“Sabina?” he asked the church. His voice bounced back, multiplied, unanswered.
He went up to the altar, to make absolutely sure. He put his candle in a candlestick. Beneath the marble triangle, in the same spot where he had left Sabina, Reverend San José Matamoros was fast asleep. Tancredo lowered the candlelight over the sleeping man: the half-open mouth, a white string of spittle.
“Father,” he said.
He saw, beside Matamoros on the marble floor, the priest’s glasses, one lens cracked, one arm mended with sticking plaster. His trousers were frayed. One shoe was half off, the sock full of holes.
“Father,” he said again, but the priest did not wake up.
“Let him sleep, Tancredito.” Once more, the voice of a Lilia chilled him. There they were, their beatific faces leaning over the Father, their hands, this time, empty of cats, shovels, earth, their hands smelling of soap, clasped and held before them as though in prayer.
“Poor thing,” they said. “He’s fallen asleep. Look at the place he chose. The altar. Where nobody bothers anyone.”
Tancredo put the priest’s glasses back on his face, passed a hand through his rumpled hair.
“Father.”
Matamoros did not wake.
“Let him rest, Tancredito. You’ll have to sleep in the sacristy tonight. You should, out of Christian charity, give the Reverend your bed. We’ll take him there ourselves.”
Sleeping in the sacristy did not alarm Tancredo. On various occasions, due to one of Almida’s sisters coming to visit, he’d spent the night there: they had installed a mat for the purpose, a sort of mattress, tucked away among the plaster angels, and, hidden in the mountain of priestly vestments, a pillow and a blanket. It did alarm Tancredo that the Lilias should insist on carrying San José’s sleeping body themselves.
“Not you, Tancredito. You already helped us enough,” they said. Because Tancredo was getting ready to lift Matamoros himself; in fact, he had managed to get his hands under the priest’s armpits and was beginning to move him when he felt the bony, vicelike fingers of the Lilias on his arms. There was a short, undeclared battle for the priest’s body. With silent force, they obliged Tancredo to lay Matamoros back down on the floor.
“Alright,” Tancredo relented. “Very well.”
The Lilias’ faces were sweating.
“We’ll take him there ourselves,” they said again. And carefully, with the most exaggerated delicacy, the three raised the priest’s body.
“You light the way,” they told Tancredo, sarcastically. It seemed like an order. “At least give us light. Do something, for God’s sake.
We do everything around here, all by ourselves, for the love of God.”
For a fleeting moment, the Lilias’ faces looked demented, unfamiliar. One of them was drooling; the drool dampened her neck, smearing it white, like the froth that spews from the mouths of rabid dogs. The other had popping eyes, and the third displayed a peculiar twisted smile of unhinged happiness on her wide-open mouth, as if about to burst into silent laughter. He did not pay any more attention to them because as he moved out into the garden, beside the Lilias gratefully bearing San José’s body, he thought he spotted Sabina. From behind a willow tree, her round, white face peeped out for a moment, or seemed to peep out; it was not her, but the moon, its light uncovered, cloudless; the stars were shimmering in the sky. In the courtyard, where not a single vestige of cats remained, not a shadow, Father Matamoros went on his way in the Lilias’ arms, as though he were floating. He was a feather. His face lolled placidly against a skirt; at no time did he stretch or seem as if he might wake up. So still he seemed dead, yet he was snoring, and suddenly snored more and more loudly, out in the air, freely: he was snoring a ludicrous song, another song. Tancredo opened the door to his room, raised the candlestick to light the way and saw how the Lilias lay Matamoros down on the bed, his bed, undressed him with expert care and pulled the covers over him.
“Now go away, Tancredito,” they said. “We’re going to pray at his side.”
“He’s asleep.”
“But he’s snoring, and that’s bad.”
Tancredo still wanted to find Sabina. It was possible she might be waiting for him in this very room; anything was possible with Sabina. Had they surprised her by arriving unexpectedly with Matamoros? Was she hiding under the bed? Like a children’s game, he thought, a shameful game.
“The Father’s still asleep,” Tancredo said. He hesitated, nothing occurring to him that would provide a pretext for looking for Sabina under the bed. “How can he pray in his sleep?”
“He’s snoring, and that’s bad. If we pray, he’ll stop snoring.”
Tancredo knelt and looked under the bed, pulling out slippers he didn’t need.
“She’s not here,” a Lilia said to him. The others were smiling triumphantly and shaking their heads.
“Look for her somewhere else,” they said. “Look for her where no one, only God, can find her. We’ll see you in the morning.”
Another tremendous snore from the Father demanded their attention. Harassed, they turned back to him.
“Like a saint.” They began to pray, crossing themselves.
“See you in the morning,” they said to Tancredo.
In his corner of the sacristy, lying in total darkness, he expected to encounter Sabina, or that she would appear at his side, stretched out on the mattress with which they were already familiar. Naked beneath the blanket, he believed he was reading the silence, or that the silence was making itself decipherable because it foretold something. He remained alert, peering through the gloom, surrounded by plaster saints and angels, under the little table on which the telephone rested. Was the telephone going to ring, was that the omen? At last he knew that she was present and cried out to himself, “Sabina is finally here.” He had a premonition of her, but could not imagine becoming aware of her presence in such a way: she was singing, faintly, but singing, in the church, and she sang as though smiling; her song whimsically crossed the passage that joined the church to the sacristy, it established itself in the gloom, making everything shiver, knocking at the closed church doors, touching the altar, taking flight in the sacred echo of the great painted dome. “Not there, Sabina,” Tancredo whispered. The anguish in her voice turned into a laugh in the church, brief but multiplied a hundred times by the echo. “Come and stop me,” he heard her say, and the song, like a threat, grew louder. She was singing as though it were a game, a girlish game, but without abandoning the threat, parodying Christmas carols: “Oh come or I shall scream oh come now child divine oh come do not delay.” Tancredo sat up, but stayed where he was, hesitant in his nakedness. “Not there,” he repeated, “here.” Another laugh, bitter, biting, answered him. Then silence. “You come,” the voice resumed, urgently, not singing this time. And burst into song again, mockingly: “Let nothing disturb thee, nothing affright thee, all things are passing, God never changeth” — and the voice soared — “patient endurance attaineth to all things.” The voice soared, the laughter soared — “Who God possesseth in nothing is wanting” — the voice soared transfigured by the laugh, a laugh that might be colossal, might wake the world — “alone God sufficeth.” Tancredo walked in fear and fascination. And went to her, to the place where she said only God could find her. There the heat, the terrifying closeness of the heat of nakedness, the desperation of the kisses he called forth, rushed at him, pulling him out of himself. “God,” he cried to himself, and knelt before her, and was thankful for the darkness, because he did not want to see her, or himself.
But he heard her.
“That blessed Father touched my bum,” she said, and repeated it in a murmur as if she were singing, happily.