These days, the thrum of web traffic and the holler of an excavator invade discussions at coffee shop tables gathered outside the Swedish Hillside pastry shop, an Austin spots where writer Stephen Harrigan and a couple of author buddies have actually lengthy collected to switch concepts. As soon as Harrigan rode his Expedition down capital to get hold of a croissant and coffee below for around $1.25; the expense on a current see was 10 times greater and the congested road testing for biking. Also this relatively historical location is a mirage: The coffee shop has actually relocated two times. Following door, the excavator is hectic digging deep into a big crater at its previous website.
Modification in Austin appears consistent, yet Harrigan’s buddies preserve their link. Harrigan credit scores Lawrence Wright, his Pulitzer Champion next-door neighbor and the morning meal club owner, with motivating his most current nonfiction publication– an expedition of a peasant woman’s visions of the Virgin Mary on a remote mountaintop in Portugal: Sorrowful Mysteries, The Guard Kid of Fatima and the Destiny of the Twentieth Century ( Alfred A. Knopf, April 2025) .
Harrigan cases he initially planned to create just a short article regarding this sincere peasant woman, Lucia, and his lengthy attraction with the secret revelation she left after hearing her tale from a religious woman at Catholic institution in Abilene.
Yet Wright vows that his friend required just a push. “The enigma of the Fatima predictions permeated his growing-up years, as it provided for many Catholics because period,” Wright informed the Texas Observer. “It appeared a best suit in between an author and a topic that has actually been biding in the darkness his whole life.”
Harrigan, that was birthed in Oklahoma City and elevated in Abilene and Corpus Christi, is a respected writer of greater than a loads publications– books, nonfiction, essays– and regarding 40 movie scripts, however he would certainly never ever in the past thought about composing a narrative. “This is sort of a sideways narrative,” he claimed. “I have not lived an extremely memoirish life.”
Harrigan, among the initial team authors of Texas Monthly publication, asserts to be just an unexpected reporter. He ended up being a “backyard male” and started cutting yards and composing posts to foot the bill after finishing from the College of Texas in 1970. 10 years later on, books “occurred out of publication items”: A tale on the fierce capture of wild dolphins for a fish tank developed his launching Aransas in 1980. The chronicle of an eccentric Italian artist that resided in San Antonio and left his heritage sculpted in sculptures throughout the Lone Celebrity State motivated Remember Ben Clayton, his 2012 legend of household satisfaction, loss, and estrangement.
Yet, when he initially took a trip to the Central Portuguese mountaintop where this peasant woman declared to have actually seen her visions– his press reporter’s trip ended up being progressively individual. Harrigan’s link with Lucia and her 2 more youthful relatives, every one of whom declared to have actually connected with the Virgin Mary in 1917, converged with his earliest memories. He and these long-dead Catholic children had all stooped to state the exact same Latin words: Ave Maria, gratia plena … What’s even more, he also had actually busily counted on the power of a kindhearted virgin, as he composes, “normally illustrated putting on a blue cape, her arms open at her sides and her hands open.”
Like them, he matured thinking Mary never ever died, however rose to paradise. He really felt relocated when he checked out the locations those youngsters lived and passed away– and when he walked via the massive temple that stands in the location of a scraggly Holm Oak where they declared to have actually seen a divine beautiful orb.
The outcome of that expedition and reporting is a knotted story of Harrigan’s life, which sees him abandon Catholicism as a UT pupil in Austin’s loafer years, and of the life of Lucia, the earliest of the 3 youngster enthusiasts and the just one to make it through to the adult years. It’s likewise an expedition of the celebration, background, and tales bordering the Virgin Mary, Jesus’ mom, whose location of fatality continues to be a secret for theologians and chroniclers alike. He likewise discovers why a lot of explorers still go to locations where she’s apparently come back, consisting of Fatima, Portugal; Lourdes, France; and Mexico City.
The appealing story of Lucia’s secret letter, a prediction from the Virgin that was offered to the pope and was left unopened for years, is the enigma that mesmerized Harrigan as a kid. Yet, as an agnostic grownup, he dug much deeper right into the life of the woman, illustrated in his publication’s cover picture putting on a head covering, a lengthy dark skirt, and a puncturing, haunted appearance. He composes normally regarding this enthusiast, whose accounts of the virgin brought a crowd of explorers– and economic destroy– to her moms and dads’ grazing land. He composes compellingly of the investigations and viciousness she dealt with, which drove her to look for the life of a cloistered religious woman.
In his job, Harrigan usually “looks for psychological affiliations.” Bringing a long-dead Portuguese religious woman to life might feel like a difficulty for the gladly wed daddy of 3 that left the church long earlier. Yet he has no problem connecting to an enthusiastic women personality, according to one more veteran buddy, the Austin storyteller Elizabeth Criminal, that lately worked together with Harrigan on a movie script based upon The Which Means Tree, her story of a lady’s mission to hound the hill lion that eliminated her mom. “Steve simply has an inherent and distinctly observant understanding of humanity. He can place himself right into the mind of his personalities and intuit their objectives with an uncommon convenience.”
In an outbuilding-turned-studio in Austin’s Tarrytown, Harrigan produces in a room bordered by wall surfaces of publications and a life time of souvenirs. On one rack are 3 plastic dolls of the Portuguese prophet youngsters. On one more rests a glass votive candles including the head of state illustrated in his 2017 book, A Buddy of Mr. Lincoln, which envisions a more youthful Abe as a risible, literary, and just in your area renowned legal representative.
Simply over his workplace chair is a decal with the motto: “Puedes exhumarlo? ,” which among his little girls published up as a joke after Harrigan mangled the translation of his 1970s catch phrase: “Can you dig it?” He understands that actually suggests: “Can you exhume it?” Yet, in some way, the motto still fits an author that collects realities in “odd edges” and composes in the middle of stacks of the proof he’s collected.
Perched atop among the greatest shelfs stand classic Western porcelain figurines, guys on horseback standing for historic and imaginary personalities, whom he calls “his earliest buddies.” He was 5 when he obtained the initial from his mom’s brand-new hubby. (His birth daddy, a WWII professional and examination pilot, passed away in an accident when his mom was expecting with him.)
Harrigan can conveniently reconnect with memories of his fatherless very early boyhood, as he performed in his 2022 unique The Leopard Is Loose— diving right into a globe where darkness change right into beasts and genuine and fictional risks socialize. He understands that visions and spirituality that grow in a kid never ever absolutely vanish in a grownup. That connectedness offers Sorrowful Mysteries, an all of a sudden global charm: Visitors all at once experience the marvel of childhood years and the high cost of unconfined idea.
In search of this tale– his very own and Lucia’s– Harrigan checked out the ascetic cell where the Portuguese peasant woman endured her grown-up life alone along with the medical facility and mountainside hut where each of her more youthful relatives died in the 1917 flu pandemic.
When he showed up someday on the Sierra de Aire, near the area where all 3 declared to have actually seen the Virgin, Harrigan experienced his very own vision: a shaggy black canine slipping along a path that attaches the flashy modern-day Fatima temple to the modest town where Lucia was birthed. As he came close to, Harrigan’s vision changed, and he understood the doglike number was an explorer– a lady on her knees creeping in the dust. She, like him, was looking for the best course.
