The girls sent to him are usually the shrieking sort, all flying hair and knotted rosaries, spitting out insults they learned from their uncles and the Devil in equal measure. You, on the other hand, are so silent they think you’re possessed by a different breed of spirit, maybe something bureaucratic—a demon who files everything in triplicate and won’t look up from the floor. Possessed is what the sisters whispered, which in Mexico in 1962 could mean anything from talking back to men, to seeing la Virgen in the tiles behind the toilets.

He is the one they chose for exorcism because his voice doesn’t rise and his hands don’t shake, because he has the sort of authority that doesn’t need to be announced. He’s good at it, too; too good, maybe. He never raises his voice. He never threatens. He only reads the litany in a voice so calm it sounds like a lullaby. He tells you to kneel, and you kneel. He tells you to confess, and you say nothing. He talks. About sin, about God, about the weather in Veracruz, about the price of bread since the Americans started importing Wonder. He catches you smoking dried corn husks behind the chapel. He takes the cigarette, stubs it out on the brick, and wipes the ash from your lips with his thumb. He should report you, should scold you, but he only says, “Tobacco stains the soul, niña.” You don’t look at him. You never do. You twist the crucifix around your neck until the chain breaks and leave the beads scattered on the tile. He sweeps them up. He always does.

The other priests think he’s too soft. They mutter about him at meals. The novices, who do not know how suffering smells—like copper, like burnt sugar, like the mold behind the baptismal font—follow him with their eyes and whisper prayers in the hallways after he passes. They don’t know what he does at night, after Vespers, when he kneels in the vestry with a leather scourge and punishes himself for every stray thought, every crumb of cake he’s smuggled into your cell, every time his hand lingers too long on your head in benediction. He knows the rules. He breaks them anyway.

When you refuse to speak for three days straight, he gives you a small marzipan pig wrapped in yellow paper. When you throw it at his feet, he only picks it up and places it back on your bed. When your nightmares get worse—when you wake the whole convent screaming in three languages, in a voice not your own—he stands by your bed and reads the Book of Tobit in Spanish, steady as a metronome, until your breathing slows. You bite his wrist once, hard enough to draw blood. He does not flinch. He simply binds his arm and continues the litany, voice even, as if reciting the weather.

He knows it is a sin to want anything for himself. He wants you to be free. He wants you to eat the sweets, to stop tearing your nails on the mortar, to look at him, just once, the way a child might look at a priest and see mercy instead of menace. He wants nothing. He wants everything. He prays more than he sleeps. The sisters joke that he is made of stone. Sometimes, after midnight, he wonders if they are right.

Tonight he brings you a sugar skull from the city, bright with red icing. He leaves it on your pillow, then locks the door behind him and goes to the chapel to bleed. He kneels until his knees ache, murmurs the Confiteor under his breath, and flogs his back in silent penance until the stone floor shines with something holy. He knows there is no absolution for men like him, only the act of contrition, performed again and again, until even the saints look away.

When the bell rings for Lauds, he stands in the half-light, fingers sticky with dried blood, and rehearses the morning’s prayer. Exorcizo te, immundissime spiritus, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti… He has done this so many times his tongue forms the words without thought. Still, he glaglances at the door to your cell, and waits.

He whispers,

“Deus, in adiutorium meum intende.”

The day begins.