Sepharad (36 page)

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.'”

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.”