FICTION
A Congregation at Saint Sylvester
By: Carlos Marban
There is a little boy sitting with his mother at church. He wears an overgrown Machu Picchu hat on his soft head. The kind that many of his grandfathers and great grandfathers wear as they traverse the mountain landscapes of Peru. There are a few people scattered and populating the brown benches all over the dimly lit brown church.
The people couch and sniff and are all very attentively paying attention to Padre Domínguez as he gives his end of the service speech. Outside the day is grey and brown, wet and icy, mist seems to be converging and shyly dancing on the first doorsteps to the church. Mist that seems to be afraid to come in, seems to want to be asked to come into the holy church.
The boy sitting on the bench next to his mother is young, small, and full of sugar and impatience. He nudges and fuzzes in his seat. His mother is tired as well, but her face shows stoic and wise softness. A kind of hard softness that she hasn’t learned, but has inherited from her mother, a kind of rock-honey warmth that she was born with.
“Y si dejamos que nuestros hijos sigan así que sigan por el camino de la maleza por la que están trochando…” The father went on in Spanish. The last sermon he had been giving for more than half an hour past the actual time that church was supposed to let out is taking its toll on everybody. All of the congregation mumbles and moves in their seats. And then the father asks them to stand up, to give an oración, for all of the young misguided youth. The old couple in front of the boy and his mother groan. The old man that reminds the boy of his grandfather whispers in Spanish: “Why don’t we just leave Alicia? It seems like he’s never going to be done!”
The old woman turns quickly to him, hissing and whispering, “No! What kind of respect is that? Padre Domínguez is trying his hardest to reach the community!”
“Yes I know woman! Just that we left the picadillo sitting in the stove when we left at six! What if it burns?” And the old woman grunts and turns her head, ending the argument, and the old man looks at her for a small while with defiance in his eyes. Then he says quietly, “¡’tonces que se joda el picadillo!”
The little boy’s mother looks down at him tenderly, smiles, and grabs his hand and pulls him up to his feet. He stands on the bench. The boy whispers to his mother, “Mamá, ¿cuándo nos vamos?” He whines a little, and keeps his quiet. His mother stares down at him, “En un rato más. Quédate calladito por un rato más.” And she puts her finger to her lips and stares ahead. The boy looks around at all of the people; he takes a drag of air into his lungs and smells all of the perfumed old essence and the wood of the bench. He moves a little dance on the bench, his little feet and his knees shaking and quivering. He stands on his tiptoes and scans the heads of all the people standing listening to the father. All of the heads stand as totem poles, unmoving and solemn and silent. The boy looks up higher past the father and up at all of the figures looming in shadows of saints and apostles. He sees faintly the red and green and shimmering painted glass windows. He has memorized them all and looks at one in particular that he doesn’t like. It is of a simply dressed apostle, with a sword in his hand, a bottle of holy water in his left.
He makes a sign with his right hand that rests upon his left breast easily. Behind him there is a golden landscape and many rays of sun insinuated by the tainted red glass around him. The glass is shaped like triangles. The boy looks on at the stained tainted glass window, he cannot see the colors. He sticks his tongue out, wiggling and shaking it with saliva at the window high above and to the left. He can hear the father speaking, “¿Y qué? Ustedes van a dejar a los incapaces solos, los van a odiar? ¿Qué si uno de esos hombres o mujeres de la calle son uno de sus propios hijos? ¿Qué harán entonces? Lo podemos…” And the boy blocks out the rest of the fathers speech. He folds his arms across his chest frail and small.
He has to turn his head very slowly, diagonally to the right, but he spots a woman. She is sitting with her legs crossed, in complete contrast to the rest of the congregation. She has a very red, very short dress that is cut at a slit and at an angle so that her left black stocking leg shows to the thigh, slender and trim fantastically. She looked on, the back of her head curved forward. The back of her neck bare and pale, white.
Her hair is pulled up in tricky and twisting knots and wiry tendrils. The boy watches as she slowly starts to turn her head, and he sees, slightly, the side of her glass like face. Pale again. She has strangely wide eyes. Like giant marbles. She has bright pursed lips. The boy leans closer to the bench in front of him; he puts his hands on the edge of the bench. The woman stops turning, she crosses and uncrosses her legs, and with that movement the boy feels a warm blow that starts at his stomach, and fills him to his chest, then back down. Farther down and down. The boy cringes and tries to kneel down, to sit back down on the bench but the soft grip of his mother, the father speaking, limits his movement to a bent position so that he is kneeling on the bench in front of him, with his stomach leaning on the edge. He can see then, that the woman is looking at him very directly with her left eyeball. She has not turned her head even towards a direction were she could look at him, and yet her eye is staring right grins, white, teeth showing slowly through her lips. The boy yells then, loudly: “¡Mamá ya vámonos que este señor habla mucho!” And the whole of the church laughs quietly. All together the church laughs respectfully. All but the woman in the red dress, who crosses her legs again and turns her head forward from the boy.
The father says chuckling “Sí. Parece que algunos de nuestros participantes están cansados.” And the father smiles. “Creo que me pasé de la hora. Entonces oremos.” The congregation stands. All but the boy and the red woman. The people turn from their benches to look at the little boy and his mother wearing the Machu Picchu hat. The fog tries to move in past the first doorsteps into the church.