Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras Page B

lapsed. Papá had put his faith in the laws of man while mamá devoted herself to the laws of science, thereby distancing herself from the sanctimonious superciliousness of grandma Matilde. Together they had agreed that the Midget and I should be raised in complete and utter ignorance of all things religious. I suppose they thought they were doing us a favour, but growing up differently, wehad real trouble dealing with commonplace concepts like heaven and hell. Our lack of reliable information about our eligibility for membership of certain clubs caused us occasional distress. And our meagre understanding of the central articles of the Catholic faith also contributed to my sense of being a fish out of water.
    I remember that one Holy Week, the magazine I got every Thursday,
Anteojito
, came with a free poster depicting the Stations of the Cross. I burned the poster and flushed the ashes down the toilet to dispose of the evidence. The idea that I was supposed to pin this graphic depiction of torture and death on my wall seemed to me as obscene as if someone had suggested decorating my room with pictures of the inner workings of Auschwitz.
    But my most traumatic experience came when I watched
The Miracle of Marcelino
, an old movie I caught on Channel 9 one night. Marcelino is an orphan boy taken in by the monks of the local monastery. One day he’s up in the attic, looking for something, when suddenly he hears a voice asking for water. Marcelino looks around but he can’t see anyone, because there’s no one in the room except him. The voice is coming from a huge crucifix on the wall, where the wooden figure of Christ is asking him for a drink.
    The worst thing about the movie was that, at the end, when Marcelino dies, the fat monk cries tears of joy and the bells ring out to celebrate the fact that the boy had been ‘chosen’ by the wooden doll. (The film, I should point out, ignores the basic fact that wood expands when it gets wet. With all the water he was drinking, there wouldn’t be a cross strong enough to hold up a fat Christ.) Everything about the film made it seem as though we were supposed to rejoice because Marcelino was a saint and had been taken up into heaven, but all I could think was that Marcelino had been murdered by a big wooden statue and nobody was doing anything about it.
    From then on, whenever me and my friends told each other horror stories, they would tell stories about Frankenstein and mummies andDracula, but whenever I mentioned the wooden Christ (oh, I nearly forgot, the statue rips one of his hands from the Cross so he can take the cup Marcelino offers him) there was a stony silence and they all looked at me like I was weird, which I suppose I was. After a while I learned to keep my mouth shut. My friends would wake up in the middle of the night, terrified they were being hunted by werewolves and headless horsemen. I’d wake up screaming, trying to escape from murderous T-shirts, ravenous Saturns and wooden Christs who clambered down from their Crosses and lumbered after me, trying to convince me that the only good child is a dead child.
    On the subject of religion, the Midget had his own issues, but they were minor by comparison. He asked mamá if he could skip the line in the Our Father where it says, ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’, because he was too little to have done any trespassing. The thing that really worried him about Catholicism was the concept of the resurrection of the flesh; I don’t know exactly what he imagined the phrase meant, but I have a pretty good idea.
    And so we arrived at the village church with quavering hearts, determined to play the part of the devout Vicente family to the hilt. Papá was in his Sunday best, mamá was wearing a tailored trouser suit and me and the Midget were wearing the matching shirts and ties we usually wore under our white school smocks, an outfit I loathed