The Religion by Tim Willocks Read Free Book Online

Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched-by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.
    "Is it time to play?" asked Amparo.
    "No, not yet."
    "But we will."
    "Of course we will."
    "You're afraid."
    "Only for your safety."
    Amparo glanced at the roses. "I don't understand."
    Carla hesitated. So ingrained was her habit of caring for Amparo that to ask her to enter a den of thieves seemed a crime. Yet Amparo had survived the streets of Barcelona, childhood years of violence and privation that Carla dared not imagine. Cowardice was not Amparo's flaw, even if in her heart of hearts, Carla believed it her own.
    Carla smiled. "What need starlight fear of the dark?"
    "Why, nothing." Amparo frowned. "This is a riddle?"
    "No. There's something I want you to do for me. Something of the greatest importance."
    "You want me to find the man on the golden horse."
    Amparo's voice was as soft as rain. She saw the world through the eyes of a mystic. Carla was so familiar with the lens of Amparo's imagination that she no longer found it strange. Carla said, "His name is Mattias Tannhauser."
    "Tannhauser," repeated Amparo, as if testing the integrity of a newly cast bell. "Tannhauser. Tannhauser." She seemed satisfied.
    "I must talk with him today. As soon as possible. I want you to go into the port and bring him back here with you."
    Amparo nodded.
    "If he refuses to come-" continued Carla.
    "He will come," said Amparo, as if any other outcome were unthinkable.
    "If he will not come, ask him if he would receive me at his earliest convenience-but today, you understand. Today."
    "He will come." Amparo's face shone with the strange joy that was as close as she came to a smile and which, in its way, was more than compensation.
    "I'll tell Bertholdo to prepare the carriage."
    "I hate the carriage," said Amparo. "It has no air and it's slow and cruel to the horse. Carriages are a nonsense. I'll ride. And if Tannhauser won't come with me, he's not the man who will walk the razor's edge-and so why would you want him to receive you later on?"
    Carla knew better than to argue. She nodded. Amparo started to walk away, then stopped and looked back. "Can we play when I return? As soon as I return?"
    There were two unvarying elements in Amparo's days, without whichshe became distressed: the hour they spent each afternoon playing music, and the session she spent at her vision stone after dark. She also went to Mass every morning, but in order to accompany Carla rather than from any sense of piety.
    "Not if Tannhauser is with you," said Carla. "What I have to say to him is urgent. For once our music must wait."
    Amparo seemed astonished at her foolishness. "But you must play for him. You must play for Tannhauser. It's for him that we've practiced for so long."
    They'd played for years and so this was absurd and, in any case, Carla found the idea quite unthinkable. Amparo saw her doubt. She took hold of Carla's hands and pumped them up and down as if dancing with a child.
    "For Tannhauser! For Tannhauser!" Again she made his name peal like a bell. Her face shone. "Imagine it, my love. We'll play for him as we've never played before."
    The beginning with Amparo had been hard. Carla had found her while taking her early morning ride, on a crystalline February day when the mist still