The Vision of Elena Silves by Nicholas Shakespeare

Author:Nicholas Shakespeare [Desmond Morris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

FROM THE OUTSET Elena made it clear she wouldn’t make love to Gabriel. Not for the moment, anyway.

“It wouldn’t be worth the guilt.” Then she smiled in a way that made him want to know what she was thinking.

“I was thinking of my patron saint at confirmation.”

“Who was?”

“Maria Goretti.”

“Who was?”

“Stabbed thirty-six times with a stiletto at the age of twelve rather than have sex with the desperate lodger.”

“But, Elena, please, I love you.”

“And she forgave him.”

“But I’m not a stranger. I’m the man who loves you.”

She smiled again. “I heard you the first time.”

Gabriel accepted her refusal. It marked her out from other girls he’d grown up with, who conceived at fifteen and spent months chewing irritant fruits to abort. So when Hipólito asked coarsely if they’d done anything, Gabriel turned on him.

“OK, OK, I’m sorry,” said Hipólito, holding up his hands. “I’m just putting myself in your place. I don’t know how you can do without it, that’s all.”

Hipólito left no one in doubt that his own appetites were being satisfied. In place of Elena, he had found a first-year student at the university, two years older than himself.

“Small, sultry and very extreme. If she has a fault it’s that she applies too much make-up.”

“What’s her name?”

“Edith Pusanga.”

On Elena’s eighteenth birthday, Gabriel presented her with a copy of Mariátegui’s essays. “My patron saint,” he explained. “I’ll give you two days to read him.” Two days in which he would refuse to see her. “Then you’ll discover what I’m on about.”

It was early evening when he next joined her on the bench. He found a girl with a brave face. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think you look like Luis Sintra. You look like him,” she said. She tapped the author’s photo on the dust-jacket. “Admit it’s narcissism which attracts you and I’ll forgive everything.”

“But what do you think?” asked Gabriel.

She had bitten her lip. He was going to hate her. Perhaps she didn’t understand. But she thought most of it was wrong.

Like what?

Like Mariátegui’s nostalgia for the Inca empire. Even she knew the Inca system of land tenure wasn’t a primitive form of communism. Their empire had been founded on conquests similar to Pizarro’s. And when Pizarro arrived the whole system was disintegrating.

Then there was Mariátegui’s interpretation of religion. His idea that the church and the state should be one. His idea that communism was essentially a spiritual movement. His idea that Marxism sprang from the same impulse as the Christianity of the catacombs, that a revolution was always religious.

Her lips were trembling. Gabriel could see the effort with which she spoke. He couldn’t restrain himself.

“But it is!” he exclaimed. In Mariátegui the word religion had a new value. It was a moral not a metaphysical code. Man had only one life. His life on earth. If the Church had fulfilled the teaching of Christ, there would be no need for communism. But it hadn’t.

“I don’t agree,” said Elena. “I just don’t agree. That was why the Virgin appeared at Fátima – to warn us against communism.

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