Her father shot, her mother crazy, the furtive journey of days and nights toward the border in a trainload of merchandise, her brother and she sleeping on straw that reeked of manure and making wild plans to join the Resistance against Hitler and Franco, the hillsides covered with flowering almond and apple trees and the narrow streets of the town where they had spent the war years in perfect happiness while their mother prayed and their father administered a school for displaced children and kept wearing the suit and tie and hat and ankle-high boots of a meticulous Republican despite the fright the libertarian militia had given him. Then the others came, clubbed him with their rifle butts, and kicked him out of the house with its patio and grape arbor and fresh-water well where they’d lived four years almost like the Swiss Family Robinsons of that book that she and her brother loved so much. “Don’t lose heart, nothing will happen to me, this is just a mistake,” she spoke into Mateo’s ear in her father’s voice. When her brother went to take a bit of food and tobacco to the barracks where they had him locked up, what most impressed him was not going inside the pen filled with men sentenced to death but seeing his father unshaven and without the celluloid collar, filthy and in a wrinkled suit.
Yet it wasn’t her father but her brother who was the hero of her tales: her comrade in childhood games and adventures among the white blossoms of the apple and almond trees, her reading partner and the instigator of their plans to run away and enlist in social revolutions, partisan armies, clandestine cells of anti-Fascist resistance, to go explore Tierra del Fuego or Patagonia or the Gobi Desert. They caught her, locked her up in a convent, and forced her to become a nun under dark and terrible threats she never explained, though she was so full of other details, but at least her brother managed to escape, and at some point in the course of all those years a letter came to her through circuitous channels. “He’s living in America, I don’t know whether north or south, and moves a lot and has so many business affairs he can’t stay too long in any one place, he might be in Chicago or New York or Buenos Aires. He always wants to know about me, but because of the witches who kidnapped me his letters don’t reach me, and I can’t send anything to him, can’t ask him to help me, to come save me.”
“You help me,” she whispered, and Mateo felt her lips and fevered breath on his ear, “help me escape and we’ll go to America together to look for my brother. What’s keeping you here, a man is free to go anywhere he wants, not like a woman, who’s a prisoner even when she’s not locked up in a convent. You don’t have anything here, all you do is repair old shoes in that cubbyhole, smelling the old sweat people leave in their shoes, and you so young and strong, with those huge hands and that energy you have, nothing could stand in your way if you got out of here and went to America, where men go who have the courage to make the world their apple, as my brother did, and where women don’t live behind closed doors or drape themselves in eternal mourning or kill themselves having babies and working in the fields and scrubbing floors on their hands and knees and washing clothes in winter in troughs of cold water with scraps of soap that tear the skin off their hands.
“Where can a woman who’s fled a convent go here if she doesn’t have papers or a man to defend her and stand up for her? No father, no husband, no brother, not like America where a woman is worth as much as a man, if not more. There women smoke in public, wear trousers, drive a car to their office, and divorce when it suits them. They race along the highways, which are wide and built in a straight line, not like here, and the automobiles aren’t black and old but large and painted bright colors, and kitchens are shiny and white and filled with automatic appliances, so all you do is press a button and the floor is scrubbed, and there’s a machine that picks up dust and one that washes your clothes and leaves them ironed and folded, and the iceboxes don’t need blocks of ice, and every house has a garage and a garden, and lots of them have swimming pools. At those pools the women wear two-piece bathing suits and drink cool drinks and lounge in hammocks while their automatic machines do the housework. They drink and smoke and no one thinks they’re whores, and they not only paint their fingernails, they paint their toenails too, and if they complain about their husband and divorce him, he has to pay them a salary every month until they find another husband. And if they get bored with life in one place, they climb into their big bright cars and move to another city, California or Patagonia or Las Vegas or Tierra del Fuego, what wonderful names, you just have to say them and you feel your lungs fill with air, or they go to Chicago or New York and live in skyscrapers fifty stories high, in apartments that don’t need windows because the whole wall is glass, and where it’s never cold or hot because they have machines they call climate control.”
“But how do we go there, woman? What do we use to buy our passage on the ship?” he said, to be saying something, but she was furious at his lack of spine and scolded him in that murmur that made him want to sleep: “I have it all planned, you sell or lease your business, that will bring in something, since it’s in such a good location, and I’ll steal some valuable things here in the convent, a silver candelabra, a beaten gold reliquary, I can even cut a painting of the Virgin Mary out of its frame, they say it’s by Murillo, so we should get several thousand pesetas for it.” He turned to ice just thinking about it, a sacrilege in addition to profanation and blasphemy, not just public dishonor and excommunication but jail besides. Now he began to understand that this demented nun wanted something more from him than just sating her unholy lust, she wanted him to be an accomplice in her criminal plans, but what did he expect from the daughter of a Red who’d been taught free love and atheism?
HE COULDN’T SLEEP, was no good at work or his charitable activities and brotherhoods, he even reached the point of forgetting to listen to his poetry programs and bullfights on the radio. Now he feared not that someone would catch him as he sneaked into the convent or left it on those stormy winter nights that were so dark and deserted, but that she would drag him into her delirium, that he would lose the common sense that had guided him all his life and end up losing everything he had, the person he was, what he’d made of himself. He dreaded seeing her every morning with Sister Barranco and was nervous until she walked out the door, because the old nun was suspicious, watching both him and her companion for signs, for proof that would push them both toward catastrophe. But he was also worried if they didn’t come, imagining that María del Gólgota was ill again and in the delirium of her fever divulging the secret of their meetings in her cell, or she might have escaped and was hiding and as soon as it was dark she would come looking for him, as she had threatened so many times. “All this because I broke my rule and got involved with a beautiful woman, a woman, moreover, who doesn’t have a husband or anything to tie her down except those old nuns who don’t know anything. A man should choose a mistress who’s on the homely side, married, and knows how to maintain some decency even in adultery. And if possible she should have a solid financial base, so she won’t be swept away by the romantic whim to leave everything behind and run off with you.”
“What a philosopher you are, you should write down this advice so your disciples can follow it,” I told him, and he laughed and motioned for me to keep my voice down and not let his wife hear. “We need your memoirs, maestro, or else tell me everything and let me be your official biographer.”
It’s too late now, he doesn’t seem to remember, or if he does, he isn’t talking. The doctors have checked his head and say he’s all right, thank God, he doesn’t have that illness old people get, Alzheimer’s, when they can’t take care of themselves and don’t recognize anything. The doctor who examined his head says that he may be depressed from not doing anything and not knowing anyone in Madrid. But what kind of depression is it if he laughs at the least thing, all by himself? When he’s watching TV and I’m doing something in the kitchen, I hear him laughing and come out, and he’s roaring with laughter although there’s nothing funny about the program, which could be one of those news repo
rts about war and hunger.
SHE GREW ROUGHER AND more demanding in her erotic needs; in a few weeks she had acquired all the depravity other women fall into only after long years of vice. Every night she became more talkative, more monotonous in her stories about the past and her mad schemes for the future. She began to discuss the best dates for her escape, to exact promises from him with terrible threats, full of visions of the freedom and wealth waiting for them in America, where in no time she would meet her adventurer, multimillionaire brother and own a long red or yellow or blue automobile with silvery tail fins, and a house with a garden and swimming pool, and the latest mechanical devices.
One night, she did not drag him in silence to her wobbly cot the moment he arrived but pressed against him in the darkness, took his face in her hands, and in a hoarse, altered voice whispered into his ear that before he possessed her—she loved that melodramatic word—he must swear to her that within two weeks, before the end of the olive harvest, they would run away together. Hadn’t he told her two or three nights before, blustering, lying his way out, that he had already half worked out a deal for his business with another cobbler? The nun’s right hand, which in so short a time had become amazingly expert in sexual manipulation, was like a grappling hook or claw that clutched his crotch and slowly began to squeeze, and she murmured something that years later still made his hair stand on end and produced an erection when he thought of it: “You betray me, I’ll rip this thing off.”
But that night was the last time. When he awoke the next morning, he was dizzy and shivering and didn’t have the strength even to crawl out of bed. He was relieved, however, that he couldn’t go to work and didn’t have to confront the daily visit and scrutiny of Sister Barranco and Sister María del Gólgota. By the third day his fever was worse, and he called the doctor, who diagnosed pneumonia and ordered him immediately to a hospital in Santiago. Mateo attributed his illness to divine punishment, and in his tormented half sleep he relived all the cold he had suffered during his vigils in the icy plaza and glacial cell of Sister María del Gólgota. The sins of the flesh, aggravated by blasphemy and not dressing warmly enough, had conspired to confine him to a hospital bed, and perhaps would send him to the tomb and the tortures of hell. He prayed, made fervent promises of penitence, swore he would live a holy life, walk barefoot in his procession for the next twenty years carrying a heavy wood cross on his back, subject himself to flagellation and hair shirts, maybe even become a monk and spend the rest of his days in a convent.
AFTER A MONTH HE returned to his narrow workshop and cobbler’s bench, but he had the feeling that more than a month had gone by, and he remembered the days before his illness as one coolly appraises the events of a remote past. The first two or three mornings he was back, he scarcely had the strength or will to work, and he awaited the two nuns with only a flicker of desire and fear. They didn’t come, however, and his next-door neighbor, the barber Pepe Morillo, told him he’d heard that Sister Barranco was very ill—the years were taking their toll—and that for some reason the other nun had been forbidden to leave the convent.
That night, wearing heavy clothes, he worked up the courage to go down to the Plaza de Santa María. The bells struck twelve, but no light came on in the window of the convent tower, and he decided, with equal measures of disappointment and relief, to go home and get in bed, and to carry out the promises he’d made during the dark days of his illness, from which he was sure he’d been delivered by the double miracle of prayer and penicillin. As he was leaving, he turned his head and saw that the light was on in the tower, and from where he stood he could see the tempting if somewhat ghostly silhouette of Sister María del Gólgota. It wasn’t his will or decision to reform that triumphed over the powerful persuasion of sin: it was a shudder that shook his entire body, a hint of renewed pain in his chest, his distaste at having to take off his clothes and later dress in an icy cell. And then there was the woman’s voice like an endless reel spinning wild tales in his ear as he drifted off to sleep, and the hard slats of the cot digging into his back, and he imagined the soft, warm bed waiting for him in the security of his home.
He overcame temptation that night, but as he recovered from the weakness following his return from the hospital his old instincts were awakened, and one night found him roaming around the Plaza de Santa María, so excited it was difficult to walk naturally, with a monumentally stiff dick, as he thought crudely, using our rich vernacular. He was wild that night, a Mihura bull, randy as a goat, ready for anything, to give her the ride of her life and then never come back. The light went on in the tower, and with his blood boiling and his heart leaping from his chest he hurried to the little door and pushed it less cautiously than he had other times—but it was locked, and it was all he could do not to beat on it with his fists. He walked away from the building, back to where he could see the window in the tower. The light went on again, but now that he was closer he could see, or thought he could see, that Sister María del Gólgota was smiling at him and lifting her robe and defiantly and sarcastically showing him her naked breasts, motioning to him, indicating that maybe he should try the door again.
He pushed again, but it was locked, and never opened for him again, and he never saw the light in the tower any of the nights he prowled around the plaza.
“AND HE NEVER HEARD from her again, or saw her?”
People always want to know how stories end; whether well or badly, they want the resolution to be as neat as the beginning, they want sense and symmetry. But few adventures in life tie up all the loose strings, unless fate steps in, or death, and some stories never develop, they come to nothing or are interrupted just as they are beginning. The years go by, and our friend has more bullfight and Holy Week posters on his tiny door, and when he runs out of space he pastes new ones over the old. He works his way up to the presidency of his brotherhood, is named official adviser for the bullfights, is interviewed in our provincial newspaper as one of the pillars of our modest local scene, and he pastes the clipping on a glass pane of his door so it can be seen by people passing in the street. The clipping gets yellow with age, some of the shops in the neighborhood began to close, including the barbershop next door, and the business of repairing shoes seems to have little future, because people throw away their used shoes now and buy new ones in the modern shoe stores that have opened in the more heavily populated areas of the city. But he has his savings, he has prepared for old age as prudently as he provided for the regular satisfaction of his sexual needs. Furthermore, he’s decided it’s time to marry, while he still has the looks to attract a mature and obliging wife who will take care of him when he really begins to lose his faculties. If he waits too long, it will be solitary decrepitude or a nursing home. He is also clear about the kind of woman that interests him, the exact profile: a widow with an acceptable income, some property—a debt-free apartment, for example—and no children. For a while he considered Madame Lieutenant, now widowed and with a solid pension and her own real estate, but she was too old for his purposes, it makes no sense to take on someone who will double the problems of age rather than offset them. Then one morning, unexpectedly, standing in line at the savings bank where he’d gone to bring his precious savings book up to date, he met the perfect woman, one who far surpassed his expectations: a teacher, spinster, nice-looking, with dyed hair and opulent bosom, and a reassuring manner as well. She had a splendid income, a substantial accumulation of bonuses, an apartment in the heart of Madrid—a family bequest—and was currently employed in a school in Móstoles. They were married within six months, and without waiting for the sale of the property where he’d had his shoe-repair shop, they set off for the capital in early September, in time for his new wife to start the school year. On September 27, the eve of our town fair, he was back, because he had to help with the San Miguel and San Francisco bullfights in his role as technical adviser to the president. A possible buyer expressed interest in his shop. He made an appointment to show it to him, on o
ne of those cool, fresh mornings at the beginning of autumn, and it tugged a bit at his heartstrings to walk down Calle Real, as deserted at that hour as it once had been crowded with people, and to open his familiar glass door—after rolling up the metal shade that had been closed for several months. There were old papers on the floor, and a handful of mail he hadn’t bothered to look through before he left, probably nothing but ads. Now, however, he went through the letters, blowing off the dust, to pass the time as he waited for the potential buyer. Among them was a brightly colored postcard of the Statue of Liberty, the American flag, and the New York skyline. On the back there was no signature or name, and except for his address he found only these words, written in the careful, rather affected hand the nuns used to teach in the Catholic schools.
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