Absolution

Clarita studied the menu on the wall behind the counter of the ceviche place inside Guayaquil’s huge and busy bus station, but she had no time to eat. In just a few minutes Julio would be waiting at the curb outside, and she hadn’t yet chosen a victim. Clarita had been working with her older brother ever since they were kids. Now, at age 34, she was an expert at choosing marks.

She saw a young couple dozing near the exit doors, leaning against their backpacks. They probably kept whatever money they had under their clothes, but the girl’s colorful woven shoulder bag lay on the floor beside her. It might hold an iPad or a phone and would be an easy snatch, but Julio would be angry at her for wasting their time on such small fish.

She took the escalator to the third floor waiting room, where a white-haired couple was having some sort of an argument in English. In general, tourists were good targets because they had more money and more valuable possessions. The couple was seated at the end of a row of connected seats, surrounded by their many suitcases. Clarita sat down in the row behind them to evaluate the situation. The man pointed to his watch; the woman threw her hands up in exasperation. The wife trotted off, probably to make one last visit to the baño before their bus was to depart. The grumpy husband opened his paperback travel guide to Ecuador and buried his nose in it.

Excelente, Clarita thought. She studied their luggage. It was always best to steal a suitcase that resembled many others. The suitcase closest to Clarita was a big, black canvas one with its retractable handle already extended. It was as if God had blessed her with the easiest heist possible! So, while its owner was engaged in his reading, Clarita stood, took the case by its handle, and wheeled it silently into the large central hallway, where she passed the gringa tourist hurrying back to her husband and a bad surprise.

At the taxi stand outside, Julio opened the trunk for his sister. He loaded the bag into the back and congratulated her. “You picked a heavy one!” They drove out of the terminal’s parking lot and joined the congested lanes of traffic. “Where do you want me to take you?” he asked.

She shrugged. “The yard. No one will be there now.”

After a few miles, Julio took a right turn and followed the street for several blocks until they reached an alley. At the alley’s end there was a recycling yard where poor Guayaquileños exchanged the cardboard, tin, and plastic they scavenged for cash. Between the hours of noon and two, the attendant went home for lunch. Julio parked the cab and took the suitcase from the trunk. “I’ll see you tonight.”

Clarita rolled the suitcase to a clear space behind a tower of folded and baled cardboard cartons. She studied the small gold-colored lock on the case. It was the barrel type where one had to enter three numbers to open it. But Clarita wasn’t worried. She had a sharp knife to cut through the canvas, but nearly half the time she encountered this type of lock, she found that the owners hadn’t bothered to set a code. Clarita turned all the tumblers to the number zero. The lock opened easily.

Inside the bag were women’s clothes and toiletries. Some of the clothes were very nice but Clarita was looking for items with a high value on the streets. She was soon rewarded for her efforts, finding a velvet bag with a drawstring closure. She emptied the contents onto her palm and smiled. The jewelry was gold, and the diamonds in the earrings looked real.

Clarita unzipped the barrier that held items in place on the other half of the suitcase and pawed her way through more clothes. At the bottom of the bag, she found a lumpy object wrapped in black plastic and duct tape. She began to unwrap it, but when she heard a vehicle approaching, she abandoned the suitcase, tucked the jewelry bag into her pocket and the bundle under her arm, and slipped out into the alley again as a truck laden with recyclable materials entered the lot.

Clarita walked the few blocks to her building. She opened the metal gate and climbed the narrow steps to the third-floor apartment she shared with Julio. She placed the black bundle on the kitchen table and arranged the jewelry on a plate in an artful display to surprise Julio when got back from work in the evening.

Clarita took a banana from the fruit basket to sate her hunger and a pair of scissors to satisfy her curiosity and began to cut through the tape and plastic that bound the heavy package. The object inside was wrapped in a piece of blue fleece fabric. She opened the fleece and then held her hand to her mouth.

The skin of the baby boy was blue and mottled. Perhaps he had been suffocated, but she couldn’t guess how long he had been dead. Other questions swirled around her. Why were foreign visitors traveling with this dead child in their luggage? Had they stolen him and not known how to care for him? What had they planned to do with him? Clarita lifted the dead infant and held him to her chest. The baby felt like a bag of corn flour against her body.

She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t very well call the police, could she? What would she tell them? That she found the infant in a suitcase she had stolen from strangers? She couldn’t return the child to the terminal or take it to a hospital because those places had security cameras trained on their entrances. If she tried to take the little body to anyplace like that, her image might appear on the evening news.

Her brother had inherited his quick temper from their father, and also, his nervousness. When Julio became stressed, he often became violent, and Clarita knew he would be furious with her for bringing this problem into their home. He would insist that she dispose of the body. What would he suggest? Probably he would demand that she throw the tiny corpse into a rubbish bin somewhere far from their home.

Clarita removed the rest of the bananas from the fruit basket and fitted the tiny body into it. Before covering the baby with fleece, she felt she should pray for his soul, but it was hard to bring a prayer to mind—she hadn’t prayed or been inside a church for so many, many years.

She felt tears welling in her eyes. She closed them as she kissed the child’s forehead and began to pray. “Santa María, bendice a este niño y entrégalo en las manos de Dios—”

When she looked at him again she was shocked to find his milky eyes staring at her! He was not dead! She was sure he had not been breathing! He’d been cold to the touch, but now his face was pink, and he was squirming. Had her feeble prayer actually worked? . Clarita made the sign of the cross.

Her mind began to race. It seemed as if he expected something from her. Should she try to feed him? Could she keep him? But she knew the answer. Julio wouldn’t hear of it. What could she do? She knew that foundlings were sometimes left in baskets on the steps of orfanatos. She would take the boy to a church and leave him there. The nuns would take care of him. He would be in good hands.

Iglesia Santa Isabel was closest, and one of the oldest churches in Guayaquil. She walked there, arriving within minutes, and stood before its tall wooden doors, carved with images of the crown of thorns around the heart of Christ. She pushed the doors open and slipped into the dark interior of the church, which smelled of cedar, incense, and carnations.

Clarita’s first thought had been to leave the basket with the child on the altar, but an old woman was sitting in the front pew, murmuring as she recited her rosary. Clarita sat in the back of the nave with the basket to wait for the old woman to leave.

Clarita lifted the child and cradled him in her arms and felt him responding to her. She realized that she longed to keep him and care for him, but again, Julio would never permit that. Why had the child been hidden in the suitcase? Had God intended her to find him? Why would God have chosen this for her? To perhaps give her the opportunity to save his life? For a return to grace? She had assumed for so long that her sin was too great for penance.

She quietly rocked him, lost in her thoughts, when a soft voice from behind her, startled her.

“Daughter, are you here to confess?”

The priest was young and handsome. He gestured toward a confessional booth in the side aisle of the church.

What should she do? Was this God again, speaking to her? She placed the baby back in the basket and followed the priest to the confessional.

In the darkness inside, she placed the basket on her lap, bowed her head and clasped her hands.

“How long since your last confession?” asked the priest.

It had been more than eighteen years. She began to admit her life of crime. She admitted to being a thief. She explained how she had found the baby in the suitcase. She explained how she couldn’t bear the thought of simply putting the little body into a rubbish bin, though she had done something like that once, long ago.

It always hurt—like an arrow through her chest—to think of her baby. She was fifteen years old when she had become pregnant. Her father would have killed her if he’d found out. So even though she was aware that neighbors were gossiping about her, Clarita had insisted that her weight gain was because she was eating too much. When the pains came, months early, Clarita had crawled to the attic of her abuela’s house and given birth to the baby, alone. She had held him for a few moments before holding her hand over his tiny face until he stopped moving. He had died without a name and without making a single cry.

As she told her story, she wept fiercely, feeling with each tear the guilt and horror seeping out of her body.

“Padre, I am going to keep this child,” she said. “I don’t care what my brother thinks. I don’t care what my father would have said. I’ll leave my brother’s house. I’ll take a typing course and find a job. I’ll be a good mother to this child. Just tell me, am I forgiven?”

There was silence from behind the priest’s screen.

“Padre, can I ever be forgiven?”

She peered through the screen to the empty space behind it. Where had he gone? She picked up the basket and scurried out into the nave of church. The old woman was not there. The candles on the altar had been put out.

She walked out of the church and into the street and started to arrange the cloth around the baby’s face.

The basket contained only bananas.