The War Of The End Of The World - Mario Vargas Llosa [82]
What had happened—an event that remained the talk of the town for many days—did not prevent the Counselor from continuing to preach in the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição during his stay in Cumbe, or again when, months later, he returned accompanied by a retinue of the elect, or on other occasions in the years that followed. The difference was that Father Joaquim usually was absent when these subsequent sermons were delivered. Alexandrinha, however, was not. She was always there, in the third row, with her turned-up nose, listening to the saint’s admonishments against worldly wealth and excesses, his defense of austere habits, and his exhortations to prepare the soul for death through sacrifice and prayer. The former water divineress began to show signs of growing religious fervor. She lighted candles in the vaulted niches along the streets, she spent a great deal of time on her knees before the altar in an attitude of profound concentration, she organized acts of thanksgiving, public prayers, Rosaries, novenas. One day she appeared with her head covered with a black kerchief and an amulet with the image of the Blessed Jesus on her breast. Rumor had it that, though they continued to live under the same roof, nothing that would offend God happened now between Father Joaquim and her. When the townspeople dared to ask Dom Joaquim about Alexandrinha, he would change the subject. He seemed bewildered. Although he continued to lead a happy life, his relations with the woman who shared his house and was the mother of his children changed. In public at least, they were as perfectly polite to each other as two people who scarcely knew each other. The Counselor aroused indefinable feelings in the parish priest. Did he fear, respect, envy, pity him? The fact was that every time the saint came to town Father Joaquim opened the church to him, confessed him, gave him Communion, and during his stay in Cumbe was a model of temperance and devotion.
When, on the saint’s last visit, Alexandrinha Correa took off with him among his followers, abandoning everything she had, Father Joaquim was the only person in town who did not appear to be surprised.
He thought that he had never feared death and that he didn’t fear it now. But his hands trembled, shivers ran up and down his spine, and he kept moving closer and closer to the fire to warm his ice-cold insides. Yet he was sweating. He thought: “You’re dying of fear, Gall.” Those great beads of sweat, those shivers, that icy feeling, that trembling were the panic of one who has a premonition of death. “You don’t know yourself at all well, old pal.” Or had he changed? For he was certain that he had never felt anything like this as a young man, in the jail in Paris when he was waiting to be shot to death by a firing squad, or in Barcelona in the infirmary, while the stupid bourgeois were curing him so that he would be in good health when they executed him by tying him to a post and strangling him with an iron collar. He was about to die: your hour has come, Galileo.
Would his penis get hard at the supreme moment, as was said to happen to men who drowned or were beheaded? That belief straight out of a horror show concealed some tortuous truth, some mysterious affinity between sex and the awareness of death. If such a thing did not exist, what had happened early this morning and what had happened a little while ago would not have occurred. A little while ago? Hours, rather. Night had fallen and there were countless stars in the sky. He remembered