Antonio Molina - Sepharad

Rounds of foaming beer, waiters’ voices, the smell of frying oil, the snorting of the coffee machine, the tinny tunes from the jukebox and cigarette machine. Our storyteller has a somewhat childish face, jovial and very round, but he is bald and wears a suit, like a lawyer or notary, with a small insignia in the buttonhole of the jacket and a silver tiepin on which you can make out a tiny figure of the Virgin. He interrupts himself to accept with mock reverence the large plate of steaming sausage the waiter has just set on the bar, and with food crammed in his mouth recites:

Morcilla, blessed lady,

worthy of our veneration.

He drinks some beer and then wipes his mouth where a black sliver of sausage has lodged between his teeth. He lowers his voice: “Imagine you’re in that vast Plaza de Santa María,” he says, stretching his arms wide, satisfied at having chosen the adjective vast, which corresponds to the gesture, evoking the blackness of a broad space surrounded by spectral churches and palaces, in another world and another time. One night, when he was in bed after returning from the home of his Madame Lieutenant, after, as he put it, having performed his chores, he lay in the dark listening to the ticking of an alarm clock that was louder than a pendulum clock. He never lost sleep over anything, but he realized that night he wasn’t going to sleep. He got dressed, put on his cape, muffler, and cap, went outside, and slunk through narrow streets as if hiding from someone. About midnight, in thick fog, he ended up at the plaza where the only light came from one or two lamps on the street corners, so faint they were nothing but splotches of light glowing like the phosphorus on the hands and numbers of his clock. He could see the dark outlines of buildings, towers, statue-lined eaves, bell towers, the Santa María and El Salvador Churches, the lion sculptures in front of the city hall, and the forbidding, massive facade of the Convent of Santa Clara, which he didn’t dare approach, not even at that hour.

A light went on in the highest window of the tower. Now that the fog was lifting, things were more visible but still veiled. He noticed, with a stab of fear, a motionless figure that appeared to be looking at him. “At that distance, and in the state I was in, I couldn’t recognize a face, yet I was sure it was the young nun, Sister María del Gólgota, who had come to the tower to see me, and she was turning the light on and off to let me know she knew it was me.” The light went out and did not come on again, but he stood there looking up, alone in the deserted plaza, with no notion of time or cold, unsure of what he had seen, wondering if he was dreaming. He stood waiting a long while, so still that the sound of the slow, echoing bells striking two sent a shiver down his spine.

THE NEXT MORNING he puzzled over his nocturnal outing, a confused mixture of fantasy and certainty. He had definitely seen a light go on and off, and a figure in a nun’s toque, but it might not have been Sister María del Gólgota, though he seemed to remember her features in every detail, down to the yellow glow of the lamplight on her skin. And her lips were painted a bright red, the rough, fever-hot lips he had kissed, but that must have been a hallucination.

“Ave María Purísima.”

He was so lost in his work and his thoughts that he hadn’t heard the glass door open, and when he looked up he saw before him the very person that had occupied his imagination for so many days. Sister María del Gólgota was taller, slimmer, whiter, not quite as young — perhaps because she did not have the contrast of Sister Barranco beside her — but she was also, above all else, a real woman, not a nun, with a woman’s eyes, and in her throaty voice there was no trace of the religious sweetness of her former visits. She was a woman trapped in robes and mantles from another century, and her gaze, for a moment, held a frankness he wasn’t used to in his dealings with women, not even those who yielded to him most brazenly. He did nothing, he didn’t even make the respectful move to stand up, didn’t take the cigarette from his lips or put down the awl and old shoe he had in his hands. He simply heard himself replying, as he did every day, “Conceiving without sin.”

She made a gesture of impatience, looked toward the street, stepped forward and said a few words to him, then stepped back, and as he started to ask her to repeat what she’d said, the door opened and the bent and dedicated Sister Barranco appeared, muttering complaints and prayers, brusquely demanding the overdue alms, scolding him for smoking and for cherishing bulls more than novenas and also chastising Sister María del Gólgota because she hadn’t waited for her, why only yesterday she’d been in the infirmary with a high fever and today you should see her, so valiant though the doctor never learned what ailed her, cured by special dispensation of our Most Blessed Virgin she was. As he listened to Sister Barranco, Mateo thought back and was able to review the words the young nun had spoken to him so quickly and quietly, hardly daring to believe that he’d heard what he heard, that it was not the fabrication of an inflamed imagination. “Just after twelve, wait until you see me turn a light on and off three times in the highest window, then push the small door around the corner, come up three flights, and on the third landing you will find a large window to the left and a door to the right. Carefully push that door open, and I will be waiting for you.”

AN INFLAMED IMAGINATION: as the story progresses, the narrator measures his pauses, emphasizes the expressions he likes best, savors them as he would a swallow of wine or piece of sausage. The group gathers more closely around him, foam grown warm slides down a mug of beer forgotten on the bar, like the remains of the meals that no one will finish and the waiter will not remove.

I picture it, that night, finally, a night of drama, the first of many, because there were many… I imagine him in his cape, muffler, and cap, like the bandit Luis Candelas in that song we listened to on the radio as children, do you remember?

Beneath the black cape

of Luis Candelas

my heart doesn’t beat faster,

it flies, it flies.

The plaza is inky black, like the mouth of a wolf, there isn’t any of the lighting that they put in later so the tourists could see, something, in my view, that robbed it of its flavor, because when the electricity came, the mystery was lost. He turns the first corner, the one by the city hall, fearful that someone might see him from a window. He sticks to the wall, and doesn’t believe that what the nun promised him that morning is true, or that he will have the courage to sneak into the convent at midnight like a thief, or like Don Juan, because even if the girl is hot as a fox, he is a coward, and suddenly he is overcome with panic, he’ll be discovered and accused of blasphemy, people will point at him, expel him from the Last Supper crew and the Corpus Christi Society, he may even be forced to close the business that provides him with a living, a modest one but comfortable enough in these difficult times. He’ll be denied his place in the presidential box at the bullring, to which he was often invited during the corridas to act as an adviser, where, smoking an extraordinary cigar and wearing a carnation in the buttonhole of his striped suit, the one for grand occasions, he rubbed elbows with the highest authorities of the city: the mayor, the police commissioner, the commander of the Guardia Civil, the parish priest of San Isidoro — that Don Estanislao, who, you remember, was in spite of his cassock and his reputation for austerity a rabid fan of the bulls and in 1947 administered the last rites to the incomparable Manolete, right there in that damned Linares Plaza.