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
