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Our baby Christ: Ecuador, 1987.

Article Excerpt
"For first, there is not to be found, in all history, any miracle



attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good-sense, education, and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves...."--David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X.

After a twenty-one-year absence my father returned to the church. The pious boy I was back then had convinced him to attend Christmas mass, and, according to my grandmother, his return that night was what led to the baby Christ's tears. Most in my family readily adopted my grandmother's version, as I was to do in the years that followed, sharing it with my American friends as another example of the quaint superstitions of my third-world country, which would often prompt in them comparisons to eyewitness news reports of Virgin Mary sightings on trunks of trees or mortadella sandwiches.

Of course, I suspected my grandmother's version was far too simple, and yet nothing ever compelled me to elaborate on it by implicating others or by including events that began long before that night or that decade.

Before my father agreed to attend Christmas mass we were at my grandmother's house. There he announced I was old enough to sit with the adults, and since my grandmother's dining table could seat only eight, and since neither my aunts nor my grandfather wanted to sour our Christmas by starting another pyrrhic battle, ten of us struggled to pass the potatoes and slice the pig without elbowing each other. And we did so in silence. My father was in an awful mood, and we knew that whoever spoke during dinner risked being savaged by his sarcasm.

My father had assumed that his appointment in the administration of Leon Febres Cordero had entitled him to arrogance, and because of these airs of infallibility we did not consider something could be troubling him.

My grandmother, restless amidst our silence, seemed to be counting rice grains with her fork, though most likely she was deliberating whether to talk. My grandmother loved a seated audience, and Christmas was that time of the year when everyone was more receptive to her stories. She must have reminded herself that she was, after all, the most inured to my father's jabs because she suddenly began recounting for us the storied origins of her dining table. The story was not a new one--none of them was--and yet we were relieved someone other than us was talking. After selling a small fraction of his plantations, she said, her father had decided on a whim to throw out all their imported furniture and start anew, contracting for the job all the carpenters available in Portoviejo at the time. For a week, on their large cobblestone patio, the sound of hammers and hacksaws merged with the sound of poor families carrying off the old furniture her father was giving away. The dining table my grandmother had inherited from those days had knotted flowers carved around its thick width, which matched the dense Guayacan patterns of the four adjacent cabinets-immense cabinets stuffed with more plates and teacups and sugar bowls than anyone could ever use in a lifetime, all of them burnished at least monthly, most of them hand-painted with landscapes no one wanted to see.

My father did not interrupt my grandmother's story. He remained silent, concentrating on the shaky horizon inside his wineglass. I could not tell if he had been staring at it for long, or if it was just a passing gesture of wine connoisseurship because I was too distracted by rehearsing in my mind the inflections of my upcoming speech. After participating in my father's reckless lifestyle the summer before, I had decided it was my duty to convince him to attend Christmas mass with us, and for this delicate task I had prepared a speech. I had spent quite some time contemplating not the exact words to deliver but my father's reaction to them, envisioning a sudden conversion like that of Saul on his way to Damascus--God's light passing through me so as to inspirit my every word. In a mixture of prayer and feverish writing, I finished my speech the night before Christmas Eve. Perhaps a resolute argument, perhaps a series of unconnected allusions to the theological texts I was studying in school--either way, there were at least seven or eight pages wrinkled by my scribbling and crossing and waiting for the light to shine. I was to address my father after dinner.

My Aunt Carmen, the only one in the family with enough good looks to marry a bold new politician, brought up the headline news. The mayor of our city, or perhaps some other elected official that I can no longer recall, had defrauded the municipality and fled. My father, aware that my grandmother had urged everyone to vote for this handsome politician during election time, muttered, "Just another crook. Another goddamn crook."

We waited for my father to riff on his scrunched remark. He didn't. This did not imply his mood was getting any better. Under the table I could see his hands nervously stroking his gray suit pants, as if reassuring them about their fine tailoring and fabric, which he had once explained to me by pointing at the minute violet stripes...

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