Category:

By age seventeen, Molly was ready to exercise the calling she'd been trained for: serving and educating. There was much work to be done at the orphanage, but Mother Rosario thought it best for her pupil to move down out of the clouds and into the real world so that she could acquire a bit of common sense and put her calling to the test. She suspected that the girl had a bonfire raging inside, so fierce that no religious habit would be able to contain it.

The world that the mother superior was referring to was limited to the Mission District, which took its name from the first Franciscan mission founded in the eighteenth century. San Francisco's large Mexican population was concentrated here. Mere days after the discovery of gold, the shameful Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, putting an end to the war and ceding more than half of the Mexican territory, including California, to the United States. The better part of the old Mexican haciendas were expropriated and the campesinos, who had lived on the land for generations, were expelled from their homes. Some futilely chased the illusion of gold, others became bandits, and the rest got by the best they could. Growing up there, we knew that certain neighbors earned their living as highwaymen, robbing travelers on the roads, but as long as they respected the people of the Mission District, no one would turn them in. More than once the neighbors had hidden them during a police raid because they knew they would be later compensated with favors or an interest-free loan in a time of need. No one trusted the bankers, who were the true thieves.

Molly Walsh got a job as a teacher in a little school by the pompous name of Aztec Pride. It consisted of a one-room adobe schoolhouse with a thatched roof where the students, all boys between the ages of six and seventeen, crowded in. The lessons were dictated in Spanish, but there were two Irish kids and one black boy, the grandson of slaves whose family had escaped the Civil War in Alabama. All three learned Spanish quickly. The modest space included two long tables flanked by mismatched stools and chairs donated from the neighborhood, a wood-burning stove in one corner to combat the damp fog and to fry eggs, a cupboard for school supplies, and a latrine outside in the yard. There was also a henhouse that provided the eggs for the boys' lunch, because many of them were sent to school on an empty stomach. There were still some powerful Mexican families in California, but their sons were educated in Catholic schools far from the Mission District. The students of Aztec Pride were all poor.

The school's founder, director, and only teacher until Molly's arrival was a mestizo man from Chihuahua named Francisco Claro, known by everyone as don Pancho. He was a true scholar, a man who had dedicated his life to his studies with the lofty ambition of being able to fathom the universe, life, and death. Nothing escaped his passionate curiosity or his formidable memory. His desire to awaken a thirst for knowledge in his students crashed up against hard reality, because as soon as they had learned the rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic, the boys left school to start work. Rarely did a student stay on for more than a year or two. Even the youngest had to contribute to the family and earn his sustenance.

Don Pancho took in the young novice nun with respectful appreciation. He needed her. With her assistance, he could now separate the students into groups. He divided the one-room schoolhouse using a paper screen painted with scenes of cranes and emperors, purchased in Chinatown, and he dedicated his time to the older boys while she taught the younger ones. He also assigned Molly the unpleasant task of raising funds to support the school through donations from the few Mexicans of good fortune and the wealthy whites eager to appease the guilt that so often accompanies unchecked greed. With her angelic face, soft manners, and novice's habit, her request for charity was hard to deny. Just as Mother Rosario, who was a full-blooded mestiza, had always said, Molly's translucent skin and blue eyes could open many doors that were closed to people of color.

*  *  *

From the start, both Molly's and don Pancho's lives were changed as she saw unexpected horizons open before her and he was able to share his passion for knowledge and education. They worked side by side, arriving at dawn to clean the yard, latrine, and henhouse; at midday they prepared a lunch of tortillas and scrambled eggs for the class; they taught until five in the afternoon and then, after their pupils left, Molly stayed on to study under the maestro's tutelage. That is how she learned of the vast animal world, endless galaxies, the customs of remote cultures, the infallibility of mathematics, and everything else that her professor considered essential. As far as the evils of the world were concerned, however, she remained as ignorant as she had been among the nuns.

Don Pancho had never had a disciple so eager to learn. He saw Molly as malleable, a smooth blank canvas on which he could leave his mark; he never suspected that beneath her apparent naïveté lay an indestructible willpower. Perhaps she herself did not yet realize it. They very quickly fell into a comfortable working routine and developed an innocent master-apprentice relationship. This made Mother Rosario breathe easy at leaving the novice to spend so much time alone in the company of a man. The director of Aztec Pride was not known to be given to the vices of alcohol, gambling, fighting, or women, and he didn't seem to like men either. In fact, it was rumored that he'd lost his balls in the Battle of Chapultepec, where he had fought at age twenty-one, not out of patriotic fervor, as he himself admitted, but because he was recruited into Santa Anna's army at the tip of a bayonet. He believed that only murderous madmen went to war voluntarily.