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By Root 2095 0

edge of the neighborhood, rigid as a post, staring hopelessly into the night, she felt herself borne upon a cold tide of despair, as bottomless as our needs. A thousand reasons why it might have happened (starting of course with the accursed Gangster) but none as important as the fact that it had. Stranded out in that growing darkness, without a name, an address, or a relative in the Palacio, La Inca almost succumbed, let herself be lifted from her moorings and carried like a child, like a tangle of seagrape beyond the bright reef of her faith and into the dark reaches. It was in that hour of tribulation, however, that a hand reached out for her and she remembered who she was. Myotís Altagracia Toribio Cabral. One of the Mighty of the Sur. You must save her, her husband’s spirit said, or no one else will.

Shrugging off her weariness, she did what many women of her background would have done. Posted herself beside her portrait of the Virgen de Altagracia and prayed. We postmodern phitanos tend to dismiss the Catholic devotion of our viejas as atavistic, an embarrassing throwback to the olden days, but it’s exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, when the end draws near, that prayer has dominion.

Let me tell you, True believers: in the annals of Dominican piety there has never been prayer like this. The rosaries cabling through La Inca’s fingers like line flying through a doomed fisherman’s hands. And before you could say Holy! Holy! Holy! she was joined by a flock of women, young and old, fierce and mansa, serious and alegre, even those who had previously bagged on the girl and called her whore, arriving without invitation and taking up the prayer without as much as a whisper.

Dorca was there, and the wife of the dentist, and many many others. In no time at all the room was filled with the faithful and pulsed with a spirit so dense that it was rumored that the Devil himself had to avoid the Sur for months afterward. La Inca didn’t notice. A hurricane could have carried off the entire city and it wouldn’t have broken her concentration. Her face veined, her neck corded, the blood roaring in her ears. Too lost, too given over to drawing the girl back from the Abyss was she. So furious and so unrelenting, in fact, was La Inca’s pace that more than a few women suffered shetaat (spiritual burnout) and collapsed, never again to feel the divine breath of the Todopoderoso on their neck. One woman even lost the ability to determine right from wrong and a few years later became one of Balaguer’s chief deputies. By night’s end only three of the original circle remained: La Inca of course, her friend and neighbor Momóna (who it was said could cure warts and sex an egg just by looking at it), and a plucky seven-year-old whose piety, until then, had been obscured by a penchant for blowing mucus out her nostrils like a man.

To exhaustion and beyond they prayed, to that glittering place where the flesh dies and is born again, where all is agony, and finally, just as La Inca was feeling her spirit begin to loose itself from its earthly pinions, just as the circle began to dissolve—

CHOICE AND CONSEQUENCES

They drove east. In those days the cities hadn’t yet metastasized into kaiju, menacing one another with smoking, teeming tendrils of shanties; in those days their limits were a Corbusian dream; the urban dropped off as precipitous as a beat, one second you were deep in the twentieth century (well, the twentieth century of the Third World) and the next you’d find yourself plunged 180 years into rolling fields of cane. The transition between these states was some real-time machine-type shit. The moon, it has been reported, was full, and the light that rained down cast the leaves of the eucalyptuses into spectral coin.

The world outside so beautiful, but inside the car…

They’d been punching her and her right eye had puffed into a malignant slit, her right breast so preposterously swollen that it looked like it would burst, her lip was split and something was wrong with her jaw, she couldn’t swallow without causing