“Where can a woman who’s fled a convent go here if she doesn’t have papers or a man to defend her and stand up for her? No father, no husband, no brother, not like America where a woman is worth as much as a man, if not more. There women smoke in public, wear trousers, drive a car to their office, and divorce when it suits them. They race along the highways, which are wide and built in a straight line, not like here, and the automobiles aren’t black and old but large and painted bright colors, and kitchens are shiny and white and filled with automatic appliances, so all you do is press a button and the floor is scrubbed, and there’s a machine that picks up dust and one that washes your clothes and leaves them ironed and folded, and the iceboxes don’t need blocks of ice, and every house has a garage and a garden, and lots of them have swimming pools. At those pools the women wear two-piece bathing suits and drink cool drinks and lounge in hammocks while their automatic machines do the housework. They drink and smoke and no one thinks they’re whores, and they not only paint their fingernails, they paint their toenails too, and if they complain about their husband and divorce him, he has to pay them a salary every month until they find another husband. And if they get bored with life in one place, they climb into their big bright cars and move to another city, California or Patagonia or Las Vegas or Tierra del Fuego, what wonderful names, you just have to say them and you feel your lungs fill with air, or they go to Chicago or New York and live in skyscrapers fifty stories high, in apartments that don’t need windows because the whole wall is glass, and where it’s never cold or hot because they have machines they call climate control.”
“But how do we go there, woman? What do we use to buy our passage on the ship?” he said, to be saying something, but she was furious at his lack of spine and scolded him in that murmur that made him want to sleep: “I have it all planned, you sell or lease your business, that will bring in something, since it’s in such a good location, and I’ll steal some valuable things here in the convent, a silver candelabra, a beaten gold reliquary, I can even cut a painting of the Virgin Mary out of its frame, they say it’s by Murillo, so we should get several thousand pesetas for it.” He turned to ice just thinking about it, a sacrilege in addition to profanation and blasphemy, not just public dishonor and excommunication but jail besides. Now he began to understand that this demented nun wanted something more from him than just sating her unholy lust, she wanted him to be an accomplice in her criminal plans, but what did he expect from the daughter of a Red who’d been taught free love and atheism?
HE COULDN’T SLEEP, was no good at work or his charitable activities and brotherhoods, he even reached the point of forgetting to listen to his poetry programs and bullfights on the radio. Now he feared not that someone would catch him as he sneaked into the convent or left it on those stormy winter nights that were so dark and deserted, but that she would drag him into her delirium, that he would lose the common sense that had guided him all his life and end up losing everything he had, the person he was, what he’d made of himself. He dreaded seeing her every morning with Sister Barranco and was nervous until she walked out the door, because the old nun was suspicious, watching both him and her companion for signs, for proof that would push them both toward catastrophe. But he was also worried if they didn’t come, imagining that María del Gólgota was ill again and in the delirium of her fever divulging the secret of their meetings in her cell, or she might have escaped and was hiding and as soon as it was dark she would come looking for him, as she had threatened so many times. “All this because I broke my rule and got involved with a beautiful woman, a woman, moreover, who doesn’t have a husband or anything to tie her down except those old nuns who don’t know anything. A man should choose a mistress who’s on the homely side, married, and knows how to maintain some decency even in adultery. And if possible she should have a solid financial base, so she won’t be swept away by the romantic whim to leave everything behind and run off with you.”
“What a philosopher you are, you should write down this advice so your disciples can follow it,” I told him, and he laughed and motioned for me to keep my voice down and not let his wife hear. “We need your memoirs, maestro, or else tell me everything and let me be your official biographer.”
It’s too late now, he doesn’t seem to remember, or if he does, he isn’t talking. The doctors have checked his head and say he’s all right, thank God, he doesn’t have that illness old people get, Alzheimer’s, when they can’t take care of themselves and don’t recognize anything. The doctor who examined his head says that he may be depressed from not doing anything and not knowing anyone in Madrid. But what kind of depression is it if he laughs at the least thing, all by himself? When he’s watching TV and I’m doing something in the kitchen, I hear him laughing and come out, and he’s roaring with laughter although there’s nothing funny about the program, which could be one of those news reports about war and hunger.
SHE GREW ROUGHER AND more demanding in her erotic needs; in a few weeks she had acquired all the depravity other women fall into only after long years of vice. Every night she became more talkative, more monotonous in her stories about the past and her mad schemes for the future. She began to discuss the best dates for her escape, to exact promises from him with terrible threats, full of visions of the freedom and wealth waiting for them in America, where in no time she would meet her adventurer, multimillionaire brother and own a long red or yellow or blue automobile with silvery tail fins, and a house with a garden and swimming pool, and the latest mechanical devices.
One night, she did not drag him in silence to her wobbly cot the moment he arrived but pressed against him in the darkness, took his face in her hands, and in a hoarse, altered voice whispered into his ear that before he possessed her — she loved that melodramatic word — he must swear to her that within two weeks, before the end of the olive harvest, they would run away together. Hadn’t he told her two or three nights before, blustering, lying his way out, that he had already half worked out a deal for his business with another cobbler? The nun’s right hand, which in so short a time had become amazingly expert in sexual manipulation, was like a grappling hook or claw that clutched his crotch and slowly began to squeeze, and she murmured something that years later still made his hair stand on end and produced an erection when he thought of it: “You betray me, I’ll rip this thing off.”
But that night was the last time. When he awoke the next morning, he was dizzy and shivering and didn’t have the strength even to crawl out of bed. He was relieved, however, that he couldn’t go to work and didn’t have to confront the daily visit and scrutiny of Sister Barranco and Sister María del Gólgota. By the third day his fever was worse, and he called the doctor, who diagnosed pneumonia and ordered him immediately to a hospital in Santiago. Mateo attributed his illness to divine punishment, and in his tormented half sleep he relived all the cold he had suffered during his vigils in the icy plaza and glacial cell of Sister María del Gólgota. The sins of the flesh, aggravated by blasphemy and not dressing warmly enough, had conspired to confine him to a hospital bed, and perhaps would send him to the tomb and the tortures of hell. He prayed, made fervent promises of penitence, swore he would live a holy life, walk barefoot in his procession for the next twenty years carrying a heavy wood cross on his back, subject himself to flagellation and hair shirts, maybe even become a monk and spend the rest of his days in a convent.
AFTER A MONTH HE returned to his narrow workshop and cobbler’s bench, but he had the feeling that more than a month had gone by, and he remembered the days before his illness as one coolly appraises the events of a remote past. The first two or three mornings he was back, he scarcely had the strength or will to work, and he awaited the two nuns with only a flicker of desire and fear. They didn’t come, however, and his next-door neighbor, the barber Pepe Morillo, told him he’d heard that Sister Barranco was very ill — the years were taking their toll — and that for some reason the other nun had been forbidden to leave the convent.