Sepharad

america

I WOULD WAIT IN MY ROOM with the lights off until the bells in the tower of El Salvador Church struck midnight. Cautious, though I hadn’t gone outside yet, cloaked so no one could recognize me on the street, although at that hour and on those raw winter nights there weren’t many people venturing out to face the wind or rain that beat down on the large open plaza. I would walk across swathed in my cape, which was very heavy and warmer than an overcoat, with a cap pulled down over my eyes and a muffler covering half my face. You have never known winters like those, or nights so dark. There were weak lightbulbs on some corners, and metal-shaded lights strung from cables over the plaza, which shook with the wind so that the light and shadows moved as they do when you walk through a room carrying a candle. On windy nights, the plaza seemed to toss like a ship in a storm. Night was a different world. There were not many radios then, and it was rare to find electric lights in every room of a house. You took a few steps away from the brazier and the light and were immediately in cold and darkness. We would pass the lightbulb and cord from one room to another through an open hole in a corner of the wall. But the current frequently cut off, the bulb would begin to glow yellow, like a candle guttering, and soon we’d be in the dark. The children had a little song for those occasions:

Let there be light

so we can be fed.

We’ll have a nice salad,

fried eggs and fresh bread.

When the current failed you had to light a candle or oil lamp to go to bed, feeling your way upstairs to a bedroom so icy that when you crawled in between the sheets, your feet never got warm all night. How you would yearn to press yourself against the warmth of a naked woman! Day was day and night was night, not like now, when the two get confused, as so many things get confused, at least for us, who are too old to adapt to these times. The long winters and endless nights, black as the inside of a wolf’s mouth in the alleyways I slinked down after I left the house, going out of my way to avoid Calle Real, where someone might recognize me, just after the clock in the plaza struck twelve, and then the bronze bells of El Salvador, always a little slow, a deeper tone in their tall belfry with the narrow windows making the tower look more like that of a castle than of a church. The minute I heard the first peal, my heart would lurch in my chest. Alone and in the dark, I waited in my room so no one would suspect me, listening to the ticking of the clock, which was so loud it often made me open my eyes in the middle of the night, thinking I heard footsteps. But the thudding of my heart was louder than the clock, and I was so impatient I would start walking in circles around the room, quietly so no one in the room below would hear my footsteps. I would sit on the bed, wrapped in my cape and wearing my cap yet feeling the cold rising from my feet, waiting for the hour to come, for the bells to ring, just as she had told me, rather, ordered me: not one minute before midnight, and not down the main street but through the alleyways, because no precaution could be too great. One or two hours before I was ready, waiting, dying to see her, already as hard and stiff as the bolt on a gate, and from being hard so long I was almost in pain; it seems impossible today, the vigor you had when you were young. “If you love me,” she would say, “don’t be early, and don’t let anyone see you.” The first peal of the bells was like a magnet pulling me, and I couldn’t resist, I would leave my room and slip down the stairs without lighting the candle, feeling along the walls, careful not to wake anyone, and draw back the bolt. How strange it is that everything that was normal for us has disappeared, big iron bolts and door knockers, house keys so enormous that when I was a boy I imagined they were Saint Peter’s Keys to the Kingdom.

SNEAKING THROUGH THE narrow streets, I would come out on the vast dark plaza of Santa María, a solitary figure trying to pass unnoticed along the walls, stopping on the corner of the Ayuntamiento, the government palace, the only inhabitant of the city awake at that hour — almost the only one, because across the plaza, in one of those colossal and somber buildings that at night was reminiscent of a fantastic engraving or opera set, someone else had been counting the minutes and the sound of the bells: every night, after twelve, she slipped back the bolt on a little side door and three times lit and extinguished an oil lantern in the highest window of the tower. That was the signal her lover waited for to cross the plaza and push open the door — the hinges carefully oiled — and then secure it from inside without making a sound.

He climbs slowly: no light, not even a cigarette lighter or a match, count three landings and forty-five steps, on the third landing there will be a large window to the left and a door on the right, knock softly three times so I will know it’s you, push it open and I will be waiting for you.

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.

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.’”

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.

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.’”

She spoke feverishly, as wound up as when she’d pulled off his clothes or urged him into the painful tightness of her virginity. She was ecstatic, sucking up a cigarette almost in one breath, pressing him between her thighs until his bones cracked, thrusting her tongue into his mouth, which he didn’t like because it didn’t seem a thing for a decent woman to do. She consumed kisses, his cigarettes, precious minutes, and maybe took the greatest pleasure in saying aloud all the things that for years had dizzied her in her secret thoughts and kept her in a perpetual ferment of daydream and impossible rebellion. But when the bells struck two, she made him dress with an impatience similar to that with which she had undressed him two hours earlier, put into his pocket an envelope containing all the cigarette butts and ashes to hide the evidence, took his hand and led him down the stairs, with no hesitation, and more than once it seemed she had the gift of seeing in the dark. She peered out the little side door, then gestured for him to go, and a second later he was alone in the plaza, dazed, bruised, unable to believe that he had actually sneaked into a convent at midnight and deflowered a nun.

IN HIS SHOE-REPAIR SHOP, and in Pepe Morillo’s barbershop next door, men liked to boast of their conquests and their feats with whores. Mateo kept silent, and smiled inside: If you only knew. He couldn’t tell his confessor about his adventure, so he suffered the uneasiness of living in mortal sin. I’m the only one he told, and that was more than forty years after the fact, when he’d been retired for some years and was living in Madrid. You should have seen the grin on his face, the two of us in the dining room of his home, surrounded by souvenirs of our hometown and prints and images of saints, and those bullfight posters. “Ah, my friend, how I’ve loved the bulls and the women, and what good times I’ve had, may God forgive me.”

Before the television he’s addled and forgetful, blinking, dozing, content. He’ll watch a cartoon, a contest of long words, or a physician’s daily advice, wrapped in a continuous flow of images and talk from films and news and South American melodramas. He’ll perk up a little when he sees a beautiful woman on the screen, to whom he may say something, first checking to see that his wife isn’t anywhere near, one of those compliments that as a young man he tossed to women strolling arm in arm down Calle Real on a Sunday afternoon. When I was little, the man who owned the only TV in the neighborhood would say obscene things to the female announcers and miniskirted women in the commercials. If people ask Mateo a question, he doesn’t hear, or says something confused, or answers a question they haven’t asked. He may burst out laughing at some program that earlier made his tears flow. You set his meal before him and he eats every bite, that’s one thing that hasn’t changed, he hasn’t lost his appetite, but after a while he doesn’t remember and asks me when we’re going to eat, so he’s getting fat. I tell him to go outside, to breathe a little fresh air, not to spend the whole day watching TV, but as soon as he goes out the door I’m nervous, afraid he’ll get lost, as foolish as he is and as big as Madrid is nowadays, and I have to be careful that his shoes are tied and he’s wearing his socks, he who was once so stylish and fussy about what he wore, even if it was only to go to the market around the corner.

He sits for hours wearing the same complacent smile, approving benevolently of everything he sees and hears, the conversations of the neighbor women and the transvestites at Sandra’s kiosk, the news programs and bulletins, the shouts of the women selling fish in the market, the medical advice on the morning shows, the faces of the living dead he meets in Chueca Plaza and on the dark corners of the barrio when he goes out wearing his great overcoat and Tyrolean hat. Sometimes when I visit him, he doesn’t recognize me at first. I sit down by him in the dining room, and he looks at me puzzled, trying to follow the conversation, and while he’s telling me something or I’m trying to get one of his old stories out of him, his eyes wander to the TV and he forgets that there’s anyone else in the room. But I have a trick that never fails: I get close to him, when his wife isn’t around, and say in a low voice, “Ave María Purísima.” His eyes light up, and he smiles the roguish smile he used to have when he talked to me about women, and he replies, “Conceiving without sin.”

HE FELT ASHAMED every time he repeated those words, when every morning at the same hour he saw the two dark silhouettes outside the glass door, and he would put out his cigarette, stow it in the drawer, and lower his head, pretending to be absorbed in his work, tearing a worn, twisted heel off an old shoe or putting on those metal reinforcements we called heel plates in our town, routine repairs during the hard times when almost no one could afford a new pair of shoes. He would feel the double scrutiny — alarming and magnetic — of Sister Barranco and Sister María del Gólgota, Fanny in the secrecy of their blasphemous rendezvous, the dark nights and blind lust in the icy cell, and when both nuns said in unison, “Ave María Purísima,” he heard in the younger woman’s voice invitation, recollection, and challenge, and as he said, “Conceiving without sin,” the formula he had repeated since he was a boy without ever having thought about its meaning, he would feel a strange mixture of thrill and contrition.

It was difficult for him to look up at them, and he tried not to meet the two pairs of eyes, lest a sign from Sister María del Gólgota be intercepted by the older nun, yet he also feared to miss the heartening nod that the little door would be open for him that night. He’d slept with many women, but this adventure caused him uncertainty and confusion, contained something that deeply wounded his masculine self-esteem, and disturbed the perfect simplicity of mind he’d enjoyed until now. “I wonder if you can explain this to me, you who have studied and know so many things. Why am I afraid of her? If I decide not to see her anymore, why do I leave my house before twelve and die of impatience for the light to come on in the tower? She’s wonderful, that’s the truth, better than a hundred loaves of bread and a hundred cheeses, and I go crazy when I think about running my hands over her body in the darkness, about the smell of her, about seeing that white flesh in the flare of the lighter or glowing ash of the cigarette.”

But the one flaw she had, which he noticed the first night and only got worse, was how much she talked after the faena, the third pass, as he would say, using the language of the bullfight. Before it, no: from the moment he entered her cell until they were both limp, the woman only breathed, panted, and moaned. But as soon as she was satisfied, she stuck to him like a leech, like a clamp locking him between her thighs, and jabbered into his ear, shaking him angrily if she saw he was beginning to doze, and he felt the touch of her lips and the endless hiss of her voice long after he was with her, when he was on his way home after two in the morning, wrapped in his cape, or when he woke from a dream about disgrace or scandal, or when he was alone in his shoe-repair shop and stopped hearing the songs on the radio, because her voice buzzed like an insect in his ear, or like pounding blood or his heart beating, and it turned into other voices that gradually he was becoming familiar with, voices from her long-ago life and ghostly family: the father wanting his daughter to get her doctorate in science or civil engineering, the mother saying her rosary, the venomous aunt clad in mourning, who came to get Fanny and her brother at the police station on the border when they ran away to France hidden in a freight car, planning to join the Resistance against the Germans or to place themselves at the service of the Republican government in exile. They were like Santa Teresa and her brother, when they escaped from their home to the land of the Moors to convert the infidels or die as martyrs, “with the difference that we didn’t have a home any longer because the Nacionales shot my father as soon as they came into our town at the end of the war, and they shaved my mother’s head and tattooed a hammer and sickle on her skull and paraded her with other women who were Reds or the wives of Reds through the center of the town, and forced her and the other women to scrub the floor of the church, on their knees on the icy stones. All because they hated my father so much, who was the best and most peaceful and meticulous man in the world, even in summer he wore his suit coat, celluloid collar, and bow tie. Just because at the beginning of the war he was walking down the street dressed that way, he was almost shot by some militiamen, and in that same suit, collar, and bow tie the agitators led him to the firing squad three years later, and he told my brother, ‘At least it isn’t my own who’re killing me.’”

Her father shot, her mother crazy, the furtive journey of days and nights toward the border in a trainload of merchandise, her brother and she sleeping on straw that reeked of manure and making wild plans to join the Resistance against Hitler and Franco, the hillsides covered with flowering almond and apple trees and the narrow streets of the town where they had spent the war years in perfect happiness while their mother prayed and their father administered a school for displaced children and kept wearing the suit and tie and hat and ankle-high boots of a meticulous Republican despite the fright the libertarian militia had given him. Then the others came, clubbed him with their rifle butts, and kicked him out of the house with its patio and grape arbor and fresh-water well where they’d lived four years almost like the Swiss Family Robinsons of that book that she and her brother loved so much. “Don’t lose heart, nothing will happen to me, this is just a mistake,” she spoke into Mateo’s ear in her father’s voice. When her brother went to take a bit of food and tobacco to the barracks where they had him locked up, what most impressed him was not going inside the pen filled with men sentenced to death but seeing his father unshaven and without the celluloid collar, filthy and in a wrinkled suit.

Yet it wasn’t her father but her brother who was the hero of her tales: her comrade in childhood games and adventures among the white blossoms of the apple and almond trees, her reading partner and the instigator of their plans to run away and enlist in social revolutions, partisan armies, clandestine cells of anti-Fascist resistance, to go explore Tierra del Fuego or Patagonia or the Gobi Desert. They caught her, locked her up in a convent, and forced her to become a nun under dark and terrible threats she never explained, though she was so full of other details, but at least her brother managed to escape, and at some point in the course of all those years a letter came to her through circuitous channels. “He’s living in America, I don’t know whether north or south, and moves a lot and has so many business affairs he can’t stay too long in any one place, he might be in Chicago or New York or Buenos Aires. He always wants to know about me, but because of the witches who kidnapped me his letters don’t reach me, and I can’t send anything to him, can’t ask him to help me, to come save me.”

“You help me,” she whispered, and Mateo felt her lips and fevered breath on his ear, “help me escape and we’ll go to America together to look for my brother. What’s keeping you here, a man is free to go anywhere he wants, not like a woman, who’s a prisoner even when she’s not locked up in a convent. You don’t have anything here, all you do is repair old shoes in that cubbyhole, smelling the old sweat people leave in their shoes, and you so young and strong, with those huge hands and that energy you have, nothing could stand in your way if you got out of here and went to America, where men go who have the courage to make the world their apple, as my brother did, and where women don’t live behind closed doors or drape themselves in eternal mourning or kill themselves having babies and working in the fields and scrubbing floors on their hands and knees and washing clothes in winter in troughs of cold water with scraps of soap that tear the skin off their hands.

“Where can a woman who’s fled a convent go here if she doesn’t have papers or a man to defend her and stand up for her? No father, no husband, no brother, not like America where a woman is worth as much as a man, if not more. There women smoke in public, wear trousers, drive a car to their office, and divorce when it suits them. They race along the highways, which are wide and built in a straight line, not like here, and the automobiles aren’t black and old but large and painted bright colors, and kitchens are shiny and white and filled with automatic appliances, so all you do is press a button and the floor is scrubbed, and there’s a machine that picks up dust and one that washes your clothes and leaves them ironed and folded, and the iceboxes don’t need blocks of ice, and every house has a garage and a garden, and lots of them have swimming pools. At those pools the women wear two-piece bathing suits and drink cool drinks and lounge in hammocks while their automatic machines do the housework. They drink and smoke and no one thinks they’re whores, and they not only paint their fingernails, they paint their toenails too, and if they complain about their husband and divorce him, he has to pay them a salary every month until they find another husband. And if they get bored with life in one place, they climb into their big bright cars and move to another city, California or Patagonia or Las Vegas or Tierra del Fuego, what wonderful names, you just have to say them and you feel your lungs fill with air, or they go to Chicago or New York and live in skyscrapers fifty stories high, in apartments that don’t need windows because the whole wall is glass, and where it’s never cold or hot because they have machines they call climate control.”

“But how do we go there, woman? What do we use to buy our passage on the ship?” he said, to be saying something, but she was furious at his lack of spine and scolded him in that murmur that made him want to sleep: “I have it all planned, you sell or lease your business, that will bring in something, since it’s in such a good location, and I’ll steal some valuable things here in the convent, a silver candelabra, a beaten gold reliquary, I can even cut a painting of the Virgin Mary out of its frame, they say it’s by Murillo, so we should get several thousand pesetas for it.” He turned to ice just thinking about it, a sacrilege in addition to profanation and blasphemy, not just public dishonor and excommunication but jail besides. Now he began to understand that this demented nun wanted something more from him than just sating her unholy lust, she wanted him to be an accomplice in her criminal plans, but what did he expect from the daughter of a Red who’d been taught free love and atheism?

HE COULDN’T SLEEP, was no good at work or his charitable activities and brotherhoods, he even reached the point of forgetting to listen to his poetry programs and bullfights on the radio. Now he feared not that someone would catch him as he sneaked into the convent or left it on those stormy winter nights that were so dark and deserted, but that she would drag him into her delirium, that he would lose the common sense that had guided him all his life and end up losing everything he had, the person he was, what he’d made of himself. He dreaded seeing her every morning with Sister Barranco and was nervous until she walked out the door, because the old nun was suspicious, watching both him and her companion for signs, for proof that would push them both toward catastrophe. But he was also worried if they didn’t come, imagining that María del Gólgota was ill again and in the delirium of her fever divulging the secret of their meetings in her cell, or she might have escaped and was hiding and as soon as it was dark she would come looking for him, as she had threatened so many times. “All this because I broke my rule and got involved with a beautiful woman, a woman, moreover, who doesn’t have a husband or anything to tie her down except those old nuns who don’t know anything. A man should choose a mistress who’s on the homely side, married, and knows how to maintain some decency even in adultery. And if possible she should have a solid financial base, so she won’t be swept away by the romantic whim to leave everything behind and run off with you.”

“What a philosopher you are, you should write down this advice so your disciples can follow it,” I told him, and he laughed and motioned for me to keep my voice down and not let his wife hear. “We need your memoirs, maestro, or else tell me everything and let me be your official biographer.”

It’s too late now, he doesn’t seem to remember, or if he does, he isn’t talking. The doctors have checked his head and say he’s all right, thank God, he doesn’t have that illness old people get, Alzheimer’s, when they can’t take care of themselves and don’t recognize anything. The doctor who examined his head says that he may be depressed from not doing anything and not knowing anyone in Madrid. But what kind of depression is it if he laughs at the least thing, all by himself? When he’s watching TV and I’m doing something in the kitchen, I hear him laughing and come out, and he’s roaring with laughter although there’s nothing funny about the program, which could be one of those news reports about war and hunger.

SHE GREW ROUGHER AND more demanding in her erotic needs; in a few weeks she had acquired all the depravity other women fall into only after long years of vice. Every night she became more talkative, more monotonous in her stories about the past and her mad schemes for the future. She began to discuss the best dates for her escape, to exact promises from him with terrible threats, full of visions of the freedom and wealth waiting for them in America, where in no time she would meet her adventurer, multimillionaire brother and own a long red or yellow or blue automobile with silvery tail fins, and a house with a garden and swimming pool, and the latest mechanical devices.

One night, she did not drag him in silence to her wobbly cot the moment he arrived but pressed against him in the darkness, took his face in her hands, and in a hoarse, altered voice whispered into his ear that before he possessed her — she loved that melodramatic word — he must swear to her that within two weeks, before the end of the olive harvest, they would run away together. Hadn’t he told her two or three nights before, blustering, lying his way out, that he had already half worked out a deal for his business with another cobbler? The nun’s right hand, which in so short a time had become amazingly expert in sexual manipulation, was like a grappling hook or claw that clutched his crotch and slowly began to squeeze, and she murmured something that years later still made his hair stand on end and produced an erection when he thought of it: “You betray me, I’ll rip this thing off.”

But that night was the last time. When he awoke the next morning, he was dizzy and shivering and didn’t have the strength even to crawl out of bed. He was relieved, however, that he couldn’t go to work and didn’t have to confront the daily visit and scrutiny of Sister Barranco and Sister María del Gólgota. By the third day his fever was worse, and he called the doctor, who diagnosed pneumonia and ordered him immediately to a hospital in Santiago. Mateo attributed his illness to divine punishment, and in his tormented half sleep he relived all the cold he had suffered during his vigils in the icy plaza and glacial cell of Sister María del Gólgota. The sins of the flesh, aggravated by blasphemy and not dressing warmly enough, had conspired to confine him to a hospital bed, and perhaps would send him to the tomb and the tortures of hell. He prayed, made fervent promises of penitence, swore he would live a holy life, walk barefoot in his procession for the next twenty years carrying a heavy wood cross on his back, subject himself to flagellation and hair shirts, maybe even become a monk and spend the rest of his days in a convent.

AFTER A MONTH HE returned to his narrow workshop and cobbler’s bench, but he had the feeling that more than a month had gone by, and he remembered the days before his illness as one coolly appraises the events of a remote past. The first two or three mornings he was back, he scarcely had the strength or will to work, and he awaited the two nuns with only a flicker of desire and fear. They didn’t come, however, and his next-door neighbor, the barber Pepe Morillo, told him he’d heard that Sister Barranco was very ill — the years were taking their toll — and that for some reason the other nun had been forbidden to leave the convent.

That night, wearing heavy clothes, he worked up the courage to go down to the Plaza de Santa María. The bells struck twelve, but no light came on in the window of the convent tower, and he decided, with equal measures of disappointment and relief, to go home and get in bed, and to carry out the promises he’d made during the dark days of his illness, from which he was sure he’d been delivered by the double miracle of prayer and penicillin. As he was leaving, he turned his head and saw that the light was on in the tower, and from where he stood he could see the tempting if somewhat ghostly silhouette of Sister María del Gólgota. It wasn’t his will or decision to reform that triumphed over the powerful persuasion of sin: it was a shudder that shook his entire body, a hint of renewed pain in his chest, his distaste at having to take off his clothes and later dress in an icy cell. And then there was the woman’s voice like an endless reel spinning wild tales in his ear as he drifted off to sleep, and the hard slats of the cot digging into his back, and he imagined the soft, warm bed waiting for him in the security of his home.

He overcame temptation that night, but as he recovered from the weakness following his return from the hospital his old instincts were awakened, and one night found him roaming around the Plaza de Santa María, so excited it was difficult to walk naturally, with a monumentally stiff dick, as he thought crudely, using our rich vernacular. He was wild that night, a Mihura bull, randy as a goat, ready for anything, to give her the ride of her life and then never come back. The light went on in the tower, and with his blood boiling and his heart leaping from his chest he hurried to the little door and pushed it less cautiously than he had other times — but it was locked, and it was all he could do not to beat on it with his fists. He walked away from the building, back to where he could see the window in the tower. The light went on again, but now that he was closer he could see, or thought he could see, that Sister María del Gólgota was smiling at him and lifting her robe and defiantly and sarcastically showing him her naked breasts, motioning to him, indicating that maybe he should try the door again.

He pushed again, but it was locked, and never opened for him again, and he never saw the light in the tower any of the nights he prowled around the plaza.

“AND HE NEVER HEARD from her again, or saw her?”

People always want to know how stories end; whether well or badly, they want the resolution to be as neat as the beginning, they want sense and symmetry. But few adventures in life tie up all the loose strings, unless fate steps in, or death, and some stories never develop, they come to nothing or are interrupted just as they are beginning. The years go by, and our friend has more bullfight and Holy Week posters on his tiny door, and when he runs out of space he pastes new ones over the old. He works his way up to the presidency of his brotherhood, is named official adviser for the bullfights, is interviewed in our provincial newspaper as one of the pillars of our modest local scene, and he pastes the clipping on a glass pane of his door so it can be seen by people passing in the street. The clipping gets yellow with age, some of the shops in the neighborhood began to close, including the barbershop next door, and the business of repairing shoes seems to have little future, because people throw away their used shoes now and buy new ones in the modern shoe stores that have opened in the more heavily populated areas of the city. But he has his savings, he has prepared for old age as prudently as he provided for the regular satisfaction of his sexual needs. Furthermore, he’s decided it’s time to marry, while he still has the looks to attract a mature and obliging wife who will take care of him when he really begins to lose his faculties. If he waits too long, it will be solitary decrepitude or a nursing home. He is also clear about the kind of woman that interests him, the exact profile: a widow with an acceptable income, some property — a debt-free apartment, for example — and no children. For a while he considered Madame Lieutenant, now widowed and with a solid pension and her own real estate, but she was too old for his purposes, it makes no sense to take on someone who will double the problems of age rather than offset them. Then one morning, unexpectedly, standing in line at the savings bank where he’d gone to bring his precious savings book up to date, he met the perfect woman, one who far surpassed his expectations: a teacher, spinster, nice-looking, with dyed hair and opulent bosom, and a reassuring manner as well. She had a splendid income, a substantial accumulation of bonuses, an apartment in the heart of Madrid — a family bequest — and was currently employed in a school in Móstoles. They were married within six months, and without waiting for the sale of the property where he’d had his shoe-repair shop, they set off for the capital in early September, in time for his new wife to start the school year. On September 27, the eve of our town fair, he was back, because he had to help with the San Miguel and San Francisco bullfights in his role as technical adviser to the president. A possible buyer expressed interest in his shop. He made an appointment to show it to him, on one of those cool, fresh mornings at the beginning of autumn, and it tugged a bit at his heartstrings to walk down Calle Real, as deserted at that hour as it once had been crowded with people, and to open his familiar glass door — after rolling up the metal shade that had been closed for several months. There were old papers on the floor, and a handful of mail he hadn’t bothered to look through before he left, probably nothing but ads. Now, however, he went through the letters, blowing off the dust, to pass the time as he waited for the potential buyer. Among them was a brightly colored postcard of the Statue of Liberty, the American flag, and the New York skyline. On the back there was no signature or name, and except for his address he found only these words, written in the careful, rather affected hand the nuns used to teach in the Catholic schools.

Greetings from America.