MY ARRIVAL WAS IMMEDIATELY consumed by preparations for the feast day of la Virgen de Guadalupe. Padre Guillermo and Padre Vicente had a specific vision for the procession of the statue of la Virgen and San Juan Diego through the streets of Apan, and made it clear what my place in it was: shouldering the litter carrying la Virgen and the saint at her feet alongside men from the town. Padre Guillermo was too old for such things, Padre Vicente said, and he—well, he would be leading the procession, wouldn’t he?
This was my place as a young cura, a sin destino priest with no parish and no hope of a career in a city. This was the proper place of a mestizo priest in the eyes of Padre Vicente. He was correct. More than he knew. Even if I had been a man of ambition, even if I had entered the priesthood with the intention of lining my life with silver and comfort like so many men I met in the seminary, I could not change what I was.
I knew Padre Guillermo from before I left for Guadalajara. How often he had found me asleep beneath the pews in the church as a boy and carried me back to my mother through the dawn, curled in his arms like a drowsy kitten. If Guillermo guessed at the reason I fled from the house in the middle of the night, seeking the silence of the house of God, he never mentioned it. It was he who wrote to Guadalajara and welcomed my transfer to the small parish of Apan, and when I arrived, dusty and exhausted from weeks on the road, he who embraced me. Guillermo, for all his fluster and pomp and his desire to please the wealthy hacendados who funded renovations in the church, was someone I trusted. But still, he had never lived on the haciendas as I had as a child. There were so many things he could never understand.
Vicente was new, a replacement for old Padre Alejandro, who had walked alongside the specter of Death for years. From the moment I met Vicente’s hawkish light gaze, a curl of fear turned in my bones. He could not be trusted—not with me, nor my secrets, nor with the struggles of my people.
The priests exited the church through the back to begin the procession, and I took my place among the three other townspeople elected to carry the litter of la Virgen—the aging master of the post, an equally graying baker, and his whip-thin son who looked no more than twelve. Nine years of insurgency had left no family unscathed. No townsperson, no hacendado, no villager had not lost a son or brother or nephew in their prime. If not in the battles that tore up the countryside and painted it black with blood, then to tuberculosis, or gangrene, or typhus.
I took my place and lifted the litter of la Virgen on my left shoulder. We were imbalanced; my height was not matched by the baker, so I would need to slouch to keep la Virgen at an even keel.
“?Todo bien, Padre Andrés?”
I looked over my shoulder at the baker’s son and grunted in the affirmative. Past him were the low stone walls of the graveyard. I turned my face away quickly.
More of my family now lay beneath the earth than walked it, but I had not paid my respects to those who lay behind the parish of Apan. My brothers were not there. Antonio and Hildo had died in battles in Veracruz and Guadalajara; only the Lord knew where they rested. The third, Diego, had vanished somewhere near Tulancingo last year. He was alive, I knew it, and was held somewhere, but none of my frantic letters to every insurgent I knew resulted in any reply. My grandmother was not there. She was buried near her home in the village of Hacienda San Isidro. I wished my mother could be buried near her, on the land where she had been born, the land that was home, the land where her family had lived for seven generations, but she was in the cemetery behind me.
I would visit soon. But not now. Not yet.
On Padre Vicente’s command, we began to walk around the church to the plaza de armas. Apan was four proper streets and a tangle of alleys; gray and quiet on most days, it burst at the seams on the feast day of la Virgen. People from the haciendas traveled into town for the Mass and the procession. They were dressed in their feast day best, men in starched shirts and women in bright embroidery, but as we proceeded slowly behind Padres Vicente and Guillermo, it became clear how faded and patched these clothes were. There were too many gaunt faces, too many feet without shoes, even in the middle of winter. The war left no part of the countryside untouched, but it left its deepest mark on those who had the least.
But whenever I glanced up, I saw eyes bright as an autumn sky. Burning with curiosity. Fixed not on la Virgen and rapturous Juan Diego, but lower.
On me.
I knew what they saw.
They did not see the son of Esteban Villalobos, onetime Sevillan foreman to old Solórzano on Hacienda San Isidro, then assistant to the caudillo, the local military officer who maintained order in Apan and the surrounding haciendas. Resident thug and drunk who had returned to Spain seven years ago.
They did not see the newly ordained Padre Juan Andrés Villalobos, a cura trained in Guadalajara, who regularly prayed before a cathedral retablo resplendent with more gold than they had ever seen in their lives.
They saw my grandmother. Alejandra Pérez, my sijtli, called Titi by her many grandchildren and by a good measure of the countryside besides.
It was unlikely they saw her in my features—these were more my Spanish father’s than my mother’s. No. I knew they felt Titi’s presence. Perhaps they even felt the shift of the earth beneath their feet, the attention of the skies tilting toward me. There, they said. That one. Look.
And look they did. They made a show of gazing at la Virgen and crossing themselves when blessed by Padre Vicente’s swinging golden censer, but I knew they watched me beneath Juan Diego’s wooden knees.
I kept my eyes on the dusty road before me.
The people of Hacienda San Isidro were clustered in a group near the end of the procession, at the front of the church. I raised my head and found my cousin, Paloma, standing with a few other girls her age. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other in anticipation, craning her neck, scanning the procession. When her eyes caught mine, a smile illuminated her face like lightning. I nearly stumbled, like Christ on the road to Calvary, from the shock of seeing someone so familiar after so many years apart. I had returned to Apan, yes, but now, in Paloma’s presence, I felt I was home.
They were all there, the people of the hacienda I had known my whole life: my aunt and Paloma’s mother, Ana Luisa, the old foreman Mendoza who had replaced my father in the wake of his indiscretions. They watched me with intense black eyes, taking me in for the first time in seven years, knowing me as their own.
I knew they expected me to step into Titi’s shoes.
But how could I? I was ordained. I had followed the path Titi and my mother urged me to take: I was not lost to the last decade of war, be it by gangrene or a gachupín’s bayonet. I had skirted the attention of the Inquisition and become a man of the Church.