Where Miracles Exist for the Weekend
November 19, 2024 at 03:30PM
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Kayla Aletha Welch | Longreads | November 2024 | 5,634 words (20 minutes)
I lost my god at 15, which is not at all uncommon for children raised in religion. And like many of them, I spent the next three years clinging to some semblance of the divine: missionary trips, fasts to raise money for starving babies, Bible study. My parents tried to make up for their own profane childhoods by sending me to a Reformed Protestant high school, whose teachers explained that Calvin’s god had determined all possible outcomes for all possible happenings in the entire universe. So maybe, or probably, I was already damned, and there was nothing I could do about it.
But even awash in all that fear, I couldn’t let go and let God. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, where people talk about shuttered steel mills with the same tenderness that they use to name first lovers, where everything cracks, everything peels, everything sighs under the totality of its abandonment. And the inertia of dark things is stronger than any law of physics. To escape places where there is more past than present takes a level of conviction that precludes any belief in preordained lives, or at least that’s what I told myself.
It’s strange, then, that earlier this year I found myself in La Isla, a small pueblo in rural Jalisco, Mexico, preparing to make my first-ever religious pilgrimage. When I dressed at four in the morning, the unholy duet of four-wheelers and dogs had only just been replaced by crowing roosters. Jovanny and I received a blessing from his mother and pushed through a forlorn gate into the street.
We were on our way to the Virgin of San Juan.
When Jovanny’s kidneys began to fail in earnest, he bought a plane ticket from Pittsburgh to Guadalajara. He planned to set out on foot from his birthplace in Jalisco and walk to San Juan de los Lagos, a hundred kilometers away. His goal? “To get a helping hand,” he said. And by that he meant that he wanted to convince the Virgin of San Juan, a doll-sized image of the Virgin Mary made from corn paste, to dole out a miracle. She lords over the Basilica of San Juan de los Lagos with a centuries-long résumé for just that sort of thing—miracles—and there was no dissuading him.
His nephrologist diagnosed him as being in denial. “He’s in the sweet spot for treatment,” she said. “He doesn’t quite need dialysis yet, but we can get him on the transplant list.” She suggested that beginning the process of list placement would pull him away from corn and miracles and back to estimated glomerular filtration rates and creatinine ratios.
She was wrong. Jovanny had already struck a bargain—“I have a manda,” he said, in the way of a gambler forced to throw down his trump card too soon. I could translate manda as “promise” or “vow,” but these approximations falter under the word’s weight. Manda comes from the verb mandar, to command, and he’d sworn an oath to walk to the Virgin of San Juan in exchange for possible healing. “Would you break an oath to your mother?” he said. “So why would you break an oath to anyone else’s?” I, whose narrow escape from the indoctrination of my youth was never far from my mind, had not made any overtures to the Virgin or the rest of her family for years.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I saw him differently then, as one does when she realizes that the man with whom she has birthed a child and opened a shared line of credit might believe that a tiny doll in a tiny town holds mysterious powers.
He wanted to convince the Virgin of San Juan, a doll-sized image of the Virgin Mary made from corn paste, to dole out a miracle.
We’d parked in a half-abandoned lot in the Wilkinsburg neighborhood of Pittsburgh, a site possessing not one touch of the magical, miraculous, or Marian. He shook his head. “I don’t think I can explain it in a way that will make sense to you.”
I should mention that I never saw any of this coming. Neither of us go to church. But there’s also an extenuating factor: my husband believes that the Virgin of San Juan came through for him once before.
I didn’t want to go. More importantly, I didn’t want him to go. The emergence of a new facet of his personality—or a facet that wasn’t new at all—scared me. So when I couldn’t change his mind, I had no choice but to sign up alongside him. In January we would fly to Jalisco, leave our toddler with Jovanny’s parents, and plod from their rancho in La Isla to San Juan de los Lagos. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from across the country make the same pilgrimage then, in preparation for the Virgin of San Juan’s annual feast day. We would walk with 50 other people who, I assumed, believed in the things that he wouldn’t articulate—that is, they believed in both the existence of transformative miracles and, for one weekend, the possibility of touching them. Jovanny seemed pleased and slightly proud that I would be going, as if he had worked out a difficult math problem.
On our way to the pilgrimage meeting point, we stopped at a tortillería whose employees—as with most of the town—were related to Jovanny through blood or marriage. His aunts offered us tortillas to warm our hands while his uncle expressed dark forebodings about our chances of success. “It’s a long way,” he said. “A really long way. May God go with you.” He looked at me. “Especially with you.”
People already stood along the unlined road into town, wearing their everyday clothes and talking very little. A girl spoke up. “Well, are we going to start or what? It’s five o’clock—they’ll have to catch up. ¡Vámonos!” And then we all staggered forward and crossed the road, descending into tomato fields lit only by flinty stars and roving flashlights.
I expected a pilgrimage to be a kind of meditation in motion, an ambulatory opportunity to reflect on oneself, one’s life, what brought one to this place. But this was not that. A group of boys sang and sprinted, and the others—some in their 50s and 60s—trotted in the blackness, plunging along paths they had known since before their earliest memory. Our legs churned as we crossed a stream and cut through lima trees. An hour later, we burst into the first town along our route: Ayotlán, where people were beginning to step from houses washed luridly by the dawn. But no one took heed of any of us, because they knew where we were going. That, at least, was no mystery.
In Mexico, pilgrimages are more than just a niche pastime of the devout. Millions of Mexicans make arduous journeys to visit religious icons every year; more than 11 million devotees visited Mexico City to view the Virgin of Guadalupe last year between December 9-12 alone. An entire culture—an art, a politics, an economy—rests on Mexican pilgrimage. It extends all the way to La Isla, a town bubbling from the edge of the Jaliscan highlands at the border of Jalisco and Michoacán. A hundred years ago, this region was divided into haciendas, or sprawling estates where landowners ran their operations like fiefs. And it was about a hundred years ago, too, when Jovanny’s grandfather and a handful of other laborers left those haciendas to build a new pueblo: La Isla, which 1,000 people call home.
In some ways, not a lot has changed here over the last century. Jovanny started working in the fields when he was 5 or 6, scattering seeds in the wake of his father’s horse-drawn plow (two bean, one corn, he says). Then he left school after eighth grade to slaughter pigs for 900 MXN—at the time, about $90—a week. It’s easy to define La Isla by its absences: for generations, wave after wave of young people has left to work in big cities or the United States. They usually don’t move back. Families find themselves fragmented across land and language, with new generations visiting grandparents whose terms of endearment they can’t understand.
In fact, although our daughter learned Spanish before English for many reasons, one of them may trace to something Jovanny’s father told him years ago: “You’re forgetting where you come from. You forget what it’s like here, to live here, to be here.”
It was nine in the morning when we reached San Ignacio Cerro Gordo, where a linebacker-thick ridge cut with a perpendicular ascent pulsed in the midmorning heat.
“I can’t do this,” I said.
Jovanny looked at me, gauging my conviction, and found it wanting. “Sure you can.” He took my backpack. “Let’s go.”
Behind us, Ayotlán’s cathedral clawed toward the sky. I thought of my daughter, who by now had woken up to grandparents she didn’t know while her mother and father wandered in the inhospitable wilderness.
“I really don’t think I can.”
“Don’t look all the way up, just look right in front of you. Look at me. Here.”
He braced his shoe between two rocks and hauled me up, and then up further. We arrived at the top of the cerro after 20 minutes of degradation, chests and calves spasming. Jovanny massaged his knee.
Even they, long accustomed to marching bands of pilgrims, stared. Why was I stumbling alongside this mass of the devout? Was I playing a bad joke on them, or on myself?
We moved deeper into the highlands on dirt paths once frequented by farmers but now abandoned for distant highways. The sun heightened the yellow huizache and azure agave and red earth, blinding us with light and sweat. Hours passed. Slowly, the trail widened with signs of civilization: hoed rows of plantings, waxy horses. And then dogs, and then a truck, and then another, and suddenly we arrived in Arandas, a city of over 80,000 people. A caravan of dusty cars passed us, ranchera music blasting into the street. These were our maleteros, or porters—dozens of others from La Isla who mirrored the broad strokes of our journey in their vehicles. They carried our tents and clothes and would set up camp at the place where we’d sleep that night. They shouted and shouted—”¡Ánimo!” “¡Así, chingao!”—and then they were gone.
Arandas is not a big town, but it does have cafés, restaurants, and hotels. I, who have lived in cities for years and years, felt ill at ease among all the bathed people with particular things to do, people who chatted in the streets or swept the sidewalks or sipped aguas frescas. Even they, long accustomed to marching bands of pilgrims, stared. Why was I stumbling alongside this mass of the devout? Was I playing a bad joke on them, or on myself?
We traipsed through avenues that became more crowded as we reached the town’s plaza, where we ate tacos at card tables. By now my body protested generously—it screamed when I stood, and the tops of my feet burned. Jovanny’s sore knee had already evolved into a more serious injury: he could no longer straighten it.
And so impaired we began the slow ascent out of Arandas.
The Virgin of San Juan is a prime example of religious iconography’s staying power. Indigenous artists from Michoacán created her 500 years ago, and in 1623 she resurrected a little girl who died during a circus act. Or that’s how one story goes. Different sources say the miracle happened in 1630, or 1634, or 1563. Like all religious artifacts, she’s undergone processes of cohesion during which many contrasting tales of origin solidify. I understand this intimately—after all, men sat in closed rooms and put together the Bible over centuries so that my high school teachers could tell me how each word was divinely breathed.
Yet the Virgin’s dubious history still packed enough punch to keep us toiling past Arandas and out across the plateaus. We walked until there were no people, no houses, no livestock. We walked until the sun began to set. Bleeding and on wobbling ankles, we continued toward a hazy horizon needled with mountains.
It was in this chalky expanse of nothingness that we finally came to a stone corral containing not cattle, but people: cars, tents, coolers, dueling radios, the smell of food. Our first campsite. Aching and dehydrated, we lurched through running children and open truck beds until we found our maletero—Jovanny’s brother, Carlos, who seemed unconcerned with our general wellbeing as he lay day-drinking in a Ford Expedition.
Which is perhaps why Gabi, another of Jovanny’s many aunts, came to check on us. “Qué bueno, mija, I didn’t think you were going to make it,” she said. “You were so red after that hill! Have you eaten? No?” With a wave of her hand, two plates of enchiladas appeared. “Eat,” she said. Like Jovanny, Gabi and her husband—whom everyone called Charro—also walked with a manda. They’d incurred the debt when one of their sons suffered a car accident the previous year. He’d since healed, but his parents would have made the journey even if he hadn’t.
Gabi, a veteran with almost 40 pilgrimages under her belt, took a practical view of our pursuit of the divine, and sent two women to check us for any serious maladies.
“Do you have a manda from the Virgencita?” one of them asked.
“No,” I said, “no manda for me.”
“Well, that’s good. Everyone says that when you walk without a manda, it’s easier. When you have a manda it becomes difficult, it hurts more and people get blisters and things like that. Because the Virgin charges interest.”
“I don’t want to know what it would be like to have a manda, then,” I said.
What a pathological twist to require such sacrifice and then make things even worse for people who loved you so much. I thought about Gramsci and Fanon and colonization and hegemony.
“You need a foot massage,” the other woman said. “It’ll make you feel better.” She kneaded my feet until I cried as she caught up on 15 years of gossip with Jovanny, who tried to read me into their conversation by tracing relationships between people’s cousins and nephews and first and second wives and lovers.
An hour later, on my way to the bathroom before we entombed ourselves in a one-person tent, I came across three boys hiding behind parked cars and trash piles. “Have you seen La Llorona?” one of them asked, referring to the phantom of Latin American legend who roams the streets at night dressed in white. She kidnaps children in her hunt for her own babies, all of whom she drowned before killing herself. “We heard her over there!”
I looked at a pile of rusted metal that twinkled in the moonlight. Their childhoods were populated by all kinds of otherworldly beings, as mine had been: God, the Virgin, saints, and martyrs, but also angels, demons, monsters, ghosts. If your mother nailed a cross over your bed or hung a red bracelet off your wrist to ward away evil, was it even possible to suss out which spiritual forms were real and which were not? Throw in fathers, uncles, and brothers who disappeared into the North, families bound to the empty tables and deserted mornings where their memories sat, and the boundaries between what was there and what wasn’t quickly eroded.
As I said, Jovanny believes that the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos came through for him once before. He was 18 then, planning to try to enter the US a third time after two unsuccessful attempts almost killed him. He decided to visit the Virgin before giving it yet another go, so he undertook his first pilgrimage. When he returned to the border, he crossed the Rio Grande on a makeshift raft. Then a smuggler sealed him into a trailer, swaddled within sound-muffling insulation beneath a murderous Texan sun. He almost suffocated, which happens—grim headlines about dozens of bodies entombed in scorching trucks appear every year. But he bit through the insulation to breathe, and he stayed alive long enough for someone to open the door. As he tells it, not dying during those hours was a miracle. An absurdity, really—his third time trying to cross the border and his third time nearly dying to achieve it. And yet he did not die and he did achieve it.
I’ve always thought, and always believed he understood in a self-analytical way, that the Virgin of San Juan functions in his story as a cipher, a strip of code to read sense into the senselessness of suffering. Jovanny is a rational person. He studied computer science and listens to NPR and likes to restore old furniture. And the Virgin was someone who could sit with him in a way that broken border policy and the capitalist horror show of undocumented labor could not: a reason. Even when he received the news of his failing kidneys and announced plans to complete the pilgrimage once again, it felt more like an elaborate gesture than anything else.
As he tells it, not dying during those hours was a miracle.
But on our trip, I was confronted with the fact that he really did believe in the Virgin. This became evident when, a few hours later, he woke with a completely useless knee. By now the pain had sunk deep within his bone and he could barely stand. We were dripping with the dew that soaked our tent, and we’d slept only moments. I was sure that he’d call off the trip, that we’d pile into a car for the remaining 60 kilometers.
But he refused. “I’ll be fine,” he said, popping two of the pills that flowed freely through the camp. Truck headlights began to flicker as murmurings punctured the silence.
“You can’t even get up,” I said.
“Walking or crawling, I’m going.” His face was hollow. “I have to, I have to make it. You should rest, though. It isn’t safe to walk in the dark like this when you haven’t slept.”
His zeal seemed even stranger when juxtaposed with a sensible approach to my own infirmities. I protested and he pretended to listen, but when a shout assembled everyone to disappear into the black maw of predawn, he limped away.
I wanted to accept what was happening. I wanted to be the sort of expansive person that could tolerate in others something she couldn’t tolerate in herself. But I doubted everything, myself most of all.
That morning I traveled with the maleteros, where women fed over 100 people while men drank and drank and drank.
It didn’t take excessive imagination to see those men as the haunts of small towns everywhere. When I was in high school about an hour outside of Pittsburgh, Barack Obama—then running for the US presidency—said that small towns in Western Pennsylvania “cling to guns and religion.” Even amid the indignation of everyone around me who immediately and correctly picked up on the condescending nature of the phrase, I understood what he meant. While no one made pilgrimages where I grew up, they did prepare for the Rapture. Eventually I felt sorry for the hollow destinies of the men I saw, who were always blissed out in church or on opioids, watching the Steelers game, or buying lottery tickets at the Circle K.
As the sun began to crest over the horizon, we waited in the quiet plaza of Santa María de los Altos. Women unpacked propane tanks and prepared pounds and pounds of carnitas. Vendors threw open their shops, scrubbing and frying and sweeping. Soon came forth that particular aroma I associate with Mexico: corn masa and cleaning fluids.
When Jovanny limped into view, Gabi and Charro looked disturbed. “Climb up into the truck just for a bit, mijo,” Charro said.
Gabi went to a pharmacy to buy more mysterious pills. I didn’t remind Jovanny that his kidney disease meant he had to avoid ibuprofen, mainly because he felt like someone else entirely.
I watched him limp away once again, a cousin at his elbow.
We set up camp for the second night at a sparse country house whose chickens terrorized the yard while cows bumbled across a yellowed pasture. This was donde Don José, where Don José lived, a place people used to define our route as if it were an incorporated town or landmark. But no: the whitewashed adobe walls encircled only a small courtyard that boiled beneath the midday haze, blue and pink bugambilias rioting in crevices. The scorched earth around the house overflowed with trash, abandoned vehicles, and dung.
Jovanny collapsed onto a chair, his knee shaking uncontrollably, and was quickly surrounded by a group of childhood friends who clapped him on the back and handed him potato chips and Gatorade. I wandered to a small group of people setting up their tents in front of the house. An effervescent woman named Nancy sat with her daughter, Diana.
“Hola, mija,” she said to me. “We’re already there, it’s a done deal.”
She attended to a blister on the edge of her foot.
“Do your legs hurt?” she asked. She gave me a peyote-based gel to rub into my muscles.
Nancy told me that she had been devoted to the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos since she was 9. “That’s when my grandma died,” she said, “my dad’s mom. She got really sick, but then she got better. So my dad went to work the next day, and when his brother called him and said that their mom was getting worse again, he finished his shift. And as soon as he was done he ran to his mom’s house, and my grandma was just sitting there on her steps, calm as can be. Had her nice dress on and everything. He said, ‘Mom, what are you doing here? You should be inside!’ And she said, ‘I was waiting for you, I wanted to see you.’ And he told her he loved her, and he helped her back inside and then went home. And that’s when his brother told him that my grandma had been dead for hours, and they were already preparing her body for burial.” Nancy smiled. “I’ve loved the Virgin ever since, because she gave my dad that moment with his mom. I’ve gone to see her every year—except when I was married.” She glanced knowingly at her youngest sister. “And what a waste of time that was!”
Then she pulled a plastic bag out of her backpack and unwrapped a photo of a handsome man with a block jaw. “I have a manda this year,” she said. “This is my baby brother. He got sick in the North, and I asked the Virgin to heal him. I haven’t seen him in 20 years. He died.” She pressed her fingers to her brother’s face. “Now he has no pain,” she said. “I’m going to fulfill my manda and he’s coming with me. Even now, he doesn’t get to rest! Not a bit!”
The other women laughed.
“I’m going to put his picture up in the Room of Miracles,” she told me.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s—you don’t know about the Room of Miracles? It’s this room behind the altar where people hang things that have to do with miracles from the Virgencita, pictures and things, and you walk in and you just feel this—this peace and . . .” She stopped. “Well, I don’t need to tell you about it, mija,” she said. “You’ll see it for yourself soon enough.”
“Ey,” her youngest sister said, in the particular way people from Jalisco have of saying sí. “Don’t miss it.” Then, “You do know the Virgin of San Juan, don’t you?”
After miles upon miles during which no one had inquired about my own religious convictions, I blinked. I tried to explain how I grew up Protestant, I mean, still Christian, just a different kind of church . . .
It was quiet, and then Nancy said, “But you’ll see, mija. You’ll come back year after year, you’ll see.”
Their childhoods were populated by all kinds of otherworldly beings, as mine had been: God, the Virgin, saints, and martyrs, but also angels, demons, monsters, ghosts.
A truck pulled up to the house with a familiar image on its rear window: a blue banner emblazoned with the Virgin of San Juan and the face of a small boy. I’d already noticed a young couple wearing shirts with the same image. Then the boy from the photo, a streak of light maybe 5 years old, jumped from the truck and into the couple’s open arms.
“The Medinas,” Gabi told me later. “Their little boy has brain cancer. He’s had it for . . .” She turned to Charro. “Three years now?”
For the first time, I felt the cost of my scrappily achieved emotional distance. Most people here were trying to find a way to live with events that could have broken their lives: absence, illness, loss, death. How could I fault them for something I also wanted, which was to wring meaning from things that have none? The boy shouted gleefully as his parents tickled him. Later, he stretched out on a blanket in a storage room, snuggled between his mother and his father. It was while I watched them sleep that I decided to walk the rest of the journey.
That little boy died about five months later, on a day in June. When I heard the news, I thought back to the storage room, where I had witnessed no anger and no grief—only three people clinging to each other, inseparable in the strength of their love.
By three the next morning we stood outside our tents in the stony dark, our bodies brilliant with cold. Then shouts began to echo in the black and—chaotically, painfully—we started jogging alongside one another. But Jovanny’s knee reached a critical point, so Gabi pulled him aside to brace it with a handkerchief. She gave him her walking stick. “The Virgin would understand,” she said. Jovanny laughed, although his breath hitched. For my part, I found that I had given up on him.
We stopped outside a sleepy store, where I saw blood staining my socks under a mosquito-infested fluorescent light. The hours passed—we met people from other towns who lifted their hands in greeting, outlined against the indigo sky. And then far off in the distance, the breathtaking burn of lights.
“That’s San Juan!” Charro cried.
“Yes, that’s San Juan,” Gabi said dully. “But it’s very, very far, and if you look at it, you’ll chase it away.”
I, of course, couldn’t help but look. My insomnia and the strange sky at dawn melded together to create a hallucinatory experience: the lights were moving, disappearing, ebbing, flowing. We came upon hundreds of glossy cows buried in mud, lowing against metal fences. The trail widened into a stone-paved road and we passed a muddy field that smelled like something burning. A very old woman, stooped beneath a rebozo and battling the filth in her full skirts, clung to her daughter’s arm as two other women held up a curtain to protect her modesty while she relieved herself. Small children sat outside of homes, selling steaming chayote and coffee and paper flowers. Massive trucks carrying thousands of gallons of milk bore down the narrow road, and three men dressed in full regalia used their spurs to whirl sweating horses past us at a full gallop. Jovanny’s other knee gave out, and then we had to slip under barbed wire and drag ourselves across a highway, right by a memorial to a pilgrim who had been hit and killed at that very spot. We inched up a dusty hill. It was nine in the morning, and then ten, and then we made it to a place that everyone called Las Cruces, high on the peaks overlooking San Juan de los Lagos.
Here, people left wooden and metal crosses to commemorate their beloved. A tree twinkled with ghostly ensembles: hats, shoes, shirts, little pieces of the dead that glimmered in the sun.
A teenager named Chaluco offered his shoulder to Jovanny for support. “Man, you’re old,” he said.
“I am,” Jovanny answered, grabbing the shoulder and shifting his weight, “but once I was as young and beautiful as you.” Chaluco grinned.
A few moments later, he, Jovanny, and I began to make our way down the final hill and into San Juan de los Lagos. I suffered the unbearable dissonance of emerging from a void of time and space into a quaint Monday morning: people waited for buses and bought groceries, romantic vestiges of a prior life. Elderly women greeted us. “You’re almost there!” “Just a little bit further!”
Most people here were trying to find a way to live with events that could have broken their lives: absence, illness, loss, death. How could I fault them for something I also wanted, which was to wring meaning from things that have none?
By the time we reached the center of San Juan, I felt the dizzying effects of euphoria. We had hiked for three endless days in the cold and the heat, on torn knees and blistered feet, stoned with pain medication and sleep deprivation. And then we met the teeming group of maleteros at the edge of a bridge that would carry us to the basilica.
The town of La Isla had organized a dance offering to the Virgin, and thus the surreal character of the moment exceeded even its own boundaries. A dozen men and women wearing violently orange feathers, dazzling pink skirts, and shockingly blue headdresses led our procession. They swirled to music emitted from a massive boombox powered by a large gas motor. Everyone embraced.
We reached the basilica itself, as beautiful and imposing as a dream that may yet slide into either fantasy or nightmare. A nun asked us to wait outside until mass ended.
“About to see the lady herself!” Chaluco said, elbowing Jovanny.
But Jovanny didn’t lift his head, not even when another group of pilgrims broke into a cheer. He held my hand and said nothing, and I felt my concern transform from worry about our broken bodies into something vaguer and more threatening.
At the appointed time, the gas motor roared back to life and we stormed into an already surging cathedral. Music blared, dancers jumped, men and women threw themselves onto their knees while weeping furiously, phones waved, children balanced precariously on dusty shoulders, banners rose and fell against the soaring baroque stone. Far above the altar, I saw a glimmer of gold and knew it was the Virgin. Two priests stood like marble cliffs at the edge of the altar, tossing holy water into the air to bless the many objects flung toward them. All eyes fixated on the tiny doll suspended dozens of feet above.
In the midst of the cacophony, Jovanny moved into a pew. Then, his mouth disfigured by pain, he lowered himself to his knees and began to sob, his face in his hands, his shoulders shaking.
The chaos of the cathedral ebbed away quite suddenly. A deep pause and then, like a damaged photo negative, I saw it.
I saw, in pieces and shadows, an image: the unbalanceable ledgers of what his decision to leave had yielded, and what it had cost. I saw bodily specters trailing him—parents who would die far away, childhood friends who mucked slaughterhouses he had abandoned, a way of being that brought him into the world and which he could not fully reenter. And the white path of the future marked by beauty, yes, but also by loneliness. Was this what he wanted me to witness, his reckoning with what had been and what was and what would come in the spectators’ arena of this place, the collision of fate and choice into hope, into despair?
He kneeled for a long time. I sat asphyxiated—because as suddenly as I saw this internal conflict, I also understood that I would never fully know it. And within me turned all the things that would never fully be known, not by him or anyone. Unnamed and unnameable, they ate a hole in my chest.
We would return to our daughter, drive to Guadalajara, and take a flight home. We’d be pulled into jobs and playdates and anxiety, transplant lists and copays and preschool committees. I’d feared that we might also suffocate beneath a new understanding of his belief and my lack thereof, but the revelation was different. We had glimpsed the unsounded depths of one another, the dark spaces where fires of transformation are fed. I didn’t believe because I couldn’t, and he believed because he had to.
And there it was, the most heartbreaking part of marriage: so much knowing and so much unknowing, together.
After a long time, I stood and began my unsteady search for the Room of Miracles. The crush of the faithful checked me at every turn—I moved through them, colliding with shoulders and hands and rosaries, until I found the flagstone steps in the rear of the nave that led to the Room of Miracles. Then I entered a spiraling stone chamber that appeared to have no ceiling. It was plastered with letters written to the Virgin over decades: shorn hair, dolls, drawings, photos. Their compactness overwhelmed any appraisal of their number: there may have been a thousand letters or a hundred thousand. People alongside whom I’d bled, eaten, and slept for days hung their relics silently and individually. A man climbed the steps on his knees, the torn cuffs of his jeans catching on the split soles of his dusty black boots. His body battled against gravity—its mournful advance up each step found an echo in the lightning recoil that shot through his face and shoulders. One by one he climbed, his eyes closed, his mouth moving. I thought of my own fear. I thought that maybe the mandas and miracles knit together a place for this, a theater where people could grapple with unspeakable things and their immensities. Each lonely vow bulwarked a shared acceptance of what scares people, including me, the most: the things we can’t know about ourselves, about one another.
By then, Jovanny had propped himself against a wall to wait for me. We limped past groves of prostrated bodies, emerging into the noise and the light.
Kayla Aletha Welch is a writer with a doctorate in literature from the University of Pittsburgh.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/19/miracles-pilgrimage-mexico-faith-doubt/
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