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She spoke in a quiet voice, so near his ear he could feel the moisture of her breath and lips, which she’d painted red for him, she said, with lipstick stolen from the perfume shop on Calle Real at a moment when neither the clerk nor Sister Barranco was watching, and she laughed at the memory. “The witch doesn’t trust me, never takes her eyes off me, but I’m quicker than she is, and besides she’s getting blind. She deserves it for the venom she spits every time she speaks, even when she’s saying her rosary.” Her talk seemed to him as improper as the delight she took in smoking, she even learned to blow smoke rings, expelling them slowly from her painted lips. “María del Gólgota, what a cross that name is, my real name is Francisca, or Fanny, which is what my father called me, may he rest in peace, he was a man who liked all things English. He wanted his little girl to learn English, play tennis, use a typewriter, drive a car, and go to the university and study something serious, not such foolishness for idle señoritas as teaching or fine arts but medicine or science. He made my brother study too, and play sports, but I was his favorite; he said that because I was a girl I needed more skills to take care of myself in the world. My mother, although she let him do it because she had a weak character, complained, ‘He’s trying to make a man out of her. Who will want to be the sweetheart of an engineer?’ My father would say, ‘I can’t believe I have a wife so backward that she’s against the progress of women.’”

She imitated their voices, creating a complete play in the secret darkness of her cell and murmuring into his ear: the grave, measured voice of her father, the whining voice of her mother, the voice of her brother, who had been her accomplice and hero from an early age, the croaking frog voice of Sister Barranco, and the various tones of ridicule and treachery used by the other nuns of the convent. “I know they hate me, want to poison me, those dizzy spells I suffer, Sister Barranco brought me warm broth but I don’t trust her, ‘Here, Sister, this nice broth will make you feel better, it will raise the dead.’ Well feed it to your mother, you witch. I began to get better as soon as I stopped drinking her broths and potions, and she with that ‘Come, Sister, let’s lift that spirit of yours, look how well that tonic did I brought last night, although, of course, our prayers to the Holy Virgin were what helped most.’”

The whispering in his ear made him sleepy but also bothered him, because he might have been a little bit on the libertine side but he was still a good Catholic. That Sister María del Gólgota, or Fanny, was prettier than a fresh-baked loaf of white bread — his words — but she seemed to him too disrespectful of holy things, and his conscience hurt him more for listening and not protesting than for going to bed with her. “All that talking she did, that chatter, right up against me on the cot, which any moment could have collapsed under our weight. She told me stories about her parents and her brother, who she said was in Africa and then in Tierra del Fuego, and about how one of her aunts had her locked up in a convent and forced her to become a novice, ‘For your own good, child, not for your happiness in the other world, because I know you don’t believe in Him, just like your father, but so you’ll have some security in this world and not end up with a shaved head and insulted in public like your poor mother, who wasn’t to blame for anything, and look how she fell apart and how we had to put her away for so long.’”

She spoke feverishly, as wound up as when she’d pulled off his clothes or urged him into the painful tightness of her virginity. She was ecstatic, sucking up a cigarette almost in one breath, pressing him between her thighs until his bones cracked, thrusting her tongue into his mouth, which he didn’t like because it didn’t seem a thing for a decent woman to do. She consumed kisses, his cigarettes, precious minutes, and maybe took the greatest pleasure in saying aloud all the things that for years had dizzied her in her secret thoughts and kept her in a perpetual ferment of daydream and impossible rebellion. But when the bells struck two, she made him dress with an impatience similar to that with which she had undressed him two hours earlier, put into his pocket an envelope containing all the cigarette butts and ashes to hide the evidence, took his hand and led him down the stairs, with no hesitation, and more than once it seemed she had the gift of seeing in the dark. She peered out the little side door, then gestured for him to go, and a second later he was alone in the plaza, dazed, bruised, unable to believe that he had actually sneaked into a convent at midnight and deflowered a nun.

IN HIS SHOE-REPAIR SHOP, and in Pepe Morillo’s barbershop next door, men liked to boast of their conquests and their feats with whores. Mateo kept silent, and smiled inside: If you only knew. He couldn’t tell his confessor about his adventure, so he suffered the uneasiness of living in mortal sin. I’m the only one he told, and that was more than forty years after the fact, when he’d been retired for some years and was living in Madrid. You should have seen the grin on his face, the two of us in the dining room of his home, surrounded by souvenirs of our hometown and prints and images of saints, and those bullfight posters. “Ah, my friend, how I’ve loved the bulls and the women, and what good times I’ve had, may God forgive me.”

Before the television he’s addled and forgetful, blinking, dozing, content. He’ll watch a cartoon, a contest of long words, or a physician’s daily advice, wrapped in a continuous flow of images and talk from films and news and South American melodramas. He’ll perk up a little when he sees a beautiful woman on the screen, to whom he may say something, first checking to see that his wife isn’t anywhere near, one of those compliments that as a young man he tossed to women strolling arm in arm down Calle Real on a Sunday afternoon. When I was little, the man who owned the only TV in the neighborhood would say obscene things to the female announcers and miniskirted women in the commercials. If people ask Mateo a question, he doesn’t hear, or says something confused, or answers a question they haven’t asked. He may burst out laughing at some program that earlier made his tears flow. You set his meal before him and he eats every bite, that’s one thing that hasn’t changed, he hasn’t lost his appetite, but after a while he doesn’t remember and asks me when we’re going to eat, so he’s getting fat. I tell him to go outside, to breathe a little fresh air, not to spend the whole day watching TV, but as soon as he goes out the door I’m nervous, afraid he’ll get lost, as foolish as he is and as big as Madrid is nowadays, and I have to be careful that his shoes are tied and he’s wearing his socks, he who was once so stylish and fussy about what he wore, even if it was only to go to the market around the corner.

He sits for hours wearing the same complacent smile, approving benevolently of everything he sees and hears, the conversations of the neighbor women and the transvestites at Sandra’s kiosk, the news programs and bulletins, the shouts of the women selling fish in the market, the medical advice on the morning shows, the faces of the living dead he meets in Chueca Plaza and on the dark corners of the barrio when he goes out wearing his great overcoat and Tyrolean hat. Sometimes when I visit him, he doesn’t recognize me at first. I sit down by him in the dining room, and he looks at me puzzled, trying to follow the conversation, and while he’s telling me something or I’m trying to get one of his old stories out of him, his eyes wander to the TV and he forgets that there’s anyone else in the room. But I have a trick that never fails: I get close to him, when his wife isn’t around, and say in a low voice, “Ave María Purísima.” His eyes light up, and he smiles the roguish smile he used to have when he talked to me about women, and he replies, “Conceiving without sin.”