Antonio Molina - Sepharad

Overwhelmed by the danger he was walking into, he nevertheless didn’t stop, didn’t turn around and go back home to the safety and security of his bed. There was still time, he hadn’t yet walked across the plaza, hadn’t yet seen a light in the window, but prudence had no effect on his feet, and to help him on his way toward the small side door of the convent, he told himself it was all a joke of the nun’s, or she was still out of her head with fever, so what did it matter if he kept walking? The door would be as tightly locked as any door in the city at that hour, especially as it was the door of a convent, with the wooden bolt shot, the way we would lock up at night during the bad times of the war, when any night they might come looking for you and take you for a little walk and leave you in a ditch with your socks and shoes thrown far from your sprawled corpse.

But the light did go on and off three times, and he did walk to the corner of the convent with trembling legs, telling himself that in spite of everything the door wouldn’t open, and in fact it resisted at first, which was both a relief to his cowardice and a painful disappointment to the desire that had flowed through him when he saw the light in the window. The door, compact, low, and narrow, studded with rows of large rusted nails, slipped open silently at a second, more determined push, and when he closed it and found himself in darkness even deeper than that of the plaza that moonless night, he thought, with both terrified fatalism and raging lust, that there was no turning back now, and he climbed the three flights of steps, feeling along the walls, hearing the whispers and faint echoes wakened by his footsteps, feeling cobwebs against his face and the cold sweat from the stones against the palms of his hands. Finally, he saw a narrow window like an embrasure on his left, a strip of faint phosphorescence in the blackness. On the landing, to the right, he felt the wood of a door, and as he reached out to push it, he feared that he might have miscounted the flights he’d climbed. As he stood there like a stone, not daring to do anything, paralyzed in the shadow, his eyes began to adjust, and he could make out the jamb and panels of the door. There was a soft sound, a friction or breathing not his, the door opened, and a hand grabbed him by his cape and pulled him inside. He shuddered as a voice in his ear warned him to stoop because the ceiling was low, then as the door closed he was dragged forward and pushed onto a hard, narrow cot where he was felt, explored, clumsily relieved of his clothes, with a mixture of inexpert roughness and determination, licked, bitten, instructed, crushed by a naked body that became so entangled with his that he couldn’t tell, in the daze of his excitement and the darkness, what he was touching or what was touching him. He was shaken like a rag doll, shoved against a wall that chilled and scraped his shoulder, muzzled by a sweaty hand when his breathing became too loud, tossed as if by a powerful wave, then held as he fell to the floor, and when finally he was left in peace and lay exhausted on the hard cot, he touched and smelled the liquid that wet his groin and concluded that it was blood on his fingertips, that for the first time in his life he had deflowered a woman. “Ave María Purísima,” she murmured, and he, a little uneasy about the irreverence of it, replied in her ear, “Conceiving without sin.”

“Tell me,” she asked, “is it true that a cigarette tastes good afterward?”

“Like heaven.”

“I will smoke one.”

When at last he saw her face in the flare of the cigarette lighter, he didn’t recognize her, because he had never seen her hair, which was chestnut, although very short and wiry, almost like her pubic hair. It was also her first cigarette, which she liked immensely despite the coughing and dizziness; it made her think of riding the merry-go-round horses when she was a little girl. “The thing about women,” he said, “is that when it’s over and the man wants to sleep or go home, they want to talk — to communicate, as we say today.” They tried to make themselves comfortable on the cot, piled all their clothing on top of them, but it was so cold they shivered. Afraid they might be discovered, he asked to leave, but she held him captive between her legs and told him there was time for another cigarette, the bells still hadn’t struck two.

She spoke in a quiet voice, so near his ear he could feel the moisture of her breath and lips, which she’d painted red for him, she said, with lipstick stolen from the perfume shop on Calle Real at a moment when neither the clerk nor Sister Barranco was watching, and she laughed at the memory. “The witch doesn’t trust me, never takes her eyes off me, but I’m quicker than she is, and besides she’s getting blind. She deserves it for the venom she spits every time she speaks, even when she’s saying her rosary.” Her talk seemed to him as improper as the delight she took in smoking, she even learned to blow smoke rings, expelling them slowly from her painted lips. “María del Gólgota, what a cross that name is, my real name is Francisca, or Fanny, which is what my father called me, may he rest in peace, he was a man who liked all things English. He wanted his little girl to learn English, play tennis, use a typewriter, drive a car, and go to the university and study something serious, not such foolishness for idle señoritas as teaching or fine arts but medicine or science. He made my brother study too, and play sports, but I was his favorite; he said that because I was a girl I needed more skills to take care of myself in the world. My mother, although she let him do it because she had a weak character, complained, ‘He’s trying to make a man out of her. Who will want to be the sweetheart of an engineer?’ My father would say, ‘I can’t believe I have a wife so backward that she’s against the progress of women.’”

She imitated their voices, creating a complete play in the secret darkness of her cell and murmuring into his ear: the grave, measured voice of her father, the whining voice of her mother, the voice of her brother, who had been her accomplice and hero from an early age, the croaking frog voice of Sister Barranco, and the various tones of ridicule and treachery used by the other nuns of the convent. “I know they hate me, want to poison me, those dizzy spells I suffer, Sister Barranco brought me warm broth but I don’t trust her, ‘Here, Sister, this nice broth will make you feel better, it will raise the dead.’ Well feed it to your mother, you witch. I began to get better as soon as I stopped drinking her broths and potions, and she with that ‘Come, Sister, let’s lift that spirit of yours, look how well that tonic did I brought last night, although, of course, our prayers to the Holy Virgin were what helped most.’”

The whispering in his ear made him sleepy but also bothered him, because he might have been a little bit on the libertine side but he was still a good Catholic. That Sister María del Gólgota, or Fanny, was prettier than a fresh-baked loaf of white bread — his words — but she seemed to him too disrespectful of holy things, and his conscience hurt him more for listening and not protesting than for going to bed with her. “All that talking she did, that chatter, right up against me on the cot, which any moment could have collapsed under our weight. She told me stories about her parents and her brother, who she said was in Africa and then in Tierra del Fuego, and about how one of her aunts had her locked up in a convent and forced her to become a novice, ‘For your own good, child, not for your happiness in the other world, because I know you don’t believe in Him, just like your father, but so you’ll have some security in this world and not end up with a shaved head and insulted in public like your poor mother, who wasn’t to blame for anything, and look how she fell apart and how we had to put her away for so long.’”