carrying the cold inside you. Actually liking the cold. The perfect school of adherence to the dictatorship in his case was Santiago Seminary. One of the coldest places in the world, a physical cold that got behind your eyes. You had to fight the cold. Franco’s regime and the Church were united, the synthesis of everything, ‘like body and soul’, a continuation of the holy union of throne and altar discussed in a famous book by Archbishop Rafael de Vélez, founder of the seminary and author of an equally famous work, The Sheath of Faith. Santos recalled Vélez’s portrait in the seminary’s dark central corridor. He’d been painted holding that book for which he was famous, the title clearly visible, except that it’d been abbreviated to The Sheath. He also recalled the nervous, furtive laughter the sight of this title provoked in young men who’d only just discovered the comical treachery committed by words when least expected. As for their historical mission, they’d been told the spirit of reconquest and crusade should remain vigilant. As a mark of glory, the novices were reminded that the only time Santiago’s seminarists had demonstrated politically was under the banner of traditionalism, which they’d used to beat the negros, as the liberals of the nineteenth century were known. It was also the seminary that published the first panegyric on Franco during the war, in praise of a movement its protagonists didn’t hesitate to call Fascist, starting with the author of the work, the priest Manuel Silva, who described in detail how the military uprising had been planned, how democratic inspectors and officers had been hoodwinked and all that machinery set in motion even before the elections, which the right was expected to lose, and who wrote with triumphal fervour about bloody acts, the rosary of crimes and human victims, necessary ritual sacrifices to see off not only the Republic, but also the heresy of centuries, anything at odds with the medieval empire of throne and altar. So it was that the Holy Year in Compostela, which should have been 1936, was prolonged for the first time in history so that Franco could be received as Caudillo in the cathedral, greeted with raised arms, led to the altar under a canopy and named Sword of God.
He turned the hourglass upside down. Earth and sky, sky and earth. His mind was going too fast. Paúl Santos had left the seminary, but not because he rebelled or lost his faith. Because of laughter. That clandestine laughter he was unable to suppress. One day, he opened the window of his room on the top floor of the seminary, with a view of Mount Pedroso to the west, and heard laughter. Another kind of laughter. Not at all clandestine. Seemingly provoked by the sun’s tickling. And he knew he’d never resist a woman’s laughter, however much he pored over The Sheath by Archbishop Vélez. So he went to the hospital in Coruña and spoke to Mother Catherine Laboure, his protector, who was drinking hot black coffee without sugar, who was smoking Celtas in the absence of Gauloises, because Romeo had got waylaid, and who was surrounded by children, a magnet for anyone with problems, anyone who felt unloved, because of her body, some part of her body, there they all were, he as well, a grown man, first up with his problem. He had a thing for laughter. That particular kind of laughter.
‘Laughter never hurt anyone, God included.’
‘What shall I do?’
‘Leave the seminary,’ she replied. ‘Straightaway. You’re not meant to be a priest. If you kill off laughter, you’ll develop an illness in your intestine. I’ll help you find a way.’
‘OK, but what shall I do?’
In a few days, he’d gone from aspiring to be God’s emissary to feeling completely lost.
‘You wanted to fight against evil? Then fight against evil!’
She blew out a cloud of smoke, which she compensated for with a sip of steaming hot coffee. She was crazy, but Paúl Santos knew from experience she was almost always right. She was a courageous nutter in a place for taming. ‘One thing’s the Holy Spirit,’ the chaplain had remarked about her sarcastically, ‘another,