TO LIVE BACK THEN, in the past, what more could I want? But a person no longer knows where he lives, not in what city, not in what time, he’s not even sure that his is the house he returns to in the late afternoon with the sensation that he’s a nuisance, even though he may have set out very early, not knowing precisely where he was going or for what reason, looking for God knows what job that would allow him to feel he was once again doing something useful, something necessary. At one of the last meals held by the association, the one we had for the purpose of awarding Jacob Bustamante our Silver Medal, Godino scolded me affectionately because it had been two years since I came home for Holy Week. I explained to him that I was going through a difficult phase, hoping that he, a man of so many resources and acquaintances, might offer a helping hand, but of course I didn’t ask for his help straight out, because of my pride and the fear of losing face in his eyes. My dejection and wounded honor kept me more removed than usual from the activities of our regional association, though I tried never to miss the meetings of the board and was scrupulous in paying my monthly dues. I wandered from morning to night, not myself, from one place to another in Madrid, from one job to another, following promises that never came to anything, opportunities where for some reason or other I always failed, meaningless jobs that lasted a few weeks, a few days. I spent hours waiting, doing nothing, or had to rush to get to something that eluded me by a few minutes.
One morning, while I was crossing Chueca Plaza with my heart in my fist and my eyes straight ahead in order not to see what was around me—the drug dealers, the people with terrible diseases, the spectacle of sleepwalking men and women with faces of the dead and the shamble of zombies—I ran into my paisano Mateo Chirino, the man who was called Mateo Zapatón when I was young, not only because of his trade as a cobbler but also because of his size; he was much larger than most men in those days and, as I remember, wore huge black heavy-soled shoes, legendary shoes he must have spent a lifetime repairing. I noticed that he seemed to be wearing the same enormous shoes, although now they’d been stretched out of shape by his bunions. I was wearing the dark suit I wore for job interviews and carrying my black briefcase and files. I had been accepted, on trial, as a commissioned salesman of supplies for driving schools. Planted in the middle of Chueca Plaza, in an oversized overcoat and a dark green Tyrolean hat outfitted with the obligatory feather, Mateo Zapatón stood staring benevolently at something, the very picture of a robust, lazy fellow with time on his hands, and he rose from those black shoes as from the pedestal of a statue or the stump of an olive tree, so deeply rooted he seemed in the neighborhood of Madrid where he was living and where he gave the impression of being as comfortable as he had been in our distant, shared hometown.
His face, too, was just as I remembered it, as if impervious to the wear of time. To a child, all adults are more or less old, so when you grow older and see those persons again after years have gone by, it seems as if they haven’t changed at all. It was a cold winter morning, one of those disagreeable workday mornings in Madrid when the facades of buildings are the same dirty gray as the cloudy but rainless sky. I was rushing as always, harried from running late to meet a client, the owner of a driving school on Calle Pelayo. I’d made the mistake of coming in my car, and the little bit of time I’d left for having a cup of coffee was lost looking for a parking place in impossible streets filled with traffic, pedestrians, unshaven transvestites, thugs, drug addicts, distributors, and trucks loading and unloading, blocking the sidewalk and provoking a blare of horns that were the last straw for my already shattered nerves.
It was late, I hadn’t eaten, I’d left my car so badly parked that it would probably be towed, but seeing Mateo Zapatón, and the pleasure of the recollections that seeing him awoke in me, was stronger than my haste. As tall as ever, erect, with the same placid expression, big nose, and slightly bulging eyes, cheeks ruddy with cold and good health, though sagging with age, his step as firm as when he used to march in his penitent’s robe ahead of the Last Supper float, guiding the huge cart sponsored by the association’s board of directors.
That float was one of the most spectacular of all Holy Week, and it had the most figures: the twelve apostles seated around a linen-covered table, with Christ standing at one end, one hand on his heart and the other raised in a gesture of benediction. The gold fringe encircling his head vibrated with every majestic turn of the wheels over the cobbled or paved streets of that time, with the same slight shiver that flickered the flames in tulip-shaped globes and rippled the white tablecloth on which the bread and the wine were arranged for the liturgical sacrifice. All the apostles were looking toward Jesus, and each had a small white light focused on him that dramatically illuminated his face. Everyone except Judas, whose head was turned away in a gesture of remorse and greed, focused on the pouch that held the coins of his betrayal, half-hidden behind his chair. The light that struck Judas in the face was green, the bilious green of liver dysfunction, and everyone in town knew that those features, which we children despised as much as those of the villains in the moving pictures, were those of a tailor who had his workshop on the corner of Calle Real, very near the cubby of Mateo Zapatón.
Godino told me the story, not without promising that he would tell me others even juicier. The figures on the float, like almost all the figures displayed during Holy Week, had been carved by the celebrated maestro Utrera, who according to Godino was one of the most important artists of the century but hadn’t received the recognition he deserved because he had chosen to stay in our hospitable though isolated city. Because he was such a genius, Utrera was naturally a dedicated bohemian, and he was always consumed by debts and pursued by creditors, one of whom, the most persistent and also the one man to whom Utrera owed the most, was that same tailor on Calle Real who made Utrera’s monogrammed shirts, his closely fitted waistcoats, the suits as snug as Fred Astaire’s, even the floating robes Utrera wore in his studio. Whenever the debt reached an unacceptable level, the tailor would present himself at the Royal Café, where the authors and artists’ club headed by Utrera met every afternoon, and would publicly call the sculptor a reprobate and a thief, shaking a sheaf of unpaid bills in his face. Very dignified, small, ramrod-straight, packaged, as it were, in the elegant Fred Astaire–model suit he had not paid for and had no intention of ever paying for, the sculptor would gaze at a different part of the room while waiters and friends subdued the tailor, whose eyes were bulging and face was dripping sweat from anger, and who ended up leaving as empty-handed as he had come, though not without having ignominiously recovered from the floor of the café the bills that had fallen from his hands in the heat of his tirade, as valuable proof of an insult he threatened to rectify in court. Imagine everyone’s shock, Godino told me, anticipating the punch line with a broad smile that lighted his clever and jovial face, when a few weeks later, the first Wednesday of Holy Week, at the first appearance of the newly carved Last Supper (the old one, like almost everything else, had been burned by the Reds during the war), the tailor saw with his own eyes what malevolent gossips had already told him, the news that was flashing around the city, in Godino’s words, “like a trail of gunpowder.” The contorted face of Judas, the green face that turned away from the kind but accusing face of the Redeemer to examine, in his greed, the badly hidden pouch of coins, was the tailor’s living likeness, exact and faithful despite the cruel exaggeration of the caricature: the same bulging eyes that had looked at the sculptor in the café as if wanting to bore holes in him. “Or petrify him, like the eyes of the Medusa,” said Godino, who as he warmed up to his tale would utter his favorite words . . . “And the Semitic nose!” With that adjective Godino would make a face and thrust his head forward, looking as the tailor must have looked when he discovered his likeness on the figure of Judas, and would twist or wrinkle his nose, which was small and turned up, as if merely pronouncing the word “Semitic”—which gave him so much pleasure that he repeated it two or three times—had the virtue
of making his nose as prominent as that of the tailor and of Judas, as the nose of all the cruel soldiers and Pharisees of the Holy Week floats: the Jews spit on the Lord, as we children used to say when we played our games of floats and parades. In the paved and dirt streets of our day, we held our juvenile versions of Holy Week and paraded playing small plastic trumpets and drums made from large empty tins; we even pulled floats fashioned from wood or cardboard boxes and wore capes made of old newspapers.
BOTH MEN HAVE BEEN DEAD a long time now, the irascible tailor and the morose, bohemian sculptor, but the vengeful joke one played on the other survives in the grim, still green-lit features of the Judas of the Last Supper, even though with every Holy Week there are fewer people who can identify them as the tailor’s or who remember the stories of the past that Godino spins, whether inventing them out of whole cloth or just embroidering them, I don’t know. Nor would there be many who recognize the other real model for the apostles, the Saint Matthew who is turned toward Christ, half devout, half frightened, his raised eyebrows underscoring the amazement in his eyes, because this is the moment when the Master has just said that one of the twelve will betray him that night and everyone is alarmed and scandalized, gesturing wildly, asking, “Master, is it I?” In the midst of that uproar no one pays attention to the green, rancorous face of Judas or notices the swollen pouch of coins that our mothers pointed out to us when we were children and they held us up in their arms as the float passed by in the procession.
I didn’t need Godino to explain to me that the noble Saint Matthew, straight of back and red of cheek, was the living image of Mateo Zapatón, who thus had his instant of public glory on the same night of Holy Week that the bill-collecting tailor was covered with ridicule. After the sculptor Utrera, when he had money or the prospect of collecting some, had the measurements for a new suit taken in the tailor shop, he would cross Calle Real and order hand-cobbled shoes from Mateo, or during hard times he would bring old pairs to be repaired. But unlike the tailor, Mateo Zapatón never reminded Utrera of past-due bills, partly because of the man’s somewhat cowardly nature, which made him inclined to accept half measures, but partly too because he had a fervent admiration for the sculptor, which swelled to the point of abject gratitude every time the maestro came by his shop and stayed several hours to chat with him, offering him his blond-tobacco cigarettes and telling him stories of his travels through Italy and of his life in the artistic circles of Madrid before the war.
“Friend Mateo,” the sculptor would say, “you have a classic head that deserves to be immortalized by art.” Said and done. Mateo never charged Utrera a cent, but he considered the debt canceled when, with a surge of vanity and modesty, he saw his unmistakable face among those of the apostles, as well as his husky shoulders in a very typical posture: looking sideways and upward from the low cobbler’s bench where he spent his life. Being a penitent and a board member of the brotherhood of the Last Supper, could he imagine a greater honor than inclusion among those who supped with the Savior? Every characteristic, the entire persona of the evangelist saint, was of a prodigal fidelity, except for the beard, which the flesh-and-blood Mateo did not have, although at times he seemed to be on the verge of letting it grow, an inconceivable daring in those years of carefully tended mustaches and shaved faces. The tailor shop sat almost directly across from the cobbler’s shop, but whenever the aggrieved tailor met Mateo on the opposite sidewalk, he would lower his head or look away, his face greener and his nose more Semitic than ever, and Mateo, like so many others, would have to clamp his hand over his mouth to keep from exploding with laughter, his cheeks flaming a bright red more appropriate for a giant figure in Valencia’s festivals than for the image of a pious evangelist.
IT GAVE ME A LITTLE START of pleasure to see that face in the middle of a hostile city, a face tied to the sweetest memories of my hometown and childhood. When I was a boy, my mother often sent me to the door of Mateo Zapatón, who without knowing anything at all about me used to pat my cheek and call me Sacristan. “Mercy, Sacristan, this pair of half soles didn’t last very long this time!” “Tell your mother I don’t have change, Sacristan. She can pay me when she comes by.” The shop was very narrow and high-ceilinged, almost like a closet, and it opened directly onto the street by way of a glass door, which Mateo closed only on the most severe winter days. All the available space, including the sides of the chest he used as a worktable and counter, was covered with posters of bullfights and of Holy Week, the two passions of this master cobbler, glued-on posters, yellowed by the years, some pasted over others, announcements of corridas celebrated at the beginning of the century or at last year’s fair, all in a confusion of names, places, and dates that fed Mateo’s chatty erudition. He was almost always surrounded by his troop of friends, with a cigarette or tack between his lips, or both at once, a tireless narrator of historic anecdotes from the world of bulls and famous taurine maneuvers, which he knew at first hand because the presidents of the corridas often asked him to act as an official adviser. His voice would break and his eyes ill with tears when he was recalling the doleful afternoon when he watched from a row of seats on the sunny side of the bullring in Linares as the bull Islero charged Manolete. “He’s going to hook you, don’t get so close,” he had shouted from his seat, and he bent forward as if he were in the plaza and cupped his hands to make a megaphone, his face tragic with anticipation, living once again the instant when Manolete could still have saved himself from the fatal goring, “the fateful goring,” as Godino always said when he imitated the madly waving arms of the impassioned cobbler as he told that tale. Godino always promised some great and mysterious story about Mateo, a secret about which only he knew the most delicious details.
I WENT UP TO MATEO there in Chueca Plaza, and he looked at me with the same broad, benevolent smile he had worn when he welcomed the shoppers and the circle of friends who gathered at his cobbler’s shop. I was moved to think that he recognized me despite how much I’d changed since the last time we saw each other. Just then another coincidence came to mind that linked him to my oldest memories and, without his knowing, made him a part of my childhood. In the space next to Mateo Zapatón’s was the barbershop my father used to take me to, the one where my grandfather always got his haircut and shave, Pepe Morillo’s shop, which was doing less and less business as his oldest customers died off and young people were letting their hair grow. Now his door was closed as tightly as Mateo Zapatón’s and the Judas-face tailor’s, like so many of the shops on Calle Real that once had been busy, before people gradually forgot to go by there, turning it, especially at night and on rainy days, into a ghostly, abandoned street. But in those days Pepe Morillo’s barbershop was as animated as Mateo Zapatón’s shoe repair, and often, on mild April and May afternoons, the clients of both shops would take chairs out on the sidewalk and smoke and talk in one single gathering, which was observed from the other side of the street, from the darkness of his empty shop, by the brooding tailor, who would wring his hands behind the counter and sink his head deeper between his shoulders, ever more closely resembling the Judas of the Last Supper, the misanthrope with the green face and hooked nose slowly pushed toward bankruptcy by the unremitting advance of mass-produced clothing.
My father, holding my hand, used to take me to Pepe Morillo’s barbershop (back then “hair salon” was a woman’s word), and I was so small that the barber had to put a little stool on the seat in order for me to see myself in the mirror and for him to be comfortable as he cut my hair. His face smelled of cologne and his breath of tobacco when he bent close with the comb and scissors, and he shaved my neck with a little electrical machine. I could hear his strong, fast breathing and feel the touch of capable adult fingers on the nape of my neck and on my cheeks, the rare pressure of hands that weren’t those of my mother or father, familiar yet strange hands, suddenly brusque when he doubled my ears forward or made me bend way over by pushing the back of my head. Every time he trimmed my hair, almost at the e
nd, Pepe Morillo would say, “Close your eyes tight,” and I knew he was going to trim the bangs to just above my eyebrows, cutting toward the middle of my forehead. Damp hair would fall on my eyelids, tickle my plump cheeks and tip of my nose, and the cold blades of the scissors would brush my eyebrows. When Pepe Morillo told me I could open my eyes now, I would be surprised by the round, unfamiliar face in the mirror, with protruding ears and straight bangs above the eyes, and also by my father’s smile as he looked approvingly at my reflection.
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