“That’s right. You know how it’s prepared?”
Prudencia nodded with a smile, savoring the intense aroma of the tea as it pervaded the shop. She sat down at the small table behind the counter and contentedly admired the antique Meissen tea service and exquisitely mismatched silver teaspoons. For a woman like herself, she reflected, this was bliss.
“I’m afraid you ladies are too refined for me,” sighed Horacio. “Please enlighten a poor man who’s been drinking ordinary tea all his life.”
“As I understand it, in Sochi they pick only the top three leaves from the plant and discard the rest. It’s the secret of the flavor,” explained Miss Prim.
“That, and the fact that it’s only harvested from May to September. The climate does the rest,” added the bookseller.
Horacio took a sip of tea and warmly praised its quality. Then he indicated the ancient edition of the catechism. “So, how difficult was it to get hold of?”
“For him, nothing could be too much trouble,” said the bookseller simply.
Miss Prim, who had been leafing through some children’s books, turned to ask: “What’s so special about this monk? Why is he so popular?”
Virginia looked at her friend in mute interrogation.
“Doesn’t she know him?”
He shook his head. Virginia looked down at the samovar lid, with which she was toying, before replying.
“The most obvious answer is that, together with the man who employs you, he founded this community.”
“And the less obvious answer?”
“That he’s the only person I know who has one foot in this world and one foot in the other.”
Miss Prim started.
“You mean, he’s dying?”
“Dying?” said Virginia, with another of her tinkling laughs. “No, I hope not! Why would you think that?”
“Let’s see if we can explain it without shocking you, Prudencia,” interjected Horacio. “What Virginia means is that in this old Benedictine monk, Plato’s allegory of the cave has been realized. He’s the prisoner freed from the cave who returns here to the bleak world of shadows with the rest of us, after having seen the real world.”
San Ireneo’s bookseller added quietly, looking at Miss Prim: “Horacio phrases everything in his own poetic way, Prudencia, but it’s really quite simple: our dear Father is a man who sees things the rest of us cannot.”
Hearing these words, Prudencia felt a wave of weary indignation wash over her. He could see things the others could not? It couldn’t escape one’s notice that there were more eccentrics in this village than seemed possible. On principle she mistrusted people who claimed to see the invisible. In the world she knew—a safe, clean, comfortable world—invisible things were invisible. If they couldn’t be seen, they didn’t exist. Of course, she had nothing against people seeking some kind of crutch to make life more bearable—spiritual beliefs, philosophies, children’s stories, emotions, feelings, sensations—as long as it was clear that such things were unreal or, if they were real, they existed only in the mind or heart of whoever experienced them. In the real world, as she conceived it, everything could be captured or recorded in some way. Whether through poetry or art, literature or music, everything had to be capable of being translated into the visible world. Invisible things, she repeated to herself, existed only in the imagination. And then the image of dark, mysterious mirrors suddenly flashed through her mind.
“So you mean he’s a mystic?” she asked coldly.
“If he is, he’s too humble to admit it,” said Horacio, signaling to the bookseller that she should pour him another cup of tea from the samovar. “But I have to say that ifsomethingexists, and I speak as a skeptic, he’s on strangely familiar terms withit, whateveritis.”
Miss Prim smiled smugly.
“And how do you deduce that? Is it something in his eyes? Does he have an aura around him?”
“It’s not what one sees in his eyes,” said Virginia gently, “as much as what he sees in the eyes of others.”
“You mean he can read your thoughts?” asked the librarian with a wry expression.
“We mean that he knows what youare.”
Miss Prim suddenly felt uneasy. She found the idea deeply troubling: an old man going around knowing what other people were. Not only troubling, but inappropriate. At best, it was a subtle, mysterious way of invading the privacy of others; at worst, it was gross deception. One way or another, there was something improper about it; improper and unpleasantly morbid. Miss Prim flatly refused to have someone know her essence. She refused both in principle and in practice.
“And I thought you were a man of science,” she said sadly.
“Ah, am I not?” her friend replied in mock surprise.
