Evelio Rosero - The Armies

“Your wife has just left,” says the woman. “She was here, asking for you.”

“I am playing cat and mouse with Otilia,” I tell her.

I am about to say goodbye, but she interrupts me.

“The Father wants to see you.” And she opens the door all the way.

I see the priest, at the back, his aquiline profile, in his black habit, his black schoolboy shoes, Bible in hand: the churchyard cherimoya and lemon trees form a backdrop to his grey head, the cool garden, beautified by large azalea bushes and clumps of geraniums.

“Father Albornoz, I am looking for my wife.”

“Come in, come in, profesor , just for a coffee.”

He was another of my pupils, from the age of eight. I was a boy as well: I was only twenty-two years old when I returned to San José to the teacher’s post, and began to teach for the first time in my life, getting used to the idea that it would be for three years at most in my home town, out of gratitude, and then I would go, where? I never knew, and in any case I never went, because here I would end up, almost buried. Something similar happened to Horacio Albornoz: he left and came back as a priest. He came to pay his respects the first day.

He still remembered the poem by Pombo that he and his classmates memorized for me: And this magnificent carpet Oh Earth! Who to you gave it? And the trees to cool and shade it? And the Earth says: God did .

“I’m sure my vocation springs from there,” he told me, laughing.

And we began to visit each other once a week: we would drink coffee at my house or in the presbytery, we talked about the news in the paper, the Pope’s latest dictates, and once in a while a confidence or two would slip out, until we reached that rare state of mind that allows us to believe there is another friend in the world.

A few months after Albornoz came back as a priest, a woman arrived in San José with a baby girl in her arms; she got down from the dusty bus — the only passenger — and went directly to the presbytery, in search of help and work. Father Albornoz, who up till then had refused the sporadic offers from several ladies of good will to take charge of his cleaning, his cooking and making his bed, of his clothes and his meager things, immediately accepted the stranger into the parish. She is now Señora Blanca, who over the years has become the sacristan. Her daughter is now one of the many girls who left, years ago; and Señora Blanca goes on being just a shadow, silently kind, so delicate she seems invisible.

One afternoon years ago, when instead of having coffee we were drinking wine, three bottles of Spanish wine that the Bishop of Neiva had given him, Father Albornoz asked the sacristan to leave us alone. He was sad in spite of the wine, his eyes were watery, his mouth downcast: I even thought he might burst into tears.

“And if not you, who can I tell?” he said at last.

“Me.” I said.

“Or the Pope,” he answered, “if I were brave enough.”

Such an opening worried me. The priest was a grimace of repentance. He spent a long minute screwing up his courage to begin before allowing me to gather, through puerile allusions, and without neglecting the wine, that Señora Blanca was also his woman, and that the girl was the daughter of them both, that they slept in the same bed like any married couple every night in this peaceable town. I know very well that savage gossip did the rounds from the start, when the woman and child arrived after him, but it occurred to none of us to be scandalized. What for?

“And what does it matter?” I told him. “Was that not a healthy and sane attitude, so different to the ones adopted by so many other priests in so many countries, hypocrisy, bitterness, even perversion, abuse, rape of children? Did he not go on being, most importantly, the parish priest?”

“Yes,” he replied in confusion, his eyes attentive, as if it had never occurred to him. But he added: “It is not easy to overcome. One suffers, before and after.”

After another minute he decided: “What I am never going to give up is the Lord’s work, my mission, in the midst of the daily sadness of this country.”

And it seemed that, at last, in this way, he had found the absolution that he needed. I still wanted to tell him, excusing him: “You are certainly not the first, this is very common in many towns,” but I began to speak of other things: now he seemed to have tremendous regret at having confided his secret to me, and perhaps desired that I would soon leave, and soon forget it, but I shall never forget the shadow of Señora Blanca, that afternoon, when she saw me to the door, the wide mute smile on her face, so grateful she seemed to be about to kiss me.

There I left them years ago, here I find them.

There I left them because Father Albornoz never asked me to visit again, and nor did he visit me. Here I find them, the same but older, while we sit in the small reception room of the presbytery, with the frosted window overlooking the plaza. After the attack two years ago, Father Albornoz traveled to Bogotá and persuaded the government to pay for the resurrection of the dynamited church: allowing the church to remain destroyed would be a victory for the destroyers, whoever they were, he argued; so another church rose in the same place, a better house for God and for the Father, said Dr. Orduz, who unlike the priest did not obtain any aid for his hospital.

If the priest is going to talk to me in front of Señora Blanca, it is not possible, I think, that Otilia has confided in him about my wall and my ladder, my secret. Otilia: you would not be able to undergo my confession in my place. So, what is he going to say? We drink our coffee without a word. On the other side of the frosted window one can make out the whole plaza, the tall oaks that surround it, the imposing town hall. The plaza is a sort of sloping rectangle; we, in the presbytery, are up above; the town hall is down below.

“And if it happens again?” the Father asks me, if the guerrillas get as far as this plaza, as before?”

“I don’t think so,” I tell him. “I don’t think they will this time.”

We hear some screams, from the plaza. Señora Blanca does not flinch; she sips her coffee as if she were in heaven.

“I only wanted to tell you, Ismael, to come back and see me, and soon. Come back as a friend, or as a penitent, whenever you want; don’t forget me, what’s wrong with you? If I don’t visit you it’s because of what happened today, what’s happened since yesterday, and what will happen tomorrow, unfortunately for this town in torment. We no longer have the right to have friends. We must struggle and pray even in our dreams. But the doors of the church are open to all, my duty is to receive the lamb who has gone astray.”

His sacristan watches him transfixed. As for me, it seems that Otilia did confess on my behalf.

“These are difficult days for everyone,” the priest goes on. “Uncertainty reigns even in the heart, and that is when we must put to the test our faith in God, who sooner or later will redeem us entirely.”

I stand up.

“Thank you, Father, for the coffee. I have to go and find Otilia. You know better than anyone that this is no day to be wandering the streets looking for each other.”

“She came here specifically, asking after you, and we talked. That reminded me of how long it has been since we've seen each other, Ismael. Don’t be such a recluse.”

He sees me to the door, but there we stop, immersed in an unexpected, whispered conversation: so many things have happened that we have not discussed — because of absence — that we try to go over everything, in one minute, and so we recall, in still quieter voices, Father Ortiz, from El Tablón, whom we knew, who was killed, after being tortured, by paramilitaries: they burned his testicles, chopped off his ears, and then they shot him for promulgating liberation theology.