“Bread, wine,” the woman repeated mechanically.
“Yes. You’ll remember the names of everything served at your table today, won’t you? So, let’s forget the difficult words, at least until the confession that I know you’ll be able to make one day. We poor sinners can’t be blamed for our verbal failings.”
“No, Father, I don’t want your understanding. I don’t want your false forgiveness, I didn’t come here for that!” the women exclaimed, her whisper building into the shriek of a steam engine. “I demand that you condemn me! I need to hear you say it, it’s what I deserve!”
Now she started to cry. The priest was used to postconfessional tears, as he inwardly called them. They didn’t cry when they committed the sin, of course. Fat chance. Then, their tears would apparently run dry, but normal functions would resume the moment they unburdened themselves into his ear. It was as if guilt came in two stages: a personal dry spell and then a rainy season in the confessional. But this time, even the tears were unfamiliar, different than usual. Yes, he must be in a different village, he thought again, giving the woman time to cry herself out. He must have been taken to a new parish in his sleep: he was listening to bastard women confessing, not to trivial acts about which he never knew how to feel, but real, life-changing passions. Women who wanted but were unable to share the whole truth. And to top it all off, there were these new hybrid tears. This creature wasn’t asking for forgiveness or succor and he was entirely unprepared.
“Good, cry for as long as you need to. Soothe those nerves.”
“No,” said the woman, choking down humors, mucus, and tears.
The priest heard the mixture splash into the pit of her stomach and he was feeling cruel enough to ask, “Why not? Why not allow yourself to be comforted?”
“Not even that tiny concession, my God. No charity, however small…”
Now it was he who chose to be silent. He was thinking of the others waiting their turn. She appeared to be talking past him to someone else, trying to use him as an intermediary. And that meant that the classic delayed confession would take shape sooner or later and the emotions would all come flooding out at once. Now she told him everything, absolutely everything, like a criminal reconstructing the scene of the crime; though torturous, it was the only way to convince them that they had really committed the act, that they were its true author.
“At first, Father, I didn’t understand what he wanted. I thought that maybe he’d gone crazy and was taking advantage of that madness. I let him lead me by the nose,” she said, violently blowing said nose with an insufficiently large handkerchief. “We were in bed, the house was silent, and the children were locked away. I knew something was going to happen, I could smell it in the air. He was lying on his back, his hands behind his head. I was in the same position, watchful in case he tried to strangle me or jump out the half-open window he kept looking at. He said, ‘And now you must call her. Your best friend from school, the one you haven’t seen for years. Everyone had a best friend, didn’t they? First call her by name, then tell me what she looked like, then how she acted.’ I told him everything. I felt like I was talking through a long tunnel. ‘Her name was Claudine,’ I answered. ‘She was taller than the others; she had black hair, an olive complexion, big eyes, and wore her hair in braids. She had a husky voice, the kind of voice that people respect. She was very beautiful. One day, the teacher told us about the Amazons and we all looked at her, like we could see her on a horse with a bow and arrow…’ ‘What else?’ he asked. I felt hypnotized, he was tearing it out of me piece by piece. ‘If she was your best friend there must be more, secrets you shared with each other.’ ‘Yes,’ I said stupidly. ‘We went on daily outings to the woods behind the school. I had to clean the erasers and, no one ever knew, but Claudine would ask for permission to get a glass of water or do a chore or fetch something from another class.’ ‘And then what?’ he asked, squeezing my arm urgently. ‘And then we’d kiss behind a tree. It was so long ago. Please stop torturing me,’ I begged, moving away from him, to the edge of the bed. That was when he wrapped his fingers around my neck and, in a voice I’d never heard before, said, ‘Now you’re going to repeat her name, once, twice, a hundred times, until you’re sure she’s back. Then all the other things you’re keeping to yourself are going to happen again. She will be here, between the two of us, completely naked like that bitch sniffing around the fields today.’”
“Christ Almighty,” murmured the priest, trying to gauge the scope of the sin.
“No, Father, I haven’t finished yet. I began to call her with his awful fingers still clamped around my throat. I don’t know how many times I said her name. I remembered how the eraser fell from my hands… Claudine’s breasts weren’t small like the others, her chest was pert under her blouse and her heart was beating like a hammer. He started to loosen his fingers and I began to lose myself, to let the naked wanderer—I could see her face now—fly in like a ghost through the window. She bonded with us in ways I never knew existed, ways that I never knew I was capable of. The devil may have been pulling our cart of madness, but I was the one cracking the whip.”
“My child,” the priest said vaguely, like someone who has been punched in the nose and doesn’t know whether to hit back or tend to his wound.
“Yes, Father, it happened just like I said. But he’ll never know, not really. I’ll never tell him. I’ll always do what I did last night, spit at him, scratch him, but inside I was screaming with joy, dragging us further and further down until we lost consciousness. The desire will creep back into its shameful shadows, just like before. But I will be desperate to experience it again. I don’t know what to call it, it’s a sin of a thousand forms, but it makes you forget about heaven every night. My God. I’ll be longing for the night to last six months, like it does in other parts of the world.”
“What does heaven have to do with it?”
“Because heaven is heaven. The other place has no name, but it comes before heaven. And then, when you look out the window in the morning, the sky seems limited, too dull, blue, and even.”
There was nothing left to do but face facts. A key word had lost its power. The woman felt weak, anemic, after her revelation. If she died then and there before her confession had finished, she thought, she’d be taken away with her hands crossed over her chest and her head covered in a white veil, as was customary for last rites. But the injustice of Claudine’s death—twenty years forgotten was the same as death—would buzz around her like the first posthumous fly, stripping the spectacle of its dignity like an unkempt interloper at a lavish funeral.
The priest, sensing that she was lost in her memories, allowed them to run their natural course. What was there for him to say? His head was spinning. He knew very well that he wasn’t up to the job. He had become a priest as casually as other people decide to be tailors, doctors, or carpenters. His mother had promised him to the priesthood if he recovered from tuberculosis after being sent away to the mountains. He would never know whether it was divine influence or just the fresh mountain air that had saved him, but he accepted his fait accompli. This is what mothers of a single child are, he thought, female leviathans whose monstrous love lines the coat of the devil himself. At the time, he had had an interest in painting, but he threw away his brushes and took the sacred vows. Now that his mother was dead and God was more or less mummified inside of him, this crisis was a test to be overcome. The worst part was that even before the Naked Woman—suddenly her image lit up the air like a lamp—his brushes had come back, as though the hangman had followed his victim into limbo. He observed people with the eyes of the trade, paying more attention to their colors and shapes than their problems. Sometimes he had to drag himself out from among the golden flecks that sparkled in certain eyes as they begged him for the absolution he was forgetting to administer. But he had to keep going. He must get rid of this sinner and shorten the sessions with the ones that would follow. He would allow himself to be punished by the words that would come raining down upon him and endeavor to mete out a little punishment himself. Otherwise his flock would think that he wasn’t doing his job.