Good Offices

Satisfied, they began to leave the church, split into groups, arm in arm. They each opened an umbrella; they were like old black birds spreading their wings by the light of the street lamps, in the infinite sparkling refractions of the rain.

“It may only be drizzle, but it’s still rain,” they said.

Tancredo placed the heavy wooden bars across the door and closed the enormous padlocks. Then, quickly, he crossed back through the church and snuffed out the altar candles, the first thing he ought to have done at the end of Mass; how had he forgotten? He answered his own question: Matamoros, his song, his water. The very presence of that Father in the presbytery was still a latent, unpredictable event. What would happen? Heading for a corner near the altar, Tancredo found — behind an enormous tapestry representing Adam and Eve fleeing the Garden of Eden — the switch that turned off the rest of the electric lights. The darkness swallowed him up completely in the cold of the sanctuary, still redolent of incense, but also of the faint, irritating whiff of aguardiente, which caused him to revisit the Mass and hear the priest singing and see him stagger feebly when it came time for Communion. Only the far-off rectangular opening of the sacristy door was dimly illuminated. A slight echo of who knew what voices from who knew where rolled slowly down from the cupola; it was a sound of forsaken souls, a distant sound, but present, as if even at night the church was not empty and other communicants waited, sitting, standing, ailing and healthy, asleep and awake. They were the echoes of the night in the empty church, the nocturnal Mass, Tancredo thought in his distress, when night caught him alone in the church.

Then he felt Sabina’s hands in his, hands like startled birds that flew up to his neck and hung on, the cold, swift kiss she pressed on him in desperation. All that time she had been following him.

“Sabina,” he said, pulling his face away, “this is the altar.”

“The altar,” she said, “the altar of my love for you.” She seemed maddened from so much love. Speechless, he stumbled, overcome by the strength of the small body, skinny but stubborn, hanging from his neck and, unlike the kiss, burning, shoving him to the marble edge of that same altar, the long, ice-cold table that gleamed upon a base like an upside-down triangle. There they fell, her on top of him, slowly and silently, as Tancredo devoted himself to breaking their fall, and she, voraciously, to kissing him. Suddenly, she took her lips away, exhaled damp breath across the hunchback’s face like another well-aimed caress and said: “Don’t go or I’ll stay under the altar and Father Almida will have to come to get me out and he’ll ask me why I’m here and I’ll tell him it’s because of you, only you.” She seemed to be crying as the hunchback lifted her into the air and put her down again to one side, like a wisp; there they sat beneath the marble triangle that Tancredo imagined to be the eye of God, upside down, regarding them. The eye of God, upside down, he thought again, and smiled in spite of himself, adding: What’s happening to me? I’m laughing. He remembered smiling recently in church; several times he had smiled right there in the sanctuary; what’s happening to me, he wondered again, and tried to see his hands, bewildered, as if they might be wet with blood. At that moment he was not thinking about Sabina at all, only about his hands — they seemed criminal to him — and the eye of God, upside down, spying on them, and then he smiled even more.

“You laugh, you’re laughing,” Sabina said, and launched herself at him again, trustingly. “This church is like a marketplace,” she said. “Those abusive Lilias are taking advantage of Almida’s absence. They flounce about like mistresses of the parish, puffed up like turkeys, but lie down like doormats for that little priest to walk all over.”

For a moment, Tancredo was overcome by a sort of sympathy and tenderness. There was Sabina, her tempestuous spirit locked inside her fragile blonde body, her reddened lips, pressed together, those teeth that bit them until they bled.

“Let’s run away, Tancredo,” he heard her say, stunned. “Right now, today, without saying goodbye to anyone. They owe us money, I’ve got it all planned, I know where to go, where we can live for ever. They won’t come after us; why should they? We’ve worked our whole lives for them. It’s only fair we’d get tired of it one day.”

He imagined himself running away with Sabina. He could not help smiling again.