“I have nephews in A Coru?a. Well, only one nephew, actually; he’s a math teacher and his wife’s a wonderful young woman, a social worker. They’ve been married for almost eight years, and they have a little girl who’s five now. Anyway, after she turned four about a year ago, the child started having nightmares. She’d wake up screaming in terror about people in her room, bad people, horrible people who shook her awake and frightened her. Her parents dismissed it at first. They thought those nightmares came from something that happened in kindergarten, maybe some child was bullying her. That kind of thing happens, you know. But the nightmares continued. The child screamed and the parents rushed to her room and tried to wake her up. But even with her eyes open the poor baby kept shouting there were people in the room. She pointed behind her parents but they saw nothing. The terror reflected in her little face seized them as well.
“The pediatrician said those were nighttime terrors, very vivid nightmares some children have. They imagine things even when their eyes are open. He gave them plenty of the usual advice: keep her away from stress, avoid active games before bedtime, no heavy meals late in the day. He even recommended warm baths and massages. But the nightmares continued. Nothing changed. They were desperate, so they consulted other doctors. Finally someone referred them to a psychiatrist who specialized in treating children. After examining the girl, the doctor told them she was perfectly healthy, and told them sometimes children with a lot of imagination convince themselves they see things. It wasn’t a bad diagnosis, but it wasn’t enough for the parents, so the psychiatrist prescribed a sleeping pill. A very mild one, he said, but it was a drug, after all. For a child.
“You can imagine their concern. They came back home devastated, and they told my sister, who happened to be there visiting a very dear friend. The friend offered some advice. ‘Look, why don’t you take her to the shrine?’
“They told her, ‘Oh, we don’t believe in hocus-pocus. We couldn’t possibly take our daughter to an exorcist.’”
“What did she reply?”
“‘I’m sure you never imagined you’d take your four-year-old to a psychiatrist and drug her either. Go ahead and give it a try, people. You’re Catholics, the child was baptized, and you were married in a church. And after all, it wouldn’t hurt any of you to attend mass once in a while.’
“They took a while to decide. I think they’d already started giving her the pills, but those weren’t working. They were desperate. So they went to the shrine, and it happened to be a festival day. After mass the father took the child to the priest and told him of their problem.
“He gave them good advice. ‘They’re about to take the Virgin from her altar and parade her around the church for the festival. Hold the little one by the hand, run under the platform carrying the figure of the Virgin, and come out on the other side.’”
“That’s it?” Manuel asked.
“That’s it. They stood outside in the crowd and saw more than one person doing exactly what the priest had described. People ducked under the processional platform with the statue of the Virgin and crossed to the other side. It seemed like a harmless game, so the father took her hand as the procession approached. The child screamed and threw a tantrum, struggling and shrieking, ‘No, no, no!’ The parents crouched by her, totally aghast, not knowing what to do, completely confused and horrified by the child’s suffering. The priest ran to them, grabbed the screaming little child, took her in his arms, and crossed beneath the platform.
“You can explain it any way you like, but when they came out on the other side, the child wasn’t screaming anymore. She was as sweet and calm as could be. She didn’t remember a whit of what had been afflicting her.”
Manuel took a deep breath.
“What can I say?” The woman sighed. She handed the card back to him. “I don’t know if my nephew and his wife are better Catholics now, but the girl’s nightmares are gone. Every time there’s a festival they take her back to cross under the Virgin’s platform.”
He drove almost thirty miles along the main road, passing through a small town and several extended villages. The story he’d just heard at the inn played in an endless loop in his head. A couple of times he passed signs pointing out places of touristic interest or architectural distinction. He turned onto a secondary road and drove for miles through the unmarked countryside. He was sure he was hopelessly lost, but the GPS insisted he go on. He didn’t mind; the beauty of that morning in the countryside intensified his feeling of successful escape.
Half a dozen humble cottages surrounded the church and its annexes. He drove around the exterior of the grounds and a deserted parking lot of impressive size, then took the drive to the main entrance. He parked in the shade of a rank of plane trees that hadn’t yet shed their broad green leaves. He got out and surveyed the double set of stairs that led up to the sanctuary.
A noise distracted him. He turned and on the other side of the street running along the far side of the parking lot he saw a pair of elderly men open an aluminum door to enter a structure identified as a bar only by a faded tinplate ad for Schweppes that would have fetched a good price at an antique store. They hadn’t noticed him. Before taking the stairs he went to the dusty trunk of a plane tree and pulled off a chunk of bark. He knew the irregularly shaped yellow wound would again look like the rest of the trunk in just a few days. His sister had loved doing that. They would wander through the parks of Madrid taking turns stripping plane trees of their scaly coverings. Sometimes they found one almost intact, its bark so cracked and buckled that it looked as if the tree were struggling to push its way out through that covering. They took real pleasure in breaking off the scaly pieces; the challenge was to see which of them could pull off the largest one that stayed in one piece. He smiled. Then he smiled again, ruefully this time, aware that in these days of uncertainty revisiting painful memories he’d suppressed so long had become one way of assuaging his pain.
He turned the jagged chunk of bark over in his hands as he climbed the stairs to the shrine. He didn’t try the door of the main entrance, for he assumed it would be locked. He walked around the building instead. Thousands of signs of the cross had been scratched into its walls, from the ground up to as far as a man could reach.
A woman with very short hair came out of the side entrance, pulling her wool jacket around her in a gesture so exaggerated it verged on the manic. She stopped, stared at him, and declared, “The church is open, but you have to use this entrance. If you want to buy candles or liturgical items, I’ll have them out in just a moment.” She pointed to a stone structure with a sign: SOUVENIRS OF THE VIRGIN.
“No,” Manuel declined, perhaps a bit too brusquely. “In fact I came to see Lucas, but I don’t know if this is a good time. Maybe I should have telephoned ahead.”
She looked disappointed and then mystified, but then suddenly grasped his meaning. “Oh! You’re here to see Father Lucas; of course he’s here. Go in and call him. He’s busy in the sacristy.” Forgetting about him, she yanked out of the pocket of her shapeless jacket a ring with more than twenty keys and headed toward the rough-hewn door of the souvenir shop.
The midmorning sun that had warmed the outside poured into the church nave from high windows. Shafts of light cut through the dusty air of an interior so dim he had to stop for a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.