Hesitation

She should have kept running too but she beelined for home instead. Can you believe it? Like everybody in this damn story, she underestimated the depth of the shit she was in.

What’s the matter, hija? La Inca said, dropping the frying pan in her hand and holding the girl. You have to tell me.

Beli shook her head, couldn’t catch her breath. Latched the door and the windows and then crouched on her bed, a knife in her hand, trembling and weeping, the cold in her stomach like a dead fish. I want Dionisio, she blubbered. I want him now!

What happened?

She should have scrammed, I tell you, but she needed to see her Gangster, needed him to explain what was happening. Despite everything that had just transpired she still held out the hope that he would make everything better, that his gruff voice would soothe her heart and stop the animal fear gnawing her guts. Poor Beli. She believed in the Gangster. Was loyal to the end. Which was why a couple hours later, when a neighbor shouted, Oye, Inca, the novio is outside, she bolted out of bed like she’d been shot from a mass driver, blew past La Inca, past caution, ran barefoot to where his car was waiting. In the dark she failed to notice that it wasn’t actually his car.

Did you miss us? Elvis One asked, slapping cuffs on her wrist.

She tried to scream but it was too late.

La inca, the divine

After the girl had bolted from the house, and after she was informed by the neighbors that the Secret Police had scooped her up, La Inca knew in her ironclad heart that the girl was fun-toosh, that the Doom of the Cabrals had managed to infiltrate her circle at last. Standing on the edge of the neighborhood, rigid as a post, staring hopelessly into the night, she felt herself borne upon a cold tide of despair, as bottomless as our needs. A thousand reasons why it might have happened (starting of course with the accursed Gangster) but none as important as the fact that it had. Stranded out in that growing darkness, without a name, an address, or a relative in the Palacio, La Inca almost succumbed, let herself be lifted from her moorings and carried like a child, like a tangle of seagrape beyond the bright reef of her faith and into the dark reaches. It was in that hour of tribulation, however, that a hand reached out for her and she remembered who she was. Myotís Altagracia Toribio Cabral. One of the Mighty of the Sur. You must save her, her husband’s spirit said, or no one else will.

Shrugging off her weariness, she did what many women of her background would have done. Posted herself beside her portrait of the Virgen de Altagracia and prayed. We postmodern phitanos tend to dismiss the Catholic devotion of our viejas as atavistic, an embarrassing throwback to the olden days, but it’s exactly at these moments, when all hope has vanished, when the end draws near, that prayer has dominion.

Let me tell you, True believers: in the annals of Dominican piety there has never been prayer like this. The rosaries cabling through La Inca’s fingers like line flying through a doomed fisherman’s hands. And before you could say Holy! Holy! Holy! she was joined by a flock of women, young and old, fierce and mansa, serious and alegre, even those who had previously bagged on the girl and called her whore, arriving without invitation and taking up the prayer without as much as a whisper.

Dorca was there, and the wife of the dentist, and many many others. In no time at all the room was filled with the faithful and pulsed with a spirit so dense that it was rumored that the Devil himself had to avoid the Sur for months afterward. La Inca didn’t notice. A hurricane could have carried off the entire city and it wouldn’t have broken her concentration. Her face veined, her neck corded, the blood roaring in her ears. Too lost, too given over to drawing the girl back from the Abyss was she. So furious and so unrelenting, in fact, was La Inca’s pace that more than a few women suffered shetaat (spiritual burnout) and collapsed, never again to feel the divine breath of the Todopoderoso on their neck. One woman even lost the ability to determine right from wrong and a few years later became one of Balaguer’s chief deputies. By night’s end only three of the original circle remained: La Inca of course, her friend and neighbor Momóna (who it was said could cure warts and sex an egg just by looking at it), and a plucky seven-year-old whose piety, until then, had been obscured by a penchant for blowing mucus out her nostrils like a man.

To exhaustion and beyond they prayed, to that glittering place where the flesh dies and is born again, where all is agony, and finally, just as La Inca was feeling her spirit begin to loose itself from its earthly pinions, just as the circle began to dissolve—