gang leaders with dozens of tattoos. They offered me gifts—perfume, food, tequila. They prayed before me, they asked my blessing, and all the while DeMario smirked at me over their bowed heads.”
“So,” said Hugo. “Your function was to impress other criminals by posing as Santa Muerte?”
“That was the idea. DeMario rarely confided in me, but once he patted me on the head and said that before we were done, he would have every criminal in Mexico worshipping at my church.”
“It doesn’t seem credible that you could frighten men to that extent.”
“Oh, I have my moments,” she said. “I don’t know whether I frightened them as much as I convinced them, but this is an unusual house. In one room there is an animal that feeds on itself, tearing at its own flesh, and yet the next day is whole again. In another there is a TV screen set in the floor that works only intermittently and shows images of an apocalyptic event that soon will be visited upon us. There are other strange things besides. Some will tell you they are nothing but tricks. High-tech illusions, animatronics, and so forth. Others claim they are magical devices. I believe both sides are right, that given certain conditions, illusions can become real.”
Hugo made a dubious noise, but Aida ignored it.
“Whatever their nature,” she said, “I think after seeing them the men were disposed to believe in me.” She lit another cigarette and exhaled through her nostrils. “DeMario’s behavior toward me underwent a change over the course of the three years that I knew him. Increasingly, he began to display anxiety in my presence. During the last year I scarcely saw him at all, until one night he broke into my apartment and raped me. I reverted to the passive resistance of my orphanage days and glared at him the entire time and gave no outcry. After he had finished he appeared terrified. He wept and babbled and called me his beautiful death. He had been using a lot of drugs those last months. Cocaine, heroin, pills. I imagined that his substance abuse provoked the incident. The next morning he was dead. Some problem with his heart. His woman told me that he had become convinced that I was Santa Muerte incarnate, and that what had started out as a game had evolved into something much darker. The rape, she said, was an attempt to restore his control over me. She, too, believed I was Santa Muerte and that I had struck DeMario down for his assault on me. She begged my forgiveness and asked me to show her mercy.
“I thought I would have to move out of the house, but the story of DeMario’s death and my part in it spread through the barrio and no one ever tried to evict me. Instead, people thronged the house, asking for my blessing. They would have transformed my home into a shrine to Santa Muerte, a big one like the old woman’s house on Alfareria Street; but I told them I wanted neither their gifts nor their adoration. I said that I had been made flesh in order to explore the nature of my humanity and to fulfill a destiny as yet unrevealed. I meant to choose those with whom I surrounded myself. The people you asked about, the ones who visit me here, they are my suitors. They come in hopes that I will grant them surcease. Whenever I feel so inclined, I give them a kiss and send them away. Not one of them has returned.”
“Some of your suitors are very young.”
“Are you so naïve that you think only the old seek death?”
“You believe they are dead, the ones you kissed?”
“I’ve come to think so. Yes.”
“Then you must believe that you are the Skinny Girl.”
“At first I did not believe it. I found the concept ridiculous. But lately…”
She failed to complete the sentence, and Hugo asked what she had intended to say.
“People assume an incarnation is a special soul given physical form,” she said. “Something apart from creation, something that has a different quality. But God is in all things, so how can His incarnation be separate … or different? I think an incarnation is a part of God that is gradually shaped by His design to satisfy some need. It took Jesus years before he understood His destiny.” She got to her feet and paced off a few steps toward the door. “Lately I have gained a new sense of myself. It’s difficult to describe, and there are moments—like now—when I doubt what I know in my heart. Words make it sound utterly preposterous.” She slapped her thigh in frustration. “Let’s just say I’ve begun to accept that my actions have some wider resonance in the world.”
“Well,” said Hugo, choosing his words with care, not wanting to upset her further, “it should be easy enough to prove. Have the people whom you kiss followed when they leave. Invite technicians into the house to examine the television and whatever else requires validation.”
“That would prove nothing. Scrutiny changes the observable. No, my idea of proof was to bring you here. Your life has been surrounded by death. It’s your passion.”
Hugo started to object, but she talked through him.
“I’ve read your interviews,” she said. “You make a point of denying me, yet you seek me out in my most terrible forms and perceive in each a vivid grace. When you photographed me, I felt you were fucking me with the camera. I stripped off my clothes because you recognized me. You responded to my beauty … you’ve always responded to me. Your desire was palpable. You wanted to touch me. Why didn’t you?”
Embarrassed, Hugo gave no answer.
“You’ve been my absent lover for a long while,” said Aida. “Soon we will be together.”
“Don’t be silly,” Hugo said. “I took those pictures to run with your story.”
“Even the ones the newspapers would refuse to print? Who are those intended for? You can’t deny your desire for me much longer. We
He followed her through the beaded curtain and down a short stairway and along a whitewashed tunnel lit by naked ceiling bulbs—like a passage leading to a gallows or a gas chamber.
“A few weeks ago, I had a vision of you,” she said as she went. “I watched you photographing the dead.”
He felt a pang of anxiety. “Dozens of people watch me at work. Cops, medics. Bystanders.”
“But no one saw you working at the New Divine, did they?”
Hugo quit walking.
“You were alone inside the club,” said Aida. “You must have bribed someone to let you in before the emergency teams arrived. There were bodies everywhere. The room was still very smoky, so you tied a cloth about your face. The first picture you shot was of a teenage girl who had been trampled trying to reach the door. She had on a green dress.”
“You must have seen footage from a security camera,” he said.
“Aren’t security tapes shot in black-and-white? Yet I’m telling you her dress was green.” She sniffed. “Don’t bother responding. You can always construct an alternative explanation. Reality is full of loopholes.”
At the end of the tunnel was a door with a padlock. Aida put a key in the lock and said, “What I’m going to show you occurred during the earthquake in ninety-nine, a few days after my arrival in this house. DeMario thought it might have caused the earthquake. I didn’t learn of it until after his death.”
She threw open the door, warm air and a smell of decay rushed out, and Hugo clapped a hand over his mouth and nose. Emerging from the wall directly ahead of them, wedged in place, resting among chunks of rock and white plaster that appeared to have been shattered by its violent incursion, were the head and torso of an androgynous giant with chalky skin and long, silky white hair and an impassive Sphinx-like face. It lay on its side, the right shoulder and arm crushed beneath its body, its left arm protruding from the shattered wall some thirty feet above, as though it had been reaching out for someone or something at the instant its momentum ceased. The position of the left hand, wrist bent and fingers dangling, reminded Hugo of the hand of Jehovah depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Half-clotted black blood welled from a gash on its wrist, spilling into a pool that had accumulated in a depression in the rock. Wisps of steam rose from the surface, and Hugo recalled the soup served in the banquet room. At the base of the throat, under the collarbone, on the shoulder blade and elsewhere, were patches of dark webbed veins that showed through the skin like evil snowflakes.
“It came for me,” said Aida. “Or so I’ve concluded.”
Despite the sluggish flow of blood, Hugo presumed the giant to be dead; but then he checked himself and decided it must be a fraud, a torso with metal bones and skin fabricated from latex, set in place and jammed into a hole. The giant twisted its neck and, with a laborious effort, lifted its head. Its eyelids opened to reveal cavernous empty sockets crusted with blood, and a chthonic groan issued from its throat. Hugo felt the bellows of its rotting breath and fell back, nearly bumping into Aida. He moved away from her, sweat dripping into his eyes.
“DeMario thought it was an angel,” she said. “It doesn’t have wings, though. I’m not sure what the damned
