Good Offices

Picking up the receiver, utterly convinced of the telephone’s ringing, he heard no voice. Just a continuous buzz that diminished and slipped away into silence. He hung up. If Reverend Almida had come in at that moment, he would have said the telephone had rung. He would have had an excuse for being up, in the office. He would have said that he had been worried by the absence of the Father and the sacristan. He would have concealed the presence of the singing priest there in the church, with Sabina, at the altar. That was the worst, the most inexplicable thing, to explain the presence of Matamoros, drunk, at that hour. But no one came into the office. Tancredo lit a candle on top of the typewriter. He waited a good while, seated near the black writing-desk, contemplating the telephone attentively. How much time had passed? He did not hear Almida’s and the sacristan’s voices, or their footsteps going up the stairs. Maybe they had already gone up? It was as if two transparent ghosts had arrived instead of the flesh-and-blood Machado and Almida. Without noticing, Tancredo picked up the receiver again and went on studying it attentively. The candle burned low.

“Who was it, Tancredito?” he heard one of the Lilias ask. Who was it, who could it have been, if the telephone had not rung?

Surprised, he noticed one of the old women standing there, the smallest of the Lilias, a shovel still in her hand, sleeves rolled up, arms dirty.

“Nobody,” he managed to say.

“And Father San José, Tancredito? I don’t see him here. Did he go to the bathroom? Look after him, I beg you. We won’t be long. Maybe he left, we’d never forgive ourselves; what would a decent soul be doing out on the streets of Bogotá at this hour?”

“He’s in the church,” Tancredo said.

“In the church!”

“At the altar.”

“Praying, no doubt. What a tremendous priest!”

The Lilia made the sign of the cross.

“Tell him we won’t be long. But don’t, for God’s sake, tell him where we are or what we’re doing, for the love of God.”

“And Almida?”

“Forget Almida and Machado. They arrived back from Don Justiniano’s house with stomach aches. What did they eat? Who knows? What did they give them, what did they stuff them with? Who knows? Perhaps they poisoned them. We’ve already taken them some mint tea, so they’ll sleep like angels.” She went out, but came back in immediately and corrected herself: “So they’ll sleep, that’s all, so they’ll sleep like what they are.”

The smallest of the Lilias said nothing about the ladies of the Neighborhood Civic Association. She didn’t mention them, as if taking for granted that Tancredo had never caught sight of them. But what private talks took place between them, what secrets brought them together in the night, identical in age, in their rapture at San José and his sung Mass? Or were they perhaps a vision? Tancredo shrugged: it was not what mattered to him now.

It was possible that the sound of the Volkswagen, of Almida’s and the sacristan’s footsteps, had alerted Sabina. How was Sabina? Grabbing another candle, Tancredo made for the sacristy. Going through the church in the gloom, he could not make out the candle San José had taken. Perhaps it had gone out. Besides, he heard no voices. Tancredo raised his own candle to shed a wider light. No one at the altar. Sabina was not there. Then, he thought incredulously, Sabina was vanquished, asleep in her room, or had she gone off to hide somewhere else? In Tancredo’s room? And Matamoros? Nowhere to be seen. Tancredo still expected to find Sabina in a far-flung corner of the church, barely reached by the candlelight. It seemed impossible that she was not there. Maybe I want to find her? he thought. Suddenly, the arrival of Almida and the sacristan didn’t matter, just Sabina and her body, he thought — Sabina’s body and, through her flesh, a sort of freedom.

“Sabina?” he asked the church. His voice bounced back, multiplied, unanswered.

He went up to the altar, to make absolutely sure. He put his candle in a candlestick. Beneath the marble triangle, in the same spot where he had left Sabina, Reverend San José Matamoros was fast asleep. Tancredo lowered the candlelight over the sleeping man: the half-open mouth, a white string of spittle.

“Father,” he said.

He saw, beside Matamoros on the marble floor, the priest’s glasses, one lens cracked, one arm mended with sticking plaster. His trousers were frayed. One shoe was half off, the sock full of holes.

“Father,” he said again, but the priest did not wake up.

“Let him sleep, Tancredito.” Once more, the voice of a Lilia chilled him. There they were, their beatific faces leaning over the Father, their hands, this time, empty of cats, shovels, earth, their hands smelling of soap, clasped and held before them as though in prayer.

“Poor thing,” they said. “He’s fallen asleep. Look at the place he chose. The altar. Where nobody bothers anyone.”

Tancredo put the priest’s glasses back on his face, passed a hand through his rumpled hair.

“Father.”

Matamoros did not wake.