Revelation

On the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany, the year I was eleven, my mother was braiding my hair when out of the blue she said, “You do know that it’s the parents, not the Three Kings, who bring you the gifts on January sixth?” “What? No, I didn’t. But, o.k.” I answered, and went out to the backyard, my braids pulling on my scalp and weighing like thick sausages on my shoulders. Even though it was January, I didn’t need a coat. This was Quito, the Andean city just a few kilometers south of the equator, where January was no different from June, only wetter. The red and blue macaw that we had brought back from a trip to the Amazon sat on the perch affixed to the garden wall. I sat on the kitchen steps and let my mother’s words sink in.

It was unfortunate that my mother had chosen our first Christmas away from Spain for her revelation. But what could she do? She had noticed the hormonal tides beginning to rise, and she didn’t want her daughter going through puberty believing that every January Melchior, Caspar, and Balthasar with their camels and retinues crossed the Atlantic and half of South America to find our house at the foot of the ash-spewing Pichincha. She, who had grown up as a free-ranging child in her Catalan village, must have wondered how she had come to give birth to such a backward child. (A few months after the Epiphany talk she had to explain that the calf on the pasture across the street had not materialized suddenly out of nothing, but had actually emerged from inside his mother, the cow.)

And I was astonishingly backward. An only child, too shy to mingle with any but my most timid schoolmates, I had no contemporaries to enlighten me on matters like sex and the provenance of Epiphany gifts. If serious, reliable adults such as my father said things to me like, “If you look up tonight you can see the star of Bethlehem guiding the Magi to our house,” who was I to argue?

Besides, in my world, the things of the spirit were present and proximate, almost within reach of my stubby fingertips. At bedtime, I could practically feel the breeze from my guardian angel’s wings as he swooped to perch on my headboard. Saint Bernadette of Lourdes may have been graced by apparitions of the Virgin Mary, but one night I had been visited by Balthasar, the Moorish King, smiling and resplendent in green turban and robes, standing at the foot of my bed. Even the thirteen pure white geese that inhabited the cloister courtyard of the Barcelona cathedral were far more than just geese: they were the direct descendants of the thirteen geese placed there in Roman times in honor of Saint Eulalia, my patron saint, who had been martyred for being a Christian when she was thirteen years old. But this was as nothing compared to the weekly Sunday miracle, when Jesus became a part of me in the form of a thin wafer that invariably stuck to my palate.

In a childhood awash in numinosity, is it any wonder that it seemed reasonable to believe that the Magi would travel all the way from Palestine to bring me a doll?

The equatorial sun was doing its daily dive behind the snowy peaks of Chimborazo, and on his perch the macaw ruffled his feathers. I invited him onto my shoulder, where he balanced by grasping my collar with his enormous, banana-colored beak, and took him into the woodshed for the night. On the top floor of the house, my father’s string quartet was rehearsing Death and the Maiden. My mother was sitting by the lamp, reading. I went into my bedroom and picked up the doll that (or rather who) had accompanied me from Barcelona, and for the first time she felt cold and lifeless in my arms. Tomorrow was the Feast of the Epiphany, and there would be a gift for me from my parents. But tonight there was no use in going out to look for the Star of Bethlehem in that alien southern sky.