— You have to learn to give things that have failed, that have been damaged or destroyed, another chance.
— But not at the expense of my health. I’m sorry.
10
The child falls asleep on the lap of the woman with the dusky face. The nuns wait on her silently, bringing her drinks, plates of rolls; they kneel before her as she sits in one of the low straw chairs surrounded by baskets of eggs and handkerchiefs, scissors and thread, corncobs. Some of the nuns fan her from time to time; others take handkerchiefs and moisten her forehead and bathe her eyes, her lips. The woman, sitting close to the ground, is stroking the child’s hair, which is dry now; he is sleeping, his face calm. She smiles; she tells you that she sees a glint in your eyes which she recognizes; she knows what you were thinking, tell her if she’s right, a nun is a woman, but not a woman one sees every day. Men don’t get used to her in everyday encounters, so they desire her even more ardently; she is hidden, forbidden, veiled, in a convent, in a prison, in an infinite construction where every door conceals another, this one leading to that, and that, and yet another … like the nuns, doesn’t it seem?
You say yes.
That is why they make that response you heard at the end of the meal, she repeats: Desire is like snow in our hands.
And you also repeat: Yes.
She looks tenderly at the sleeping child, and without shifting her gaze, she talks to you, there is never enough time for everything, maybe for animals there is, since they don’t measure time, if they even have any, but for people, well, the ones who manage to become flesh, who possess a body, isn’t it true that they never have all the time they want?
You return her look with your own uncomprehending one; you are sitting in a higher chair, staring down at the woman and the child; no, what she means — she speaks rapidly, in a sad but strong voice — Sister Apollonia takes care of wiping off the saliva that sometimes trickles from her lips — is that nobody ever has enough time for life, even if they live to be a hundred years old; nobody leaves the world feeling they’ve exhausted life; there is always one last hope, an encounter we secretly wish to have, a desire that remains unfulfilled.
Yes …
There is never enough time to know and to taste the world completely, and the nun sighs, stroking the head of the little boy. — My son was denied things, there are things he never experienced. Does that seem incomprehensible to you?
No.
Abruptly, she takes your hand, her eyes shining, and asks, But this time? He could live longer than he did the other time, that’s why he has come back to be reborn, she tells you, that’s why I dared to do it again, they say I don’t have the right, that my child has no right to be born twice, sir (the mutilated nun, Agatha, dries the sweat off her brow), they say it’s monstrous (she squeezes your hand, this time her touch hurts), they say what I’m doing is monstrous, bringing him back into the world a second time (the blind nun, Lucía, carefully cleans the blood flowing from under the woman’s skirts, forming a puddle on the floor), but you have to understand what I’m doing, you have to help me …
— Señora …
— You are a mason, or a carpenter, or something like that, aren’t you?
You listen to her with annoyance, irritated, you don’t understand her. But you agree, yes, you are, a manual laborer; and she sighs, perhaps the miracle can be repeated, despite what everyone says; she slowly opens her eyes, the blind nun wipes them with the bloody handkerchief, she doesn’t close them, as if welcoming that stain, murmuring, If he has three fathers, why can’t he have three mothers? And if he has three mothers, why can’t he have had three fathers…?
You look around you: the eight nuns are there, standing, surrounding the three of you, the woman with the dusky face, the sleeping child, and you, and one holds a harp in her hands, another a guitar, one a staff, another a lead plate, the fifth’s hand has bells on every finger, the sixth a fork, the last a knife, a real dagger pointing at your eyes. You have a horrible feeling that everything unspeakable — sighs, sorrows, griefs — is about to find a voice.
— No, says the woman, delicately lifting the head of the sleeping child, you don’t have to say anything …
You manage to say something anyway, in a panic: —The child is already alive. You don’t have to do anything, look at him, he’s sleeping but he’s alive, you babble on a moment before the eight women begin to press up against your body, and you feel those other bodies against you, an intimacy of smells and skin and menstruation, a delicious sensation of bodies naked under green silk, their saliva in your ears, the conch in your mouth; orange silk covered your eyes and the breath of eight women had become a single breath, as fragrant as your nights, as bitter as your mornings, as sweat-drenched as your middays, and in the center of the circle, reserved for you, untouched, immaculate, the woman who was dusk itself, dark, desperate, the moles on her temples tightening like screws, saying come, José María, it took you a long time to arrive, but you are here at last, my love … The woman and her companions speak in unison, pressing against you, surrounding you, suffocating you, shutting you in the tiled bathroom decorated in a pattern of foliage, with porcelain frogs set in the white bathtub that is like a vast bed of water into which you sink … You are suffocated by unwanted kisses, smothered in that bath of steam in which you suddenly remember the maternal womb you have longed to regain before you die, and that other bath floods over you, my brother, Carlos María.
11
Those first days, Doña Heredad Mateos sat at the door of the watchman’s hut in a severe black dress, with her shawl sometimes over her head, sometimes hiding her face, when a kind of willful mortification made her hide her features, which nonetheless appeared about to slide from her face like pebbles from the wall of a ruin. At times she would drape the shawl over her shoulders to emphasize various attitudes: majesty, resignation, hope, even a hint of seduction. For all this and more, since its invention, the Mexican shawl, the rebozo, had served, and the aged Doña Heredad employed it with a kind of atavistic wisdom, seated at the entrance of her temporary home, on a rude woven straw chair, with her feet planted in the dust, the points of her black, well-shined shoes peeking out of her dark skirts.
Her breast was covered with scapulars commending her to all the saints, male and female. And by her side, though she never touched it, a cup decorated with flowers, ducks, and frogs silently inviting everyone to leave the contribution that she neither solicited nor, seemingly, touched. The cup was always half full and each twosome entering the hut added a handful of pesos to the pot, but later they began to leave coins and Doña Heredad assessed them out of the corner of her eye, fearing and confirming that some were mere coppers dropped from poor fists, but others — she didn’t reveal her delight — were treasures taken from who knows what hiding places, flowerpots, mattresses, money boxes: testons, silver pesos, even the occasional gold piece.
So they came in pairs, a woman with a man, a woman with a child, a man with a child, two children, two women, almost never two men, and some left crying, others wearing beatific smiles, most in silence and with their heads bowed, some trying not to laugh, and they were the only ones Doña Heredad favored with a look of icy fury that was like a premonition of what hell reserved for the infidel, and the promise of paradise was reserved for those who left on their knees, repeating Miracle, miracle, miracle, and when the lines grew and began to snake through the construction site and down Calle José María Marroquí, a look of satisfaction appeared on her face, particularly when the aged mother of the watchman Jerónimo Mateos noticed scapulars like hers on the chests of the devout, and even cactus thorns piercing the breasts of the most faithful, and she tried not to feel too happy about the trail of blood left by the knees wounded on the painful climb from the excavations to the shack, since (as my brother Carlos María Vélez would say ironically), in addition to using the direct entrance to the shack from the street, where the engineers had put the much-discussed traffic light, those who felt they didn’t deserve the vision without some penance decided to crawl through the mud, the construction materials, the debris, the barbed wire, the iron rods, and the clutter of the project, to be rewarded with the divine vision inside the shack of Señora Heredad: miracle, miracle, miracle, Madonna and Child, revealed in the window of a humble shack, practically a manger, said a woman to her husband, Bethlehem, O little town of Bethlehem, how still … no, said another man to his wife, I happen to know that they just put the glass in that window; but that doesn’t make it less holy, you heretic, answered his wife icily …