This was what filled the overfilled bag she carried. Marisita had thought very hard about what Daniel might need, and had taken quite a long time to assemble it into the pack. Here was what she had brought: ten cured sausages, a pot of cheese, twelve avocados, three oranges, two cups of lard, a small pile of tortillas, four tins of beans, cornmeal, a skillet, one hundred matches, three pairs of dry socks, four clean shirts, a harmonica, a small blanket, a pocketknife, a paring knife, a votive candle, a hairbrush, a bar of soap, a notebook that was only halfway used up, a pen, three cigarettes, a sheep-collared coat, a cup for water, a pellet gun, a flashlight, and a small satchel of Francisco’s rose petals in case Daniel needed to smell it in order to cure homesickness.
The tenderness of this gesture finally provided Beatriz a window into Marisita’s heart. For the first time, she began to see Marisita as not merely a pilgrim but rather a person, and not just a person, but someone who showed her care for someone else in intensely practical ways.
Joaquin, on the other hand, had reached the end of his stamina for uncertainty. “Beatriz! Let’s go! We can’t be talking to her! This is madness! She could kill us both!”
Marisita knew the taboo as well as a Soria, perhaps better, after the events of the night before. She was already ducking away as she said, “You should! I don’t want something else terrible to happen. I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to meet anyone tonight.”
“Wait,” Beatriz said, although she did not yet know the words that were going to follow. The problem with ideas is that they never come all at once. They emerge like prairie dogs. An edge of ear, or the tip of a nose, and sometimes even the whole head. But if you look straight at an idea too fast, it can vanish back into the ground before you’re even sure of what you’ve seen. Instead, you have to sneak up on it slowly, looking out of the corner of your eye, and then and only then you might glance up to get a clear look.
Beatriz was having an idea now, but she’d only seen an ear or a whisker.
“Wait?” echoed Joaquin.
“I just—I have questions,” Beatriz confessed.
“Beatriz,” Joaquin exhorted.
“She’s the pilgrim Daniel helped,” Beatriz told him. “She’s the last one to see him. This is Marisita.”
“Oh,” said Joaquin.
There was a pregnant pause. An unusual and elegant intersection of needs and wants had formed in that moment, and they could all sense it. They all longed to talk to one another about their common interest: Daniel. As pressing as this urge was, if it had only been a desire for information, it might have died there. But there was something else. When Daniel had asked Beatriz if she ever thought they were doing it wrong, he had merely voiced an unspoken question both of them had been carrying for a while. For Daniel, it was because ethics pressed badly at him, with all of the pilgrims falling between the cracks. For Beatriz, it was the sense that the facts were being made to add up to something that was not quite true. All of these truths were being bundled together and sealed with superstition and fear instead of science and reason.
Marisita lingered, but didn’t speak. Beatriz’s mind worked busily. Joaquin’s mouth still held the shape of his last word. None of them knew precisely how far they could press this meeting.
Before he’d moved into the greenhouse, Francisco would sometimes tell Beatriz stories of scientists, like Guillermo González Camarena, the teenage inventor of the color TV, or Helia Bravo Hollis, the botanist who’d catalogued hundreds of succulent plants and founded the Sociedad Mexicana de Cactología. These great minds organized facts in new ways and performed experiments on the accepted truth, changing one variable here or there to test just how factual their facts really were. Beatriz and Daniel had been eyeing the facts they’d been given for quite a while, though they’d had no way to test them. But now—
Beatriz’s thoughts moved to the radio, which was still noisy with Diablo Diablo’s banter. It sounded as if they were still hearing Joaquin’s voice, but really, it was not Joaquin at all. It was the sound of his voice encoded onto a signal, which the transmitter then modified so that the stable-stolen radio could pick it up and play it from the speaker. It was no more Joaquin than a drawing of him would be him.
“What do you think about …” Beatriz began. The prairie dog of an idea had lifted its head from the hole. “Doing a radio interview?”
We don’t quite understand miracles. This is the way of most divine things; saints and miracles belong to a different world and use a different set of rules. It is hard to tell the human purpose of St. Joseph of Cupertino’s miraculous levitation, for instance. Whenever he was transported by faith, he was also transported by physics, often several feet into the air, sometimes in the middle of a homily. He would at times remain up there for hours, paused in mid-speech, while his fellow brothers waited for him to descend and finish his thought. It is also difficult to tell the usefulness of the miracles of St. Christina the Astonishing—after rising from the dead in her twenties, she would upon occasion hurl herself into a river and allow herself to be carried downstream into the path of a churning mill wheel. There she would be thrown in violent circles before emerging unscathed: a miracle. And then there was St. Anthony of Padua. His miracles were varied, all beyond understanding, but perhaps the most inscrutable was the miracle at the water’s edge. Finding no human company to address, he preached at the water’s edge so piously that a school of fish broke the surface to listen—a miracle difficult to understand, as fish have no souls to save and no voices to convert unbelievers.
Compared to these, the Soria miracles were quite palatable. Yes, sometimes the pilgrims to Bicho Raro became impossibly ugly or fearfully radiant, intensely practical or clumsily fanciful. Some grew feathers. Some shrank to the size of a mouse. Sometimes shadows came to life and scampered around the pilgrim. Sometimes wounds formed that refused to heal. But these oddities were no random punishments but rather messages specific to each pilgrim. The darkness made flesh was a concrete puzzle that, if solved, provided the mental tools the pilgrim needed to move on.
The intention of every Soria miracle was the same: to heal the mind.
Daniel Soria had been telling himself this over and over since the night before. This trial was not a punishment, he reminded himself. This trial was a miracle.
But it did not feel like a miracle.
He was out in the high desert night, sitting cross-legged by a smoldering fire. Although it was very cold, it was a very small fire, because Daniel could not shake the image of Joaquin coming after him despite all warnings and finding him by the light of the blaze. So he kept it near-suffocated, and sat with his palms pressed against the still-warm ground.