Sepharad

by Antonio Munoz Molina

  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 tr
eachery 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.’”

  The whispering in his ear made him sleepy but also bothered him, because he might have been a little bit on the libertine side but he was still a good Catholic. That Sister María del Gólgota, or Fanny, was prettier than a fresh-baked loaf of white bread—his words—but she seemed to him too disrespectful of holy things, and his conscience hurt him more for listening and not protesting than for going to bed with her. “All that talking she did, that chatter, right up against me on the cot, which any moment could have collapsed under our weight. She told me stories about her parents and her brother, who she said was in Africa and then in Tierra del Fuego, and about how one of her aunts had her locked up in a convent and forced her to become a novice, ‘For your own good, child, not for your happiness in the other world, because I know you don’t believe in Him, just like your father, but so you’ll have some security in this world and not end up with a shaved head and insulted in public like your poor mother, who wasn’t to blame for anything, and look how she fell apart and how we had to put her away for so long.’”

  She spoke feverishly, as wound up as when she’d pulled off his clothes or urged him into the painful tightness of her virginity. She was ecstatic, sucking up a cigarette almost in one breath, pressing him between her thighs until his bones cracked, thrusting her tongue into his mouth, which he didn’t like because it didn’t seem a thing for a decent woman to do. She consumed kisses, his cigarettes, precious minutes, and maybe took the greatest pleasure in saying aloud all the things that for years had dizzied her in her secret thoughts and kept her in a perpetual ferment of daydream and impossible rebellion. But when the bells struck two, she made him dress with an impatience similar to that with which she had undressed him two hours earlier, put into his pocket an envelope containing all the cigarette butts and ashes to hide the evidence, took his hand and led him down the stairs, with no hesitation, and more than once it seemed she had the gift of seeing in the dark. She peered out the little side door, then gestured for him to go, and a second later he was alone in the plaza, dazed, bruised, unable to believe that he had actually sneaked into a convent at midnight and deflowered a nun.

  IN HIS SHOE-REPAIR SHOP, and in Pepe Morillo’s barbershop next door, men liked to boast of their conquests and their feats with whores. Mateo kept silent, and smiled inside: If you only knew. He couldn’t tell his confessor about his adventure, so he suffered the uneasiness of living in mortal sin. I’m the only one he told, and that was more than forty years after the fact, when he’d been retired for some years and was living in Madrid. You should have seen the grin on his face, the two of us in the dining room of his home, surrounded by souvenirs of our hometown and prints and images of saints, and those bullfight posters. “Ah, my friend, how I’ve loved the bulls and the women, and what good times I’ve had, may God forgive me.”

  Before the television he’s addled and forgetful, blinking, dozing, content. He’ll watch a cartoon, a contest of long words, or a physician’s daily advice, wrapped in a continuous flow of images and talk from films and news and South American melodramas. He’ll perk up a little when he sees a beautiful woman on the screen, to whom he may say something, first checking to see that his wife isn’t anywhere near, one of those compliments that as a young man he tossed to women strolling arm in arm down Calle Real on a Sunday afternoon. When I was little, the man who owned the only TV in the neighborhood would say obscene things to the female announcers and miniskirted women in the commercials. If people ask Mateo a question, he doesn’t hear, or says something confused, or answers a question they haven’t asked. He may burst out laughing at some program that earlier made his tears flow. You set his meal before him and he eats every bite, that’s one thing that hasn’t changed, he hasn’t lost his appetite, but after a while he doesn’t remember and asks me when we’re going to eat, so he’s getting fat. I tell him to go outside, to breathe a little fresh air, not to spend the whole day watching TV, but as soon as he goes out the door I’m nervous, afraid he’ll get lost, as foolish as he is and as big as Madrid is nowadays, and I have to be careful that his shoes are tied and he’s wearing his socks, he who was once so stylish and fussy about what he wore, even if it was only to go to the market around the corner.

  He sits for hours wearing the same complacent smile, approving benevolently of everything he sees and hears, the conversations of the neighbor women and the transvestites at Sandra’s kiosk, the news programs and bulletins, the shouts of the women selling fish in the market, the medical advice on the morning shows, the faces of the living dead he meets in Chueca Plaza and on the dark corners of the barrio when he goes out wearing his great overcoat and Tyrolean hat. Sometimes when I visit him, he doesn’t recognize me at first. I sit down by him in the dining room, and he looks at me puzzled, trying to follow the conversation, and while he’s telling me something or I’m trying to get one of his old stories out of him, his eyes wander to the TV and he forgets that there’s anyone else in the room. But I have a trick that never fails: I get close to him, when his wife isn’t around, and say in a low voice, “Ave María Purísima.” His eyes light up, and he smiles the roguish smile he used to have when he talked to me about women, and he replies, “Conceiving without sin.”

  HE FELT ASHAMED every time he repeated those words, when every morning at the same hour he saw the two dark silhouettes outside the glass door, and he would put out his cigarette, stow it in the drawer, and lower his head, pretending to be absorbed in his work, tearing a worn, twisted heel off an old shoe or putting on those metal reinforcements we called heel plates in our town, routine repairs during the hard times when almost no one could afford a new pair of shoes. He would feel the double scrutiny—alarming and magnetic—of Sister Barranco and Sister María del Gólgota, Fanny in the secrecy of their blasphemous rendezvous, the dark nights and blind lust in the icy cell, and when both nuns said in unison, “Ave María Purísima,” he heard in the younger woman’s voice invitation, recollection, and challenge, and as he said, “Conceiving without sin,” the formula he had repeated since he was a boy without ever having thought about its meaning, he would feel a strange mixture of thrill and contrition.

  It was difficult for him to look up at them, and he tried not to meet the two pairs of eyes, lest a sign from Sister María del Gólgota be intercepted by the older nun, yet he also feared to miss the heartening nod that the little door would be open for him that night. He’d slept with many women, but this adventure caused him uncertainty and confusion, contained something that deeply wounded his masculine self-esteem, and disturbed the perfect simplicity of mind he’d enjoyed until now. “I wonder if you can explain this to me, you who have studied and know so many things. Why am I afraid of her? If I decide not to see her anymore, why do I leave my house before twelve and die of impatience for the light to come on in the tower? She’s wonderful, that’s the truth, better than a hundred loaves of bread and a hundred cheeses, and I go crazy when I think about running my hands over her body in the darkness, about the smell of her, about seeing that white flesh in the flare of the lighter or glowing ash of the cigarette.”

  But the one flaw she had, which he noticed the first night and only got worse, was how much she talked after the faena, the third pass, as he would say, using the language of the bullfight. Before it, no: from the moment he entered her cell until they were both limp, the woman only breathed, panted, and moaned. But as soon as she was satisfied, she stuck to him like a leech, like a clamp locking him between her thighs,
and jabbered into his ear, shaking him angrily if she saw he was beginning to doze, and he felt the touch of her lips and the endless hiss of her voice long after he was with her, when he was on his way home after two in the morning, wrapped in his cape, or when he woke from a dream about disgrace or scandal, or when he was alone in his shoe-repair shop and stopped hearing the songs on the radio, because her voice buzzed like an insect in his ear, or like pounding blood or his heart beating, and it turned into other voices that gradually he was becoming familiar with, voices from her long-ago life and ghostly family: the father wanting his daughter to get her doctorate in science or civil engineering, the mother saying her rosary, the venomous aunt clad in mourning, who came to get Fanny and her brother at the police station on the border when they ran away to France hidden in a freight car, planning to join the Resistance against the Germans or to place themselves at the service of the Republican government in exile. They were like Santa Teresa and her brother, when they escaped from their home to the land of the Moors to convert the infidels or die as martyrs, “with the difference that we didn’t have a home any longer because the Nacionales shot my father as soon as they came into our town at the end of the war, and they shaved my mother’s head and tattooed a hammer and sickle on her skull and paraded her with other women who were Reds or the wives of Reds through the center of the town, and forced her and the other women to scrub the floor of the church, on their knees on the icy stones. All because they hated my father so much, who was the best and most peaceful and meticulous man in the world, even in summer he wore his suit coat, celluloid collar, and bow tie. Just because at the beginning of the war he was walking down the street dressed that way, he was almost shot by some militiamen, and in that same suit, collar, and bow tie the agitators led him to the firing squad three years later, and he told my brother, ‘At least it isn’t my own who’re killing me.’”