Traveler
(Part VI: Medjugorje)

During the time Lalo lived with my grandmother Chayo, way back in the early seventies, he had a dream I remember he told us about. I guess the memory is extremely vivid for me because I had never heard anyone tell that kind of dream before. In the dream, Lalo said he was looking up to the sky when he saw the Virgin Mary appear above him. She had smiled sweetly at him, and had then dropped two carnations into his hands: one white, one red. I recall he was quite surprised with the dream and kept wondering what it meant. Maybe I’m reading too much into it now, but later events seemed to give it a special significance.

        Years later, near the end of 1993, when Lalo was participating in John Grepe’s study group, it was decided a small number of the participants would travel to Medjugorje, where there were claims of apparitions of the Virgin.

Virgin of Medjugorje

                 
      Lalo really wanted to go, but knew it was completely out of the question. There were a number of insurmountable obstacles which made it impossible for him to travel to Medjugorje. First and foremost, there was the question of money. He didn’t have any and so couldn’t pay for the trip. Besides that, he didn’t have his cartilla, the obligatory military document all Mexican males must get when they turn 18 years old. This document indicates that the person in question has completed his “military service”; in Lalo’s day, this consisted of a year of Saturday mornings spent doing marching drills and calisthenics. After that, the document was “liberated”, which meant it had been cleared officially. Without the “cartilla liberada” a man couldn’t get a passport between the ages of 18 and 45, after which the document was unnecessary as his “military duties” were over.

         Lalo had never even gone to get his preliminary military document, the precartilla. In those days, you could have more than one nationality until you turned 18, when you had to decide for one definitive nationality. As usual, for Lalo, luck intervened; he had left the country for Paris a little before his “last” Mexican passport expired and with a brand new US passport. From Paris he had travelled to the US as an American citizen; from the US he had come to Mexico on a tourist visa, had returned to the US as an American citizen, and had again come into Mexico definitely as a tourist. Once here, he had used his Mexican Birth Certificate to get official documents like his driver’s license, and had asked my father to get him a not totally legitimate precartilla with a relative of my father’s second wife; this family member was in the Mexican Army. This he used in all other cases where it was necessary. Most of the time, you could get by with the precartilla, except in the case of a passport. For that, you had to have the whole thing, the cartilla liberada, or there was no getting out of the country unless you still had a valid tourist visa (which allowed a maximum “visit” of six months) or you literally walked across the border to the US with your American Birth Certificate in hand, pretending you were from the US and had just taken a stroll across the border, losing the tourist visa along the way (Lalo, of course, did this a couple of times when he went to the US for a visit with his friend, Carlos). In the case of Medjugorje, there was no possibility leaving without a valid passport and, without a cartilla liberada, there was no possibility of getting one.

        If something like this had happened to any person other than Lalo, it would have been the end. In Lalo’s case? Difficult, maybe, but not impossible. A friend of his within Grepe’s group offered to lend him the necessary money as he believed Lalo absolutely had to go to Medjugorje. Why did he believe this? I can’t remember, but it was important enough for him to actually finance Lalo. But what about the cartilla, the passport, the impossibility of getting out of the country? Some friend of a friend knew a guy who knew a lawyer who knew someone else who got Lalo a temporary dispensation so that Lalo could get a temporary passport which would only last long enough to get him to Bosnia and Herzegovina and back.

        During the trip, I think Lalo found more questions than answers; he couldn’t totally make up his mind about what was happening in Medjugorje. But he did meet another man from Mexico who offered him a great job in charge of the complete musical department of a small Catholic TV channel. Lalo worked with him for several years and was able to cement his reputation as a musician and producer. He also brought back some weird cold virus he propagated among all of us. He did the same thing again some time later when he travelled to Venezuela in search of another set of apparitions of the Virgin.

        Did all this contribute to his fervor? Undoubtedly. Even if he was never sure about the manifestations of the Virgin in those two places, they were a part of his spiritual journey. And, curiously enough, apart from the dream he had as a teen and these two voyages in search of the Blessed Mother, I like to think he was called to her service the day he died: September 8^th, Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and, naturally, a Thursday.

Susana Olivares Bari