The Temptation of Celeste Azul by Mark Jacobs

For the longest time, Celeste Azul believed it was a race, and nothing but a race. Watching the Polish priest stoop to lay the first brick in the first row of what would rise to be the chapel of Mary in the village of Jagua’í, she felt an internal clenching. She would live to see the chapel built, or she wouldn’t. It was her money causing the chapel to go up. It was her illness tearing her body down. In time, one of them would win. She would be permitted the unutterable pleasure of seeing the chapel consecrated, or she wouldn’t be. She did not believe temptation entered into it.

After several false starts—the men of the village building the chapel exaggerated their personal disagreements, deriving from them a satisfaction that sometimes led to their stopping work out of pique—the chapel was nearing completion. The walls, outside and in, had been stuccoed a stainless white that blinded the eye aware of sin.

One December morning, Padre Zeta drove his motorbike out from San Pedro del Paraná to inspect the construction. Lying in bed, Celeste Azul recognized the two-stroke whine of his Japanese machine and knew he would come by to visit as soon as he had looked at the chapel. The extreme wet heat of Paraguayan summer was like an animal the size of the sky lying down next to her, pushing against her, so that she struggled to breathe. In fields she was too sick to get up and observe, thin, muscular watermelon vines snaked alongside cotton plants on which white bolls were beginning to look like cash.

Every year, there was less cotton planted, and every year, more people left the village. It took a stubborn woman to build a house of God in a place from which God’s people were determined to flee. Some would say headstrong. More than a few of her neighbors were critical of Celeste Azul’s project. In this failing place, there was so much that might be done with her money if she wanted to spend some of it. The criticism failed to touch her.

When she heard the priest’s motorbike, she rose from the bed so as to be ready. She was alone that morning. Flavia, who helped out, hadn’t shown up. By the time Padre Zeta lifted the latch on the front gate, she was at the door in a dark skirt and white blouse, looking something like the no-nonsense school principal she had been for twenty-two years.

“Good morning, Padre.”

He frowned. In his third year in Paraguay, Father Zbigniew Mazur had not yet accepted the need for the social niceties that lubricated conversation, or else he was oblivious. He was young, irresponsibly so. He was so blonde you might take him for a white ghost. Hair of lank straw, colorless eyebrows, alabaster skin he had to shield from the sun; it burned so quickly. Nobody could pronounce his name. They had settled on Father Z.

“Where are the men?” he demanded.

He meant the village men who had agreed to provide the labor for the chapel when Celeste Azul put up the money for materials. He found working with them trying; he lacked what she thought of as local comprehension.

“Such a beautiful morning we have,” he fulminated, “they ought to be able to get something done.”

“Come in, Padre,” said Celeste Azul. “We’ll drink tereré.”

Her invitation was calming. He realized he was being unreasonable.

“I’m sorry. How are you feeling today?”

His Spanish would never be good, but it was no longer bad.

They sat in the shade of an adolescent lemon tree. She had planted it herself the year she built the house, which was the year before she retired as principal of the primary school and realized she would never leave the village. This steadily disappearing settlement in the extrasolar south of a green landlocked country was not just her home, it was her fate. Why would she not use the money she had amassed through the years, living single and close to the bone, to acknowledge the Mother of God?

In his blunt way, the priest studied her as he took the polished cowhorn of cool yerba mate from her and sucked on the straw. It was her eyes that unsettled him. They were startlingly blue, the only eyes of that color in a human face in her part of the country. At birth, her parents had disagreed on what to call her, while agreeing the name had to be blue. Her mother favored Celeste, while her father liked the plain, strong sound of Azul. Neither gave way, and in the compromise, they called her both. On her deathbed, her mother had told her a confusing story about an ancestor who went to Brazil and took a blue-eyed lover from an exotic country whose name she could not recall.

Celeste Azul explained to the priest what he already knew, that the men were working in their fields, readying for the harvest toward the end of January or early February. They would keep their word and finish the capilla. Leaving, he blessed her with his chalky Polish hand, asking God to preserve her in faith. He knew how badly she longed to be there the day he consecrated the building to God’s purposes. Not for the first time, it occurred to her that Padre Zeta’s God might not speak her language. The thought was idle and evaporated upon contact with her thinking mind.

After he left, she was exhausted and lay down to rest. If there was a dream involved in what came next, she woke with no memory of it. She did have a rinsed feeling, what a person would feel after prolonged tingling. It came accompanied by a mental picture of Morgan, about whom she had not consciously thought in years. A North American. He had come to Jagua’í with the Peace Corps. For two years, he worked, with medium success, to convince people to build latrines. With the rinsed feeling and the image of Morgan as a young man, there came a snarled thought.

She was lying on her back in the bed. A fly landed on her face. She swatted it away. It landed on her arm; she shook it off. The thought, slow to shape itself, emerged finally as a question. Had she wasted her life?

She had made love with the North American. Once. They were young. They were drawn to one another. Evenings, he came to the teachers’ brick house, which sat kitty-corner to the schoolhouse, to play cards with them. He shared their supper and listened to their stories. He was lean and lithe and laughed at the slightest provocation. He played a harmonica and pulled American pennies from behind the students’ ears.

As the fly came close to her mouth, she expelled a jet of air and blew it away. She had never confessed her sin with Morgan to a priest. She understood—she had understood it from the beginning with clarity and precision—that it was necessary for her to know what she was renouncing. It was her choice to stay in the village and to stay there alone. Not to know what she was giving up would have robbed the choice of half its value. The life she had not lived was suddenly there in the room with her. An impulse with shoulders, a figure with a face, restlessly on the move so that she could not make out its expression. She had a sense the creaturely thing was big. Big enough, anyway, to block out the other life, the one she had chosen deliberately to live.

Here came the fly again.

***

Celeste Azul was in a funk of bad feelings and would not have forced herself out of bed to answer the telephone. Flavia could not resist the appeal of the ring, however. She leaped to pick up the mobile from the cabinet in the kitchen. Answering, she swelled with pleasure on behalf of the retired principal, her patron and mentor. The relationship was complicated. Beaming, she carried the phone to Celeste Azul, who had a premonition.

Abelardo Cáceres. He proposed visiting and took her Not now, Abelardo as maidenly reluctance, becoming but not dispositive.

“I’m not well,” she told him.

“Hah! Then a visit will cheer you up.”

Abelardo lived in the capital. He had been a fixer. They called them tramitadores. His beat was the Ministry of Education. When the time came for Celeste Azul to retire, she had to enlist the services of a fixer, not an employee of the state but a freelancer who knew how to get things done. Without a person like Abelardo, her paperwork would have languished for months and possibly years. It cost, of course. It cost a good bit. You could rail against the corrupt system, or you could hire a tramitadorand collect your pension. Her mind was on a chapel for the village, and Celeste Azul hired Abelardo.

She wasn’t sure how it happened, but midway through the process—she was staying in a hotel in Asunción while Abelardo worked the system on her behalf—he fell in love with her. They were the same age. He was a widower and, for a man in an odiferous profession, had a romantic streak, along with an awkward desire to do the right thing. Celeste Azul wrote off the infatuation to her unusual eyes. Certainly, she did nothing to encourage his illusion. He refused to accept a cent for the work he did on her behalf, insisting on returning the money she had advanced him. Thinking of the chapel, she took it. That had all been years ago. The torch he carried had not yet gone out.

Flavia favored a liaison of ancients. Never mind the age of both parties, she equated love with excitement, in short supply in Jagua’í. This, to Celeste Azul, was one more worrisome indication that her campaign to cure the girl of flightiness was a flop. Flavia had enormous potential. She had been, hands down, the best student the village ever produced. Her memory was encyclopedic, her logic could be compelling, and she loved to read. But she was as blessed in body as she was in mind. She was slinky, she was sexy, she drove old men and young men and teenaged boys crazy with desire. And of all the wrong potential mates in a twenty-kilometer radius, she had to choose Beto Duarte, whose only skill, interest, and occupation was organizing horse races for local men to bet on. He had not yet made the killing he was certain must come his way.

“I think you should wear the yellow dress,” Flavia said.

Abelardo had spent the night in San Pedro and was arriving soon.

Celeste Azul sat up. She shook her head. Dizzy, and a sense of coming undone, bits of her once unified self flying off into space. It was the clogged arteries, or the fluid around the heart, or the high blood pressure. Maybe it was all of them. She had been parsimonious. Money she might have spent on her body had gone instead to the chapel. Foolish, in the view of those who knew. But Mary understood Celeste Azul’s devotion to her son. In a wonderfully unsettling moment six months ago, the Mother of God had sent confirmation that she saw, she knew, she approved.

Midnight and no moon. Celeste Azul’s house sat on the road that ran through Jagua’í to the river. Something pricked her awake. Possibly a muttering hen. Disoriented, breathing with difficulty, she roused herself and went through the gate into the roadway of red dirt. Two, maybe three hundred meters down, she watched light cohere around a mystical center and become a person. More than a person. An apparition. Such a beatific color was seldom seen by eyes the sinful likes of hers. Miracle blue and heartbreak yellow, not blended but coexisting in the same shimmering space. Even from a distance, she felt tender warmth pulsing toward her in radiant waves. She ought to have fallen to her knees, but in her condition, she might not get up again. That was okay. The unworded message came through clearly. You are loved.

Now, she said, “No yellow dress.”

And Flavia burst into tears. She rushed to Celeste Azul, wrapped her young, strong arms around her, and wept.

“I don’t want you to die. It’s not fair.”

They stayed like that on the side of the bed, rocking like lovers making up after a quarrel. Celeste Azul found herself echoing, in a more sedate fashion, the younger woman’s rhythmic moans. The warmth of Flavia’s body, her dark-eyed, slinky self, did something to keep Celeste Azul alive. This, too, must be a gift from God.

“You have to go to Encarnación,” Celeste Azul told her, pulling herself together.

Encarnación was the departmental capital. There was a teacher-training school there. It was Flavia’s first necessary step. Celeste Azul had kept aside enough money to finance the girl’s education. With patience, diligence, discipline—the traditional virtues that the retired principal kept in a powdered milk tin, doling them out to the girl as circumstances dictated—Flavia could become principal in her home village school. If there were any families with children left, that is, by the time she graduated and served her apprenticeship as a teacher.

Celeste Azul dressed decorously to receive Abelardo, who had the grace to come into a two-room house of bricks with a tile roof in a village of shacks as though it were la Zarzuela, where the King and Queen of Spain lived in official splendor. He bowed before her, delivering a bouquet of flowers that had survived the trip from the capital pretty well.

Celeste Azul was taken aback by how old he looked. He was heavier, slower, fussier in his movements than the last time he visited. His once eloquent hands were ponderous. His hair, always thin, was more an idea of hair than the thing itself. But his black eyes were alive, lighting on the woman he had come to see.

“Flavia, bring the tereré,” Celeste Azul said, and the three of them sat in chairs in the front patio while Abelardo presented his proposal in a formal manner as though it were a business deal. His voice quavered now and then, the only clue to the river of emotion rolling through the man.

Celeste Azul should marry him. He had a decent house in a quiet neighborhood in an Asunción suburb. A reliable young woman would take care of all the cooking, cleaning, shopping. Abelardo committed himself to overseeing the completion of the chapel. On the day the Polish priest consecrated it, Celeste Azul would be there.

It took time for Abelardo to lay out the future he envisioned for both of them. As he spoke, a bus went past toward the river, raising a wake of red dust that settled slowly, like a thought recollected by a tired mind. Then an oxcart creaked by loaded with tresses of onions that gave off a powerful earthy odor. The barefoot boy driving the cart stared openmouthed at Abelardo, who was obviously a foreigner. Meantime, Flavia could scarcely sit still. She was so pleased with the prospect of Celeste Azul’s moving to Asunción. Love would triumph after all, and she would have a place to stay when she visited.

It cost Celeste Azul to turn Abelardo down. She felt a genuine affection for the man. If things were different… but they weren’t. He took her response as best he could, hearing in her carefully chosen words the lingering possibility of success. He would not give up. When he left, after a hearty meal of chicken and rice, Celeste Azul told Flavia to take Abelardo’s flowers to the chapel.

“Put them on the altar.”

Celeste Azul’s refusal to marry Abelardo had nettled Flavia. It was the only kind of happy ending she was able to imagine. “The altar is only half done,” she protested.

“Nothing is ever done. Not the way we think it ought to be.”

“Beto put together a race. On Saturday. I’m going to help him collect the bets.”

Celeste Azul understood that protesting the girl’s decision to throw herself in harm’s way yet again would be counterproductive.

“When you leave the flowers, don’t forget to say a prayer. Mother Mary will hear you. She knows I want to live to see the consecration.”

Flavia’s eyes teared again, and that was that. Left alone, Celeste Azul reflected for a moment. The temptation Abelardo Cáceres was holding out was not the real one, not the one that mattered. The real one was here in the room with her, where it seemed to have taken up residence. It liked to prowl. It blocked her view. It gave off a smell stronger than a cartful of onions.

***

Sometimes, it miffed Padre Zeta. By every known yardstick, he outranked Celeste Azul. He was a man. He was a priest. He was a foreigner with an advanced degree in the science of God and had seen the world. But in Jagua’í, his authority did not match hers. The truth was, it did not come close. That rankled him, but this time, he had the good sense to defer to her the solution of a problem that had come up.

“The men have divided themselves into two camps,” he told her.

He had come by her house early while the night’s damp still lay lightly on the road so that his motorbike wheels churned up a spray of clumped powder. Flavia was nowhere to be seen. She had likely spent the night with Beto at his mother’s, where the organizer of horse races ruled the roost. His mother and three sisters waited on him hand and foot, believing him to be the second incarnation of the sun. Such a waste, never mind the moral question. If Flavia conceived a baby, the odds of her going to school in Encarnación dropped to zero.

Celeste Azul did not need the priest’s summary of the problem at the construction site. Three neighbors had already stopped by to apprise her of what was happening. She heard him out for courtesy’s sake. According deference to a man of God was an ingrained habit.

“One group is adamant that the bell should be hung now,” he told her. “That is, before the chapel is finished. The other group insists we must wait for the consecration. I believe that a personality disagreement is at the base of the problem.”

“I suspect you are right, Father. And you yourself, what is your opinion?”

“I would prefer to wait. That seems proper. However, I do not wish to set my foot wrong in this matter. You will understand better than I how to proceed.”

That was how she wound up later that morning on a high half-hectare of grassy ground on the west edge of the village where the road bent toward the river, three kilometers off. This was where the chapel was going up, pleasingly substantial. Already, it had a personality to suit its neighborhood. When it was complete and consecrated, anybody traveling through the village from either direction must remark it, going by. Some—a few—would say reflexively to themselves, There stands Mary’s chapel, and grace would do its winged work.

But there was something about the unfinished look of the building that pleased Celeste Azul just as it was. Stacks of dun bricks and orange roof tiles lay about, as did buckets for water and buckets for whitewash, hoes and hammers, and a black-handled sieve. Window frames were not yet fitted into the holes that had been left for them in the walls; a carpenter’s level rested in one of them. The bell tower was still bare brick. In that moment, in that unfinish, impulse was visible in the idea, a new word making itself flesh with discipline and desire.

Eighteen men watched her stride across the high ground toward a handsome cast-iron bell resting on a pallet in the grass. A friend of Celeste Azul’s had rescued it from an abandoned chapel across the Paraná in Misiones that was unlucky enough to stand on ground claimed by a shopping mall. Unloading the bell from the flatbed truck that delivered it had been a labor of many backs, many hands, many grunting voices. What Argentina no longer wanted, Paraguay would cherish.

Celeste Azul did not know how she would handle the situation until she absently patted the bell as though it were a dog and felt the heat collected there. The sense of urgency it imparted to her was not to be despised.

“Juan Pablo,” she called.

“Señorita,” he said, stepping forward.

Juan Pablo del Valle was the best builder in the village, having worked in construction in Buenos Aires a good ten years. He was proud and fiery, handsome on the tall black horse he rode everywhere. On horseback, pride became disdain for those traveling shank’s mare. He had come home only because his failing mother insisted on dying in Jagua’í. With the bell as in all matters of opinion, he took the position contrary to that taken by Chacho Morales, his rival since they were boys.

“You think we should wait for the consecration.”

“I do.”

She nodded. She felt strength coursing through her the way it used to. She knew whom it belonged to.

“Your idea is good,” she told Juan Pablo. “It shows the respect your heart feels in this important matter. Your heart is wise.” She paused. Little zigzags of light were flashing behind her eyes, her own personal lightning storm. “And yet,” she said. “And yet, just now, I have a different thought. I say, let us hang the bell today, for tomorrow we die. I say, let the bell ring us to our senses; let it ring us to a sense of our sin and our need for forgiveness. Let it ring in the morning to call us to the completion of the task we have taken on, knowing our work glorifies God.”

There was no doubt she would carry the day. She felt no triumph; she derived no satisfaction from the look of wonder on Padre Zeta’s white face. Something was taken out of her, and she walked home slowly, refusing all offers of assistance. The lightning storm raged. Who would have thought such private weather possible?

Wanting air, she lay down in the leather hammock on the back patio. Hens nattered in the dust, inspected by a brick-red cock with a herky-jerky neck. Insects in a patch of swampy woods behind the village droned their praise of an insect god. She dozed, coming awake with a specific memory of Morgan. She had let him see her naked. Her lack of shame had surprised her at the time. It ran counter to her expectations. But the fact was, she let him have a good long look while looking just as long at him.

It was a mellow spring night when they made love. She went to the shack he lived in, where he seemed to expect her. Inside, he lit a kerosene lantern, they stripped, they lay on his pallet. All of it was easy, as though they had rehearsed a hundred times. Afterward, they dressed and sat on a hillock of grass, watching the moon, whose mountains looked scalable, for once.

When he told her he neither needed nor wanted God in his life, she had been appalled. She scarcely bothered to follow his explanation why. She was shocked to her Catholic core. Thinking about it now, his indifference no longer seemed outrageous. It was merely puerile, a boy’s ignorant bluster. When he went home to America, he had sent letters irregularly for several years. Then they stopped coming. The last one contained a snapshot of his first-born child.

It was not a loss of faith she was undergoing now, or a loss of trust. Mother Mary stood behind her as always, the folds of her blue robe tenting around her, encasing her in warmth. It was, rather, an all-too-human consciousness of waste, of a mistake that could not be fixed. Years drilling pellets of basic knowledge into the hard heads of village kids who either resisted learning or were fatally passive. Years of planting a garden that only wanted to parch in the sun. Years of trying to nurture and develop Flavia while shielding her from a hundred harms. Years of saying no. Years—let it be said—of sleeping alone. And now here she was, lying in a hammock with a lightning storm behind her eyes and a sense of time rushing, racing, barreling along like a train whose engineer has fallen asleep at the throttle. She churned in the hammock, trying to get comfortable.

***

The bell was tolling in the belfry. The sound it made was as clear and resonant as she could have hoped. Better, even. Blessed be the hands of the Argentine craftsmen who had cast it all those decades ago. It sent a shiver through Celeste Azul, and she felt an overmastering curiosity to know who was pulling the bell rope. She rolled easily out of the hammock onto steady feet. She practically ran to the field where the chapel stood. She scrambled up the bank and ducked under the fence wire. She made her way inside. Hah! Just as she had guessed. It was Flavia ringing the bell. The girl was barefoot and had a witchy grin on her winsome face. Oddly, she was wearing a white dress, as though this was an occasion for dressing up; it was a celebration.

Celeste Azul always knew when the girl had had sexual relations with Beto. She was catlike and cushiony. Her smooth skin glistened like an inner tube pulled from the river. She had a glow and could not contain her glee. Words were exchanged. They were insignificant. This too, Celeste Azul heard herself murmur; this too has its shining place.

***

Sleep helped. So did the dream that came with it, although she could not say how. But something had changed. She knew it by her reaction to Padre Zeta when he came by the house. This was how important things changed, of their own volition, at their own pace, unpredicted by the people whom they most affected.

“I had a feeling,” the priest told her. “I was on my way back to San Pedro, and suddenly it came over me. I wondered how you were feeling.”

She was seeing him as if for the first time, seeing the man behind the identity. A man whose plumber brother in Poznan regularly sent packages with Polish sweets. A man who put on his socks and tied his shoes a certain fastidious way. A man who remembered a massive willow tree in a yellow meadow at his grandparents’ farm, how the meadow dipped canting to the bank of a clear creek. A man whose left elbow frequently itched. A man who walled off his dreams even from himself, believing that was his sacerdotal duty. This new seeing—it was more than mere imagining—braced and encouraged her. The worst was over.

“I had a dream,” she told him.

“Would you care to talk about it?”

Such a courteous response.

“No,” she told him. “That won’t be necessary.”

“But you’re feeling well.”

She thought for a moment before responding, and in the gap here came Flavia around the corner of the house, glowing and grinning. She was carrying a grapefruit, which she had already begun to peel. She would hand the sections to Celeste Azul one by one, knowing how much the older woman loved the fruit. She would admonish her to eat slowly, savoring each piece.

“I’m feeling strong,” Celeste Azul told the priest.

He nodded. Because an important thing had changed, she was able to perceive his pleasure at hearing the words. It showed in the slight shifting of his shoulders.

“Next month,” she said.

“Yes?”

“By the end of next month, we shall finish the chapel.”

“Next month,” Padre Zeta agreed, his white face going red.

Done. This was her life, chosen or stumbled into; the difference was trivial. She felt an ecstasy commensurate with her fresh sense of certainty, spinning like a top, animating her region by region down to the nethermost parts. Still, she was a private person and was glad no one could see the transformation.

“When the day comes,” she said.

The priest and the girl waited patiently. They knew it would come.

After a moment, collecting herself, she told them, “I want to ring the bell.”

She had no doubt. Neither did they. Another month and a little more, in a new chapel in an old village, she was going to ring the bell.