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 weak
ened 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.’”
Rounds of foaming beer, waiters’ voices, the smell of frying oil, the snorting of the coffee machine, the tinny tunes from the jukebox and cigarette machine. Our storyteller has a somewhat childish face, jovial and very round, but he is bald and wears a suit, like a lawyer or notary, with a small insignia in the buttonhole of the jacket and a silver tiepin on which you can make out a tiny figure of the Virgin. He interrupts himself to accept with mock reverence the large plate of steaming sausage the waiter has just set on the bar, and with food crammed in his mouth recites:
Morcilla, blessed lady,
worthy of our veneration.
He drinks some beer and then wipes his mouth where a black sliver of sausage has lodged between his teeth. He lowers his voice: “Imagine you’re in that vast Plaza de Santa María,” he says, stretching his arms wide, satisfied at having chosen the adjective vast, which corresponds to the gesture, evoking the blackness of a broad space surrounded by spectral churches and palaces, in another world and another time. One night, when he was in bed after returning from the home of his Madame Lieutenant, after, as he put it, having performed his chores, he lay in the dark listening to the ticking of an alarm clock that was louder than a pendulum clock. He never lost sleep over anything, but he realized that night he wasn’t going to sleep. He got dressed, put on his cape, muffler, and cap, went outside, and slunk through narrow streets as if hiding from someone. About midnight, in thick fog, he ended up at the plaza where the only light came from one or two lamps on the street corners, so faint they were nothing but splotches of light glowing like the phosphorus on the hands and numbers of his clock. He could see the dark outlines of buildings, towers, statue-lined eaves, bell towers, the Santa María and El Salvador Churches, the lion sculptures in front of the city hall, and the forbidding, massive facade of the Convent of Santa Clara, which he didn’t dare approach, not even at that hour.
A light went on in the highest window of the tower. Now that the fog was lifting, things were more visible but still veiled. He noticed, with a stab of fear, a motionless figure that appeared to be looking at him. “At that distance, and in the state I was in, I couldn’t recognize a face, yet I was sure it was the young nun, Sister María del Gólgota, who had come to the tower to see me, and she was turning the light on and off to let me know she knew it was me.” The light went out and did not come on again, but he stood there looking up, alone in the deserted plaza, with no notion of time or cold, unsure of what he had seen, wondering if he was dreaming. He stood waiting a long while, so still that the sound of the slow, echoing bells striking two sent a shiver down his spine.
THE NEXT MORNING he puzzled over his nocturnal outing, a confused mixture of fantasy and certainty. He had definitely seen a light go on and off, and a figure in a nun’s toque, but it might not have been Sister María del Gólgota, though he seemed to remember her features in every detail, down to the yellow glow of the lamplight on her skin. And her lips were painted a bright red, the rough, fever-hot lips he had kissed, but that must have been a hallucination.
“Ave María Purísima.”
He was so lost in his work and his thoughts that he hadn’t heard the glass door open, and when he looked up he saw before him the very person that had occupied his imagination for so many days. Sister María del Gólgota was taller, slimmer, whiter, not quite as young—perhaps because she did not have the contrast of Sister Barranco beside her—but she was also, above all else, a real woman, not a nun, with a woman’s eyes, and in her throaty voice there was no trace of the religious sweetness of her former visits. She was a woman trapped in robes and mantles from another century, and her gaze, for a moment, held a frankness he wasn’t used to in his dealings with women, not even those who yielded to him most brazenly. He did nothing, he didn’t even make the respectful move to stand up, didn’t take the cigarette from his lips or put down the awl and old shoe he had in his hands. He simply heard himself replying, as he did every day, “Conceiving without sin.”
She made a gesture of impatience, looked toward the street, stepped forward and said a few words to him, then stepped back, and as he started to ask her to repeat what she’d said, the door opened and the bent and dedi
cated Sister Barranco appeared, muttering complaints and prayers, brusquely demanding the overdue alms, scolding him for smoking and for cherishing bulls more than novenas and also chastising Sister María del Gólgota because she hadn’t waited for her, why only yesterday she’d been in the infirmary with a high fever and today you should see her, so valiant though the doctor never learned what ailed her, cured by special dispensation of our Most Blessed Virgin she was. As he listened to Sister Barranco, Mateo thought back and was able to review the words the young nun had spoken to him so quickly and quietly, hardly daring to believe that he’d heard what he heard, that it was not the fabrication of an inflamed imagination. “Just after twelve, wait until you see me turn a light on and off three times in the highest window, then push the small door around the corner, come up three flights, and on the third landing you will find a large window to the left and a door to the right. Carefully push that door open, and I will be waiting for you.”
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