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By Root 1127 0

how to read or write music, and never learned. He worked by ear, and by intuition. Once he had learned the melody, he sang it to the mestizo Blas Sanjinés, a teacher in the neighborhood, who set it down in notes on music paper. He never had the slightest desire to make a paying business of his talent: he never copyrighted his compositions or charged royalties for the use of them, and when friends came to him with the news that mediocrities from the lower depths of the artistic world were plagiarizing his melodies and his lyrics, he merely yawned in boredom. Despite this disinterest, he found himself earning a certain amount of money, sent to him by record companies or radio stations, or forced upon him by people who had asked him to play at a party. Crisanto gave all this income to his parents, and when they died (he was thirty years old at the time), he spent it with his friends. He never wanted to leave Los Barrios Altos, nor room H on the little alleyway where he had been born. Was this out of fidelity and affection toward his humble origins, out of love for the gutter? These feelings no doubt played a certain role. But above all it was because in this narrow back street he was only a stone’s throw from the offspring of consanguineous parents, whose name was Fátima, whom he had first met when she was a servant girl and who had now taken the veil and pronounced her vows of obedience, poverty, and (alas!) chastity as the bride of Christ.

This had been, and still was, the secret of his life, the reason for that sadness that everyone (blindness of the multitude to the soul’s wounds) attributed to his withered legs and his dwarflike, asymmetrical physique. Moreover, thanks to this difformity that made him appear years younger, Crisanto had continued to accompany his mother to the religious citadel of the Discalced Carmelites, and he had been able to see the girl of his dreams at least once a week. Did Sister Fátima love the cripple as he loved her? There is no way of knowing. A hothouse flower, ignorant of the lubricious mysteries of the pollen of the fields, Fátima had acquired a conscience, feelings, grown from childhood to adolescence to adulthood in the aseptic world of the convent, surrounded by old women. Everything that had reached her ears, her eyes, her imagination had been rigorously filtered through the moral sifting-screen of the Order (the strictest of the strict). How could this creature who was virtue incarnate have guessed that what she believed belonged to God (love?) could also be a human interchange?

But (water that flows down the mountainside to the sea, little calf that before opening its eyes seeks the teat to suck the white milk) perhaps she did love him. In any event, he was her friend, the only person her own age she knew, the only playmate she had ever had, if “play” is the proper word for the work they shared—sweeping floors, cleaning windowpanes, watering plants, lighting candles—as María Portal, the illustrious seamstress, taught the nuns the secret of her embroideries.

But it is also true that the two of them, from childhood on, talked a great deal together during these years. Naïve dialogues—she was innocent; he was shy—in which (delicacy of lilies and spirituality of doves) they spoke to each other of love without the word ever crossing their lips, by way of interposed subjects, such as the pretty colors of Sister Fátima’s collection of pious images and the explanations that Crisanto gave her of what streetcars, automobiles, movies were. All this was recounted, for those who had ears to hear, in Maravillas’s songs dedicated to that mysterious woman whose name was never mentioned, save in the very famous waltz whose title so intrigued his admirers: “Fátima is the Virgin of Fátima.”

Though he knew that he would never be able to take her out of the convent and make her his, Crisanto Maravillas was happy just seeing his muse a few hours each week. These brief encounters left him all the more profoundly inspired, and were thus responsible for the birth of his many mozamalas, yaravíes, festejos,