Juan successfully concludes our visit in the Mexican café when he does something that would be considered perfectly rational in Spain five hundred years ago and utterly ludicrous and pathetic in 2017. He has asked the Mexican server in the café if her parents live nearby. She replies, no, they live in Mexico. Where? he asks. Mexico, she repeats. The country where I was born. No esta en Espana? or, it isn't in Spain? he asks, bewildered. He wants to know why a young lady of her class and breeding shouldn't be at home serving her mother and father. She smiles, picks up our empty cups, and hurries away. In a theatrically low voice he confides to Ilhuitl and I that he plans to find her father in order to ask for her hand in marriage. Ilhuitl stares long and thoughtfully at his friend, then suddenly throws back his head and erupts in the loudest, most unrestrained derisory laughter I have ever heard. Juan is thunderstruck. His face sinks down from unfettered rage, to embarrassment, then sinks further down to abject shame. He gets up and slinks out of the café. Ilhuitl has not, and apparently cannot, stop laughing.
Juan is seated, hunched, in a bus shelter, trying to conceal that he is weeping. Then Ilhuitl surprises us both by parking himself right next to him on the bench as he puts his arms around his friend. Juan accepts the gesture and the apology and for a while shakes with silent sobbing and Ilhuitl gently rocks him back and forth till he calms down. I have seen this in Ilhuitl before, this unabashed affectionate nature that I think many would find embarrassing, but this also helps makes him shine. I have not been able to deduce whether this is from the culture he grew up in, or if this is just Ilhuitl openly expressing love to those he cares about. Even though he has been training for the Aztec priesthood, he still hasn't shed human blood, making him even more the innocent. He has told me that just days before, when he was abducted to the Mexico City of 2017, he was just about to kill his first human offering to Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and chief of the Aztec pantheon .
But the Millionth Council has already informed me that had Ilhuitl's hands been stained with the blood of even one human sacrifice, they would not have brought him to our current era, likewise with Juan, who has already bragged aplenty about the various villains and scoundrels and Moros and heretics he has slain, but I was told that had he not been lying about it he would also have remained in the Sixteenth Century.
Juan is calm now and for him his nervous friendship with Ilhuitl has been restored. He asks about seeing a priest. I know there are a couple of churches within walking distance. The two cathedrals, Anglican and Roman Catholic. Christ Church, the Anglican cathedral, is closer. We are just in time for the midday Eucharist. I cannot persuade Juan to approach the small circle of people seated near the high altar, where progressive Anglicans often gather to celebrate Holy Communion. For Juan of the Middle Ages it is too holy and too sacred a place for laity to enter and he cannot place himself at the level of the participants, whom he assumes to be persons far holier than he. We sit near the front of the nave, observing the sacred rite. Ilhuitl seems particularly and intently focussed on the ritual. Juan is transfixed by the stain glass windows, the riot of holy colour that illumines this place of reverence.
At the end of the service I bid my friends to come with me to the doorway where the celebrating priest is ready to meet and greet. I introduce myself and my friends and she responds with calm kindness. Juan whispers in my ear that he wants to see a priest. I step aside with him to explain that here she is. No, he does not want to talk to a nun, he almost spits while whispering, but to a priest. But she is a priest I tell him. He insists that she is a nun and feigns deafness when I try to explain that women have been ordained to the Canadian Anglican priesthood for the last forty years. Ilhuitl, smiling, approaches her with extended hand.
The Roman Catholic cathedral isn't that far, perhaps a ten or fifteen minute walk, and something has to be done for Juan, who appears crestfallen and disconsolate. Mass is over, there are no priests in sight and perhaps less than a half dozen visitors, some admiring the stain-glass, two or three quietly occupying the pews. Juan, seeing a statue of the Virgin Mary approaches like a lost child running toward his mother's open arms. Ilhuitl and I maintain a respectful distance as Juan is kneeling, prostrated at her feet. Then the young Aztec slowly approaches him from behind and sits in the pew just behind Juan, in silent support and patient waiting.
No comments:
Post a Comment