The Mexican Messiah
Jay Kauffmann is chair of the English department.
Read this exclusive online preview of Jay Kauffmann’s debut novella, The Mexican Messiah. Vanessa Blakeslee, author of Perfect Conditions, captures the beauty of Mr. Kauffmann’s work best in her review: "Part lyrical thriller, part vivid speculation upon perhaps the most pervasive of life's mysteries-not only miracles and faith, but transformation and salvation-Jay Kauffmann's The Mexican Messiah beguiles from the very beginning. I couldn't wait to turn the page but also found myself pausing so as not to miss the rich language in which he has captured this world and its inhabitants with wholly convincing and heartfelt precision. This gem of a collection is a work of wonderment itself."
I.
EVENING NEWS
Catharine Beauregard Stein came in from the garden as if out of a furnace, the knees of her jeans coated with earth. She stood there for a moment, in the entrance of her house, dripping with sweat, savoring the first cold rush of air-conditioning. It was August, early evening, a wet Virginia heat.
At seventy-two, a widow, Catharine felt more or less content to live alone. She still carried herself, she liked to think, with the dignity of a debutante, and though her hair was gray now, she artfully streaked it blond. She had a kind, noble face, gently ravaged from years of sun-worshipping, with steel-blue eyes that tended to stare off into some middle distance. She came across as dreamy, aloof.
She took off her gardening gloves and dropped them to the floor, then stepped out of her muddy sneakers. She went into the kitchen and poured herself a tall glass of iced tea, then, in her stocking feet, shuffled into the living room and collapsed onto the couch. She was exhausted and filthy, having gardened all day, too tired even to bathe. She switched on the television, as she did every day at this hour, just in time for the Evening News. She enjoyed the news, as a good-for-you distraction, never seeing it as having anything to do with her. She stared at the screen contentedly, watching but not watching.
Everything about the newscast was performed in its usual, reassuring way—often she would burst out laughing at the anchor’s ridiculously dramatic, stylized delivery—and yet tonight there was something different about the program. She felt implicated, as if it were expressly for her.
He began to report the story of a young Mexican man named Jesús Almirez, who had captured the imagination of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans convinced he was the Messiah. “And now,” said the reporter, “from Mexico City . . .” The camera then jumped back and forth between an overhead shot, as from a helicopter, and a close-up of Almirez himself as he waded through a sea of people. They crushed towards him in a frenzy, many in tears, desperate to get near him, to touch him. They fell to their knees, stretched out on their bellies in supplication.
“Good Lord!” Catharine said, sitting upright.
Close to thirty thousand people had shown up to hear him speak at the Zocalo, the central plaza in Mexico City. As he walked through the crowd, he appeared calm, smiling and greeting people as he passed. He was thirty-two, according to the report, but looked years older, and at the same time like a child. He was small and brown, dressed in a beige threadbare cotton suit, with the faintest trace of a beard and mustache. But it was his eyes that caught her attention. They were large and bright, as if lit from within, and so familiar, though she couldn’t quite place them. In the fleeting instant Jesús’s glance now turned to the camera, Catharine caught her breath and felt something very subtle pass between them.
Before Catharine knew it, the segment had ended and she was watching the weather, promising yet another scorching day. Catharine turned off the television and took a deep breath, clearly shaken on some level she could not name. Perhaps the Pope could summon such devotion, she thought, but never in her life had she seen anything like this. She closed her eyes and found that she could review the image of his face in detail. She felt she would burst with emotion or become overwhelmed with sleepiness. Her childhood came rushing back: cold mornings in the convent, saying her prayers by rote, Mother Superior’s ever-watchful gaze, and the miraculous morning when she slipped into perfect stillness as if God had walked into the room.
Her first impulse was to go straight upstairs, pack her bags, and catch the next flight to Mexico City. But she sat a moment longer—as the ice cracked and melted in her glass, and Zack, her black Lab, scratched at the screen door—until the impulse passed and was replaced by a dozen everyday concerns. Then she got up to make herself some dinner, smiling to herself at her foolishness.
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