Evelio Rosero - Good Offices

“There’s no happier pair than a boy and a dog,” he heard Matamoros say.

And, much later, pulling him out of his reverie, he heard the voice of a Lilia: “This cat acts like it’s out on the streets: open your mouth out there, and they’ll snatch your tongue.”

As she was saying this, the thieving cat had just appeared and disappeared, now carrying off a great strip of crackling. The Lilias watched the speedy getaway, but this time they did not move from their places. Instead of leaping up, they shook their heads and poured themselves more wine; they might even have smiled.

“One remembers forgotten songs,” Father Matamoros said. “I’m remembering one for absent friends. I learned it years ago from the poet Fernando Linero, who played the piano as if he were strumming the clouds.”

First he cleared his throat with a good swig; it was the end of the bottle, which one of the Lilias replaced as if by magic, as though not wanting to miss a moment of the song; setting the bottle at the priest’s right, she waited as San José burst into song like one more lonely traveler with no place to go, just him and the road, and as he sang his eyes roamed over Tancredo and the Lilias in the candles’ flickering gloom. What’s that cat doing on the table, so sure of itself? Tancredo fretted for a second — washing its whiskers, listening attentively to Matamoros’s song. Now other cats are sauntering across the table, there’s one, the epitome of elasticity, wisely settling on the rabbit, unhurriedly finishing off the golden throat, savoring it, spitting out little bones, and no one seems to notice, no one looks at it, the song goes on, the candles crackle as if in response, now the cats even stop eating, seek their lairs with astonishingly calm expressions, set out, reach a corner of the table and leap off one at a time, settle themselves back in their niches, watchful, their eyes fixed on Matamoros’s voice, “Dancing,” Tancredo said to himself, suddenly noticing the Lilias, “they’re dancing” — and so they were. Driven by a lilting waltz Matamoros was whispering, the adoring Lilias were weaving about the kitchen in a silent dance, sunk in a vertigo of the spirits, suspended in the air as if beneath a waterfall, their eyes half-closed, arms raised. Tancredo did not know how much time went by, but suddenly saw that the cats were emerging from their niches again, leaping one by one onto the edge of the table and from there into the darkness; they jumped inordinately slowly, springing lazily into the air, seeming to hang motionless aloft for two or three seconds before disappearing, and at the same time he saw the Lilias were no longer there, it was extraordinary, not a single Lilia seated or dancing around the table. He discovered that Matamoros had stopped singing, but could only shake off the spell of the last song by reaching up and linking his hands behind his head as if stretching. So he was alone with Matamoros; since when? The two of them in the most profound silence; no, Father Matamoros was talking about dreams, telling a dream, or was he singing it? What was Father Matamoros’s dream about? How long had he been talking about dreams? Seated at the table, they regarded one another attentively, each on the verge of a word; whose turn was it to speak? Without knowing how, Tancredo resumed the conversation, as if he really had been holding that non-existent conversation with the Father, or did it exist? Whatever the case, he said or carried on saying, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, that he had dreamt, Father, that he had an Indian slave-girl, tied up with a chain like an animal, and that he took her for a walk through a sunlit meadow, the sun, the smell of the sunshine, “everything full of the most terrible lustfulness, Father, hanging over our heads, it was impossible not to take her in my arms, the soft moss offered itself, the leafy oak gave its shade, she stretched out wearily on the grass, it wrapped itself around her like a sheet, offering her rest, and, with the same chain I used for leading her about, she drew me toward her, as if I were the animal and not her, and she spread her legs and all her Hell burned me, Father.”

In the silence, one of the candles was dying. Here Matamoros interrupted.

“Why Hell?” he asked.

“Because of the heat.”

“The heat, yes, but why Hell?”

“The terrible lustfulness.”

“Love, the absence of love.”

“Love?”

“Like Joseph in Egypt, I too interpret dreams.”

Then Tancredo was not ashamed any more to hear himself telling the Father of his eternal animal fear. I’m telling him of my fear, I should ask him to hear my confession, he thought. “Father, let this be a confession,” he said. “God bless you, my child, of what do you accuse yourself?” “Of wanting to kill myself.” “In order not to kill someone else?” “In order not to kill someone else, Father.” “Speak freely. There exists the secrecy of the confessional, of sinners heard in confession; but in the end God and the dead hear us, see us, they are listening to us.” “I don’t care if the dead are listening,” Tancredo shrugged, his head spinning, “or God.” “God doesn’t care about that either,” Matamoros replied. He seemed to Tancredo to be dozing off; his eyes were closed; he was nodding. Then Tancredo saw him shudder and take a hurried drink. He was reborn.

“What is there to fear?” the priest asked. “There’s no sin in wishing to die in order not to kill. These are wearying times, human times. There are good times and bad, and at wearying times the best thing to do is rest.”

At last Tancredo was able to make his confession.

“No one can rest here,” he said. “We’re worked to death.”

To tell you the truth, he thought quickly, everyone here wants to kill Almida and his sacristan.

They were talking in whispers, taking frequent drinks, their heads bowed, resting on one hand, their other hands holding the glasses of brandy, while the Lilias remained out of sight. “I’m tired of all this, Father, not because I don’t want to do it, but because I can’t do it, my head’s bursting,” something like that. Tancredo shook his head. Was he drunk too? Most likely, because finally he talked about Sabina, his entire life with Sabina, and not just his life, he even revealed where she was at that time of night. “What time is it, Father?” “The time of the heart, my son.” Matamoros drank, attentive now. “Where is that furious girl,” he asked, “where’s she waiting for you?” “You’re not going to believe me, Father.” “Where, my son?” “At the altar, Father, or, more precisely, beneath the altar; it’s her way of telling me she wants me to go away with her; she says if I don’t go she’ll stay there until Almida comes and finds her.”

“Is she capable of that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me about her.”

“It’s Sabina’s eyes, her tongue wetting her lips when she speaks to me. She convinces me of her schemes, her plotting. It’s painful not to give in to what emanates from Sabina’s body, her face, all of her, so hopeful of our escape.”

Far off but palpable, like vibrations, they heard the voices of the three Lilias, their footsteps in the courtyard. What were they doing out there lost to the world, in the darkness of the immense courtyard, where the Father’s Volkswagen would soon be arriving? Tancredo had to hurry; he resumed his confession.

Quite simply, Sabina wanted to be with him, Father, and give free rein to pleasure. Pleasure he was incapable of ignoring; not long ago, while Sabina had been talking to him, he had imagined her naked, and Sabina seemed to discover the desire in his gaze, Father, almost to smell it, because for a few seconds she had stopped talking and even parted her legs slightly, as if making herself comfortable, and smiled imperceptibly, blushing all the more, in anticipation. To roll in each other’s arms, oblivious to the world, that was what drove Sabina. To get down to it, and not just beneath the altar, but all over the place, on every altar, wherever, it made no difference, Father. It was her tempestuous spirit locked inside her fragile blonde body, her reddened lips, those teeth that bit them until they bled; it was a different passion, not like resentment or bitterness, that made her suffer and hurt, it was desire, Father, and it all caused him pain, because he desired her too. One day she took him to the little room where Almida and the sacristan keep the money, on the first floor, Father, where no stranger would ever appear, and he allowed her to take his hands in hers and encourage him to follow her. In the library, behind a little door discreetly disguised by three unframed tapestries, they peeked at the boxes of money. There were six rectangular wooden chests, without padlocks, lined up across the secret little room. Around them, stacks of Missals, which the Church printed to give as gifts at First Communions, lined the walls right up to the ceiling. In a corner, piled any which way, lay seven or ten Bibles, dusty and disintegrating, huge, black and forgotten. The six boxes, in contrast, were clean and apparently polished. “Sabina knelt in front of them, Father. She lifted one of the lids: neat bundles of notes filled it up to the top. And she turned to look at me, her hands open on the bundles, messing them up. She ended up sitting on top of the boxes, her chest heaving, her tongue flicking over her lips, moistening them. I didn’t recognize her. She crossed her legs and leaned back on her hands. She was looking at me defiantly. ‘Let’s run away,’ she said. ‘Any one of these boxes would give us enough to live on. Just one box. I’m not talking about all of them. We’ve worked our whole lives for these people.’ She told me they were mean, that when she’d been a girl they’d never given her a toy, a birthday cake, a decent coat or a scarf, never mind an education, a profession, so that she could be independent. ‘What do they want to condemn us to?’ she asked, and then supplied the answer: ‘To grow old in their service.’ She told me her bastard of a godfather, that’s how she put it, had taken advantage of her when she was little, not once, but a hundred times. And she struggled not to cry. ‘Almida does the same to the factory girls who come to the Community Meals,’ she said. That provoked a blind rage in me, Father. The truth is I couldn’t refute Sabina’s assertions. That has always been my great torment: knowing that she tells the truth. Hearing what she said made me furious, and I wanted to reach out a hand, just my right hand, and wrap my fingers round Sabina’s delicate neck, squeeze until it snapped and never hear her again. Why, Father, why that desire of mine to take her life? It was a plan like a cold shudder I didn’t know I had in me, but I recognized it the next moment, was amazed by it for an instant, but just an instant, because then I was terrified, Father. Sabina was crying. In any case, with or without tears, it was easy to envisage where she was heading with her words, what her body was hinting at, stretched out beseechingly on top of the boxes, as if pleading that we play an unexpected game. ‘Just one box,’ she said again, ‘and we’ll run away.’” As desperate as she was lascivious, she had reached toward him, seized his hands, she was pulling him, her wet lips moving as if in silent prayer. And he saw her naked, suddenly he saw her naked, Father, on top of bundles and bundles of money. Money that didn’t belong to her. Money that had begun to pile up at an excessive rate, ever since Don Justiniano had shown up in the parish. And he had preferred not to wonder, never to wonder again, about where that money came from or why it accumulated in boxes, not being deposited in a bank, not being spent, at the very least, on the parish’s basic requirements. Well, it was no secret, Father, that the Community Meals were put together at minimum cost, that potato soup and rice with potatoes were the sole insipid ingredients, army mush reserved for the blind, the street children, the prostitutes. With difficulty he pulled away from the hands that were entrapping him, with difficulty, Father, he managed to escape the spell of the body snaking toward him, the burning face on the point of conquering him. And he heard her cry out behind him, Father. “Oh, you great brute,” she cried, “coward, a thousand times over,” and, in her frustration, Sabina launched herself at the Missals. With a blow she demolished a stack. She tripped over the pile of dusty Bibles. She kicked them. A cloud of dust flew up, sullying the air. “Swine,” she cried, “all of you are pigs here.”