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irascible tailor and the morose, bohemian sculptor, but the vengeful joke one played on the other survives in the grim, still green-lit features of the Judas of the Last Supper, even though with every
Holy Week there are fewer people who can identify them as the tailor’s or who remember the stories of the past that Godino spins, whether inventing them out of whole cloth or just embroidering them, I don’t know. Nor would there be many who recognize the other real model for the apostles, the Saint Matthew who is turned toward Christ, half devout, half frightened, his raised eyebrows underscoring the amazement in his eyes, because this is the moment when the Master has just said that one of the twelve will betray him that night and everyone is alarmed and scandalized, gesturing wildly, asking, “Master, is it I?” In the midst of that uproar no one pays attention to the green, rancorous face of Judas or notices the swollen pouch of coins that our mothers pointed out to us when we were children and they held us up in their arms as the float passed by in the procession.
    I didn’t need Godino to explain to me that the noble Saint Matthew, straight of back and red of cheek, was the living image of Mateo Zapatón, who thus had his instant of public glory on the same night of Holy Week that the bill-collecting tailor was covered with ridicule. After the sculptor Utrera, when he had money or the prospect of collecting some, had the measurements for a new suit taken in the tailor shop, he would cross Calle Real and order hand-cobbled shoes from Mateo, or during hard times he would bring old pairs to be repaired. But unlike the tailor, Mateo Zapatón never reminded Utrera of past-due bills, partly because of the man’s somewhat cowardly nature, which made him inclined to accept half measures, but partly too because he had a fervent admiration for the sculptor, which swelled to the point of abject gratitude every time the maestro came by his shop and stayed several hours to chat with him, offering him his blond-tobacco cigarettes and telling him stories of his travels through Italy and of his life in the artistic circles of Madrid before the war.
    â€œFriend Mateo,” the sculptor would say, “you have a classic head that deserves to be immortalized by art.” Said and done.
Mateo never charged Utrera a cent, but he considered the debt canceled when, with a surge of vanity and modesty, he saw his unmistakable face among those of the apostles, as well as his husky shoulders in a very typical posture: looking sideways and upward from the low cobbler’s bench where he spent his life. Being a penitent and a board member of the brotherhood of the Last Supper, could he imagine a greater honor than inclusion among those who supped with the Savior? Every characteristic, the entire persona of the evangelist saint, was of a prodigal fidelity, except for the beard, which the flesh-and-blood Mateo did not have, although at times he seemed to be on the verge of letting it grow, an inconceivable daring in those years of carefully tended mustaches and shaved faces. The tailor shop sat almost directly across from the cobbler’s shop, but whenever the aggrieved tailor met Mateo on the opposite sidewalk, he would lower his head or look away, his face greener and his nose more Semitic than ever, and Mateo, like so many others, would have to clamp his hand over his mouth to keep from exploding with laughter, his cheeks flaming a bright red more appropriate for a giant figure in Valencia’s festivals than for the image of a pious evangelist.
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    IT GAVE ME A LITTLE START of pleasure to see that face in the middle of a hostile city, a face tied to the sweetest memories of my hometown and childhood. When I was a boy, my mother often sent me to the door of Mateo Zapatón, who without knowing anything at all about me used to pat my cheek and call me Sacristan. “Mercy, Sacristan, this pair of half