Antonio Molina - Sepharad

The younger nun, Sister María del Gólgota, had a chin like Imperio Argentina’s, and despite her robes it was possible to get an idea of what her body was like, not her bosom, of course, which was starchily concealed, but a knee, or the hint of a hip or thigh, as she walked up the street into a strong breeze, or the line of a heel and an ankle that promised a naked extent of milk-white legs within the dark cave of her habit.

“Ave María Purísima.”

“Conceiving without sin.”

He answered without looking up from what he was doing, lest Sister Barranco, who always wore such a suspicious expression, discovered an excess of interest in his eyes, and also to postpone the pleasure of seeing the younger nun’s face and trying to coax a little friendliness or complicity from her sidelong glances. He tells me, or used to tell me until recently, that one of his rules is to seek out women who aren’t beautiful, because beautiful women don’t give themselves completely in bed, they don’t make anywhere near the effort as one who is a little homely and must compensate for it in other ways. No beautiful screen stars, no models. “If the woman under you is ugly, no problem, just turn out the light or don’t look at her face,” the reprobate liked to say. “The results are incomparable, and there’s much less competition.” The narrator of this tale roars with laughter in the bar, orders new drinks and fried octopus and fish, takes a great swallow of beer, smacks his lips, and continues the story, so flattered by everyone’s attention that he doesn’t notice how loud his voice is.

The nun really pleased him, her beauty notwithstanding. He liked her so much that he began imagining things, and feared he would make a false step and do something stupid. “She stood there looking at me as if she wanted to tell me something, and gestured at the old woman as if saying, if I could get away from her… but after they left I wasn’t sure whether I’d seen it or imagined it, and the next day they came again, Ave María Purísima, Conceiving without sin, and though I looked carefully, I couldn’t see that Sister María del Gólgota was making any sign. She just stared at a poster for a bullfight while Sister Barranco collected my coins for the day and said, as they left, ‘God will reward you,’ and it was as if all that time she was a nun like any other nun. Maybe I was delirious from being alone so many hours, not talking with anyone and doing nothing but repairing toes and cutting half soles, surrounded by old shoes, which are the saddest things in the world because they always made me think of dead people, especially that time of year, in winter, when everyone is off to the olive harvest and I could spend the whole day without seeing a soul. During the war, when I was a little boy, I saw a lot of dead people’s shoes. They would shoot someone and leave him lying in a ditch or behind the cemetery, and we kids would go look at the corpses, and I noticed how many had lost their shoes, or I’d find a pair of shoes, or a single shoe, and not know which dead man they belonged to. Once in a newsreel I saw mountains of old shoes in those camps they had in Germany.”

“MAY I HAVE a little water?”

The young nun was paler than usual that morning, her face dull, the rims of her eyelids red, and there were circles under her eyes, as if from sleepless nights. Under the scowling gaze of Sister Barranco, he led her to the narrow, shadowy corridor behind his shop, where the washroom and water jar were, one of those old brightly colored glazed jugs in the form of a rooster with red comb and yellow chest. It seemed improper for a nun to drink from her cupped hands, so he looked for a clean glass. Her hands trembled a little as they took the glass, and he watched her beautiful pale lips, a thread of water trickling down her strong chin. Her hands were shaking now, and when he tried to catch the glass before she dropped it, his hands touched hers, and he could feel how hot they were. He pressed them and was close enough to smell her fevered breath and feel the carnal mass of a body weakened by discipline and fasting, by the merciless cold of the cells and refectory and corridors of that convent that was so old it was practically in ruins. “Then,” he said, “I lost my head completely and not even I believed what I was doing, I took her by the waist and drew her to me, I groped for her thighs and ass beneath the habit, and kissed her on the mouth, though she tried to turn away. I thought, she’ll scream, the other nun will run in and make a royal scene; I could almost see the people coming out of the nearby shops, but I didn’t care, or else I couldn’t help what I was doing, drawn to her lips and feeling how hot her face was, her whole body. I expected her to scream, but she didn’t, she didn’t even resist, in fact she fell into my arms as I felt her all over, felt the body I had so often imagined. Then I saw she had closed her eyes, the way women do in the movies when a kiss is coming but is cut by the censor. But no, it wasn’t an amorous trance, she had fainted, and I tried to hold her but couldn’t, her eyes rolled back in her head, and she fell to the floor.”

How terrified he was to see her lying there, pale as death, her eyelids half closed, as if he’d killed her with the profanation of his advance. He couldn’t remember whether he shouted for the other nun or whether she came into the room behind the shop because she was worried about how long the girl had been gone or because she’d heard the thud of her fall. When they managed to revive her, the young nun was paler than ever, and if he spoke to her, she looked at him with an empty face, as if not remembering anything that had happened. She smiled weakly and thanked him for his help as she started back to the convent, leaning upon the strong, stout Sister Barranco, and once again he was unsure about what had happened in those few instants behind the shoe repair shop. Perhaps she was too.

Days went by, and neither of the two nuns appeared. Possibly Sister Barranco suspected something and wouldn’t let Sister María del Gólgota leave the convent, to say nothing of going anywhere near the cobbler’s door. Or possibly the young nun was very ill and Sister Barranco didn’t leave her side, or she had even died of her fever. But if she were dead, it would be known in the city, the slow, widely spaced tolling of the bells for the dead would be heard. Then one day, at midmorning, he locked his glass door and left to wander around the plaza of Santa María, though not too near the convent doors, which opened from time to time to let a nun pass through who always, for a few seconds, was the figure of Sister María del Gólgota, or maybe Sister Barranco glowering at him for his irreverent behavior.

HE DIDN’T ABANDON his other activities, of course, you know how he was. He attended the meetings of the board of the Last Supper crew and of the Corpus Christi Society, which was dedicated to providing medical assistance and modest subsidies to farmers and artisans in those days before social security. Neither did he desert the wife of a second lieutenant who always sent him word as soon as her husband went off on maneuvers. But in the meetings he was more distracted than usual, and his Madame Lieutenant, as he called her, found him cool and asked if he had another woman, threatening in a fit of spite to tell everything to the lieutenant or steal his pistol and do something horrible. “You remember what I told you about beautiful women? They ruin you, make you critical of other women, the way we get used to wheat bread and white potatoes and are no longer satisfied with black bread and yams, and the carobs we ate so greedily during the lean years turn our stomach. After I became infatuated with the nun, so beautiful and young, my Madame Lieutenant began to look old and fat to me, no matter how hot and grateful she was in bed, or how much café con leche and buttered toast she brought me afterward. Since the lieutenant was in the quartermaster corps, there was plenty of food in that house. Sometimes when I was leaving, my Madame Lieutenant would give me a dozen eggs or a whole tin of condensed milk. ‘Take this,’ she’d say, ‘to build up your strength.’”