Antonio Molina - Sepharad

So many memories have been erased, so many itineraries, obligations, and words forgotten, but from time to time a precise voice comes to him, superimposed on the voices of a present in which he often does not know where he is, as if he suffered not so much from amnesia as from sleepwalking, awaking suddenly not in a plaza in his beloved town but in the heart of Madrid, dressed in clothing he is slow to recognize as his, a visitor in an aged, leaden body that can’t be his.

“Ave María Purísima,” the voices say to him, and he answers, “Conceiving without sin.”

He heard two voices, with the sound of the glass door opening, but he didn’t look up immediately or interrupt his work, accustomed to this same apparition nearly every morning, to the differences in the two voices and the two accents, as much a contrast as between the figures they belonged to, though seen from a distance the figures seemed identical: two nuns in the same habit, brown robe and black wimple, one taller and younger than the other, both wearing sandals that must have left their feet freezing, feet as white as their hands and faces. One face was translucent, the other dead and muddy, one voice clear, with an accent of the north, the other hoarse, as if from bronchitis, with a rough country intonation. One of the nuns pushed open the door with the badly fitting glass panes, and he didn’t have to look up to know immediately what expression he would see on each face: friendly supplication, ill-humored demand. Both stood before his cobbler’s bench, asking almost every day for a donation to the poor, a pair of old shoes he couldn’t use anymore, a few centimos for altar candles or to buy medicine for an ailing mother. So different, yet identical as they came toward you from the end of Calle Real any morning that winter, a deserted morning, because the olive harvest had begun and half the city was in the country picking the crop, so the street became busy only as dusk fell.

Ave María Purísima.

He acted as if he were irritated by their persistence, but if he was smoking when they entered, he took the cigarette from his lips and quickly extinguished it against the end of the bench, then stuck it over his ear, because you didn’t waste a shred of tobacco in those days. He would nod vaguely, or get to his feet before replying, in a mocking tone of resignation, “Conceiving without sin.”

Today he is an old man but still impressive, though lately a little strange in the head, but when he was thirty he was so tall you couldn’t miss him, and he always joked with the women patrons who brought him their shoes to be mended, jokes that often went too far, although he was so witty he got away with it. After all, he was the director of one of the Holy Week crews, and he marched carrying a candle in the Corpus Christi procession, and his clientele included priests from nearby churches and even officers from the headquarters of the Guardia Civil, which at that time was on a small plaza down a side street. But he conquered the women without saying a word, and you’d be amazed to know how many ladies of good reputation, who took Communion every day, crossed the line, using the subterfuge that he was bringing them a pair of recently mended shoes — at an hour when the husband was at work and the children in school — and sometimes, I know this because he told me himself, he had them step into the room behind the shop, which was even smaller than the cubby where he worked, and there, in a fit of lechery, he lifted their skirts and gave them the benefit of his attentions. Women then were much more passionate, he says, or used to say, because nowadays he doesn’t tell many tales, not the way he used to, when as soon as I brought up the subject he would start and there would be no stopping him, and it was fun to walk down the street with him, because he spoke loudly and looked all the women over with a fierceness he doesn’t have now and really isn’t appropriate for a man of his years anyway. “Look,” he’d say, “don’t miss that, what an ass, what a pair of tits that woman has, the way she walks.” He went to confession and was given huge penances, so that almost every year he walked barefoot in the procession and sometimes carried a heavy cross, and no one knew the reason except his confessor, Don Diego, I’m sure you remember the red-faced man who was the parish priest at Santa María. Every once in a while Don Diego threatened to deny him absolution. “You can do your penance, Mateo, but if you don’t mend your ways the sacrament will not cleanse you of your sins.” The thing is that deep in his heart he didn’t believe that the Sixth Commandment was as serious as the other nine, especially if it was broken with discretion and with the full enjoyment of both parties involved and without scandal or harm to a third party, and in addition you were spared the degradation and lack of hygiene that went with dealing with whores, a very widespread habit when there were still legal houses, places Mateo boasted about avoiding. “How could I enjoy having a woman who was only with me because I paid her?”

That was the year of the new float for the Last Supper, when that sculptor who owed our friend so much money repaid Mateo by portraying him as Saint Matthew. “Look, Sister,” said the older nun, “this cobbler has the same face as the Apostle, but what he doesn’t have is his saintliness.” “We are made of clay, Mother, sinners all though good Christians, and we can’t all devote ourselves as exclusively to divine worship as you good sisters. Didn’t Christ say that in the home of Martha and Mary? And didn’t Saint Teresa say that our Lord also walked among the prostitutes? Well, maybe he also walks here among my old shoes and half soles.” “More works of charity and fewer words, cobbler, for faith without good works is a dead faith, and furthermore, only pagans have such a passion for the bulls. Fewer posters of bullfights and more prints of saints.”

The other nun, the young one, didn’t say anything, she would stand looking at him as if she were thinking of something else, or cast a sideways glance at the older one. Gradually, on those winter mornings when there was so little work, he began to take more careful note of her, to distinguish between her and the other one, as well as between her and the abstract figure of a nun, surprising expressions so fleeting they seemed not to have been there, quick flashes of, perhaps, disgust or boredom, the way the girl sometimes rubs her hands together or bites her lower lip in a burst of impatience that has nothing nunlike about it, that doesn’t go with the habit or the crude sandals or the sweet, devout tone he nearly always heard in her voice, in the few things she said, scarcely more than “Ave María Purísima” or “God will reward you.” At first he thought the young nun always behaved like a meek subordinate of the older one, the second part in a churchly duet, but as the days went by he perceived discord, an anger revealed only in the quick flash in her pupils, anger at having to trail after an old woman weighed down with ailments and tedious manias, at having to control the natural rhythm of her step to adapt to the older woman’s slow pace as every morning they climbed the hill from the bottom of Calle Real, dark silhouettes in a nearly deserted city, the younger woman sometimes lifting her head with an elegance that was perhaps involuntary, or perhaps secretly aggressive, and the old and bent zealot, her face as wrinkled as her mantle, her hands dry, and her toes as gnarled as grape vines in her penitential sandals.

They stopped at every shop as they made their way up the street, shops that have nearly all disappeared now, the candy store, the ironmonger’s, the toy and watch shops, the tailor’s, the pharmacy, Pepe Morillo’s barber shop — the same irritating routine every morning, the sound of the glass doors opening and the tinkling little bell. Sister Barranco was the older one, Sister María del Gólgota the young one, what names! He doesn’t remember much of it now, but when I’m with him at his home and his wife can’t hear, I say, “Sister María del Gólgota,” and he smiles a half smile, as if remembering very well but after all these years still not wanting the secret to be known. Some mornings, if their visit was a little behind schedule, he would go to the door in his leather apron with a cigarette in his mouth and wait until he saw them at the bottom of the street, after they turned the corner from Plaza de los Caídos, and then he would stub out his cigarette and swing the door back and forth to clear away the smoke and tobacco odor, and he would turn off the radio, on which all he listened to were quiz shows, programs about bullfights, or popular poetry. How strange, he thought, not to have noticed until now, to have seen nothing but a nun’s face, white and round like any other. Now he realized that the girl had large slanting eyes and long fingers, and hands that were always raw from washing in cold water, but also were very delicate. Her face, even framed by a toque, did not have the rather crude roundness nuns’ faces often have, it was a strong face that reminded him a little of Imperio Argentina — as a youth he spent all his time in the Cinema Ideal just across the street from his shoe-repair shop, and when it came to movies he loved the same thing as in real life: women, the bare-legged dancers in the musicals, the actresses who played Jane in the Tarzan movies and wore those short little leather skirts, but especially, more than any of the others, the bathing girls in the Technicolor films of Esther Williams, Esther Williams herself being the greatest of all.