Sepharad

sacristan

WE HAVE MADE OUR LIVES far away from our small city, but we just can’t get used to being away from it, and we like to nurture our nostalgia when it has been a while since we’ve been back, so sometimes we exaggerate our accent when talking among ourselves, and use the common words and expressions that we’ve been storing up over the years and that our children can vaguely understand from having heard them so often. Godino, the secretary of our regional association — which has been rescued from its dismal lethargy thanks to his enthusiasm and dynamism — regularly organizes meals where we enjoy the food and recipes of our homeland, and if we are disgruntled that our gastronomy is as little known by foreigners as our monumental architecture or our Holy Week, we like having dishes that no one knows about, and giving them names that have meaning only to us. Oh, there’s nothing like our gordal and cornezuelo olives! Godino exclaims, the plump ones and the long, pointed ones! Our rolls, our borrachuelos—we dream of those sugar-sprinkled pastries with a light touch of brandy — our layered pasta, our Easter cakes, our morcilla—our sausage has rice, not onion — our typical gazpacho, which is nothing at all like Andalusian gazpacho, and our wild-artichoke salad… In the private room of the Museo del Jamón, where those of us on the directors’ council often meet, Godino gluttonously hacks off a piece of bread and before dipping it into the bowl of steaming morcilla makes a gesture like a benediction and recites these lines:

Morcilla, blessed lady,

worthy of our veneration.

The owner of the Museo is a countryman of ours who, as Godino says, often personally oversees the catering of our feasts, in which there isn’t a single ingredient that hasn’t come from our city, not even the bread, which is baked in La Trini’s oven, the very oven that to this day produces the mouthwatering madeleines and the Holy Week cakes with a hard-boiled egg in the center that we loved so much when we were kids. Now, to tell the truth, we realize that the oily dough sits a little heavy on our stomachs, and though in our conversations we keep praising the savor of those hornazos, which are absolutely unique in the world and no one but us knows the name of, if we start eating one, we quit before we’re through, even though it’s painful to waste food — something our mothers always taught us. We remember the early days in Madrid, when we used to go to the bus station to pick up a food package sent from home: cardboard boxes carefully sealed with tape and tightly tied with cord, bringing from across all that distance the undiluted aroma of the family kitchen, the delicious abundance of all the things we have missed and yearned for in Madrid: butifarros and chorizos, sausages from the recent butchering, borrachuelos sparkling with sugar, even a glass jar filled with boiled red pepper salad seasoned with olive oil, the greatest delicacy you can ask for in a lifetime. For a while the dim interior of the armoire in our boardinghouse room would take on the succulent and mysterious penumbra of those cupboards where we kept food in the days before the advent of refrigerators. (Now when I tell my children that back when I was their age there was no refrigerator or television in my house, they don’t believe it, or worse yet, they look at me as if I were a caveman.)

We had been away from our homes and our city for long, long months, but the smell and taste of them offered the same consolation as a letter, the same profound happiness and melancholy we felt after talking on the phone with our mothers or sweethearts. Our children, who spend the whole day glued to the telephone, talking for hours with someone they’ve seen only a short while before, can’t believe that for us, not only in our childhood but our early teens as well, the telephone was still a novelty, at least in ordinary families, and because the system wasn’t as yet automated, calling from one city to another — ringing someone up, as we said then — was a rather difficult undertaking that often meant standing in line for hours, waiting your turn in a public telephone office crammed with people. I’m not exactly an old man (although at times my wife says I seem ancient enough), but I remember when I had to call my mother at a neighbor’s house and wait until they went to get her, all the while hearing footsteps in the wooden booth at the telephone company on the Gran Vía. Finally I would hear her voice and be overcome by an anguish I have felt only rarely since, a sensation of being far away and of having left my mother to grow old alone. We both would be nearly tongue-tied, because we used that exotic instrument so seldom that it made us very nervous, and we were consumed by the thought of how much we were paying for a conversation in which we barely managed to exchange a few formalities as trite as those in our letters: Are you well? Have you been behaving? Don’t forget to wear your overcoat when you go out in the morning, it’s getting cold. You had to swallow hard to work up the nerve to ask the person you were talking with to send a food package, or a money order. You hung up the telephone and suddenly all that distance was real again, and with that, besides the desolation of going outside on a Sunday evening, there was the contemptible relief of having put behind you an uncomfortable conversation in which you had nothing to say.

Now that distances have become much shorter, we feel farther and farther apart. Who doesn’t remember those endless hours on the midnight express, in the second-class coaches that brought us to Madrid for the first time and deposited us, done in from fatigue and lack of sleep, in the unwelcoming dawn of Atocha Station, the old one, which our children never knew, although some of them, just kids, or still in their mama’s womb, spent arduous nights on those trains that carried us south during the Christmas vacations we looked forward to so much, or during the short but cherished days of Holy Week, or of our strange late fair that falls at the end of September, when the men of our parents’ generation picked the most delicious grapes and pomegranates and figs and allowed themselves the luxury of attending the two bullfights of the fair: the one on Saint Michael’s day, which opened the fair, and the one on the day of Saint Francis, which was the most splendid, the “big day,” our parents called it, but also the saddest because it was the last, and because the autumn rain often spoiled the corrida and forced the mournful closing of the few carousels we had in those days, completely covered over with wet canvas.

TIME LASTED LONGER THEN, and the kilometers were longer. Not many people had a car, and if you didn’t want to spend the whole night on the train, you got on the bus we called the Pava, which took seven hours, first, because of all the twists and turns on the highway toward the north of our province, and also because of the cliffs and tunnels of Depeñaperros, which were like the entrance into another world, the frontier, where our part of the world was left behind on the last undulating hillsides of olive trees, and then the endless plains of La Mancha, so monotonous that sleep seemed to bleed into exhaustion and prevail over discomfort and you fell fast asleep and with a little luck didn’t open your eyes again until the bus was approaching the lights of Madrid. What a thrill it was to see the capital from afar, the red tile roofs and, high above them, the tall buildings that impressed us so strongly: the Telephone Building, the Edificio España, the Torre de Madrid!

But it was another emotion that moved us most, especially when our illusions about the new life awaiting us in the capital began to wane, or when we simply began to get used to that life, the way you get used to everything and, as you do, lose your taste for it, the way liking turns into boredom, tedium, hidden irritation. We preferred the emotion of that other arrival, the slow approach to our home country, the signs that announced it to us, not kilometer markers on the highway but certain familiar indications seen from the small window of the train or bus: a roadside inn, the red color of the soil along the banks of the Guadalimar River, and then the first houses, the isolated street lamps on the corners, if we arrived at night, the sensation of already being there and the impatience of not quite having arrived, the sweet feeling of all the days that lay ahead, of vacations begun and yet still intact.

There was in those days one last house, I remember now, where the city ended on the north, the last one you left behind as you traveled toward Madrid and the first you saw on the return, an ancient little hotel with a garden, called La Casa Cristina, which was often the meeting place for the crews of olive pickers and also the place where we bade the Virgin farewell when at the beginning of September her image was returned to the sanctuary of the village from which she would be brought the following year, at the time of the busy pilgrimage in May, the Virgin to whom, as children, we came to pray on late-summer afternoons.

Maybe the limits of things were drawn more clearly then, like the lines and colors and names of countries on the maps that hung on the schoolhouse walls: that small hotel with its tiny garden and its yellow street lamp on the corner was precisely where our city ended. One step farther and the country began, especially at night when the lamp glowed at the edge of the darkness, not lighting it but revealing it in all its depth. A few years ago, when I was on a trip with my children, who were still small — I remember that the second one was holding my hand — I tried to take them to see La Casa Cristina, and along the way I was telling them that it was near that hotel that the owner of the olive groves would hire my mother and me to work as pickers. I told them how icy cold it was as we walked through the dark city in heavy wraps: I wearing my father’s corduroy cap and wool gloves, my mother in a shawl that completely enveloped her and covered her head. It was so cold that my ears and hands were frozen, and my mother had to rub my hands with hers, which were warmer and rougher, and blow her warm breath on my fingertips. I would get choked up when I told them about those times, and about my mother, whom they had scarcely known. I made them see how much life had changed in such a short time, because it was nearly unimaginable for them to think that children their age had to spend the Christmas vacations earning a daily wage in the olive groves. Then I realized that I had been talking for a long time and wandering around without finding La Casa Cristina, and I thought I’d lost my way because of all the talking I was doing, but no, I was right at the place I’d been looking for: what wasn’t there was the house. A man I asked told me it had been torn down several years before, when they widened the old Madrid highway. Whatever the case, even if La Casa Cristina had still been on that corner, the city wouldn’t have ended there: new neighborhoods had grown up, monotonous block after brick block, and there was a multisports complex and a new commercial center the man showed me with pride, as if pointing out impressive monuments to a foreigner. Only those of us who have left know what the city used to be like and are aware of how much it has changed; it’s the people who stayed who can’t remember, who seeing it day after day have been losing that memory, allowing it to be distorted, although they think they’re the ones who remained faithful and that we, in a sense, are deserters.

My wife says that I live in the past, that I feed on dreams like the idle old men who hang around playing dominoes at our social center and attend the lectures and poetry readings that Godino organizes. I tell her that I am like them, more or less, as good as unemployed, almost permanently “between jobs,” as they say now, no matter how hard I try to start business deals that don’t come to anything, or accept nearly always short-lived, often fraudulent jobs. What I don’t tell her is that at this point I would really like to live in the past, to sink into it with the same conviction, the same voluptuousness, that others do, like Godino, who when he eats morcilla stew, or remembers some joke or the nickname of one of our paisanos, or recites a few lines from our most famous poet, Jacob Bustamante, flushes with enthusiasm and happiness, and is always planning what he’s going to do when Holy Week comes, and counting the days till Palm Sunday, and especially till the night of Ash Wednesday, when it’s time for the procession he participates in as a member of the brotherhood and also as director. “Just like our renowned Mateo Zapatón, who’s retired now in La Villa y Corte,” says Godino, who knows an unbelievable number of our paisanos by their proper names and nicknames although he has lived his whole life in Madrid, and calls everyone “illustrious,” “esteemed,” “distinguished,” hitting that uished so hard, the way they do in our town, that more than once he’s sprayed saliva as he says it.

It’s true, many of us would like to live in the immutable past of our memories, a past that seems to live on in the taste of some foods and those dates marked in red on the calendars, but without realizing it we’ve been letting a remoteness grow inside us that no quick trip can remedy or increasingly infrequent telephone calls ease — forget the letters we stopped writing years ago. Now that we can make the three-hour trip swiftly and comfortably on the expressway, we go back less and less. Everything is much closer, but we’re the ones drifting farther away, even though we repeat the old familiar words and stress our accent and though we still get emotional when we hear the marches of our religious association or recite poems by the “distinguished bard who gives meaning to the word,” as he is introduced by Godino — who is flattering and admiring him but at the same time pulling his leg — the poet Jacob Bustamante, who apparently paid no attention to the siren song of literary celebrity and chose not to come to Madrid. He’s still there, in our city, collecting prizes and accumulating benefits because he’s a civil servant, as is another of our local glories, maestro Gregorio E. Puga, a composer of note who also ignored the siren song scorned by Godino in his day. They say (actually, Godino says) that maestro Puga concluded his musical studies in Vienna brilliantly, and that he could have found a position in one of the best orchestras of Europe had the pull of his hometown not been so strong, but he returned instead with all his diplomas for excellence in German, in Gothic lettering, and very quickly and very easily, in a competitive examination, earned the position of band director.

WE LIKED TO COME BACK with our children when they were small, and we were proud to find that they were fond of the same things that had enchanted us in our childhoods. They looked forward to Holy Week, when they could wear their costumes as little penitents, the child’s cape that left the face uncovered. Almost as soon as they were born, we enrolled them as members in the same associations our fathers had enrolled us in. When they were a little older, they would get antsy in the car, asking, from the moment we left, how many hours till we got there. Born in Madrid, they spoke with an accent different from ours, but it made us proud to think, and to tell one another, that they belonged to our land as much as we did, and when we took them by the hand on a Sunday morning and led them down Calle Nueva, just as our parents had led us, and lifted them up as a float passed so they could get a better look at the donkey Jesus rode as he entered Jerusalem, or the green, sinister face of Judas on the Last Supper float, we were consoled by the sense that life was repeating itself, that time didn’t pass in our city, or that it was less cruel than the nerve-racking and jumbled pace of life in Madrid.

But the children have been growing up without our realizing it, turning into strangers, unsociable guests in our own homes, locked in rooms that have become dark dens from which sounds of insufferable music issue, and smells and noises we prefer not to identify. Now they don’t want to go back, and if one of us tells them something, they look at him the way they would at a pitiful old man, at some worthless bum, as if it were a snap for a person to find a secure and decent job after the age of forty-five. And they’ve forgotten all the things they liked so much, the thrill of the tunics and hoods (Godino insists that our word is cowls) that covered their faces like storybook masks, the noise of the trumpets and drums, the taste of the candy cigarettes that were sold only in Holy Week and the red caramel pirulís on a stick, spiraled with sugar, that we bought at the street stall of a small man appropriately nicknamed Pirulí; he died a few years ago, even though to those of us who’d been seeing him since we were children, he seemed as frozen in time as Holy Week itself. Our children are no longer drawn to the attractions of the fair, and it’s as if only we, their parents, have retained some trace of nostalgia and gratitude for the modest carousels of all those years ago, the merry-go-rounds, as we called them as children and as we taught our children to say. Nothing we like has meaning for them now, and when from time to time they stand and stare at us with pity, or indifference, making us feel ridiculous, we see ourselves through their eyes: worn-out old-timers whom they don’t feel the need to thank for anything, who irritate and bore them more than anything, nobodies they walk away from as if wanting to rid themselves of the dirty, dusty cobwebs of the time to which we belong: the past.

TO LIVE BACK THEN, in the past, what more could I want? But a person no longer knows where he lives, not in what city, not in what time, he’s not even sure that his is the house he returns to in the late afternoon with the sensation that he’s a nuisance, even though he may have set out very early, not knowing precisely where he was going or for what reason, looking for God knows what job that would allow him to feel he was once again doing something useful, something necessary. At one of the last meals held by the association, the one we had for the purpose of awarding Jacob Bustamante our Silver Medal, Godino scolded me affectionately because it had been two years since I came home for Holy Week. I explained to him that I was going through a difficult phase, hoping that he, a man of so many resources and acquaintances, might offer a helping hand, but of course I didn’t ask for his help straight out, because of my pride and the fear of losing face in his eyes. My dejection and wounded honor kept me more removed than usual from the activities of our regional association, though I tried never to miss the meetings of the board and was scrupulous in paying my monthly dues. I wandered from morning to night, not myself, from one place to another in Madrid, from one job to another, following promises that never came to anything, opportunities where for some reason or other I always failed, meaningless jobs that lasted a few weeks, a few days. I spent hours waiting, doing nothing, or had to rush to get to something that eluded me by a few minutes.

One morning, while I was crossing Chueca Plaza with my heart in my fist and my eyes straight ahead in order not to see what was around me — the drug dealers, the people with terrible diseases, the spectacle of sleepwalking men and women with faces of the dead and the shamble of zombies — I ran into my paisano Mateo Chirino, the man who was called Mateo Zapatón when I was young, not only because of his trade as a cobbler but also because of his size; he was much larger than most men in those days and, as I remember, wore huge black heavy-soled shoes, legendary shoes he must have spent a lifetime repairing. I noticed that he seemed to be wearing the same enormous shoes, although now they’d been stretched out of shape by his bunions. I was wearing the dark suit I wore for job interviews and carrying my black briefcase and files. I had been accepted, on trial, as a commissioned salesman of supplies for driving schools. Planted in the middle of Chueca Plaza, in an oversized overcoat and a dark green Tyrolean hat outfitted with the obligatory feather, Mateo Zapatón stood staring benevolently at something, the very picture of a robust, lazy fellow with time on his hands, and he rose from those black shoes as from the pedestal of a statue or the stump of an olive tree, so deeply rooted he seemed in the neighborhood of Madrid where he was living and where he gave the impression of being as comfortable as he had been in our distant, shared hometown.

His face, too, was just as I remembered it, as if impervious to the wear of time. To a child, all adults are more or less old, so when you grow older and see those persons again after years have gone by, it seems as if they haven’t changed at all. It was a cold winter morning, one of those disagreeable workday mornings in Madrid when the facades of buildings are the same dirty gray as the cloudy but rainless sky. I was rushing as always, harried from running late to meet a client, the owner of a driving school on Calle Pelayo. I’d made the mistake of coming in my car, and the little bit of time I’d left for having a cup of coffee was lost looking for a parking place in impossible streets filled with traffic, pedestrians, unshaven transvestites, thugs, drug addicts, distributors, and trucks loading and unloading, blocking the sidewalk and provoking a blare of horns that were the last straw for my already shattered nerves.

It was late, I hadn’t eaten, I’d left my car so badly parked that it would probably be towed, but seeing Mateo Zapatón, and the pleasure of the recollections that seeing him awoke in me, was stronger than my haste. As tall as ever, erect, with the same placid expression, big nose, and slightly bulging eyes, cheeks ruddy with cold and good health, though sagging with age, his step as firm as when he used to march in his penitent’s robe ahead of the Last Supper float, guiding the huge cart sponsored by the association’s board of directors.

That float was one of the most spectacular of all Holy Week, and it had the most figures: the twelve apostles seated around a linen-covered table, with Christ standing at one end, one hand on his heart and the other raised in a gesture of benediction. The gold fringe encircling his head vibrated with every majestic turn of the wheels over the cobbled or paved streets of that time, with the same slight shiver that flickered the flames in tulip-shaped globes and rippled the white tablecloth on which the bread and the wine were arranged for the liturgical sacrifice. All the apostles were looking toward Jesus, and each had a small white light focused on him that dramatically illuminated his face. Everyone except Judas, whose head was turned away in a gesture of remorse and greed, focused on the pouch that held the coins of his betrayal, half-hidden behind his chair. The light that struck Judas in the face was green, the bilious green of liver dysfunction, and everyone in town knew that those features, which we children despised as much as those of the villains in the moving pictures, were those of a tailor who had his workshop on the corner of Calle Real, very near the cubby of Mateo Zapatón.

Godino told me the story, not without promising that he would tell me others even juicier. The figures on the float, like almost all the figures displayed during Holy Week, had been carved by the celebrated maestro Utrera, who according to Godino was one of the most important artists of the century but hadn’t received the recognition he deserved because he had chosen to stay in our hospitable though isolated city. Because he was such a genius, Utrera was naturally a dedicated bohemian, and he was always consumed by debts and pursued by creditors, one of whom, the most persistent and also the one man to whom Utrera owed the most, was that same tailor on Calle Real who made Utrera’s monogrammed shirts, his closely fitted waistcoats, the suits as snug as Fred Astaire’s, even the floating robes Utrera wore in his studio. Whenever the debt reached an unacceptable level, the tailor would present himself at the Royal Café, where the authors and artists’ club headed by Utrera met every afternoon, and would publicly call the sculptor a reprobate and a thief, shaking a sheaf of unpaid bills in his face. Very dignified, small, ramrod-straight, packaged, as it were, in the elegant Fred Astaire — model suit he had not paid for and had no intention of ever paying for, the sculptor would gaze at a different part of the room while waiters and friends subdued the tailor, whose eyes were bulging and face was dripping sweat from anger, and who ended up leaving as empty-handed as he had come, though not without having ignominiously recovered from the floor of the café the bills that had fallen from his hands in the heat of his tirade, as valuable proof of an insult he threatened to rectify in court. Imagine everyone’s shock, Godino told me, anticipating the punch line with a broad smile that lighted his clever and jovial face, when a few weeks later, the first Wednesday of Holy Week, at the first appearance of the newly carved Last Supper (the old one, like almost everything else, had been burned by the Reds during the war), the tailor saw with his own eyes what malevolent gossips had already told him, the news that was flashing around the city, in Godino’s words, “like a trail of gunpowder.” The contorted face of Judas, the green face that turned away from the kind but accusing face of the Redeemer to examine, in his greed, the badly hidden pouch of coins, was the tailor’s living likeness, exact and faithful despite the cruel exaggeration of the caricature: the same bulging eyes that had looked at the sculptor in the café as if wanting to bore holes in him. “Or petrify him, like the eyes of the Medusa,” said Godino, who as he warmed up to his tale would utter his favorite words… “And the Semitic nose!” With that adjective Godino would make a face and thrust his head forward, looking as the tailor must have looked when he discovered his likeness on the figure of Judas, and would twist or wrinkle his nose, which was small and turned up, as if merely pronouncing the word “Semitic”—which gave him so much pleasure that he repeated it two or three times — had the virtue of making his nose as prominent as that of the tailor and of Judas, as the nose of all the cruel soldiers and Pharisees of the Holy Week floats: the Jews spit on the Lord, as we children used to say when we played our games of floats and parades. In the paved and dirt streets of our day, we held our juvenile versions of Holy Week and paraded playing small plastic trumpets and drums made from large empty tins; we even pulled floats fashioned from wood or cardboard boxes and wore capes made of old newspapers.

BOTH MEN HAVE BEEN DEAD a long time now, the irascible tailor and the morose, bohemian sculptor, but the vengeful joke one played on the other survives in the grim, still green-lit features of the Judas of the Last Supper, even though with every Holy Week there are fewer people who can identify them as the tailor’s or who remember the stories of the past that Godino spins, whether inventing them out of whole cloth or just embroidering them, I don’t know. Nor would there be many who recognize the other real model for the apostles, the Saint Matthew who is turned toward Christ, half devout, half frightened, his raised eyebrows underscoring the amazement in his eyes, because this is the moment when the Master has just said that one of the twelve will betray him that night and everyone is alarmed and scandalized, gesturing wildly, asking, “Master, is it I?” In the midst of that uproar no one pays attention to the green, rancorous face of Judas or notices the swollen pouch of coins that our mothers pointed out to us when we were children and they held us up in their arms as the float passed by in the procession.

I didn’t need Godino to explain to me that the noble Saint Matthew, straight of back and red of cheek, was the living image of Mateo Zapatón, who thus had his instant of public glory on the same night of Holy Week that the bill-collecting tailor was covered with ridicule. After the sculptor Utrera, when he had money or the prospect of collecting some, had the measurements for a new suit taken in the tailor shop, he would cross Calle Real and order hand-cobbled shoes from Mateo, or during hard times he would bring old pairs to be repaired. But unlike the tailor, Mateo Zapatón never reminded Utrera of past-due bills, partly because of the man’s somewhat cowardly nature, which made him inclined to accept half measures, but partly too because he had a fervent admiration for the sculptor, which swelled to the point of abject gratitude every time the maestro came by his shop and stayed several hours to chat with him, offering him his blond-tobacco cigarettes and telling him stories of his travels through Italy and of his life in the artistic circles of Madrid before the war.

“Friend Mateo,” the sculptor would say, “you have a classic head that deserves to be immortalized by art.” Said and done. Mateo never charged Utrera a cent, but he considered the debt canceled when, with a surge of vanity and modesty, he saw his unmistakable face among those of the apostles, as well as his husky shoulders in a very typical posture: looking sideways and upward from the low cobbler’s bench where he spent his life. Being a penitent and a board member of the brotherhood of the Last Supper, could he imagine a greater honor than inclusion among those who supped with the Savior? Every characteristic, the entire persona of the evangelist saint, was of a prodigal fidelity, except for the beard, which the flesh-and-blood Mateo did not have, although at times he seemed to be on the verge of letting it grow, an inconceivable daring in those years of carefully tended mustaches and shaved faces. The tailor shop sat almost directly across from the cobbler’s shop, but whenever the aggrieved tailor met Mateo on the opposite sidewalk, he would lower his head or look away, his face greener and his nose more Semitic than ever, and Mateo, like so many others, would have to clamp his hand over his mouth to keep from exploding with laughter, his cheeks flaming a bright red more appropriate for a giant figure in Valencia’s festivals than for the image of a pious evangelist.

IT GAVE ME A LITTLE START of pleasure to see that face in the middle of a hostile city, a face tied to the sweetest memories of my hometown and childhood. When I was a boy, my mother often sent me to the door of Mateo Zapatón, who without knowing anything at all about me used to pat my cheek and call me Sacristan. “Mercy, Sacristan, this pair of half soles didn’t last very long this time!” “Tell your mother I don’t have change, Sacristan. She can pay me when she comes by.” The shop was very narrow and high-ceilinged, almost like a closet, and it opened directly onto the street by way of a glass door, which Mateo closed only on the most severe winter days. All the available space, including the sides of the chest he used as a worktable and counter, was covered with posters of bullfights and of Holy Week, the two passions of this master cobbler, glued-on posters, yellowed by the years, some pasted over others, announcements of corridas celebrated at the beginning of the century or at last year’s fair, all in a confusion of names, places, and dates that fed Mateo’s chatty erudition. He was almost always surrounded by his troop of friends, with a cigarette or tack between his lips, or both at once, a tireless narrator of historic anecdotes from the world of bulls and famous taurine maneuvers, which he knew at first hand because the presidents of the corridas often asked him to act as an official adviser. His voice would break and his eyes ill with tears when he was recalling the doleful afternoon when he watched from a row of seats on the sunny side of the bullring in Linares as the bull Islero charged Manolete. “He’s going to hook you, don’t get so close,” he had shouted from his seat, and he bent forward as if he were in the plaza and cupped his hands to make a megaphone, his face tragic with anticipation, living once again the instant when Manolete could still have saved himself from the fatal goring, “the fateful goring,” as Godino always said when he imitated the madly waving arms of the impassioned cobbler as he told that tale. Godino always promised some great and mysterious story about Mateo, a secret about which only he knew the most delicious details.

I WENT UP TO MATEO there in Chueca Plaza, and he looked at me with the same broad, benevolent smile he had worn when he welcomed the shoppers and the circle of friends who gathered at his cobbler’s shop. I was moved to think that he recognized me despite how much I’d changed since the last time we saw each other. Just then another coincidence came to mind that linked him to my oldest memories and, without his knowing, made him a part of my childhood. In the space next to Mateo Zapatón’s was the barbershop my father used to take me to, the one where my grandfather always got his haircut and shave, Pepe Morillo’s shop, which was doing less and less business as his oldest customers died off and young people were letting their hair grow. Now his door was closed as tightly as Mateo Zapatón’s and the Judas-face tailor’s, like so many of the shops on Calle Real that once had been busy, before people gradually forgot to go by there, turning it, especially at night and on rainy days, into a ghostly, abandoned street. But in those days Pepe Morillo’s barbershop was as animated as Mateo Zapatón’s shoe repair, and often, on mild April and May afternoons, the clients of both shops would take chairs out on the sidewalk and smoke and talk in one single gathering, which was observed from the other side of the street, from the darkness of his empty shop, by the brooding tailor, who would wring his hands behind the counter and sink his head deeper between his shoulders, ever more closely resembling the Judas of the Last Supper, the misanthrope with the green face and hooked nose slowly pushed toward bankruptcy by the unremitting advance of mass-produced clothing.

My father, holding my hand, used to take me to Pepe Morillo’s barbershop (back then “hair salon” was a woman’s word), and I was so small that the barber had to put a little stool on the seat in order for me to see myself in the mirror and for him to be comfortable as he cut my hair. His face smelled of cologne and his breath of tobacco when he bent close with the comb and scissors, and he shaved my neck with a little electrical machine. I could hear his strong, fast breathing and feel the touch of capable adult fingers on the nape of my neck and on my cheeks, the rare pressure of hands that weren’t those of my mother or father, familiar yet strange hands, suddenly brusque when he doubled my ears forward or made me bend way over by pushing the back of my head. Every time he trimmed my hair, almost at the end, Pepe Morillo would say, “Close your eyes tight,” and I knew he was going to trim the bangs to just above my eyebrows, cutting toward the middle of my forehead. Damp hair would fall on my eyelids, tickle my plump cheeks and tip of my nose, and the cold blades of the scissors would brush my eyebrows. When Pepe Morillo told me I could open my eyes now, I would be surprised by the round, unfamiliar face in the mirror, with protruding ears and straight bangs above the eyes, and also by my father’s smile as he looked approvingly at my reflection.

I remembered all this as if I were reliving it when I unexpectedly ran into Mateo Zapatón in Chueca Plaza… and something else that until that moment I hadn’t known was in my memory. Once, as I was waiting my turn and reading a comic book my father had just bought for me, I felt thirsty and asked Pepe Morillo’s permission to get a drink. He pointed to a small, dark interior patio at the rear of the barbershop, through a glass door and down a dark corridor. When you’re a boy, the farthest places can be reached in only a few steps. As I pushed open the door, I think I was a little dizzy; maybe I was getting a fever and that was why I was so thirsty. The paving tiles were white and gray, with reddish flowers in the center, and they echoed as I walked across them. In a corner of the tiny patio, where a number of plants with large leaves added to the humidity, there was a pitcher on a shelf covered with a crocheted cloth, one of those clay water pitchers they had back then, a brightly colored, glazed jug in the shape of a rooster, made, I remember precisely, by potters on Calle Valencia. I took a drink, and the water had the consistency of broth and the taste of fever. I went back down the hallway, and suddenly I was lost. I wasn’t at the barbershop but in a place it took some time to identify as the cobbler’s shop, and the person I saw was the flesh-and-blood apostle Saint Matthew, although he was wearing a leather apron and not the tunic of a saint or a member of the brotherhood, and he was beardless, with the stub of an unlit cigarette in one corner of his mouth and a tack in the other. “Mercy, Sacristan, what in the world are you doing here? You gave me quite a turn.”

JUST AS I HAD THEN, I looked at Mateo and didn’t know what to say. Up close he seemed much older, he no longer resembled the eternal Saint Matthew of the Last Supper. Neither his gaze nor his smile was directed at me: they stayed absolutely the same when I spoke his name and held out my hand to greet him, and when I clumsily and hastily told him who I was and tried to remind him of my parents’ names and the nickname my family had back then. Limply holding my hand, he nodded and looked at me, although he didn’t give the impression that he was focusing his eyes, which until a moment before had seemed observant and lively. His hat, more than tilted to one side, was skewed on his head, as if he had jammed it on at the last moment as he left the house or put it on with the carelessness of someone who can’t see himself well in the mirror. I reminded him that my mother had always been a customer in his shop — then shops had patrons, not customers — and that my father, who like him was also a great fan of the bulls, had often been present at his gatherings, and at those in Pepe Morillo’s barbershop next door, which communicated with his via an interior patio. Mateo listened to those names of persons and places with the look of one who doesn’t completely connect with things so far in the past. He bowed his head and smiled, although I also thought I noticed an expression of suspicion or alarm or disbelief in his face. Maybe he was afraid that I was going to cheat him, or assault him, like many of the thugs who hung around that area — you saw them all the time, kneeling in clusters beside the entrance to the metro and dealing in God knows what. I had to go, I was very late for an appointment that was probably futile in the first place, I hadn’t had breakfast, my car was double-parked, and Mateo Zapatón was still holding my hand with distracted cordiality and smiling, his mouth half-open, his lower jaw dropped a little, with the gleam of saliva at the corners of his lips.

“You don’t remember, maestro?” I asked him. “You always called me Sacristan.”

“Of course I do, man, yes,” he winked and stepped a little closer, and it was then I realized that now I was the taller. He put his other hand on my shoulder, as if in a benevolent attempt not to disappoint me. “Sacristan.”

But the word didn’t seem to mean anything to him, though he kept repeating it, still holding the hand that now I wanted to get free, feeling trapped and nervous about continuing on my way. I pulled back but he didn’t move, the hand with the soft, moist palm that had clutched mine still slightly raised, the hat with the tiny green feather twisted around on his forehead, standing there alone like a blind man, in the middle of the plaza, supported on the great pedestal of his large black shoes.