HE FELT ASHAMED every time he repeated those words, when every morning at the same hour he saw the two dark silhouettes outside the glass door, and he would put out his cigarette, stow it in the drawer, and lower his head, pretending to be absorbed in his work, tearing a worn, twisted heel off an old shoe or putting on those metal reinforcements we called heel plates in our town, routine repairs during the hard times when almost no one could afford a new pair of shoes. He would feel the double scrutiny — alarming and magnetic — of Sister Barranco and Sister María del Gólgota, Fanny in the secrecy of their blasphemous rendezvous, the dark nights and blind lust in the icy cell, and when both nuns said in unison, “Ave María Purísima,” he heard in the younger woman’s voice invitation, recollection, and challenge, and as he said, “Conceiving without sin,” the formula he had repeated since he was a boy without ever having thought about its meaning, he would feel a strange mixture of thrill and contrition.
It was difficult for him to look up at them, and he tried not to meet the two pairs of eyes, lest a sign from Sister María del Gólgota be intercepted by the older nun, yet he also feared to miss the heartening nod that the little door would be open for him that night. He’d slept with many women, but this adventure caused him uncertainty and confusion, contained something that deeply wounded his masculine self-esteem, and disturbed the perfect simplicity of mind he’d enjoyed until now. “I wonder if you can explain this to me, you who have studied and know so many things. Why am I afraid of her? If I decide not to see her anymore, why do I leave my house before twelve and die of impatience for the light to come on in the tower? She’s wonderful, that’s the truth, better than a hundred loaves of bread and a hundred cheeses, and I go crazy when I think about running my hands over her body in the darkness, about the smell of her, about seeing that white flesh in the flare of the lighter or glowing ash of the cigarette.”
But the one flaw she had, which he noticed the first night and only got worse, was how much she talked after the faena, the third pass, as he would say, using the language of the bullfight. Before it, no: from the moment he entered her cell until they were both limp, the woman only breathed, panted, and moaned. But as soon as she was satisfied, she stuck to him like a leech, like a clamp locking him between her thighs, and jabbered into his ear, shaking him angrily if she saw he was beginning to doze, and he felt the touch of her lips and the endless hiss of her voice long after he was with her, when he was on his way home after two in the morning, wrapped in his cape, or when he woke from a dream about disgrace or scandal, or when he was alone in his shoe-repair shop and stopped hearing the songs on the radio, because her voice buzzed like an insect in his ear, or like pounding blood or his heart beating, and it turned into other voices that gradually he was becoming familiar with, voices from her long-ago life and ghostly family: the father wanting his daughter to get her doctorate in science or civil engineering, the mother saying her rosary, the venomous aunt clad in mourning, who came to get Fanny and her brother at the police station on the border when they ran away to France hidden in a freight car, planning to join the Resistance against the Germans or to place themselves at the service of the Republican government in exile. They were like Santa Teresa and her brother, when they escaped from their home to the land of the Moors to convert the infidels or die as martyrs, “with the difference that we didn’t have a home any longer because the Nacionales shot my father as soon as they came into our town at the end of the war, and they shaved my mother’s head and tattooed a hammer and sickle on her skull and paraded her with other women who were Reds or the wives of Reds through the center of the town, and forced her and the other women to scrub the floor of the church, on their knees on the icy stones. All because they hated my father so much, who was the best and most peaceful and meticulous man in the world, even in summer he wore his suit coat, celluloid collar, and bow tie. Just because at the beginning of the war he was walking down the street dressed that way, he was almost shot by some militiamen, and in that same suit, collar, and bow tie the agitators led him to the firing squad three years later, and he told my brother, ‘At least it isn’t my own who’re killing me.’”
Her father shot, her mother crazy, the furtive journey of days and nights toward the border in a trainload of merchandise, her brother and she sleeping on straw that reeked of manure and making wild plans to join the Resistance against Hitler and Franco, the hillsides covered with flowering almond and apple trees and the narrow streets of the town where they had spent the war years in perfect happiness while their mother prayed and their father administered a school for displaced children and kept wearing the suit and tie and hat and ankle-high boots of a meticulous Republican despite the fright the libertarian militia had given him. Then the others came, clubbed him with their rifle butts, and kicked him out of the house with its patio and grape arbor and fresh-water well where they’d lived four years almost like the Swiss Family Robinsons of that book that she and her brother loved so much. “Don’t lose heart, nothing will happen to me, this is just a mistake,” she spoke into Mateo’s ear in her father’s voice. When her brother went to take a bit of food and tobacco to the barracks where they had him locked up, what most impressed him was not going inside the pen filled with men sentenced to death but seeing his father unshaven and without the celluloid collar, filthy and in a wrinkled suit.
Yet it wasn’t her father but her brother who was the hero of her tales: her comrade in childhood games and adventures among the white blossoms of the apple and almond trees, her reading partner and the instigator of their plans to run away and enlist in social revolutions, partisan armies, clandestine cells of anti-Fascist resistance, to go explore Tierra del Fuego or Patagonia or the Gobi Desert. They caught her, locked her up in a convent, and forced her to become a nun under dark and terrible threats she never explained, though she was so full of other details, but at least her brother managed to escape, and at some point in the course of all those years a letter came to her through circuitous channels. “He’s living in America, I don’t know whether north or south, and moves a lot and has so many business affairs he can’t stay too long in any one place, he might be in Chicago or New York or Buenos Aires. He always wants to know about me, but because of the witches who kidnapped me his letters don’t reach me, and I can’t send anything to him, can’t ask him to help me, to come save me.”
“You help me,” she whispered, and Mateo felt her lips and fevered breath on his ear, “help me escape and we’ll go to America together to look for my brother. What’s keeping you here, a man is free to go anywhere he wants, not like a woman, who’s a prisoner even when she’s not locked up in a convent. You don’t have anything here, all you do is repair old shoes in that cubbyhole, smelling the old sweat people leave in their shoes, and you so young and strong, with those huge hands and that energy you have, nothing could stand in your way if you got out of here and went to America, where men go who have the courage to make the world their apple, as my brother did, and where women don’t live behind closed doors or drape themselves in eternal mourning or kill themselves having babies and working in the fields and scrubbing floors on their hands and knees and washing clothes in winter in troughs of cold water with scraps of soap that tear the skin off their hands.