Sepharad (34 page)

Ave María Purísima.

He acted as if he were irritated by their persistence, but if he was smoking when they entered, he took the cigarette from his lips and quickly extinguished it against the end of the bench, then stuck it over his ear, because you didn't waste a shred of tobacco in those days. He would nod vaguely, or get to his feet before replying, in a mocking tone of resignation, “Conceiving without sin.”

Today he is an old man but still impressive, though lately a little strange in the head, but when he was thirty he was so tall you couldn't miss him, and he always joked with the women patrons who brought him their shoes to be mended, jokes that often went too far, although he was so witty he got away with it. After all, he was the director of one of the Holy Week crews, and he marched carrying a candle in the Corpus Christi procession, and his clientele included priests from nearby churches and even officers from the headquarters of the Guardia Civil, which at that time was on a small plaza down a side street. But he conquered the women without saying a word, and you'd be amazed to know how many ladies of good reputation, who took Communion every day, crossed the line, using the subterfuge that he was bringing them a pair of recently mended shoes—at an hour when the husband was at work and the children in school—and sometimes, I know this because he told me himself, he had them step into the room behind the shop, which was even smaller than the cubby where he worked, and there, in a fit of lechery, he lifted their skirts and gave them the benefit of his attentions. Women then were much more passionate, he says, or used to say, because nowadays he doesn't tell many tales, not the way he used to, when as soon as I brought up the subject he would start and there would be no stopping him, and it was fun to walk down the street with him, because he spoke loudly and looked all the women over with a fierceness he doesn't have now and really isn't appropriate for a man of his years anyway. “Look,” he'd say, “don't miss that, what an ass, what a pair of
tits that woman has, the way she walks.” He went to confession and was given huge penances, so that almost every year he walked barefoot in the procession and sometimes carried a heavy cross, and no one knew the reason except his confessor, Don Diego, I'm sure you remember the red-faced man who was the parish priest at Santa María. Every once in a while Don Diego threatened to deny him absolution. “You can do your penance, Mateo, but if you don't mend your ways the sacrament will not cleanse you of your sins.” The thing is that deep in his heart he didn't believe that the Sixth Commandment was as serious as the other nine, especially if it was broken with discretion and with the full enjoyment of both parties involved and without scandal or harm to a third party, and in addition you were spared the degradation and lack of hygiene that went with dealing with whores, a very widespread habit when there were still legal houses, places Mateo boasted about avoiding. “How could I enjoy having a woman who was only with me because I paid her?”

That was the year of the new float for the Last Supper, when that sculptor who owed our friend so much money repaid Mateo by portraying him as Saint Matthew. “Look, Sister,” said the older nun, “this cobbler has the same face as the Apostle, but what he doesn't have is his saintliness.” “We are made of clay, Mother, sinners all though good Christians, and we can't all devote ourselves as exclusively to divine worship as you good sisters. Didn't Christ say that in the home of Martha and Mary? And didn't Saint Teresa say that our Lord also walked among the prostitutes? Well, maybe he also walks here among my old shoes and half soles.” “More works of charity and fewer words, cobbler, for faith without good works is a dead faith, and furthermore, only pagans have such a passion for the bulls. Fewer posters of bullfights and more prints of saints.”

The other nun, the young one, didn't say anything, she would stand looking at him as if she were thinking of something
else, or cast a sideways glance at the older one. Gradually, on those winter mornings when there was so little work, he began to take more careful note of her, to distinguish between her and the other one, as well as between her and the abstract figure of a nun, surprising expressions so fleeting they seemed not to have been there, quick flashes of, perhaps, disgust or boredom, the way the girl sometimes rubs her hands together or bites her lower lip in a burst of impatience that has nothing nunlike about it, that doesn't go with the habit or the crude sandals or the sweet, devout tone he nearly always heard in her voice, in the few things she said, scarcely more than “Ave María Purísima” or “God will reward you.” At first he thought the young nun always behaved like a meek subordinate of the older one, the second part in a churchly duet, but as the days went by he perceived discord, an anger revealed only in the quick flash in her pupils, anger at having to trail after an old woman weighed down with ailments and tedious manias, at having to control the natural rhythm of her step to adapt to the older woman's slow pace as every morning they climbed the hill from the bottom of Calle Real, dark silhouettes in a nearly deserted city, the younger woman sometimes lifting her head with an elegance that was perhaps involuntary, or perhaps secretly aggressive, and the old and bent zealot, her face as wrinkled as her mantle, her hands dry, and her toes as gnarled as grape vines in her penitential sandals.

They stopped at every shop as they made their way up the street, shops that have nearly all disappeared now, the candy store, the ironmonger's, the toy and watch shops, the tailor's, the pharmacy, Pepe Morillo's barber shop—the same irritating routine every morning, the sound of the glass doors opening and the tinkling little bell. Sister Barranco was the older one, Sister María del Gólgota the young one, what names! He doesn't remember much of it now, but when I'm with him at his home and his wife can't hear, I say, “Sister María del Gólgota,” and he smiles a half
smile, as if remembering very well but after all these years still not wanting the secret to be known. Some mornings, if their visit was a little behind schedule, he would go to the door in his leather apron with a cigarette in his mouth and wait until he saw them at the bottom of the street, after they turned the corner from Plaza de los Caídos, and then he would stub out his cigarette and swing the door back and forth to clear away the smoke and tobacco odor, and he would turn off the radio, on which all he listened to were quiz shows, programs about bullfights, or popular poetry. How strange, he thought, not to have noticed until now, to have seen nothing but a nun's face, white and round like any other. Now he realized that the girl had large slanting eyes and long fingers, and hands that were always raw from washing in cold water, but also were very delicate. Her face, even framed by a toque, did not have the rather crude roundness nuns' faces often have, it was a strong face that reminded him a little of Imperio Argentina—as a youth he spent all his time in the Cinema Ideal just across the street from his shoe-repair shop, and when it came to movies he loved the same thing as in real life: women, the bare-legged dancers in the musicals, the actresses who played Jane in the Tarzan movies and wore those short little leather skirts, but especially, more than any of the others, the bathing girls in the Technicolor films of Esther Williams, Esther Williams herself being the greatest of all.

The younger nun, Sister María del Gólgota, had a chin like Imperio Argentina's, and despite her robes it was possible to get an idea of what her body was like, not her bosom, of course, which was starchily concealed, but a knee, or the hint of a hip or thigh, as she walked up the street into a strong breeze, or the line of a heel and an ankle that promised a naked extent of milk-white legs within the dark cave of her habit.

“Ave María Purísima.”

“Conceiving without sin.”

He answered without looking up from what he was doing, lest Sister Barranco, who always wore such a suspicious expression, discovered an excess of interest in his eyes, and also to postpone the pleasure of seeing the younger nun's face and trying to coax a little friendliness or complicity from her sidelong glances. He tells me, or used to tell me until recently, that one of his rules is to seek out women who aren't beautiful, because beautiful women don't give themselves completely in bed, they don't make anywhere near the effort as one who is a little homely and must compensate for it in other ways. No beautiful screen stars, no models. “If the woman under you is ugly, no problem, just turn out the light or don't look at her face,” the reprobate liked to say. “The results are incomparable, and there's much less competition.” The narrator of this tale roars with laughter in the bar, orders new drinks and fried octopus and fish, takes a great swallow of beer, smacks his lips, and continues the story, so flattered by everyone's attention that he doesn't notice how loud his voice is.

The nun really pleased him, her beauty notwithstanding. He liked her so much that he began imagining things, and feared he would make a false step and do something stupid. “She stood there looking at me as if she wanted to tell me something, and gestured at the old woman as if saying, if I could get away from her . . . but after they left I wasn't sure whether I'd seen it or imagined it, and the next day they came again, Ave María Purísima, Conceiving without sin, and though I looked carefully, I couldn't see that Sister María del Gólgota was making any sign. She just stared at a poster for a bullfight while Sister Barranco collected my coins for the day and said, as they left, ‘God will reward you,' and it was as if all that time she was a nun like any other nun. Maybe I was delirious from being alone so many hours, not talking with anyone and doing nothing but repairing toes and cutting half soles, surrounded by old shoes, which are the saddest things in the world because they always made me think of dead
people, especially that time of year, in winter, when everyone is off to the olive harvest and I could spend the whole day without seeing a soul. During the war, when I was a little boy, I saw a lot of dead people's shoes. They would shoot someone and leave him lying in a ditch or behind the cemetery, and we kids would go look at the corpses, and I noticed how many had lost their shoes, or I'd find a pair of shoes, or a single shoe, and not know which dead man they belonged to. Once in a newsreel I saw mountains of old shoes in those camps they had in Germany.”

 

“
MAY I HAVE
a little water?”

The young nun was paler than usual that morning, her face dull, the rims of her eyelids red, and there were circles under her eyes, as if from sleepless nights. Under the scowling gaze of Sister Barranco, he led her to the narrow, shadowy corridor behind his shop, where the washroom and water jar were, one of those old brightly colored glazed jugs in the form of a rooster with red comb and yellow chest. It seemed improper for a nun to drink from her cupped hands, so he looked for a clean glass. Her hands trembled a little as they took the glass, and he watched her beautiful pale lips, a thread of water trickling down her strong chin. Her hands were shaking now, and when he tried to catch the glass before she dropped it, his hands touched hers, and he could feel how hot they were. He pressed them and was close enough to smell her fevered breath and feel the carnal mass of a body weakened by discipline and fasting, by the merciless cold of the cells and refectory and corridors of that convent that was so old it was practically in ruins. “Then,” he said, “I lost my head completely and not even I believed what I was doing, I took her by the waist and drew her to me, I groped for her thighs and ass beneath the habit, and kissed her on the mouth, though she tried to turn away. I thought, she'll scream, the other nun will run in and make a royal scene; I could almost see the people coming out of the
nearby shops, but I didn't care, or else I couldn't help what I was doing, drawn to her lips and feeling how hot her face was, her whole body. I expected her to scream, but she didn't, she didn't even resist, in fact she fell into my arms as I felt her all over, felt the body I had so often imagined. Then I saw she had closed her eyes, the way women do in the movies when a kiss is coming but is cut by the censor. But no, it wasn't an amorous trance, she had fainted, and I tried to hold her but couldn't, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she fell to the floor.”

How terrified he was to see her lying there, pale as death, her eyelids half closed, as if he'd killed her with the profanation of his advance. He couldn't remember whether he shouted for the other nun or whether she came into the room behind the shop because she was worried about how long the girl had been gone or because she'd heard the thud of her fall. When they managed to revive her, the young nun was paler than ever, and if he spoke to her, she looked at him with an empty face, as if not remembering anything that had happened. She smiled weakly and thanked him for his help as she started back to the convent, leaning upon the strong, stout Sister Barranco, and once again he was unsure about what had happened in those few instants behind the shoe repair shop. Perhaps she was too.

Days went by, and neither of the two nuns appeared. Possibly Sister Barranco suspected something and wouldn't let Sister María del Gólgota leave the convent, to say nothing of going anywhere near the cobbler's door. Or possibly the young nun was very ill and Sister Barranco didn't leave her side, or she had even died of her fever. But if she were dead, it would be known in the city, the slow, widely spaced tolling of the bells for the dead would be heard. Then one day, at midmorning, he locked his glass door and left to wander around the plaza of Santa María, though not too near the convent doors, which opened from time to time to
let a nun pass through who always, for a few seconds, was the figure of Sister María del Gólgota, or maybe Sister Barranco glowering at him for his irreverent behavior.

 

HE DIDN'T ABANDON
his other activities, of course, you know how he was. He attended the meetings of the board of the Last Supper crew and of the Corpus Christi Society, which was dedicated to providing medical assistance and modest subsidies to farmers and artisans in those days before social security. Neither did he desert the wife of a second lieutenant who always sent him word as soon as her husband went off on maneuvers. But in the meetings he was more distracted than usual, and his Madame Lieutenant, as he called her, found him cool and asked if he had another woman, threatening in a fit of spite to tell everything to the lieutenant or steal his pistol and do something horrible. “You remember what I told you about beautiful women? They ruin you, make you critical of other women, the way we get used to wheat bread and white potatoes and are no longer satisfied with black bread and yams, and the carobs we ate so greedily during the lean years turn our stomach. After I became infatuated with the nun, so beautiful and young, my Madame Lieutenant began to look old and fat to me, no matter how hot and grateful she was in bed, or how much
café con leche
and buttered toast she brought me afterward. Since the lieutenant was in the quartermaster corps, there was plenty of food in that house. Sometimes when I was leaving, my Madame Lieutenant would give me a dozen eggs or a whole tin of condensed milk. ‘Take this,' she'd say, ‘to build up your strength.'”