A Miracle at Luna Park

by Charles Newbery

Josh Applegate

This took place in the last year of my father’s life. It was one of those things you never expect at the time, but in hindsight you knew was going to happen. I now think that maybe his whole life had been leading up to this very evening when he could shine like never before, in near-holiness.

I say holiness now, but at the time I simply thought my father was acting up again, and I was leaving him on his own because he was taking it too far this time. Way too far.

He’d got me to buy tickets to see a Virgin Mary visionary at Luna Park, a boxing arena in Buenos Aires.

In the days leading up to the event, we were living as we had for much of our lives. I reeled in embarrassment at my father’s derisive comments about gender, race, and religion, his pushiness in supermarket lines, his finger-snapping at waiters, his telling me to honk to get that idiota driver to move out of our way, his way. But everybody else reveled in his charm. Don’t be fooled! That’s what I wanted to tell his entourage. Still, in the end he could manage to ensnare even me with his opinions on architecture (his trade), art, politics, Eastern philosophies and the lives of the old families of Argentina, like ours.

My father had come to spend three weeks with my family in Buenos Aires from his adopted home in Los Angeles. He was 93 years old, ridden with skin cancer, and dying. He wanted once again to see the city where he’d spent the first 35 years of his life. When it was time for him to go home, he hinted at staying. I knew better, and refused. Not to his face, but to my wife. She wavered, though, and when we sat down to tell him, he started the conversation by thanking us for our kindness after his “wonderful” (a favorite word of his) visit before asking about staying longer.

“Only if it’s no trouble. I know you’re busy. Maybe it’s best not,” he said, dropping his head.

Before I could call his bluff and make sure he got on the airplane, my wife said, “It’ll be no problem.”

He moved in and made himself right at home.

With him came a nurse we paid for to clean and dress the wounds caused by his skin cancer and care for his health during the day, and we settled into a routine. We mopped the bathroom floor after his morning bath, and cleaned his linen. At night, we cleaned him when he didn’t get to the toilet on time. Our dog ate his used tissues off the floor. We took him to the emergency room after his falls. I got to know many doctors and nurses, and my nerves weakened as his health worsened.

One day after getting home, the nurse came up to me and said in Spanish, “It’s your dad.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“He’s in a foul mood.”

“Ha, what is it this time?”

“He says you didn’t bring him his chocolate milk this morning.”

I didn’t laugh. My father was once again overplaying his part as an unappreciative pain in the ass. And what could I say? He was dying.

My father had it good. He moved into my work-from-home office in the front bedroom. It had the best light and a fine view of the cobblestoned streets and a row of houses and a jacaranda tree. I put my desk in the dank and dark garage. It had no windows.

My three children laughed at their grandfather’s stories, and he applauded anything they did. We took him on our vacation to the beach. Cousins and friends came to visit in the city. We had lunch, tea, and dinner parties, and he took daily walks while he still could, using a cane, then a walker. He bought a legal thriller at the bookshop, went to the café, and left me notes on my desk in the garage. “Bring some chocolate for the kids and me, and those chocolate-covered biscuits that I love. A kilo, please.”

At the park, my father would exercise his legs. He would sit on a bench and pull one leg up, then the other. He left a note requesting weights for his arms. When I didn’t buy any that same day, he took a tin of garbanzo beans from the cupboard. He incorporated the tin into his qigong routine, a Chinese form of meditation. He would stretch his arms up and down and around in circular motions, his eyes closed.

But his strength soon failed and he spent more time in bed and the wheelchair. His mood soured — but not his desire to live. He wanted to live another month, another year, and he was looking for ways to make this happen. He spoke to priests. He had me pay for Reiki sessions. He meditated. He did two weight sessions a day with his tin of garbanzos, and three routines of qigong, sometimes four. He ate mushrooms that he told me were specially grown for his condition. I ordered them — and paid for them. He wanted to rid the cancer from his body, walk again. He told me that two of his cousins were nearing one hundred years old. They were winning, he was losing. That’s how he explained it to me.

We tried to cheer him up. On the Sunday of our night out at Luna Park, a cousin came over to cook a fish pie for my father, and my wife and I pitched in to make it a midday feast. I arranged a plate of cheeses and crackers — a favorite of his — and placed it before him on the patio table.

He looked up at me in dismay. “There’s too much food,” he said. “This party wasn’t very well organized.”

In a family, everybody kicks each other, but my father kicks too much. So when I drove him to see the visionary at Luna Park that night, I pushed the wheelchair that much faster over the curb and onto the street.

“Ouch!” he said.

“Sorry.”

I said sorry with a certain amount of hesitation. I wanted him to know I was fed-up after what had become a year of him lording it over me. But as quickly as he winced, I wanted to kick myself for not making the most of our last days together.

At Luna Park, I wheeled my father in to find seats.

“Señor,” an usher said, coming to get my attention. “You can take him to the front.”

I took my father as indicated down a gentle slope past thirty or forty rows teeming with people. We reached the front row, right below the stage. I made sure my father was okay, and turned to go to the back to watch from afar. But the usher, who had come down with us, stopped me. “You have to accompany the man you came in with.”

“Really?” I said.

I frowned and went back to sit down next to my father.

Musicians came onto the stage. A slender guitarist in a loose-fitting suit looked out to the three thousand-plus crowd and said into a microphone, “Be silent and you will see, you will hear.”

My father watched glumly and his body started to sink into the wheelchair. His eyes soon closed, his head bowed, and he fell asleep.

I looked around, and my first thoughts were how much money this production must cost to help people feel good. At least there was a pretty nun near the stage to look at, but I couldn’t stare at her the whole time. So I watched for any gaffes in the production. Behind the musicians sat six priests in white robes and purple sashes, the VIPs, no doubt. Did they have to play along to keep the donations coming in for their churches?

The music continued and my dad woke up. “Are they still singing?” he asked me in English, the language he’d always spoken to me and my siblings, to help us fit into America.

“Yep,” I said.

“This music is awful!” he said out loud, turning to look at the musicians.

“Dad! You can’t say that!”

“What, what?”

This was becoming yet another of our routines. He would act out and then ignore my response or not hear me because of his increasing deafness.

But he had a point. The guitarist had closed his eyes, and then a singer called on us to clap and sing along. She raised her arms above her head to clap, and around the arena thousands of eyes closed and the clapping and singing grew in fervor.

My dad’s head fell again, sour and despondent, and then, may the heavens be thanked, he nodded off.

The music ended and my father awoke.

We watched a priest walk up to the podium and launch into a sermon.

His lesson: “Suffering brings growth.”

My father started shifting in his wheelchair and then sat forward and said loudly in Spanish to the priest, “How long do we have to suffer from listening to this imbecile?”

“Dad!”

“But this is dreadful!” he said to me, before turning to the priest again and saying, just as loudly as before, “We’re suffering down here just listening to you!”

I looked up at the priest, and his face fell. Everyone could hear my father. In a terrible twist of fate, one of the microphones on the low stage was pointed at my father and me, and was picking up every word.

The priest’s eyes narrowed and he stared at us coldly. My father said nothing.

The priest recomposed himself and went on. “Christ suffered for our sins. He died so that those who believe in him may have eternal life.”

My father couldn’t keep quiet. He turned to me again and said, “Why is this priest speaking? We’ve paid to hear the visionary, not this idiot. Make him go away!”

The priest stopped again and glared down at my father, and a woman behind us said, “Hush.”

My father turned around to stare coldly at the woman, looking her up and down.

“This is terrible,” he said to her.

The woman turned away with a sharp snort.

When the priest finished, my father started to clap, saying loudly, “He’s done, thank God. We must applaud.”

The priest ignored my father and turned to address the congregation again, calling on us to greet our fellow worshippers with words of peace.

And what good Catholic wouldn’t want to say, “Peace be with you,” to an old man in a wheelchair? The worshippers started to line up to shake my father’s hand.

The cripple, the cripple!

That was the siren call around the congregation, and people lined up to greet the poor old man with kind words.

Aghast, my father turned to me as a dozen people formed a line to say, “Peace be with you.”

“Why do they want to give me their peace?”

“I don’t know,” I said, enjoying myself a little now. “Maybe it’s because you’re in a wheelchair?”

“We must go. Push me out of here.”

I went to move him, but it was impossible to navigate past the crowd, and so the only thing to do was to let them come. And they did. “Peace be with you,” they said, one after another. Out they stretched their hands to shake his, or to bow and kiss him on the cheek, as is custom in Argentina.

My father looked at each and every one of them in the eyes and said, “Get lost! Don’t kiss me! I don’t want your peace!”

But these were devout people, and his pleas emboldened them, and more worshippers came to pay their respects to the cripple. The woman who had hushed my father joined the line with a face of remorse. How could she make it up to the cripple after her hushing, after her snort? How else but to call over all her friends.

My father didn’t give up in his retorts, and I edged back and watched it all happen from a safe distance.

After a few more minutes, my father’s pleas were answered at last. A man in a navy blue pinstriped suit took to the stage and tapped a microphone. The congregation looked up at him and returned to their seats. He had broad shoulders, short dark hair, a glittery ring and black shoes with pointed toes.

My father looked up at him and scowled.

“Who is this horrible man?”

I didn’t want to answer because the microphone was still picking up our voices. So I leaned in close and whispered, “I think it’s the guy who speaks to the Virgin Mary.”

“Who?”

“The visionary,” I said, a bit louder.

“At last,” my father said, settling down in his wheelchair and smiling for the first time that evening.

The visionary looked down at us, and my father looked back at him expectantly. The visionary caught my eyes and I grinned nervously before bowing my head.

We listened to the visionary’s story through a translator. He saw the Virgin Mary for the first time when he was a boy in Bosnia. Other appearances followed, and soon she started talking through him. It was like a history lesson.

I looked over at my father.

He was getting restless, and this made me nervous.

Then it came: “We want to hear from the Virgin Mary,” my father said out loud to the visionary. “Not you!”

My face turned white.

“Shh!” the hushing woman said from behind, more pleasantly than before.

My father ignored her and reached into his dark-green waist bag, rummaged around, and then pulled out his cell phone and held it up to the visionary.

“Call her!”

The visionary looked at my father and his phone, hesitated and then looked for an usher, to whom he nodded, before resuming his lecture.

The congregation, however, watched and listened as the usher approached my father who was still holding his cell phone out, and said, “Señor, you must remain quiet.”

“Riot? What riot?”

“Quiet, sir. You must be quiet.”

I looked up at the visionary, who had paused again in his speech to watch the discussion.

My father said to the usher, “What do you want?”

“If you could please keep your voice down,” said the usher.

“Rejoice?” my father asked.

“Your voice, sir.”

“My voice is fine. You can hear me, can’t you?”

Sweating now, I drew close to my father. “He says you have to be quiet.”

My father nodded. “Well, why didn’t he say that in the first place?”

I turned to the usher and said, “He’ll keep quiet.”

I settled back into my chair and tried to ignore my father.

He soon closed his eyes. Then he sat up in his wheelchair and started moving his arms around in circular motions out in front of his body and then above his head, his qigong routine. I watched him. He now seemed to be at peace with himself, now that he had found a way to use the time to his liking.

I relaxed. He’d been doing qigong since I was a kid, so this was nothing out of the ordinary, it was just him.

Then there was a tap on my shoulder.

I turned around. The hushing woman had shifted forward in her seat to ask, “Is he channeling?”

“What?”

“Channeling?”

“Um — ”

She didn’t wait for my response. “I think he is,” she said, her voice full of awe. “Ay, Dios mío! He’s channeling the Virgin Mary. I can’t believe this! It’s a miracle.”

She turned to her friends and the others near her, who were now studying my father’s movements too.

“Look,” she said. “The Virgin is using this old man to speak to us. It all makes sense. The meek shall inherit the earth. We must listen to what she may tell us through this old man.”

The visionary fell silent, looking down at us.

My father continued his routine, his eyes still closed. He was tuned out of the swelling commotion as word spread that he had become a channel for the Virgin Mary.

“What will he say?” the woman asked out loud, the microphone picking up her voice. “Oh, heavens. I can’t believe this!”

It was then that my father brought his routine to an end and let his arms come to rest on the side of his wheelchair.

“We must listen!” the woman said.

The visionary’s eyes widened as my father started to lift himself up in his wheelchair as if to get out, and his face strained as he pushed up with his arms.

“He’s going to rise, he’s going to walk! This is the work of the Virgin Mary,” the woman cried.

My father pushed harder, straining, and then he shifted his rear from side to side in the wheelchair.

I looked at him with concern.

“Are you alright, Dad?”

“What?”

“Are you OK?”

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m just trying to get comfortable. I’ve got an awful case of gas.”

“What did he say?” the hushing woman asked.

She didn’t wait for my response.

“I know,” the woman continued. “He’s speaking in tongues.”

Another woman next to her said, “It sounds like English to me.”

“No, it’s not. It’s tongues. Let me interpret.”

My father raised himself up again and everybody watched.

Then a foul stench hit me, and I knew.

“Thank God,” my father said, sinking back in his chair. “I really needed to let that out.”

“What did he say?” the interpreter asked. “I couldn’t quite get it.”

“He spoke in English,” I said.

“I thought so,” the other woman said.

“Shh,” the interpreter of tongues said before turning to me. “Tell us. What did he say?”

As I thought of what to say, I saw the pretty nun running down the aisle with a microphone. She reached me, handed me the microphone and urged me to stand up. I did so, holding the microphone in my hands, feebly.

“Well…” I began to say. “He said … he said … ‘Let it out.’”

The interpreter of tongues didn’t flinch. She knew the significance of what I’d said, of what the Virgin Mary had channeled through my father. Her eyes welled up at the clarity of the message, so simple and so true. She beamed because she knew that she could rejoice, that we all could rejoice at what had just transpired.

“Love,” she said, sighing.

“Yes, love,” I said in the microphone, my confidence growing. “Let love flow out and onto others.”

People around the congregation sighed and started to talk with their neighbors, the believers. The visionary smiled at the fervent joy in the congregation. Then he tapped the microphone, and attention fell back on him. “Mysterious ways,” he said. “Here we have it, the mysterious ways of the Virgin Mary. Let love flow out and onto others.”

There was applause and people turned to hug each other.

In all of this, my father turned to me and said, “I’m tired now.”

The interpreter understood this by the look on my father’s face, and she said to me, “Take your father home. He must be exhausted. This old man, this channel of love, of the Mother of God, of a message so true for our lives: Let love out, let it flow.”

“Let us sing,” the woman next to her said.

“Let us worship,” another said.

“Let us love,” said the interpreter, her attention returning to the congregation.

As the chorus of love spread once again over the arena, the congregation broke into song, thousands of eyes closed and of hands clasped as the visionary watched. I stood and started to wheel my father up the aisle. People made way for us. They looked at my father and several leaned out to touch him on his shoulder, his chair. Hands fell on me.

Then we emerged from the arena, and the doors closed behind us, and the sidewalk stretched out before us.

I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” my father asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I said.

“It’s a miracle we got out,” he said.

“Yep.”

“They didn’t take any of your money for that awful priest, did they?”

“No.”

“Mine?”

“No.”

“That’s good.”

I laughed again, but this time he didn’t ask why.

At the corner, I edged my dad carefully off the curb to cross the street to my car. He didn’t squeal or complain. He let me push, and everything felt fine. We didn’t discuss the visionary or the Virgin Mary or his trapped gas. We were just enjoying the moment, one of our last together.

*

Charles Newbery is a freelance journalist based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has reported for Al Jazeera, the Financial Times, The New York Times and other outlets. His creative writing has appeared in The Good Men Project, The Grief Diaries, Nanoism and Trapeze Magazine.