Almost Never A Novel

44


What luck! The wedding day itself dawned rainy—in November? who would believe it, or who thought that if it didn’t rain the marriage would have (no holds barred) a disagreeable destiny. To hell with such superstitions! They always get in the way.

The customers started arriving about one hour before the Mass and stayed to help. Figure about twenty, let’s say, counting by fours: soaking wet. The tears of the tempest looked like mere fluff dusting their clothes, a whitish sheen, accumulated shimmerings of light drops, more noticeable if the shirts and blouses hadn’t been white, lucky devils. Then came the relatives hailing from Nadadores and Lamadrid, and they were many. They filled the entrance hall in a flurried rush, almost a logjam, almost a gray mass—could it be a sheepfold full of forty fellows? If that wasn’t the exact number, we are definitely close, and so the following question becomes apt: would all these penned-in people be eating? If so, there wouldn’t be enough seats, wherein arose a problem, the need for restricting numbers when the time was ripe. Vigilance at the entryway—but how? A red-hot unforeseen … alas … At fifteen minutes to eleven the groom arrived with his mother and his aunt. The three were dressed in black, they looked like mourners, but you should know that the color black also symbolizes good fortune, especially if adorned with a flower, and here we evoke coquetry: he with a carnation on his lapel, and Doña Telma and Doña Zulema each with a yellow rose on her bodice. So, black elegance—unique, solemn, warranted … The real event was the arrival of the bride and the bridesmaids and groomsmen and Renata’s sisters with their husbands: a fragrant front, perfumes that swooned when pooled randomly together; an aggregation of nerves, uneven: rising, but then arrived the parish priest draped in green, with his red sextons, and now finally the wedding march began with no music, nor chorus nor anything at all, one had to imagine the sublime sounds of what could have been uplifting, for bringing the music of wind or strings to a parish church, that would have been really expensive. Demetrio didn’t care a whit if he walked to the altar holding his mother’s arm without even one strum of a guitar; he cared more about grabbing for good the green-eyed gal than about the rise and fall of any harmony whatsoever.