Happy Families_ Stories - Carlos Fuentes [90]
She knew that this way, by being so obliging, she provoked Father Benito. She wasn’t a good-for-nothing. And she wasn’t a beast of burden. When she went down to the market, one admired her cadenced walk, the lightness of her flowered dress, the guessed-at feminine forms, firm and rounded. Mayalde was, for one, the elusive magic of the village. She smiled at everybody.
“She’s simpleminded.”
One thought, however, that her coquettishness was fidelity to Father Benito Mazón. That was what one told oneself.
One day Father Benito broke the flowerpots and freed the canaries. She remained very still, staring at the priest and imagining that she, if she decided to, could change into a flower or fly like a bird.
Father Benito did not want to admit that nothing defeated Mayalde. He felt like telling her, “Go on, my girl. Go back to your mother. Tell her to treat you well and that I remember her. You know I’m no good at being your father. We’ll see if she even bothers to see you. Though I doubt it. You should have seen how glad she was to get rid of you.”
For her part she thought, I make him angry because I love things, I love the flowers, the birds, the markets, and he doesn’t. I serve him, but he doesn’t enjoy it. He’s a sour old man with vinegar in his blood.
It was clear to Mayalde that Father Benito wanted to enjoy things. She bathed outside under an improvised shower in a small courtyard, and she knew the priest spied on her. It amused her to play with the schedule. Sometimes she bathed at dawn; other times she bathed at night. The priest always spied on her, and she soaped her sex and her breasts before pretending alarm at being caught, covering herself quickly with her hands and laughing without stopping as she imagined the confusion of the priest with the narrow eyes of an uneasy wolf and the iguana’s profile.
“Put aside evil thoughts,” the priest would tell her when she confessed. And he would add with growing exaltation: “Repeat after me, child. I am a sack of foul-smelling filth. My sins are an abomination. I am pernicious, scandalous, incorrigible. I deserve to be locked away in a cell on bread and water until I die.” And rolling up his eyes to heaven: “My fault, my fault, my most grievous fault.”
Mayalde observed him with a smile, convinced he had lost his mind. The girl shrugged in amazement and kept her own counsel.
Father Mazón would sing these damn hallelujahs that have been repeated in Mexican churches for the past five hundred years and eventually move away from Mayalde, the object of his recriminations, and conclude by praising himself, remembering what they had told him at home when he disclosed his ecclesiastical vocation:
“Benito, there’s nothing theological about you.”
“Benito, you look more like a scoundrel.”
“Benito, don’t tell us you’re not pretty horny.”
He agreed with the last two propositions but decided to put them to the test by subjecting himself to the disciplines of the first: entering the priesthood.
His relationship with the beautiful Mayalde joined together his three temptations: the divine, the worldly, and the erotic. How far had it gone? In the village, one didn’t know for sure. The situation itself—priest with supposed goddaughter or niece who, in the end, turned out to be secret daughter—had occurred so often it couldn’t withstand another version. The strength of the tradition obliged one to think certain things. It also allowed us, a few of us, to propose the exception.
“That only happens in old movies, Doña Altagracia. Let’s say she really is his niece or an orphan or whatever all of you like and prefer, and the priest simply and openly exploits her as a maid without enjoying her as a concubine.”
Some said yes, others no. One, who tries to be fair, would not admit baseless gossip or unproven suspicions. But when Mayalde came down the mountain to the market, a melancholy silence surrounded her. The village smelled of wet dog, of lit hearth, of roasted food, of burro dung, of ocote pine smoke, of untouchable snow, of unpardonable sun. She moved as if she weren’t touching the