Good Offices

“What a treat, these little strips of crackling on the rice.”

“We couldn’t fail to include a suckling pig.”

“And the wine, saintly women, the wine, by God.”

They drank again and Tancredo decided to join in. Although he had not eaten a thing, none of the Lilias thought of encouraging him to do so, as all their attention was focused on the Father, and on the cat too, the vanished cat, who, in a split second, like a lightning flash with phosphorescent eyes, appeared and disappeared, carrying off a drumstick. The three Lilias leapt up from their seats at the same time, with the same shriek.

“There he goes, I saw him, I saw him,” they said. “Oh, diabolical Almida! Why didn’t you catch him? You were nearest.”

They talked among themselves as if weeping and fluttered about out of sight, in despair, at the far end of the kitchen.

“This time he took a drumstick.”

“The sly devil.”

“And from right under the Father’s nose! The shame of it.”

“Don’t worry about the cat,” Matamoros said. “He’ll be amusing himself with his chicken.”

“How can we not worry? We’re just not quick enough,” they wailed. “We’re not as nimble as we used to be. It’s impossible to catch a cat at our age, and Almida, the rascal, is the worst of the lot: he only lets us touch him to stroke him.”

“Forget about him.”

“And he stole a piece of chicken.”

“Don’t worry about the chicken.”

The three Lilias returned to the table, out of breath. They seized their respective glasses, which Matamoros had topped up again.

“Almida will go on stealing,” they said, “and not out of hunger, but to provoke us; after the drumstick, it’ll be the wings, and then the rabbit. Father, you’d better hurry or Almida will beat you to it, and goodbye little rabbit, the only one there is, Father, the icing on the cake, that worthy little rabbit.”

“I’d rather we talked about the cat, not Reverend Almida.” Matamoros’s voice was solemn.

“At this hour, one forgets oneself,” they said. They licked their lips, stained red by wine. “So much wine in such a short time.” They were amazed. “Like holy water. But we should change the thief’s name. What shall we call him?”

“Nobody,” Matamoros said. “Nobody is the very origin of names.” And for the first time, he burst out laughing, at his ease, while the Lilias drank.

“They’re drunk,” Tancredo said to himself, unable to believe it, “drunk.” During the time he spent imagining Sabina beneath the altar, the three Lilias had drunk enough to become inebriated. He really did hear double meanings in their allusions to the cat and to Father Almida. Reverend San José, on the other hand, seemed extremely lucid now and urged them on, comforted them, but it was useless, because the thieving cat was troubling the Lilias, smashing their little happiness to bits, causing them to withdraw, sorrowfully watchful.

“If it weren’t for that cat, we’d be happy,” one of them said.

It sounded as if she had cried out that they would be happy without Almida.

A sickly smile of unearthly pleasure, of the joy known only to drunkards, lit up Matamoros’s face. He began to speak to the Lilias, to fill their ears with secrets, to question them, to reply himself, to persuade and let himself be persuaded, tasting an occasional mouthful, praising it to the skies. His conversation amazed the Lilias, exalted them utterly, and there was no shortage of toasts, clashing glasses now, sprinkling wine over the fruit.

And then it went dark. The light went out. But they were slow to realize, not so much because the coal stove was still casting its reddish glow as because of the Father’s unexpected singing: the song and the darkness both were unexpected. Not even Tancredo paid attention to the absence of light. For some time he had been absorbed in Matamoros’s words, above all the most recent ones, when he was explaining that he had always wanted to sing, to be a singer from dawn to dawn, from dusk to dusk, from east to west and north to south, so he said, to set out with his song over his shoulder until the day he died. “I used to sing other songs,” he had just finished saying, and that was when the light cut out, just as the song appeared, ringing round the tomb of darkness and reverberating in their hearts. Reverend San José Matamoros del Palacio crooned a bolero, sang it halfway through, then a tango, also, whimsically, half of it, and a folk song and a cumbia dance tune and a ballad, and went back to another bolero about when the rain falls all around, “and in a far-off village I will stop my wandering and there I will die,” he was singing, the closed-in darkness serving as a background to his voice, repeating it, a strange echo of echoes.