The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [20]
The waitress looks like Dianne Wiest, so I expect her to be all maternal love and wise wink, but she’s grumpy as hell. “I guess some of us can eat carbs,” she grumbles, looking me up and down. She scribbles my order on her pad and barks “B-cakes” to the Mexican cooks.
I look at Madre across the table. She wears a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform: white blouse, pleated skirt. I have a sharp sense of déjà vu. We’ve sat in this same café in exactly this same way. “We’ve been here before,” I say.
Madre thinks about that for a long time, then shakes her head. “No,” she says. “No, we haven’t.”
The waitress flings our plates on the table, unconcerned about who ordered what. We wait until she’s turned her back to redistribute the breakfasts.
“What I wouldn’t give to take Manny to the beach today,” Lupe sighs. “Some time just to play.”
“I can drive through the night,” I offer.
Tony and Barbaro are game, but the others want to get a good start into California.
“It’s, like, nine hours to the border,” Magdelena insists.
I doubt that.
“Plus I have to bleach my hair.” She pulls at her part to show off her creeping brunette roots.
“We can take the caravan,” Paula offers. “Meet up in Sacramento tomorrow?”
That old truck with its painted wood canopy won’t go over fifty, so it’s a deal.
I lick the raspberry syrup from my fingers.
The warm sand on Sunset Beach feels like heaven under me. A dragon cloud floats past. Salty air. I watch Barbaro as he takes off for the shore.
After all his years of schooling to become a doctor, Barbaro had only practiced medicine for two years. “Sometimes it is right to battle death,” he explained to me once. “But sometimes death has its reasons.”
He’d lost a patient to what he’d only call “complications due to an error” and slumped into a heavy-hearted remorse. “It was truly an avoidable error,” he said.
Three weeks after his death, the patient appeared to Barbaro in dream, thanked him for the error. The man’s eyes gleamed with a joyous liberation Barbaro had never seen before.
The next morning, Barbaro traveled by train to the medieval hilltop village where the man had lived with his family. He waited in a dark café to spy on the man’s wife and daughter. Late afternoon and he finally saw them: The women walked an easy, flowing walk through the piazza, as if a terrible burden had been lifted from their shoulders.
“I knew then that I had been drawn to medicine to heal souls, not bodies,” Barbaro told me. “But medicine is not the thing that heals souls. Only drama can heal souls.”
Only drama.
Tony builds gothic sand castles with Manny, croons love sounds at Lupe. They make a cute family, really. Lupe and the baby an anchor to Tony’s wandering mind, he intentionally gentle when she expects the worst from men. She wears a turquoise bikini to show off the intricate octopus tattoo on the small of her back, but her scars are visible, too. Knife marks on her chest and back. Don’t bother asking. “I’ve had a lot of fight in my life” is all she’ll tell you.
I stretch out and let the sun wrap its tiger paws around me.
“The goddess Yemaya lives in those waves,” Barbaro laughs, kicking up dry sand as he rushes up the beach toward me. He translates for a Catholic: “Our Lady of the Sea!” Every goddess in the world becomes a manifestation of Our Lady. I wonder if the Great Mother wept, back in the day, when she was demoted from known creator to mortal woman, mere mother of the male savior. Two thousand years is a slow climb back to glory. From mortal to saint, and then finally, just a few years ago, Vatican officials admitted that she ought to be called the Mother of God. Big words for guys who still considered all creation men’s work, but who was God talking about in Genesis when God referred to God as Us? God might be one, but God’s a couple, too, a team. I roll onto my belly, shade my eyes with my hand to get a good look at Barbaro. Probably Our Lady doesn’t much mind what the Vatican calls her.
“You will come and bathe?