward. Claudia was able to
open her eyes and breathe raggedly by the time it came for her to take the
vows. There was muted, embarrassed
applause as Jeff kissed her briefly on one side of the mouth.
Somewhere in her fragmented
thoughts, as Claudia stumbled out the door with her husband into the bright
light of an Arizona day, she thought that maybe the worst was over, maybe she
would be able to stop thinking about what she had done and enjoy life.
But the truth was that she
was just completely broken, for good and forever.
