2666 (63 page)

The attacks on
San Rafael
and San Tadeo got more attention in the local press than the women killed in
the preceding months. The next day, Juan de Dios
Martinez
and two policemen went back to
Colonia Kino and Colonia La Preciada and showed people the sketch of the
attacker. No one recognized him. At lunchtime the policemen went downtown and
Juan de Dios
Martinez
called the director of the asylum. The director hadn't read the papers and
didn't know anything about what had happened
  
the
  
night
  
before.
  
Juan
  
de
  
Dios
  
asked
  
her
  
out
  
to
  
lunch. Unexpectedly, the
director accepted the invitation and they agreed to meet at a vegetarian
restaurant on Calle Rio Usumacinta, in Colonia Podesta. He'd never been to the
restaurant, and when he got there he asked for a table for two and a whiskey
while he waited, but they didn't serve alcohol. The waiter was wearing a
checkered shirt and sandals and looked at him as if something was wrong with
him or he'd come to the wrong restaurant. It was a nice place, he thought. The
people at the other tables talked in low voices and there was the sound of
music like water tumbling over smooth stones. The director saw him as soon as
she
c
ame in, but she didn't say
hello. She went to talk to the waiter, who was preparing fresh-squeezed juice
behind the bar. After exchanging a few words with him, she came over to the
table. She was wearing gray pants and a low-cut pearl-colored sweater. Juan de
Dios
Martinez
got up when she reached him and thanked her for agreeing to have lunch with
him. The director smiled: she had small, even teeth, very white and sharp,
which made her smile look carnivorous in a way that was out of keeping with the
restaurant. The waiter asked what they wanted to eat. Juan de Dios
Martinez
looked at the
menu and then said she should choose for him. As they were waiting for their
food he told her about San Tadeo. The director listened carefully and at the
end she asked if there was anything else. That's the whole story, said the
inspector. My two patients spent the night at the center, she said. I know, he
said. How? After I left the church I went to the asylum. I asked the guard and
the nurse on duty to take me to their rooms. Both were asleep. There were no
urine-stained clothes. No one let them out. What you're describing is illegal,
said the director. But now they aren't suspects anymore, said the inspector.
And I didn't even wake them up. They didn't realize a thing. For a while the
director ate in silence. Juan de Dios
Martinez
was beginning to like the water-sounds music more and more. He told her so. I'd
like to buy the album, he said. He meant it sincerely. The director seemed not
to hear him. For dessert they were served figs. Juan de Dios
Martinez
said it had been years since he ate
figs. The director ordered a coffee and wanted to pay for the meal herself, but
he wouldn't let her. It wasn't easy. He had to insist more than once, and the
director seemed to turn to stone. When they left the restaurant they shook hands
as if they would never see each other again.

Two days later, the stranger got into the church of Santa
Catalina, in Colonia Lomas del Toro, late at night when the building was
closed, and he urinated and defecated on the altar, as well as decapitating almost
all the statues in his path. This time, the story made the national news and a
reporter from
La Voz de Sonora
dubbed the attacker the Demon Penitent.
As far as Juan de Dios
Martinez
knew, the culprit might be anyone, but the police decided it had been the
Penitent and he thought it best to go along with the official story. It didn't
strike him as odd that nobody living near the church had heard anything, even
though it would have taken time to break all those sacred objects and would've
made lots of noise. No one lived at the church. The officiating priest was
there from nine in the morning till one in the afternoon, and then he went to
work at a parochial school in Colonia Ciudad Nueva. There was no sexton and the
altar boys who helped at Mass sometimes came and sometimes didn't. In fact,
Santa Catalina was a church with almost no parishioners, and the things inside
were cheap, bought by the diocese at a store downtown that sold cassocks and
saints, wholesale and retail. The priest was an open-minded man, a freethinker,
or so it seemed to Juan de Dios
Martinez
.
They talked for a while. There was nothing missing from the church. The priest
didn't seem scandalized or upset by the outrage. He made a rapid calculation of
the damages and said that for the diocese it was a drop in the bucket. He
wasn't startled by the shit on the altar. After you leave this will all be
cleaned up in a few hours, he said. But the quantity of urine alarmed him.
Shoulder to shoulder, like Siamese twins, the inspector and the priest examined
every corner where the Penitent had urinated, and the priest said at last that
the man must have a bladder the size of a watermelon. That night, Juan de Dios
Martinez
thought to
himself that he was beginning to like the Penitent. The first attack was
violent and the sexton was almost killed, but as the days went by he was
perfecting his technique. With the second attack he had only frightened some
churchgoers, and with the third no one saw him and he was able to work in
peace.

Three days after the desecration of the
church
of
Santa Catalina
, in the early
morning hours, the Penitent slipped into the
church
of
Nuestro Senor
Jesucristo
, in Colonia Reforma, the oldest church
in the city, built in the mid-eighteenth century and once the seat of the diocese
of Santa Teresa. Three priests and two young Papago Indian seminarians who were
studying anthropology and history at the
University
of
Santa Teresa
slept in an adjacent building, located at the corner of Calle Soler and Calle
Ortiz Rubio. In addition to pursuing their studies, the seminarians performed
some minor cleaning tasks, like washing the dishes each night or gathering up
the priests' dirty laundry and delivering the load to the woman who did the
washing. That night, one of the seminarians wasn't asleep. He had tried to
study in his room and then he got up to get a book from the library, where, for
no reason, he sat reading in an
a
rmchair
until he fell asleep. The building was connected to the church by a passageway
that led straight to the rectory office. It was said that there was another
underground passageway that the priests had used during the Revolution and the
Cristero War, but the Papago student had never heard of it. Suddenly he was
woken by the sound of breaking glass. First, oddly enough, he thought it was
raining, but then he realized the noise was coming from inside the church, not
outside, and he went to investigate. When he got to the rectory office he heard
moans and he thought someone had gotten locked inside one of the confessionals,
which was entirely unlikely, since the doors didn't lock. The Papago student,
despite what was commonly believed about people of his ancestry, wasn't brave
at all and was afraid to go into the church alone. First he went to wake up the
other seminarian and then the two of them knocked very discreetly at the door
of Father Juan Carrasco, who at that hour was asleep, like everybody else in
the building. Father Juan Carrasco listened to the Papago's story in the
hallway and since he read the news he said: it must be the Penitent.
Immediately he went back into his room, put on pants and sneakers that he wore
to go jogging or to play
fronton,
and got an old baseball bat out of a
cupboard. Then he sent one of the Papagos to wake up the caretaker, who slept in
a little room on the first floor, next to the stairs, and, followed by the
Papago who had raised the alert, he headed for the church. At first glance both
had the impression that no one was there. The opalescent smoke of the candles
rose slowly toward the vaulted ceiling and a dense, tawny cloud hovered
motionless inside the sanctuary. A moment later they heard the moan, like a
child trying not to vomit, then another and another, and then the familiar
sound of the first retch. It's the Penitent, whispered the seminarian. Father
Carrasco furrowed his brow and headed resolutely toward the place the noise was
coming from, gripping the baseball bat in two hands, as if he were about to
step up to the plate. The Papago didn't follow him. Maybe he took a small step
or two in the direction the priest had gone, but then he stood still, prey to a
divine terror. Even his teeth were chattering. He could neither advance nor
retreat. So, as he later explained to the police, he began to pray. What did
you pray? asked Inspector Juan de Dios
Martinez
.
The Papago didn't understand the question. The Lord's Prayer? asked the
inspector. No, oh no, my mind went blank, said the Papago, I prayed for my
soul, I prayed to the Holy Mother, I begged the Holy Mother not to abandon me. From
where he was he heard the sound of the baseball bat slamming against a column.
It might have been (he thought or he remembered having thought) the Penitent's
spinal column or the six-foot column on which stood the wooden carving of the
Archangel Gabriel. Then he heard someone panting. He heard the Penitent moan.
He heard Father Carrasco swear at someone, but the words were strange, and he
couldn't tell whether it was the Penitent who was being sworn at, or he himself
for not following, or an unknown person from Father Carrasco's past, someone
the Papago would never know and the priest would never see again. Then came the
sound of a baseball bat dropping on stones cut with skill and precision. The
wood, the bat, bounced several times until at last the noise ceased. Almost at
the same instant he heard the scream, which brought back the sense of divine
terror. Unthinking terror. Or a terror expressed in shaky images. Then he
thought he saw, as if by candlelight, though it might just as easily have been
a ray of lightning, the figure of the Penitent shattering the shinbones of the
archangel in a single blow and knocking it off its pedestal with the baseball
bat. Again the sound of wood, this time very old wood, hitting stone, as if in
that place wood and stone were strictly antagonistic terms. And more blows. And
then the footsteps of the caretaker, who came running and plunged into the
darkness too, and the voice of his Papago brother asking him, in Papago, what
was wrong, what hurt. And then more shouting and more priests and voices
calling for the police and a flurry of white shirts and an acid smell, as if
someone had mopped the stones of the old church with a gallon of ammonia, the
smell of piss, as he was informed by Inspector Juan de Dios Martinez, too much
urine for one man, for a man with a normal bladder.

This time the Penitent went berserk, said Inspector Jose
Marquez as he knelt to look at the bodies of Father Carrasco and the caretaker.
Juan de Dios Martinez examined the window the Penitent had come in through and
then he went outside and spent a while walking along Calle Soler and then Calle
Ortiz Rubio and through a plaza the residents used as free parking at night.
When he got back to the church, Pedro Negrete and Epifanio were there, and as
soon as he came in the police chief motioned for him to join them. For a while
they talked and smoked sitting in the last row of pews. Under his leather
jacket Negrete was wearing a
p
ajama shirt. He smelled of
expensive cologne and he didn't seem tired. Epifanio was wearing a light blue
suit that looked good in the dim light of the church. Juan de Dios
Martinez
told the police
chief the Penitent must have a car. What makes you say that? He can't get
around on foot without attracting attention, said the inspector. His piss
stinks. It's a long way from Kino to Reforma. It's a long way from Reforma to
Lomas del Toro, too. Let's say the Penitent lives downtown. You could walk
downtown from Reforma, and if it was nighttime, no one would notice you smelled
like piss. But to walk downtown from Lomas del Toro, that would take, I don't
know, at least an hour. Or more, said Epifanio. And how far is it from Lomas
del Toro to Kino? At least forty-five minutes, assuming you don't get lost,
said Epifanio. And that's not to mention Reforma to Kino, said Juan de Dios
Martinez
. So the bastard
gets around by car, said the police chief. It's the only thing we can be sure
of, said Juan de Dios
Martinez
.
And he probably carries a change of clothes in the car. What for? asked the
police chief. As a safety precaution. So in other words you think the Penitent
is nobody's fool, said Negrete. He only goes crazy when he's in a church, when
he comes out he's just like anybody else, whispered Juan de Dios
Martinez
. Goddamn, said
the police chief. What do you think, Epifanio? Could be, said Epifanio. If he
lives alone, he can come back smelling like shit, since it doesn't take him
more than a minute to get from his car to his base of operations. If he's got
some woman at home or his folks, he must change his clothes before he goes in.
Makes sense, said the police chief. But the question is how we stop all this.
Any ideas? For now, station an officer in each church and wait for the Penitent
to make his next move, said Juan de Dios
Martinez
.
My brother's a churchgoer, said the police chief, as if thinking out loud. I
have to ask him a few things. What about you, Juan de Dios, where do you think
the Penitent lives? I don't know, Chief, said the inspector, anywhere, although
if he has a car I doubt he lives in Kino.