Juanita la Larga: a Novel

Chapter 16

Chapter 16 A t ten o’clock a high Mass was said with organ accompaniment , because they have a very good organ in Villalegre, which is not the case in Tocina1 and in other parts of Lower Andalusia , where it is said that for lack of an organ a guitar is played in church. We cannot confirm this. It may be slander. We’re telling the story because we’ve heard it told. The Virgin once again occupied her chapel behind the main altar , whose reredos, all of it carved, gilded wood, rose to the top of the apse and was a capricious and daring excess in churrigueresque style: a complex labyrinth of twisted stems and stalks, colossal foliage , fruits, arms, symbolic monsters, and rosettes, in which appeared the innocent and winged heads of angels and seraphim. On the right and on another altar, the patron saint was also in his niche. Both altars were aglow with myriad candles and burning torches, and both were adorned with bouquets of flowers and festoons and garlands of myrtle, laurel, and lemon tree sprays. The walls of the church, although white and spotless from a recent whitewashing, were covered in part with red damask, but mostly with moreen, damask’s lookalike. The faithful could admire, on both sides of the altar of Saint Dominic, a host of votive offerings, clear testimony to their celestial advocate’s miraculous power. There were legs, eyes, arms, and even whole children, and a num77 1. A small town in the province of Seville. 78 Juanita la Larga ber of small panels painted in oil, where the miracle was depicted, with each one explained by handwritten signs at the bottom. The throng filled the church. In the center almost all the women, on their knees or sitting on the floor, were fanning themselves. The movement of multicolored fans gladdened the eye. The men were standing all around, and only a few of the walnut benches were occupied by town officials, and the cacique Don Andrés, who came to church, although he did not march in the procession. The people present gawked in amazement at the cacique’s chest, where that day there glittered for the first time the gold, diamond, and ruby insignia and resplendent sash in the shape of a cross that the government had just conferred on him in recognition of his distinguished service. Both Juanas, who had not been in the procession either, because they had watched it pass in front of their house, showed up in church when the Mass was beginning. An involuntary and general murmur of admiration escaped from the men on seeing them. The women grumbled out of anger and envy. The mother came first, elbowing her way through, followed by the daughter, as pretty as a picture in her new Chinese silk dress, her tasseled mantilla, her high tortoiseshell back comb, and a profusion of carnations next to the comb. Since the dress was not low cut, Juanita was not wearing a shawl and revealed to advantage all the gracefulness and slenderness of her figure. She looked like the principal señora, the queen of that observance, and her fellow townspeople could scarcely comprehend that she was the very same girl who not long ago used to go with a water pitcher to the fountain. Her step was martial and resolute, but at the same time majestic and modest. In her hand she held a large fan that she manipulated with much flair, and that hand seemed to have been preserved in cotton wadding , like a delicate piece of jewelry, instead of having been used in humble and hard domestic tasks. It is not an exaggeration to say that the astonishment caused by her entrance into the church interrupted for three or four minutes the order and quiet that prevailed there. The schoolteacher, a wellread man who knew Spanish ballads by heart, recalled in consequence , whispering in a town councilor’s ear, the effect that a certain Sevillian girl had made with a similar entrance into the hermitage of Saint Simon, exciting even the acolytes and sacristans, who, instead of saying amen, said love, love. Such a huge triumph did not shock Doña Inés. She had already learned of the transformation of Juanita from a rustic village girl into someone who thought of herself as a lady, and she already knew, thanks to Crispina’s...