Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories

Jesus behind Bars

69 Not far from St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, from its sanctuary smells of melting wax and replica of Rome’s Holy Stairs where worshipers ascend on their knees, Jesus is behind bars, his nose rubbing against an iron fence on Liberty Avenue . But everyone long ago stopped trying to set him free, believing this is just one more cross for their Savior to bear. Everyone except for Aida Estella Del Negro, an old woman who spots the life-sized statue on her way back from buying two chickens at a live poultry market in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. Normally Aida Estella doesn’t leave her own river town, let alone ride a bus to the city, but for Easter she must cook live chickens and prepare a feast like she’s never done before. She is accustomed to making a ham with pineapple slices and candied sweet potatoes after a dish of ravioli, but this year she will cook meat as white as the Easter lily in memory of her husband Giorgio, who died last year at the age of eighty-eight, three days after the Resurrection. More than any other Easter, she wants to celebrate its miracle. She hasn’t prepared live chickens in years, yet she believes that she must start with life to witness death and the wonder of rebirth. Jesus behind Bars She boards the bus whose route along the river will take her to a strip of fish and poultry markets. Once settled in her seat, she pulls out her pocket Bible and rereads the passage where Jesus rises from the dead. She thinks of him moving that boulder and breaking out of the cave and figures it might as well have been a prison with bars and barbed wire. And she thinks of the time her husband fell into a deep crevice in the dry earth of their San Procopio and how her eldest daughter, Celestina , found him buried in its rock and rubble, how old man Agosto pulled Giorgio out as if he too rose from the dead. She closes the Bible and pictures two roasted chickens in the center of her dining room table with enough food to feed her children and grandchildren. She stares out the window, knowing nothing about the city except that there are new immigrants here as she once was. She’s heard them being called “boat people,” which reminds her of how she and her family were stowed in the basement of a steamship for eighteen days. There was only enough room to stand like a candle with your arms pressed against your side. She remembers the smell of vomit and disease mixed with salt water. As miserable as that was, she is convinced that the fear of falling off a raft and drowning in the middle of the ocean like so many Cubans have done must be worse. These immigrants, she’s seen on the news, make their own boats from inner tubes and scraps of canvas and wood. And why do they risk their lives? The only answer that comes to Aida Estella’s mind is faith. They believed, like she believed, that when one life ends in the old country, a new one begins in America. The hesitation her husband had leaving his San Procopio is no different from the hesitation the new immigrants had stepping into a boat. And neither, in Aida Estella’s mind, is different from her husband’s reluctance to let go after being in a coma for weeks. She knows next to saying goodbye to her parents in the old country so many years ago, the hardest thing she’s ever done was to release her husband. He was comatose. He gritted his teeth. His arms were stiff and his hands were in fists. She forced one open, told him 70 Jesus behind Bars 71 it was time. His body was nothing more than a cage that trapped his spirit. It served no purpose anymore other than to hold him back. That he should be set free. She could never muster the courage to tell him that until Easter Sunday. Three days later, he died. All of this reassures her doubts of being on a bus en route to a place she’s never been with nothing more than her broken English. She must begin with live chickens and go to the only place her...