Chapter 10 The Shadow of the Confessional

MERCEDES

The kiss is an abyss of orange blossom, fire, and desperation, but reality rips us from the delirium in the most violent way possible.

"Dr. Almeda! Are you in there?"

The voice—shrill, aristocratic, and loaded with a latent suspicion—comes from the hallway, accompanied by three impatient knocks. It is Dr. Clara Leguina, a professor of Moral Theology and the most inquisitive member of the department.

Panic enters my chest like a needle of ice.

I pull away from Claudia suddenly. My breathing is so loud in the silence of the office that I fear Leguina can hear it through the wood.

Claudia stares at me with dilated eyes, her cheeks flushed, and her lips damp, bitten by the passion of just a moment ago. Her dark hair is disheveled.

My God. If she opens the door now, we are dead. My reputation, my career, my soul... everything will reduce to ashes.

"Dr. Almeda! The dean tells me your car is still in the parking lot," Leguina insists, and I notice the brass doorknob turning, held back only by the miraculous click of the lock.

"Just... one moment, Clara!" I manage to call out, horrified to find my voice shaking.

I point frantically toward the small private restroom at the back of the office, hidden behind a service door that barely distinguishes itself from the wall.

Claudia nods immediately. She glides like a silent shadow across the hardwood floor and locks herself inside just as I desperately wipe my mouth, smudging the remains of smeared lipstick with the cuff of my silk blouse.

I put on my glasses. I smooth down my suit jacket with twitching hands. I touch the gold cross, which now feels like it burns my skin like a searing branding iron.

I walk toward the door, turn the brass key trying not to make a sound, and open it just a crack, positioning my body in the gap.

"Clara," I force an icy, professional smile. "Forgive me. I am... organizing some notes from the conference and I don't want any interruptions."

Dr. Leguina, a petite woman with reptile eyes behind gold frames, sizes me up with an analytical gaze that makes me break into a cold sweat. Her eyes linger for a second at the base of my neck, on my breathing that still struggles to stabilize.

"My, Mercedes. You look exhausted," she comments, trying to peer over my shoulder into the dimness of the office. "I am here to ask you for the minutes of the Salamanca plenary session. I thought you would have them here."

"The dean has them, Clara. I handed them to him this morning," I lie without blinking, keeping my voice firm with academic authority. "If you'll excuse me, I am on my way out. I need to stop by the chapel before they close."

"Ah, the Vigil of Shadows," she nods, softening her hostility a bit at the mention of my devotion. "That is an excellent custom. I won't keep you any longer. Good night, Mercedes."

"Good night."

I wait for the sound of her stiletto heels to fade down the hallway before closing the door again. I press my back against the wood, exhaling a sigh of relief that feels like a prayer. But the danger is not over.

CLAUDIA

I step out of the small office restroom the moment I hear silence. Mercedes is leaning against the door, pale as a corpse, her eyes closed and one hand clutching her gold cross so tightly her knuckles are shaking.

"Mercedes..." I whisper, taking a step toward her.

"No," she cuts me off immediately, opening her eyes.

Her gray gaze no longer holds the fire from a few minutes ago; now it is filled with a desolate terror, a wall of ice rising between us once again.

"Leave, Claudia. Go down the service stairs.

This... this never happened. It is an aberration. A weakness born of the devil."

The word aberration drives a dagger into my stomach. I don't understand how she can call the purest, most electric and real moment of my life that. But I see the panic on her face, and I know now is not the time to argue.

I exit into the damp hallway through the back door.

The night chill hits my face, but my mind is still burning.

I need to wash my face, clear my head. I walk through the dimly lit corridors of the faculty down to the old student restrooms, a basement with vaulted ceilings and white tiles that smell of dampness and bleach.

I turn on the tap of the porcelain sinks and splash freezing water onto my cheeks. I look at myself in the worn mirror. My lips are redder, my eyes have a brightness I don't recognize. Javi... God, Javi is a speck of dust in the middle of this gale.

Suddenly, the wooden door of the restroom opens.

I spin around, my heart in my throat, expecting to see Dr. Leguina or the dean. But it's her.

Mercedes walks into the student restroom.

She carries her gray coat over her shoulders and her leather bag in her hand.

She stops when she sees me, surprised to find me here.

The door closes behind her with a groan from the hinges.

We are alone in the dim light of the basement, beneath the single flickering beam of a fluorescent light.

Neither of us speaks. The only sound is the steady dripping of the tap I haven't turned off completely.

Mercedes takes three slow steps, as if an invisible, magnetic force is dragging her toward me despite her own prayers. She stops beside me, in front of the row of sinks. Her bare hands tremble subtly against the edge of the damp porcelain.

"I can't breathe, Claudia," she confesses in a thread of a voice, looking at our hands reflected in the mirror. "I walk into my office and I smell you. I step into the hallway and I see you. This is killing me."

A wave of tenderness and desire blurs my vision. I raise my hand and, with a boldness that frightens me, I place my fingers over hers as they rest on the edge of the cold sink. The contrast between her warm skin and the freezing water that still drips makes my skin prickle.

Mercedes closes her eyes and rests her forehead against the tiled wall. She doesn't pull her hand away. On the contrary, she turns her palm and intertwines her fingers with mine with a savage desperation, squeezing me as if she is drowning in the middle of a storm.

"I am afraid," she whispers against the cold tile.

"Me too," I admit, leaning subtly toward her, feeling the heat of her body in the middle of the basement's stone tomb. "But I can't help it."

We hear an echo of male voices in the hallway outside.

Students coming down from the library. The spell shatters instantly.

Mercedes lets go of my hand as if my touch is poison, takes a step back, and, without looking at me again, rushes out of the bathroom, leaving me alone with the sound of the water and the trembling of my own fingers.

MERCEDES

The scent of stale incense, burning wax, and old wood in the Church of San Griselmo always brings me peace. Today, however, it feels like the atmosphere of a crypt.

The church is dark, illuminated only by the flickering light of the red candles at the feet of the Virgin of Sorrows and the small green bulb indicating that the confessional at the back is occupied.

I walk down the central nave, my heels echoing on the marble like the footsteps of a ghost. I kneel in the last pew, but prayers do not come to my mind.

I only see Claudia's dark eyes under the flickering fluorescent light of the bathroom, feel the warmth of her fingers intertwined with mine over the damp porcelain.

I stand up, driven by a desperation bordering on madness. I approach the carved walnut confessional. I open the side door and slip into the dimness of the booth. The space is claustrophobic, smelling of the cold sweat of sinners and the priest's tobacco.

I kneel on the worn wood. I slide open the small metal grate. On the other side, in the shadows, I can make out the profile of Father Esteban, the faculty confessor, a seventy-year-old man of unyielding morals.

"Hail Mary Most Pure," I whisper, my voice broken.

"Conceived without sin. Tell me, my child," the tired voice of the priest responds.

I press the gold cross against my chest so hard I feel I am going to break the chain. Tears of guilt and helplessness finally overflow, slipping down my cheeks in the darkness of the cubicle.

"Father... I have sinned. I have sinned gravely against the sixth commandment. Against decency, against my ministry, against God."

"The weakness of the flesh is a mire into which we can all fall, daughter. Was it a slip with a colleague? A moment of abandonment?"

I swallow, and I feel the air in the confessional become unbreathable. The truth is a monster that will devour me if I speak it aloud, but I cannot lie in the sacrament.

"It... it is a woman, Father. One of my students," I confess in a whisper that is barely a thread of cold air.

A heavy, deathly silence falls on the other side of the grate. I can feel the instant rigidity in Father Esteban's silhouette. The sigh he exhales is loaded with a disappointment and a repulsion that chills me to the bone.

"Almighty God... Mercedes, is that you?" He recognizes my voice, and the use of my name in that tone of horror shatters me inside.

"You are the chair professor. A woman who must be an example of virtue in this institution.

What you are telling me is not just a sin of the flesh; it is an aberration against nature, a scandal that can destroy the faculty and damn your soul to eternal fire. "

"I know, Father, I know..." I sob, covering my mouth with my hand. "But I can't get her out of my head. Her touch... when she touches me, I feel my entire theology reduce to ashes. Help me. Please, save me from myself."

"You must cut off this satanic temptation at the root, Mercedes," the priest decrees with an ecclesiastical coldness that freezes my blood.

"You cannot see her alone again. You must cancel her tutorials, change her thesis committee if necessary.

Stay away from her as if she were the plague.

Do penance. Pray three rosaries a day on your knees on the cold floor, beg for the grace of purity, and punish that rebellious body.

If you do not distance yourself from her immediately, I will not be able to give you absolution.

Do you hear me? You will remain in a state of mortal sin. "

I look at the metal grate. The confessor's words echo in my head, but for the first time in my life, the doctrine sounds empty, stale, disconnected from the living, painful fire burning in my chest.

I close my eyes. In the shadows of my mind, the face of Christ does not appear, nor does the Virgin's. The clean, frightened, and innocent gaze of Claudia de la Vega in the faculty bathroom appears.

"Yes, Father..." I lie in the middle of the confessional, my soul shattered into a thousand pieces. "I will distance myself from her. I promise you."

I step out of the confessional shaking, knowing I have just committed the worst sacrilege: lying to God to protect the memory of a transgression that no longer has a return ticket.