Good Offices

Quite simply, Sabina wanted to be with him, Father, and give free rein to pleasure. Pleasure he was incapable of ignoring; not long ago, while Sabina had been talking to him, he had imagined her naked, and Sabina seemed to discover the desire in his gaze, Father, almost to smell it, because for a few seconds she had stopped talking and even parted her legs slightly, as if making herself comfortable, and smiled imperceptibly, blushing all the more, in anticipation. To roll in each other’s arms, oblivious to the world, that was what drove Sabina. To get down to it, and not just beneath the altar, but all over the place, on every altar, wherever, it made no difference, Father. It was her tempestuous spirit locked inside her fragile blonde body, her reddened lips, those teeth that bit them until they bled; it was a different passion, not like resentment or bitterness, that made her suffer and hurt, it was desire, Father, and it all caused him pain, because he desired her too. One day she took him to the little room where Almida and the sacristan keep the money, on the first floor, Father, where no stranger would ever appear, and he allowed her to take his hands in hers and encourage him to follow her. In the library, behind a little door discreetly disguised by three unframed tapestries, they peeked at the boxes of money. There were six rectangular wooden chests, without padlocks, lined up across the secret little room. Around them, stacks of Missals, which the Church printed to give as gifts at First Communions, lined the walls right up to the ceiling. In a corner, piled any which way, lay seven or ten Bibles, dusty and disintegrating, huge, black and forgotten. The six boxes, in contrast, were clean and apparently polished. “Sabina knelt in front of them, Father. She lifted one of the lids: neat bundles of notes filled it up to the top. And she turned to look at me, her hands open on the bundles, messing them up. She ended up sitting on top of the boxes, her chest heaving, her tongue flicking over her lips, moistening them. I didn’t recognize her. She crossed her legs and leaned back on her hands. She was looking at me defiantly. ‘Let’s run away,’ she said. ‘Any one of these boxes would give us enough to live on. Just one box. I’m not talking about all of them. We’ve worked our whole lives for these people.’ She told me they were mean, that when she’d been a girl they’d never given her a toy, a birthday cake, a decent coat or a scarf, never mind an education, a profession, so that she could be independent. ‘What do they want to condemn us to?’ she asked, and then supplied the answer: ‘To grow old in their service.’ She told me her bastard of a godfather, that’s how she put it, had taken advantage of her when she was little, not once, but a hundred times. And she struggled not to cry. ‘Almida does the same to the factory girls who come to the Community Meals,’ she said. That provoked a blind rage in me, Father. The truth is I couldn’t refute Sabina’s assertions. That has always been my great torment: knowing that she tells the truth. Hearing what she said made me furious, and I wanted to reach out a hand, just my right hand, and wrap my fingers round Sabina’s delicate neck, squeeze until it snapped and never hear her again. Why, Father, why that desire of mine to take her life? It was a plan like a cold shudder I didn’t know I had in me, but I recognized it the next moment, was amazed by it for an instant, but just an instant, because then I was terrified, Father. Sabina was crying. In any case, with or without tears, it was easy to envisage where she was heading with her words, what her body was hinting at, stretched out beseechingly on top of the boxes, as if pleading that we play an unexpected game. ‘Just one box,’ she said again, ‘and we’ll run away.’” As desperate as she was lascivious, she had reached toward him, seized his hands, she was pulling him, her wet lips moving as if in silent prayer. And he saw her naked, suddenly he saw her naked, Father, on top of bundles and bundles of money. Money that didn’t belong to her. Money that had begun to pile up at an excessive rate, ever since Don Justiniano had shown up in the parish. And he had preferred not to wonder, never to wonder again, about where that money came from or why it accumulated in boxes, not being deposited in a bank, not being spent, at the very least, on the parish’s basic requirements. Well, it was no secret, Father, that the Community Meals were put together at minimum cost, that potato soup and rice with potatoes were the sole insipid ingredients, army mush reserved for the blind, the street children, the prostitutes. With difficulty he pulled away from the hands that were entrapping him, with difficulty, Father, he managed to escape the spell of the body snaking toward him, the burning face on the point of conquering him. And he heard her cry out behind him, Father. “Oh, you great brute,” she cried, “coward, a thousand times over,” and, in her frustration, Sabina launched herself at the Missals. With a blow she demolished a stack. She tripped over the pile of dusty Bibles. She kicked them. A cloud of dust flew up, sullying the air. “Swine,” she cried, “all of you are pigs here.”