"Mr. Mendoza's Paintbrush" by Luis Alberto Urrea

Hi, I'm LeVar Burton, and this is LeVar Burton Reads. In every episode, I handpick a different piece of short fiction and read it to you. The only thing these stories have in common is that I love them, and I hope you will too. You know, sometimes I want a short story to just transport me, to fully immerse me in another time or place, to give me a whole set of characters who feel so real that they become my friends, family, my enemies, in just a few thousand words.

And Luis Alberto Urrea can construct a short story that will do exactly that. This one is from his collection entitled The Water Museum. Luis is going to take us to the town of El Rosario in Sinaloa, Mexico. It was historically a mining town, rich in silver and gold,

and has a beautifully Baroque church with an altar covered in gold leaf that was rebuilt after the original structure was on the verge of collapse. Luis's father is from the town, and Luis has come back to it again and again in his writing, sometimes calling it tres camarones.

This version of the town is all his own, and he's given El Rosario a graffiti artist in residence, Mr. Mendoza, who acts as the townspeople's conscience and calls them out in their hypocrisy and wrongdoing.

Luis writes wonderful and warm prose, and somehow he always gives us the perfect level of detail so that each of his characters is immediately familiar to us. If you've never encountered his writing, you're in for a treat.

Luis Alberto Urrea is the author of 17 books, and he's been a Pulitzer Prize finalist for nonfiction, a member of the Latino Literature Hall of Fame, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

So there. His most recent novel is called Goodnight Irene, The story of a woman who joins the Red Cross during World War II and finds herself on the front lines. The story is inspired by Louise's own mother, who worked as a donut dolly, serving coffee and donuts right at the heart of the action.

And now, if you're ready, let's get into today's story. Let's take a deep breath. And begin. Mr. Mendoza's Paintbrush by Luis Alberto Urrea.

When I remember my village, I remember the color green. A green that is rich, perhaps too rich, and almost bubbling with humidity and the smell of mangoes. I remember heat, the sweet sweat of young girls that collected on my upper lip as we kissed behind the dance stand in the town square. I remember days of nothing and rainstorms,

dreaming of making love while walking around the plazuela, admiring Mr. Mendoza's portraits of the mayor and the police chief, and saying dashing things to the girls. They, of course, walked in the opposite direction,

followed closely by their unsympathetic aunts, which was only decent. Looking back, I wonder if perhaps saying those dashing things was better than making love. Mr. Mendoza wielded his paintbrush there for 30 years. I can still remember the old women muttering bad things about him on their way to market. This was nothing extraordinary.

The old women muttered bad things about most of us at one time or another, especially when they were on their way to market at dawn. Double file, dark shawls pulled tight around their faces to buy pots of warm milk with the cow's hairs still floating in them. Not until later in the day, after their cups of coffee with a bit of this hairy milk strained through an old cloth and many

spoonfuls of sugar, would they finally begin to concede the better points of the populace, except for Mr. Mendoza. Mr. Mendoza had taken the controversial position that he was the graffiti king of all Mexico. But we didn't want a graffiti king.

My village is named El Rosario. Perhaps being named after a rosary was what gave us our sense of importance, a sense that we from Rosario were blessed among people, allowed certain dispensations.

The name itself came from a Spanish monk, or was it a Spanish soldier named Bonifacio Rojas, who broke his rosary. The beads cascaded over the ground.

Kneeling to pick them up, he said a brief prayer, asking the good Lord to direct him to the beads. Like all good Catholics, he offered the Lord a deal. If you give me my beads back, I will give you a cathedral on the spot.

The good Lord sent down St. Elmo's fire, and directly beneath that, the beads. Bonifacio got a taste of the Lord's wit, however, when he found an endless river of silver directly beneath the beads. It happened in 1655, the 3rd of August, a Saturday. The church was built, obliterating the ruins of an Indian settlement,

and Rosario became the center of Chametla province. For some reason, the monks who followed Bonifacio took to burying each other in the cathedral's thick adobe walls. Some mysterious element in our soil mummifies monks,

and they stood in the walls for 500 years. Now that the walls were crumbling, though, Monks pop out with dry grins about once a year. When I was young, there was a two-year lull in the gradual revelation of monks.

We were certain that the hidden fathers had all been expelled from the walls. A thunderclap proved us wrong. Our rainy season begins on the 6th of June, without fail. That year, however, the rain was a day late,

and the resulting thunderclap that announced the storm was so explosive, windows cracked on our street. Burrows on the outskirts burst open their stalls and charged through town throwing kicks right and left.

People near the river swore their chickens laid square eggs. The immense frightfulness of this celestial apocalypse was blamed years afterward for gout, diarrhea, birthmarks, drunkenness, and those mysterious female aches nobody could define but everyone called dolencias.

There was one other victim of the thunderclap. The remaining church tower split apart and dropped a fat slab of clay into the road. In the morning, my cousin Jaime and I were thrilled to find a mummified hand rising from the rubble, one saffron finger aimed at the sky. An evangelist, I said.

Even in death, he said. We moved around the pile to see the rest of him. We were startled to find a message painted on the monk's chest. How do you like me now?

Deflated. Deflate your pomp or float away.