THE PAINTER OF CHURCHES

On the warm spring evening when El Poquito arrived in San Miguel, slowly leading his burro down Sonora Road, and quietly announced himself as a painter of churches, none of us knew where he had come from.  Indeed, he seemed to materialize from a twilight haze like the unexpected manifestation of a mirage.  In one moment, none of us had ever heard of him or even imagined him, but in the next, he passed before us, diminutive, thin, arthritically gnarled, his thick gray beard and white mustache denoting his advanced age,  his shaggy antique burro following at the same shuffling pace. 

    Before El Poquito so suddenly appeared, we’d been watching a sunset fade over the Mogollon Mountains, sitting on the front stoop of the Martinez grocery, elderly Alejandro Borrego, Ted Wilson, George Mendoza, and I, and then, not to our pleasure, Pacheco had come stumbling, or rather, weaving up Sonora Road, returning home to bedevil his wife from his semi-reserved stool at The Buffalo Bar.  Three years before, Pacheco had been occasionally employed by Robert Mondragon as a painter’s assistant.  What that meant is that Robert allowed Pacheco to carry his ladder, unfold and refold his tarps, and clean up after whatever work Robert happened to be doing, but Robert also had the good sense never to allow Pacheco to wield a brush or apply a single drop of wet paint to any wall in the village.  Unfortunately, fumes from the lead paint used in those days finally crippled Robert to a point where the county authorities had been forced to remove him to the state’s mental institution, and when they did, Pacheco tried to set up for himself.  To her regret,  Doña Dolores had then hired Pacheco to paint her house a pleasing shade of pink with the pitiful result that Pacheco, unable to mix colors properly, left two thirds of the house shaded in a variety of pinks ranging from hot to pale before Doña  Dolores fired him; that left the final third of her home, her porch and gallery, colored the same peeling yellow that she had so desperately wanted to be covered over.  Following his failure as a house painter, Pacheco collected welfare, grew fat, and employed himself by leaning against the walls of The Buffalo’s facade when not actually inside nursing a beer on one of the establishment’s stools.  Twice during that time, Deputy Placencio had arrested him for domestic abuse, and while we never talked about it,  none of us liked being around him because in or out of his cups, Pacheco behaved like a bully and spoke in an abrasive manner.

    Thus it was that when El Poquito appeared and came shuffling by with his burro, Pacheco, who had stopped to perch himself on the stoop where a stanchion held him up, couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

    “Hey, Viejo, hey El Poquioto!” he barked, instantly proclaiming his supposed superiority while belittling the old man by labeling him “Little Bit.”

    The old man stopped, turned slowly, and looked at Pacheco with an even gaze.

    “You speak to me, Señor?” he asked, his voice so quiet that we had to strain to hear him.

    “Where you come from?  What you doing in San Miguel?” Pacheco gruffly demanded.

    “Pay him no attention,” Alejandro said to the old man.  “He’s drunk.  Shut up, Pacheco; you’re being offensive.  Who the hell are you to ask questions of strangers?”

    “Perdón, Señor,” the old man said, making Alejandro a slight bow, “but I am not offended.  I go to seek Padre Romero, because I am a painter of churches.”

    In response to that quiet announcement, Pacheco exploded into raucous laughter and made a spectacle of himself by slapping his knee and nearly rolling off the stoop. “A painter of churches!” he roared. “You are giving me the laughs, El Poquito!  You are too feeble to hold a brush, and if you try to climb a ladder, you was fall on your head and crack your cabeza!”  Pacheco might have said more, but George had heard enough, launched out, and delivered a swift kick to Pacheco’s butt cheek where it spread across the boards of the stoop.  The kick wasn’t much, but Pacheco got the point and shut up, and when he did, El Poquito tipped his hat to George, turned back to the road, resumed his shuffle, and led his burro toward the rectory, a modest adobe, which stood where it had always stood, beside the walls of San Miguel’s little church.  Before the burro had moved far beyond us, Pacheco once more began laughing at the old man and casting aspersions in his direction, but before he could say much, Alejandro spoke to him sharply and managed to send him to his long suffering wife with a flea in his ear.

    Later that evening, I happened to run into Father Romero as he returned from taking a supper with Tío and Tía  Duarte where they lived at the top of Sonora road.  After a few moments of conversation regarding union politics at the mine and Notre Dame’s prospects for the coming football season, I asked our priest if he’d had a visit from El Poquito, and he said that he had.  

    “He called himself a painter of churches,” I said, registering a restrained sense of wonder.

    “Yes,” said Father Romero, “that is what he also told me.  He said that he underwrites his own work—how, I have no idea—and asked if he could paint a mural of our Savior’s nativity, not a  large one,  on the interior east wall of our church.  He then produced a sketch showing me the program that he intends to follow with outlines of the figures and animals he would include, and after some discussion, I gave him my permission to proceed.  I gather that his burro carries his paints, his possessions, and whatever equipment he needs, and according to what he told me, he has painted group subjects several times in the past so that he works with a fixed number of pre-positioned figures and with colors already determined.”

    “Where do you suppose he comes from?” I asked.

    “I’m afraid I can’t say,” Father Romero replied.  “He mentioned doing recent work in Chamberino and La Union Viejo, north of El Paso, but he didn’t say a word about where he’s started out.  He did show me a wooden Santo that he’d painted, and he’d done such a fine job that his artistry in creating the Santo finally sold me on letting him do the mural.”

    Rather than places of origin, Chamberino and La Union Viejo, farming settlements along the Rio Grande, sounded to me like temporary way stations on the road to somewhere else.  My single sighting of El Poquito suggested to me that he’d come almost directly from Mexico, from a town or village in Chihuahua, from somewhere south of Palomas.  His clothes, his partially chewed straw hat—something to which I imagined his burro had contributed--and his huaraches, worn without socks, all spoke to me of old Mexico rather than anything a regional Dollar Store might have to offer, and his demeanor when he stopped before us struck me as the attitude that an imaginary peon might have adopted for speaking to the patrón of a hacienda or a captain of rural police in the dangerous years surrounding the Mexican Revolution.  If El Poquito was a painter of churches, I couldn’t help wondering where he’d learned his trade and what stimulus had prompted him to find San Miguel.

    On the following morning when I saw him enter the church for mass, I also wondered where he’d slept, but that question I quickly answered when, upon leaving the church and heading for home, I walked around the rectory on a path that led toward my house and saw El Poquito feeding his burro where he’d tied the animal to a post beside Father Romero’s wood shed.  Apparently, he’d slept the night in the wood shed, and over an open fire located a safe distance from the shed, he’d also begun to cook his breakfast in an iron skillet.  

    “Señor,” he called when he saw me, “con su permiso, Señor.  Un momento, por favor.”

    I stopped and waited while he shuffled toward me, and there, without preamble, he made his pitch.

    “For the painting of churches, Señor, it is necessary to have the faces.  I paint the Navidad for the church of San Miguel.  Permit your face to be one of Los Reys; I will make you to be a good king, and you will only need to give ten dollars Americano for me to incorporate you into the pintura.  I make the regrets, Señor, but I must ask, to make the support for my food and the pigments.  This is agreeable to you, that you will permit me to paint your face into the pintura?”

    I hesitated but only for a moment because El Poquito seemed so sincere and so humble in his approach that I didn’t have the heart to dissuade him.

    “I will agree,” I said.  “When do you wish me to return to the church.”

    “Si posible, today,” he said, “after you have broken your fast.”

    “Once more, agreed,” I said, and went my way home, breakfasted with Clare, returned to the church around eight o’clock, and found El Poquito waiting.

    Standing on a stool while I posed in a kneeling position, El Poquito immediately dropped all resemblance to the old man who we’d seen in the street.  Quickly, he sketched in the outlines of my face with a joint of charcoal, and then working with astonishing speed and a broad palate, he painted onto the wall in less than two hours what I found to be a fair likeness of my features.  The remainder of my kneeling form he also sketched in charcoal but said that he would only complete the figure after all of the other faces had been painted, adding robes, a turban, and gifts of gold which suggested to me that he’d tapped me for his rendering of Melchior, the supposed Persian king who had visited the Christ child.

    I returned home after the session, but on the following morning, to satisfy my curiosity, I watched as Alejandro entered the church to pose, he later told me, as the Magi Gaspar, and on the next morning, Ted Wilson showed up to fulfill the trio by posing as Balthasar.  And then, on successive days thereafter, an entire stream of our villagers, children and women as well as men, went in, one by one, so that El Poquito could flesh out the faces for the assembly of humanity he wished to include in his program.

    In the meantime, Pacheco, usually returning from The Buffalo in the afternoon and having nothing better to do, plopped himself on a low adobe wall across from the church, and then made a nuisance of himself by laughing at the sitters and throwing them insults as they emerged from the entrance after their sessions.  The most biting of his remarks he saved for El Poquito, suggesting that he ground his pigments with his tongue, thickened his colors with the burro’s manure, and tainted his work with the gasses he passed from eating too many beans.  El Poquito never rose to the bait; instead, he ignored the ignoramus, tipped his hat to others that he met in front of the church, rounded the corner, and disappeared into Father Romero’s wood shed, emerging only to cook his meals, feed his burro, and go back to work on the following morning.  When and where he shopped for his food and other necessaries, I have no idea because I never saw him do it, but that he should have been well able, I have no doubt; across the four week period he spent composing his work and applying paint to stucco, he must have included thirty or forty faces in his composition.  At ten dollars a head, that amount of money could buy a lot of tortillas, beans, chili, and apples which were the only things I ever saw him eat.  Fodder for the burro he seemed to gather himself, sometimes taking the animal to pasture in the country after he’d completed his labors for the day.

    Thus the work continued, none of us getting a look at it because El Poquito, kept it draped during mass and vespers, the only services for which Father Romero opened the church.  For all other church functions, while El Poquito worked in solitude, Father Romero opened his house,  meeting there with his altar society, servers, and the conformation class in the tiny front room of the rectory.  As I remember, once El Poquito completed work on the faces he intended to include, he then required more than a month to fill in the remainder of the mural.

    “He tells me that he’s working on the manger, the animals, the robes and clothing of the assembly, and such things as surrounding hills, trees, and sky,” Father Romero told me when I inquired.  “I don’t want to say that he’s secretive about what he is doing, but when he’s working, he doesn’t like to be disturbed, so I’ve made it my policy to leave him in peace.”

    “Very wise,” I said.  “When do you imagine that we’ll see the completed work?”

    “When he completes it,” Father Romero said, showing me a witty grin.

    If anything, throughout that last month while El Poquito tried to work away in silence, Pacheco became even more objectionable.  On more than one occasion, for example, even as El Poquito entered the church to begin work in the morning, Pacheco seemed already on hand, stopping on his way down to The Buffalo to hurl a few insults even before he went to put away his first beer.

    “Dung grinder,” I once heard him shout at El Poquito, “stand on your beast and refresh the porch colors of that bruja, Doña Dolores, why don’tcha!”

    Naturally, El Poquito paid Pacheco no attention so that Pacheo, thrown out of The Buffalo by early afternoon, returned both tipsy and more belligerent than ever, sat once more on the wall, and hurled insults at everyone who passed until Big Billy Ojinaga offered to black his eye in order to shut him up.  Whether or not El Poquito noticed any of that, I doubt because at the time the painter of churches was still inside, working placidly on his wall.

    Finally, about a week after Labor Day, El Poquito announced to Father Romero that he had completed his work, that the painting was finished, that Father Romero might unveil the mural following vespers that evening.  In so far as I know, Father Romero made no special announcement about the unveiling, but nevertheless, word got around with the result that by six o’clock, San Miguel’s little church was packed to the point of standing room only, Pacheco, sitting on the wall across the street, barely able to remain upright, scoffing and spitting, being the only holdout.

    Following the service, I fully expected El Poquito to step forward and remove the drape with which he’d covered his mural, but when I looked around, I couldn’t see him anywhere, and that was when Father Romero offered a brief prayer of thanks for the painter’s dedication and then stepped forward and removed the drape from the painting.  

    Immediately, the little church resonated with a chorus of admiration as the assembled parishioners registered their approval, pretty Alicia Ramos recognizing her face as the model for Mary, Henry Jordan recognizing his likeness in the features of Joseph, Alejandro, Ted, and I finding ourselves represented in the Magi, Helen Dominguez, Betsy Smith, Ellen Stiles, and Lorinda Ortiz seeing themselves cast as angels, Chuy and Ed Sepulvada, Hank Means, Rick Vinigoni, Rumaldo Benevidiz and several others locating their images in the faces of the shepherds, and a few others entering the work as enlightened worshipers. In fact, while no one would have mistaken El Poquito for Michelangelo, we all thought that he’d done a creditable job considering both his attractive design and the brilliant colors he had used.  And then, beginning with a chuckle and a few giggles, the congregation burst into a crescendo of wild laughter when they discovered amid the surrounding cows, goats, sheep, lambs, chickens, and assorted birds, Pacheco’s unmistakable face worked artistically and with feeling onto the head of the painted scene’s lone jackass.

    Possibly, Pacheco found himself mystified when everyone laughed at him upon exiting the church that evening, but because he never deigned to attend either mass or vespers, he may have remained mystified for several days thereafter.  Eventually, someone must have enlightened him about his sudden artistic celebrity, but by that time, El Poquito had passed beyond his grasp, old Tía Duarte revealing the fact that shortly before the parish assembled for vespers on the evening Father Romero revealed the painting, she had glimpsed the painter of churches leading his burro quietly up Sonora Road and away from the village.  Where he went, none of us have ever known.

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Phillip Parotti has published numerous short stories and essays in literary magazines as well as three historical novels about The Trojan War.  His most recent novel, Splinter on the Tide, will be published by CASEMATE in 2021.  Now retired, he lives in New Mexico where he continues to write and work as a printmaker.