I HAD WATCHED my father enter the church through the side door.
I bit my lip in embarrassment as I realized that he was too humble and afraid to go in by the main door. He didn’t know that I was there; that I’d tagged after him for the last hour or so as he trudged through the town, begging. He would have been shamed if he’d known his son had witnessed people spurning him, and one grandee pushing him aside and spitting in the street as he passed by.
He thought I was with my mother, sitting beside the straw mattress where she lay, unable to move with the sickness that had struck her down a few weeks ago. I was supposed to stay beside her and try to keep her quiet, for last night she’d started to call out words in a language I didn’t know. When this began, my father became very anxious and tried to hush her so that the neighbours wouldn’t hear her speak in this strange tongue. And then he’d stroked her head, while murmuring, half chanting, some poem in her ear. It seemed to soothe her. When I’d asked him what she was saying, he told me it was the speech of angels. But I recognized his expression: I had seen it on his face before, in other places we’d lived, when he decided it was time for us to move on – the look of a hunted animal when it scented danger.
All my life we had travelled from town to town. At the time I didn’t think much about the reason for this. There was never enough money. Any we had my father used to buy medicine, for my mother’s health was always poor, and often one of us would have to stay home to look after her. Our days were spent finding enough food to eat, and this was what occupied my mind now. I knew that I made a better beggar than my father. He would have been distressed had he found out that I sometimes resorted to begging for bread. But I’d done it before, taking advantage of the fact that I looked much younger than my years. When neither of us could get work, I would huddle down in a doorway until I saw some rich señora approaching, and then I’d whimper in a pathetic way.
But as I sat under a tree in the square outside the church on this sultry summer day, I was very hopeful that my father would be successful. When he left that morning he’d asked me to tend to my mother, but I had disobeyed him. My mother had fallen asleep so I’d trailed behind him as he followed the richly dressed girl and her companion. I figured out, as I imagined he had, that if someone like her was walking in this area, she could have only one destination. She would be going to the shrine of the Virgin Mary, which was inside the church on the cliff overlooking the sea. And if this girl was visiting a church to pray on a day not designated for religious observance, then it was likely that she had a merciful disposition. She seemed to be about my age, with the most beautiful long black hair caught up in swirls and curls with fine tortoiseshell combs. From time to time the young nobleman who was with her would turn to smile at her and reach out to touch her hair. She looked like a good girl, her face properly covered with a veil, kind and devout. She’d come to this poorer part of the town to visit the shrine, so it must mean that she sought some special favour, that she had a sorrow or a petition of her own.
I thought, She will listen to my father as she expects her God to listen to her.
I was wrong.