Death Stirs Something to Life in Me

I think I have been thinking about New Mexico lately because, in part, I just finished reading Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, which is set in New Mexico, and you can't read that book without becoming obsessed with the land that it is set in. The landscape is practically the main character in the book. Through it, the two protagonists - Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant, French Catholic missionaries - travel back and forth as they attempt to reestablish the catholic church in the Southwestern US in the decades following the Mexican-American war, when the US - to quote Adrienne Rich - "forc[ed] California into the hand of Manifest Destiny, law following greed." The young french Bishop must wrest his Papal See from the hands of the old Spanish bishop in Durango, then rid his diocese of corrupt priests, and bring the faith back to thousands of American frontiersmen, Native Americans and Mexicans who suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the new border, citizens of a new country. And all through the story, there is the landscape. In fact the story even starts with landscape - a juxtaposition of the tame gardens and posh villas of Rome against the harsh desert and humble dwellings of the American Southwest. From there, the New Mexican landscape forms the backdrop to every single event that takes place, to every word that is spoken, to every tear that falls.

Oddly enough. I had resisted reading this book for a long time, cuz I thought it would be a real downer. I mean, just look at the title. Death Comes for the Archbishop. Can't be anything but sorrow and misery in a book with that title. But, oh! How wrong I was. This is not a depressing book, although I was melancholy when I finished reading it. And it isn't a sad book, though I did shed a few tears at the end. But it was the melancholy one feels and the tears one sheds when one has lost the company of a dear friend. because, that is what the characters became for me while I was reading the book. Dear friends. trusted allies, bosom companions on life's rugged road. It seemed to me, that by the end of the book, I knew them as well as I know my wife, and missed them when they were no longer there for me to turn to in the evening. Bishop Latour, Father Vaillant and the harsh yet breathtaking New Mexico landscape.

And now, I find it hard to get New Mexico out of my mind - or is it my heart - and I long to see it. As if going there now, today, would satisfy me. Because it wouldn't be the Mexico of the 1870s and 1880s. It wouldn't even be the New Mexico of Cather's day. It's the 21st century New Mexico, full of fast cars and fast people living in ticky-tacky suburbs that sprawl across the beautiful desert valleys that Cather described so beautifully that I could see them as clearly as I can see the trees sheltering my house where I sit writing this entry on this stiflingly hot, humid Massachusetts Saturday, dreaming of an adobe house nestled in the red hills that shelter old Santa Fe.