It was gone three a.m. when the Count heard a rather authoritarian scratching on his kitchen door. He knew it was useless to try to ignore it, since stubbornness was the scratcher’s most pronounced trait, so he got up to open the door.
“Hell, Rubbish, what kind of time is this to be coming home?”
On the brink of the advanced age of fourteen, Rubbish retained his streetwise ways intact, and would prowl the barrio every night in search of fresh air, frantic fleas and females on heat. Ever since the Count had brought him home to live with them on that stormy night in 1989, the quarrelsome Maltese had insisted on his freedom, which the Count accepted, seduced by the character of the animal who, alerted by the faint, lingering scent of the evening’s feast on his clothes, now barked twice, demanding to be fed.
“All right, all right, grub’s up.”
Conde fetched a metal tray from the terrace. He opened the bag of leftovers from the paladar and tipped part of the contents onto the tray.
“But you eat it outside…” the Count warned, taking the tray out on the terrace. “We’ll talk tomorrow, because this has got to stop…”
Rubbish barked twice again, and wagged his battered tail like a shuttlecock, urging him to get a move on.
Back in bed, Mario Conde smoked a cigarette. With the dark eyes of Violeta del Río floating in his mind, his memory slipping over her thick wavy hair and satin skin, he was finally blessed with sleep and, quite unexpectedly, slept soundly for five hours, feeling swindled when he woke up, because he couldn’t recall a single dream about the beautiful woman sheathed in lamé.
What the fuck am I doing here?… Conde stood in the church entrance and took in a far too pleasurable lungful of the damp draught blowing down the aisle of the modest slate and brick building he’d entered for the first time on the day he was baptised. Forty-seven years ago, according to his calculations – a number that never got smaller. Once again he saw in the distance the rather modest high altar and its peaceful image of the clean, pink-cheeked archangel Raphael, a heavenly being immune to the pull of world. The rows of dark pews, empty at that time in the morning, contrasted with the bustle the Count had left behind in the street, populated by its motley crew of churro and pastry sellers, passersby rushing or dawdling, grumpy morning drunkards propping up the bar on the corner and resigned pensioners waiting for the deferred opening of the cafeteria where they would comfort their groaning stomachs.
Over the last ten to twelve years, Conde had begun to visit the local church suspiciously frequently. Although he’d never been to another mass and never contemplated the possibility he might kneel by the confessional, the urge to sit for a few minutes in the deserted temple, freeing up the floodgates of his mind, repaid him with a feeling of calm he argued had nothing in common with mystical or extra-terrestrial spiritual longings apart from its basic function that the Count never used – he never prayed or asked for anything, because he’d forgotten all his prayers and didn’t have anyone to include in them – the church had begun to provide a kind of shelter where time and life lost the savage rhythms of the struggle for daily survival. Nonetheless, his conscience warned that, despite his lack of belief in life after death, a diffuse feeling did exist he’d yet to pin down, that wasn’t sapping his essential atheism but was beginning to entice him into that world and its persistent, magnetic appeal. Conde had come to suspect that the blend of aging and disillusion overwhelming his heart might finally cast him back, or just return him, to the fold of those who find consolation in faith. But the mere thought of that possibility irked him: the Count was a fundamentalist in his loyalties, and converts might be contemptible renegades and traitors, but re-conversion verged on the abominable.
That morning Conde felt full of expectation: he wasn’t entering church in search of passing solace, but to find an unlikely response, quite unrelated to mysteries of transcendence, but rather connected to those of his own past, in the most earthbound of all possible worlds. Consequently, rather than sitting anonymously on one of the pews, he crossed over the central aisle and headed for the sacristy, where he found, as he’d hoped he would, the ever-stalwart figure of octogenarian Padre Mendoza, Bible open at a page of the Apocalypse, searching no doubt for the text for his next sermon.
“Good morning, Padre,” he said, entering the precinct.
“Ready then?” asked the old man without looking up.
“Not yet.”
“Don’t leave it too long,” the priest warned.
“What did we agree? Is or isn’t the Lord’s time infinite?”
“The Lord’s is, your’s isn’t. Nor is mine,” he retorted smiling at the Count.
“Why are you so keen to convert me?” asked the Count.
“Because you’re crying out for it. You insist on not believing but you are somebody who can’t live without belief. All you need is to dare to take the final step.”
Conde had to smile. Could that be true or was the wily old priest merely exercising his sibylline logic?
“I’m not prepared to believe in certain words again. What’s more, you will ask me to do things I can’t and don’t want to do.”
“For example?”
“I’ll tell you when you give me confession,” wriggled the Count and, coming back to earth, he handed the priest a cigarette, as he put another to his own lips. He lit both with his lighter and they were soon enveloped in a cloud of smoke. “I came to see you because I need to find something out and you can perhaps help me… How long have you known my family?”
“For fifty-eight years, since the day I first came to this parish. You weren’t even a twinkle in your father’s eye… Your Grandfather Rufino, who was even more of an atheist than you, was my first friend around here.”
Conde nodded and again worried about what had really driven him to Padre Mendoza’s door. A skilled hand in these uncomfortable situations, the priest helped him make the next step.
“So what is it you need to know?”
Conde looked him in the eye and felt the trust-suffusing gaze of that old man who’d once placed in his mouth a flour wafer that, he claimed, was the very body of Christ.
“Have you ever heard of a woman called Violeta del Río?”
The priest looked up, perhaps surprised by that unexpected question. He took a couple of drags, then put out the cigarette in the ashtray and returned Conde’s gaze.
“No,” came his firm reply. “Why?”