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By Root 209 0

had he gone to public school. Rito’s elementary school had been built in the thirties, an institutional version of the popular Mission Revival style, with tiled roofs and long, arched arcades. But Sally Morrot believed in a Catholic education. By subscribing all the village children to St. Catherine’s, she singlehandedly preserved in Rito a small, reactionary order of Carmelites, an odd assortment of monastics exiled to this obscure valley for too great a love of earthly things, poor relations with others, an excessive interest in lonely women or young boys. When David was in the fifth grade, the nuns informed Sally Morrot that he was exceptionally gifted, whereupon she summoned him to the mansion, fed him sugar cookies and a pale, woody drink he later identified as milky tea. She administered a series of writing and mathematical problems of her own devising and, finding his performance indeed remarkable, overrode his parents’ humble objection—he was their only child—and sent him to a private Catholic boarding school in Ojai.

Sally Morrot monitored his progress and later, during summer vacations in his high-school years, expected him at her home every Thursday night for dinner, where he joined five or six other young people in whom she took an active, often financial, interest. Some were children of her litigious, ruined relatives; others were collected from the valley’s dwindling aristocracy. The young people were expected to dress for the occasion, so David wore the white shirt and gray corduroy slacks of his school uniform. His relatives answered the door, served the food, cleared the table.

Sally was incredibly old by that time, her hair vividly white. Her arms were light as cornstalks and her skin a mass of large, round freckles; she looked as if she had been covered with transparent pale-brown leaves. She presided over these dinners with her live-in companion, an elegant, elderly Chinese woman. Dora, whose father had been a diplomat from Hong Kong, spoke with an upper-crust British accent. Sally and Dora asked the children questions to sharpen their conversational abilities: Who has a story to tell? What amusing things happened this week? Who has read a good book? In their more vigorous years, Sally and Dora had traveled all over the world, so they were always saying, “When we dined with Alberto Moravia …” or “When we lunched with Josephine Baker….” None of the teenagers knew who these people were, but the implication was that some day they, too, might eat a meal with Moravia or Baker or Irwin Shaw or General So-and-so, the second-in-command of the French Foreign Legion.

After tea in the study, they were sent home in the black Cadillac driven by Sally Morrot’s driver, who was David’s uncle, Rafael Flores. Crammed inside the car, the teenagers routinely referred to the two women as “old stick-birds,” mimicked Dora’s accent, and mimed the quavery, underwater motions of Sally Morrot’s undiagnosed Parkinson’s disease.

One by one, Rafael dropped off the teenagers until only David remained in the car. As the village curandero and spiritual leader, Rafael also took an interest in David’s education. What have you learned about trees? he’d ask. What have you learned about people? You’re studying fisiología—what have you learned about the body? And religiones, mijo, what have you learned about God? Although he loved his uncle, David had become ashamed of Rafael’s heavily accented English and superstitious beliefs. His curanderismo seemed like something in the educational films on primitive cultures David watched in social studies classes. More than a decade would pass before he asked to learn his uncle’s art. At sixteen or seventeen, David felt only embarrassed for and protective of Rafael, and answered his questions politely yet evasively as the older man parked the Cadillac in its garage by the warehouse. Together, they walked the quarter-mile to the village, into the range of Umberto García’s woozy accordion and the battered, permanently dazed fighting cock who crowed night and day, into the smells of fertile dirt and