glasses that from time to time slipped down her straight nose.
“I’m going blind, Laura. It’s a blessing I can’t see my hands, look at my hands, they look like the knots sailors make on the docks, like the roots of an old tree. How can I play the piano like this? At least I have Aunt Virginia, who reads to me.”
Virginia kept her eyes wide open, as if in shock about something, and her hands resting on a kidskin binding, as if it were the skin of a beloved being. She tapped her fingers in time with the blinking of her very black, alert eyes. Was she waiting for the arrival of something imminent or the entrance of some unexpected but providential being? God, a mailman, a lover, a publisher? All those possibilities passed simultaneously before Aunt Virginia’s all too lively eyes.
“You never spoke to Minister Vasconcelos about publishing my book of poems?”
“Aunt Virginia, Vasconcelos isn’t a minister anymore. He’s in opposition to Calles’ government. Besides, I’ve never met him.”
“I don’t know anything about politics. Why don’t the poets govern us?”
“Because they don’t know how to swallow toads without making a face,” laughed Laura.
“What? What are you saying? Are you insane or what?
Although the three sisters had decided to run the boarding house, in reality only Leticia worked at it. Weak, nervous, tall, holding her back very straight, her hair graying, a woman of few words but of eloquent punctuality in the execution of all tasks, she had the menus ready, the rooms clean, the plants watered. All with the active help of Zampaya, who went on bringing joy to the house with his dances and songs from who knew where:
Laura was shocked to see the wiry gray hair on the black man’s head. She was sure Zampaya was secretly in contact with a sect of dancing witches and an interminable chorus of invisible voices. These are the people with whom we went to give my brother Santiago’s body to the sea, these are the people with whom we are witnesses. Then Laura looked toward the attic, thought about Armonia Aznar here in Xalapa, and, who knows why?, she thought about Carmela with no last name in the maid’s room in Mexico City.
Leticia especially looked after old acquaintances from Veracruz passing through Xalapa. But now, with the arrival of Laura and Maria de la O, in addition to the presence of Aunts Hilda and Virginia, the two permanent and penniless guests, there was room for only two guests. Laura was astonished to see once more the now adult red- haired tennis player, the big fellow with strong, svelte, hairy legs who had abused the girls at the San Cayetano dances.
He greeted her with a gesture of excuse and submission as unexpected as his presence. He was a traveling salesman, he said, selling automobile tires on the Cordoba-Orizaba-Xalapa-Veracruz circuit. At least he hadn’t been sent to that hell the port of Coatzacoalcos. The company gave him his own car-his face lit up, as it had when he’d frenetically danced the cakewalk in 1915-though of course it wasn’t his hut the company’s.
The lights went out.
The other guest was, Leticia told her, an old man, he never leaves his room, I bring his meals to him.
One afternoon, Leticia was busy with something at the door and left the guest’s tray of food in the kitchen, where it was getting cold. Not thinking anything of it, Laura picked up the tray and took it to the guest, who never allowed himself to be seen.
He was sitting on the edge of his bed with something in his hands that he hid as soon as he heard Laura’s footsteps. She managed to detect the unmistakable sound of rosary beads. When she set the tray down, she felt a tremor run through her entire body, a chill of sudden recognition through veils and more veils of oblivion, time, and, in this case, disdain. Laura’s memory had to make a gigantic leap backward to identify the young priest from Puebla, dark-skinned and intolerant, who’d disappeared one day with the church’s treasure.
“Why, it’s you, the priest.”
“You are Laura, isn’t that right? Please, don’t raise your voice. Don’t get your mother into trouble.”
“Father Elzevir.”
The priest clasped Laura’s hands. “How can you remember? You were just a child.”
There was no need to ask him what he was doing hidden away there. “Please, don’t raise your voice. Don’t get your mother into trouble.” He said she didn’t have to ask him anything. He would tell her he didn’t get very far with what he’d stolen. He was a coward. He admitted it. When the police were about to catch him, he thought it would be better to submit to the pity of the Church, for Don Porfirio’s police had none.
“I asked forgiveness, and it was granted to me. I confessed and was absolved. I repented and again entered the community of my Church. But I felt it was all too easy. It was true and profound, but easy. I had to pay for the evil I’d committed, my temptation. My illusion. God our master did me the favor of sending me this punishment, Calles’ religious persecution.”
He looked at Laura with the eyes of a conquered Indian. “Now I feel guiltier than ever. I have nightmares. I’m sure God punished me for my sacrilege by causing this persecution to fall on His Church. I believe I am responsible, because of my individual act, for a collective evil. I believe it profoundly.”
“Father, you have no reason to confess to me.”
“Oh, but I do.” Elzevir squeezed Laura’s hands, which he’d never stopped holding. “Oh, but I do. You were a child. But who better than a child can I ask for forgiveness for the tumult of my soul? Will you forgive me?”
“Yes, Father, I never made charges against you, but my mother-”
“Your mother and your aunts have understood. They have forgiven me. That’s why I’m here. Without them, I would have been shot.”
“I’m saying you did me no harm. Excuse me, but I’d forgotten all about you.”
“But that was the harm. Don’t you see? Being forgotten is the harm. I sowed scandal in my parish, and if my parish forgets it, the reason is that the scandal penetrated so deeply that it was forgotten and forgiven.”
“My mother has forgiven you,” Laura interrupted, somewhat confused by the priest’s logic.
“No, she keeps me alive here, puts a roof over my head, and feeds me, all so I can know the mercy I did not bestow on my flock. Your mother is a living reproach for which I am thankful. I don’t want any one to forgive me.”
“Father, my sons have not had their first communion. The fact is that my husband… would be outraged… if I even asked his permission. Wouldn’t you like to-?”
“Why are you really asking me for this?”
“I want to be part of an exceptional rite, Father. Routine is killing me.” Laura turned away, wailing. It was somewhere between raving and weeping.
In truth, she felt a deep satisfaction in participating in a ceremony missing from her married life, knowing she was going against her husband’s implicit wishes. Juan Francisco neither went to Mass nor spoke of religion. Neither did Laura or the boys. Only Maria de la O kept some religious pictures stuck in her mirror, which Juan Francisco, without saying so, considered the relics of a hypocritical old woman.
“I don’t oppose it, but still, I have to ask why,” Leticia wondered.
“The world becomes too flat without ceremonies to mark the passage of time.”
“Are you so afraid of losing track of the years?”
“Yes, Mutti. I fear time without hours. That’s what death must be like.”
Leticia, her three sisters, and Laura gathered together in the priest’s bedroom with Santiago and Danton.
“This is my body, this is my blood,” Elzevir intoned, and put pieces of bread in the mouths of the boys, now seven and six, amused because they’d been brought to a dark bedroom to eat bits of roll and hear words in Latin. They preferred running through the gardens of Xalapa, Los Berros and Juarez Park, watched over as always by their dark-skinned aunt; they felt they owned this tranquil city, a space without danger, a territory that gave them the freedom forbidden them in Mexico City, with its streets filled with trucks and wise guys and toughs from whose challenges Santiago had to protect his younger brother.
“Why are you looking so hard at the roof of that house, Mama?”
“No reason, Santiago. I lived there when I was young with your grandparents.”
