Carlos Fentanes

Conversations with Virgin Mary

The next day I went back to the hospital Radiology waiting room and I hoped the man would be there again. The one who had spoken to me strangely the morning before. I wanted to ask who he was, why he was telling me these things, though I doubted I’d get a straight answer.

I sat and opened my phone, scrolled through emails, tried to look occupied. The fluorescent light hummed like it had been burning for decades. He wasn’t there.

When I asked the nurses, they said he often came in the mornings, but then he might vanish for weeks. Nobody knew where. He always returned though, like a planet moving in an orbit only he understood.

I was gathering my jacket to leave when he rushed in—two paper cups in his hands, the smell of burnt coffee filling the waiting room.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, slightly out of breath. “She told me you would come. I stopped at Starbucks. This will be a long conversation.”

He handed me a large black coffee, my name written on the cardboard sleeve. The handwriting startled me—it looked too familiar, almost like my father’s. I stared at it, wondering.

“You should try mine,” he added quickly. “One sugar, one oat milk shot. You’ll need to break your habits if you want to continue.” Without pause he swapped the cups.

His cup bore a name: Jorge.

“Jorge?” I asked.

“Yes. From my mother’s heroes.”

“Heroes?”

“St. George, the one who killed the dragon. And also Jorge Luis Borges. She adored his stories. Her favorite was The Library of Babel.”

“When I think of Borges,” I said, “I think of The Aleph. The possibility of seeing everything, every place, every person at once.”

“That was Borges’ secret,” Jorge nodded, as though confirming something I hadn’t asked. “He could see everything.”

“You said she told you I was coming?”

“Oh yes. There’s much to show you. Not my words—hers.”

“Hers?”

“Virgin Mary!”

From his coat he drew out a thin folder, edges worn soft with use. “These are the first pages. My hand was trembling when I wrote them, the Parkinson’s already in its first stages. The words slip, the lines tilt. But you will understand.”

And he placed the manuscript in my hands.

---

Monday, August 18

I am not appearing to you as a vision, for visions can be doubted. I am appearing as writing, which is more fragile but also more permanent. The word resists time differently than the image. Remember this.

Do not expect doctrine here. Do not expect to understand the whole. There are truths beyond your human nature, and they will not bend to your comprehension.

There is an import… (text breaks off here, illegible)

What you hold are fragments of a greater order — they speak, but never in full. I am not here to explain, but to remind. Your Soul does not forget, but you do.

There are three silences in which I speak:
– the silence of the hospital corridors,
– the silence of unanswered prayers,
– the silence between two consecutive heartbeats.

If you learn to hear those, you will recognize me.

[… ink stain, two lines indecipherable …]

---

I will share more of these pages in the weeks to come. For now, this is the first fragment.