A. Muia. A Desert Between Two Seas: A Novel in Stories. University of Georgia Press, 2025. $26.95. 248 pp.
In the mid-third century AD, a Christian teenager fled into the Egyptian desert, seeking safety from religious persecution after his own brother-in-law betrayed him to the Roman pagan authorities. It turned out well for him at the end. He found a cave with a fresh water supply and a palm tree nearby—all he needed for food, drink, and clothing all at once. Eventually, a raven started bringing him his daily bread too. So he remained in his cave, in daily prayer and holy solitude, for the next one hundred years.
Legend holds it that the more famous Desert Saint, Anthony, befriended the very elderly Paul the Hermit towards the end of the latter’s life. Anthony buried him eventually as well. Even desert hermits need other people, it seems, at the vulnerable end of life stage. Even if the ravens can richly supply their other needs.
The Desert Saints, from the days of John the Baptist, that horsehair-wearer and honeyed locust-eater, have always been an odd lot. Saints they are, no doubt about it—men and women bent on the unwavering pursuit of God. And yet, often their lives are filled with sins they combat and, in some cases, cannot escape. Anthony, for one, had spent his twenty years of solitude, locked inside an abandoned Roman fort, fighting with demons that would not leave him alone. It isn’t just other people who cause us to sin, after all. We ourselves bring our sinful nature with us wherever we go, and these sins are what Anthony’s demons represent.
But what about the role the desert itself plays in the story of the saints it beckons, welcomes, persecutes, torments, sanctifies, and eventually absorbs into its sandy depths? That is the question at the heart of A. Muia’s beautiful new novel about a different desert—and a different sort of saints. Set in the Sonora Desert of Baja, California, A Desert Between Two Seas spans a period of over a century, from 1820 to 1937. Told in short staccato bursts, episodic stories, each one self-standing yet all of them connecting and extending each other, the tales revolve around two main characters, both a sort of modern-day desert saint.
At the opening of the novel, we meet the first of them: Fr. Espín, who is priest of the mission in Mulegé. He rescues a baby from his dead mother’s womb—literally cutting him out of the dead woman. The orphan, then, becomes his ward—a beloved son of the sort a priest could never otherwise have. The boy has a talent: he dives for pearls, bringing them back to his adoptive father, who decorates the local church with them. But one day the boy drowns while diving, and the devastated Fr. Espín cannot remain where he is. The locals in the mission do not blame him, yet he blames himself for encouraging the boy in such a risky activity that ultimately led to his death. And so, he departs into the desert: “At some hour in the night, he rose. He wrote no letter to the superior and blessed no one nor prayed. Abandoning all the sacred things, he slipped into the wilderness, a poor and exiled Cain with only the hand of God to recommend him.”
Is he a Cain, though? That is Fr. Espín’s view of himself, as he departs into the desert, like the Desert Saints of old. His very torment by his heavy guilt, though, already shows that he is no Cain, someone who killed a brother he hated in a fit of rage. Still, blood guilt demands atonement, and Fr. Espín wants nothing more than to atone for his sins in the rest of his life. But how?
Seeing himself as a curse upon the people whose care had been entrusted to him, Fr. Espín is seeking the solitude of Paul the Hermit and Anthony the Great. But just as too many ancient Desert Saints could not escape other people even in the farthest and loneliest depths of the desert, so Fr. Espín unwillingly finds himself beset by the company of others, time after time. Is it God’s hand bringing them to him at a time of need—his own and that of others?
The most poignant of all is the abandoned deaf toddler, born without ears, who is dropped off in his remote desert hut one day, twenty years after he had first taken care of the orphan boy at Mulegé. He takes care of this little girl, unexpectedly thrust into his life, remembering his love for the drowned boy before. To love a child is easy, natural, even for a hermit. As he picks her up for the first time, he remembers the feel of the infant boy in his arms decades earlier. But then one day the child’s mother, who had mysteriously abandoned her, just as mysteriously reappears to claim her back. Seeking to protect the child, Fr. Espín takes her along and escapes yet again.
But children have a habit of growing up—Deo volente. So it is that this little girl, Dolores, the bearer of sorrows, becomes the subject of the stories in the second half of the book, after her path diverges from that of the elderly Fr. Espín. Her life is not easy, and she too keeps moving around, a desert saint on the run from persecutions of men. And she acquires a reputation as a Pistolera, a violent shooter unafraid to protect herself. In one of the stories, a man who had known Dolores in the past talks about her with a woman now living in a house that once used to be that of Dolores: “She said the whole territory now talked of a woman who had killed three men or perhaps more. Such stories had a way of growing, and soon there might be ten or twenty men dead in the telling. It was said La Pistolera could hear nothing from the world of men but other forces spoke to her from beyond. Had he not heard the songs? Of pounding hearts and slain lovers and a great mane of hair that encircled the unwary.”
It is not surprising that Muia received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for this novel. While her work is not Gothic in O’Connor’s distinctive way, her writing is undeniably spiritually haunted. The two main characters of this novel, the priest and the deaf Pistolera, are an unlikely pairing, yet are kindred spirits formed by the desert setting of their lives. Their suffering, while profound, is never predictable or clichéd. Neither hermits nor monastics at the end, they see something that remains invisible to all others around them.
Only this desert could produce such saints, Muia’s stories suggest. Men and women of sorrows, convicted of their sins, haunted by the barren desert around them—this desert capable of bringing death to many in myriad ways. Yet they remain forever in love with it too, almost in spite of themselves, feeling its rhythms in their very marrow. And at the end, the desert alone can give these weary saints their longed-for rest.