Laura Restrepo: Hot Sur

They didn’t know what would happen to them once they were inside, but they had gone there alone and on foot along Route 285, something absurd in and of itself, this having to walk through southern Colorado at this point in their lives. The older of the two, Greg, was twenty-six, the younger one barely thirteen, a child really, known as Sleepy Joe in school because he fell asleep in class.

“I’m not sleeping, I’m praying,” he’d protest to his teacher, who shook him whenever she caught him with his eyes closed.

Wendy Mellons thinks they must have looked more like father and son than brothers walking along the shoulder of that long highway that traverses three states. No one spends almost three hours like they did on a trip they could have easily made using their father’s pickup truck.

“They were following orders,” Wendy Mellons explains. “They’d been told that they should arrive alone and on foot.”

After walking most of the way on 285, they took the old road leading from Purgatory to New Saddle Rock. Once they’d crossed the dry riverbed of Perdidas Creek and trudged through a field of weeds, they climbed through the barren terrain until they saw the small white adobe house, separate from any other structure and hidden by a billboard for Coors Golden Beer.

“I’m thirsty,” the younger one said, standing in front of the billboard. “We should have at least brought some water…”

“Maybe we just shouldn’t have come,” the older one responded.

Neither of them said much more, each trapped in his own thoughts, wondering what it would be like to walk into that house, what awaited them inside. About fifty yards from the door was a stone cross, which they knelt before, although they were worried about getting their already dirty pants even dirtier; after all, they were wearing their Sunday best — linen suit, shirt and tie, and black socks and shoes. No one in the adobe house opened the door or cracked a window. Perhaps no one had noticed their arrival, but they had been told to wait by the cross and so they did. More than a few minutes passed before an old man came out of the house. He walked toward them so slowly that the younger boy almost lost his patience and told him to hurry up. The old man told them a few things they did not understand, and then returned to the house with the same deliberateness as before. Then the real wait began for the boys. Just when their knees could no longer tolerate the rocky ground, the door opened again and three men came out and approached them.

They wore black robes, their faces half-hidden by the hoods, but even then the boys could recognize two of them: Will, the gas-station attendant, and Beltrán, the one who sold souvenirs at the UFO Gift Shop. Both were lifelong neighbors of theirs, but there was something off, something weird; the eccentric getups and the exaggerated mannerisms made those neighbors into strangers — strangers who announced that they’d now be their godfathers and who blindfolded them.

“Mine’s too tight, Will,” Greg said.

“Don’t call him Will,” Beltrán cut in. “If you want to address us you should call us the Penitent Brothers.”

“So, can you loosen my blindfold, Penitent Brother?”

They were guided to the door of the Morada, which is what the Penitent Brothers, who it seemed were renaming everything, informed them they should call the adobe house. Blindfolded, the two boys stumbled forward until they were told that they should knock for permission to enter. The password was a string of words they had learned. They’d spent days repeating it and trying to memorize it, though with great difficulty, according to Wendy, because Spanish wasn’t their first language, and English really wasn’t either; more likely it was the Slovak spoken by their parents, who came from the Banská Bystrica region, a pair of immigrants, who even though they were white were as poor and as Catholic as the gente , which is what the longtime Hispanic inhabitants of San Luis Valley in southern Colorado call themselves.

“Who knocks on the door of the Morada?” a male voice demanded from within.

“It’s not the door of the Morada, it’s the door of my conscience, and we come full of remorse and begging for mercy,” the boys half muttered, tripping on the words and getting through it only with the help of the godfathers, who whispered in their ears those words that for them meant nothing.

“Ask for penance then,” the response came through the closed door.

“Penance! Penance! We come looking for salvation,” they said.

“Who lights my house?”

“My father Jesus.”

“Who fills it with joy?”

“My mother Mary.”

“Who keeps my faith?”

“The carpenter Joseph.”

Their mistakes were overlooked, and they were allowed to enter. Even though they were blindfolded, they knew they had walked into a small room because of the heaviness of the air and the smell of enclosure. They were ordered to shed their clothes, and since they seemed reticent, various hands did it for them. In exchange, they were each handed a long coarse blanket with a hole in the middle to put their heads through, and a rope that they were to tie around their waists. They felt totally helpless, blind, and naked amid the invisible people surrounding them; and Sleepy Joe remembered the hatred he’d recently felt when a nurse at the Samaritana Medical Center had forced him to take off his clothes and put on a green robe to take X-rays. Now too he felt he was wearing a ridiculous costume and wanted to laugh, but such an urge was quickly dispelled by the gust of fear overtaking him. They were handed various lit candles and told to prepare body and soul, for they were about to enter the quarters of the Penitent Brothers of the Sangre de Cristo. The moment had come.

“What happens here stays here.” They were made to repeat this three times, with the warning that if the secret were to be revealed, the price was death. Nevertheless, all of this eventually came from the mouth of Wendy Mellons.

“Maybe I should just be quiet from now on,” she admits.

When the two boys crossed the threshold, they removed the blindfolds and found themselves in a large room poorly lit by candles and saturated with the thick smell of copal. There were men in brown robes — the Illuminated, or Brothers of the Light, according to the godfathers — and others in black cloaks, the Blood Brothers, or the Brothers of Passion, also known as the Penitent Brothers. In the middle of the room was a table on which were four or five of what the gente call “the figures,” wooden carvings of saints and other sacred images.

Greg regretted that they had taken his wristwatch in the previous room. He wished he could glance at it now, because maybe he could then get the hours moving again, or at least confirm that all this would end soon. The copal smoke stuck in his throat, and he began to choke for lack of air.

They put the two of them, the only ones with fair skin, right in the middle of the crowded congregation of mostly dark-skinned folk and ordered them to lean their heads back and focus on the cross hanging from the ceiling. Meanwhile the group formed two semicircles around them, brown robes on their right, black cloaks on their left, chanting hymns that reached the two boys from afar, as if through mounds of cotton, drowned out by the banging of their own hearts resounding in their ears.

“Repeat after me these words of forgiveness to Brother Picador,” one of the Brothers of the Passion said.

“Brother Picador, I forgive you, I give you thanks and at the same time beg of you that your hand doesn’t move with a vengeful or resentful spirit,” the boys tried to repeat.