Requiem for a Woman's Soul

by Omar Rivabella

Genres: Hispanic & Latino

Synopsis

In a town in an unnamed Latin American country, a Catholic priest—racked by moral doubt regarding the Church’s social role—discovers the torn papers of a diary belonging to a woman arrested and brutally tortured for no apparent reason.

Release date: January 21, 2015

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 128

Sample

I
 
It was at the 7:00 A.M. mass that I saw her. She sat alone in the last row of pews, hugging a large cardboard box, that partially hid her face, on her lap.
 
It was the box that first caught my attention as I mounted the pulpit and briefly scanned the small nave, more out of habit than to find out which parishioners were present.
 
The eyes of the woman never left me as she fiercely held onto the box. I wondered if in her possession was a newborn infant.
 
During the mass I was obsessed with the woman and her cardboard box. Several times while praying I gazed furtively at her, searching for some clue to her identity. It had been six months since I had taken charge of this parish in this small town of less than one thousand inhabitants, and by now I had gotten to know almost everyone in town. But I had never seen this woman before—in church or on the street. I now had a sudden premonition that something secret and strange could erupt that morning.
 
At the end of the mass, as the congregation began to file out slowly, some waited at the foot of the pulpit to talk to me about private matters and were surprised when I did not descend the two steps to the floor. But all my attention was on that woman with the box, who stared straight ahead impassively despite the murmuring and the stares of the parishioners who passed her on the way out.
 
Her solitude amidst the empty pews, heightened by her extremely pale face, gave her an aura of sanctity.
 
The church was now empty.
 
The woman remained seated for another few minutes, as if she were making sure that no one would return. Then she placed her box on the bench next to her and emerged from behind the pew. As she took her first steps toward me, I noticed that she limped badly.
 
“Who are you?” I asked.
 
She didn’t answer.
 
“How can I help you?”
 
She kept coming slowly toward me, her eyes focusing only on my lips.
 
“Are you all right? Who are you?” I stammered. As she came closer to me I realized that she was struggling to hear me.
 
“My name is Luisa. I became deaf over six months ago, Father,” she said in a tone of despair that moved me to compassion.
 
“How can I help you?” I repeated slowly, exaggerating the movement of my lips. She read my lips carefully and paused.
 
“Susana sends you that,” she said, pointing to the box in the pew.
 
Then she turned around and headed for the door.
 
“Who is Susana?” I shouted as she limped out of the church. She didn’t look back.
 
“Who is Susana?” I shouted again, forgetting that she couldn’t hear me.
 
I heard the sound of an engine outside the church and as I ran into the street I found myself enveloped by a cloud of dust raised by a compact car leaving the scene in a hurry.
 
Back inside the chapel, I went to the pew where the box lay. I stood there staring at it, uncertain about what to do next.
 
I approached the cardboard box cautiously. Slowly I slid my fingers under it and strained to lift it. But I overestimated its weight and fell backwards, laughing nervously at my clumsiness.
 
I carried the box to my room in the parish house. The top was tightly secured by broad strips of adhesive tape. As I succeeded in opening the box, I was assaulted by an intense odor as of a mixture of urine and human excrement. Whatever lay at the bottom of the carton was covered by abundant wads of paper.
 
I recoiled, convinced that someone had played a bad practical joke on me. I grew afraid; I felt in danger. Before my transfer to this chapel a few months before to this desolate country village, Bishop Antonelli had warned me that my life might be threatened despite all our precautions. During the ten years I had been assigned to the Inmaculada Concepción in the capital city, under Bishop Antonelli’s jurisdiction, I had voiced strong criticism against the government’s unjust treatment of the poor. I was a social worker. I had always thought, like a few other priests, that the church should be militant. Part of my admiration for Bishop Antonelli lay in the fact that he was one of the few in the high hierarchy who thought that our being politically submissive was a contradiction of our faith. He always encouraged us with his own involvements, and he often reassigned “outspoken” priests to protect them.
 
In the small makeshift kitchen that Juanita, my housekeeper, had created for the few occasions on which I had dinner at the parish, I went through every drawer until I came across the rubber gloves Juanita wore to scrub the floors.
 
Back in my room, I opened the window to let the cool air of the morning flush out the lingering odor of the contents of the box.
 
Annoyed, I closed it, and kicked it into a corner, resolving to get rid of it the next day.
 
When I returned from mass the following morning, Juanita had cleaned my room, but the box was still in the corner.
 
“Why did you leave this trash here?” I called to her.
 
“It didn’t look like trash to me, Father,” she replied with an innocence that has always made me suspect her of being a rascal, a combination of candor and mischief I found disarming.
 
“There’s writing on the pieces of paper, Father,” she continued.
 
“Writing?”
 
“Yes, Father.”
 
I unfolded one of the wads. “Go back to the kitchen,” I said.
 
As soon as Juanita disappeared, I unfolded a second piece of the paper. Scribbled in such minute handwriting that I had to strain to read them, were three paragraphs of what seemed to be a diary. The entry was dated “January 18.”
 
Today they led me hooded back to the same place. The muffled noises I heard as I walked up the metal stairs poured out like a flood when they opened the door. They ceased abruptly as soon as we entered.
 
“This nut here again?” asked the same voice that had yelled at me the time before. “You filthy seditious whore,” he said, as he shoved a hard pointed object up my anus.
 
I struggled to control my impatience. Clumsily, I unfolded a few more pieces of paper. As I read them, I was overcome by nausea; my hands started to shake. An uncontrollable anguish swept over me, as when ten years before, I had read the first paragraphs of a letter from my sister telling me of the death of our mother.
 
I paced the room for a while trying to regain some calm. I then joined Juanita in the kitchen. I asked her to brew some coffee, and deliberately engaged her in small talk as a distraction.
 
Back in my room I grabbed a handful of the strips of paper and read. One hour later, I gave up reading and spent the rest of the day wandering along the muddy streets of the shanty town in the outskirts of the village, unable to chase away the ghost now haunting my life.
 
Then, one night, I picked up a few more of the little rolls with the absurd conviction that I was ready to make the self-sacrifice to face the challenge of exposing myself to whatever the notes would lead to. From that moment on, I set aside all my activities to decipher and organize the diary of an unknown woman.