“All right, fine, of course,” said Father O’Donovan. “I’ll talk to him as long as Fonchito wants to talk to me. But don’t try to force him. Don’t even think about obliging him to come here. Nothing like that. Let him come willingly, if he feels like it. So the two of us can talk like a couple of friends, present it to him like that. Don’t take this too seriously, Rigoberto. I’ll bet it’s just some kid’s nonsense.”
“I didn’t, at first,” Rigoberto said. “Lucrecia and I thought that since he’s a boy with a lot of imagination, he was inventing the story to make himself important, to keep us hanging on his words.”
“But does this Edilberto Torres exist or is he an invention?” asked Father O’Donovan.
“That’s what I’d like to know, Pepín, that’s why I’ve come to see you. So far I haven’t been able to find out. One day I think he does exist and the next day I think he doesn’t. Sometimes I think the boy’s telling me the truth, and other times I think he’s playing with us, fooling us.”
Rigoberto had never understood why Father O’Donovan, instead of pursuing teaching and an intellectual career as a scholar and theologian within the Church — he was erudite and sensitive, loved ideas and the arts, and read a great deal — had stubbornly confined himself to pastoral work in a very modest parish in Bajo el Puente, where the residents were uneducated as a rule, a world in which his talent seemed wasted. Once he had dared to ask him about it. “Why didn’t you write or give lectures, Pepín? Why didn’t you teach at the university, for example?” If there was anyone among his acquaintances who seemed to have a clear intellectual vocation, a passion for ideas, it was Pepín.
“Because I’m needed more in my parish in Bajo el Puente.” Pepín O’Donovan only shrugged. “Pastors are needed; there are more than enough intellectuals, Ears. You’re mistaken if you think it’s difficult for me to do what I do. Parish work interests me a great deal, it plunges me headfirst into real life. In libraries, one sometimes becomes too isolated from the everyday world, from ordinary people. I don’t believe in your spaces of civilization that set you apart from others and turn you into an anchorite, but we’ve already discussed this.”
He didn’t seem like a priest because he never touched on religious subjects with his old schoolmate; he knew that Rigoberto had stopped believing when he was in the university, but being friends with an agnostic didn’t seem to discomfit him in the least. On the few occasions he had lunch in the house in Barranco, after getting up from the table, he and Rigoberto would usually go into the study and play a CD, generally something by Bach, whose organ music Pepín O’Donovan loved.
“I was convinced he was making up all those appearances,” Rigoberto explained. “But this psychologist who saw Fonchito, Dr. Augusta Delmira Céspedes, you’ve heard of her, haven’t you? It seems she’s very well known. She made me doubt again. She told me and Lucrecia in no uncertain terms that Fonchito wasn’t lying, that he was telling the truth. That Edilberto Torres exists. She left us very confused, as you can imagine.”
Rigoberto told Father O’Donovan that after going back and forth about it for a long time, he and Lucrecia had decided to find a specialized agency (“One of those agencies that jealous husbands hire to spy on their erring spouses?” the priest asked mockingly, and Rigoberto nodded: “Exactly”). A detective would follow Fonchito whenever he left the house, alone or with friends. The report from the agency—“which, by the way, cost me a fortune”—had been eloquent and contradictory: At no time had the boy had the slightest contact anywhere with older men, not at the movies, or at the Argüelles family’s party, or when he went to school or came home, or even in his fleeting visit to a discotheque in San Isidro with his friend Pezzuolo. And yet, in that discotheque, when Fonchito went to the bathroom to pee, he’d had an unexpected encounter: There was the aforementioned gentleman, washing his hands (of course there was nothing about this in the report from the agency).
“Hello, Fonchito,” said Edilberto Torres.
“At the discotheque?” asked Rigoberto.
“In the bathroom at the discotheque, Papa,” Fonchito specified. He spoke with confidence, but it seemed as if his tongue were heavy and each word required enormous effort.
“Are you having a good time here with your friend Pezzuolo?” The gentleman seemed disconsolate. He’d washed his hands and now was drying them with a paper towel he’d just pulled from the small box on the wall. He wore his usual purple sweater but his suit was blue, not gray.
“Why are you crying, señor?” Fonchito dared to ask him.
“Edilberto Torres was crying there too, in the bathroom of a discotheque?” Rigoberto gave a start. “Like on the day you saw him sitting beside you at the Larcomar Cineplex?”
“At the movies I saw him in the dark and I might have been wrong,” Fonchito responded with no hesitation. “Not in the bathroom at the discotheque. There was enough light. He was crying. Tears came out of his eyes and ran down his face. It was … it was … I don’t know how to say it, Papa, it was sad, really sad, I swear. Seeing him cry in silence, not saying anything, looking at me with so much sorrow. He seemed to be suffering so much and it made me feel bad.”
“Excuse me, but I have to go, señor,” Fonchito stammered. “My friend Chato Pezzuolo is waiting for me outside. I don’t know how to tell you how it makes me feel to see you like this, señor.”
“In other words, as you can see, Pepín, this isn’t a joke,” Rigoberto concluded. “Is he telling us the whole story? Is he delirious? Is he hallucinating? Except for this, the boy seems very normal when he talks about other things. This month his grades in school have been just as good as usual. Lucrecia and I don’t know what to think anymore. Is he losing his mind? Is this an adolescent crisis of nerves, something that will pass? Does he just want to frighten us and have us worry about him? That’s why I’ve come, old man, that’s why we thought of you. I’d be so grateful if you could help us. It was Lucrecia’s idea, as I said: ‘Father O’Donovan might be the solution.’ She’s a believer, as you know.”
“Yes, naturally, of course I will, Rigoberto,” his friend reassured him again. “As long as he agrees to talk to me. That’s my only condition. I can see him at your house, or he can come here to the church. Or I can meet him somewhere else. Any day this week. I realize now that this is very important to both of you. I promise to do everything I can. The only thing, really, is that you not force him. Suggest it to him and let him decide whether he wants to talk to me.”
“If you get me out of this, I’ll even convert, Pepín.”
“Not on your life,” said Father O’Donovan, making the sign of vade retro. “We don’t want sinners as refined as you in the Church, Ears.”
They didn’t know how to bring up the subject with Fonchito. It was Lucrecia who had the courage to speak to him. The boy was somewhat unnerved at first and took it as a joke. “But what do you mean, Stepmother, isn’t my papa an agnostic? Was it his idea for me to talk to a priest? Does he want me to confess?” She explained that Father O’Donovan was a very experienced man and a very wise person whether he was a clergyman or not. “And if he persuades me to enter a seminary and become a priest, what will you and my papa say then?” the boy continued to joke.
“Absolutely not, Fonchito, don’t say that even to be funny. You, a priest? God save us!”
The boy agreed, as he’d agreed to see Dr. Delmira Céspedes, and said he preferred to go to the church in Bajo el Puente. Rigoberto drove him in his car. He dropped him off and went to pick him up a couple of hours later.
“He’s a very nice guy, your friend,” was all Fonchito would say.