Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

“I have encouraged her to have more children,” Rivera says. “To-”

Enough, Adan thinks. This is getting insulting. “Father,” he says, “Gloria is all we can care for now.”

He leaves a check on the desk.

Goes home and tells Lucia that he has spoken with Father Rivera, and the talk strengthened his faith.

But what Adan really believes in are numbers.

It hurts him to see this sad, futile faith of hers; he knows she is hurting herself more deeply every day, because the one thing Adan knows for certain is that numbers never lie. He deals with numbers all day, every day. He makes key decisions based on numbers, and he knows that arithmetic is the absolute law of the universe, that a mathematical proof is the only proof.

And the numbers say that their daughter will get worse, not better, as she gets older, that his wife’s fervent prayers are unheard or unanswered.

So he puts his hopes in science, that someone somewhere will come up with (literally) the right formula, the miracle drug, the surgical procedure that will trump God and His useless entourage of saints.

In the meantime, there is nothing to do but keep putting one foot in front of the other in this futile marathon.

Neither God nor science can help his daughter.

Nora’s skin is a warm pink, flushed from the bath’s steaming water.

She has on a thick white terry-cloth bathrobe, and a towel wrapped in a turban around her hair, and she plops down on the sofa, puts her feet up on the coffee table and picks up the letter.

She asks, “Are you going to?”

“Am I going to what?” Parada asks as her question pulls him out of the sweet reverie of the Coltrane album playing on the stereo.

“Resign.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I suppose so. I mean, a letter from Il Papa himself…”

“But you said it was a request,” Nora says. “He’s asking, not ordering.”

“That’s just a courtesy,” Parada answers. “It amounts to the same thing. One doesn’t refuse a request of the Pope's.”

Nora shrugs. “First time for everything.”

Parada smiles. Ah, for the careless courage of youth. It is, he thinks, a simultaneous flaw and virtue of young people that they have so little regard for tradition, and even less for authority. A superior asks you to do something you don’t wish to do? Easy-just refuse.

But it would be so easy to accede, he thinks. More than easy-tempting. Resign and become a mere parish priest again, or accept an assignment to a monastery-a “period of reflection,” they would probably call it. A time for contemplation and prayer. It sounds wonderful, as opposed to the constant stress and responsibility. The endless political negotiations, the ceaseless efforts to acquire food, housing, medicine. Not to mention the chronic alcoholism, spousal abuse, unemployment and poverty, and the myriad tragedies that spring from them. It’s a burden, he thinks with full realization of his own self-pity, and now Il Papa is not only willing to remove the cup from my hands, he’s requesting that I give it up.

Will, in fact, forcibly rip it from me if I don’t meekly hand it over.

This is what Nora doesn’t understand.

One of the few things that Nora doesn’t understand.

She’s been coming to visit for years now. At first, it was short visits of a few days, helping out at the orphanage outside the city. Then it turned into longer visits, with her staying for a few weeks, and then the weeks turned into months. Then she would go back to the States to do what she does to make her money, and then return, and the stays at the orphanage became longer and longer.

Which is a good thing because she’s invaluable there.

To her surprise, she’s become quite good at doing whatever needs to be done. Some mornings it’s looking after the preschool kids, others it’s supervising repair of the seemingly endless plumbing problems or negotiating with contractors on prices for the new dormitory. Or driving into the big central market in Guadalajara to get the best deal on groceries for the week.

At first, each time a task came up she’d whine the same refrain-“I don’t know anything about that”-just to get the same answer from Sister Camella: “You’ll learn.”

And she did; she has. She’s become a veritable expert on the intricacies of Third World plumbing. The local contractors simultaneously love and hate to see her coming-she’s so beautiful but so relentlessly ruthless, and they’re both shocked and delighted to see a woman walk up to them and pronounce in butchered but effective Spanish the words “No me quiebres el culo.”

Don’t bust my ass.

Other times, she can be so charming and seductive that they give her what she wants at barely a profit. She leans over and looks up at them with those eyes and that smile and tells them that the roof can’t really wait until they have the cash-the rains are coming, don’t you see the sky?

No, they don’t. What they see is her face and body and, let’s be honest, her soul, and they go and fix the condenada roof. And they know she’s good for the money, she’ll get it, because who at the diocese is going to say no to her?

No one, that’s who.

No one has the balls.

And at the market? Dios mio, she’s a terror. Strolls through the vegetable stands like a queen, demanding the best of this, the freshest of that. Squeezing and smelling and asking for samples to test.

One morning a fed-up grocer asks her, “Who do you think you’re buying for? The patrons of a luxury hotel?”

She answers, “My kids deserve as good or better. Or do you disagree?”

She gets them the best food at the best price.

The rumors about her abound. She’s an actress-no, a whore-no… she is the cardinal’s mistress. No, she was a high-priced courtesan, and she is dying of AIDS, she has come to the orphanage to do penance for her sins before she goes to meet God.

But that story loses credence as a year goes by-then two, then five, then seven-and still she comes to the orphanage and her health hasn’t declined and her looks haven’t faded and by that time the speculation on her past has pretty much ended anyway.

She does enjoy the meals on her visits to the city. She eats herself into a near stupor, then takes a glass of wine into the big bathroom with real tiles and soaks in hot water until her skin is a glowing pink. Then she dries herself with the big, fluffy towels (the ones at the orphanage are small and practically transparent), and a maid comes in with the clean clothes that were being washed while she was in the tub, and then she rejoins Father Juan for an evening of conversation, music or movies. She knows he’s taken advantage of her bath to go outside in the garden and sneak cigarettes (the doctors have told him and told him and told him and his response is, “What if I give up the smokes and then get hit by a car? I will have sacrificed all that pleasure for nothing!”), and then he does this funny thing of sucking on a mint before she comes back, as if he’s fooling anybody, as if he needs to fool her.

In fact, they’ve come to measure the length of her baths by cigarettes-“I’m going to have a five-cig bath,” or, if she feels especially grimy and tired, “This is going to be an eight-cig bath”-but he still goes to the trouble to deny by silent implication that that’s what he’s doing, and he always sucks on the mint anyway.

This game has been going on now for almost seven years.

Seven years-she can’t believe it.

On this particular visit she came, unusually, in the morning, having spent all night bringing a sick child into the city hospital and then sitting up with him. When the crisis had passed she’d taken a taxi over to Juan’s residence and availed herself of a bath and a full breakfast. Now she sits in his den and listens to the music.