What My Sister Asked Me For in the Sacristy

My name is Mateo. I’m thirty-four years old and I’m the sacristan of the Church of Saint Christopher, in an almost empty village lost in the mountains of León. Winter lasts here nine months, and the wind slips through the old stones with a moan that won’t let you sleep. There are days when the bells are the only thing you can hear for miles.

I live in the parish house, attached to the church, with my sister Elena. She just turned nineteen. Our parents died in an accident when she was still crawling, and I, who at the time was preparing to enter seminary, gave everything up to raise her. I changed one vocation for another. I brought her up, combed her hair, taught her her first letters and her first prayers.

But a year ago something twisted inside me. My prayers stopped asking for salvation and started asking for something else. Permission, maybe. Advance forgiveness.

Isolation here amplifies everything. We’re the only two young people for miles around, and loneliness works like a mirror: it forces you to face head-on what you’ve spent years avoiding. I had learned not to look. Until that night.

***

Everything broke on Maundy Thursday. The church was heavy with the smell of melted wax, stale incense, and the lilies beginning to wilt on the altar. I was in the sacristy, ironing and folding the vestments for the priest who would arrive the next day from the parish in the valley. Outside, the storm was battering the windows with branches and hail.

Elena came in without warning. She was wearing a dark skirt and a light blouse, dressed in mourning for the occasion, but there was nothing funereal about her. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold and her hair was tousled by the wind.

“Mateo,” she said, closing the heavy oak door behind her. The impact echoed against the stone walls like a small thunderclap.

“What are you doing here? You should be home, with the fireplace lit.”

“I’m cold. And I’m scared. The wind sounds like it wants to bring the tower down.”

She came closer slowly. I was still holding a purple velvet chasuble, not knowing what to do with my hands. She laid her palm over mine. Hers was freezing, but beneath that cold there was a warmth beating through it that I recognized at once, because it was the same one that had been burning me for a year.

“Scared of what?” I asked. My voice sounded rough, out of place in that silence.

“That one day you’ll realize I’m not a little girl anymore. And that then you’ll leave and abandon me to go back to your God.”

I turned to look at her straight on. Her eyes, dark and wet, were not asking for a sister’s comfort. They held mine with something else, a determination I didn’t know in her.

“I’m never going to leave you, Elena. You’re the only thing I have.”

“Then prove it to me,” she whispered.

And then she did what I had been fearing and wanting in equal measure for months. She took my hand, the same hand that had lit candles and cleaned chalices for years, and placed it on her chest, right over her heart.

I felt the frantic beat beneath the thin fabric of her blouse. But I also felt the softness, the firm curve of a woman who no longer had anything to do with the child I had raised. My fingers, betraying everything I thought I was, closed just slightly. A minimal pressure. Enough to condemn me.

She let out a sigh that mingled with the creaking of the old wood.

“You’ve spent your whole life taking care of my body, Mateo. Washing it, wrapping it up, healing it. Why is your hand shaking now?”

I didn’t know how to answer. Reason had abandoned me all at once, like a candle snuffed out by a draft.

***

I took her by the waist and sat her on the sacristy table, sweeping aside with one hand the vestments I had just folded. The purple velvet ended up crumpled beneath her thighs. Part of me was screaming that this was a desecration. The other part was no longer listening.

“This is a sin, Elena,” I said, bringing my face close to hers, breathing in her warm breath. “The kind that can’t be undone.”

“It’s not a sin if it’s only the two of us,” she replied, and opened her legs to catch me between them. “We come from the same place. We’re the same thing. Love me already.”

I kissed her. I kissed her with a hunger built up over years, with the rage of someone giving in after resisting too long. She kissed me back with the same fury, biting my lip, gripping the back of my neck so I wouldn’t pull away. I had no intention of pulling away.

I slid my hands under her skirt and found the hot skin of her thighs over the stockings. She wasn’t wearing any underwear. She had taken it off before crossing the church nave, before inventing the excuse of fear and the storm. That premeditation, that calculated surrender in the middle of a sacred place, ripped away the last shred of my sanity.

“You came looking for me,” I murmured against her neck, marking her pale skin with my teeth. “You had it all planned.”

“I came to confess,” she gasped, arching her back when my fingers found her wetness. “And my penance is you.”

I fumbled with my trousers, shaking like a novice. The church was in shadow, lit only by the red lamp of the sanctuary lamp filtering in from the main altar. That light tinted Elena’s skin a reddish hue, between the divine and the forbidden, and made her seem the most beautiful and most dangerous creature I had ever seen.

I entered her slowly, holding back, looking her in the face so I wouldn’t miss a single expression. Elena closed her eyes and threw her head back, and the sound that escaped her bounced off the stone vault and came back to us multiplied. She was tight and burning hot, and feeling her body yield to mine was, God forgive me, the closest thing to a revelation I have ever experienced in my life.

“Don’t stop,” she begged, digging her nails into my back through my shirt. “Please, don’t stop now.”

I didn’t stop. I moved inside her with a rhythm that grew deeper and deeper, and the sacristy table began knocking against the wall with every thrust. The smell of incense mingled with that of our bodies. I looked at her and recognized my own features in her face twisted by pleasure, and that thought, instead of slowing me down, only set me on fire more.

“You’re mine,” I told her, burying my hand in her hair to make her look at me. “Before anyone else, before God, you’re mine.”

“Yours,” she sobbed, her voice breaking. “Always yours. Always.”

The end came to me like punishment and relief at once. I collapsed over her, emptied out, listening to our breathing slowly die away in the empty nave while the storm kept roaring outside, indifferent to what had just happened among those stones.

***

Since that night, the sacristy became our refuge. Our secret.

We invented our own ritual. Every night, after locking the church doors with the big iron key, Elena comes to me. Sometimes we do it on the front pew, before the wooden Christ, defying His carved gaze. Other times I sit her in the confessional and, through the grille, I speak to her in a low voice while I listen to her breathing on the other side, until neither of us can take it anymore and I open the narrow little door.

At first we were careful. We barred the doors, spoke in whispers, looked through the windows before we began. But fear eventually wore itself out, and what was left was only desire, cleaner and more stubborn than ever.

For the people in the village, I’m still the devout Mateo, the man who cares for the church and his orphaned sister with exemplary devotion. No one suspects that, when I pull the rope to ring the Sunday bells, my hands still carry the scent of Elena’s skin. No one imagines that, when she comes up to receive communion and opens her mouth, I remember what that same mouth whispered to me the night before.

We live in a kind of grace in reverse. We know that, by everything I was taught, we’re condemned. But when I hold her in the early hours, in the narrow bed of the parish house, while the wind keeps battering the tower, I can’t feel anything that resembles guilt. Only the heat of her body against mine and the terrible, sweet certainty that I have no intention of giving her up.

If hell consists of burning, I suppose we’ve already started practicing. Between cold stones and warm sheets. And, God forgive me, I can’t think of a better way to damn myself.