In This Name
/Hosanna Patience
Magdalena sits with her mother in the usual pew in la Casa Nueva Prelaticia for 6 a.m. service, not listening to Pastor John Stevens, not reading the prayer book that rests in her hands. Through vaulted windows she can see that dawn has come, that the blunted peaks of the Sierra Madre and the casitas that cling to its foothills have begun to blush, flustered by the night’s furtive energy.
She counts the villagers’ secrets. Marigolds already have begun gathering souls with their scent as they tilt toward sunlamps beneath floorboards, while smiling wooden calacas hide in closets, in cupboards, their skeleton faces hewn in candlelight. Mazatl Ojeda scrapes paint from his fingers, evidence of the tiny wooden bones he has made for his perrito; José bounces his Bible against his palm as if calculating the weight of the pork carnitas he will carry to his cave alter; even Guillermina’s virginal visage is belied by the sugar scent of candy skulls stashed in pockets, inscribed with a long-dead lover's name.
Magdalena has no dead she wishes to celebrate. She will not join the skeleton parade snaking the caves of Sistema Cheve tomorrow, nor will she help the villagers construct their altars, which they will drape in forbidden flowers. She will not crouch on cave floors to share plates of food with people whom she has spent her life but does not know. Those who do not care if she comes or goes. Those who call her, la rota — the broken — when they think she does not hear.
Outside a crow carves up the sky. It circles in tight arcs, never widening its path as it swoops and dips, then doubles back upon itself.
Perhaps the villagers’ celebration will be discovered, and they will be executed like the people of Veracruz last November. Five years have passed since the Faith and Reckoning Laws of 2022, since her father had died a scarecrow. Since then no overt offerings of pumpkin cooked in brown sugar, mezcal or whiskey have been carried to the homes of the newly passed, nor have they been moved to cemeteries to be enjoyed by relatives and friends.
A nudge reminds Magdalena to turn the page to Hebrews 13:17, which El Pastor has begun to recite. His blonde coif puffs out from his temples suggestive of a halo, making him appear younger than his sixteen years. Today is El Pastor’s second day back from the evangelical weapons seminar in México City, and he has returned with a new gun in the holster of his robe and a sunburn that he itches often.
He wipes sweat from his brow with a handkerchief embroidered with tiny prayer hands, then fingers his peeling chin revealing glossy medallions of skin. “Obey your leaders and submit to their authority.”
Magdalena has no dead she wishes to celebrate. She will not join the skeleton parade snaking the caves of Sistema Cheve tomorrow, nor will she help the villagers construct their altars, which they will drape in forbidden flowers.
Magdalena’s mother bends her head, mouth moving with El Pastor’s, her forehead against the vinyl sheath that encircles her in sanctified air. She used to wield a scythe against holy men, now she prays to them. She is no more in this church than in the rooms of their casita, her eyes alighting on stacks of hymnals, on porcelain cats, hours spent praying or watching The Sacred and the Profane— a Telenovela starring curvy Rosalinda in constant peril of Arabs and goat-masked Pagans. Words have turned luxury when Magdalena works beside her mother at the charcoal-heated metate, grinding cinnamon, sugar, cacao beans into liquid chocolate they shape into crosses to be sold from carts before afternoon worship. Magdalena is seventeen, no longer a girl, and when her mother dies, she alone will pluck the cacao pods, and heat the beans until they sizzle.
El Pastor has begun to mumble, making it difficult to hear him. Something about souls. Magdalena’s papa used to speak of them. How the first Mazatecos had walked into the light from Huautla’s cave underworld where immortal souls gather and are reborn. Magdalena used to believe those folktales. Her papá and sister’s spirits are as gone as their bodies. Ashes to ashes. She is alone.
Magdalena lingers in the doorway of the church as her mother mounts a bicycle. Dried specks of water streak the vinyl sheath that encloses her face.
“I need more chiles,” her mother says.
Magdalena picks at a fleck of azure paint from the door as her mother pedals off. The crumbling remains of the pink Templo strain heavenward. The bark of dogs and distorted hymns of Salvation Radio filter from open doorways as street vendors begin their morning preparations. Bicyclists cruise past flashing baskets of fresh baked sweet breads shaped like the Virgen de Guadalupe.
El Pastor is the last to leave. Magdalena imagines him in Mission San Miguel Huautla: breathing musty air, staring at his ceiling as night recedes; she wonders what he does when he is not preaching and if he minds the nighttime as she does.
“Did you enjoy today’s sermon?” he asks. He rubs his burnt cheek. His Spanish is smooth and unbroken, although he has not yet been here a year.
Magdalena dips her hand into the fountain. Copper pesos flickers beneath the water, no longer of value. “Your skin, it hurts?”
El Pastor nods but does not look at her. Water spats the rim.
“Aloe is nice for that.” She imagines snapping the porous spines for him and rubbing the goo into his burn.
He smiles. Silence rattles between them. He crumples a fistful of robe, then releases. His eyes are hazel and clear as marbles.
“Did you have family in Texas?” she asks, although forbidden.
He takes out his tablet. “They died in The War. El Presidente will be here tomorrow,” he says, “and la Milicia Cristiana.” He writes her a ticket for loitering and unsolicited intimacy.
Magdalena splashes at the water. She takes the ticket and pockets it.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
She salutes.
“The Bible says to love thy neighbor. Did you know that?”
Magdalena does not answer.
“It does. There are so many great things it says.” El Pastor does not meet her eyes. “Don’t be out today, okay?” He nods, pink against shiny pink, then mounts his bicycle.
She watches his back as he dissolves into the jungle. Ill-omened is this visit from El Presidente during this week of celebration. The last time the Supreme Ruler had visited Huautla de Jiménez, Magdalena had hidden amongst elephantine tree ferns and watched the descent of the archbishop’s helicopter: the shimmering of its underbelly, the gun barrels, and feet that danged from its gut. As the helicopter touched down, dozens of la Milicia Christiano in jumpers with smiling golden Jesuses on their breasts spilled from its seams. On their heads were cameras, worn during all of the crusades of Latin America. El Presidente followed, his orangey face sandwiched between a hat and robes. Magdalena knew El Presidente’s bloated gringo face from the billboards lining the roads from Oaxaca City to the oily waters of the desolate Puerto Escondido. It was rumored that he had injected snake venom into his skin to keep it smooth. Others said he had stolen fat from newly dead niños.
Trailing wisps of clouds streak the sky. Magdalena looks for the crow and finds it gone. She imagines it soaring over cornfields, continents, it’s feathers matted and bloody. Although she has received warning, she begins walking away from church. She passes prayer vestibules, a fruit stand, a burnt-out store marked with a cross.
She is struck by the contrast between the luxuriant vegetation and the villagers’ diminishing lives— the ever-narrowing precepts, their fear of torture and death, their somnolent lives. At the start of The War, El Presidente had gained warriors by touting the end of drugs and crime, the return of piety, a chance for a better life after The Wall, and reunification of God and Right at the bosom of Estados Unidos. Pastors swept the countryside preaching the end of human detainments.
Magdalena herself had been among the freed. She buys burnt milk and prickly pear ice cream and a basket of spiced and roasted grasshoppers that she cannot eat. Her sister had always been fond of grasshoppers. Inda Jani. The beauty. Nine years of age. Soft black hair like crows’ wings. Dirty spic, they had called her in those lines that ribboned the waste facilities they had been stored in. Magdalena had held Inda Jani’s cold hand in hers. Puta.
Magdalena has begun to sweat. She removes her woolen tunic and continues walking in her cotton underblouse, the sun against her bare shoulders. She might be shot for this offense.
She tries on death the way a virgin might slip on her quinceñera gown, over breasts and thighs, with an anticipatory shudder and sigh. She has done this many times. There is quiet in death, she knows. The motionlessness of an Adam’s apple as flies gather in the void of eyes, blood like burnt marigolds blooming in soil.
Turning against the usual pathways, Magdalena descends to an asphalt road that borders the jungle. She watches for patrols that do not come. She passes no one.
One street soon becomes another and Magdalena finds she is at the outskirts of town. Because it is Sunday, a day of resting for la Milicía Cristiano, there is little risk that she will be asked for the card that identifies her as Mazateca, yet El Pastor warned her, so she unravels her braid to mimic la Raza Pura.
She tries on new names. Carmen. Domitila.
Car relics line the sidewalks; some are covered with mosaics of the Saints, others corrode and gather dust. None have moved since before the War, not since the Great Petroleum Shortage when the government limited gas usage to dignitaries and Holy Men. Garbage clogs the gutters: empty mezcal bottles, cigarette butts, the carcass of a chicken.
She is struck by the contrast between the luxuriant vegetation and the villagers’ diminishing lives— the ever-narrowing precepts, their fear of torture and death, their somnolent lives.
Magdalena wonders if her mother has discovered that she has not yet returned. The villagers will not. In their silent preparations, they do not speak to her, unless to order from her cart. Perhaps tomorrow they will be found out. It is not her place to warn them. She feels her skin beginning to burn and slides into her overblouse, then hears a clink-clink-clink and beep and whirr from down the street. ‘Gambling for God’ is emblazoned on a dark window, a doorway draped in velvet.
She whispers her new name, Domitila, and enters.
Colors scatter the room from a window depicting the Virgin Mary, a golden chip in her hand, tinting white-clad men— strange men whom she has never seen— turquoises, maroons, yellows, as they pull handles. Cigarettes dangle from their mouths. Some scribble wishes on index cards that they drop into their machines. They do not seem to notice Magdalena; they do not turn when she stands behind them to watch their machines spin and stop, spin and stop: cross, sacred heart, cross; dagger, dagger, crown of thorns. From one man’s machine, out rolls fistfuls of cigarettes, from another, tiny bottles of wine labeled, ‘Blood of Christ.’
Sweat collects below her breasts. Gringo businessmen fidget beside one another while smoke chokes the room. She feels the smoke coiling inside her, and she remembers that other time. Keep walking. Inda Jani, weak in the moonlight that reflects off the hollow places of her face.
Magdalena pushes the memory away as swingsets descend from the ceiling with fleshy golden gringas. Feathers fleck their breasts, their hips, and they smile and pump and stretch glittering legs.
She watches another gringo pay a handful of tokens to remove his shirt and lay before an elderly man in robes who retrieves a horsewhip and begins to whip him until welts crisscross his back. Magdalena fingers her ribcage through her blouse. She wonders how it would feel to lie beside him, feel that bite against her skin.
A man bumps into Magdalena but does not apologize. His face is so close she can smell his breath— the sweet corn and cocoa scent of el popo mixing with the musk of his tobacco. “You shouldn’t be here. You will be arrested,” he whispers.
Per the edict of seven meters between opposite sexes, she has never been this near a man, save her father. No amount of camellia oil in her hair or nut butter for her hands could make her eligible.
“You don’t remember me.”
Magdalena examines the door.
“You were a fat mango last I saw you.”
All angles, his face, with small attractive ears.
“No. My name is Domitila.”
“Your papa was Tuech, the teacher who led the Mazateco rebellion. You should not be here.”
“My papa is at home. He works in El Banco de las Américas.”
She imagines this new papa counting his stacks of cash.
“I am Javier.” He smiles like he does not believe her.
There was a Javier Martinez with whom she used to play as a child. He had vanished with his mother and the other sinners to the Campos de la Reforma in Tijuana years ago, not long after her detention.
“Have you tried to play, Domitila?” Javier hands her a card and pencil.
She shakes her head.
“Then make a wish.”
Magdalena’s teal casita perches like a stork above the hillside. Inside it is warm and smells of mole: the charred guajillo, pasillo, and mulato negro chiles, the cinnamony canela, the resinous sweetness of yerba santa leaf and anise ground with sesame, chocolate, garlic, plantain, raisin, clove, allspice, onion.
Magdalena hears noises from the backyard and goes out. She finds her mother beneath a mango tree, its branches drooping from the weight of the green fruit. Bright flowers litter the ground. Magdalena walks across the lawn and stands beside her mother. They do not touch. Without the sheath, her mother’s face is honey in the late afternoon sun. How long since her mother smiled? Or laughed that shallow, quick laugh that Magdalena’s papa used to call his jabberwocky?
“Mamá?” She wants to touch her mother's cheek but does not. “I’m so sorry I am late. I lost track of time.”
Her mother blinks. She stares at the flower in her hand. “Magda, check on the molé. Don’t let it burn.” Her fingers twist a hibiscus from the branch then let it fall.
Magdalena examines herself in the reflection of the window in her room. In a certain light, she is almost pretty. Overripe, but her dark hair is shiny from brushing, and her cheeks have a flush of berry juice that was not there yesterday. She wears a cotton blouse with buttons made of habas del cacao and a turquoise-and-pink ribbon skirt. Maybe someday she will taste whiskey for the first time, eat a bowl of Chichilo Negro without sharing, steep her hair in ground coffee until it blackens like the ladies along la Avenida Prostituta. Or maybe tonight, she will find that quiet.
How long since her mother smiled? Or laughed that shallow, quick laugh that Magdalena’s papa used to call his jabberwocky?
Magdalena can hear the TV in the opposite room where her mamá sleeps, the sputter of a machine gun. She reaches below her blouse and touches her ribcage. She feels the ridges of old wounds. Wants to open them, feel their sticky warmth. She slides her hand. She smells him still, Javier, as he’d guided her outside, his palm against her back, the sun sideways in the sky.
It is illegal to meet a man without permit. She thinks of her classmate, Carmen, and her crushed cheekbones. Magdalena holds the taste of death against her tongue and rolls it around. In the opposite room, her mother begins to cough. Magdalena listens at the door until breathing again turns rhythmic. She gathers her things and turns to leave the casita.
The moon trails her like a puppy as she makes her way down the hill. Shops are closed in the town center. Glowing crosses hang in jaundiced windows. The church with its pristine whites and polished bell stands in contrast to the cracked and faded concrete that typifies the buildings. Only the magenta-domed McDonalds that squats a street over rivals it.
As Magdalena makes her way towards the golden ‘M,’ she wishes she had brought a shawl for her shoulders. She thinks of the villagers again and whether she should have warned someone of the coming of El Presidente.
But she is no longer Magdalena. She is Domitila.
She checks her reflection in the door, then pushes inside, bright like at the gates of heaven. Burger and drink dispensers line the room while a fry machine chops and dips baskets of golden potatoes; on the dome above, a mural of Jesus at his last supper, a McEspirituadlidad burger poised in his holy hand.
Ronald McDonald greets Magdalena and asks for her order. “What would you like?”
Magdalena mumbles, “Meal of Saints.”
The clown returns, holding a paper bag— El Presidente’s face is printed on one side, the Pope on the other, both enjoying milkshakes. Ronald points her to the Prayer Gymnasium.
Behind transparent vinyl, a network of tubes wind like a hamster cage. Magdalena peers into the Tube of Rebirth— round and fluid-filled, a pacifier-shaped snorkel fitted in Flora Martinez's mouth, which she sucks to the whoosh and pull of a synthesized heart. The Tube of Penance is tall and flat with barely enough room for Itzcoatl whose arms are raised above his head in exaltation. His moans are interrupted only by loudspeaker announcements:
“Find Salvation, enjoy the Meal of Saints!”
“Drink McSacramento shakes and partake of Jesus’ sacrifice!”
Magdalena finds the entrance to the Tube of Confessions, removes her shoes, and climbs a ladder to a porthole door, embossed with a haloed ‘M.’ She crosses herself, then crawls in, grazing the ceiling, the floor unyielding as bumps press her kneecaps.
A mechanical voice pipes in, “Welcome to the Tube of Confessions. Please close the door.”
It is warm and stagnant, and with the door closed, she is without sight. In the darkness she tries to shut them out, the moans of tens of thousands she’d slept beside in darkness beneath squalid tents, the sharp pungency of the piss and excrement, her sister who would cry in the night.
A crackling noise, “Find Enlightenment. For one meal ticket, you may purchase forgiveness. Say ‘forgiveness’ now if you would like to make a purchase.”
“Javier?” She crawls faster.
Hands grab her ribs. She kicks at them, but they grab and hold. The lingering odor of tobacco, the grease, and salt of fries.
“Calm down, Domitila,” he says. He is laughing, and she feels herself go light. Javier. “Keep going. We are nearly there.”
They crawl until they reach a closet-sized vestibule with a large yellow bench. Javier sits and pulls out a wrapped hamburger, fries, and a plastic statue of San Pedro Mártir with the dagger in his head and breast, and places them on the bench between them. Speakers crackle from a square by the wall, then the mechanical voice says, “Would you like forgiveness?”
Javier chuckles and clasps his hands, rises and says, “Oh, Ronaldo, I have eaten too much popo.”
Silence. Then the mechanical voice says, “Have you examined your conscience?”
“Yes, Ronaldo.”
"I did not hear you. Speak, ‘yes,’ now, if you have examined your conscience.”
“Oh, yes, Ronaldo.”
“I heard you speak, ‘Yes.’”
A whirring noise. “El Presidente offers you forgiveness.”
Javier laughs, hard and fast, and tickles Magdalena so that she is laughing too. His hand rests against her shoulders, and he is whispering, lips brushing her ears, so that soon all she can hear is the sound of breath.
The clown returns, holding a paper bag— El Presidente’s face is printed on one side, the Pope on the other, both enjoying milkshakes. Ronald points her to the Prayer Gymnasium.
Wearing a long vestido of cream wool, Magdalena holds the tapestry of parrots and flowers that she has embroidered for Javier. She has plucked a hibiscus for her hair. In an hour, the villagers will leave in darkness, carrying baskets of pan de muerto, bowls filled with chiles, fresh tomatoes, chicken and potatoes. Death will welcome them, whether drawn by sweating candles and the scent of flowers and food or hastened by El Presidente. She will meet Javier. They will take the overnight train to Belize, be married.
Clouds have arrived hanging heavy in the sky like fat sponges waiting to be squeezed. She must go out and fetch the laundry before it is soaked. She runs to pull down underpants from the clothesline, strung from her casita to the waxy-leaved cafeto trees that edge the property. Through the foliage, she can just make out her mother. Magdalena watches her pluck bright drupas— the fruit from which they will harvest the day’s coffee beans— and deposit them in a satchel at her hip. She works methodically but quickly, examining the clusters for the deepest reds, turning leaves, removing dying flowers that have not yet fallen.
Magdalena grabs billowing sheets and stuffs them in her basket, remembering the feeling of Javier’s tongue against hers. She had never kissed a boy. She touches her lips with her fingers.
“Mamá,” she calls.
Her mother does not turn. Her feet are naked beneath a dressing gown. “Oh, Magda. They’ve gotten into them. The birds.”
“Yes, Mamá. But you have plenty more drupas to harvest.”
“El Pastor, he says to get a scarecrow. But I will not.”
Magalena plucks a wet stem of the pecked-at fruit. She turns it in her hand and tosses it away.
Her mother’s dark eyes dart between the property line and Magdalena’s face, as though searching. “I have something.”
Magdalena frowns. “What do you mean?”
Her mother gathers her baskets of drupas and beckons for Magdalena. She is smaller than usual in this overcast dusk, her bare feet in wet grass. They enter the kitchen that still smells of mole. And another. A sweetness of egg and sugar.
“What, Mamá?”
Her mother sits on the floor and begins prying at a loose board until it pops free. Beneath are three sugar skulls, their names drawn in frosting. Teuch. Inda Jani. Magdalena.
“To them, will you give them? When you go tonight.”
Magdalena held her breath. “Pardon, Mamá?”
“To el Sistema Cheve. Call back their souls for me, Magda. Tell them to come home.”
Magdalena stumbles from the hills, her pockets laden with the forbidden skulls. She passes no one. Domitila, she whispers. The rain has begun to mist again. Soon her cream wool is heavy, but she will not pause until she reaches the prayer arcade and Javier. Domitila, she whispers again. She tries not to think of her mother, those small bare feet, the weight of the skulls in her pockets. She considers tossing them into the foliage, but cannot. She will take them on the train. They will have them for dessert and have a laugh.
Javier is already inside wearing the virtual reality helmet and wielding an Uzi that he uses to shoot Jesus haters in the streets of Tehran. Magdalena pulls her hair into a bun and picks out a helmet to match her dress. She waits for Javier to finish, wants to brush her hand against his but does not.
He nods when he sees her then pushes his visor open: glossy pink skin beneath. El Pastor removes the helmet, fluffs his hair, and nods again. A flake of skin curls his nose. He does not seem surprised to see her.
She holds her body very still.
“Have you ever gotten to the surprise level with the vats of tar?” El Pastor asks.
Magdalena forces a smile.
“It took me a while to figure out how to pour the tar just right to scald the skin off,” he says. El Pastor offers to play her, and she agrees.
He will come. Javier.
They work together to defeat Arabs with machine guns. Ghost-like bodies flicker across the screen while speakers amplify discharged bullets, the screams of people dying. She thinks of bleeding marigolds, the slackness of a jaw as her father hangs. How long she plays, she does not know. Javier will come.
El Pastor smiles and shuffles in his gilded boots. They watch the darkness beyond the windows. “Listen,” he says, “This is not the night to be out.”
He is hinting around something that she does not wish to hear.
She takes off her helmet and stands beside him.
“Go to your mother, would you? Would you just go back to her?” He flinches as though he cannot bear it.
She watches the window.
She can feel the stillness of his body and his breathing coming quick. “Love thy neighbor,” he says. “It says that, the Bible.”
She does not know why he keeps repeating this, but thanks him, nods and goes out. It is cold and raining harder. She scans the bushes for signs of Javier but finds none. She follows the path back through the jungle trying not to think of what might have happened.
She tries not to think of her mother, those small bare feet, the weight of the skulls in her pockets.
Magdalena hears something: a parrot, or a howler monkey. No. There is a dark-haired man in the road ahead. He is crouched beneath a kapok tree. The light of the moon glints off a jumper as another person begs for life, as she had begged for Inda Jani: those black wings of hair, soft like a crow’s, an emaciated body on concrete, the smell of piss and shit.
Magdalena can see them now, the curve of a spine in that jumper as it bends and straightens, something metal that falls, and she thinks of hands against cheeks, that corn and tobacco smell of him, of blood matting a crow’s wings.
It is raining harder, and she is running.
She hears Javier behind her.
“Magdalena,” he yells. There is blood on his face, blood on the white of his jumper while Jesus smiles.
She wonders if he will shoot her, vomits, then begins running again. Fingers grab at her, “Please,” he says, but she bites until she feels the snap of his skin, hears him yelling, but she is faster and already into the jungle.
Javier is twenty meters back; she waits for the crack of his gun, and remembers his head in her hands, the ridges of his scalp, flies filling eyes, a scarecrow in a field. She runs. She runs. She runs until she no longer hears him. She is climbing now, into the hills where the jungle will absorb her. She reaches a ravine and has to crawl, mud spreading along her clothes, strands of hair dragging in the dirt.
A hundred meters more, through heavy rain, she can see the mouth of the cave. The glow of candles reflects off the cliffs in fiery reception. Not too late.
She scrambles but it is wet, slick, and rocks and mud slip beneath her feet. She falls and climbs and falls again. When she can no longer climb, she lies to face the rain and watches ribbons of water form rivulets along the steep rocks, backlit in their descent. She can hear the villagers’ song.
From her pocket, she feels the bony hollows of the sugar skulls. Teuch. Inda Jani. Magdalena. She is no longer shivering, no longer caring that she is muddy, that her vestido clings to her like skin. I am not Domitila. Only Magdalena. The thought does not wound her, as she would have supposed.
Author’s Commentary: Silence is complicity.
Hosanna Patience is a writer, teacher, and editor. She is a graduate of The New School’s MFA program. She was a recipient of the AWP Writers' Conferences & Centers scholarship for an emerging fiction writer, the Pearl Sperling Evans Prize for most promise in fiction, and she was a nominee for the anthology, Best New American Voices.
