the Count calculated. He said it out loud so it seemed more credible, used his fingers to reckon up yet again the obscenely inflated figure, which represented so many, many years, and he began to accept it must be so when he felt the anxiety stirred by what had gone forever to be in denial. Then time changed into an irritating, identifiable feeling, like a pain spreading from his stomach and starting to oppress his chest; his mother was next to him, a tiny white headscarf on her jet-black hair and that linen – linen? – dress that crackled because of the macerated yucca juices in which she’d soaked it before subjecting it to trial by iron, and he fingered the bluish, gentle spume of prickly starch and the final severity of the now ironed cloth, as he felt it minutes before they went into church, and his mother gave her son that hug he would never forget. You’re going to be a saint, she told him, you are my handsome boy, she told him, and the white purity of the material wrapped round them that Sunday morning passed through his pores and reached his soul: I am pure, he thought, as he walked towards the front row of pews to listen to the mass Father Mendoza would intone and receive at last that memorable wafer with an ancient flavour that should change his life: when it fell on his tongue, he would join a privileged clan: those with a right to salvation, he thought, and he looked at her again, and she smiled back at him, so beautiful in her headscarf and white dress, twenty-eight years ago.
