The Madonnas of Echo Park (11 page)

Since then, I have come to understand that God is the fear that motivates you to protect yourself from evil. God cannot be everywhere at once, and it is up to each of us to use our own faith in Him to protect ourselves. My husband, Gabriel Esperanza, taught me this. His father was one of the few
Californios
to hold on to his land when the
gringos
came. They drew a line in the desert and said, Your property belongs to us now. When writs and warrants didn't scare him, a mob of drunken
gringos
came with a hangman's noose to “reposses” his land. Gabriel's father, an educated man of prominent civic standing, repelled them armed with nothing more than a Bible and a shotgun. When his father died, Gabriel kept up the vigil, leaving enough of a parcel for his own estate, then selling much of the land to the city at a handsome profit. That land became Angelino Heights, the first suburb in the City of the Angels. Can you imagine that? A
Mexican
created our first suburbia, a place built on the fundamental notion of keeping people you think aren't as good as you believe yourself to be—out.

Gabriel was rugged and dashing, and I considered myself fortunate that a sixteen-year-old would be married off by the convent to
their fifty-six-year-old benefactor. God and a fistful of spiny, pink cactus needles sewed into a throw pillow kept him out of my bed until I turned eighteen, but Gabriel was a decent man, or as decent as a man who bought a girl from a convent could be, and while I never bore him a son (there was one daughter, Felicia, whom I sent away when she was four because Gabriel had no interest in raising a daughter, and I had no interest in being a single parent), he was content to live a life apart from me, listening to his Lucha Reyes records on a separate floor while I lived a life on my own floor of his turn-of-the-century Victorian mansion in Angelino Heights. It was a house he'd bought from a silent film mogul who was shot by a jealous mistress. The bullet didn't kill the mogul, but her thirty-seven stab wounds to his abdomen with a poisoned stiletto letter opener did, an excess that befitted the style in which he'd decorated the mansion's seventeen rooms—burgundy velvet wallpaper, gold candelabras, and an actual waterfall built into the stairwell's balustrade.

When Gabriel died, my faith would no longer endorse his often profligate spending: the Mexican maids he hired to “service” him when I wasn't in the mood to be ridden like a cow and his extravagant donations to the convent. A pair of white nuns came out in a fancy automobile and, in
my
house, had the audacity to say that, without Gabriel's contributions, they couldn't afford to keep the convent open.

“Sell your car and give the money to the poor,” I said. Luke 12:33. The church is too rich anyway.

Then my sisters, Aracely and Patricia, begged to move into
my
house. There was more than enough room for us, they said, including my mother, who with age had grown slow, senile, and nearing death's hands, desperate for reconciliation.

Where's
Abuelita
? I asked. Where was my
real
mother?

She drowned herself in Echo Park Lake, my mother said, because Archie wouldn't let us back into his house. That's where I will die if you don't give me a roof to put over my head.

I told her: “And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves, for charity shall cover the multitude of sins”—1 Peter 4:8. Find the paths that don't cross mine, I said. That was my charity to them.

Thanks to me they found their way. Within a year, my mother was living a happy life with my daughter, Felicia, in a tin shack in Chavez Ravine; my sisters had left America and moved south, to a small Mexican village in Guadalajara, where they belonged; and the convent had been converted to a high school, St. Gottschalk's. I believed this was a better use for the community, but a foulmouthed miscreant—their running coach—now blasphemes the Lord's name by teaching his charges profane chants, which they bellow on their morning jogs throughout the neighborhood. Thank God I still have the strength to walk to the curb every morning with a garden hose and a hose end insecticide sprayer filled with holy water.

Do you now see how much of my industriousness has been devoted to Him? “Let your good deeds shine out for all to see, so that everyone will praise your heavenly Father”—Matthew 5:16. I am a pious woman and have lived a righteous life, never once strayed in my path of conviction.

This is why God sent the Virgin Mary to me.

Ah, you see now why telling you this story is dangerous! You've heard what happens to those who claim they've seen Our Lady. They are ridiculed and ostracized by disbelievers, hounded and persecuted by believers yearning to be healed, either in body or in spirit. But Mary didn't “appear” out of thin air; she had to earn my belief, as you have had to earn my confidence to hear this story.

There was an old Italian woman—a beggar—with a fake black wig, a cane, and ankles as sturdy as a nursemaid's who used to hobble across a hectic intersection in Echo Park every morning without crossing at the light. I made the mistake one time of helping her. Then, whenever she saw me, she'd motion me to help her across without so much as asking. Do once, and be prepared to do again and again, I
say. Why should I help an old woman take a shortcut? Who has ever helped me across the street? The day I need help to cross the street is the day I learn how to find what I need on
this
side of the street.

When I saw her flailing that cane in the air, I walked to the bus shelter on Sunset Boulevard in front of Pilgrim's Supermarket (it's now some kind of convenience store that isn't convenient if you are poor or an old woman like me). There in the doorway of a block-long ninety-nine-cent store stood a shiny-faced teenage girl in ankle-length blue slacks and a matching blue coat spotted with a constellation of translucent stars, flat nurse's shoes, a red scarf wrapped around her head in the shape of a circlet to protect her fair skin from the sun, and a white lamb's-wool sweater with a fraying ring of delicate gold thread across her chest. There was nothing remarkable about her clothes—you'd find them at
las tiendas descuentas
up and down the block—but a young woman wearing such an old lady's outfit? Even back then, most of the girls went to church like
putas
in miniskirts and thongs, with their faces made up like
payasos.
It's worse today with that
chisme
coming out of their
telefonitos
! Who could be more important to talk to in a church than God?
Tus novios? Tus amigas? Tus chulos?
Disgraceful.

Her clothes seemed to float atop her body. Plus it was a Tuesday—
nobody's
idea of a holy day. When I turned to look, she was walking alongside me, a beatific smile on her face, one that for a moment made me forget my wariness of strangers, the only people I mistrust more than my relatives.

“Ay, m'hija,
my feet are so tired today,” she said.

There was no one else on the street. My shoulders tensed, and I began to think of what I could say to scare her away should she prove to be crazy or, worse, a panhandler.

“How have you been,
m'hija
? Did you hear about my son?” she asked. “Arrested him in the thick of night. Turned in by one of his best friends,
ay.
What am I going to do?”

“I don't have any money,” I said. “Leave me alone.”

“Don't be afraid,
m'hija,
” she said. “There's nothing I want from you, Beatriz. What you have in abundance I want none of.”

How did she know my name? Or that I was afraid?

“Go away,” I said and quickened my pace. The woman kept up stride by stride without visibly moving her legs. She drifted alongside me as if carried on a breeze. There was a bus picking up passengers at the shelter, and I started to run; it wasn't my intention to board it—I had nowhere outside Echo Park to go—but I needed the security of a crowd.

“Beatriz, please.” She laughed. “Why are you running to be alone?”

The bus pulled away before I could reach it. I sat down on the bench in the shelter to catch my breath. The woman hovered next to a garbage can, her ashen glow visible in the shelter's advertisement glass display. “If you stay on this path you're on, you'll get to where you are going whether you run or walk.”

“How dare you speak to an elder this way!” I shouted. “Leave me alone!”

“Ay,
don't be so rude!” she said. “You are not talking to your daughter!”

Not another soul living today knew about Felicia. “I don't have a daughter,” I lied. “And I don't know who you are. I've never seen you before,” I said, defiant. Her eyes were two pinhead flames of rose quartz, and I was unable to move, transfixed out of either anger or fear.

“You know me and have seen me,
m'hija.
I am the mother of all children, and of my son Christ, our Lord,” she said.

“Your Son,
Jesús
?” I scoffed. “This is silly. Everything you say is false. Get away from me and beg from someone else.” I turned my back on her, hoping she'd understand how degrading her behavior was for both of us, two women strangers arguing in public.

“You will be tougher than I thought.” She wafted down on the bench next to me like a fog moving onshore. The street noise, its
traffic and people, disappeared. A strange feeling of warmth poured over my skin. Imagine the weight of your many years that you carry on your shoulders disappearing in one single, immense, breathtaking moment. Your humiliation dissolved, your hurts healed, your grievances redressed, your bitterness crystallized into acceptance; everything that has been done wrong to you has now been done right, as if an enormous switch deep inside your soul has been flipped, reversing the flow of years of anger and hatred and animosity and grief, turning it into love and compassion. You never want to say another word in anger again. You have no memory of your mother beating you with a hairbrush, no guilt over watching your sisters being molested by your uncle behind a fetid apple tree and doing nothing, saying nothing. The desperation and hopelessness that you tried to rid yourself of but couldn't, because it left you exposed, floats away, leaving behind a body and a soul that feel transparent and blemish-free, like newborn skin.

She rose from the bench, and the weight of my hurt came crashing back onto my shoulders. The street roared back to life with cars, noise, and people. I strained my eyes to look at her bright face. “I will return when you are ready to hear what I have to say,” she said.

“You didn't say anything. Wait,” I said. She floated behind the bus shelter and disappeared. On the bench was a trail of rose petals that led to the garbage can, where a rosebush—not a bouquet but an entire bush—was blooming.

I smelled roses everywhere on my way back to my house—in the garbage, by Echo Park Lake, and in the dust kicked up by small children running home. I fell into a deep sleep at four in the afternoon, not waking for fourteen hours. In my dreams I wandered through a field of burning weeds wearing a coat made of rain. The coat enveloped me with the sensation of both drowning and breathing, its chill warding off the incredible heat around me. I was searching for my daughter, now a grown woman, who was sitting on an island of blooming jacaranda trees surrounded by a brimstone lake. Her adult
face, which I've never seen but knew intimately in the dream, floated out of reach. Then I awoke.

At the bus stop the next day, the petals and the rosebush were gone. The smell, though, was stronger than before, and when it entered my nostrils, I started crying. Tears that smelled of roses plopped on my hands and feet. I held out my hand to catch them, and brought up a palm brimming with rose petals.

Every day for six days, I made my pilgrimage to the bus shelter. The Virgin Mary didn't return as she'd promised. Every night for six nights, I had the same dream. I'd made no effort to tell people about my experience for fear I'd be branded one of those old, crazy women who mutter to themselves on the street. What I needed was a man used to the lunacy of the extraordinary. What I needed was a man of God.

Father Alemencio at St. Gotteschalk's had gained a reputation as a “street priest,” a rare member of the church capable of offering both compassion and practical advice. He'd brokered truces between several gangs, was a discreet bearer of condoms to newlyweds, and offered a free literacy and job-training program for ex-cons. We met late one afternoon in his office, bright with fluorescence yet somehow dark as a tavern.

“Your husband was a great man,” Father Alemencio said. “His generosity will be remembered for a long time.”

“Why? If I hadn't ended his spendthrift ways, you and your school wouldn't be here.”

“Your devotion has only assumed a different form, the same way as all of our own faiths take different forms as we get older,” he said. “What do you want to discuss with me, Beatriz?”

“I am having complicated dreams,” I said.

“I understand.” He smiled. “I've had this talk with everyone from old women concerned that if they die in their sleep they'll
die in real life to young boys ashamed about . . . well, Catholicism gives everyone something to feel ashamed about. Dreams, recurring fantasies, nightmares—they're quite normal. What happens in your dream?”

“There is this burning field, and I'm walking through it wearing an overcoat made of rain,” I said. I didn't mention the part about my daughter.

“Something to keep the heat off your shoulders.” He laughed. “When did you start having this dream?”

“After seeing the Virgin Mary,” I said.

“Ah, Our Lady of Guadalupe. She has visited the dreams of many a Mexican woman. You should consider yourself blessed, Beatriz. Our Lady's strength and—”

“No, I've
seen
her,” I blurted out. “She appeared to me. In real life.”