El Camino to Jarales: Purgatorial Conversations with Don Manuel

About the Book

El Camino to Jarales:

Purgatorial Confessions with Don Manuel

The setting takes place in la Capilla de San Francisco Xavier in Jarales, New Mexico where an acerbically witted Don Manuel, destined for entrance into Heaven, has been sidetracked to serve his Purgatorial obligation. Only the sun disk on the altar gives him strength and reduces the agony in his soul. He cannot ascend into Heaven until he has found a mortal who will listen to his story about the Sanchez from Jarales. It is slow in coming!

Lucia Sanchez meets with Don Manuel in la capilla when she is alive and agrees to ask her son to visit with him. The son takes long in doing and by that time Lucia chances upon another encounter with Don Manuel as she happens her way through Purgatory on the way to her eternal home. She departs and Don Manuel bemoans his plight but remains confined to feel the blood pass through his stomach.

The son eventually meets with Don Manuel under the shadows of the night in the capilla nestled at the foot of the cottonwoods. Though suspicious of the “prisoner in la capilla,” the son engages him in conversations but remains guarded of the medium under which events take place. The greater his suspicions, the more offers of proof are provided: transmigration, meeting with the dead and seeing wine turn to blood in a knothole. Don Manuel holds the son’s hand as they cross the veneer between immortal and mortal life and relates names, cites events and dates only one with an intimate acquaintance can tell. Information spills like the unconscious perfume in roses. The means under which events unravel nearly drive the son insane. Events unfold only a sacred oracle can tell from intuitions of the pure-hearted. Such details in another place could lend reason for them to be false but the give and take in the capilla leaves no reason for refuting them. It is said, under extreme situations ancestral stories are dusted from their eternal closets to walk in the mortal world. Could this be the case or is the son bordering on the flowerbed of insanity?

The son returns to the capilla after their last meeting and Don Manuel’s departure for Heaven but the doors are bolted and so have remained. He questions the mayordoma about the doors being locked. She declares, “I have the only key and never leave the doors unlocked at night.” This raises questions in the son. As stories of the past rage in his mind he understands conversations had to be quid-pro-quo for releasing Don Manuel. But, did they meet on the last pew and walk along the roads in Jarales? On the other hand, if Don Manuel had not been present, how else would the son know about the Sanchez?

About the Author

Oscar S. Ramirez was born in Mexico and reared in Jarales, New Mexico the land of his Sanchez ancestors. He received a PhD in Psychology, was a university professor, cofounded the Hispanic Institute for Family Development, honored as a Distinguished Western Hemisphere Scholar and retired as a college vice-president. He delves in poetry and sees the world as a picture book of our journey through human life. This is his first attempt at prose. He and his wife Sue live in El Dorado Hills, California where they enjoy living not far from open spaces, ranch land where the nighthawk shrills in the night air and where a tear of joy begins with their ancestors.