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.”