Chapter 12 The First Sacrilege

MERCEDES

The silence Claudia leaves behind when she departs is not an emptiness; it is a presence that weighs heavy, that breathes, and that smells of cool orange blossom in every corner of the office.

I stand motionless behind my mahogany desk.

I raise my right hand—the one that hung just inches from hers—and stare at it.

My fingers tremble with a rhythmic spasm completely beyond my control.

She almost breaks through my safety buffer, and I, in my mystical delirium, propose a pact of absolute chastity to her.

A piece of theological madness just to keep from letting her go. A pious lie to deceive the Creator.

I walk unsteadily toward the back bookshelf, where the leather-bound volumes of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae rest, covered in invisible dust. Hidden behind the leather spines on the lowest shelf, in the shadows, I keep a small olivewood box that I haven’t opened in fifteen years.

I pull the box out. The wood feels cold. As I lift the lid, the scent of dried lavender and aged paper hits my memory like a whip crack.

Inside, there are no love letters, no explicit photographs. There is only a small prayer card of the Virgin of Montserrat, frayed at the corners, and a blue silk bookmark that once belonged to a missal.

I close my eyes, and the gray stone of San Griselmo fades away.

I am eighteen years old. Winter at the all-girls boarding school of the Adoratrices Mothers in the north is a monster of fog and bells that toll at six in the morning.

I wear the navy serge uniform, buttoned to the chin, and my hands are perpetually red from chilblains and the holy water from the font at the entrance.

Her name is Inés.

Inés is everything I don't allow myself to be.

She breaks the solemn nighttime silence to read foreign novels under the covers with a flashlight; she wears her dark hair thick and free, and she laughs with a freshness that makes the rigidity of the stone corridors tremble.

The nuns watch her from the corners of their eyes, fearful of her "rebellious spirit.

" I, already the class discipline prefect, watch her with a mix of reproach and a blind fascination that burns my chest.

Our collision happens in the boarding school library on a stormy afternoon, where the light from the oil lamps barely illuminates the wooden desks.

"You're cold, Mercedes," Inés whispers, appearing by my side like a warm shadow. Her uniform smells of rain and the apple she just stole from the dining hall.

"I am perfectly fine, Inés. Return to your duties," I reply, forcing the rigid voice I already use as a shield.

Inés pays me no mind. She sits on my very same bench, reducing the distance between us to nothing.

Without asking permission, she takes my freezing hands in hers.

Her palms are warm, alive, incredibly soft.

At the contact of her skin, I feel an electric current, an unfamiliar tremor that shoots up my arms and steals the air from my lungs.

I don't know what it is. In my eighteen-year-old vocabulary, no words exist for this.

I only know it is beautiful. Too beautiful not to be a sin.

"See how you're shaking..." Inés murmurs, looking at me with dark eyes that glint in the library's shadows. She leans in a little closer. Her breath, tasting of fresh fruit, brushes against my lips.

I freeze, sucked into a gravity that terrifies me.

Inés raises a hand and caresses my cheek with the pad of her thumb, a gesture of such pure tenderness that it brings tears to my eyes instantly.

I feel a savage, desperate urge to lean into her, to press her body against mine beneath the cold gaze of the wooden saints on the walls.

But fear is stronger.

An intense, inherited fear that screams at me that I am on the edge of the abyss.

That what I feel is an aberration, a satanic temptation that will destroy my soul and damn me to eternal fire.

I rip myself away from her suddenly, shoving the wooden bench back with a violent screech that shatters the library silence.

"Don't touch me!" I snap, my voice broken with panic and disgust toward myself. "It's an indecency. A baseness."

Inés's face contorts, showing a wound of bewilderment and pain that will haunt me for the rest of my days. She tries to take a step toward me, her hands hovering in the freezing air.

"Mercedes, I only wanted..."

"Get away from me," I cut her off, implacable, reclaiming the stone mask I have just perfected. "If you come near me again, I will tell the Mother Superior. You are a danger to the order of this house."

I carry out my threat. Not to the Mother Superior, but in the confessional that very afternoon.

I kneel and confess the "deviation of my thoughts" with such a level of detail and self-loathing that the confessor imposes a brutal penance on me.

From that day on, I never look Inés in the eye again.

I treat her with an indifference so icy, so ruthless, that she ultimately fades away.

At the end of the term, her parents pull her out of the boarding school. I never hear from her again.

I bury the eighteen-year-old Mercedes in that library. I become the marble statue everyone respects.

I snap my eyes open.

The office at San Griselmo rushes back around me, with its scent of mahogany and its buzzing heater. I hold the Montserrat prayer card between my trembling fingers.

I have spent twenty years in a desert of rectitude, believing I conquered the flesh, convincing myself that my loneliness is the price of sanctity.

And now... now Claudia de la Vega arrives with her thesis, with her clean gaze, and with that very same mouth that awakens the exact same fire within me, but multiplied by a thousand.

I press the prayer card against my chest, feeling the gold cross dig into my flesh through my blouse.

"Not again, Lord..." I moan in the shadows of the empty office, as tears of guilt and memory slip down my cheeks. "Don't make me go through this again. Save me from her. Or save me from myself."

Because now I know, with terrifying certainty, that if I destroy this love again to save my soul, this time I won't have enough ashes left to keep pretending I am alive.