When I moved into this apartment a couple of years ago, it was a nice surprise to spot a little tile above the door with an image of the Virgin on it, which is visible from the landing. Underneath, screwed into the lintel, was a plaque that read ‘Ave María Purísima’. I imagined a scene on a farm: someone claps their hands and shouts, ‘¡Ave María Purísima!’ and I answer from inside in traditional Spanish style, shouting as well, over the barking of the dogs: ‘Conceived without sin!’
That little tile helped me to feel protected as I embarked on the adventure of living alone, which was something I hadn’t done for years. Not long ago, a student leaving my apartment after a workshop turned around when she reached the lift and pointed at the tile.
‘Are you Catholic?’ she asked.
I looked at her for several seconds, thoroughly perplexed. It was an unanswerable question.
‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ I said. I carried on pondering the matter long after the students had all gone home, and it kept returning to me in the days that followed. One afternoon, in the kitchen, while I was washing the dishes – an excellent opportunity for reflection – the answer came to me. I formulated it slowly and clearly: ‘Yes, I’m a Catholic in the same way that I’m Uruguayan.’ Not by choice, but by birth.
My entry into this nation was, needless to say, due to my mother; and, less obviously, it was also through her that I had my first contact with the Church. Something that in other countries would have been perfectly normal was, here, entirely down to chance. Whether because of staunch adherence to the ideas of Don Pepe Batlle, or because he was an anarchist, or simply because he was stubborn and ignorant, my maternal grandfather was a fanatical atheist, or, more precisely, he was virulently anti-religious, anticlerical and blasphemous, and it was rare for anything he said, however brief, not to contain a few wholly gratuitous and indecent epithets directed at a member of the Holy Family, particularly God the Father. The social sphere, it’s safe to say, was (and is) happily separate from religion; Don Pepe had fought and roundly beaten the powers of the Church, but the fight didn’t stop there: he finished up by exterminating all religious feeling from the majority of the population, or at least the outward signs of it. An ex-priest friend of mine told me that, around the middle or the end of the thirties, priests even had stones thrown at them in the street.
Nowadays, for better or worse, all that repressed, latent religiosity has broken out in the appearance of dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of sects, and the churches of these different groups are sprouting up like mushrooms all over the city.
When I was eight years old I voluntarily agreed to be baptised, and my mother took advantage of this to get baptised as well. In the years before that, I only remember occasional strange visits to some church or other on Good Friday; and a priest who stood in a kind of sentry box with his back to everyone, speaking in Latin; and my mother looking as serious as a dog in a boat, the corners of her lips turned downwards in a very sour expression and a black shawl covering her head. And my uneasiness, a feeling somewhere between guilt and fear, though I didn’t know the reason for either.
There was also a brief period during which I was taken to a place called ‘Sunday school’. I don’t remember much about it, but I think it looked like an Evangelist temple; instead of the uncomfortable pews you get in Catholic churches, it had wooden chairs, which were far more comfortable and varnished to a deep shine. I can’t have looked up very much, because the chairs are all I remember; everything else is shrouded in mystery. I think I was taken to this place with other children, because I vaguely remember there being a group of us, but I don’t have a clue who they were, any more than I can imagine who would have taken us, though I think it was a very young woman. If my current experiences are anything to go by, I probably fell into a trance as soon as I was left in that person’s care and noticed almost nothing about my surroundings, as often happens to me these days when I leave the house. If there’s someone with me, after a few blocks I might begin to look up and take some interest in the world around me, but I always begin with my gaze fixed on my shoes. How I manage to cross roads or avoid walking into pedestrians or pillars I’ll never know. I probably have peripheral vision that I’m largely unaware of, or perhaps I emit ultrasound waves like a bat.
I’ve retained one very clear image of that Sunday school, and only one: my right shoe – and who knows what unnatural material it was made of, or what fiendishly pointy shape it had – tracing random shapes on the back of the seat in front of me, or, in other words, scratching the impeccable varnish. It made a very soft, very satisfying scraping sound, which I thought only I could hear, while the room echoed with the voice of a figure a long way in front of me, out of my sight. I have a feeling I didn’t hear a single word properly, and if I did, either I didn’t understand or I wasn’t interested. The truth is, I learnt absolutely nothing at that Sunday school, and I couldn’t even say what they were trying to teach us. Along with the pleasing image of the little picture I was drawing with my shoe, another much less pleasing image occurs to me: the frowning face of someone, perhaps the same young woman who was in charge of us, looking at me sternly and gesturing for me to stop what I was doing. The telling-off made me feel self-conscious and I must have withdrawn into myself even further, enveloped in an infinite boredom.
The simultaneous baptisms came about once we’d moved to the city centre, thanks to a man we used to call Don Tomás. I don’t know how he came into our lives, and I’ve never, even now, been able to pin down exactly what sort of a person he was. He was an accountant by trade, if I’m not mistaken. And his hobby – or perhaps his second profession, since I often saw my mother surreptitiously slipping him a roll of banknotes – his hobby, let’s say, was being a healer. But he was no ordinary, run-of-the-mill healer. Born in Majorca, he was what you’d call an educated man, or at least educated enough to give that impression; he was well spoken, although he didn’t say much, and he knew a vast amount about a wide range of topics. The strangest thing about him was his relationship with various members of the Catholic Church. It’s no secret that Catholics, especially priests, have no time for healers, spiritualists or charlatans of any kind; and yet Don Tomás was friends with several high-ranking clergymen. So much so that, if I remember rightly, our baptism, which was orchestrated by him, took place in the Cathedral itself.
He maintained, and in this he was energetically backed up by his wife, that he could see dead people. He was often running into them and saying hello, and he told us that for him it was an everyday occurrence. His therapeutic approach was quite mysterious: with no warning, and when no one was expecting it, he’d fall into a trance (he called it ‘concentration’). He screwed his eyes shut and stayed perfectly still, while around him a respectful silence fell. Sometimes nobody noticed and the conversation continued for a few moments, until whoever was talking broke off suddenly in embarrassment, even though Don Tomás had explained more than once that when he was ‘concentrating’ you could fire a cannon and he wouldn’t hear. Nevertheless, we fell into a deep silence, if only out of a kind of fearful respect. What strange things were happening around us, under the influence of that concentration? I hardly breathed. We were all waiting for him to wake up, and sometimes we were waiting a long time. I never worked out whether it was all an act. My mother was once bold enough to ask him what happened during those concentrations. His answer, like all his answers, was very vague, or rather indirect, but it included something about how ‘he could see inside the human body with perfect clarity, and even move around inside it’. He didn’t say this was what he was doing; he just said he could do it. From then on I used to wonder, during his trances, whether he was looking inside me, and what he might find.
At first, our sessions with Don Tomás were held in the house of some well-to-do Galicians, a couple I’d never seen before then and never saw since. In the scene from these sessions that’s most clearly recorded in my memory, the owner of the house was diagnosed by Don Tomás as having a broken or cracked rib. The treatment struck me as particularly strange: he had to stand on a chair and jump off it backwards. He was made to repeat this several times. I don’t know what came of it.
Nor do I know what my father thought of all this. My father was a shop assistant, an outwardly unpretentious man. And yet with time I discovered a wisdom in him that was probably innate, and which allowed him to behave in the most correct and appropriate way no matter what situation he found himself in. One of his most firmly held principles, I believe, was his respect for things he knew nothing about, combined with a frank and natural recognition of his own limitations. When it came to those sessions with Don Tomás, he did what he had to do: he came along, he was respectful, he almost certainly paid, because my mother didn’t have her own income in those days, and he sat through each and every session with no apparent difficulty, even though some of them went on for a very long time. But I never found out what he thought of it all. Maybe he didn’t think anything.
The Galicians soon found a way of passing the buck; we inherited Don Tomás and the sessions began taking place in our house, and that went on for a good while – certainly months, and perhaps more than a year. The Galician man’s technique must have been very simple and effective, since he was always the one who put an end to the sessions in his house, with the words: ‘Well, this is all very interesting, but tomorrow we have to work.’ He stood up and we all immediately did the same, and then we went home.
In our house, things were different. One of Don Tomás’s skills was sending his wife ahead to infiltrate long before he arrived, which put us in a very awkward position. As far as I know, this was never explicitly agreed; but one fine day, the day of a session, his wife rang the doorbell, we opened the door, she came in and sat down, and there she stayed, with my grandmother and mother taking it in turns to keep her company. She was a very fat, ugly woman, seemingly lacking in any particular talent. She had nothing to talk about and sat in her chair like a vegetable, dozing off every now and then. Who knows what her husband was up to in the meantime; sometimes he didn’t arrive until much later. With time, even my grandmother and mother left her alone and went back to whatever they were doing. She didn’t mind; her face was completely expressionless, almost shapeless.
It must, I realise now, have been my father who discreetly put an end to those sessions. I’ve just remembered how, at one point, he began to wonder out loud about the man’s powers.
‘If he has the power to cure people,’ I can hear him saying, ‘why doesn’t he cure that stuff in his eyes?’
And indeed, as well as wearing glasses, Don Tomás had trouble with a whitish secretion at the outer corners of his eyelids, perhaps caused by tiredness or some kind of infection. I think the seeds of my father’s rebellion were sown when Don Tomás said one day that ‘you can catch dandruff from hairdressers’. My father’s doctor had told him that dandruff was the result of stomach problems, and for my father, his doctor’s word was the word of God. In fact, as I understand it now there are various possible causes of dandruff; like almost everything else, it doesn’t come from just one thing but from a combination of factors. And besides, Don Tomás’s explanation strikes me as more plausible than the explanation of my father’s doctor, but neither of them is completely right. Still, I heard my father repeat this argument more than once, and it’s quite possible that from then on Don Tomás’s days in our house were numbered. Like me, my father wasn’t a violent man, but he was very persistent.
The person I can’t find anywhere in these reminiscences is my grandfather; it’s as if he were already dead by this point. But I don’t think he died until some time afterwards. It could well be, however, that when one of the sessions was taking place in the house, he made himself scarce, presumably retiring to a different room, since by then he’d stopped going out. If he was still alive, it seems strange that I can’t remember a single story about him in which the healer makes an appearance; there should be plenty, and juicy ones at that, or at least with bursts of very colourful language.
The story of Don Tomás began with me and that famous heart murmur I had to put up with from the age of three. Around the time of the sessions, the doctors announced that the murmur ‘was cured’. My mother was convinced Don Tomás had worked a miracle. But my theory is that the murmur never existed; when I was about thirty, a doctor told me that the doctors who diagnosed the heart murmur had most likely been hearing the sound of the apex of one of my lungs. What’s more, the doctors who said it had been cured were from the city centre, and very different to the ones who treated me in that obscure polyclinic in the back of beyond, and who gave me a check-up every so often to see if the murmur was still there. They had obviously read my medical records and weren’t about to disagree with the initial diagnosis, because, as everyone knows, the medical profession is one big mafia whose members look out for one another. The nurses in that public health dispensary were gangsters as well. At the end of each visit, they’d ask my mother if she ‘needed anything’. My mother always needed a litre of alcohol, or something like that, which she acquired for the price of a modest tip. Corruption is nothing new in Uruguay, contrary to what people believe today. I remember my aunt the teacher, whose house was stuffed with industrial quantities of exercise books, pencils and other equipment she stole from the local school where she worked. And all the other public-sector workers were as much thieves as she was. Stealing from the State was the natural, logical thing to do, and nobody disapproved. Not even the State, since as far as I know it never did anything to stop it. And don’t tell me no one knew about the vox populi, or about whatever the Latin is for ‘the sight of the people’. The point is that it wasn’t just rumour: everything was plainly, flagrantly on show.
Anyway, what I wanted to say before I merrily embarked on this digression was that Don Tomás was the man behind my baptism and the simultaneous baptism of my mother, and I’m grateful to him for that, in spite of his horrible fat wife and the boredom of those interminable sessions.
The selectiveness of memory never ceases to amaze me. I imagine the unconscious has its reasons for fixing some scenes in the mind more firmly than others, but my conscious self has no idea why, for example, of everything I experienced during the baptism, all I remember is happily descending the steps when it was over – and that it was sunny. They could well have been the Cathedral steps; there were several of them, and they were very large. That patch of stone and sun; my only memory of an act that’s meant to be transcendental, and that I must have found interesting and affecting. As for the inside of the church, the priest, the holy water on my head, my mother … all I have is a dark, hazy impression, with no clearly defined images, which seems more like a product of logical necessity than anything else.
The only more or less fair criticism I could make of my father, of the many I secretly or overtly made of him when I was young, is that he was absent. I’ve often described, in different places, my most pressing concern, my insistent question when I could still barely speak: where’s my father? And the answers never made sense to me, and nor, of course, did they fill the gap. Where was he? He was working, in a shop, standing behind a counter for eight hours a day to support us. And later, when the eight hours were over, he spent his evenings teaching English. Even when he was physically present in the house, he didn’t have time for me.
Saying he worked in a shop to support us is a rather dramatic way of putting it; he could have done other, less apparently demanding things if he’d wanted. But the fact is, he liked that work, or, more than liking it, he found that it fulfilled a deep internal need. He had always got on very badly with his own father, about whom all I know is that he was extremely strict, even brutal. My father once mentioned, in passing, when we were talking about other things, that as a boy he only had one place in his house that belonged to him: a little wooden box with a padlock, where he kept his most treasured possessions – and I could never imagine what they might have been. From time to time, his father would use a tool to open the padlock and look inside the box, saying that his son could have no secrets from him. So my father left home as soon as possible, and to make it possible he decided to get a job. You don’t need to be a certified psychoanalyst to unravel the secret of his love for his work; the first shop that employed him was called Paternostro, and that was also the surname of the owner. When Paternostro closed down, my father moved to the London-Paris shop, and he was there until he retired. He talked about the owner of that shop as reverently as he used to talk about Paternostro. They were both obvious father figures, and to him they were almost like gods. In those shops he found the home he’d never had, and, although they were his bosses, father figures who were kinder to him than his real father had ever been. The owner of the London-Paris shop had the surname Tapié, and I never heard my father call him anything other than ‘Mr Tapié’. At one point, Mr Tapié fell seriously ill, and when my father came home for lunch he’d always update us on the medical situation, deeply concerned. And when Mr Tapié died, my father went through a period of genuine mourning.
I mention these things to explain the gap in my childhood where a father figure should have been, and my lifelong difficulties with exerting even a tiny amount of self-discipline. The thing is, I could never identify with a figure who had any real authority. My mother was the one with the authority, but because it wasn’t real authority, she always exercised it in that ambiguous way women do, ambiguous and arbitrary, and exaggerated, over-the-top, hysterical, when a bit of love and intelligence would have sufficed. And this authoritarianism has evidently become a part of me, judging by how I treat myself when I want to be more disciplined; as some of my friends have pointed out, I turn into a kind of fascist sergeant. Without achieving a great deal, of course, which is always the way with illegitimate authority.
That being the case, there came a time, dangerously close to when I hit puberty, in which my mother apparently found me quite impossible to control. I don’t remember a single incident that backs up this claim – no particularly bad behaviour on my part, that is – because, after all, I was fairly easy-going; I was fussy, certainly, and certainly almost always with good reason, but not the type to cause a scene or go in for any antisocial or abnormal activities. Still, one day my mother was at her wits’ end, and she tried something completely disproportionate: she threw a Bible at me. She threw it at me, literally, and told me to read it, saying I’d learn a thing or two and see what kind of future I had in store.
I picked up the Bible with great interest; at last, I thought, I was going to get to grips with the famous business of God, about whom I’d heard so many one-sided and contradictory things – from my grandfather, for example. I soon established a relationship with Jehovah, the early God of the Jews, and it wasn’t long before that terrifying figure became part of my life – and in a way, I think he still is. Many years later, before she died, my mother asked for forgiveness for all the harm she’d caused me. I told her not to be silly and said I had nothing to forgive her for, but in those fraught moments it was hard to be objective. I had plenty of things to forgive her for, in fact, and I hope I’ve managed to do so; and that business with the Bible was surely among the most serious. After my first reading of it, which I found overwhelming, because at the end of the day I didn’t understand much of what I was reading, and I still don’t think I’m capable of understanding much of that mixture of texts which some people see as the ‘word of God’, but after my first reading, as I was saying, for a considerable time I lived in fear. I’d already spent a considerable time living in fear, especially at night, ever since they dropped those atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and everyone started talking about atomic danger and chain reactions. Once, when I was about eight, I heard that the way to protect yourself from radiation was to cover yourself with a white sheet from top to toe, and so every night before going to sleep I pulled the sheet up over my head. I still wasn’t sure if the blankets on top of the sheet covering the rest of my body would stop it working. Night after night, interminably, waiting for the explosion of the bomb and the complete destruction of everything around me, and probably also myself, because to be honest I didn’t have much faith in the white-sheet method; I’d seen documentaries that showed experiments involving atomic bombs exploding on islands, and I wondered what a piece of cloth could possibly do in the face of all that. The image of Jehovah didn’t help matters; in fact, it made things worse, because now I had someone inside me checking up on my thoughts, and I had bad thoughts, which I tried to hide even from myself. I couldn’t say how long this terror lasted, but it’s certainly never entirely gone away; it’s still there now, more or less hidden, more or less buried – especially since I found out, many years later, that it’s completely true that God knows all our thoughts. But since God is no longer the Jehovah of the Jews, it doesn’t bother me so much that he knows them, although my thoughts continue to be pretty bad.
What made my mother’s act of throwing a Bible at me so serious was that, in doing so, she put me in direct contact with God, or what I thought was God, without the mediation of a priest. This is too much for anyone, especially a child. Perhaps, at the time, a good priest could have sorted things out.
My relationship with God continued to change after that first encounter in the Bible. When I was around twenty-five, a door opened up inside me that led to the spiritual world. Extraordinary things gradually began to happen, showing me that reality had far more dimensions than I’d realised; and I set about investigating this, haphazardly and not very systematically but with great determination, using a wide range of sources and not discounting personal adventures. I got into a few scrapes – and got out of them with psychotherapeutic assistance – but I gained things as well, not least literature. I investigated, as I said, in a disorderly and haphazard way, consulting spiritualist, occultist, psychoanalytical, religious and scientific materials, and I managed to find out that something really did exist, and that you could call it God if you wanted, although it also answered to other names. At any rate, it was something beyond my capacity for perception and understanding; but there was, yes, something alive and transcendental, involving the multidimensionality of the universe. I found, too, that you could communicate with this something in strange ways, and that these ways were never the same twice and I couldn’t simply use them whenever I pleased.
An ex-priest, who at the time practised parapsychology, supplemented my psychological therapy with some parapsychological therapy which saved me, to an extent, from that dangerous world of uncertainties. He may not have provided any certainties, but he gave me some simple guidelines to ensure I didn’t get carried away by paranormal phenomenology, or irrevocably overpowered by it. I was still in contact with this paranormal therapist when Cándido appeared at a birthday party.
To my surprise, he was introduced to me as a priest. He didn’t look like a priest. He had coarse but pleasant features, like a European peasant, and at first I thought he was Catalan, because of his proud expression. He was probably a few years older than me – I was around thirty-five or thirty-six – but his thick hair was already grey, almost white. His cheeks were the kind of pink that makes you think of health and apples, but that’s not to say he was one of those chubby-faced priests: he was a thin man, with a peasant’s sharp and slightly suspicious gaze. He didn’t so much speak as mumble through gritted teeth, wrestling with a language he hadn’t mastered. It took me a while to recognise his Spanish as distorted by Italian, because it was nothing like the usual Spanish spoken by Italian immigrants; he must have been from the countryside and had a dialect as his first language. To complete the picture, which is making me sweat, because describing people has never been my forte, I’ll simply add that he was dressed in very simple, rough clothes, especially his trousers, which were baggy at the knees. Oh, yes: and that his whole being exuded an air of resolute frankness. The moment I saw him, I thought: ‘Now, here’s a person you can trust.’
I didn’t realise it at the time, but when we left the birthday party and set off down the street, we were already friends. We walked to my apartment, which wasn’t far away, and I invited him up. The moment he set foot in my study, he saw the chessboard on a table. Without further ado, he emptied the box of pieces onto the board, sat down and started to arrange half of them. The whites, of course. I sat down, arranged the black pieces, and selected two pawns, one of each colour, which I mixed up with my hands behind my back; I then presented him with my two closed fists to choose from. I don’t know which of us ended up with white, or which of us won. And I didn’t realise that at that moment we were establishing a ritual, or at least a powerful shared addiction. Cándido came over a lot from then on. He always headed straight for the chessboard, and generally didn’t leave until we’d decided on a winner after the usual two or three games. We didn’t speak much, if at all. Sometimes we’d carry on until late: one, two, or even three in the morning. This was bad for him because he invariably had to give mass at 8 a.m.; a mass that he didn’t enjoy. ‘For those old ladies … ’ he’d say, his jaws clenched. He hated pious old ladies, especially the ones who got up early.
The priestly office, in any religion, has always inspired respect in me. I assume there’s a permanent link between God and the priest, and that this link is a form of divine presence. Faced with a priest, my best qualities make themselves known to me and my worst qualities try to hide. In a way, I find being close to a priest therapeutic, because when your better qualities rise to the surface, you feel better yourself somehow; you treat yourself better, and you treat other people better as well. The divine presence could be real or imaginary; if it’s imaginary, the priest simply serves as a reminder that there are higher powers in the universe. And even that means a great deal, in a world that’s constantly pelting us with low, vile, ordinary things.
However, the day came when I had no choice but to separate my friend Cándido into two personalities: the priest and the friend, or, more precisely, the priest and the chess adversary. The first time this happened I was very surprised, by both his behaviour and my own. During a game, he got distracted and left his queen vulnerable to one of my pieces.
‘Cándido,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if you saw, but you’re about to lose your queen.’
He looked at the board and quickly moved the piece back.
‘Ah, yes,’ he said. He didn’t say thank you. A little later, I accidentally left my queen exposed to one of his pieces. Cándido, impassive, snatched my queen off the board, and put his piece on that square. At first I thought it was a funny way of pointing out my mistake, and I waited for him to give back my queen. But he didn’t. He carried on looking serenely at the board, waiting for my move. I exploded with rage.
‘Jesus fucking Christ, Cándido!’ I burst out, forgetting his priestly status. ‘You’re not a gentleman,’ I added, a little calmer now, though still furious, ‘you’re a lout.’
He looked at me nonplussed, and didn’t give back my queen.
‘Cándido,’ I tried again, summoning all my patience. ‘You handed your queen over just now without realising, and I told you and let you go back. Why should you play with an advantage, like a child?’
Then he mumbled more incomprehensible things in an unrecognisable language, returned the queen to its place and waited for me to make another move.
I think he picked up that ruthless style, more appropriate to sport than to an intellectual puzzle, from his games against the boys in the student residence he ran. That style of play, which involves exploiting your opponent’s distraction, makes me lose all interest in the game. It turns it from an intellectual confrontation into a matter of old-fashioned street cunning. But he also played football with those boys, and his ankles were always covered in bruises. I could never get him out of the habit of playing chess that way, and that wasn’t the only time I had to swear at him; every time I pointed out something he’d missed, he moved the piece back; but any distraction on my part, bam, before I knew it Cándido had seized the piece like a falcon swooping down on an unsuspecting baby animal.
As long as he wasn’t doing things like that, I always felt very aware that he was a priest, and I treated him with the requisite respect. He didn’t seem to notice, and I’m sure it didn’t matter to him at all.
Once, I brought up the topic of religion, in relation to one of my many anxieties on the matter. And I brought it up again several times after that, and he never did once. His answers to my questions weren’t exactly brilliant, though he took me very seriously, forgetting about the chess game for a moment and giving me his full attention. He provided me with formulaic, even childlike explanations; dogma expressed in its simplest form. It was completely useless trying to dig deeper; that was how things were, because it was; although he didn’t say this in an authoritarian way, but simply with total conviction. It was what he’d been taught, and because he believed what he’d been taught he repeated it honestly – indeed, if I can allow myself a pun on his name, I’d say he repeated it candidly. It took me a long time to begin to tell the difference between his faith and his credulity, or, to put it another way, his simple-mindedness.
I once invited him to a lecture on parapsychology, to be given by my therapist friend. At first he said no and launched into a rant about parapsychology and parapsychologists. I said that this particular parapsychologist was a serious person, that he used to be a priest like him and had left the cloth to get married; and that proof of his seriousness was the fact that the lecture would take place in a Catholic school. He carried on stubbornly refusing. I knew that if he went, he’d love it; and by then I knew him well enough to play on his weaknesses.
‘Besides,’ I said, ‘the speaker is going to levitate, and he’ll come into the lecture hall through the window. The lecture hall is on the second floor.’
He said no more about it, and neither did I. I didn’t really think he believed me, but when it was time to leave for the lecture, there he was in my apartment; he’d come without my needing to repeat the invitation. We went together, then, and he did indeed love it. On the way back we were walking along, looking for a bus stop, and talking about different parts of the lecture. I’d forgotten my tactic for luring him along, but when we saw the bus approaching, Cándido turned to me accusingly and said:
‘He didn’t come in through the window.’ And he went on looking at me, waiting for me to explain. I burst out laughing. He was in a bad mood for a while.
But hand in hand with his gullibility came his faith; and that faith gave him all of his strength. That faith is the only thing I’ll consciously let myself envy about him. Thanks to that faith, he could install himself anywhere, in any part of the world, in any situation, and feel at home. I, on the other hand, am permanently on edge, even in my own home, as if I didn’t want to get in the way, or as if I might be moved on at any moment, even when I’m living alone.
One day, Cándido gruffly expressed a desire for me to watch him giving mass. ‘On a Sunday evening,’ he said. There was a good crowd on Sundays, among them my friends from the birthday party and lots of young people, and Cándido wanted me to see him at work in this congenial atmosphere. ‘Not the other days because those old ladies will be there. Sundays.’ I said I would, and the following Sunday I walked the few blocks to the church feeling quite expectant. I couldn’t imagine him delivering mass, let alone the sermon – or the homily, as he called it, using the more correct term. I sat in a pew in one of the back rows, as I always did on the rare occasions I went to a church. A little out of humility, a little out of shyness, and a little to keep my distance from a religion that, despite many approaches over the years, has always felt alien to me.
I was surprised to see Juan José, my friend from the birthday party, step onto the little podium or whatever it’s called – priests must have some technical name for it – which was a kind of platform protected by a backrest and fitted with a microphone, from which laypeople sometimes speak and sometimes sing. My friend began to sing, in his beautiful, powerful, full-bodied voice, the hymn that precedes the entrance of the priest. And there was Cándido, dressed in some unbelievable violet robes that didn’t look bad on him, and which he wore quite naturally and with dignity. I don’t remember the exact order of the stages of the mass, though I experienced them again countless times after that. There was a reading, and then came the homily, and Cándido expressed himself with notable clarity and good sense. Then, when it was time for the celebration, or whatever you call it – the mass itself – as he handed out the bread and wine, he really was transfigured, and it was no longer Cándido standing there. He was evidently in a trance, or a kind of ecstasy, if you like; concentrating hard, serene, detached from his surroundings for a long while, his eyes closed. The faithful formed a queue – spurred on by the soaring voice of my friend, who was back in position – all singing at full volume (one woman, probably not very young and clearly very histrionic, always stood out for her piercing high notes, like a soprano in an opera. I don’t remember seeing her face; her voice was coming from somewhere outside my field of vision). When he began to distribute the wafers, Cándido, or whoever it was that had taken his place, remained distant and deep in concentration; he’d opened his eyes again, but only slightly. It was interesting to see the different ways the faithful had of receiving the host; some simply opened their mouth so the priest could place it inside, which has always struck me as slightly obscene. Others took it in their hand, which is what I’d do, I said to myself, if I had to take Communion.
I sat down and stood up many times that evening, following the orders I heard or the actions of everyone else. The main thing, in my view, is to respect the customs of the places you go. But I didn’t kneel, because it didn’t seem right, and because there were other people who didn’t kneel either.
‘And now we’ll say goodbye, as usual, by singing to our mother, the Virgin Mary,’ said my friend Juan José, up on the podium again, and during another chorus, the procession towards the exit began, with the priest himself at the head. Then Cándido stationed himself at the door, and he was Cándido again, but an exultant, rejuvenated Cándido, rosy-cheeked and beaming like a happy child.
From then on, I don’t think I missed a single Sunday. Sometimes, on Saturday nights, Cándido would interrupt the chess to ask my advice. ‘Tomorrow I have to do a homily on … ’ – and he’d mention a topic. ‘Can you think of anything?’ he’d ask. I could always think of something. As a layperson with all the freedom in the world to say whatever I liked, I unleashed upon him every more or less secret line of reasoning that had accompanied me throughout my life; curiously, he accepted them without further discussion, because, of course, he’d asked and I’d answered. To my amazement, the next day, during the homily, I’d usually find that Cándido had appropriated my ideas and was calmly dispensing them to the congregation. He didn’t use my words or my concepts; instead he developed them, or rather digested them, processed them and made them his own. It wasn’t that he smoothed out the rough edges or adapted my thoughts into dogma; he simplified them without distorting them, and in that simplification they lost all intellectual malevolence, and sometimes he went further, much further than I had. On one occasion I was completely horror-struck, expecting nothing less than Cándido’s excommunication, when, based on some of my arguments from that Saturday night, he declared from the pulpit: ‘Baptism is completely unnecessary.’
One Sunday, the date of which I could calculate with total precision, I went to Cándido’s mass, just like on any other Sunday. The mass took place as usual, with no special details that would make it stick in the memory, until the very end. Cándido pronounced his ‘Ite, missa est’ according to the formula in Spanish that I now don’t remember, and Juan José, up on the podium, reminded us that ‘As usual, we’ll say goodbye by singing to our Mother, the Holy Virgin’ and, as usual, my face twisted with distaste, because of all the parts of the dogma I found hard to swallow, the Virgin was the most difficult. I’m a man of the Holy Spirit; unlike Borges, it’s all I understand, all I know, all I believe in. The rest of the figures seem rather vague; I don’t have an exact image of the Father, and in the image I have of the Son, he’s been manhandled so much that he doesn’t seem very appealing. Like the poet Machado, I prefer the one who walked on the sea, though I always picture the one on the cross, and I don’t like that. But back then the idea of the Mother of God, and a virgin on top of everything else, struck me as more than unpleasant; it rubbed me up the wrong way, and I found her popularity particularly galling. So I twisted my mouth into a grimace, as usual, and stayed in my seat, waiting for the end of the procession, which was moving slowly towards the exit, its members singing at the top of their lungs. That was when it started to rain; a drop fell onto my shirt, in the region of my chest, on the left side, where we think the heart is. I was very surprised. How could it rain inside a church? Was there a hole in the roof? I looked up and, of course, all I saw was the drawings (if there were in fact drawings; in my imagination, the ceiling of that church looks like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but there probably weren’t any ‘drawings’). Another droplet landed on me, symmetrical to the last, and I began to feel nervous; I hadn’t brought anything waterproof, or a coat, and my apartment was a few blocks away. I thought that if rain was dripping through a leak in a building as solid as the church seemed to be, there was surely a torrential downpour. But in the end I realised it wasn’t raining. Instead, my eyes were crying. I say my eyes because I myself still hadn’t started to cry; I was completely removed from what was happening inside me, or wherever it was – in that place where emotions are created. And, filled with confusion as I felt those tears sliding down my cheeks and wetting my shirt, for a moment I was utterly disconcerted, and also rather afraid, because I wasn’t used to the schizophrenia that meant I could have someone inside me crying and only find out by means of deduction. But that schizophrenia ended abruptly, and I saw, I saw, don’t ask me with what eyes, but I saw inside me the face of a woman I knew and loved, and then another, and another, a whole legion of women I loved, which included my mother, and in such numbers and at such speed that I couldn’t recognise them individually, but there they all were, parading along, coming towards me, and they all seemed to say the same thing, a ‘Why don’t you love me?’, and I realised that what was addressing me, this pure essence of femininity, this common denominator of all the women and all the loves of my life, was Her, Mary herself, in all her power and all her presence. She looked nothing like she does on the prayer cards. She wasn’t one woman; she was all women. A living abstraction, living and present. I shuffled leftwards along the pew, half sitting, half crouching, looking for a pathway free of people, and I escaped in distress, ashamed of my crying, which not only hadn’t finished but in fact seemed to be just getting started; the famous lump in the throat, the unbearable angst that only sobbing can release, rising up from the chest. I crept along, hiding behind pillars and pressing myself against walls, until I found a discreet way out and went down the steps furthest from the entrance, where Cándido and my friends must have been waiting for me, and shrunken, hunched, made my way through the shadows of the evening and the street until I arrived home, without stopping my crying for a single moment. When I was back in my apartment, without having run into anyone I knew on the way, I threw myself down onto my bed, just as I was, and carried on crying, and I was crying when I fell asleep, and the next day when I woke up I was still crying.
I find it very hard to believe that I went out that morning without having breakfast, but I also can’t imagine having breakfast and crying at the same time. I know I called Cándido the second I got up, telling him I had an urgent problem and needed to ask his advice as soon as possible. He told me to come and see him in his office, in the student residence he ran, which was in the same block as the church. And so, with or without breakfast, off I went. Cándido showed me to a comfortable armchair. He sat behind his desk. I briefly explained what was happening to me, crying and blowing my nose the whole time. He was silent for a few moments, and then reached for a Bible he had on one side of his desk. He opened it at random. ‘Let’s see what the word of God says,’ he mumbled, and fixed his gaze on the page in front of him. As if it were the I Ching, the response fit the question perfectly. Cándido read aloud a few paragraphs of that strange story from the Gospels in which Jesus cried.
Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled. And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept.
Martha and Mary were Lazarus’ sisters. Cándido explained that the function of women is to encourage men to do their work; without women’s encouragement, men would do nothing. Martha and Mary push Jesus to resuscitate the dead man, just as the other Mary, the mother, had pushed him to turn water into wine. (Jesus got annoyed and objected, but in the end he did as he was told.)
‘I think you’re ready to take Communion,’ Cándido added. And I agreed, and the crying stopped.
‘I understand there’s a lot of preparation to do first,’ I said. ‘You’re more than prepared,’ he replied. ‘You can take it directly next Sunday.’ When I said I could calculate the date with total precision if necessary, it was because the day of my First Communion was the Feast of Corpus Christi, the festival in honour of the Eucharist; the sacrament, that is, which, in the form of bread and wine – according to Catholic doctrine – contains the true presence of Jesus Christ.
That Corpus Sunday I joined the queue to receive the host. Cándido fully respected my request for anonymity, but that didn’t stop him telling a few of my close friends; after the ceremony there was a small gathering, even with cake and savoury snacks, in a room next to the nave of the church. The parapsychologist and his wife were there, and Alicia and Juan José, of course. And Elisa, my childhood and lifelong friend. But during mass I’d sat alone a long way away, as usual, and I’d gone up alone to receive the First Communion. No one had the right to take anything away from me of that moment that was totally mine.
That night, Cándido came round to play chess as usual, with his baggy trousers and peasant’s expression; as ever, there was no sign of the transfiguration he’d undergone during mass. This time, I stopped him abruptly when he went into my study, and before he’d sat down at the chessboard, I stood up as tall as I could and pointed an accusatory finger at him:
‘What do they put in the wafers?’ I demanded.
He seemed momentarily taken aback, then responded very naturally:
‘Flour and water.’
‘I know that, Cándido. I’m not stupid. But what do they put in with the flour and water? I mean: what kind of drug?’
He looked at me for some time, bewildered. Then he clenched his teeth and repeated:
‘Flour and water. Just flour and water.’
‘That’s as may be. But for mine in particular, because today was a special occasion, you added something extra.’
Cándido was alarmed now.
‘I didn’t even see you,’ he confessed.
And I realised it was true: he gave out the wafers in a state of beatitude or trance, with his eyes half-closed, repeating mechanically ‘the body of Christ’. He hadn’t seen me, and he couldn’t have selected a spiked wafer especially for me.
I’d taken the wafer from his hand and put it in my mouth, and then, without chewing, returned slowly to my place in the pew. I closed my eyes to explore what I was feeling as the wafer gradually dissolved, now with the help of a little work from my teeth. I swallowed it and went on meditating, or trying to meditate, but my whole mind had become cloudy, filled with something cotton-like though not entirely white, but with a few greyish patches. That was when the wing of an angel brushed against me. Against my chest. From the inside. On the solar plexus, perhaps. And not even the wing; a single feather of the wing. The most delicate physical contact imaginable; or indeed less than physical, as if it involved a material vastly more delicate than the most delicate material we know. At that moment, I described it as the wing of an angel, and I never found a better way of expressing it. And then it was over.
The following Sunday, I went to receive my wafer with an anticipatory longing to feel that gentle flutter once again. Everything was repeated exactly, except for the flutter. This time, in my pew, when I closed my eyes and swallowed the wafer, my mind wasn’t filled with that cottony substance, and instead, suddenly, with no prior warning, I saw myself nailed to a cross. The vertical part of the cross was made of wood that looked thin and flexible, like a rod, because of the distance; it was several miles high, and from up there the Earth looked tiny, almost like a dot far below. The vertical part of the cross was bending with my weight, or because of the curvature of space. I felt dizzy and panicked. It lasted a few moments, then it was gone.
And never again did a wafer have any noticeable effect on me.
So I’m a Catholic, then, although it’s many years since I last set foot in a church. I don’t think it’s necessary. Once that symbol of something unnameable, which is named Christ, has become part of you, it will be part of you forever, and the Church will be inside you; the real Church, not the earthly, political one.
When Cándido was transferred to the interior of the country and after a while escaped to Italy – having promised to write to me often, though he never sent a single letter – I felt bereft for a while. I drifted from one church to another, but it all sounded completely hollow, and the wafers were made of lower-quality flour and water.
Many years later, I was living in Colonia. One afternoon, Cándido called me on the phone: he was in Montevideo.
‘I’ll be right there,’ he said. Someone had told him how to find me. And he came; a few hours later he was ringing the doorbell to my house.
There he was at the front door, the same as ever. I later found out that he’d come from Australia. And I don’t think he was in Colonia just to see me; a film was being shot there starring Marcello Mastroianni, and the next day Cándido set about tracking him down. Eventually he found him and was able to ask the actor, in Italian, how he was. ‘Bene,’ Marcello answered, and Cándido was satisfied.
But that night, standing at my front door, very serious, with his teeth clenched, he didn’t even say hello, or ask how I was doing. He simply said:
‘Where’s the chessboard?’