“What are you talking about, señorita? I don’t understand,” a Lilia replied, her tone conciliatory. “What do you want us to say? What do you want to hear?”
And another: “You’re not the little Sabinita we once knew. For the past few years you’ve been an ill-mannered little madam. You don’t seem like the sacristan’s goddaughter any more. It’s as if you’ve never read the Bible. You make the three of us sad, we who watched you grow from a girl, who were your mothers and grandmothers and friends, your servants.”
Sabina tensed up, began stamping her foot, fists clenched, lips pursed. In the light of the single bulb, she was more than golden, suffused with the flames of her hair, with the fiery moon of her troubled face. She could not speak for rage. Tancredo rushed to intervene.
“Prepare the meal,” he said again. “I should shut up the church.”
“The church.” The Lilias were startled. “God’s church open, by God. How did you forget the doors of the church, Tancredito? A thief could come in at any moment and. .”
“And steal God?” Father Matamoros’s voice was heard to ask. They saw him leaning in through the doorway. “Are you going to leave me all alone?” he asked. “They might steal me too. Let’s chat for a few minutes in peace; then I’ll go. The rain is letting up. You. . Tancredito. . go and shut those doors. We’ll wait for you.”
The three Lilias immediately moved toward the Father.
“The food is ready,” they explained. “It just needs heating up.”
“Come with me,” Matamoros replied, allowing them to surround him. Sabina approached them; she wanted to say something, she had to say something, to have the last word. But she didn’t know what it was.
Tancredo hurried back to the church. Crossing the empty interior, he made sure there was no one in the naves. He even peeked into the chapel of Saint Gertrude; its blue image, with eyes that seemed to be slipping away as if on a river, held his gaze, and he crossed himself, wanted to say a prayer, but was unsure of which one to say. Still preoccupied, remembering the pungent smell of the aguardiente at the altar, he still couldn’t believe it; seeming to pray silently, he was thinking of the Inquisition: for that one act alone they might have burned San José Matamoros alive. He imagined the priest on a pyre, in this very church, and smiled: before the fire, the priest would request another aguardiente, please. Tancredo smiled more broadly as he checked the confessionals, one by one, in case some thief had taken refuge there. This was not unusual. Thefts from the church were on the rise. Not just valuable objects were stolen, such as the chalice or the linens, but also simple plaster statues, tapers and candlesticks, votive candles, sticks of palosanto, censers, collection boxes — one day a prie-dieu, another day a pew, a strip of carpet, even the stone jars in which the holy water was kept, the shabby noticeboard from the entrance, the rubbish bin and, to top it all, the first two steps of the narrow staircase, polished and carved, which in their long ascent spiralling up to the domed ceiling illustrated the Stations of the Cross. However much Reverend Almida publicly exhorted the thief to render unto God the things that are God’s, explaining that the staircase had been a present from a Florentine religious society and had, besides, been blessed by Pope Paul VI, the two steps were not returned; worse still, a third and a fourth disappeared, in just three Sundays, and it no longer seemed the work of a thief, but that of a prankster or a fanatic seeking the Pope’s blessing. A collector. Bogotá, in any case. Father Almida ordered the rest of the steps to be stored away and replaced with ordinary stairs, made of poor-quality timber, now being eaten away by woodworm.
Tancredo was about to shut the doors when he noticed that the last pew in the church, in the main nave, was completely occupied by motionless women, seven or nine worshippers from the parish, most of them feeble, confused grandmothers, members of the Neighborhood Civic Association. They had been watching him all that time, ever since he had begun to check the confessionals, seek out lurking presences, realign pews, and straighten up the prie-dieux.
“You take a lot of trouble,” one of the women said.
Tancredo pretended not to be surprised.
“I have to shut the doors now,” he said.
“Doors that ought to remain open,” the same woman replied. “But what can we do, Tancredito, if not even God is respected in this country?”
They got to their feet as one and moved toward Tancredo.
“It was a lovely Mass,” they said. “For a moment we thought it wasn’t an earthly one. The Reverend who celebrated it must be. . a special person. Thanks to him, we’re singing once more. We sing with him and weep for joy. If Doña Cecilia were alive she would have been happy.”
And they all made the sign of the cross.
“May she rest in peace,” they said in unison. They seemed to go on singing. And moved behind Tancredo to the doors, as if in procession. The rain had eased, but a persistent, stinging drizzle made it even worse out in the street.
“The rain doesn’t matter,” one of the women said. “It wasn’t a waste of a Mass, thank God.”
The rest agreed sorrowfully: “Because some are, some are.”
They were waiting for Tancredo to say something, but he remained silent.
“We wanted to speak to the Father,” they said, letting him off the hook.
“Whenever you like,” Tancredo replied. “You can make an appointment, as always.”
“You don’t understand, Tancredito. We want to speak to the bird who sang before us today. Would that be possible?”
Tancredo had already guessed this.
“Father San José is taking some refreshment,” he said.
“So, his name is San José.” They were astonished.
“It would have to be, for someone who sings like that.”
And then, discussing it among themselves: “Don’t disturb him. We’ll meet him one day. We need a priest like him so much, don’t we?”
“Indeed we do,” another replied. “Because, begging God’s pardon, if this priest were in charge of our parish, we’d all be livelier.” Having said this, she blushed immediately; none of her companions wanted to, or could, contradict her.
“The Lilias,” they said, “our friends the Lilias, the loyal and devoted Lilias, will be able to tell us about Father San José and his whereabouts, with all the details. Don’t worry, Tancredito, we’ll speak to them.”
Satisfied, they began to leave the church, split into groups, arm in arm. They each opened an umbrella; they were like old black birds spreading their wings by the light of the street lamps, in the infinite sparkling refractions of the rain.
“It may only be drizzle, but it’s still rain,” they said.
Tancredo placed the heavy wooden bars across the door and closed the enormous padlocks. Then, quickly, he crossed back through the church and snuffed out the altar candles, the first thing he ought to have done at the end of Mass; how had he forgotten? He answered his own question: Matamoros, his song, his water. The very presence of that Father in the presbytery was still a latent, unpredictable event. What would happen? Heading for a corner near the altar, Tancredo found — behind an enormous tapestry representing Adam and Eve fleeing the Garden of Eden — the switch that turned off the rest of the electric lights. The darkness swallowed him up completely in the cold of the sanctuary, still redolent of incense, but also of the faint, irritating whiff of aguardiente, which caused him to revisit the Mass and hear the priest singing and see him stagger feebly when it came time for Communion. Only the far-off rectangular opening of the sacristy door was dimly illuminated. A slight echo of who knew what voices from who knew where rolled slowly down from the cupola; it was a sound of forsaken souls, a distant sound, but present, as if even at night the church was not empty and other communicants waited, sitting, standing, ailing and healthy, asleep and awake. They were the echoes of the night in the empty church, the nocturnal Mass, Tancredo thought in his distress, when night caught him alone in the church.