resigned pensioners waiting for the deferred opening of the cafeteria where they would comfort their groaning stomachs.
Over the last ten to twelve years, Conde had begun to visit the local church suspiciously frequently. Although he’d never been to another mass and never contemplated the possibility he might kneel by the confessional, the urge to sit for a few minutes in the deserted temple, freeing up the floodgates of his mind, repaid him with a feeling of calm he argued had nothing in common with mystical or extra-terrestrial spiritual longings apart from its basic function that the Count never used – he never prayed or asked for anything, because he’d forgotten all his prayers and didn’t have anyone to include in them – the church had begun to provide a kind of shelter where time and life lost the savage rhythms of the struggle for daily survival. Nonetheless, his conscience warned that, despite his lack of belief in life after death, a diffuse feeling did exist he’d yet to pin down, that wasn’t sapping his essential atheism but was beginning to entice him into that world and its persistent, magnetic appeal. Conde had come to suspect that the blend of aging and disillusion overwhelming his heart might finally cast him back, or just return him, to the fold of those who find consolation in faith. But the mere thought of that possibility irked him: the Count was a fundamentalist in his loyalties, and converts might be contemptible renegades and traitors, but re-conversion verged on the abominable.
That morning Conde felt full of expectation: he wasn’t entering church in search of passing solace, but to find an unlikely response, quite unrelated to mysteries of transcendence, but rather connected to those of his own past, in the most earthbound of all possible worlds. Consequently, rather than sitting anonymously on one of the pews, he crossed over the central aisle and headed for the sacristy, where he found, as he’d hoped he would, the ever- stalwart figure of octogenarian Padre Mendoza, Bible open at a page of the Apocalypse, searching no doubt for the text for his next sermon.
“Good morning, Padre,” he said, entering the precinct.
“Ready then?” asked the old man without looking up.
“Not yet.”
“Don’t leave it too long,” the priest warned.
“What did we agree? Is or isn’t the Lord’s time infinite?”
“The Lord’s is, your’s isn’t. Nor is mine,” he retorted smiling at the Count.
“Why are you so keen to convert me?” asked the Count.
“Because you’re crying out for it. You insist on not believing but you are somebody who can’t live without belief. All you need is to dare to take the final step.”
Conde had to smile. Could that be true or was the wily old priest merely exercising his sibylline logic?
“I’m not prepared to believe in certain words again. What’s more, you will ask me to do things I can’t and don’t want to do.”
“For example?”
“I’ll tell you when you give me confession,” wriggled the Count and, coming back to earth, he handed the priest a cigarette, as he put another to his own lips. He lit both with his lighter and they were soon enveloped in a cloud of smoke. “I came to see you because I need to find something out and you can perhaps help me… How long have you known my family?”
“For fifty-eight years, since the day I first came to this parish. You weren’t even a twinkle in your father’s eye… Your Grandfather Rufino, who was even more of an atheist than you, was my first friend around here.”
Conde nodded and again worried about what had really driven him to Padre Mendoza’s door. A skilled hand in these uncomfortable situations, the priest helped him make the next step.
“So what is it you need to know?”
Conde looked him in the eye and felt the trust-suffusing gaze of that old man who’d once placed in his mouth a flour wafer that, he claimed, was the very body of Christ.
“Have you ever heard of a woman called Violeta del Rio?”
The priest looked up, perhaps surprised by that unexpected question. He took a couple of drags, then put out the cigarette in the ashtray and returned Conde’s gaze.
“No,” came his firm reply. “Why?”
“The name cropped up yesterday and, for some reason or other, it sounded familiar. I had the feeling that something sleeping had suddenly woken up. But I can’t think where or why…”
“Who is this woman?” enquired the priest.
The Count explained, trying to fathom why Violeta del Rio seemed both mysterious yet remotely familiar in this perplexing story that made no sense at all.
“How old were you in 1958?” asked the priest, staring at him.
“Three,” the Count replied. “Why?”
The old man pondered for a few seconds. He seemed to be weighing up his responses and which words he should say or keep to himself.
“Your father fell in love with a singer around that time.”
“My father?” rasped the Count. The parish priest’s words clashed with the strict, home-loving image he cherished of his father. “With Violeta del Rio?”
“I don’t know what her name was, I never did, so it might have been her or somebody else… As far as I knew, it was a platonic affair. But he did fall in love. He heard her sing and became infatuated. I don’t think it went any further. I think… She lived in one world and your father in another: she was beyond his grasp, which I think was something he realized from the start. Your mother never found out. What’s more, I didn’t think anyone was in the know, apart from your father and me…”
“So why does the name sound familiar?”
“Did he ever mention her to you?”
“I don’t think so. I’m not sure. My father never spoke to me about what he did – you know what he was like.”
Conde tried to reshape the monolithic image he had of his father, with whom he never succeeded in establishing the channels of communication he’d enjoyed with his mother or his grandfather, Rufino the Count. They’d loved each other, certainly, but neither had ever been able to express that affection verbally, and silence governed almost every aspect of their lives. Besides, the idea he might have been chasing after a beautiful singer in bars and cabarets didn’t fit with the image of his father that he clung to.
“Well it must have been him… I expect he told you one day and you just forgot. Men in love do do crazy things.”
“I know. Tell me about it. But not him.”
“How can you be so sure? He wasn’t that different.”
“We didn’t speak much.”
“What about Grandfather Rufino? Might he have said something to you?”
“No.”
“I expect he did, he told old Rufino everything and it got through to you and…”
“But what was this woman like my father fell for?”
“I haven’t a clue,” smiled the priest, “he just told me he couldn’t get the singer, Violeta or whatever her name was, out of his head. Your father came to see me because he said he was going mad. He told me everything right here. Poor man.”
Conde finally smiled. The image of his father infatuated with a singer of boleros seemed unreal, but it was so human he found it reassuring.
“So my father fell in love with a singer and watered at the mouth at the mere thought of her. And nobody ever found out…”
“I did,” the priest corrected him.
“You’re different,” explained Conde.
“Why am I different?”
“Because you are. Otherwise, my father would never have told you.”
“True enough.”
“So why didn’t you ask him what her name was?”
“It wasn’t important. For either of us. It was as if desire had struck like lightening: it came and turned his life upside down. What’s in a name? I just told him to take care, that some changes can’t be reversed,” answered the
