I t is said that:
In a town at the edge of the desert, in Sonora, there was once a learned Pastor who owned a small house and a few books that he had read over and over until they were worn. His belongings fit inside a suitcase, and he had an eleven-year-old daughter who, in turn, had a little white lamb. The Pastor had become a widower on the same day he became a father; he chose to know no other woman after his wife and had raised his daughter in the Faith. He was giving Bible lessons to a small group of parishioners and pastors who traveled from other towns to learn from him when his daughter interrupted to ask if he would help her stitch a bleeding wound that a wire fence had opened in her lamb. Seeing his daughter’s distress, the Pastor suspended his lesson and the two returned home. He opened the tin where he kept his belongings, wanting to sew the lamb’s wound, but his needle was not where it should have been among the petroleum jelly he used during winters and droughts when his lips cracked, his wife’s devotional medallion, the Bible his mother gave him when he was a boy, spare buttons, and the scissors he used to cut both hair and nails. He closed the tin, took the lamb in his arms, and carried it to the home of an acquaintance who kept cattle. The acquaintance’s wife was preparing an elaborate stew that the Pastor’s daughter wanted to learn how to make. The weather was hot that afternoon, unusually hot, and between the solemn conversation the Pastor was having with his acquaintance and the fact that his daughter was having a good time in the kitchen, the couple invited them to stay for a meal and said they were welcome to spend the night in their guest room. It was the first time the Pastor had seen his daughter under the same roof with another woman, the way it would have been if her own mother had not died in childbirth on what was by far the bloodiest night of the Pastor’s life. He accepted the invitation. The girl, on the threshold of adolescence, thanked her father profusely and asked that the lamb sleep near her; she also asked the woman to teach her more skills, as many as she could. The lamb slept between the two twin beds where the Pastor and his daughter spent the night while the moonlight gleamed on the trickle of blood that had begun to seep through its stitches.
The extreme heat on that summer night started a small fire at the outskirts of town that spread and surged until it had taken thirteen houses. The Pastor’s home was the first to disappear amid the flames, the crackling, and the embers. At sunrise, when the Pastor, his daughter, and the lamb were on their way home, someone from the town told them that their house had burned down during the night and that no one had been able to find them. The same person said their neighbors did not know if they would ever appear, or if they had died in the fury of the blaze. The Pastor was a man of many words for and about God but not a man of many words when it came to himself, and the few words at his disposal seemed to have abandoned him.
The learned Pastor led his daughter and the lamb into the desert. The clothing on their backs and the lamb, with its faltering step, were all they brought with them to their new home. The Pastor’s daughter began to ask questions that he could not or would not answer, and then, perhaps, the flame that had been lit in his daughter not long before grew and sparked her adolescence. The girl confronted her father, asking him questions she had never dared to ask. The Pastor, thin and dry as a stick, answered her calmly. Blood and pus began to ooze from the lamb’s wound, just like the blood that had announced the death of his wife in the small hours of the morning when he was handed his living daughter. The Pastor watched his footsteps fade as he walked. It was strange how, in that motionless heat, the thinnest veil of air could erase his steps, erasing the past; this is what the Pastor was thinking when his daughter began to reproach him. How could their home exist one day and then not exist the next? How could God have burned their home, a home that had dedicated all its prayers to Him? How would her lamb be able to cross the desert? Her father knew that the lamb was all she loved in this world; how could he guarantee it would reach their new home alive? A prayer? How could it be that he, a good man who had dedicated himself to the Holy Scriptures and to God, should have his wife, his home, his entire life wrested from him, despite his prayers? In that moment, his daughter pushed him further, as if toward that same line between life and death along which the ailing lamb stumbled, by asking: “What could be worse than all we have suffered?” And the learned Pastor answered, “The greatest misfortune that could befall us would be to forget that we are God’s children.” No sooner had he spoken these words than the lamb collapsed and was gone, just as his wife had gone before his eyes.
It is also said that:
In a town in Sonora there was once a learned Pastor who had an eleven-year-old daughter. The Pastor had become a widower on the day of his daughter’s birth and had raised her in the Faith. He was giving Bible lessons in his home one afternoon when his daughter interrupted him to ask for help. The Pastor suspended his lesson to help his daughter, a task that took him to the other side of town. The girl, on the threshold of adolescence, thanked her father profusely for setting aside something that seemed to be of the greatest importance to him. The Pastor noticed a change in his daughter.
That afternoon, the Pastor decided to take a long walk with his daughter and speak to her of the Holy Scriptures, which could perhaps accompany her as she approached adolescence since her mother could not. The extreme heat that summer afternoon sparked a small fire at the outskirts of the town that spread and surged until it had taken a strip of houses; the home of the Pastor and his daughter was the first to disappear amid the flames, the crackling, and the embers. Returning to find his home reduced to nothing, the learned Pastor knew that God had saved his life and his daughter’s, but his daughter’s childhood was burned to nothing when she saw the ashes of their home, and she began to ask her father questions she had never asked before. The Pastor, long and thin as a stick, answered his daughter calmly, like a stick gliding along a current of water. How could her mother and their home appear and disappear without God doing anything about it, and how could a good man who had dedicated his life to the Holy Scriptures have his wife and home taken from him? Wasn’t that the worst thing that could happen to them? God had orphaned her and now He had left her without a home, and those were the worst things that had ever happened to her. How could she call herself the daughter of a woman she had never even met? No, daughter, said the learned Pastor, the worst thing would be to forget we are all someone’s child, the way you are and will always be your mother’s.
And they say that:
In a town in Sonora there was once a learned Pastor who had an eleven-year-old daughter on the threshold of adolescence. The Pastor had become a widower on the day of her birth and had raised his daughter in the Faith. He was giving Bible lessons to a group one afternoon when his daughter interrupted to ask him questions she had never asked before. That night, their house caught fire and the Pastor and his daughter began their exodus in search of a new home. Stripped of their past and of their belongings, they crossed the desert after watching their house be consumed by the flames and, for the first time, father and daughter had a conversation that was sharp, harsh, and therefore intimate. The Pastor, long and thin as a stick that could break if his daughter hurt him or if anything happened to her, hid his fragility behind calm answers. She said that God had made everything she loved in this world disappear and that He had cast them out of their town because He had forgotten them. Wasn’t that the worst thing that could happen? No, my child, the worst thing would be for us to forget: God disappears if we forget Him, just like we disappear if others forget us.
And it is known that:
A learned Pastor had an eleven-year-old daughter who was about to turn twelve and who, ablaze with adolescence, challenged her father’s Faith by asking him questions that wounded him deeply and cast a shadow over his name. He had already lost his wife, and they had already lost their home, when his daughter asked him what could be worse than disappearing. Worse than disappearing, replied the learned Pastor, is to fear disappearing because God is with you. 
Brenda Lozano is a fiction writer, essayist, and editor. She is the author of Todo nada (2009), Cuaderno ideal (2014; Loop, 2021, tr. Annie McDermott), the short story collection Cómo piensan las piedras (2017), Brujas (2020; Witches, 2022, tr. Heather Cleary), and Soñar como sueñan los árboles (2024; Mothers, forthcoming October 2025, tr. Heather Cleary). Named among the Hay Festival’s Bogotá39 (best Latin American writers under forty), she holds grants from the Borchard Foundation and Mexico’s national council for the arts. Lozano writes for El País and lives in Mexico City.
Heather Cleary is an award-winning translator of poetry and prose from Spanish whose work has been recognized by English PEN, the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, the National Book Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. She is the author of The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction (2021) and is currently writing a novel about translation and betrayal.
Illustration: Jess Rotter
