Photo by Kyle Loftus on Unsplash
The Binding of Isaac Garcia by Sandro Francisco Piedrahita
“Very truly I tell
you, before Abraham
was, I am.”
—Jesus, John 8:58
Abraham Garcia was seventy-five years old before anything happened in his life. He had survived during all those years through his staunch Catholic faith, simply tending to the large hacienda bequeathed to him by his father, never engaging in politics or war, living in peace with his wife Sara, who had never had a child. But when he was close to what he thought would be the end of his earthly journey, he received a revelation which would upend everything. He was a paragon of piety and God had decided to reward him. He learned that he was only in the middle of his life, that he would live for at least another hundred years, past the year eighteen-hundred. An angel appeared to him in the middle of the night and told him, “Abraham Garcia, your descendants shall be as numerous as the grains of sand upon a beach, as numerous as the stars in Heaven. Your progeny shall be warriors, victors, saints. They shall possess land far and wide. One of them will rule all Peru, not through the brute use of force but because in light of his wisdom he shall be loved by all.” Abraham Garcia was taken aback. “How can that be, since my wife is barren? She’s long past the age of menopause. Am I to look for another woman?” The angel countered, “You shall receive a sign from God at the right time. For now, just be still and know that God is with you. Wait for the Voice of God and eventually you will understand. In due course, the Lord shall demand certain favors from you.”
Abraham Garcia had led an uneventful life, never straying too far from Cajabamba, the Andean town where he was born. The quechua peasants who worked for him at his hacienda, San Elias, knew him for his kindness and sense of justice. Unlike many of the other encomenderos, Abraham Garcia paid the Indians a fair wage and had never subjected even one of them to the pain of the master’s whip. Nor had he ever taken one of the Amerindian women who toiled his fields as his own, unlike many of the other white landowners of Cajabamba who filled the town with their multitudinous mestizo offspring, the product of their never ending rapes of peasant women. But when Abrahama Garcia told his wife Sara about the apparition of the angel and his prediction that he would be the father of many generations, it was Sara who suggested he find a quechua woman to bear his child.
“Under the circumstances,” said Sara, “that would be the best. I cannot possibly give you a child at my seventy years of age, now that I’m long past my childbearing years. I think the angel’s message can be fulfilled only if you share your bed with another woman. Then I shall have a son at last.”
“That would be a sin,” Abraham Garcia remonstrated. “In all my years I have never fornicated.”
“Nothing ordered by God can possibly be sinful. Believe me, it will bring great pain to my heart, but you are destined to have a child with another woman. I don’t want to get in the way of the Master’s plans.”
“What woman would we choose?” asked Abraham Garcia. “I don’t want to force myself upon any of the women I employ.”
“What about one of the prostitutes at Tingo Maria? I’m sure one of them will agree for the right sum.”
“I don’t want my firstborn son to be the child of a whore,” Abraham Garcia replied.
“There are many peasant women who would willingly allow you to know them in a carnal sense. Why don’t we hold a raffle? Only women interested would participate. The winner would spend the night with you and be paid handsomely for it.”
“I don’t know,” answered Abraham Garcia. “What could be more base than to exchange sex for money? I would be leading one of our young ñustas to vice, seducing them with the abject promise of compensation. Don’t forget what Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz once wrote. ‘Which is more to be blamed, the woman who sins for money or the man who pays money to sin?’ Making a whore out of one of my cholas would be the worst kind of exploitation.”
“Would you feel more comfortable taking one of them by force?”
“Certainly not,” answered Abraham Garcia. “I have never done it and I shall never do so.”
“That’s what I thought,” Sara replied. “In that case, a raffle seems like the best option. Don’t be scrupulous. You shall be fulfilling God’s own prophecy. If the act is justified in the eyes of God, it should certainly be justified in the eyes of men.”
“Why are you so keen on this, Sara? I’ve been faithful to you for a lifetime. I would think the very idea of my having carnal relations with another would be deeply abhorrent to you.”
“Perhaps it is because I could never forgive myself for failing to provide you with a son. You know that I prayed for it for years, long before my change of life. But the Lord never listened. Who am I to object to the instructions of an angel? ”
“The angel didn’t tell me to share my bed with another. Have you ever considered that it might be you who shall carry my child in the womb? Maybe the Christ will yet answer your prayers.”
Sara laughed.
“If I couldn’t give birth to your child when I was twenty, I will certainly not be able to do so at the age of seventy.”
“Nothing is impossible for God,” responded Abraham Garcia. “If God can allow me to live for another hundred years, He can certainly put a child in your old woman’s belly.”
“That would be my heart’s desire. But let’s not delude ourselves, Abraham. Seek out a young woman to bear your child. The will of God must be obeyed. It is a Call, do you understand that, Abraham? The angel’s message is a Call from God. You must completely trust in God no matter what He orders.”
In the end, no raffle was necessary. A young girl by the name of Genara Huaman volunteered to carry Abraham Garcia’s child without seeking payment. Unlike the other quechua peasants, she lived in the servants’ quarters of the Garcia home, where she assisted Sara with her daily housekeeping, cooking and sundry tasks. Instead of a raffle for a night in Abraham Garcia’s bed, Sara decided that a ram should be raffled instead.
“If el patron wants to have a child in his old age,” said Genara in her twin black braids and thick pollerones, “I would be honored to fulfill his desires. You don’t have to give me any money. El patron is a noble and generous man and I would feel blessed to bear his child.”
Sara did not object.
“Consort with Genara,” she ordered her husband. “The ñusta is young and lovely and shall give you a precious child.”
On a sultry summer night, Genara and Abraham Garcia consummated the relationship. Abraham Garcia was afraid he would not be able to perform, given his age and the fact he had not made love to his wife for years. At the appropriate time, however, Genara’s tenderness and solicitousness prevailed over his fears. Even though she was a virgin at the time, Genara guided the septuagenarian gently in the ways of love. She kissed him as if she didn’t realize their vast difference in years, as if she desired him given that his body was still that of a young man – muscular and strong, sinewy and taut. After all, as the angel had stated, he was in the middle of his life and nowhere near its end.
For his part, Abraham Garcia felt aroused in a way he had never been aroused before. Was it possible to experience shame and jubilation all at once? Lust came upon him like an avalanche and his body shook with a previously unknown euphoria mixed with anguish. That had been the chief of his scruples before he made the irrevocable decision to bed the glistening Genara, the fear that he would actually enjoy his sin. Genara didn’t disappoint. She moved Abraham Garcia to a moment of unfettered bliss. After that first night, Abraham Garcia would desire her forever, but he would never once again touch her brown luminescent body. A few weeks later, Genara announced that she was pregnant with his child. Abraham and Sara celebrated as if the child belonged to both, but Abraham noticed there was something grim and bitter in Sara’s countenance.
At first Sara treated the newborn with kindness, even wishing that she could suckle him herself. It was Sara who thought of naming the child Ismael, for she knew it means “God listens.” God had certainly listened to her prayers for a child although He had responded in an unexpected way. One could not doubt that Ismael was the fulfillment of a divine promise. With time, however, Sara would grow to detest the child and realized he wasn’t the answer to her prayers.
That would only come with the passage of the years, when the geriatric Sara would become pregnant at the age of ninety-five.
The older Ismael became, the more he was hated by Sara, to such a degree that she contemplated ordering his murder. It was not hatred at first sight, but it was hatred nonetheless, an implacable hostility that fiercely combated with Sara’s conscience. Sara recognized that Ismael was doted upon by his father and that his mother was given special privileges as a result. Genara was no longer treated as a servant by Abraham Garcia but as a member of the family. He even moved her to a second-story room at the main house of the hacienda and decreed that she should no longer live in the servants’ quarters. Soon thereafter Sara violently protested, accusing Abraham Garcia of secretly loving Genara and lusting after her. Abraham Garcia did not quite know how to respond. He couldn’t deny that he loved Genara ever since she gave birth to Ismael – perhaps he had loved her long before – nor that every night he dreamed of taking her to bed. The truth is that he thought of Genara day and night, her lovely olive-skinned body, her jet black hair, the startling crimson of her lips. So when Sara ordered that Genara and her son return to the servants’ quarters, Abraham Garcia meekly consented. Thereafter, Ismael would grow up surrounded by the Amerindians who worked for his father and quechua would be his mother tongue. But even that was not enough for Sara. By the time Ismael was seven years old, she decided to banish Genara and Ismael from the household altogether. Without telling her husband, she ordered one of the peones to take Genara and Ismael to the Sechura desert, hoping they would die of thirst. When Abraham found out about it, he immediately went to their rescue and returned to San Elias with the two of them – a little dusty, a little tired, but still alive. That is when Sara began to plot their murder. It became an obsession for her, something that was always on her mind. Finally she gave instructions to a peasant named Macario to slash their throats as they were walking on the cobblestone streets of Cajabamba. Sara demanded that Macario bring her their two hearts as evidence of the crime and ordered him to bury the two bodies in a secret location as soon as they were killed.
Macario was troubled to no end by the order of his mistress. He had never killed before and could not understand why he had been chosen for the grim task. Still, if he desisted someone else would take his place. So instead of murdering them he decided to alert them they were in mortal danger and should depart from Cajabamba as soon as possible. Genara took her boy to the nearby town of San Blas, on the banks of the Urubamba river, where she had relatives who took them in. For his part Macario killed two lambs and extracted their hearts which he handed to Sara as proof of the macabre deed she had demanded.
Thereafter, Sara couldn’t sleep and was beset by constant nightmares of Genara and Ismael moaning in the dark with their red and bloodied throats. As far as Abraham Garcis, he was so distraught by the disappearance of Genara and his son that he lapsed into a deep depression. He barely ate. He barely slept. He walked about the house like an automaton. Sara’s remorse over what she had ordered also tormented her day and night. How she wished she had never concocted such an evil plot! Ismael had been given to her husband as a miraculous gift from God and Sara had cruelly taken away the gift. Finally her grief was so great that she confessed it to Abraham Garcia, thinking their long relationship would soon end. But rather than castigating her for her desperate act, he told her he forgave her, for in the previous night he had heard the voice of God and knew that neither Genara nor his son were dead. God also told Abraham Garcia that as a result of Sara’s murderous intentions he would be withholding his blessings from her for twenty-five years. God had decided to bless Sara with a child of her own, but now felt she was undeserving. She would have to wait until she was ninety-five for her own son to be born, sufficient time for her to ponder the gravity of her intended crime.
“I don’t see how you could possibly forgive me for such a heinous act,” Sara said amid her sobs.
“It seems the Lord has already forgiven you if he still intends to bless you with a child. If God grants you His pardon, who am I to withhold my own?”
“Is that what the Lord said?” asked Sara. “That at my age I shall bear a son?”
“You shall have to wait twenty-five years because the Lord disapproved of your perfidious act. And as a punishment you will never have the opportunity to raise your child to adulthood.”
“What does that mean?” Sara asked with consternation. “Does that mean I will die before my child grows up or does it mean he will predecease me?”
“I don’t know, Sara. I wasn’t given an explanation for the prophecy. All I know is that you shall never see him fully grown.”
“Well, if Genara and Ismael are alive, let them know they will be welcome in our home and won’t be living in the servants’ quarters. And if you want to make Genara your mistress I shall not object.”
“I don’t intend to make anyone my lover, for I am married to you and the Lord blessed our union with His sanctifying grace. I look forward to the birth of our son in twenty years, thirty years, forty years, whenever it happens. One must trust in the slow work of God. I know I shall still be around, for the angel announced to me that I would live at least to the year eighteen-hundred. And frankly I think I shall live long beyond that.”
One summer morning in December of the year seventeen-hundred-twenty-five, Ismael Garcia announced to his father that he had decided to join the insurrection launched by Tupac Amaru II against all the white men of Peru. Even before Ismael said anything, Abraham Garcia was surprised by the way his son was clad. Usually, Ismael used to dress like a Spanish hidalgo, wearing a white linen shirt with a ruff and matching wrist ruffs, over which he had a black doublet with long sleeves. But on that fateful morning of the year seventeen-hundred-twenty-five, Ismael appeared in the clothing of an Indian peasant, wearing a multicolored poncho made of alpaca wool, a vest with vicuñas embroidered on it, and a red knitted chuyo on his head, with ojotas rather than shoes on his two feet.
When Abraham Garcia asked his son why he was dressed that way, Ismael responded with aplomb that he was fully accepting his Indian identity and would henceforth abjure everything Spanish in him. He advised Abraham Garcia that ever since his childhood, he had identified more with his mother’s quechua peoples than with the criollos like his father. Since Sara had banished him to the servant quarters for so long, he had lived his earliest years among the Amerindian peasants who worked at San Elias and well knew about the plight of those who worked under the tyranny of other hacendados and encomenderos. So many women like his mother had been used and then discarded by their Spanish masters. So many bronze-skinned men continued to perish in the mines. So many Indians were cheated out of their rightful inheritance by the greedy and treacherous descendants of Europeans.
“So you’ve decided to wage war against your own father?” asked Abraham Garcia. “I’ve heard of Tupac Amaru and know that he means to banish the white man from Peru, that he promises to restore the Inca empire known as the Tahuantinsuyo. The sanguinary man has had no qualms about exterminating thousands upon thousands of Spaniards and their progeny. And you mean to cast your lot with such a man?”
“I realize you are one of the kindest and fairest hacendados, father, but I still wonder why any of the Indians should have to work from sunup to sunset for landowners of Spanish origin like you. And despite your kindness, still you treat your three-hundred cholos like children. You force them to speak Spanish and have even imposed the Catholic religion on them. They are forbidden from praying to the gods of the Inca pantheon and must abide by your faith in Jesus.”
Abraham Garcia was rattled, but he responded to his son in an impassive voice.
“All that shows is that I love my cholos, Ismael, that I care about their eternal future. I know if they persist in their idolatry of pagan gods, they will not achieve salvation in Christ. If I’m tyrannizing them to save their souls, so be it.”
“You will never understand,” responded Ismael indignantly. “You shouldn’t have the power to tell them what to believe or how to worship. After all, it is the Indians, not the Spaniards, who are the legitimate owners of all Peru. The only means to achieve justice is through a revolution. And let me tell you what the Indians think. They believe Tupac Amaru II is the Inkarri himself.”
“The Inkarri?” queried Abraham Garcia. “What could that mean?”
“If you ever spoke to your Indians you would know. The quechua peasants believe that Atahualpa has returned to life as the Inkarri. Atahualpa was decapitated and dismembered by Francisco Pizarro in the sixteenth century, but he promised to return as the Inkarri. The Indians believe that Atahualpa’s torso, under the ground, grew back all his extremities and that he has come back to avenge the Indians and finally oust the Spaniards and their offspring from Peru. They are sure that Tupac Amaru II is the resurrected Inkarri.”
Ismael’s expression was as fiery as what he said.
“I hate to tell you this, my son, but you look a lot more like your Spanish father than your quechua mother. You don’t even look like an Indian, Ismael. When you’re dressed in the raiment of a Spaniard, no one would know you have indigenous blood. You don’t have copper-colored skin, high cheekbones, a flat nose or coarse black hair. Your hair is a curly light brown, your eyes are blue and your skin is fair. And I’ve educated you as a white man with the Jesuits, have given you every possible privilege and opportunity. You have no idea what it means to live like a Runa peasant.”
“Studying with the Jesuits has made me hate the white man all the more. With the Jesuits I not only learned Greek and Latin, but also about the wonders of the Inca empire as recounted in the works of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, a learned man who had a white father and an Amerindian mother just like me. He shared my deep outrage over what the Spaniards have done to the natives of Peru. As far as the color of my eyes and the fairness of my skin, have you heard of the fair-haired Indians of Junin?”
“If all the land were turned over to the Indian peasants,” said Abraham Garcia, “they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Production of crops would decrease dramatically. The quechua peoples don’t use the most modern and scientific methods. You’re being naïve if you think otherwise.”
“That’s what the white man always says to continue to enslave the Indian,” responded Ismael truculently. “The Incas tilled this land for centuries and never lacked for anything. In fact, the Indians would work harder if they owned the land where they labor. I agree with Tupac Amaru II. What we need is a new pachacuti, a cosmic reversal, a return to the days when the Indian was lord and master. What we need is an earthquake to shake all Peru. Do you think the Indians are doomed to be servants of the white man forever?”
“I don’t know what forever means,” responded Abraham Garcia. “I think that those who believe in the revolution are perpetual adolescents. But when you return, downcast and defeated, I shall welcome you with joy, like the father of the Prodigal Son.”
Then Abraham Garcia pressed Ismael to his breast and gave him a silent blessing.
Ismael Garcia left the hacienda of San Elias that same day, mounted on one of his father’s finest horses. When he arrived at Cusco, Tupac Amaru II welcomed him with open arms. It was the eve of a great battle against the white man and the rebel leader was happy to receive all the help that he could get. Unfortunately for Ismael, that battle would prove to be Tupac Amaru’s greatest defeat. On the first day of battle, Ismael was captured and thereafter subjected to the same punishment as his master. Ismael was tied to four horses, attached by his four extremities. At a certain moment, the white men whipped the horses so they would run in four different directions. Ismael’s four limbs were all pulled apart, leaving only his torso and his head on the ground to bleed. Then he was decapitated. His head and his arms and legs were all buried in different places. When Abraham Garcia learned his son’s fate, he rent his garments in disconsolate grief. He couldn’t even give his son a Christian burial. And he was childless once again, in his eighty-seventh year. Had the Lord forgotten His promise?
Abraham Garcia had to wait another ten years to learn that He had not.
On her ninety-fourth birthday, the fragile Sara Garcia experienced something remarkable and disconcerting. As she was ambling in the living room with difficulty, assisted by a broomstick used like a cane, the ancient woman realized her underwear was wet. At first she thought it was incontinence, for in the past she had unwittingly urinated at the strangest times. For a moment, she also considered that it might be the return of her period, but she dismissed the idea out of hand. Nonagenarians don’t bleed monthly. When she went to the bathroom to check, however, there was no doubt about it. For the first time in more than fifty years, she had menstruated and it was a heavy flow. Her panties were steeped in crimson as they had been once a month before the onset of menopause at the age of forty-five. In a startling moment of recognition, she realized her soiled undergarments could be an indication that at long last she could get pregnant, a sign that the Lord had finally heard her plea to give a child to her husband. She remembered the prophecy that she would give a son to her husband in her ninety-fifth year and rejoiced. But she didn’t want to give false hopes to Abraham Garcia so she decided to wait till the following month, to see if she got her period once again, before saying anything to him. In the end, she didn’t say anything to her husband until she had been menstruating for six months, which was a sure sign that despite her old age she was ovulating, unassailable proof that pregnancy was possible.
One morning, before Abraham Garcia went out to the fields to direct his peasants in their daily work, Sara told him she had something important to tell him.
“What might that be?” asked Abraham. He was over a hundred years old, but still had a robust body and a dextrous mind. “At our old age, nothing important happens.”
“My menstrual cycle has returned,” said Sara matter-of-factly. “I bleed on the thirteenth of every month, like clockwork.”
“Maybe the Good Lord has finally forgiven you for what you tried to do to Ismael and Genara. Still, it might not mean anything. It might even be the evil one who is trying to deceive us.”
“No, Abraham, that’s wrong. Now that I’m ovulating monthly your seed can lodge itself inside my womb and produce a child. Don’t forget what God prophesied twenty-five years ago. I think if you lay with me, we’ll have the child we’ve always wanted. The Lord does not break His promises.”
“That’s a tall order. It’s been twenty-five years since I last touched a woman and at my age I might be impotent. You might be able to conceive a child but perhaps not me.”
“You still think of Genara, don’t you?”
“I delighted in her arms. Why lie to you?”
“And she gave you a son. I understand why you might still have feelings for her. But don’t forget that God promised He would give you a son and told you that child would be the father of many generations. Ismael is dead and obviously won’t have any descendants.”
“I suppose we can try,” muttered Abraham Garcia, “although I can’t promise anything.”
“Do you find me repellent, Abraham, an old hag who could never arouse your desires? It is true that my body is withered now, that I am merely a skeleton. What man could feel passion for such a woman? I recognize that you still gaze hungrily at Genara, that she is still the object of your lust.”
“I still love you,” said Abraham Garcia, but he didn’t mean it in a physical sense. He couldn’t contemplate the idea of making love to such a decrepit woman.
On a summer evening, Abraham Garcia and his wife Sara decided to consummate the sexual act. Sara did not undress in front of her husband, for she was embarrassed to show him her shrunken breasts, the dilapidation of her body. She merely lifted up her skirt, fully dressed, and let him inhabit her. When Abraham Garcia made love to Sara, he closed his eyes and imagined he was in bed with Genara. Aside from Sara, Genara was the only woman he had ever touched and her memories were the only thing that allowed him to bed Sara, for at her ninety-five years he found her completely unattractive, dare one say repulsive.
“You won’t even kiss me,” she complained. “There is no tenderness from you. All of this is merely the exchange of bodily fluids. Meanwhile you still tremble for Genara.”
“We are no longer in our twenties, Sara. Our old bodies are no longer meant for lovemaking. I am only doing this to satisfy your desire to have a child. Frankly it’s been years since I had any interest in sex, with you or anybody else.”
“At least cradle me in your arms, Abraham, let me feel a little love. Remember all those times when we joyfully cavorted to the wee of the night.”
“Those days are long gone. I know it will cause you pain, but I’m only doing it because I consider it an order from our God.”
“Would you do anything that God directed you, even if it was inimical to your nature?”
“Anything, Sara, anything.”
He said that without knowing that at some point in the future God would call him to murder his own son.
Sara’s labor was extremely long, painful and difficult. It took two-hundred -seventy-six hours – more than a full week – from the time her water broke to the moment of delivery. By then, Genara was her inseparable companion – they had lived together for over thirty years, were now sisters rather than antagonists – and it was she who acted as the midwife. By then, Genara was a robust woman with white hair despite being younger than fifty years, but unlike the members of the Garcia family she was not blessed with the gift of near perpetuity. (Abraham’s father Noel had lived to the age of five-hundred years.) At some point, Genara suspected that the child would never be born, anticipating a breech birth which would result in calamity, since there were no Caesarian sections at that time and place. Genara had felt the belly of her mistress and recognized that the baby’s head was near her ribs and his feet were in her pelvis. As a midwife to many women, Genara fully knew that when a baby is breech, delivery can be complicated and dangerous and it was all the more dangerous for a woman of Sara’s extravagant age. Indeed, Genara feared that the old woman would die of exhaustion before the baby was born and if the child was born, she feared the baby might be born dead, strangled by his own umbilical cord given his feet-first position.
“It would be ironic, wouldn’t it, Genara,” Sara asked as she perspired and puffed, her swollen feet soaked in the water of a washbasin, “if I lived a lifetime waiting to get pregnant and when it happened the child died at birth?”
“Just stay strong,” Genara counseled. “To be quite frank in all my years I’ve never witnessed a labor that took so long. It’s probably because of your old age. Just keep pushing.”
Sara remembered the prediction that she would not see her son as a grown man. She wondered whether a stillbirth would be the reason she would never see her child grow to maturity. Perhaps that was God’s ultimate punishment for trying to kill the luckless Ismael when he was a little child.
Outside the room where Sara’s apparently infinitely long labor was taking place, Abraham Garcia paced back and forth restlessly, smoking without cease. It was not the habit at the time for husbands to witness their wives’ deliveries and he had to satisfy himself with whatever news Genara issued from time to time.
“Not yet?” Abraham would nervously ask every time Genara left the room where Sara was going through her labor.
“Not yet,” affirmed Genara,
As the days passed, Abraham’s questions became more and more desperate.
“I have never heard of it taking so long for a child to be born,” complained Abraham Gaarcia. “Not yet, Genara?”
“Not yet,” came the response.
The fact is that the hundred-year-old Abraham Garcia had loved the child in his wife’s womb practically from the moment of his conception, a love that only grew with time as he saw his wife’s belly expand. When Ismael had been born, he had loved him too, but not with the feverish intensity with which he awaited the birth of this new child, the only one prophesied by God. Even the merest thought that the child might be stillborn brought him to despair and he realized that never, in his entire life, had he loved anyone so much. He made a silent promise to the Virgin of Guadalupe that he would visit her shrine in distant Mexico City when his son was twelve if only the Lord would spare his child. On that same day, he found that Genara had placed the statuette of an Inca goddess in their living room, beneath an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and another of Saint Martin de Porres feeding a dog, a cat and a mouse from the same plate. It was an earthenware figure, called a huaca by Peruvians, with large goggle eyes and multiple breasts.
“What does this mean?” he bellowed as he called Genara. “Who is represented by this huaca?”
“That’s an image of Mama Allpa,” responded Genara. “She’s the protector and guide to women during pregnancy and childbirth. I hoped she could help Sara as the poor woman has spent more than a week in the throes of labor with no end in sight.”
“Well, I’ll have nothing of it,” Abraham responded with severity. “I have repeatedly told you not to follow the devils worshipped by your ancestors. I will have no idolatry in my own home.”
“I meant nothing by it,” Genara meekly protested. “I figured it could do no harm.”
“That’s all right,” responded Abraham Garcia in a softer voice. “I realize you’ve brought the huaca into our home because you’re so concerned about Sara. Just don’t forget to go to Confession this Sunday and confess your sin of idolatry.”
And then Abraham Garcia took a hammer from a kitchen drawer and pulverized the statuette in silent fury.
By then, Abraham Garcia had resigned himself to the fact that both his wife and child might soon be dead and he redoubled his prayers to the Virgin of Guadalupe. He considered the olive-skinned virgin to be the only succor to women during childbirth for he knew that the Guadalupana impressed on Juan Diego’s tilma was visibly pregnant in the image.
Finally, Genara unexpectedly appeared in front of Abraham Garcia in his study on the tenth day of his wife’s labor, her face beaming with joy.
“It is finished,” she said. “You can now visit your wife and son. Your son Isaac has been born at the eleventh hour.”
Abraham Garcia entered the room where his wife was lying with Isaac at her breast. She was literally drenched in sweat and her appearance was disheveled, the very image of a woman who had survived a war.
“Meet your son Isaac,” the old woman said as she gently smiled with her toothless mouth. “Do you know the meaning of his name? It means, ‘He laughs.’ I have given him such a name because he has brought joy and laughter to this house. When we thought we were in the evening of our days, he has come to bring us the marvelous and unexpected sunshine of his presence. The will of God has been fulfilled. I have never loved anyone more.”
“Nor have I,” admitted Abraham Garcia as he lifted the baby with both hands and kissed his forehead. “This is the happiest day in a hundred years. Our child will bless us with many generations.”
“Let’s not think about the future,” Sara warned as a little spittle ran down her chin. “Let us enjoy the present moment, this time of unbridled bliss. What the future portends only God knows.”
“You’re afraid you won’t be able to raise him to adulthood given your age, aren’t you, Sara?”
“What most frightens me is the idea that he will die first. The Lord’s promise was ambiguous on this point. Now that Isaac is born, I couldn’t imagine my life without him.”
“Then pray for the Lord to change His plans. I am planning a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe to thank her for this unmerited blessing. Maybe you should visit the Lord of Miracles at Pachacamilla. Ask the Christ for the two of you to live at least until Isaac’s seventeenth birthday.”
“God doesn’t change His mind,” pronounced Sara. “If He promises something, it will happen. You cannot act for God.”
“God changes His mind all the time,” protested Abraham Garcia. “What do you think miracles are? Jesus brought Lazarus back from the dead after God the Father took his life.”
“And what if no miracle comes?” asked Sara.
“Then we submit and follow the rule of God, be thankful no matter what,” responded Abraham Garcia. He had been trying to submit to the will of God for a hundred years, but he didn’t yet know what submission meant.
The exhausted nonagenarian mother fell asleep with the child still at her bosom pondering her husband’s words.
When Isaac was twelve, Abraham Garcia decided to take him on the voyage to Mexico City he had promised to the Virgin of Guadalupe shortly before his birth. Even at the age of a hundred-and-ten, Abraham was still as robust as a sixty-year-old while his wife Sara was increasingly frail. By then, Isaac was a boy of a great piety – he went to Mass every day, not just on Sundays and feast days – and Abraham thought the boy would greatly profit from the pilgrimage to Mexico. So one afternoon, they took two horses and made their way to Lima, where they boarded a ship that would take them to the Mexican port of Tampico. Several days later, they arrived at Mexico City and immediately visited the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Abraham Garcia and his son Isaac both kneeled below the image of the olive-skinned virgin which was forever depicted on the cloak of the Indian Juan Diego. Abraham explained that the image had inexplicably appeared on the Indian’s tilma after the Virgin had appeared to Juan Diego and demanded he request that Bishop Zumarraga build a temple for her on the mount of Tepeyac. When the bishop had asked for some heavenly proof that the Indian had actually been visited by the Virgin Mary, Juan Diego showed the bishop his tilma, where the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe had miraculously appeared. Then and there Bishop Zumarraga had ordered that a teocalli be built where the Virgin had requested it.
“The Virgin Mary,” Abraham Garcia told his son, “is the best example of how the Christian should respond to the demands of God. When the archangel Gabriel appeared to her and told her she would bear a son even though she had never known a man, Mary responded with her ‘fiat.’ ‘Let it be,” she said, ‘I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done in accordance with God’s will.’ In like manner, every Catholic should say ‘fiat’ – let it be – when the Lord asks him to do anything, no matter how difficult or disagreeable. We are never to forget that the Lord is Master and we are only His servants. It took Abraham Garcia another year to figure out just how hard it would be to follow the Master’s message.”
“What if God asks you to do something against your conscience? Is that even possible? Father Robles once preached about how God had demanded that the prophet Hosea marry a prostitute. And the prophet did it. Had Hosea refused, would he have committed a great sin? Can the dictates of the Lord ever be disobeyed?”
“Never,” responded Abraham Garcia. “Anything God wills is inherently good.”
“The biblical Abraham was ordered to murder his own son,” said Isaac. “Must even such orders be obeyed?”
Abraham Garcia just repeated what he had previously said without giving it much thought.
“Anything God wills is inherently good. Even the great sacrifice imposed on Job – the loss of his family, wealth and land – redounded to the greater glory of God.”
“I don’t think I would marry a harlot even if it was a command from God.”
“You must comply with the will of God especially when it’s difficult,” responded Abraham Garcia. “In my long life, I have never disobeyed any order from God. I even had a son with Genara because it was God’s manifest will. No matter what God asks of me, I shall respond with my fiat. But don’t forget that at the last moment, God decided to spare the son of the biblical Abraham. The prophet Jeremiah very clearly stated that child sacrifice is against the will of God.”
“I’ve heard differently,” responded Isaac. “Father Robles once said during a homily that Abraham actually killed his son.”
“If that’s what happened, it was not a crime. Some people think it’s only a sin when you hurt other people, but that’s not exactly true. It is a sin whenever you disobey God. We don’t abstain from meat on Fridays because it hurts anyone, but because it is against the will of God. And it cuts both ways. We might be commanded to do something inimical to our nature, dare I say our consciences, but it is not a sin if it is the will of God.”
On the next day, Abraham Garcia and his son visited the pyramids of Teotihuacan. When they arrived at the site, also known as the City of Gods, Isaac was awed by what he saw. On the Avenue of the Dead, there were majestic pyramids to the Sun and the Moon, as wide at the base as the largest cathedral. He also marveled at the Temple to Quetzalcoatl, located in a large courtyard called the Citadel. The vast pyramid was about four stories tall, with a long ascending central stairway flanked on both sides by terraces made of stone. Abraham Garcia explained to his son that the Aztecs routinely sacrificed children on the tops of the ancient pyramids of Teotihuacan.
“Was that justified?” queried Isaac. “Was it a crime even if they were doing it to appease their gods? Was that any different from what the biblical Abraham did?”
Abraham Garcia was flummoxed by his son’s question. He thought about it for a while before responding.
“How can I put it?” he asked. “I’m not an expert on such matters, but I do know that both the book of Genesis and Saint Paul’s epistles state that the sacrifice of Abraham’s son was never completed. I know that over the centuries many theologians have debated the issue and many write that Abraham’s son was actually killed. But even if that were true, you must remember that with the coming of the Christ everything changed. After Jesus sacrificed His own life for us, there was no longer a need for any other holocausts.”
“But the Aztecs didn’t know about the Christ,” Isaac objected. “Was their sacrifice of children to their gods a sin or not?”
“They weren’t acting at the direction of the One True God. There’s the difference. The murder of thousands of Aztec children was a massive crime, unjustified in the eyes of God. That’s why the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared on Juan Diego’s tilma, to convert the Indians to the Catholic faith and forever put an end to their heinous acts of child sacrifice.”
“If Abraham’s son wasn’t spared,” expounded Isaac, “I don’t really see the difference, other than the numbers.”
When Isaac was around thirteen years old, Abraham Garcia began to hear insistent locutions of unknown provenance. It was a constant refrain inside his head: I want proof of your love. Will you refuse me? Abraham Garcia heard the Voice when he was out in the fields overseeing the work done by his peasants, when he was in church attending Mass, when he prepared to go to sleep in the evening, when he had breakfast and when he ate dinner. The locutions became so demanding that Abraham felt he was about to go mad. He didn’t initially believe that the voice inside his head was the Voice of God and suspected it might be an effect of senile dementia. After all, he was now the oldest man in the entire province of Cajamarca.
“I am going crazy,” he complained to his wife as he nervously smoked a cigarette. “There are relentless voices within my head and I don’t comprehend their message. Give me proof of your love, they say again and again. Will you refuse me? I have no idea what they mean.”
“Maybe the voices inside your head are a manifestation of God’s presence,” responded the wrinkly Sara. “Who else would seek evidence of your love other than the Godhead? Pray to God and ask Him how he wants you to demonstrate your love for Him.”
“I shall ask Jesus for a dream,” promised Abraham Garcia. “You might be right.”
The next morning Abraham Garcia appeared in the kitchen for breakfast in a foul mood. Sara saw his grim countenance and was perturbed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “I’ve never seen such bitterness in your face.”
“I now know what the message means. And I wish I had never asked for clarification. It’s monstrous, Sara, monstrous. God wants me to sacrifice Isaac on an altar in the mountains as proof of my love for Him. But I won’t do it. I’ll send Isaac to a boarding house in the capital, so far away that it will be impossible for me to commit the deed.”
“Maybe it’s just a nightmare, Abraham, or a temptation from the evil one. Maybe it’s a moment of incipient madness. Why would God want you to commit such a crime, to murder the fruit of your own loins?. Remember He said you will be the father of many generations. Now that Ismail is dead, if Isaac dies as well, you shall not have any descendants. Don’t forget in the dark what God told you in the light. Pray about it. You once told me that through prayer one can change God’s mind.”
“It was no mere nightmare,” grimaced Abraham Garcia. “I had a vision of the Christ, more resplendent than a hundred suns. He told me He wanted to know if I truly loved Him, if I would love Him until it hurts. And what could hurt me more than the death of my child? No, Sara, I won’t do it. If God wants to punish me for my disobedience, so be it. But to me Isaac is sacrosanct. It might be a sin to admit it, but perhaps I love my son more than the Christ Himself. Jesus asks if I shall refuse His outlandish demands. Yes, I shall!”
“Maybe,” said Sara, “that explains Jesus’ prophecy that I would not see Isaac grow to maturity. Maybe he shall be immolated at the age of thirteen, like a pigeon, like a calf. And he will die at the hands of his own father.”
“No, he won’t. I shall never kill Isaac, even if it leads me to perdition.”
“Pray for a reprieve. Ask the Lord to take Isaac only in old age. Tell Him to take me first, so that His prophecy might be fulfilled.”
That night Abraham Garcia had another vision. He wasn’t sure whether it was a dream or the product of a rapture. But one thing he knew for sure: the Christ appeared to him in person.
“Abraham, do you love me?” Jesus asked.
“Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.”
“Abraham, do you love me to the point of death?”
“You know everything. You know that I would gladly give up my life for you.”
“Abraham, do you love me more than your own son?”
Abraham Garcia paused. He didn’t want to lie to the Master. Finally he began to speak.
“I don’t want to kill him, my Lord. Ask for any other sacrifice, my health, my sanity, my wealth, but don’t ask me to end the life of the person I most love. You were the one who gave me such a gift. Don’t take him away from me so soon. Let me die before him. I don’t deserve such a punishment. I have kept the Commandments, paid homage to the Lord. I have led a virtuous life. Lord, you are righteous. Why make me suffer?”
“Don’t you know it’s impossible to argue with your God? Don’t you realize you can’t challenge your Creator and Redeemer? Is your faith in God so weak? Even Job accepted the trials God sent him, and he lost everything – his wealth, his health, his children – despite being a God-fearing man. Show me that you love me, Abraham. Didn’t I proclaim that those who follow me must hate their father, mother, wife and children? Take your son, your only son, whom you love, and offer him up as a burnt offering to God. See it as an act of worship. Will you refuse me?”
Immediately after seeing the vision of the Christ imploring him to sacrifice his son, Abraham Garcia made it a habit to go to the Church of Maria Auxiliadora every day and kneel in front of the Blessed Sacrament, hoping he could yet persuade the Christ to change His mind. He spent several hours praying by himself in the church, crossing himself repeatedly, since he still thought the Lord’s directives were not cast in stone. He offered to sell his hacienda and distribute the proceeds among the poor. He offered to immolate the most beautiful heifer among his cows. He offered God whatever He wanted so long as it was not the life of his only son. He wept silently as he prayed, clasping his hands together with his eyes shut, and Father Robles noticed his boundless despair and melancholy.
“You’ve been coming here every day for over a week,” said the grizzled priest, “and I’ve seen you crying. What, pray tell me, is causing you such a lacerating pain?”
“My son,” responded Abraham Garcia, feeling a sense of vertigo as he spoke. “I’m afraid that I shall soon lose my Isaac. You know him well.”
“Is he very ill?” asked the priest. “Has a doctor seen him?”
“At this point,” responded Abraham Garcia, “my son could only be spared by the Great Physician’s skill. If God doesn’t intervene, I’m afraid my son will soon be dead.”
And then he burst into tears.
“Dead! Dead! I myself shall bind him!” exclaimed Abraham Garcia. The priest did not understand the meaning of his words and thought the desperate man was referring to the burial shroud.
“Yours is a great trial,” said Father Robles, “but know that as long as the Christ is with you, there is no reason to be afraid. Let me give you something written by Saint Teresa of Avila that you should ponder. It begins by saying, ‘Let nothing worry you, let nothing frighten you.” It ends by saying, ‘He who has God lacks nothing. God alone suffices.’ Think of those words as you go through your test. You may lose your son Isaac, but the Lord you will always have. Let that be a source of divine consolation. There is still room for another season of joy. God has given us everything, Abraham. Everything is a gift from God. The birds, the roses, the sunsets, the fact you still have your robust body despite being older than a hundred years.”
“I would gladly give all that up if only I was not separated from my son,” cried Abraham Garcia amid his tears. “I would prefer the plague, blindness, paralysis, if only my son would not be bound at death’s sacrificial altar.”
“I don’t understand your words,” said the priest.
“That’s all right, father. Your words have brought some solace to my soul. If God wants to reclaim Isaac, who am I to get in the way? God gives and He takes away. God alone suffices as Saint Teresa said.”
And then he stood up and, no longer trembling, said in an ardent voice, “I still have my God, my Lord and my Savior. Blessed be the Lord.”
On a cloudy sunless Friday morning, Abraham Garcia decided to execute God’s orders and commit the deed. He roused the young Isaac from his sleep and said, “Come with me. The Lord wants us to sacrifice an offering to him.” Abraham Garcia took an ass from the stable and loaded it with wood as well as ropes. He also brought a lit torch with him to ignite the fire for his son’s projected immolation. Before leaving the hacienda, he made one last plea to his Lord and Savior. “If it be possible,” he intoned, “please let this chalice of pain pass from me. But let your will and not mine be done. I am now ready to do whatever you command.”
As they began to ascend the hills to reach the mount of Razuhuillca, the place where God had demanded the offering, Isaac asked his father a question in a docile voice, suspecting nothing.
“We have the wood and the fire and you have the sacrificial knife, but we haven’t brought a lamb or a heifer with us. How can we make an offering without an animal?”
Abraham Garcia looked at his son with mournful eyes and said, “Don’t worry about it overmuch. God will provide a victim at the right time and place for the burnt offering.”
As they arrived at the point where the Lord had demanded the sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham Garcia built a makeshift altar and piled the wood below it preparing to ignite it in order to offer up his son. Next, he turned to Isaac and told him, “Let me tie you up. You must be bound when this sacrifice happens. Please make no effort to resist as it is the will of God.”
“I shall run away,” Isaac cried. “You are far older than I and won’t be able to catch me.”
“Please don’t make it harder than it already is,” said Abraham Garcia. “The Lord won’t allow you to escape. The will of God cannot so easily be thwarted.
Suddenly, as Isaac began to run, he felt a great heaviness in his legs, as if the pull of gravity was ten times stronger than usual. Finally, he collapsed on the ground, immobile as neither his arms nor his legs could move.
“Whatever you intend to do,” he said to his father, “do it quickly.”
But Abraham Garcia was slow. He still expected a miracle at the end. Wasn’t the son of the biblical Abraham spared under similar circumstances? Didn’t Jonah survive three days in the belly of a whale? Didn’t Jesus heal many on the threshold of death, reversing the actions of His Father? So while Isaac was tied up on the altar awaiting his execution, with a red and black handkerchief at the mouth to muffle his never-ceasing cries, Abraham Garcia prayed for hours, giving the Lord time to perform His miracle. He was anxiously awaiting the Voice from Heaven telling him what the biblical Abraham had been told.“Lay not your hand upon the lad, neither do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son from me.”
The hours passed, however, and Abraham Garcia did not hear such words coming from the Christ. On the contrary, Jesus continued with His insistent refrain, “Will you refuse me?” And the odd thing is that at the same time the Enemy of mankind was whispering in his ear. “You are under no obligation to follow the dictates of a demented deity. Unbind your son, pick him up and return to your home and family. How could an infinitely wise God make laws in order to ask you to violate them?”
But ultimately, when it was almost sundown, Abraham Garcia decided to consent to the will of God and annihilate the sacrificial lamb. He took his burnished knife and mouthing a prayer to Jesus he slit the throat of his only son whose blood spurted thick and red. Throughout the process, he felt like an unconscious automaton without doubt or guilt, as if he were dreaming or suffering from a nightmare, enacting a beastly ritual. That evening he returned to his home with an ashen face, still holding the bloodied knife, with the absolute conviction he had done something irremediable and definitive. He now realized there is no limit when it comes to horror. And in some dark corner of his soul he feared everything might have been the product of his own psychosis or the deception of the enemy.
“I was hoping at the last moment my son would be spared like the child of the biblical Abraham,” he said to his wife in a defeated voice. “But he was not. I didn’t have the courage to incinerate him, but we are childless once again. Why would the Lord do such a thing to us? Why would He give us this irreversible pain after having given us the joy of Isaac’s birth? Has He been deceiving us all along, promising a child whose seed would multiply, when in the end He planned to make us drink from the bitter chalice to its dregs?”
The lady in blue appeared suddenly, bathed in a translucent light, her eyes an ocean green, her hair auburn like the cedars, her face like a white rose. She placed her pink hand on Isaac’s forehead and asked him, “Child, what has happened to you?” but Isaac could not respond. He could feel the lady’s soft hand and felt a respite from his pain, soothing like the balm of Heaven. “Let me clean you,” the lady said and she applied a silk handkerchief to Isaac’s neck, cleaned off the blood and placed on his pale face a kiss. There was something in the lady’s visage which Isaac had never seen before and which he could never express in words, a look of divine contemplation and joy. As she placed a pillow beneath Isaac’s head cloaked in crimson, the thirteen-year-old boy thought he was in Paradise, for he had never seen such beauty or felt such love before. He made an effort to speak, to thank and bless the lady, but he could not. His father Abraham Garcia had slashed his throat through and through and it was impossible to talk.
Soon Isaac realized who was visiting him – the Virgin Mary, the morning star, the mystic rose. Even though she was dressed in blue, there was something in the lady which mirrored the sun. She was a messenger Heaven-sent who gently ministered to the young boy’s wounds. The pain immediately subsided, as if Abraham Garcia had never stabbed him in a moment of preternatural despair. Isaac could feel the Virgin Mary stitching his neck with tenderness, as if each stitch were a miracle in itself. Suddenly, for the first time in his life but not the last, Isaac was in rapture. He felt he was being transported to Heaven itself by the lady in blue. Isaac had never read Dante’s Paradiso, but if he had he would have realized the Italian master did no justice to Isaac’s vision. Isaac experienced a feeling of ubiquity and bliss. He could see everything – everything! – from his perch in Heaven. He could see the forests, the mountains, the roaring seas, the town of Cajabamba where he was raised, the city of Paris, the capital of Egypt, scenes from the past, scenes from the future too, billions of souls who had died in the peace of Christ, the communion of the saints and the face of God. And just like the angels who see every human all at once, Isaac was also given this favor, as if by being in Heaven he could be everywhere on earth. He saw his father and mother, his dead brother Ismael, the gentle Genara and many others. And he witnessed scenes from his future, the fact he would live to the age of one-hundred-and-seventy-five and have a myriad of descendants, the fact that one day his own brother would be confused with the Inkarri.
“Surely I never want to leave this place,” he told the lady in blue, but the Virgin Mary gently whispered, “Isaac, your book is not finished. You are going to return to live among men. Your heirs shall be men and women of every race and station.”
On the thirtieth day after the binding of Isaac Garcia, he reappeared at the hacienda at San Elias, a little thinner, a little paler, with a thick purple scar about his neck. Sara was the first to see him and was sure he was a specter. Perhaps she was right and he had come back from the dead. In the aftermath of the great miracle, no one could know for sure whether Isaac Garcia had died and resurrected or whether his father’s knife had never killed him to begin with. At all events, when Abraham Garcia saw him in the living room of his home, he knelt on the floor to thank his munificent God. Suddenly he heard a response from the Heavens, “Your son Isaac has not died and he will live well past the next century. You have withstood the test, survived the trial, and now I know that you fear God, since you did not refuse to sacrifice your only son to me.”
“Why did you let me slash his throat rather than stopping me before I did so like you did with the biblical Abraham?”
“Because I knew you expected it and thus binding him without putting your knife to his neck would not be proof of your devotion to me. Now I know that your obedience to me was blind and knew no limits, for you placed your faith in God above everything else, even the life of the person you loved the most in this land of wretched exiles.”
Sara Garcia died within a year, never having seen Isaac grow to adulthood as the prophecy had predicted. For his part, Abraham Garcia would live to the year eighteen-ninety, having seen Simon Bolivar’s armies put an end to Spanish rule throughout the continent, the establishment of the Peruvian Republic, the War of the Pacific between Peru and Chile in eighteen-eighty-one, and the ascendancy of one of his grandsons to the office of President of Peru. He remarried a young Andean woman and was blessed with four more sons and a daughter who was the apple of his eye. Finally, when he was over two-hundred years old, he expired on his deathbed, surrounded by his manifold descendants. He was sure the Lord awaited him on the other side.