THE CHANGE

 

 

 

Rainy afternoon clarity flooded with the neon lights of the sky. After the rain, the transparent and vacuous night has grown. Don Gerardo returns home. He is a fat priest who scrambles with difficulty in the seat of his Seat 600. Drive very cautiously, very far to the right. Rigidly holding the steering wheel with both hands. It is his first car and there are still many kilometers to go before the thousand kilometers and to leave the "on the road". Perhaps I will never get out of those sixty per hour. Sixty an hour is plenty of haste. "Much more haste," Don Gerardo thinks, "than I have or ever will have. We must not commit recklessness. Recklessness: this is an imprudent time. Don Gerardo says the word "reckless" to himself, aloud, like an incantation. All of them accelerate instead of braking in the face of danger. Catchphrases, phrases, half-sentences, faces from the meeting he has just left come and go. Change. Arrhythmic imprudence of this time without a center. Youth does not possess the secret, it does not know how to slowly transmute itself into the other, into the new, giving time to time. It devours the new in one bite and digests nothing. Besides, there's nothing really new. Only appearances change, reality, truth is immutable. Youth only consumes their impatience. At this point, Don Gerardo is given an old "however" in the pit of his stomach. And he feels once again as he has felt all afternoon at the meeting of the priests of the diocese: confused, out of place, offended, attacked, irritated, restless, guilty in the face of this new gesticulating, reckless rhetoric. And all this is repeated once again like a heavy meal. All "it" that is aggressive, indefinable, variable and vaguely replete with personal allusions like a nightmare. "Transubstantiation," Don Gerardo thinks. We are now told at every turn that "substance" does not mean to us what it did to the theologians of Trent. Is it just a matter of names? Are the things themselves different as well? What is meant when we are told that we did not understand the old language? Of course we didn't understand it! Of course, I have never known – neither I nor almost anyone else – in what precise sense the word "transubstantiation" explained the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist! That is precisely what the doctors of Holy Mother Church were for. "Don't ask me, I'm ignorant. Holy Mother Church has doctors who will know how to answer you." But things never went so far that it was necessary to go to the doctors. He always got away with what one remembered. And there were always formulas. And people were satisfied that there was to know that there were – somewhere in the Church, in Rome perhaps, in the monasteries of the Benedictines, in the Dominicans, in the pontifical universities – doctors always at hand. No, we didn't understand the old language much more or much better than the new, if there is one. But we used it easily and almost wisely, as a monetary system that has now suddenly been taken out of circulation. It is a high and mild night after the rain. There is little left to arrive. A curve, the last one, and the headlights raise, ghostly and instantaneously, the white mass of the walls of the convent garden. Two hundred meters further on you can see the house that Don Gerardo occupies with his mother. Don Gerardo approaches her. Stop to the side of the curb and get out of the car heavily. It is a rectangular, white, two-story house. The negatives of the leaves of a virgin vine that covers part of the entrance and almost the entire east wing of the building, shake slightly in the empty night air. A bird hidden not far away, at any part of the night, emits its good warning. Don Gerardo lives upstairs with his mother, with his inaudible mother who never asks anything or wishes for anything, who has never altered anything and who has always, from as far away as Don Gerardo remembers, fills in the son's intentions like that very simple piece of a puzzle that we immediately place in the right place. The convent gardener and his wife live on the ground floor. A seventeen-year enmity – the seventeen years that Don Gerardo has been chaplain to the nuns. Don Gerardo would not know, at this point, how it began: it is as familiar, as everyday as saying Mass or reading its breviary. "Build up in us, Lord, a new heart." Alas, Lord! Don Gerardo sighs every time one of the thousands of incidents of this insoluble relationship with his neighbors below takes place. A familiar annoyance that periodically, acutely, reproduces itself and remains as the background of his monotonous existence. Perhaps Don Gerardo's shyness or his mother's non-communicative personality is to blame. Or perhaps the unpremeditated mixture of a sacerdos in aeternum secundum ordinem Melchisedech, and Matilda, the gardener's wife, who eternally sees sexual devils in the looks, in the laughter, in the silences and even in the shoes of every male animal that approaches the convent. In any case, Don Gerardo and his mother fear her and treat her courteously, which at once emboldens and offends Matilde. The gardener, Remigio, has a good car and television – although not in colour – and a refrigerator; and Matilda's mother has a shop selling fabrics, sausages and convertible furniture in the neighbouring town – a shop that she aspires to make a supermarket and sell everything, even the air she breathes, for forty leagues around. Matilde is oily and white. Of curdled and very white gelatin and large, implausible, breasts of stone. She is younger than her husband and childless. She is aggressively devout as if to prove that her appearance, in spite of appearances, is the perpetual temple of the Holy Spirit. He defiantly takes communion on Sundays. When Don Gerardo enters the common hallway, you can hear the gardeners' TV music and you can smell the fried food of his camacha dinner. That smell, which alone is the whole hallway, always brings back to Don Gerardo equivocal memories of festivity, of fairgrounds. Don Gerardo climbs the stairs slowly. Open the door. Come in. A long hallway with doors on the sides. All are closed. It smells closed. "God bless every corner of this house," reads the flickering light of oil on a Sacred Heart of Jesus in relief of white earthenware. A slit of light is visible under a door in the background. Don Gerardo opens that door. Her mother sitting at the kitchen table. Don Gerardo dines. Smoke a cigarette after dinner. It is the twelfth of that day. He is trying to reduce as much as possible, but the effort drives him crazy almost without realizing it. Mane nobiscum Domine quoniam advesperas-cit. Have mercy on us, Lord, for it is getting dark," Don Gerardo thinks without noticing and slightly altering his sentence as he thinks so. He prays the breviary for a while, finishes what he lacks. "Sing a new song to the Lord." How do you sing a new song? What is a new chant? Before going to bed, Don Gerardo tries to read the leaflets he has brought back from the Mutual meeting. He is overcome by sleep. Turn off the light. He does not sleep. Turn on the light. He sits up with difficulty in bed. Light a cigarette. Try reading again. He can't find out what he's reading. Extinguish the cigarette halfway through by carefully depositing half, without smoking in the ashtray. Turn off the light. The bird can be heard outside until it sinks into some sinkhole of the clean, empty, celestial hole. Don Gerardo has finished celebrating Mass in front of the nuns. In the sacristy after Mass. Seventeen years doing the same thing. Saying that same mass. A text by Kierkegaard read somewhere out of context – because Don Gerardo is not much of a reader and certainly not a reader of Kierkegaard – now occurs to him a bit as if it were his thought and not Kierkegaard's: the grave man is serious because of the seriousness with which he repeats in repetition. A pastor who did the same thing every day, who baptized every day, said Mass – the "pastors" won't say Mass, I say, Don Gerardo thinks – confessed, and so on – and did not really have the virtue of gravity, would want to stimulate, move, be up to date. The seriousness of the grave man is characterized by the seriousness with which he repeats in repetition. These invisible fruits of the divine word. And the distance. O God," Don Gerardo prays sometimes, "precisely because I do not know how to keep my distance, you have turned me back into distance, through timidity! No one ever gets very close to me. No one ever separates too far. The nuns have their own confessor. The religion class at the Institute – where Don Gerardo teaches twice a week – fills up part of his time. Don Gerardo is afraid of that kind. That mocking struggle of all the children, without noticing, against him. When he leaves the sacristy, he is once again seized by the anguish that lately vaguely catches him every day when he says Mass; and, above all, after having said it, especially after the consecration. And invariably every Sunday before the Sunday talk. This feeling of unworthiness is only, perhaps, a malignant distortion of his feeling of inferiority, of his timidity as a seminarian son of poor farmers. Perhaps it has been the same anguish during all his years of priesthood, but which Don Gerardo only now recognizes, trembling. For seventeen years, every Sunday, Don Gerardo has addressed the veiled bundle of thirty-five equal, motionless nuns to the word of God in general terms. As if gently pushing them into the kingdom of heaven, which, in any case, they will have already more than earned. Don Gerardo often has, when preaching to the nuns, the feeling one has when one pushes something that seems at first glance to offer great resistance and yet gives way suddenly and unexpectedly when pushed. Bewilderment. And tenderness. This is the strangest thing of all: that his anguish always leaves this impossible tenderness without objects when he leaves. Or rather: populated by innumerable, incongruous objects, like a puzzle. His breviary, a small crucifix that he has kept since he was a child, the cat, the back of his mother's neck, the children of the Institute who torment him and do not listen to his religion classes. The years are making me cry, Don Gerardo often thinks. When he arrives at his house he sees two foreigners, two boys, two with their backs on their backs who move away down towards the beach. The clothesline is the work of Matilde, who has had her husband install it with great space facing the brackish wind of the beach, right in front of the house and which offers an almost permanent exhibition of her white and pink clothes. That's what Matilde loves: to come to the clothesline with the two buckets full of damp clothes that still smell of indigo and hang them with the wooden tongs that she takes out of the front pocket of her apron. He spreads the pieces of rigid, dripping fabric, until the wind comes to scan it from the seas and the sun to strut it and make it airy, fragrant and shiny. Also that day Don Gerardo sees the air highlighted in the laundry, the half side of the sun and Matilde barefoot, stony and white, rising to hold one side of a sheet with the clothespin. Don Gerardo averts his gaze because the sight of Matilde barefoot and wet invariably makes him nervous. The two foreigners have already lost their way down the dune. Matilde hurries to talk to him. Every time there are men around, he gives the loquacious deer to Matilde.

"They're one of these hippies, as they call them," he announces, pointing with a tug of the head to the missing boys, "who have gotten into the beach."

"In the pine forest?" Don Gerardo asks. Because the pine forest is almost his heart, his place, the only place where without understanding or talking to each other, without asking questions or surprising himself with answers, with the bland peace of his heart left to the smell of the pines, to the murmur of the beach, to the gravity of the air and the light on the closed eyelids,  Don Gerardo sometimes falls asleep for a little while. There he feels less fat, more transparent, less ashamed or overwhelmed by his diffuse tenderness like bad thoughts.

"In the part above the sentry box," Matilda continues tenaciously.

The checkpoint in question is one of the carabineros. Don Gerardo knows the place well. That site, in addition to the pine forest, is an invariable part of his afternoon walk. And without knowing why, when he hears Matilde, Don Gerardo is happy. Matilde is unusually communicative. Aggressively one-on-one in your "you" and your "Don Gerardo."

"I have let them take the water in our jug, the empty one; then Remigio arms it to me, let's see if we don't see it anymore. I told them that they can't stay there. They take the world for their own money. They say that only a few days I was there movies, just telling my husband, I was sorry there. And what hairs they have, I have them because I have them, excuse me Don Gerardo, but you know what life is, and they speak it like you and like me the Spaniard, the those...!

"They must be Spaniards," says Don Gerardo to say something.

"Those, what are they going to be, there is no such thing here!" Those, anything!

Matilde excited and loquacious. Don Gerardo leaves, offending Matilde, of course, once again by doing so. Don Gerardo goes up to his house. Eat breakfast. He enters his little office. From the window of his little office - of gloomy carved furniture, black, large - you can see the round tops of the pine forest and then, at the same time, the still, high sea; motionless, yes, on the edge of the pines. Don Gerardo likes to sit there at the window to see that. Simply watch it until it changes, like a melody that changes very little. It seems like an eternal sea. Spend the morning. Tomorrow is Institute Day. Don Gerardo prepares his classes meticulously. Uselessly. His subject is not a problem for anyone. You attend because it is just before math class and there is time to copy the problems. Time to laugh and ask the priest if kissing is a mortal sin or if "circumcision" and "epiphany" mean the same thing. Then they both eat, his mother and he, both his mother and him, a whiting and salad. Don Gerardo has been on a diet for years. A pear and coffee only in the mornings. The whiting and the salad and fruit of the time to the meal. A French omelette and a mashed potato and carrot in the evenings. He is also rheumatised by fatness or because of his heredity or age; which is not, after all, much. Some days he takes a couple of "sovereigns" – the days of Institute – that invariably exalt him and make him feel bad. I'm fat from birth. The time for blessing has come. The nuns sing, wrapped up and old-fashioned. Unintentionally malicious, almost all of them from a good family. For seventeen years. What young people seem to be humming, waterfalls! After the blessing – which always lasts forever – Don Gerardo returns home today. Suppressing his usual walk in the pine forest – which for no precise reason Don Gerardo has decided to suppress this afternoon – worries him as a sacrifice or as a minimal deprivation, but visibly unnecessary, useless, visibly invisible to anyone's eyes. In the eyes of God. "Like a child at its mother's breast my soul stands before You." When he arrives at his house, Don Gerardo finds the two boys with Matilde's jug.

"We've been calling, and since no one answered, can we leave the bottle here?"

"The carafe," Don Gerardo repeats.

"She left it with us yesterday to carry the water. Now we have one of our own. You say thank you very much.

They are both very young. The poorly grown beard fiercely whitens their faces as if disguised as wolves. They are disguised, Don Gerardo thinks, looking at them. Their bright blue garments shine with the inconsistency of distant clouds. They remember – for I don't know what reason – the pictures of a book of short stories.

"Well, thank you very much," says Don Gerardo, holding the bottle with both hands. Don Gerardo is about to stop them for a moment, but the two boys are already moving away towards the dark green pine forest, self-conscious or simply forgetting the priest and the jug. Don Gerardo slowly enters the house, between two lights, perplexed. It shines overhead, like a thread of voice, the still sea of night.

Don Gerardo starts his Seat 600. It's the next morning. Today are his two religion classes at the Institute. He promised to give them six years ago and now there is no excuse to leave them. And it is better that way, Don Gerardo thinks, without daring to offer this sacrifice to God; their unworthiness, as the greatness of our great works is offered to those who are loved. At one of its turns, the road passes about a kilometre from the pine forest. One of the boys from the day before is hitchhiking. Don Gerardo stops the car, which stalls, because Don Gerardo is still driving very stumbling. Don Gerardo sees the boy's dirty, bare, clean feet.

"I'm going only as far as Valerna," says the boy. Can you take me there?

"There I go too," says Don Gerardo. Go up, up.

The boy sits next to Don Gerardo. Don Gerardo, before leaving, offers him a cigarette that the boy accepts. They hardly speak during the trip. Without noticing it, Don Gerardo drives a little faster than usual. The boy remains very still in his seat, with his hands on his knees. From time to time Don Gerardo glances sideways at his companion. The first houses of Valerna are already visible and Don Gerardo asks:

"Where do you want me to leave you?" I go almost to the center.

"Here... You can leave me right here.

Don Gerardo is happy about this. He had been a little overwhelmed by the idea of entering Valerna (what a small place Valerna is!) with the boy next to him, like Lazarillo de Tormes. Don Gerardo slows down, the Seat 600 stops. It's a very clear day of winter sunshine, vaharme Sun in the brambles. Don Gerardo hears himself saying:

"I'll come back at two... If you want to take advantage of the trip.

The boy hesitates. A calm smile illuminates the fierce childish face of the faraway boy.

-Well, thank you very much. I don't know, I'll see. Thank you very much anyway.

The car starts again. Don Gerardo drives the car down the main street towards the Institute. Now he drives very slowly as if it were possible to delay the time of those classes or to imaginarily delay the indefinite, the instantaneous of the instant of his journey with the boy. Don Gerardo sweats. Enter the Plaza del Instituto. Park the car to the side. Carefully avoid parking in the free place of Doña Mercedes. Or in the free place of Don Bernardo, the secretary, the one in mathematics. Or too close to the place where the boys leave their bicycles. Is he waiting for me at both o'clock? The Institute is a quadrangular red-brick building with two cloisters, each with a permanently stuck musty fountain in the center. The façade has a square tower in the center with a clock that marks the hours at its own pace and that invariably worries Don Gerardo not coinciding with his wristwatch. Because he only comes to the Institute twice a week, because religion is a silly subject, a "Maria," and because if he were late it would be the same as if he arrived too early, Don Gerardo always arrives at the Institute agitated and very punctual. When he enters the classroom there is, as usual, a pre-class math noise that, as usual, only half-subsides when he enters. Like a lemon and mint mystery, the children of the first row contemplate him with round pairs of previously nubile eyes. There are always two or three who ask him questions after the classes, and Don Gerardo fears those questions more than the class itself. Besides, he fears every time that the reason for the happy questions – which are always prolonged or whose answers are always prolonged by Don Gerardo, invariably incapable on those occasions of thinking clearly or in a hurry or speaking quickly – is to run mathematics rather than to understand religion. Who wants at fifteen years of age, Don Gerardo thinks in his sad days, to really know what the word God or its synonyms mean? That is the only thing you want when the light is low and it gets dark. The row of the first faces of the first row, undefined, panicky, curious, makes his nerves stand on end. And he speaks without pause, the mosconeo of a speech that does not cease that is the background of all the funds of his kind. My God, what will they have to talk about all the time! Don Gerardo sometimes thinks at Mass. Dilexi decorem domus tuae et locura habilitationis gloriae tuae. The class ends, as always, without anything being concluded, from a quarter past eleven until twelve. Don Gerardo leaves and enters the teachers' room. There he sees Doña María de la Concepción Sosa-Martínez, subsistent, correcting Latin notebooks, her brow furrowed. There you can see the physics and chemistry student reading the ABC. Don Gerardo says "Good morning" and sits down in a chair. His buttocks come out of his seat. Don Gerardo rests for half an hour and after half an hour he goes back to class. When it is all over it is twenty to two. As when he gives in to a temptation, he meticulously thinks the opposite of what he wants: I am sure he will not be waiting for me at both o'clock. And it is better that way. He remembers, with a sudden outburst of nerves – which is joy or torment, depending on how you look at it – the fiercely childish face of the boy who now seems, in memory, to belong to the dawn of a mirror. Nothing is outside. Noli foras iré. The clouds are pushing each other today. Drunken sky hurried. The end of the street and you can already see the shacks on the outskirts. There is no one waiting. Don Gerardo goes from second gear to third gear from a stranch. The odometer reaches almost seventy-odd with the toes. The buggy jumps bumps and curves like a shaken pickle can. This afternoon Don Gerardo does not go out for a walk and the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament seems to him more unreal, more incredible than ever. When he gets home he reads the first thing, before kissing his mother on the forehead, before taking off his shoes, Psalm 118-119 and its monotonous, superhuman, insistence pacifies him by sweetening him:

Blessed are those who walk

On immaculate roads

who walk along the law of the Lord.

Make him understand your commandments

Grant, Lord, that I may be able

to think about your wonders.

From my soul that bends sadness,

lift me up with your word.

Take me away from the paths of lies

and teach me things sweetly.

Because I chose the way of truth,

Lord, I chose the truth at all costs.

I made your laws and your forces my own.

I am lost, I am bound to your commandments.

O Lord, do not let your servant be confused.

Here intuition intent, intuition intuition servo.

Don Gerardo goes to bed and falls asleep that night. Now it's the next day. This is my Body. This is my Blood. And whenever you do this, do it simply in remembrance of me. I don't remember you, Lord. I've forgotten everything. The nuns come two by two. Evenings. And they kneel. Perhaps in these seventeen years they have changed, they have hated each other, they have fallen in love or they have died. It always seems that there are the same thirty-five. They pray in chorus every mañanita and, because they were never mystical nuns but of teaching, every mañanitas their choir sounds to the chorus of the multiplication table. Don Gerardo has never had anything to do with them. He serves the Bread of Life in the mornings and remains on the sidelines until the blessing and the rosary in the afternoon. It seems like only yesterday that Don Gerardo and his mother arrived. It seems like yesterday when he was a child and he wanted to go from the village to the seminary because in the seminary he was at least a little more than the fat son of a poor and skinny peasant. Sometimes the sky becomes very clear mint like a tree. Today is one of those days. Don Gerardo sits down to breakfast.

"We're without water, Gerardo," his mother says as she puts the cup of black coffee in front of him. No water. It's always the same. They and the gardeners receive the water from the nuns' reservoir. The stopcock is in the gardeners' kitchen. In reality there is no reason to ever turn off that tap, but since it is an outdated installation and the water supply is relatively limited in that region and Matilde is inexpressibly fond of baths and washing; "I like to hear her in the water in spurts," she says, "let her run like crazy and not this misery here of those stingy things..." (because Matilde maintains at all costs that the nuns are fist to face, and that they have millions and the jewels of the coffers), that is why Matilde has had a tank installed in the kitchen, which she always has full "to have an extra in anticipation", and often forgets or makes her forget,  Once the tank is full, I have to turn back on the stopcock that leads the water to the priest's and his mother's flat.

"Now I will tell you when I go downstairs, mother.

What a strange humiliation this is! Don Gerardo thinks, almost cheering up, almost amused at the thought, this having to ask Matilde please not to forget to turn on the tap of our water, and how strange is, above all, the humiliation of knowing that she can, if she feels like it, turn it off and wait for the priest to come down, more distant than ever as he approaches,  to ask her to please turn on the water so that it can go up to the second floor of the house. The humiliation is so complex that it almost doesn't seem to be so anymore. It seems almost an obscure, abstract, literary exercise, in humiliations, patience and virtues. It seems like a game almost, an unreal way of being and being tested just insofar as it is as vigorously real as the tears of chopping onions. When he goes downstairs he approaches Matilde's door and shakes the knocker once, with some firmness. As expected, it has to wait a long time. Reread the door plate. "Remigio Velarde. Gardener-Horticultural Technician." At last he knocks again and says, feeling, as he did a thousand times before this, ridiculous as he says it aloud: "I am Don Gerardo." Matilde can be heard inside.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," he shouts. The female flip-flop of Matilde is heard. Open the door. Smell of toilet soap or whatever. Matilda's head is seen wrapped in a towel, the smudged tint of the white face that the black eyes heavily disturb.

"Would you do the favor..." Don Gerardo begins, as on other occasions when we turn on the stopcock when we are without water.

Matilde does not answer immediately. He always keeps quiet first on those occasions and looks very slowly at the person who is talking to him. It's a good trick, and Matilde knows it all too well. It's the trick of his bad days, when boredom climbs up his belly like a big rat.

"Water?" What water? That the water has been cut off? Well!

"The stopcock, which perhaps you forgot to open as before."

"Ah, the stopcock!" To have said it! Maybe I forgot it in my haste!

Don Gerardo goes out into the street and thinks: "This afternoon I will go for a walk in the pine forest." Laurels of the maritime noon imitate the lightness of the sky. But this afternoon Don Gerardo stays at home until the time for his walk passes, as a discomfort. And when he finally goes out – walking is, among other things, for Don Gerardo "a medical prescription" – he does not go to the pine forest, to the murmuring, dark greenery of the dunes, but to the other side, which is without physiognomy because the beach places take on physiognomy depending on the beach.

Sunset the next day. Don Gerardo walking towards the pine forest. "For a short time the light is still in your midst. Walk while you have light, lest you be overtaken by darkness, for he who walks in darkness does not know where he is going. While you have light, believe in the light, that you may be children of light." Walk slowly. The bulging bulk of his shadow is ahead of him. All things turn toward the end. The sand of the path, between the dunes, has become secret among the grass. Don Gerardo trips over something on the ground and stops. Think: it's too late to go back. The pine forest rises not much more than two hundred meters in front of him, and the thin trunks crisscrossing each other weave – for an instant – a net in the night air. Don Gerardo takes a deep breath of the salty air. The wind, fish or evening birds cross the aerial eyes of the dry needles. The whole pine forest at intervals trembles and varies. Now the network is plunging into the night waters. The sea says nothing, means nothing, remembers nothing. All unraveling forever in its countless loss. Don Gerardo travels the remaining two hundred meters and enters the grove. The pine forest rises on a protruding ridge that on one side slopes towards the convent and the house of Don Gerardo and on the other, abruptly, clearing into circles, towards the beach. Valerna's buggies usually come there for a snack in the summer. Don Gerardo does not usually arrive on his evening walk so far. You can see the carabineros checkpoint. Don Gerardo now remembers the last visit he made to that checkpoint. There were recent shit and the smell of dried shit and nettles. The terrazzo floor was broken in circles, one window was only a hole and the other, the one facing west, had all its panes. The window facing west now has a red reflection. Inside it was a large room. Right next to the door was a large nettle forest. There's a kitchen with two hobs and he sat there in the middle, half-stacked, on the collapsed kitchen to smoke a cigarette and his cassock was torn.

-Hello.

Don Gerardo turns away scared. One of the boys, but not the one from the day before, has come on top of him from behind. He carries a kind of sack on his shoulder. Another figure right behind him.

-Hello... afternoons. You gave me a fright.

"And you us."

"He's the one who caught me the other day," says the second figure.

"I came for a walk.

As he says this, Don Gerardo has the feeling that he is inventing an apology. There is only a slice of sun left in the background. Air transparency. Don Gerardo suddenly calms down. The three of them enter the checkpoint. One of the boys lights a candle.

"Sit down, you are at home.

Don Gerardo sits down. There is no longer a slice of sunshine. The night is tender like a melody that is difficult to build, joyful like a huge melody that is not well heard because the voices block the light at the bottom of that rhythm. The pines cover what little remains of the afternoon light. Nothing happens. For an hour or so the three of them sit on the floor of the sentry box. And I guess they will talk or they won't talk. Something is said, I suppose. But it is not necessary to record it. The fact is that after an hour Don Gerardo leaves them. And he almost jumps back home. Everything is off. The gardeners have the TV on. Don Gerardo's mother will be in the kitchen. Don Gerardo goes up to his apartment. He kisses his mother on the forehead as he does every night. And he goes to bed. Before falling asleep, he holds the breviary without reading it with both hands on his chest, as if dead. And he says: My God, my God. Or a similar phrase. The next morning Don Gerardo says mass. And after reading the Gospel, before the Creed, without being customary or relevant, he preaches the following:

"Little sisters: We are like boys and girls at their mother's breast. Even if we are old, we are never old, because the pain of others and the joy of others is our business. And it will be ours until death. Rejoice with me sweetly, for the breast of God and the temple of God is infinite. Rejoice with me, because the secret of the Cross is gossiped throughout the universe. Rejoice with me, because the secret of the Cross is the secret of man's freedom. Because freedom and the cross are one and the same. Little Sisters; rejoice with me with the joy of your most secret tears."

The mother superior is a middle-aged mother, and made of oddities, coming as she does from an illustrious Gipuzkoan family. It would be more than enough at this point to be a provincial mother if it had not been decided that she works too much and a little rest is good for her. Superior now merely of these old ladies. But the oddities to which she is made are all oddities of people of her kind, fine and wealthy extravagances. And all secular women. In church, the Mother Superior likes things that are somewhat bland and very dead, like the color of her cousins' outfits who know exactly how black or dark green is elegant in the afternoon. So such a sudden sermon volcanizes her a little and irritates her. Who will this believe that he is, Fray Luis de Granada? The elderly nuns – at least two who are friends and have secret tins of biscuits hidden under their beds – are amused by the sermon. And although out of pure sacrifice and discipline they kneel apart at opposite ends of the first bench in the first row, now they look at each other out of the corner of their eyes, and without speaking to each other they decide to make an ugly face to the spiritual director, a corny, an ordinary and a pelma, who invariably confesses them, and to confess both of them from now on with Don Gerardo.  the chaplain. The Mother Superior, for her part, decided to speak to Don Gerardo that same morning about funds and forms in sermons at eight o'clock Masses. But just that morning she has to go out to do something about the bishop. And Don Gerardo returns home to have breakfast intact. His mother stares at him, while he peels the pear and drinks, making a disgusted face as he swallows the unsweetened black coffee.

Don Gerardo on his way out speaks to Matilde, who is sweeping at the door.

"Good morning, Matilde.

"Good morning, Don Gerardo.

Don Gerardo stops a little and Matilde comes to him with the word on him.

"What do I say that nowadays, Don Gerardo, you don't know what to expect?"

-No, well, no, we don't know.

-Now that we know more than some people think we do, because there are like frogs, the ass in the air that the head is snatched away, but boy can you see the ass, you can see it!

The sinisterly symbolic character of almost everything that Matilde says – or implies – amuses Don Gerardo in general. Even when the symbolism is pure personal aggression (not like on this occasion this morning, Don Gerardo thinks, because this particular morning Don Gerardo does not think of aggression) the symbolism of the Matilde – on its own, even if it hurts him – amuses him. After a while, Don Gerardo leaves. And the afternoon arrives. And Don Gerardo walks towards the pine forest. And again the three of them sit down at the sentry box. But since Don Gerardo has gone earlier this afternoon there is still light. And there the two young men look at him curiously, affectionately, and especially at the young man whom Don Gerardo had picked up on the day of the institute class. Don Gerardo doesn't know German – nor do I – but what happens is said in German, like this – Rilke puts it like this – "Jungling dem Jüngling, wie er neugiering hinaussah." Don Gerardo returns home again that night. The next day is institute day. That morning, the nuns with the biscuits lost the thread of the litany three times, nervously waiting to see if Don Gerardo, the chaplain, would preach again, all of a sudden. But the Mass passes without any incident, except, of course, that daily incident of the happy phrase that disturbs us so much in these years or stories: "This is my Body. This is my Blood", a phrase, I repeat, which, although it does not mean anything concrete, is more of an event than any real event, possible or impossible because it designates, as a human act, an act of personal courage, of courage, greater than which nothing can be thought. Then the day passes; A long day until the afternoon. The children of the Institute, preoccupied with an exam, are, for once, almost silent and, although they do not listen, they do not speak. There are no questions at the exit. And Don Gerardo returns home early and prepares for his walk. Matilde is on the street, making her do something when he goes out. Don Gerardo is now going a little faster than he would like to go. Now she apparently needs to see the two boys, and this haste is reflected in a certain haste when she says "Good afternoon," which Matilde catches on the fly and resents on the spot.

"What?" On a walk, Don Gerardo?

"Well, yes, for a walk."

"What do I say that they are still in the pine forest and they don't have to, because what hairs they bring, have you seen them?" What is today one does not know what is chicken and what is chicken, because it is not known, don't you think?

"Well... yes," says Don Gerardo, amused, but at the same time knowing that he is playing the guy without knowing why he knows it or what, in particular, his wisdom refers to. You are right, Matilda. Nowadays neither fu nor fa.

Pause. Why does Don Gerardo come and go to the pine forest? Because Don Gerardo has taken that walk uninterruptedly every afternoon since seventeen years ago he came as chaplain to the nuns. Now it seems, however, that another reason is superimposed on this custom. Now it seems that Don Gerardo goes for a walk in the pine forest as was his custom, but in particular, in addition, to see the two boys or one of them. It happens, however, that to know it – what is said to know – is not known. We can, no doubt, invent a motive as Matilde can invent it – as in fact Matilda is already inventing or has invented since the beginning of the centuries – to undo Don Gerardo, whom she hates with that pure and simple hatred with which the Matildes of this world hate. But that would be an invention and not a fact. There is no reason to suppose that Don Gerardo has conceived a sudden passion - definitely sexual - for these two boys or for one of them. That would be too much to suppose Fables that suppose everything -or too much- are fables without grace and without substance. Fables that assume everything – or too much – cannot be true. To date, neither Matilde, nor the reader, nor I know more about Don Gerardo than what has been seen or said to date. And since I don't know more, that's what I'm sticking to. The reader will have to be content with recording what is visible (immediately or mediately). Don Gerardo finally gets rid of Matilda, who follows him with her eyes until the heavy figure of the priest disappears from Matilde's sight – making, as she disappears, Matilde feel as if something was stolen from her or deprived of a whim. (It means, then, that Don Gerardo's perversity, his escape, is in this case perfectly natural and due to the nature of space or to the laws that govern our perception of objects in three-dimensional spaces.) This, however, is a bad state for Matilda to be. It is bad that Matilda is excited by things that are neither fully taught nor entirely hidden from her. Because Matilda in her brutal way is very dowsing and in her unspeakably absurd way, she wants to know the truth at all costs as much as a poet or a wise man desires. It is not a question here of reducing or despising Matilda. It is a matter of not giving the figure of Matilde more importance than she really has – or will have – in this story or in life. It means, then, that what for seventeen years has not surprised or occupied Matilde's imagination, namely, Don Gerardo's evening walk is going to occupy her, from now on, because the presence of the two bearded young boys in the sentry box in the pine forest, coming from time to time to fetch water, dressed in that provocative way,  has triggered in Matilde what everyone knows. So it is that the meaning of Don Gerardo's walk – its figurative character, as well as real – comes partly from something that happens to Matilde – seventeen are the years since she is fed up with her husband's utensil! – and partly from something that happens to us, to the reader and to me,  namely: that we would like to let this story fall towards its fate in all simplicity, following the easy thread of an outcome perfectly predictable from the beginning. But it happens that Don Gerardo simply goes once again to the pine forest. He sits down for a while to chat with the boys – who are invariably there – and then leaves back home in all simplicity. The truth is that they don't talk much. Because the three of them have become accustomed to being together. So each of the three is doing their own thing. Don Gerardo smokes his cigarette and the two boys do whatever it takes. Until the time comes to leave and Don Gerardo leaves. For a week or two weeks, or three things go on like this. After three weeks, for example, Don Gerardo no longer goes to the pine forest in anguish or returns home jubilantly. He goes with an ordinary gesture to the pine forest and returns home with an ordinary gesture. It means, then, that Don Gerardo has become accustomed to this custom. Don Gerardo avoids one thing: to think that one day he will go to the pine forest and the two boys will no longer be there. Don Gerardo – having avoided and avoided that thought – thinks, instead, of what he will do after that event takes place. She takes it for granted that this will happen, that she can skip it and face the next idea, which is the idea of a greater solitude of which nothing can be thought. And Don Gerardo thinks, at the same time, that when that solitude arrives he will offer it to God. You have to be Don Gerardo to think like this: I mean you need to have the kind of greatness of mind that Don Gerardo has. In any case, that's how he lives day after day. But greatness of mind, which faces its difficulties on its own and in the flesh, must also face difficulties that it itself does not generate. A difficulty that is not his own, but perhaps more deadly (I mean that it usually carries with it the strict and precise death of the magnanimous). I am referring specifically to the fact that Matilde has already begun to notice Don Gerardo. And it has declared war to the death.

"What do I say, Don Gerardo, what do you think of today, because, come on, you have to see it to believe what you see today...

Don Gerardo at this point and on this particular morning allows himself – perhaps for the first time in his life – to contradict Matilde, or at least to play an innocent game of words.

"You must also believe it to see it, Matilda, don't you think?"

Something that sounds like Matilde, for no one knows what reason – perhaps because the phrase sounds very distant like a challenge – like a heretical thing, like an atheist or communist or queer priest.

The fact is that Matilde is left for an instant without knowing what to say. Emotion, perhaps, of contradiction and combat will break her throat.

"Oh, yes?" -he says at last-. Well, I don't agree.

Don Gerardo immediately backed away. Does it do good or bad? Do we always have to fight or only sometimes? How should it be given and how long does that terrible gesture, human and superhuman, of luck or death, last—how long does it last? Don Gerardo does not know, that is the truth. But few know it, so there is no reason to reproach him for not knowing it. Don Gerardo says something and leaves. The next day is Sunday. And the Mass is full. Don Gerardo preaches a little sermon on charity. "Love one another as I have loved you" is the theme. Don Gerardo exposes it badly, very badly. It does not expose any of the wonderful symbolic implications of that phrase. Nor does he make use of the parallel text: "You did not choose Me, but I chose you." A text in which love, metaphorically, reaches the purest, highest and most generous expression of Itself that man has known. Definitely listening to this Sunday sermon by Don Gerardo is not worth it. But the fact – the only essential thing that is relevant – is that it is a sermon on love, something that worries us all, and both Matilde and Don Gerardo, as well as the reader, as well as me. It is not known why on that day the church seems more like a boat than ever. And Matilde is more visible and more communicant than ever. And her cousins from the village, who have come to spend Sunday with her. Or several from Matilde's town, also rich from the village. And Matilde's mother, the one in the supermarket of the future. All immersed in prayer, ecstasy or hatred. (Or simply immersed in the deadly torpor of evil thinking and false being.)

The mass ends. And Don Gerardo returns home. Nothing happens. Downstairs all the Matildes have lunch, noisily, with the TV on. Don Gerardo's mother, upstairs, talks a little that day.

-Gerardo, I had a letter from Teresina (Teresina is the sister of Don Gerardo's mother) and they tell me that they are fine.

-You give him memories of me when you write.

Don Gerardo dwells a lot that morning on everything. It takes a long time in everything. It takes so long that it seems that it has lost its strength. And he has lost it. He is losing it in buckets and spurts, because God occupies him. But how does God occupy him? And what God is that? Is this the same God in whose memory Don Gerardo says every morning: This is my Body and my Blood? Because maybe there are two gods. Now seriously: there are thousands of gods and not because each man has his own – that would be a repulsively cheap and easy idea to think of – but because God is Being and being is – if one is – thousands, millions and billions. Am I wrong? No, I'm not wrong. I only make mistakes when I feel like it. (Improving on the present and with apologies to those present.)

O God, forgive me," Don Gerardo thinks all this morning, "because although I did not want to be like You, I wanted to be worthy of You. And I haven't known. Now an unspeakable current embarrasses me, which is not love for You, nor is it love for You, but which You understand, because You are God and You understand the greatness of man made in Your image.

Don Gerardo returns once again to the pine forest that afternoon. The light slept on the edges of the misty grass like all the children who collected shells and will rejoice in their undeserved prizes.

 

END

 

STORMS {Stories}

Imagen con IA

 

My mother dreamed things before they happened and, in her dreams, she found things. I was at the kitchen table cutting a cardboard box to make doors and windows the morning he came down and said he knew where Rua was. I was in a hurry.

"I'm going!"

"Hurry up."

It was one of those frosty mornings in mid-January, when the air is so cold it feels like new. As we got out, the wind pushed the air I was breathing back into my lungs. I followed her along the path into the forest. A woodcock flew over the trees. Something told me not to speak. My mother knew where I was going. We crossed a ditch and came out into a beet field that I didn't recognize. She stopped and pointed in the direction of a heath.

"It's there," he said.

We separated the heather and there was Rua, our red Setter, with his neck caught in a trap. He looked dead, but I couldn't look away. My mother loosened the clamps and spoke to him. There was blood on the wire. We carried him home and gave him milk, but he couldn't swallow. Beneath his coat his bones were visible and he slept for three days. On the fourth day he got up and followed my mother around the house like a shadow. When I asked her if I was going to find things in my dreams too, she told me that she hoped that would never happen. I didn't ask him why. Even though I was a child, I had known for a long time why they were two words my mother hated.

The tambo was a cold and dark room that my parents had filled with the things they hardly used, from the time before I was born. Yellow paint bulged on the walls and wet tiles glistened on the floor. The flanges hung hardened from the beams; their bites, dusty. The churn was still there, and the smell of sour milk lingered in it; the wood smoothed, but perforated by woodworm, the pallets lost for a long time. I don't remember glass in those windows, only rusty bars and the strange applause of the wind blowing through the trees.

Someone pushed the old incubator into the dairy and a chicken escaped; a rusty metal thing that used to shine like a spoon. We put freshly hatched chickens there, picking them up in our hands like yellow petals and releasing them in that heat, down-covered balls with legs always moving, assimilating that heat as our own. Heat keeps us alive. Sometimes those yellow balls fall off, overcome by the cold, their legs like orange arrows pointing downwards. My father's hand discarded them as if they were weeds. My mother would pick them up carefully, inspect those little yellow bodies for any sign of life, and when she didn't discover any, she would say, "My poor chicken," and smile at me as she slid them down the pouring chute.

The milk strainers were there, too, the old gauze hanging in dirty bunches over a frayed strand. And the jars of wild currant jam that smelled like sherry, reduced in the glass with a moss rim. My mother always made more jam than we could eat. We used to make apple jelly: we cut those acidic fruits into quarters and boiled them into pulp, with hearts, seeds and everything; We poured the lumpy fluid into an old pillowcase, tied to each of the legs of an upside-down stool. It dripped, dripped, dripped all night into the canning jar.

I went to the dairy when they sent me; for a jar of varnish, six-inch nails, a bridle for a big-headed mare. The doorknob was too high. I had to stand on a can of creosote to reach it, and the metal I stood on was thin as a leaf. When I went there by my own choice, it was to look in the chest, a large rusty box, a pirate's suitcase as a child. It was so old that if I had hollowed it out and put it in the light, it would have been like looking through a sieve. Inside the chest there was nothing I liked: old books, stuck together by the damp and without illustrations, darkened maps and some prayer books.

"All this belonged to your father's family," my mother told me, using a volume of voice that he was not supposed to hear.

The chest was as long as I was and half as tall, with a tight lid and no handles. He would have opened it and looked at those things, he would have fiddled with the books with broken spines, with lost covers. It was the past; the past was there. I felt that if I could understand its contents, my life would have more meaning. But that never happened. I would have had enough of looking at such things, I would have slammed the lid shut, I would have made the metal grind.

The next dream changed everything. My mother dreamed of her mother, dead. Their moans woke me up in the middle of the night. Someone was noisily banging on the kitchen table. I sneaked down and stood there, staring into the darkness. My mother was curled up on the floor. My father, who never said anything affectionate, spoke to her tenderly, persuading her with brandy, pronouncing her name.

Mary, Mary!

The two, who never touched each other, whose fingers let go of the gravy boat before the other grabbed it, were touching each other. I crawled back up and listened, as those loving words turned into something else.

In the morning the telegram arrived. The postman took off his cap and told my mother that he was sorry for the problems she had. My mother rolled the telegram between her fingers like cigarette rolling paper. My father made the arrangements. Strangers came to the house. A neighbor hit me on the hand when I turned on the radio. My grandmother, the woman with the violet rash and her breasts furrowed by blue veins, which we have washed as if it were paint, came back rigid from the nursing home, in a drawer lined with ruffles, and we put her in the cold of the living room. I got up in the middle of the night and went downstairs to see her when no one was there. A gust caused wax to fall from the lit candle on the sideboard. He knew little about her, except that he wasn't afraid of angry geese or afraid of getting tuberculosis. It could cure all kinds of poultry disease. My mother had grown up surrounded by ducks, chickens, and turkeys. I touched my grandmother's hand. The cold scared me.

"What are you doing?" My mother asked me.

All that time she had been sitting there in the dark.

"Nothing," I said.

Neighbors came to accompany us after the funeral, cars piled up on the road. I sat on the legs of strangers. They passed me from one to the other like a bag of tobacco and I drank three large bottles of 7UP.

My aunt stood still, guarding the ham. "Let's see who's going to want another slice?" he asked, the deadly knife in his hand.

My mother sat looking at the fire and never said a word. Not even when Rua climbed on the sofa and began to lick herself.

Months passed. My mother began to clean the barn, even though we had sold the cows years ago. He went with the brush and the bucket, he scrubbed the mangers, the corridor, and even polished the hubcap that we used to serve frothy milk to the cats. And then he would come back and talk to the statues until lunch. He imagined storms, locked himself under the stairs when he heard wind, put cotton in his ears when the thunder came, hid under the table with Rua.

Once, my father and I, baling rye, watched her in the field, calling the cows.

-¡Chuck! ¡Chuck! ¡Hersey! ¡Chuck! ¡Hersey!

She stood there, banging on the zinc bucket to make the imaginary cows come and eat. My father took her home. And that's when my mother started living upstairs.

So by the time summer came, I was the one carrying the big kettle for the hay reapers, my beak covered with a page from the Farmer's Journal. Men would suck on straws and look at me, and rudely tell my father that he would soon be of age.

She came to pick me up in the middle of the night, dressed in a red nightgown that I had never seen her before. He got me out of bed, and we went down the dark steps and out into the mowed meadow, past the piles of hay, with our bare feet sticking to seeds. And we went on up the stubble fields, his hand bolted to mine, the back of his nightgown flailing in the wind. And then we reached the top and lay on our backs, looking at the stars, she with her bronze-colored hair and her crazy words, not entirely meaningless, but sensing what we couldn't understand. Just as the dog is the first to hear the car on the road.

He pointed to what he called the saucepan, an arrangement of the stars, and told me how he got there. It was an animal story that took place in the time of Our Lord, in Africa. There was a drought. The ground had turned to dust, and even the riverbeds were dry. The animals roamed Africa looking for something to drink. The sheep lost their wool and the snakes, their skins, but a young bear found a saucepan full of water and gave it to everyone to drink to get them out of trouble until it rained. All the animals drank to their heart's content, but the pan never dried up. It had a curved handle, and when the rain came, the stars took its shape, and that's what happened. And then I could see her in the sky too.

We were there until dawn, the smell of hay blowing in the wind. She told me about my father, about how he had beaten her for fifteen years because she was not the same as the other women. He taught me the difference between loving someone and having someone liked. He told me that he liked me as little as he did because I had the same cruel eyes.

I didn't understand, but that's when I started going to the dairy without being sent around. It was a quiet place. There was nothing, just the wind blowing and the gurgling of the water tank overhead. The hole in the ceiling between the rafters allowed me to see the dollhouse, the place where my cousins used to take their dolls to bang their heads against the sloping roof.

It was a stormy day the day the truck came to take her away. My father said he was hurting himself, but it was nothing you could see. I asked him if he meant he was bleeding inside.

"Something like that," he said.

I thought of the image of the sacred heart on the stove, the red heart exposed, illuminated by the red lamp that never went out.

Men are coming to the house to look for her. She's under the table. I can't see. I run to the dairy farm, open the chest and look inside. I pull out a prayer book and turn the pages. They are worn and soft like my mother's arm. I open one of the darkened and torn maps, and until I find a place I recognize, I cannot distinguish which is the land and which is the sea. There is an insect wing attached to Norway. I hear them in the next room. I open another book and look for illustrations, but there are none. I get into the chest, I squat down. I hear glass breaking. The sound of what has become my mother's voice grows to a moan. Something falls. I push the tin lid open, let the metal fall on me with a rusty, tense squeak. Everything goes black. It's as if I no longer exist. It's not me sitting on damp books, inside a big, black can. The smell is old and musty like the smell of the bread bin or like the smell of the back of the sideboard when there are cake crumbs left. A smell that is a century old. I remember that rats once gnawed on the incubator grid. They got to where the chickens were and we found pieces of down with legs everywhere and the fleshy parts completely eaten. Other chickens are found terrified, exhausted and hidden among paint cans or rolls of wire, still unable to flee. We pick them up, their yellow bodies throbbing, minimal screams and crazed.

Now I manage the house. The last one who said he was of age received a burn. My mother always said that there was nothing worse than a burn. And he was right. It happens that I don't accept nonsense from anyone. They leave their rubber boots outside and my father leaves the dirty dishes on the drainer. I haven't heard him say that potatoes don't have a well-cooked center. I know how to use the serving spoon to punch. He knows that too. Rua goes around the house looking for her. I think of him as my mother's shadow, wandering around the house.

I visit her on Sundays, but she doesn't know where she is or who I am.

"It's me, Mom," I say.

"I could never stand the smell of fish," he says. He and his herrings.

"Don't you recognize me?" I'm Elena.

"Helen of Troy!" Get on your horse! -he says.

She's good with cards, she cheats on others and takes the money they give them for their expenses each week, and the head nurse has to go to her closet to get it out when my mother is in the bathroom. He doesn't realize it. Money never had any interest for my mother.

I keep going back to the psychiatric hospital. I like the smell of disinfectant in the hallways, the rubber-soled nurses' shoes, the fights over Sunday newspapers. I like that what they talk about is meaningless. What does that say about me? My mother always said that the madness of a family is hereditary and I have it on both sides. I live in a house with the man my mother married. I have a dog that almost died, but doesn't mind being alive. When I look in the mirror, my eyes are cruel.

I guess I have my own reasons for coming here. Maybe I need some of what my mother has. A little barely. I keep a small part for my own protection. It's like a vaccine. People don't understand, but you have to face the worst possible case to be able to do anything.

 

END

 

 

THE WAX DEVIL

 

 

The cackling crowd had circled around a dreadful thing, covered with a greasy piece of linen.

Eyes were fixed for a moment on the human form beneath the filthy shroud, and then they rose to the upper floor of a dreary building, whose ramshackle façade bore a decaying "For Rent" sign.

"Look, the window is open!" It has fallen from there!

"He has fallen... or has jumped!

The dawn was unpleasant, and a few lanterns were still burning here and there. The crowd consisted mainly of people who had to get up very early to go to the factory or office. Although it led to Cornhill, the street was not very lively; It was a long time before the bobbies discovered the corpse, which would remain there, in its ridiculous posture of a disjointed doll, until the commissioner arrived. He soon appeared on the opposite sidewalk, accompanied by a young man with an intelligent face.

The commissioner was short and short-handed, and did not seem to have fully awakened yet.

-Accident, murder, suicide? What's your opinion, Inspector White?

"It is possible that it is a murder. Of a suicide, perhaps, although the motive is not too clear.

"To me it is a minor case," said the commissioner laconically. Did you know the dead man?

-Yes, his name was Bascrop. "Bachelor and quite wealthy, he lived like a hermit," replied White, who was trying to adopt the dry tone of his implacable superior.

"Did he live in this house?"

-Of course not, since it is about to be rented.

"If so, what was he doing in it?"

"This property belonged to him.

"Ah! Well, it will be a minor survey, Inspector White. I don't think it will take up much of his time.

When the jury had ruled out the possibility of murder, White resumed the investigation on his own. In fact, nothing allowed us to exclude the possibility that it was a crime.

The young police officer had been particularly impressed by the expression of indescribable anguish that had been preserved, in death, on the face of the unsociable Bascrop.

He had entered the empty house, climbed the stairs to the third floor, and finally entered the mysterious room, the window of which had been left open. As he passed, he had observed that all the rooms were completely devoid of furniture. In it, however, there were several miserable-looking objects: a rickety chair and a white wooden table. On the latter stood a candle, which a draught of air must have extinguished, shortly after the drama.

A layer of dust covered the table, which was only clean in three places. In fact, the powder bore the marks of two small circles and a completely regular rectangle. White didn't have to think long to figure out the cause.

"Bascrop," he said to himself, "sat down to read by candlelight. In the place of that rectangle the book was to be found; As for the two circles, they were undoubtedly formed by the elbows of the deceased. But where is the book in question? No one but myself has entered this house, after the death of the owner. Therefore, the unfortunate man surely had it in his hand at the moment of his fall.

White continued his reasoning. On the one hand, the street ended in Cornhill, indeed; but, at the other extreme, he ended up in a labyrinth of alleys of very bad reputation. On most of the doors could be read this inscription traced in chalk: "Call at four."

A night watchman had to live in the vicinity, and it was possible that this man knew something.

The night watchman was a dirty, loathsome old man who smelled of alcohol a mile away, and who greeted White with obvious displeasure.

-I know nothing, absolutely nothing. I was told that a man tired of life jumped from the third floor. These are things that happen.

-Let's go! White said dryly. Give me the book you found near the corpse, if you don't want to get involved in a murder.

"Finding is not stealing," the old man sneered. And, on the other hand, I was not there.

"Be careful! White threatened. That book may be the beginning of a rope that ends around his neck...

The old man hesitated for a few moments, and at last murmured, reluctantly:

"Well, that book might be worth a shilling.

"Here is your shilling!"

That was how White got into possession of the book he was looking for.

* * *

"A book of magic, and dating from the sixteenth century!" The inspector growled. At that time, the executioners did not stop burning this kind of work, and they did it perfectly.

He began to leaf through it slowly. A page folded at one end caught his attention. He began to read with growing interest. When he had finished, his face had a grave expression.

"Why shouldn't I try it too?" he murmured.

A little before midnight he went to the deserted street, pushed open the door of the sinister mansion, and climbed the stairs in the darkness.

The darkness was not absolute: a full moon swept across the sky with its cold rays and sent enough light through the dusty panes of the windows.

Arriving at the drama room, White lit the candle, took Bascrop's place, and opened the book to the page previously indicated. It read:

"Light the candle at a quarter to twelve at night and read the formula aloud."

It was a prose text, very obscure, of which the inspector understood nothing. But when he had finished reading and coughed lightly to clear his throat, he heard the clock of a steeple strike the twelve fateful strokes.

White raised his head and uttered a frightful cry of horror.

* * *

White has never been able to describe precisely what he saw at that moment. Today, he still doubts that he has really seen anything. However, he had experienced the sensation of seeing a gloomy and threatening being advancing towards him, which forced him to retreat towards the window.

Unspeakable fear flooded his heart. He thought that he had to open that window, that he had to continue to retreat, and that finally he would throw himself into the street to crash against the pavement, three stories below. An invisible force impelled him to do so.

His will left him, he was perfectly aware of it. But a kind of instinct – that of the policeman who has to fight for his life – remained awake in him. A superhuman effort allowed him to seize his revolver. Drawing on all the strength he still had at his disposal, he managed to point the gun at the mysterious shadow and pull the trigger.

A dry detonation tore through the silence of the night, and the candle was blown to pieces.

White lost consciousness.

* * *

The doctor who was at the bedside when he woke up, shook his head, smiling:

"Well, my friend! he exclaimed. I had never heard that the devil could be struck down by means of a single revolver. And yet, that's what you did.

"The devil! The inspector stammered.

"My young friend, if you had not reached the sail with that shot, there is no doubt that your end would have been the same as that of the unfortunate Bascrop. Since the knot of the mystery was the candle, precisely. Its antiquity dates back at least four centuries, and it was made with a wax soaked in some terrible volatile matter, the formula of which was possessed by the sorcerers of the time. The length of the magical text to be read was calculated in such a way that the candle would have to burn for a quarter of an hour, which is more than enough for an entire room to be filled with a dangerous gas, destined to poison the human brain and awaken in the victim the haunting idea of suicide. I confess that this is nothing more than a guess, although I don't think it is very far from reality.

White had no desire to engage in a discussion on the subject. On the other hand, what other hypothesis could he have made? Unless... No, it was preferable not to think about that matter any more.

 

END

 

The Monkey’s paw

 

 

I.

Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Laburnam Villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly.  Father and son were at chess, the former, who possessed ideas about the game involving radical changes, putting his king into such sharp and unnecessary perils that it even provoked comment from the white-haired old lady knitting placidly by the fire.

“Hark at the wind,” said Mr. White, who, having seen a fatal mistake after it was too late, was amiably desirous of preventing his son from seeing it.

“I’m listening,” said the latter, grimly surveying the board as he stretched out his hand.  “Check.”

“I should hardly think that he’d come to-night,” said his father, with his hand poised over the board.

“Mate,” replied the son.

“That’s the worst of living so far out,” bawled Mr. White, with sudden and unlooked-for violence; “of all the beastly, slushy, out-of-the-way places to live in, this is the worst.  Pathway’s a bog, and the road’s a torrent.  I don’t know what people are thinking about.  I suppose because only two houses in the road are let, they think it doesn’t matter.”

“Never mind, dear,” said his wife, soothingly; “perhaps you’ll win the next one.”

Mr. White looked up sharply, just in time to intercept a knowing glance between mother and son.  The words died away on his lips, and he hid a guilty grin in his thin grey beard.

“There he is,” said Herbert White, as the gate banged to loudly and heavy footsteps came toward the door.

The old man rose with hospitable haste, and opening the door, was heard condoling with the new arrival.  The new arrival also condoled with himself, so that Mrs. White said, “Tut, tut!” and coughed gently as her husband entered the room, followed by a tall, burly man, beady of eye and rubicund of visage.

“Sergeant-Major Morris,” he said, introducing him.

The sergeant-major shook hands, and taking the proffered seat by the fire, watched contentedly while his host got out whiskey and tumblers and stood a small copper kettle on the fire.

At the third glass his eyes got brighter, and he began to talk, the little family circle regarding with eager interest this visitor from distant parts, as he squared his broad shoulders in the chair and spoke of wild scenes and doughty deeds; of wars and plagues and strange peoples.

“Twenty-one years of it,” said Mr. White, nodding at his wife and son.  “When he went away he was a slip of a youth in the warehouse.  Now look at him.”

“He don’t look to have taken much harm,” said Mrs. White, politely.

“I’d like to go to India myself,” said the old man, “just to look round a bit, you know.”

“Better where you are,” said the sergeant-major, shaking his head.  He put down the empty glass, and sighing softly, shook it again.

“I should like to see those old temples and fakirs and jugglers,” said the old man.  “What was that you started telling me the other day about a monkey’s paw or something, Morris?”

 “Nothing,” said the soldier, hastily.  “Leastways nothing worth hearing.”

“Monkey’s paw?” said Mrs. White, curiously.

“Well, it’s just a bit of what you might call magic, perhaps,” said the sergeant-major, offhandedly.

His three listeners leaned forward eagerly.  The visitor absent-mindedly put his empty glass to his lips and then set it down again.  His host filled it for him.

“To look at,” said the sergeant-major, fumbling in his pocket, “it’s just an ordinary little paw, dried to a mummy.”

He took something out of his pocket and proffered it.  Mrs. White drew back with a grimace, but her son, taking it, examined it curiously.

“And what is there special about it?” inquired Mr. White as he took it from his son, and having examined it, placed it upon the table.

“It had a spell put on it by an old fakir,” said the sergeant-major, “a very holy man.  He wanted to show that fate ruled people’s lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.  He put a spell on it so that three separate men could each have three wishes from it.”

His manner was so impressive that his hearers were conscious that their light laughter jarred somewhat.

“Well, why don’t you have three, sir?” said Herbert White, cleverly.

The soldier regarded him in the way that middle age is wont to regard presumptuous youth.  “I have,” he said, quietly, and his blotchy face whitened.

“And did you really have the three wishes granted?” asked Mrs. White.

“I did,” said the sergeant-major, and his glass tapped against his strong teeth.

“And has anybody else wished?” persisted the old lady.

“The first man had his three wishes.  Yes,” was the reply; “I don’t know what the first two were, but the third was for death.  That’s how I got the paw.”

His tones were so grave that a hush fell upon the group.

“If you’ve had your three wishes, it’s no good to you now, then, Morris,” said the old man at last.  “What do you keep it for?”

The soldier shook his head.  “Fancy, I suppose,” he said, slowly.  “I did have some idea of selling it, but I don’t think I will.  It has caused enough mischief already.  Besides, people won’t buy.  They think it’s a fairy tale; some of them, and those who do think anything of it want to try it first and pay me afterward.”

“If you could have another three wishes,” said the old man, eyeing him keenly, “would you have them?”

“I don’t know,” said the other.  “I don’t know.”

He took the paw, and dangling it between his forefinger and thumb, suddenly threw it upon the fire.  White, with a slight cry, stooped down and snatched it off.

“Better let it burn,” said the soldier, solemnly.

 “If you don’t want it, Morris,” said the other, “give it to me.”

“I won’t,” said his friend, doggedly.  “I threw it on the fire.  If you keep it, don’t blame me for what happens.  Pitch it on the fire again like a sensible man.”

The other shook his head and examined his new possession closely.  “How do you do it?” he inquired.

“Hold it up in your right hand and wish aloud,” said the sergeant-major, “but I warn you of the consequences.”

“Sounds like the Arabian Nights,” said Mrs. White, as she rose and began to set the supper.  “Don’t you think you might wish for four pairs of hands for me?”

Her husband drew the talisman from pocket, and then all three burst into laughter as the sergeant-major, with a look of alarm on his face, caught him by the arm.

“If you must wish,” he said, gruffly, “wish for something sensible.”

Mr. White dropped it back in his pocket, and placing chairs, motioned his friend to the table.  In the business of supper the talisman was partly forgotten, and afterward the three sat listening in an enthralled fashion to a second instalment of the soldier’s adventures in India.

“If the tale about the monkey’s paw is not more truthful than those he has been telling us,” said Herbert, as the door closed behind their guest, just in time for him to catch the last train, “we sha’nt make much out of it.”

“Did you give him anything for it, father?” inquired Mrs. White, regarding her husband closely.

“A trifle,” said he, colouring slightly.  “He didn’t want it, but I made him take it.  And he pressed me again to throw it away.”

“Likely,” said Herbert, with pretended horror.  “Why, we’re going to be rich, and famous and happy.  Wish to be an emperor, father, to begin with; then you can’t be henpecked.”

He darted round the table, pursued by the maligned Mrs. White armed with an antimacassar.

Mr. White took the paw from his pocket and eyed it dubiously.  “I don’t know what to wish for, and that’s a fact,” he said, slowly.  “It seems to me I’ve got all I want.”

“If you only cleared the house, you’d be quite happy, wouldn’t you?” said Herbert, with his hand on his shoulder.  “Well, wish for two hundred pounds, then; that ’ll just do it.”

His father, smiling shamefacedly at his own credulity, held up the talisman, as his son, with a solemn face, somewhat marred by a wink at his mother, sat down at the piano and struck a few impressive chords.

“I wish for two hundred pounds,” said the old man distinctly.

A fine crash from the piano greeted the words, interrupted by a shuddering cry from the old man.  His wife and son ran toward him.

“It moved,” he cried, with a glance of disgust at the object as it lay on the floor.

“As I wished, it twisted in my hand like a snake.”

“Well, I don’t see the money,” said his son as he picked it up and placed it on the table, “and I bet I never shall.”

 “It must have been your fancy, father,” said his wife, regarding him anxiously.

He shook his head.  “Never mind, though; there’s no harm done, but it gave me a shock all the same.”

They sat down by the fire again while the two men finished their pipes.  Outside, the wind was higher than ever, and the old man started nervously at the sound of a door banging upstairs.  A silence unusual and depressing settled upon all three, which lasted until the old couple rose to retire for the night.

“I expect you’ll find the cash tied up in a big bag in the middle of your bed,” said Herbert, as he bade them good-night, “and something horrible squatting up on top of the wardrobe watching you as you pocket your ill-gotten gains.”

He sat alone in the darkness, gazing at the dying fire, and seeing faces in it.  The last face was so horrible and so simian that he gazed at it in amazement.’  It got so vivid that, with a little uneasy laugh, he felt on the table for a glass containing a little water to throw over it.  His hand grasped the monkey’s paw, and with a little shiver he wiped his hand on his coat and went up to bed.

II.

In the brightness of the wintry sun next morning as it streamed over the breakfast table he laughed at his fears.  There was an air of prosaic wholesomeness about the room which it had lacked on the previous night, and the dirty, shrivelled little paw was pitched on the sideboard with a carelessness which betokened no great belief in its virtues.

“I suppose all old soldiers are the same,” said Mrs. White.  “The idea of our listening to such nonsense!  How could wishes be granted in these days?  And if they could, how could two hundred pounds hurt you, father?”

“Might drop on his head from the sky,” said the frivolous Herbert.

“Morris said the things happened so naturally,” said’ his father, “that you might if you so wished attribute it to coincidence.”

“Well, don’t break into the money before I come back,” said Herbert as he rose from the table.  “I’m afraid it’ll turn you into a mean, avaricious man, and we shall have to disown you.”

His mother laughed, and following him to the door, watched him down the road; and returning to the breakfast table, was very happy at the expense of her husband’s credulity.  All of which did not prevent her from scurrying to the door at the postman’s knock, nor prevent her from referring somewhat shortly to retired sergeant-majors of bibulous habits when she found that the post brought a tailor’s bill.

“Herbert will have some more of his funny remarks, I expect, when he comes home,” she said, as they sat at dinner.

“I dare say,” said Mr. White, pouring himself out some beer; “but for all that, the thing moved in my hand; that I’ll swear to.”

“You thought it did,” said the old lady soothingly.

 “I say it did,” replied the other.  “There was no thought about it; I had just——­ What’s the matter?”

His wife made no reply.  She was watching the mysterious movements of a man outside, who, peering in an undecided fashion at the house, appeared to be trying to make up his mind to enter.  In mental connection with the two hundred pounds, she noticed that the stranger was well dressed, and wore a silk hat of glossy newness.  Three times he paused at the gate, and then walked on again.  The fourth time he stood with his hand upon it, and then with sudden resolution flung it open and walked up the path.  Mrs. White at the same moment placed her hands behind her, and hurriedly unfastening the strings of her apron, put that useful article of apparel beneath the cushion of her chair.

She brought the stranger, who seemed ill at ease, into the room.  He gazed at her furtively, and listened in a preoccupied fashion as the old lady apologized for the appearance of the room, and her husband’s coat, a garment which he usually reserved for the garden.  She then waited as patiently as her sex would permit, for him to broach his business, but he was at first strangely silent.

“I—­was asked to call,” he said at last, and stooped and picked a piece of cotton from his trousers.  “I come from ‘Maw and Meggins.’”

The old lady started.  “Is anything the matter?” she asked, breathlessly.  “Has anything happened to Herbert?  What is it?  What is it?”

Her husband interposed.  “There, there, mother,” he said, hastily.  “Sit down, and don’t jump to conclusions.  You’ve not brought bad news, I’m sure, sir;” and he eyed the other wistfully.

“I’m sorry—­” began the visitor.

“Is he hurt?” demanded the mother, wildly.

The visitor bowed in assent.  “Badly hurt,” he said, quietly, “but he is not in any pain.”

“Oh, thank God!” said the old woman, clasping her hands.  “Thank God for that!  Thank—­”

She broke off suddenly as the sinister meaning of the assurance dawned upon her and she saw the awful confirmation of her fears in the other’s perverted face.  She caught her breath, and turning to her slower-witted husband, laid her trembling old hand upon his.  There was a long silence.

“He was caught in the machinery,” said the visitor at length in a low voice.

“Caught in the machinery,” repeated Mr. White, in a dazed fashion, “yes.”

He sat staring blankly out at the window, and taking his wife’s hand between his own, pressed it as he had been wont to do in their old courting-days nearly forty years before.

“He was the only one left to us,” he said, turning gently to the visitor.  “It is hard.”

The other coughed, and rising, walked slowly to the window.  “The firm wished me to convey their sincere sympathy with you in your great loss,” he said, without looking round.  “I beg that you will understand I am only their servant and merely obeying orders.”

There was no reply; the old woman’s face was white, her eyes staring, and her breath inaudible; on the husband’s face was a look such as his friend the sergeant might have carried into his first action.

 “I was to say that Maw and Meggins disclaim all responsibility,” continued the other.  “They admit no liability at all, but in consideration of your son’s services, they wish to present you with a certain sum as compensation.”

Mr. White dropped his wife’s hand, and rising to his feet, gazed with a look of horror at his visitor.  His dry lips shaped the words, “How much?”

“Two hundred pounds,” was the answer.

Unconscious of his wife’s shriek, the old man smiled faintly, put out his hands like a sightless man, and dropped, a senseless heap, to the floor.

III.

In the huge new cemetery, some two miles distant, the old people buried their dead, and came back to a house steeped in shadow and silence.  It was all over so quickly that at first they could hardly realize it, and remained in a state of expectation as though of something else to happen —­something else which was to lighten this load, too heavy for old hearts to bear.

But the days passed, and expectation gave place to resignation—­the hopeless resignation of the old, sometimes miscalled, apathy.  Sometimes they hardly exchanged a word, for now they had nothing to talk about, and their days were long to weariness.

It was about a week after that the old man, waking suddenly in the night, stretched out his hand and found himself alone.  The room was in darkness, and the sound of subdued weeping came from the window.  He raised himself in bed and listened.

“Come back,” he said, tenderly.  “You will be cold.”

“It is colder for my son,” said the old woman, and wept afresh.

The sound of her sobs died away on his ears.  The bed was warm, and his eyes heavy with sleep.  He dozed fitfully, and then slept until a sudden wild cry from his wife awoke him with a start.

“The paw!” she cried wildly.  “The monkey’s paw!”

He started up in alarm.  “Where?  Where is it?  What’s the matter?”

She came stumbling across the room toward him.  “I want it,” she said, quietly.  “You’ve not destroyed it?”

“It’s in the parlour, on the bracket,” he replied, marvelling.  “Why?”

She cried and laughed together, and bending over, kissed his cheek.

“I only just thought of it,” she said, hysterically.  “Why didn’t I think of it before?  Why didn’t you think of it?”

“Think of what?” he questioned.

“The other two wishes,” she replied, rapidly.

“We’ve only had one.”

“Was not that enough?” he demanded, fiercely.

“No,” she cried, triumphantly; “we’ll have one more.  Go down and get it quickly, and wish our boy alive again.”

The man sat up in bed and flung the bedclothes from his quaking limbs.  “Good God, you are mad!” he cried, aghast.

 “Get it,” she panted; “get it quickly, and wish—­Oh, my boy, my boy!”

Her husband struck a match and lit the candle.  “Get back to bed,” he said, unsteadily.  “You don’t know what you are saying.”

“We had the first wish granted,” said the old woman, feverishly; “why not the second?”

“A coincidence,” stammered the old man.

“Go and get it and wish,” cried his wife, quivering with excitement.

The old man turned and regarded her, and his voice shook.  “He has been dead ten days, and besides he—­I would not tell you else, but—­I could only recognize him by his clothing.  If he was too terrible for you to see then, how now?”

“Bring him back,” cried the old woman, and dragged him toward the door.  “Do you think I fear the child I have nursed?”

He went down in the darkness, and felt his way to the parlour, and then to the mantelpiece.  The talisman was in its place, and a horrible fear that the unspoken wish might bring his mutilated son before him ere he could escape from the room seized upon him, and he caught his breath as he found that he had lost the direction of the door.  His brow cold with sweat, he felt his way round the table, and groped along the wall until he found himself in the small passage with the unwholesome thing in his hand.

Even his wife’s face seemed changed as he entered the room.  It was white and expectant, and to his fears seemed to have an unnatural look upon it.  He was afraid of her.

“Wish!” she cried, in a strong voice.

“It is foolish and wicked,” he faltered.

“Wish!” repeated his wife.

He raised his hand.  “I wish my son alive again.”

The talisman fell to the floor, and he regarded it fearfully.  Then he sank trembling into a chair as the old woman, with burning eyes, walked to the window and raised the blind.

He sat until he was chilled with the cold, glancing occasionally at the figure of the old woman peering through the window.  The candle-end, which had burned below the rim of the china candlestick, was throwing pulsating shadows on the ceiling and walls, until, with a flicker larger than the rest, it expired.  The old man, with an unspeakable sense of relief at the failure of the talisman, crept back to his bed, and a minute or two afterward the old woman came silently and apathetically beside him.

Neither spoke, but lay silently listening to the ticking of the clock.  A stair creaked, and a squeaky mouse scurried noisily through the wall.  The darkness was oppressive, and after lying for some time screwing up his courage, he took the box of matches, and striking one, went downstairs for a candle.

At the foot of the stairs the match went out, and he paused to strike another; and at the same moment a knock, so quiet and stealthy as to be scarcely audible, sounded on the front door.

The matches fell from his hand and spilled in the passage.  He stood motionless, his breath suspended until the knock was repeated.  Then he turned and fled swiftly back to his room, and closed the door behind him.  A third knock sounded through the house.

 

“What’s that?” cried the old woman, starting up.

“A rat,” said the old man in shaking tones—­“a rat.  It passed me on the stairs.”

His wife sat up in bed listening.  A loud knock resounded through the house.

“It’s Herbert!” she screamed.  “It’s Herbert!”

She ran to the door, but her husband was before her, and catching her by the arm, held her tightly.

“What are you going to do?” he whispered hoarsely.

“It’s my boy; it’s Herbert!” she cried, struggling mechanically.  “I forgot it was two miles away.  What are you holding me for?  Let go.  I must open the door.

“For God’s sake don’t let it in,” cried the old man, trembling.

“You’re afraid of your own son,” she cried, struggling.  “Let me go.  I’m coming, Herbert; I’m coming.”

There was another knock, and another.  The old woman with a sudden wrench broke free and ran from the room.  Her husband followed to the landing, and called after her appealingly as she hurried downstairs.  He heard the chain rattle back and the bottom bolt drawn slowly and stiffly from the socket.  Then the old woman’s voice, strained and panting.

“The bolt,” she cried, loudly.  “Come down.  I can’t reach it.”

But her husband was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw.  If he could only find it before the thing outside got in.  A perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door.  He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the same moment he found the monkey’s paw, and frantically breathed his third and last wish.

The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house.  He heard the chair drawn back, and the door opened.  A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond.  The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.