Sepharad (35 page)

Rounds of foaming beer, waiters' voices, the smell of frying oil, the snorting of the coffee machine, the tinny tunes from the jukebox and cigarette machine. Our storyteller has a somewhat childish face, jovial and very round, but he is bald and wears a
suit, like a lawyer or notary, with a small insignia in the buttonhole of the jacket and a silver tiepin on which you can make out a tiny figure of the Virgin. He interrupts himself to accept with mock reverence the large plate of steaming sausage the waiter has just set on the bar, and with food crammed in his mouth recites:

 

Morcilla, blessed lady,
worthy of our veneration.

 

He drinks some beer and then wipes his mouth where a black sliver of sausage has lodged between his teeth. He lowers his voice: “Imagine you're in that vast Plaza de Santa María,” he says, stretching his arms wide, satisfied at having chosen the adjective
vast,
which corresponds to the gesture, evoking the blackness of a broad space surrounded by spectral churches and palaces, in another world and another time. One night, when he was in bed after returning from the home of his Madame Lieutenant, after, as he put it, having performed his chores, he lay in the dark listening to the ticking of an alarm clock that was louder than a pendulum clock. He never lost sleep over anything, but he realized that night he wasn't going to sleep. He got dressed, put on his cape, muffler, and cap, went outside, and slunk through narrow streets as if hiding from someone. About midnight, in thick fog, he ended up at the plaza where the only light came from one or two lamps on the street corners, so faint they were nothing but splotches of light glowing like the phosphorus on the hands and numbers of his clock. He could see the dark outlines of buildings, towers, statue-lined eaves, bell towers, the Santa María and El Salvador Churches, the lion sculptures in front of the city hall, and the forbidding, massive facade of the Convent of Santa Clara, which he didn't dare approach, not even at that hour.

A light went on in the highest window of the tower. Now that the fog was lifting, things were more visible but still veiled. He noticed, with a stab of fear, a motionless figure that appeared to be
looking at him. “At that distance, and in the state I was in, I couldn't recognize a face, yet I was sure it was the young nun, Sister María del Gólgota, who had come to the tower to see me, and she was turning the light on and off to let me know she knew it was me.” The light went out and did not come on again, but he stood there looking up, alone in the deserted plaza, with no notion of time or cold, unsure of what he had seen, wondering if he was dreaming. He stood waiting a long while, so still that the sound of the slow, echoing bells striking two sent a shiver down his spine.

 

THE NEXT MORNING
he puzzled over his nocturnal outing, a confused mixture of fantasy and certainty. He had definitely seen a light go on and off, and a figure in a nun's toque, but it might not have been Sister María del Gólgota, though he seemed to remember her features in every detail, down to the yellow glow of the lamplight on her skin. And her lips were painted a bright red, the rough, fever-hot lips he had kissed, but that must have been a hallucination.

“Ave María Purísima.”

He was so lost in his work and his thoughts that he hadn't heard the glass door open, and when he looked up he saw before him the very person that had occupied his imagination for so many days. Sister María del Gólgota was taller, slimmer, whiter, not quite as young—perhaps because she did not have the contrast of Sister Barranco beside her—but she was also, above all else, a real woman, not a nun, with a woman's eyes, and in her throaty voice there was no trace of the religious sweetness of her former visits. She was a woman trapped in robes and mantles from another century, and her gaze, for a moment, held a frankness he wasn't used to in his dealings with women, not even those who yielded to him most brazenly. He did nothing, he didn't even make the respectful move to stand up, didn't take the cigarette from his lips or put down the awl and old shoe he had in his
hands. He simply heard himself replying, as he did every day, “Conceiving without sin.”

She made a gesture of impatience, looked toward the street, stepped forward and said a few words to him, then stepped back, and as he started to ask her to repeat what she'd said, the door opened and the bent and dedicated Sister Barranco appeared, muttering complaints and prayers, brusquely demanding the overdue alms, scolding him for smoking and for cherishing bulls more than novenas and also chastising Sister María del Gólgota because she hadn't waited for her, why only yesterday she'd been in the infirmary with a high fever and today you should see her, so valiant though the doctor never learned what ailed her, cured by special dispensation of our Most Blessed Virgin she was. As he listened to Sister Barranco, Mateo thought back and was able to review the words the young nun had spoken to him so quickly and quietly, hardly daring to believe that he'd heard what he heard, that it was not the fabrication of an inflamed imagination. “Just after twelve, wait until you see me turn a light on and off three times in the highest window, then push the small door around the corner, come up three flights, and on the third landing you will find a large window to the left and a door to the right. Carefully push that door open, and I will be waiting for you.”

 

AN INFLAMED IMAGINATION:
as the story progresses, the narrator measures his pauses, emphasizes the expressions he likes best, savors them as he would a swallow of wine or piece of sausage. The group gathers more closely around him, foam grown warm slides down a mug of beer forgotten on the bar, like the remains of the meals that no one will finish and the waiter will not remove.

I picture it, that night, finally, a night of drama, the first of many, because there were many . . . I imagine him in his cape,
muffler, and cap, like the bandit Luis Candelas in that song we listened to on the radio as children, do you remember?

 

Beneath the black cape
of Luis Candelas
my heart doesn't beat faster,
it flies, it flies.

 

The plaza is inky black, like the mouth of a wolf, there isn't any of the lighting that they put in later so the tourists could see, something, in my view, that robbed it of its flavor, because when the electricity came, the mystery was lost. He turns the first corner, the one by the city hall, fearful that someone might see him from a window. He sticks to the wall, and doesn't believe that what the nun promised him that morning is true, or that he will have the courage to sneak into the convent at midnight like a thief, or like Don Juan, because even if the girl is hot as a fox, he is a coward, and suddenly he is overcome with panic, he'll be discovered and accused of blasphemy, people will point at him, expel him from the Last Supper crew and the Corpus Christi Society, he may even be forced to close the business that provides him with a living, a modest one but comfortable enough in these difficult times. He'll be denied his place in the presidential box at the bullring, to which he was often invited during the corridas to act as an adviser, where, smoking an extraordinary cigar and wearing a carnation in the buttonhole of his striped suit, the one for grand occasions, he rubbed elbows with the highest authorities of the city: the mayor, the police commissioner, the commander of the Guardia Civil, the parish priest of San Isidoro—that Don Estanislao, who, you remember, was in spite of his cassock and his reputation for austerity a rabid fan of the bulls and in 1947 administered the last rites to the incomparable Manolete, right there in that damned Linares Plaza.

Overwhelmed by the danger he was walking into, he nevertheless didn't stop, didn't turn around and go back home to the safety and security of his bed. There was still time, he hadn't yet walked across the plaza, hadn't yet seen a light in the window, but prudence had no effect on his feet, and to help him on his way toward the small side door of the convent, he told himself it was all a joke of the nun's, or she was still out of her head with fever, so what did it matter if he kept walking? The door would be as tightly locked as any door in the city at that hour, especially as it was the door of a convent, with the wooden bolt shot, the way we would lock up at night during the bad times of the war, when any night they might come looking for you and take you for a little walk and leave you in a ditch with your socks and shoes thrown far from your sprawled corpse.

But the light did go on and off three times, and he did walk to the corner of the convent with trembling legs, telling himself that in spite of everything the door wouldn't open, and in fact it resisted at first, which was both a relief to his cowardice and a painful disappointment to the desire that had flowed through him when he saw the light in the window. The door, compact, low, and narrow, studded with rows of large rusted nails, slipped open silently at a second, more determined push, and when he closed it and found himself in darkness even deeper than that of the plaza that moonless night, he thought, with both terrified fatalism and raging lust, that there was no turning back now, and he climbed the three flights of steps, feeling along the walls, hearing the whispers and faint echoes wakened by his footsteps, feeling cobwebs against his face and the cold sweat from the stones against the palms of his hands. Finally, he saw a narrow window like an embrasure on his left, a strip of faint phosphorescence in the blackness. On the landing, to the right, he felt the wood of a door, and as he reached out to push it, he feared that he might have miscounted the flights he'd climbed. As he stood there like a
stone, not daring to do anything, paralyzed in the shadow, his eyes began to adjust, and he could make out the jamb and panels of the door. There was a soft sound, a friction or breathing not his, the door opened, and a hand grabbed him by his cape and pulled him inside. He shuddered as a voice in his ear warned him to stoop because the ceiling was low, then as the door closed he was dragged forward and pushed onto a hard, narrow cot where he was felt, explored, clumsily relieved of his clothes, with a mixture of inexpert roughness and determination, licked, bitten, instructed, crushed by a naked body that became so entangled with his that he couldn't tell, in the daze of his excitement and the darkness, what he was touching or what was touching him. He was shaken like a rag doll, shoved against a wall that chilled and scraped his shoulder, muzzled by a sweaty hand when his breathing became too loud, tossed as if by a powerful wave, then held as he fell to the floor, and when finally he was left in peace and lay exhausted on the hard cot, he touched and smelled the liquid that wet his groin and concluded that it was blood on his fingertips, that for the first time in his life he had deflowered a woman. “Ave María Purísima,” she murmured, and he, a little uneasy about the irreverence of it, replied in her ear, “Conceiving without sin.”

“Tell me,” she asked, “is it true that a cigarette tastes good afterward?”

“Like heaven.”

“I will smoke one.”

When at last he saw her face in the flare of the cigarette lighter, he didn't recognize her, because he had never seen her hair, which was chestnut, although very short and wiry, almost like her pubic hair. It was also her first cigarette, which she liked immensely despite the coughing and dizziness; it made her think of riding the merry-go-round horses when she was a little girl. “The thing about women,” he said, “is that when it's over and
the man wants to sleep or go home, they want to talk—to communicate, as we say today.” They tried to make themselves comfortable on the cot, piled all their clothing on top of them, but it was so cold they shivered. Afraid they might be discovered, he asked to leave, but she held him captive between her legs and told him there was time for another cigarette, the bells still hadn't struck two.

She spoke in a quiet voice, so near his ear he could feel the moisture of her breath and lips, which she'd painted red for him, she said, with lipstick stolen from the perfume shop on Calle Real at a moment when neither the clerk nor Sister Barranco was watching, and she laughed at the memory. “The witch doesn't trust me, never takes her eyes off me, but I'm quicker than she is, and besides she's getting blind. She deserves it for the venom she spits every time she speaks, even when she's saying her rosary.” Her talk seemed to him as improper as the delight she took in smoking, she even learned to blow smoke rings, expelling them slowly from her painted lips. “María del Gólgota, what a cross that name is, my real name is Francisca, or Fanny, which is what my father called me, may he rest in peace, he was a man who liked all things English. He wanted his little girl to learn English, play tennis, use a typewriter, drive a car, and go to the university and study something serious, not such foolishness for idle señoritas as teaching or fine arts but medicine or science. He made my brother study too, and play sports, but I was his favorite; he said that because I was a girl I needed more skills to take care of myself in the world. My mother, although she let him do it because she had a weak character, complained, ‘He's trying to make a man out of her. Who will want to be the sweetheart of an engineer?' My father would say, ‘I can't believe I have a wife so backward that she's against the progress of women.'”

She imitated their voices, creating a complete play in the secret darkness of her cell and murmuring into his ear: the grave,
measured voice of her father, the whining voice of her mother, the voice of her brother, who had been her accomplice and hero from an early age, the croaking frog voice of Sister Barranco, and the various tones of ridicule and treachery used by the other nuns of the convent. “I know they hate me, want to poison me, those dizzy spells I suffer, Sister Barranco brought me warm broth but I don't trust her, ‘Here, Sister, this nice broth will make you feel better, it will raise the dead.' Well feed it to your mother, you witch. I began to get better as soon as I stopped drinking her broths and potions, and she with that ‘Come, Sister, let's lift that spirit of yours, look how well that tonic did I brought last night, although, of course, our prayers to the Holy Virgin were what helped most.'”