The Sisterhood (27 page)

Menina asked Sor Clara to stand aside, and gave it a good kick with her boot. The door scraped open—probably for the first time in many years, judging by the cloud of dust their entrance raised—and stuck halfway open. Menina sneezed and, looking around, saw they were in a room so long and dark that its ends were in shadow. She guessed it ran the length of the cloister. As her eyes adjusted she saw it was similar to the room with the iron grille where she had been yesterday, only much bigger. This one had the same dark carved wooden furniture, as well as a stiff horsehair settee with stuffing coming out of it, matching chairs, and a huge crucifix crooked on a wall. Then Menina caught her breath. The walls, which had just looked dark at first, were actually covered with picture frames.

Weak light filtered through the dust motes onto a threadbare Persian rug in the middle of the room. The arms and backs of the furniture were draped in rotting antimacassars, and an arm had fallen off one of the chairs. An embroidered runner with holes in it ran the length of a heavy table against the wall, beneath a dusty plaster statue of the Virgin Mary and two fat lopsided ecclesiastical candles in holders. The musty smell that permeated the convent was overwhelming, and the silence was so heavy it was tangible.

“How long since anyone used this room?” Menina asked, looking around.

“Many years. Is cold in winter. But I think the painting by Tristan Mendoza was in this room.”

“Do you remember where, Sor Clara?” asked Menina faintly, looking up at the walls that held probably hundreds of pictures, all dark with dirt and age. Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack. Sor Clara tottered over to one of the stiff-looking settees, sat down, and waited expectantly.

“Sor Clara, do you know which wall it hung on?”

“Eh?” Sor Clara cupped her hand around her ear to hear better. Menina repeated the question, almost shouting. Sor Clara gave an expressive eye-rolling shrug.

“Why did I ask?” Menina said to herself. She chose a small frame at random, lifted it gingerly from the wall, took a piece of bread and began working it between her palms to soften it, then started pressing it gently onto the surface of the painting. The bread picked up dirt until it disintegrated. Menina stepped back and realized she could see a hand. She hastily pressed some more bread onto the surface until she recognized the same tonsured monk with a crooked nose and squinty eyes she had seen yesterday, only from a different angle. Menina took it to the middle of the room and searched for a signature at the bottom but could see
nothing, no sign of writing or a bird. She wished she had a magnifying glass, but she didn’t. Sor Clara was asleep with her rosary in her lap and her mouth open, snoring gently.

Menina propped the monk out of reach of the sun and picked another frame from the middle of the wall and started to work as quickly as possible. It would take months to get to every painting.

A couple of hours later, Sor Clara hadn’t moved. Alarmed the elderly nun might be dead, Menina checked her breathing, then realized Sor Clara was probably tired because of the nighttime vigil. By now, half a dozen murky paintings of different sizes stood propped up against the wall. Menina stepped back and squinted at her handiwork. The monk kept drawing her attention, and the longer she looked at it the more uneasy it made her. She knew her reaction was probably due to being tired and disoriented—but it had an evil presence and she didn’t like it. Finally, she turned it face to the wall.

As for the next four paintings…she peered, trying to see what they were about, looking for familiar themes and symbols and subjects that cropped up in religious art that would give her a clue about the painting. At college she always enjoyed the exercises where students had to “read” a painting, but at college there were textbooks and a library for reference. Now she was on her own, memory her only resource.

At Holly Hill the course on Renaissance methodology began with the same joke every year, that anyone brought up in the Bible Belt had a head start identifying the themes of Renaissance art. Menina had been astonished to find that years of Baptist Sunday School and coloring books of Bible stories had delivered this particular dividend. And while the methodology course was no more than the basics, Menina loved the process of hunting for clues to a painting’s hidden meaning, unraveling the significance of light and shade and colors, the positioning of the figures, the symbols—like
rays streaming through a window to represent the Divine Light illumining the world, or pomegranates to symbolize fertility and the Resurrection, dogs for fidelity, and parrots that people in the Middle Ages believed made the sound “Ave” as if they were about to pray to the Virgin Mary.

But the artist’s perspective was only part of it. Painting was a dialogue between the artist and the viewer, and to interpret a painting you had to understand how the artist expected people of the time to understand it. And that depended on many things—the period when it was painted, politics, and religious ideas. The question you had to ask was, where were the painter and the viewer “at”? Maybe the painting was intended to link a donor or artist’s patron to holy figures—where everybody was “at” was that the saint’s holiness rubbed off on the donor by association. Maybe it was intended to generate awe in the viewer at the radiance of God’s word, maybe it had a message of the power of life over death, or connected a king or queen to God, or illuminated a mystery everyone would have been aware of at the time, like changing the water and wine of communion into the body and blood of Christ—the possibilities were endless but it was important to search for a painting’s message
to
the person looking at it.

Menina thought about all this while she opened her notebook and uncapped a ballpoint. She would be methodical and give each painting a number before she began cleaning it, then write a brief description of what she found. Then she could try the dialogue test.

She took down painting number one and narrowed her eyes. Where was everybody “at” with this one? The longer she looked, the uglier it seemed—a moon-faced Madonna whose hands looked like they had been painted on as an afterthought, sticking awkwardly out of her sleeves. Either the artist had no grasp of basic anatomy or it was an artistic statement. She would let somebody else worry
about it. Just in case, she pat the corners looking for a signature, finding a
C
followed by something that might be “Lopez.”

Painting number two was equally disappointing—insipid angels with open mouths, flat and lifeless against a brown sky. No signature. Menina put it next to the Madonna.

Number three was a still life of roses and lilies which she knew were a reference to the Virgin Mary, and might be valuable depending on the detail and colors under the dirt. She checked for a signature, found a
B
. and put it aside.

Number four was a stolid child carrying a lamb over his shoulder. Both lamb and child wore exactly the same dramatic pout and soulful expression. So awful it made her smile. She put it with the Madonna.

Three and a half hours later Menina was filthy, surrounded by two dozen paintings propped haphazardly against the walls. She wiped her forearm across her brow. None of it looked promising—maybe a cut above, or at least older than what was hanging in the corridors—but still she would bet nothing she had seen so far was worth much. She stood up to stretch her back and looked around the walls again. It was now early afternoon and the room was bright enough that Menina could see that a large black frame hanging at eye level had a lumpy pattern.

She looked at the frame closely, then scratched it with her nail, leaving a hairlike gray line. Menina spat on it and breathed on it and rubbed it with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, until her sleeve was dirty and the spot she had rubbed had a dull gleam. Not gilt as she had expected, but silver. Venetian? But a silver frame surely must be an indicator that the painting it held must be reasonably good. She looked at it closely. Under the tarnish was an ornate pattern of curling vines. Then Menina cried, “Oh!” Among the vines were small birds with forked tails.

She staggered under its weight as she lifted it down. Propping it up against the wall she set to work, until she could make out what looked like a crowd of people with no faces. No wait, there was a face in profile on the side. The others weren’t faceless—it showed the backs of their heads. They were looking toward the center right which had something light, what looked like two figures…something was happening in the middle…she could see what looked like a bandaged leg. Was that crooked thing a crutch?

Unsettling faces, some in profile, some at an angle, emerged from the dirt—grotesque faces, syphilitic or alcoholic or something, noses too short and wide and nostrils twisted up, mouths open, sick and weary and mad faces, faces with features swollen and battered and distorted by hard lives and hunger, a crowd of suffering people all focusing on something. Someone lying on what looked like a stretcher. A skeleton. And something moving at the bottom of the painting. As the grime of centuries came away, demons with reptilian bodies, grinning humanoid features, and malevolent yellow eyes stared directly at Menina even as they scurried away between the legs of the crowd, away from whatever was taking place in the center of the painting.

She recognized the theme immediately—the story from the Bible of Jesus healing and casting out demons. She cleaned some more dirt off until she could make out two figures in the center. Two men in profile? No, it looked like a man and a woman. With the last piece of bread she dabbed the lower left-hand corner. And as the last bit crumbled, she thought there was a
T
. Then an
r
.

It wasn’t possible, she told herself, turning the painting to get the light on it. But was that a
T
? And a capital
M
? At that point she would have licked the dirt off to find out if it wouldn’t have done so much harm to the paint. In her excitement she gathered up dirty crumbs from the floor and rubbed, a little more vigorously than anyone should do on an old painting, and there—she couldn’t
believe it, she rubbed her eyes—was a little blob. Mustn’t get overexcited, a blob was a blob…unless it was a swallow! She cleaned until she saw
T
-
r
-
i
-
s
then
M
-
e
-
n
-
d
, and stopped rubbing before she damaged it irreparably.

She stood up and took some deep breaths. She, Menina Ann Walker, age nineteen, had just made a discovery, a real art-world discovery, just like that! Bam! Art historians spent entire careers trying to do what she had just done. “I don’t believe it,” she muttered over and over. Then she punched the air with her fist and cried, “Yes!” Wait till Becky and Holly Hill and her parents heard! Yes! She was so excited she did a little impromptu victory dance, then “Sor Clara. Sor Clara? Wake up! Good news!” She patted the old nun on the arm excitedly and Sor Clara snored loudly and woke up, looking startled. “Eh?”

Menina said very loudly in Spanish, “I found the Tristan Mendoza! I found it! I found it! It was here! Just like you said! And I found it! Thank you! Thank you!”

“
Deo gratias
…” mumbled Sor Clara, rubbing her eyes.

There was a sound of footsteps, then Sor Teresa threw open the door and without preliminaries announced Menina’s food was waiting for her and they must hurry. Sor Clara had to go to the vigil and she needed to get back to the kitchen because there were
polvorónes
baking. All the world wanted
polvorónes
, everything was late today, she had far too much to do, and Alejandro needed to speak to Menina at once.

“Sor Teresa, come look. I found the Tristan Mendoza! I found it!” Menina was almost jumping up and down with excitement like a five-year-old when she suddenly remembered Sor Teresa couldn’t see. She started to apologize, but she needn’t have bothered; Sor Teresa wasn’t listening.

“We talk about it later. Come now!” she barked. Leading the way down the corridor to the
locutio
parlor, she was loud enough to
be heard on the other side of the grate, complaining it was
Semana Santa
, and they were too busy to be always welcoming Menina’s visitors. The captain said reasonably from the other side that he was the only visitor and it was necessary for him to speak to Menina on police business.

The two nuns hobbled off, Sor Teresa airing her grievances loudly as she went. Menina tried to stop dancing and bubbled happily. “Captain, you were right about the convent having a valuable painting, I just found—”

To her surprise he wasn’t interested. He said, “Mees Walker, some people are looking for you.”

The day was getting better and better. “Thank heaven! My parents obviously managed to galvanize
somebody
. I’m so reliev—”

“Your parents, eh? Though you do not believe me, I would have telephoned them if it had been possible, but I could not. So maybe is not your family who send them,” he said slowly. “And maybe is more important than ever that you stay out of sight.”

“What? Of course it’s my parents! Who else? I called them from the airport to let them know I wasn’t in Madrid yet, and that I was taking a bus. Obviously they got the police to trace the bus, and the bus driver explained I had been left here and—”

“No, it is a man and a woman who are following you, and whoever they are, they are not police. In fact they do not want the police to know they are looking for you. And because I do not want them to cause problems for me, I must get to the bottom of this now. You must tell me, who wants to find you?”

Menina’s mouth suddenly felt dry and her elation evaporated as she remembered. “Oh God, please, not Theo!” she muttered. He had the money and connections to trace her, but surely the Bonners would be trying to put a spin on why the wedding had been canceled.

“Who is Theo?” the captain demanded.

“Um, nobody. My parents must have hired a private detective to find me.”

“No, I do not think so. And I will tell you why I do not think so, and then you will tell me why they look for you, because it does not make sense to me. An old man, a retired policeman friend of my father, is driving from Malaga back to a village in the mountains where he lives with his daughter’s family, and he stops for coffee. While he is drinking his coffee, a couple comes into the bar, a man and a woman, nice clothes, want to put a sign in the bar window, a picture of a girl, very pretty, and it says ‘Menina Walker,’ an American, is missing. Says big reward for information. My friend thinks I should know this…never mind why. But he, too, wants to know why so he listens to everything—old habit. And people do not think an old man in the corner with his pipe and his coffee is listening. He wants to see what this couple do next. He drinks more coffee, reads his newspaper. The couple order food, drinks, spend a lot of money for a small bar, and people at the bar say OK, they can put up their poster, but is better to fill out an official report at the police station. But, the couple say no, they do not bother police.”