Bitter Taste of Time, The

PART ONE
1920-1930
LATER, AFTER YEARS HAD PASSED AND THEY ALL HAD THE benefit of hindsight, they would comment on how truly strange Asunción Encarna had been from the start. A curious bird. As unpredictable as a goat. As peculiar as all those foreigners who arrived on the coasts of Spain dressed in gingham shorts and knee-high socks.
The roots of this peculiarity--the one that years later would have her collecting clocks in all shapes and sizes--they traced back to the events at the train station on a Friday in 1920. It was there that her husband of two short months, Manuel Pousada--a lunatic himself, one was quick to comment, a criminal of the worst kind, another added--aware that gossips loomed all around them and eager to avoid a scene during these, their final moments together, had tried in vain to stem her tears, silence her pleas, keep her from making a public spectacle of herself.
But then, he never loved her, they would say later. No, not for one moment did he seem sad to leave her.
Manuel Pousada and Asunción Encarna were at the station that day so that Manuel could take the train to the coast. From there, he would be boarding the ship to Brazil. Brazil. Howlong he had waited for this. The word rested sensuously on his tongue, the thought of it seemed like heaven. His wife's tears, her adolescent tantrums, jarred him now that the dream seemed so close at hand, now that his mind was already lost in the thought of much better things, on the stories he had heard from all those who had gone before him and had returned with gold and women and especially with the heat--sí, especially the heat, which they captured and brought back with them, and which glinted in their eyes and shone in their hair and glowed in their habit of walking with erect shoulders forever after.
And then one more kiss, one last backward look, a shake of the head, and he was gone, into the train and away from her life. And more tears and more anguish, and the promise--Cariño, he had said, it is only a matter of time now.
It would indeed be a matter of time before Asunción heard news of him, and then only after showering a mountain of abuse on the archaic and inefficient postal system of the region and the half-witted man in charge, who cried real tears of desperation because of it. When the letter finally arrived, she shared its contents with no one, stopping only to fold it neatly into its four parts once it had been read and announcing to all that her husband had now joined the ranks of the dearly departed.
Three months later, in August of 1920, after a long day and an even longer night, their daughter Gloria was born. In the room with Asunción, accompanying her through every heave and every push, were her mother María, her sister Matilde, and her aunts Carmen and Cecilia. There too was Doña Emilia, the town's midwife, and the two old women who accompanied all of the women in Canteira through the mysteries of labour, Doña Teresa and Doña Elena--greatly respected for having delivered eight healthy babies apiece, and eager to tell the storyof each of those births as a way of reminding everyone that childbirth, fraught with so many dangers, could as often as not produce healthy, happy children.
Outside, the town of Canteira was as silent as the stars with only the occasional sound rising here and there to punctuate the night--the whelp of a dog, the gasping spasms of a donkey, the odd distant and disembodied voice emerging from the hills which appeared purple and bruised in the encroaching darkness. It was a hot night, one of the hottest of that year. The large windows in the bedroom had been left open, but the warm breeze that drifted in did little to alleviate the oppressive humidity. For months before the birth, Asunción had remained closeted in this room, grieving for her dead husband and praying for the health of her unborn child. There, at least, she was thought to be safe from the many dangers that lurked outside, like the moon--the source of inspiration to many a haunted poet, but which pregnant women avoided, believing that to look at it would be to risk giving birth to an idiot.
As the labour progressed, and Asunción's screams grew shriller, her discomfort greater, Doña Teresa and Doña Elena interrupted their stories to implore the midwife to take some extraordinary measures.
Bring us a pair of her husband's pants or one of his hats, Doña Teresa said between two particularly strong contractions. There is no surer way to calm the pain than with some of the father's clothing. May he rest in peace, she added quickly, crossing herself as she did so.
A prayer to San Ramón will do the trick, Doña Elena said. The prayers I myself uttered can scarcely be counted.
María, Asunción's mother, an imposing woman with little respect for the sayings of the people, for all the crazy ideas thatcirculated through town, the fears of the dead and the superstitions that held so many hostage, dismissed the suggestions of these women with an impatient wave of her hand.
She turned now to her sister Cecilia--a nervous, emotional woman, who would punctuate every contraction and accompanying scream with a furious Dios mío--ordering her to boil some more water in the kitchen--a command she issued more to rid the room of her sister than because any water was actually needed.
Later, it would be Cecilia who would tell the story of the birth, exaggerating and embellishing the details to such an extent that eventually no one who had been there could distinguish between what they could remember and the inventions of Cecilia's feverish mind. What was true, irrefutable because it had become a part of the history of the town itself, was that Gloria had been born into a world full of women. It was not only that her father had perished in an unimaginable and distant land before her birth, but that he had left his wife behind in the care of her mother, two aunts, and a younger sister. What was also true was that Asunción had almost perished from the effort, all the pushing and the pulling, all the tears, all the desperate screams. The screams had been heard, in fact, as far away as the region of Castile--this, again, according to Cecilia, who had held Asunción's hand through most of the ordeal, attempting to ease her pain by forcing almost two full glasses of aguardiente into her mouth, but carefully, one drop at a time, until Asunción had grown drunk and delusional from the devastating combination of liquor, longing and pain.
It is during childbirth that you discover love, Asunción would tell them all afterwards, once the child had been born and she was so overwhelmed with grief that she was sure she had caughta glimpse of Manuel, hovering over her like a dark, unforgiving angel. In her drunken stupor, she had slurred his name so many times and with such a deep feeling that the women had been reduced to a heap of tears and even Edelmiro, the barnyard help, who had never loved and never lost, even he had felt as if there were a hole inside his stomach too, created by the acidic vapours of such an intense and unfulfilled yearning.
At least it is a girl. The child's grandmother was the first to say it. Her two sisters, Cecilia and Carmen, and her daughter Matilde had thought this too but had refrained from uttering what could only have been said by a grandmother. María said this only after her daughter Asunción had ceased crying--only after three weeks of her sobbing did María say this, and then only to bring to the house a well-needed tone of order.
She had always mistrusted the child's father, Manuel Pousada. Insolent eyes; unspeakable desires. No better than a peasant traipsing into their lives, without thought or forewarning, seducing her daughter in one single furtive morning.
But now there was this newborn, his newborn, a girl of white marble. Cabrón she thought uncharitably. Another man lost to the other world where he could walk unencumbered by memory or obligation. Amidst her cursing, though, it occurred to María, not for the first time, that Manuel's death had perhaps not been an altogether bad thing.
Many days passed after the baby's birth before the rhythm of the house was restored to its proper order--before the women could return to the work that fed and clothed them in a world where money was always an uncertain prospect. For years the women had survived by providing room and board to the many travellers who passed through town on their way to the coast.
In those days Canteira bustled and boomed with the machinations of illegal commerce. Situated in the heart of the Spanish region of Galicia, between the Atlantic coast and the border with León, the town was the resting stop for the endless stream of contrabandistas who travelled through at first on horseback and later inside Renaults and Peugeots, on their way to the coast to retrieve the goods that would be peddled in the dark cities of the Spanish interior.
The country as a whole had by then fully declined into a slothful decay. One by one, the colonies that remained in the Americas had reclaimed their independence from the incompetent central government of Spain. After 1898, all that remained were bitter words scribbled by a generation of writers bleeding their shame into the gaping wound the colonies left in their wake. All Spain could boast of now were greedy landowners, fattened Jesuits, disgruntled miners biding their time till they could stand up against the owners of the fetid hellholes where they worked themselves into an early grave.
In Galicia things were worse. Long forgotten by the central powers of Spain, no easy path led people to this remote region of the country, no reason existed to travel to this poverty-ridden chunk of the world. In this northwest bit of the Iberian peninsula, the only constant visitor was the rain, which made lettuce flourish and pastures unbearably beautiful, but delivered interminable nights of darkness so that depression was more common here than in all of Spain. More green than Ireland, more melancholic than a thousand Romantic poets, the region was lauded for its otherworldly beauty. Her people, though, were more often than not dismissed as illiterate peasants by their fellow countrymen and by the odd visitor from other lands, who arrived brandishing Bibles and preaching conversion from the sins of popery--only to find that it was not the Church of Rome that reigned supreme in the small towns and even smaller villages here, but superstitious beliefs of forest gods, black witches, and lascivious wolfmen, a legacy, like the bagpipes and stone hilltop forts, of the region's Celtic ancestry.
Canteira itself was a beautiful town even then--long before concrete and hotels had turned it into a vibrant, bustling affair, in the days before emigrant remittances, miniature cathedrals and five-day fiestas with virgins decked in gold and pearls--even then the town was an astounding sight, surrounded by the most beautiful natural scenery in all of the region, framed in summer by a night sky of infinite stars and a moon that gleamed like brittle porcelain.
It was María who had conceived of the idea of turning their house into a pensión. It was an enormous house, built by their uncle Ignacio who had left for Mexico when barely a boy and returned a decade later, a man straight and true, tall, handsome, and richer than he had ever imagined in his childhood dreams. He had built the house with the intention of marrying quickly and filling it with ten joyful children who would shower him with devotion and love. He was a happy man--perhaps the last happy man to be born to that family--and his infectious optimism blinded him to the climatic limitations of this corner of Spain, so that he built a house more appropriate to Andalucía, where the sun shines uninterrupted for months on end. The Galician workmen--ordinarily taciturn and sombre, suspicious of anyone who thought of the world as anything other than a vat of pain--were instantly seduced by Don Ignacio's enthusiasm, and grew to believe that the house he had designed in his head, complete with giant courtyard and a stone fountain decorated with cherubim carved in thesouth of Spain, would somehow defy the dreariness of Galicia's dark winter days. When the house was finally finished, Don Ignacio stood back and sighed in contentment. What he saw was a handsome rectangular mansion made from granite carved by the talented masons of the town, with eight bedrooms, four on the west wing of the house, four on the east, a sizable kitchen decorated with Portuguese blue and white tile, and at the front, the room he loved most of all, a parlour large enough to accommodate twenty people or more, heated in winter by a handsome wood-burning stove that radiated enough warmth to reach the many rooms that lay behind it on either side. Built on the outskirts of town, on a beautiful piece of land covered with apple, fig, and cherry trees, framed in the west by a bubbling creek and in the north by the splendour of Canteira's rolling hills, the house would soon become the envy of all who passed by on their way through town.
Sadly, Don Ignacio would not live long enough to fill the house with children, would not even live long enough to find a suitable wife, succumbing shortly afterwards to the typhus epidemic that took the lives of so many during the long winter of 1881. So it was that the house ended up in the hands of his younger brother, the father of María, Carmen, and Cecilia--a weak man who possessed none of the ebullience that had made Don Ignacio so loved in town, and who, despite all of his earnest efforts, was unable to produce a male heir who would survive the trauma of being brought into the world--a fact that he used to justify his wasted existence and the copious abuse he heaped on his wife. By the time he died, just months after María's marriage to Arturo Pérez Barreiro, the house had fallen into a state of pathetic disrepair, the paint on the walls eaten by the humidity, the wooden floors in various stages of decay.
It would take years of labour to set the house to rights again but María possessed all the determination that her own father had lacked and had a firm hand with her sisters besides. Carmen and Cecilia would remain unmarried, resigning themselves to assuming their respective places in the house, Cecilia taking charge of things in the kitchen and Carmen tending to the animals and managing the work in the fields. Two daughters were born in rapid succession to María-Asunción and then Matilde. Eight years later, her husband, not yet thirty years old, was dead. Faced with the uncertainty of a life without the income Arturo had derived as one of the town's schoolmasters, the sisters opened the house up to strangers a year later, offering beds made with sheets embroidered in Camariñas, wine from the Ribeiro Valley, and regional dishes cooked under the guidance of Cecilia--an enormous woman by then, driven to fat by a feverish, inexplicable hunger that she assuaged with chorizo, loaves of fresh bread, and, during the fall, pound upon pound of roasted chestnuts. Later, once Cecilia had passed away, Gloria made it a habit to take chorizo from the yearly slaughters to her great-aunt's grave where it disappeared shortly thereafter, eaten by the wolves or a graveyard loiterer--but really, Gloria believed, inhaled by Cecilia herself, who lay lonely and hungry inside her kitchenless coffin of black walnut and crushed velvet inlay.
Barely a week had passed after Gloria's birth when three guests arrived on horseback at the doors of the pensión.
Catalanes, Cecilia told the others in her best conspiratorial tone. You can tell by their funny way of talking and because their shirt sleeves hang like curtains.
The Catalanes, three men in their late twenties, perturbed to find themselves in a house full of so many women--A newly arrived one too, one of the men told the others, though youcan't tell yet; it's only when their eyes open up to swallow you whole that you can tell they've finally become women--stayed there nonetheless, too tired to search for other accommodation. Later, once they had downed enough Ribeiro wine to cure themselves of their initial bashfulness, they sang songs, told stories, and hummed to the new baby in a futile attempt to rid her of her sadness.
The following morning, Jordí, the tall Catalan with the eagle eyes--the one whose singing voice they would recall for years after because it was a deep, lush baritone that reminded them of the processions of the dead at midnight--handed the women a bit of Belgian lace, telling them it was for the child, señoras, for her baptismal robe. María, unaccustomed to this sort of generosity from strangers, and especially strangers from a part of the country she disliked for no particular reason, took the lace, smiling for the first time since their arrival. Later, she would comment that it augured well to have these guests--three Catalanes no less--offering gifts to the newborn on this, the longest night of the year, because it was August, and August nights were good only for the tortures of memory.




Three months passed before the lace was attached to the linen that became the baptismal robe, three months too long for the parish priest, Don José, who warned the women of the torturous limbo that awaited the child were she to suffer the great misfortune of dying before receiving the touch of God upon her forehead.
That man is an animal in black robes, María told the others one night, as he approached her on his way to evening mass with yet another dire warning. María was still nursing the wounds inflicted by the death of her husband, Arturo Pérez Barreiro, akind, gentle man who had descended slowly into an overwhelming unhappiness until the day he could take no more and, standing on a pine stool in the kitchen, hanged himself next to the salt-cured hams and cloves of garlic. He left a note, his words scribbled in the slanted way of those who know death is imminent, and the words engraved themselves on her heart until the day she died when she too, remembered to repeat them.
The flesh is willing, cariño, but the heart cannot go on.
It was her sister Cecilia who stumbled upon the body, swaying gently from the rafters, propelled by a soft summer breeze, the face grey and drawn from all the effort of a self-inflicted annihilation. The smell of Arturo's dead body would follow her everywhere thereafter, driving her into a fury of culinary experimentation with exotic herbs and spices that she used in copious amounts, hoping that their pungency would overwhelm the persistent and seductive odour of self-destruction.
Don José fought long and hard with María over the issue of a Christian burial for Arturo, arguing that God would not receive this unrepentant sinner into sacred ground, and depicting all manner of natural catastrophes that would be visited upon them should they try such a thing, until María, enraged with grief and longing, finally took the good priest by the collar, saying, Don't think I don't know about those late night meetings with your political enamorados because I do, you bastard wretch. Don Jose--scared more for his future in the tumultuous political climate of the time than of any dire retribution from the Lord--forgave Arturo Pérez Barreiro's sins on the spot, even going so far as to deliver an effusive eulogy at the funeral, never once taking his eyes off the widow, who looked at him fixedly and without emotion for the duration of the mass.
It was only after the baptism of Gloria, held on a coldNovember day, that the house seemed fully restored to its normal order. That very night, Don Miguel, the Andalusian with the green eyes, long black hair, and the bearing of an aristocrat, arrived at their doors seeking accommodation. Dressed head to toe in black and tall--as big as a Scandinavian, Carmen told the others, though in truth she had never seen a Scandinavian--Don Miguel appeared to them in a haze of mystery. Instead of the usual collection of odds and ends carried by the contrabandistas on their way to the coast, the Andalusian carried books and vials and bottles filled with liquids that shone in the candlelight. Instead of the usual chatter of I'm going to Vigo, señoras, and my wife's name is Teresa, just like the virgin of San Roca, instead of the familiar talk of lonely men on the road, Don Miguel said little, issuing only the odd terse instruction to María about dietary preferences--meat cooked rare, fish broiled always with onions. And, por favor, señora, more candles in the bedroom.
The man looks like the devil incarnate, Cecilia commented to the others in a hushed whisper that very night, scared because of his height, the colour of his eyes, and his habit of wearing so much black, a privilege she had always believed belonged exclusively to unhappy women.
After a week had passed and Don Miguel continued to stay at the house, saying little and shunning all contact with anything but his books, which he read until the early hours of the morning, the women began to grow suspicious.
Look here, sisters, Carmen said one day to the others. No one stays in this town longer than a day. After all, what is there to do here? What if this man is a criminal of some kind?
Or worse, a violador--a rapist, Cecilia added, scaring herself so much that her chest heaved unnaturally for the rest of the day whenever the thought surfaced to torment her.
If you ask me, he is a lonely man, no more, said Asunción, who had been released partially from the depression of her husband's death by the distraction provided by Don Miguel, and who was feeling considerably more sympathetic towards him.
It was Cecilia though, tormented by the unhappy thought of an imminent and collective violation, who finally broke down and approached him.
And where is it that you are going, Don Miguel? she asked him, well into his second week at the house, as she served him a dinner of stewed pork and tomatoes.
Why do you assume I am going somewhere? Don Miguel said, not bothering to look at her.
Everybody is on their way to somewhere when they stop in this town, señor.
And I am not, he said, and buried his head in his meal, indicating thus that he would be saying no more.
But that very night, over a glass of aguardiente, as they all came together around the heat of the wood stove, the Andalusian finally broke his vow of silence and began telling them stories--of places he had been and people he had met, such stories that the women's imaginations blazed for weeks and months afterwards--travellers' tales and bits of poetry, recited softly by the light of white candles, words that enthralled the women into sleepless nights and days of endless rumination. Despite their many attempts to glean from these stories even the most minute detail of Don Miguel's own history, the women learned little about him except for a few of his favourite foods, his love for the poetry of Rosalía de Castro, and his strange habit of humming an unfamiliar tune to himself while he disposed of his breakfast in the morning.
For three weeks they repeated this routine, sitting around theheat of the wood stove, the women embroidering--all except for María, whose eyes had always been too weak to distinguish between tulips and camellias--and Don Miguel telling his tales. There, the women learned of faraway lands like Germany, inhabited, Don Miguel would tell them in his slow Andalusian drawl, by blond giants who spoke in grunts and barbaric growls.
But then Spanish, señoras, is the only language appropriate for the longings of the Lord.
Amén, the women would utter in unison, proud of their connection to such a holy tongue but unsure of what he really meant, because they had never heard another language except for Catalan and it was their distinct impression that Catalan was an invention of the people of the northeast to exclude them from their world and therefore not a language at all but a form of snobbery. There too, they learned of happenings in all the corners of Europe and stories of their own country, of Andalusian gypsies and Basque pastors and Madrid intellectuals who wrote poetry celebrated in countries they had never heard of.
On the dreariest nights, the nights when the winds blew most fiercely and the rain pelted the roof of the house with an insistence that seemed almost menacing, Don Miguel would take advantage of the women's incipient fear to tell the darkest, most disturbing stories in his repertoire. It was on a night like this that Don Miguel sat down to his customary glass of aguardiente and related one such tale, one they would remember for years, instilling such a fear of cats in the women, that they never allowed one in the house thereafter.
In the heart of Castile, he began, in one of those towns that seem to have been abandoned by God, where even the dogs look like ghosts and where the only people to emerge in the dark are a legion of deformed, miserable beggars, lives JacoboOrtega, a wealthy merchant, one of the wealthiest of the area though one whose wealth has always been rumoured to be founded on many a shady dealing. I always stay with him on my way through town, as did my own father in the days when he himself travelled through there doing his business.
It was my father who noticed their cat--a large, mangy thing with a vicious disposition and the ability to look right into your very soul. My father could remember seeing that cat on the first day he had stayed there, perched on a chair in the parlour, surveying his surroundings with careful attention. When I started travelling with him and we stayed in that house together for the first time, my father pointed the cat out to me. There, he told me, is an animal that has been around at least as long as I have.
I was curious about this creature; after all, it is strange that a cat should live so long, and he looked in excellent shape given what must have been his age. That night, at dinner, I asked the owner of the house about it. "Don Jacobo, how long has this cat been in the family?"
"This cat?" asked Don Jacobo, laughing and pointing to the animal, who seemed to be staring at me now with an even greater dose of his usual malice. "This cat, my dear friend, has been in this family since the days of my own grandfather."
That was impossible, of course! No cat could live so long--unless the strange creature was not a cat at all but something much more sinister. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck stand on end as I thought of the only one who could have been loitering in this house for so long now. The cat, as if sensing my suspicions, now attempted to intimidate me with an even fiercer gaze.
I asked that some holy water, kept at the front of the house, be brought to me. Don Jacobo laughed at my request, buthumoured me nonetheless. "You're not thinking of conjuring up some of your Andalusian witchery in this house, are you, my dear man? Surely you know what we think of that nonsense in Castile, Don Miguel," he said to me, laughing still.
The people of the house had by now congregated in the parlour and were laughing with Don Jacobo, who handed me a glass of the holy water and introduced me to the company with a dramatic swing of his arms. "Señores and señoras, before you now is the newly appointed court magician."
I took the glass of holy water, ignoring their laughter. The cat seemed poised to strike at me, his body perched and taut, his eyes daring me to attack him. I dipped my fingers into the holy water and sprinkled some of it on the cat's head.
"Stop that!" the cat screamed immediately. "You're burning me!"
I sprinkled some more holy water on him. "I said stop that!" he screeched again, shuddering at the touch of God upon his neck.
"What are you doing here?" I asked him, my hands wrapped tightly around that glass of water. The people of the house were now silent, riveted by our exchange.
The cat laughed malevolently. "Waiting for those in the house to die," he spat out. "Those who have died here before have already joined me."
Satanás! The women dropped their embroidery at this point, their gasps punctuating the night. Only María remained impervious to the drama in this story, though it was she who ordered the women to be silent so that Don Miguel could go on with his tale.
Satanás, of course Satanás, dear ladies. His devious ways are too numerous to count. I took the rest of the holy water and poured it over the cat in one single dose, after which he evaporatedin a billow of smoke but not before promising to return once more.
And then Don Miguel was laughing, telling lighter stories, a comic tale of infidelity from Barcelona, a tale of two thieves from Madrid. But it was the story of the cat that the women would remember, that would keep them awake that night, their eyes searching for signs of the devil in the dark. From then on, no cat would ever be viewed with anything but suspicion and even María would feel uncomfortable in the company of the many strays that roamed the fields around their house.
Every night brought a new story, a new reason to look forward to the after-dinner chats. Sometimes it was poetry he recited. From Bécquer, wondrous words of love--
What is poetry? you say As you fix my eyes with your eyes of blue What is poetry ... you ask me that? Poetry ... it is you!
Words that scorched the hearts of the women, tantalized them with the thought that such feelings could emerge from the minds of men. Words that upset María, though, words that made her uncomfortable, that inevitably led her to complain--Don Miguel, she would ask, shaking her head reproachfully whenever he launched into a stanza or two, are these the words for decent women?
Ay, Doña María, he would respond, laughing, these are the words that heal all wounds.
Those were memorable days for the women, unaccustomed as they were to any excitement except the excitement of death,and they quickly grew used to these late night gatherings around the wood stove, Don Miguel's melodious voice silencing the howls of the wind outside, his stories thrilling them when they recalled them as they tended to their many chores in the morning.
It was with dismay, then, that they reacted to the news, a month later, that Don Miguel would finally be leaving. For a week after his departure, the women told and retold the stories, imitating his slow Andalusian drawl and his habits of inflection, until María finally put an end to such talk by screaming, Basta ya! Enough of these stories, worried that they were descending into a sort of communal madness from which they would never emerge.
But it was already too late for Matilde. Matilde of the huge heart and the gentle eyes inherited from her dead great-uncle Ignacio. Matilde, so plain of face, so pallid in the light of her sister's beauty. Matilde, who had been fading for some years now, relegated to the background with her mother's unmarried sisters. But she was now awakened--and emboldened, her mother thought. Where was the source of Matilde's new fervour? Only the devil could give birth to such things. The devil and cavorting with mysterious men in the darkness.
Matilde, what are you doing sitting there alone in the candlelight Matilde? her mother asked, worried to no end about her daughter's newly found radiance.
It was not Don Miguel's stories that had granted definition to the once shadowy Matilde, but the stomach pain he inspired, brought on by years of longing, first for a father and then for a purpose to her days, but now for him, for this man in black who had traipsed in for no other apparent reason than to awaken her to the power of the morning.
It was his hands that drew her to him at first--the way they held a glass of wine, the certainty with which they told a story; then, suddenly it was his eyes, so green, so full of mysteries that she thought she could read a thousand tales with a million different endings in those eyes, and she entertained herself with divining each and every one of them. At night, he appeared to her in dreams, a shadowy figure beckoning and then disappearing into the strange nooks and crannies of her feverish imagination.
One word, she thought. One word from you, Miguel, and I will find meaning in this small, relentless existence, in the pain of being cursed with a plain face, of having been abandoned by God in the middle of nowhere. One word, and I will see myself differently, climb mountains, write the words you whisper to us--tristeza, you say, there is nothing as beautiful as sadness. One word and I will finally be me, and not this empty thing that speaks to no one, that is afraid, that thinks of death during the unbearable hour between eleven and midnight--one word and I will be whole again and not half, the half which has been left by itself to wander.
Finally, when she thought she could bear it no longer and had exhausted herself with the intensity of her emotions, Matilde worked up the courage to approach him, but only after preparing herself to ask the innocent questions that would justify her intrusion: Do you need a change of sheets, señor? How about some water? And so on, mundane questions, the kind that would force him to turn around and distinguish her from the mass of women who surrounded him in that household.
In the end, though, the question that emerged was an altogether different one.
Do you want to see the prettiest spot in all of Canteira? she asked, fumbling immediately with the hem of her apron andfighting the overwhelming urge to burst into tears, for what could this man possibly want with the prettiest spot in Canteira when he had travelled the world and seen remarkable things, the things he described in his slow seductive Andalusian drawl: Mujeres, he had said, there lies the world beckoning to you, and there she stood, Matilde with her childish question, as outside the sun shone with the intensity of a thousand mornings.
But si, he responded. Sí, he said, yes and yes, and then nothing else with his mouth but she was sure with his eyes he was saying other things. She was sure with his eyes he was saying, I know about you, about your loneliness, about your father's sadness on the occasion of your birth and your mother's emotional absence. I know it was your sister Asunción who shone the brightest. I know these things and others, the things that hide inside the crevices of your mind, the things that haunt you in the darkness. So give me your hand, Matilde, give me your hand and let me put you at the top of the world where you belong, and not here in the periphery of the night sky, dancing alone to the tune of a distant longing.
They walked there later that day, but only after Matilde had looked well behind her, making sure her mother was busy with tending to the animals, and her aunt Cecilia was labouring over the cooking for the household, and her sister Asunción, the sister with the alabaster skin and the eyes that hinted at a never-ending seduction, was occupied with the baby. The evening sky was red that night--she would remember the colour and the intensity for the rest of her life, would summon the memory during long days and nights of uncertainty--the squishing of their feet the only sound they made as they walked through the winding path to the edge of the forest.
Matilde had stumbled upon the spot when only eight yearsold, at the time when she was losing her father to the profound sadness that would eventually kill him. She had stumbled upon the prettiest spot by accident, on a bright summer day, and it was the rock that had beckoned to her--a magical rock, a rock built by time, that jutted sharply from the ground to greet the sky. On the rock she traced with her fingers what someone had engraved there: a woman's head with hair made of coiling snakes and a sixpointed star and the mysterious words anima mundi. That very night, she had told her father of the rock as she had washed his feet and he had stared into the ceiling catatonic. She had told him about the woman with the serpent hair and the star, and she was sure that in the night of his lost stare, her father's eyes had registered something.
When Matilde and Don Miguel reached the spot, the prettiest spot in all of Canteira because from there the whole world was at their fingertips, the brook that lulled her to sleep in the afternoons, the ruminations of the animals and in the west, in the distance, the hills of Orense, hills that could be mistaken for mountains they were so majestic--when they reached the spot and Don Miguel had run his fingers along her magical rock and inspected every fleck and dot upon it, he had finally looked at her, not with the careless eyes of one who has seen everything, but with the eyes that appeared inside her dreams, eyes that beckoned and promised, eyes, above all, that recognized the living, breathing being inside of her, the genius who had found the mountain.
But then he was leaving and there was no special good-bye, no look, no furtive touch on a bare arm, no hidden message. Instead, he gave her one of his books, a leather-bound, ponderous tome full of so many words that she thought she would go mad just contemplating them. But nothing said, no explanation, no answer to the questions that had been tormenting her nightly.
After he had disappeared, leaving her devastated, she read each and every one of the words in that book over and over again in the slow, careful way she had been taught by Doña Gertrudes, reading forwards and backwards until she could recite entire passages from memory word for word, without even an inkling of their true meaning, reading the book over and over again in a futile attempt to glean the message she felt sure was hiding there. And then one day, finally, on page 159 there it was: amor, she read, the love of learning is the great answer. But it was only after a year of torturous rereadings that the word finally reached out to her, igniting a passion that would fill her days forever after.
From then on, she searched the town for every book she could find, and then paid contrabandistas to bring books from the coast, which arrived wrapped in foreign newsprint smelling of cod and ripe tomatoes--all of this she did to the utter chagrin of her mother, who warned her of the dangers that lay inside the pages of all the leather-bound volumes. Books, Matilde, are the temptations of the devil himself, María would tell her, worrying about what would happen to her household due to the obsessions of her ridiculous daughter, the one who looked the most like her husband, a resemblance that brought such pain to her heart that María had stopped looking at Matilde years ago.
Later, once Matilde had entered her sixth decade of life, holding enough words in her heart to circle the earth a thousand times, she would give talks to the young children in town about the beauty of metaphors, the music of poetry, the tranquillity of a world unsullied by smell, by the absence of touch, by the overwhelming pain of never being looked at by your own mother.
María knew she was not liked by the townspeople of Canteira. Sí, hombre, of course she knew it. The way they looked at her, the stories they told--of Arturo, especially, of how her husband had hanged himself on a Friday in July, and next to the hams no less. What dignity, they asked, could there possibly be in a man who chose death next to the hams and the garlic? In her rare moments of self-reflection, María would concede that she was not all that well liked by her family either. For the most part, though, these thoughts, when they surfaced, did not bother her unduly. It had been her lot in life to take care of things, to tend to the animals as her father lay on the floor of the local taverna, felled by too much wine, to care also for her mother after she had succumbed to the stroke that left her paralysed. And now it was the five women who needed tending to, her sisters Carmen and Cecilia (useless both of them), and her daughters: one, Matilde, a dreamer of the most illogical kind, and the other, Asunción, the one who looked the most like her, the one who had held some promise until the appearance of the wretched Manuel who had stolen her heart, left her with child, and disappeared into the Brazilian jungle to cavort with el demonio himself, for God, María was convinced, would surely have wanted nothing to do with that sinner.
In town, she was known as María la Reina--the Queen--because of her haughty way of walking and her habit of looking down at people, a relic, people thought, of her younger days when her beauty had been so great that it was almost legendary. So who cares about her beauty? the less beautiful women--the women who hated the thought that such power existed but did not belong to them--would ask. With all her beauty, she still managed to drive her husband into an early grave, and that is what beauty does, eh? It drives men into the hands of death,and if you don't believe me, just think of her equally beautiful daughter Asunción and her equally dead husband Manuel. Sí, that is the power of beauty for you.
Now older, still beautiful, still as forbidding as Italian marble, draped head to toe in the black she never managed to rid herself of because there was always someone dying, always someone to mourn--the black that only made María appear more outstanding, more dramatic, more regal than the ancient queens of Spain--with the passing of time, María had adopted an even haughtier air, inspiring even more criticism from the nastier tongues, some of whom had turned the thought of María into an obsession. If María knew of the commentaries--and everything in town was eventually known to everybody--she did not acknowledge them, mastering instead the dismissive look that drove both men and women crazy, the former with unspeakable desires, the latter with a suspicion that their husbands were feeling such things.
But now she felt old. Too many disappointments, too many nights reliving the pain of too many accumulated days. She thought then of Arturo's dead body, an image she had never been able to banish, and the thought of his hanging brought to mind the smell of her sister Cecilia's cooking, which had grown stranger with the passing of time. Cecilia was loca, had come undone due to the odour of death, and there she was at that very moment dumping so much turmeric into the rice that the house was sure to smell vaguely of a distant country for days and weeks after.
What to do? Once, as a child, in the fleeting moment before her mother's stroke and her father's descent into an alcoholic madness, María had dared to envision a totally different future for herself. Now, her life seemed burdened with dependent women everywhere, and complicated by the contrabandistas and their loneliness and darkened by her memories of death, yes,especially her memories of death, of her father and her unhappy mother and, above all, her inconsolable husband, Arturo--
Arturo, where are you, Arturo? Are you hiding again? Don't scare me.
Arturo. Why had it been Cecilia who had bumped into his dead body in the kitchen when surely the initial shock of his death belonged to her, the first encounter with the lifeless body, the first knowledge that he had hanged himself, just to flee from her? Why Cecilia dear God, who was never anything more than an appendage in the household, the unmarried sister given to fat and to endless melodrama, why her, Señor, when that moment was mine, as sure as the night it was mine? No matter, she would think of it no longer.
Outside, the morning light mixed with the interminable rain, rolling off the window panes like Cecilia's laughter. On a day like this María had married Arturo against her parents' wishes and to the surprise of all the townspeople, who had expected a grander choice from la Reina, because even if her inheritance amounted to a pittance, her beauty promised her more--one of the Nogueira brothers, for example, who owned vast expanses of land and who dressed in linen suits of the highest quality, or Joaquin Rodríguez, the mayor's son, a man who still harboured a deep and unrequited love for her.
But Arturo Pérez Barreiro? Not only was Arturo from an ordinary family but he was a known weakling, a man given to tears at the most inopportune moments, at fiestas when inspired by the brilliance of the night sky, and at public ceremonies where he often took to reciting stanzas from his nebulous poetry--poetry that so befuddled the townspeople that he was known as el poeta confuso, because they thought that only someone labouring under a terminal case of confusion could possibly have dreamedup such cumbersome lines, such cryptic allusions. But that is what an education does to you, eh? That was the comment--an education was good only for the useless outpourings of poets, and as one of the town maestros, Arturo had nothing if not an education. And when he died, so young and so violently, the people of Canteira held the poetry responsible for his madness, the poetry and María--who, according to the more sinister minds, had driven him to poetry in the first place, depriving him of his senses with the promises she had surely never delivered.
In the morning your face takes on the contours of the moon, prolonging the night prolonging the unbearable, beautiful darkness
So he had said, so he had written in his schoolboy's hand, words, seductive words she would never trust again. Now it looked as though Matilde had inherited the lunatic seed, the love of words that had driven her husband to an undignified death and had thrown María into a ceaseless mourning because she was never to rid herself of the burning pain inside her heart and in the pit of her stomach which is where real feeling ends.
After a day of these dark thoughts, the kind that kept her awake during the night (and which she would blame on her rheumatism the following morning), after a day of these thoughts and the anguish that arose from them, María unleashed her frustration on the women, a habit she had developed even before the death of her husband, and one that was sure to guarantee her at least one night of sleep--even if it kept all the others awake for much more than just one night afterwards. As usual, she directedher anger towards Matilde first and launched her attack even before the first course of chestnut soup was served, signaling to all that this would be an unhappy dinner.
No more books Matilde, do you hear me?
Si, Mamá, don't worry.
Don't worry? How can I not worry when the town is on fire with talk about you. Some even say you pay men money to bring you books and let me not find out that you are paying men, because that would be the end of me, do you hear me, Matilde?
Bueno, María, leave the child alone now. This was Cecilia speaking in her calm, dulcet tone, hoping to put an end to María's tirade before the dinner was ruined and the night turned mad and they were all at each other's throats, cursing and furious. Cecilia hated these dark moods of her sister's, the infernal moods that made eating tense, and Cecilia wanted nothing interfering with her dinner. But her sister's intrusion only worsened María's turbulent mood, and she now unleashed her ire on Cecilia, accusing her of trying to kill the household with a combination of spices that could only rot the stomach and pervert the mind, reminding her of that day when, as a child of only eight, Cecilia had poisoned--that was the word she used, poisoned--the entire family with the half cup of pimienta picante she had dumped on the octopus, and look, it had nearly killed the abuelo already seventy-six and ailing. Si, even then you were up to something. Cecilia had heard this attack before, but it never failed to reduce her to a crumbling heap of self-pitying sobs, for after all, there she was, a slave to the stove, cooking her inventive dishes--hermana, she would say between hiccups and nose blowing, this type of cooking does not come easy--and suddenly the whole kitchen was in an uproar, with one consoling the other, the other berating another, and so on,until there was nothing to do but walk away from the table and take refuge in the barn, in a bedroom, in the hall, anywhere where one could be alone. All except for Cecilia who would remain in the kitchen eating, but only between hiccups and sobs, and without any enjoyment whatsoever.
On those nights, Cecilia would finally crawl up to bed at midnight, after eating her portion and everyone else's and, full of food, creep into the bed she shared with her sister Carmen--a woman a third her size due to a disorder of the bowels that made the easy digestion of food an impossibility, but which made sharing a bed so much more comfortable--and Carmen liked sharing a bed with Cecilia, the heat of all her sister's flesh warming her in the winter, the sound of her breath reminding her that she was not alone in the world, a world she had never understood or even cared for. There she calmed her fat sister, reminding Cecilia of all the fiestas of their childhood. Shshsh, hermana, it is almost daylight. And soon they were both asleep, dreaming of the stars, the moon, and the planet Mars--the planet, an old meiga had once assured them, that was the architect of all misunderstanding.




The month of March in Canteira was cold; the kind of cold that seeped through bones, invaded the heart, and then spread slowly to all other organs below. The kind of cold that years later, would make a mockery of advertisements lauding the sultry heat of Spain, the countless operas where sensuous Spanish women are forever seducing hapless señoritos in the shade. And the sunshine--this was the land of sunshine, was it not? The place the Germans and the British would invade in droves decades later, hoping thus to escape the misery of their cold countries up north.
But this was Galicia, the north of Spain. The green, Celtic, rain-infested, so-beautiful misty north, so misty that if you looked hard enough, you could see God traipsing about on distant hillocks, angels dancing on treetops. But so cold that few thought of coming this way, not even later when isolation became a thing of the past, gone the way of chaperones and faith healers with the arrival of three-lane highways, financed by European subsidies and twenty years of unparalleled growth.
In 1926, the month of March was an especially bitter one. Cutting winds penetrated unabated through doors and windows, and there never seemed to be enough blankets to burrow under. Black shadows appeared beneath eyes. Phlegm formed in lungs. Blistering coughs punctuated the light of the early morning. At nights, cold and coughs merged, sleep escaped through window cracks, rain fell on rooftops, and eyes remained open searching for consolation in the darkness. In Canteira, that month would be remembered for years to come--not because of the unbearable cold however, but because that was the time when the virgin lost her head at the patronal feast and Carmen became known as Carmen the Holy One forever after.
At the pensión of María la Reina the fiesta preparations had begun in the early morning with the arrival of the fresh oysters, barnacles, and the lamprey, with María's ill mood and with Cecilia's creative exertions in the kitchen. Twenty guests had been invited from as far away as Santiago de Compostela, many whose names were preceded with estimado this and estimada that, a group that included at least three wealthy merchants and two prominent priests, and the excitement had been building in the household for weeks now. By then the reputation of María la Reina's pensión had grown--Stay there, señor, in that house on the outskirts of town, the one that belongs to the Encarnas.No better meals can be found in the whole of the country, no talk better than there, in their parlour by the candlelight, people would tell each other excitedly. As more guests had arrived over the years, more money had been made, and now, finally, María announced it was time to celebrate their success so that others in the town would realize the extent of it.
That year, the colour in fashion was forest green. Dresses were made princess style, embroidered with rose petals, and hats were worn by even the poorest farmers. All through the year, there had been an unusual number of marriages in Canteira, precipitated by a spate of unplanned pregnancies and an equal number of enraged future fathers-in-law. That year, the winter cold was followed by the intense heat of an unusually long summer. Contrabandistas arrived bearing strange contraptions from the coasts of Galicia, inventions from the eccentric and often perverted minds of the French and the English.
Inside the pensión, new dishes had been bought and fashionable dresses had been ordered for the women from Isabel la sorda, the renowned seamstress from the nearby town of Tres Luces, who could weave miracles with linen and disarm the devil himself with her expansive collection of imported buttons. That was the year María la Reina sacrificed a bit of her mourner's black to wear a dress in grey and green, colours which accentuated her stunning cat-like eyes and inflamed the jealous tongues of the women of Canteira even more. They whispered to each other furiously throughout the fiesta mass, for How could she? Sí, mujer, it is much too soon after her husband's death and that of her son-in-law also, and anyway, that is a dress more appropriate for a very young girl than for a grandmother.
María had used her grey-green eyes only to observe every deficiency in the household from the quality of the fish that hadarrived that morning, fresh from the coasts of Vigo, to the culinary concoctions of her sister Cecilia, so excited by the prospect of feeding the distinguished guests on that day that she had outdone herself, creating dishes bearing names of local luminaries made with ingredients no one had ever heard of.
In the church, a new virgin shone by the altar. Made by the craftsmen of Canteira and decorated with freshwater pearls, a gown of white brocade, and eyes painted with drops of gold and silver, this was to be her official debut after endless collections from the townspeople and a final donation from María la Reina herself, which drew a nod of approval from Don José and a thunder of disgruntled criticism from others in town even more envious of her newly fattened purse than of her legendary beauty.
At half-past eleven, six men in black appeared at the church and placed the virgin on their shoulders. A hush filled the cold air as people waited for the mass to begin dressed in their fiesta finery, huddling behind the virgin in preparation for the customary procession around the church's perimeter. Rain fell outside, littering the earth, granting an air of solemnity to the proceedings. Inside, the air bristled with excitement. The virgin's face, luminous, as splendid as one of the statues described by the town's most learned man, Emilio Larra, upon his return from a visit to El Prado, beamed at the congregation from beneath her golden canopy.
Soon after the ringing of the church bells, the men commenced their walk around the church behind Don José, who was singing the Gloria in a voice that cracked and irritated, with the congregation dressed in their forest green and high-heeled shoes following closely after them. Among them was Carmen Encarna, who was thinking not of God, nor of the beauty of thenewly decorated virgin, but of the strange heat that had begun invading her body well over a month ago now and that was keeping her awake at night with painful desires, the product of a million indecent thoughts and as many furious longings.
She could speak to no one about the heat, not even to her sister Cecilia, her sole confidante throughout her quiet lifetime. Not to María. Dios mío, not María--who knew what María would make of her new-found preoccupation? Not to friends, she had few friends in any respect because her time was fully occupied with toiling at the pensión. In any case, these were indecent longings, the kind they had been warned about since they were young children, the kind Don José was forever railing about on Sundays and on other holy days.
As the people chanted and the men rocked back and forth with the weight of the freshly decorated virgin and Don José's voice continued to crack and meander, Carmen's thoughts grew increasingly more intense, the heat more unbearable. Thoughts of indecent caresses and kisses in the moonlight--no, by the church, here, amidst the graves of Canteira's forefathers, a kiss, a caress, the hot lingering touch of a mysterious man dressed in a suit of English wool and a stunning black fedora. Yes, Ave María and all that. Yes, sin pecado concebido also. The virgin, God, Jesus Christ, and all the saints, Popes too, sí the Popes if you like, but a hand slipped sensuously down her back, the passionate kiss of an unknown stranger--sí, señor, as well to all that too, God almighty, our Father who is most certainly in heaven, for where else would he be?
Just as thoughts grew hotter, and rain mingled with sweat making Carmen's discomfort all the greater, Antonio Fernández, the baker with the limp who had been entrusted with one of the corners of the virgin's canopy, tripped on a jutting stone,lost his balance and sent her flying backwards where she landed on the ground with a crashing thud, losing her newly painted head, which rolled furiously backwards until it came to rest at Carmen's feet, whose own head was lost at that moment inside her many indecent thoughts and who started to scream deliriously at the sight, associating the impurity of her desires with the tragedy of the virgin's face that lay before her, and who continued screaming until well after the ceremony had ended and the fiesta meal had been ruined and María la Reina had threatened her with a whole range of reprisals--which failed to diminish Carmen's tears or to scare her into a more private contrition, however, for she felt secretly that she deserved these punishments and fervently longed for each and every one of them.
In Canteira, the talk of the day's events filled the town for weeks and months after. Despite the most earnest attempts to reattach the virgin's head to her spectacular baldachin robe, the crack in her neck remained visible, so that she was condemned to wear a white gossamer scarf at each successive fiesta for years after. Of Carmen's strange behaviour--behaviour that grew stranger in the days that followed as she took to her catechism with a passion that seemed more appropriate to the pious nuns of the nearby Convent of Santa Clara--much had been said with no conclusions reached. After that day, Carmen Encarna came to be known as Carmen the Holy One, baptized by the events at that year's fiesta by words from God himself, a God she would tell one and all, who had spoken to her from inside the pearly head of the decapitated virgin.
It would be Asunción's fate that, born already with a delicate mind, she would fall in love with the one man in town who had the power to unhinge her completely.
She met him at the Fiesta of San Andrés, at her first dance, when she was just sixteen--too young to know the ways of the world, yet old enough to fall madly in love with Canteira's most notorious fiend. Already Asunción was known for being beautiful--not as beautiful as María maybe, but certainly sweeter, because she had inherited her father's weepy disposition and had none of that haughtiness of her mother's that so disturbed the busy tongues of Canteira.
The object of Asunción's obsession was one Manuel Pousada, the son of a local farmer with little land and even less sense, who was adored by the women in town, the señoritas, who watched him behind their fans, whispered things to him from their verandahs. At twenty-five, Manuel could already boast of an abysmal reputation--especially among the fathers and mothers of Canteira's young women, who fretted endlessly about the state of their daughters' virginities and the disgrace that the loss of that state would bring to their families and entire generations of their descendants. His reputation was so dark, the rumours of his conquests so exaggerated, in fact, that merely to be seen with him would sully a girl's reputation. No matter. Manuel Pousada cared little for the talk, or for the stains he brought upon the names of the women he spoke to. He had fallen so in love with the stories of his conquests that he had begun inventing women and situations, blending fact and fiction to such an extent that even he himself grew incapable of distinguishing between them.
In any case, it was not the women Manuel lived for but the thought of Brazil--a name he had heard first in the mouth ofhis father's brother José, and one that seemed to him replete with unlimited possibilities. At night, it was the scent of the heat that came to him, the feel of the feverish dancing and the sound of the songs uncle José had learned when he worked at the Hotel Boa Esperança--songs that spoke of streets paved with gold and of glorious, redeeming sunshine.
His uncle was not the only one to have succumbed to the lure of emigration. For decades now, the men of Canteira and the surrounding villages had been leaving--one by one at first, in droves later--for Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and the tiny nations of the Caribbean. They left for these countries in search of work, dignity and, above all, an opportunity to return to their small towns and even smaller villages, their pockets bulging with the wealth that would buy them the respect they had always dreamed of. In their countries of choice--in the Brazils, the Cubas and the Argentinas--these emigrants worked arduously, constructing bridges and houses for the ostentatious new-world rich, cleaning up in restaurants and hotels, making unheard-of sums of money running prostitution rings and peddling contraband liquor. In all cases, as they cleaned, peddled, and bribed, they pined for their homeland, waxing so nostalgic in bars and in restaurants that jokes soon surfaced about these foreigners, these peasants lost in the dream of the return. What is there to return to, they would be asked, when you came here to escape the misery, the poverty, the dirt, even the green hills and the chestnut groves of your glorious Galicia?
Back home in the desolate green hills and valleys of Galicia, the women tended to their families, fed the animals, and laboured in the fields, waiting for news from their men, many of whom succumbed in these exotic countries to yellow fever--which was rumoured to devour the liver and turn the eyeballsyellow with sadness--and other diseases, even more frightening and evil, convincing those back home that their men had departed to a hell on earth, from which only the very lucky few could hope to return.
Those who did return--after having cleaned interminable bedrooms and bribed a bevy of faceless officials--would arrive bearing puzzling gifts and carrying with them the smell of their new countries, a smell that lingered for days, sometimes weeks on their clothes and on their breaths, reminding all that the men's stay would be a short one. But it was the ground they would kiss upon landing, the earth bathed in the perennial mist of their homeland, the mist they had longed for during the endless sun-filled days when the world seemed too bright, imbued with too much laughter, laden with sweltering sunshine. They knew--instinctively and with certainty--that it is the rain that holds the real promise of eternity, the rain, the mist, and the impenetrable darkness.
The more successful of the emigrants--the Pérez and the Rodríguez families, for example, who had accumulated what seemed to those back home to be suspiciously large amounts of money--had returned to build houses that were not houses, but ponderous jagged things, fashioned from granite and marble and built into the nooks and crannies of the region's more desolate hills and valleys. Some, like Ramón Camacho, who had made his fortune in furniture--though no one, it was true, could figure out just how he could have made so much money with tables and chairs and things of the like--had even decorated his windows and doors with what were believed to be diamonds, because they glittered beautifully in the sunlight and beckoned to his door in the night all manner of forest animals and contrabandistas, seduced by the beauty and majesty of this house.
For the most part, though, the people who returned--those who had survived the arduous work and the plethora of deadly and largely unpronounceable infections--found, to their horror, that things had changed irreparably in their absence. Now Andrés the mason was dead, and Jaime, the owner of the local taverna was nearly blind, and even their families had grown older, more weary, had dared to go on, altering forever the sacred memories of childhood. And their children, babies when they had left, transformed now into total strangers, shrinking visibly from the men they could not remember, who stood before them now, claiming to be their fathers.
Then the tears began in earnest, not for a land or a people, but for the dreams the men had carried in their heads for too long, the nebulous, beautiful memories of a time and a place now utterly transformed, a place forever denied to them.
But Manuel Pousada would never miss this land. Had never been obsessed with a land wet with rain and tears when the land denied them the dignity of work, when she failed to offer a way to survive the interminable nights, a way to assuage the pain of all the frozen mornings. Manuel's only dream was of the heat, of the sunshine that rolled off backs and rested on top of heads, the kind of sunshine he would only find in America--Europe was too old now to offer anything but the same tired darkness.
When he caught a glimpse of Asunción at the Fiesta de San Andrés, holding awkwardly to her woollen skirt, her huge black eyes looking at him in the way he had come to recognize long ago as the longing of a smitten woman, he had experienced no great lurch of the heart, no great moment of recognition.
Instead. That niña has eyes for me, Juan, Manuel told his friend, laughing at her under his breath because he had grown bored with the attention paid to him by all the women long ago.
That niña, idiota, is the very daughter of your beloved María, Juan responded, eyeing Asunción as he did so, surprised to see her staring so boldly at his friend, a man Juan resented deeply, judging him to be wholly undeserving of such exaggerated female attention.
María? María la Reina? That is María's daughter? Manuel's cynical smile now disappeared because if there was one woman in the world guaranteed to perturb Manuel, it was María, the woman who dismissed him with an empty look every time he contrived to bump into her at church--which he attended only to catch a glimpse of her--or to brush by her in the market near Carmiña's stall, where María stopped to purchase fresh sardines, silver hake, and salted cod on Fridays. Instead, all he had succeeded in doing with his bumps and brushes was to annoy María thoroughly, for who was this clod? she would ask herself after he had bumped into her yet again, and what was he doing brushing up against her, a woman who could be his much older sister? For the most part, though, she ignored him completely, managing thus to aggravate the flames of Manuel's ardour, because for Manuel the thought of María was as powerful as the thought of Brazil, her gaze as seductive as the heat he so longed for. Caray, and now here before him was the daughter--pretty too, no doubt, but nothing like the haughty María.
Leave her alone, Manuel, Juan warned him now, worried about the look in his friend's eyes, a look that Juan had seen all too often and that warned of a whole series of impending improprieties.
If her mother knew the girl was looking at you like that she'd lock her up for the rest of eternity.
If her mother knew.
Juan had no idea why Manuel obsessed over María the wayhe did, when she was almost a decade older, when she was as imposing as a French aristocrat and as difficult to read as the dolmens in Lauredo. María was beautiful, but shrewish and proud and altogether impossible. No one, in Juan's estimation, was worthy of the kind of attention his friend devoted to her, an obsession that had lasted for years now, this mad, relentless love--when all around him the most beautiful women of Canteira sighed and fainted at the mere mention of Manuel, offered themselves up to him. And here he stood, the idiota, besotted by this dark, unapproachable woman.
In Asunción's lovesick stare Manuel saw an opportunity, the one he had been praying for since first setting eyes on María, and no amount of cajoling from his friend, no lengthy enumeration of dire consequences, would stop him. Before long and with minimal effort, Manuel was at Asunción's side, catapulting her into a frenzy of love in just one hour and invading her mind to such an extent that even years and years later, after all the tears he had caused her to shed, it was his face that she saw before succumbing to the disease that killed her.
After the fiesta, they met secretly in the forest and by the church, Asunción crazy with love, Manuel biding his time until he could get to her mother. It would be the only time in her life that Asunción would outsmart María, finding clever excuse upon clever excuse to run an errand in town just so that she could spend precious moments with the beautiful Manuel, the man who looked like an angel, the man whose passion surprised and overwhelmed her. The consequences of this passion she was quite ignorant of, believing as many young women did then--sheltered and protected as they were from the realities of life--that babies came from Paris and things of the like, and she was thus earnestly perplexed by the range ofsymptoms that eventually afflicted her and that the older women quickly surmised could add up to nothing other than a pregnancy.
Later, when María sat down to try to make sense of it all, when she paused to determine how she had been deceived so easily when her instincts were usually so sharp, when she had lived all of her life to avoid such things, the only answer that came to her was that it was Matilde's fault, that if María hadn't spent so much time worrying about her younger daughter, she would have been watching out more closely for Asunción, would have saved her from a fate worse than death, the fate of having to spend the rest of her life with a man undeserving of her.
It was with a shock then, matched only by the shock she had suffered from the death of her husband Arturo, that she received the news that her beautiful daughter Asunción, barely more than a girl and as innocent as the sun, had managed to get herself pregnant and by that clod Manuel--and where had she seen him before? María asked herself.
They were married a week later, quietly, with few in attendance apart from the aunts, who sniffed into their handkerchiefs, and shook their heads at the virgin, and oohed and aahed underneath their breaths at the glorious man who was about to join their household. That very day, after the marriage ceremony--and after Asunción had vomited almost without respite for an hour, trying with all her might to defeat wave upon wave of morning sickness--Manuel moved into the granite house and began taunting the women with his often disrespectful behaviour.
At first it was his appetite, so voracious that it scared even Cecilia, who had thought no one desired food more than she, and who stared at him dumbfounded as he inhaled the chorizoand the salted ham and the plates of Galician cocido, washing it all down with bowls and bowls of the best vino tinto. Then it was Manuel's habit of grabbing his new wife in the presence of the virginal and shocked aunts, who hummed and hawed and looked at the floor and out the window in an effort to avoid embarrassment, but who managed, nevertheless, to observe every grab and every pinch out of the corner of their eyes, mesmerized by the sort of behaviour they had always fantasized about, and by a man like that! Imagine, hermana, Carmen told Cecilia one day in bed, just imagine it, making it clear with the tone of her voice that she was spending a good deal of time doing just such imagining herself.
But it was María he outraged the most, making her skin crawl with the intensity of his stare--What is he saying Good Lord, what are those insolent eyes telling me?--with his habit of brushing up against her in the parlour--Oh so sorry, Doña María, I didn't see you there--outside by the barn as they tended to the pigs and, worse, in the hallway between their respective bedrooms, as María prepared for bed and Manuel ran to catch up with her, coming so close she thought she could feel his hand slide impertinently down her back, his breath heavy on her frightened earlobe. Soon María was wandering the house in a state of complete and utter terror, fearing another encounter, another brush with her son-in-law.
The naked insolence in Manuel's gaze spoke to María of the things she dared not acknowledge, because Dios mío, no, how could she have driven her husband to his death and now this, be intruding upon the happiness of her daughter? It was her face again, her treacherous face, for it could not be her demeanour. She was as cold as stone to Manuel, as foreboding as a thousand widows in mourning. No, she would not accept what his eyes told her during those furtive moments when hecaught her gaze, eyes that said the things his mouth never dared utter. That was how to keep the insanity of a man's desire at bay, that was the trick to sleep undisturbed at night and awake calmly in the morning she told herself. But the torment remained, the knowledge that this despicable man lurked in the shadows of her house like a rabid rodent.
One night, after Asunción had retired to her bed early complaining of fatigue and the other women were busy tending to the guests at the pensión, Manuel's ardour turned into abject carelessness. He found María alone in the kitchen, peeling the potatoes for the morning tortilla, lost in the darkness of her thoughts, in the fear that things would never be right again. She was thinking that Manuel Pousada was no better than vermin, just like each one of his sorry ancestors--especially his lazy father and the madwoman who had been his mother, dead now, worn down by years of abuse and the depression brought on by their wretched poverty. How had this happened, Good Lord what is it I have done to be paying for my daughter's mistakes? How long must I weather the insults of this impossible animal?
Lost in her thoughts, she failed to hear Manuel approach her from behind, failed to stop him before he had placed his hand on the small of her back. And then--the line had been crossed.
First though, there was confusion.
What? What are you doing? How dare you.
So sorry, señora, thought you had called. Thought you had need of my services.
And then his laughter. Ringing in her ear, the one final insult.
And you will leave, she screamed, knife in hand, liver in throat, enraged beyond her wildest imagining. You will leave this house now, not tomorrow, nor the day after, but now, do you hear me?
You will leave, I say, leave before the morning, she told him again when he continued laughing, the smell of liquor enveloping her, aggravating the insult. A contemptuous peasant, that's what he was. As rough as those pigs they slaughtered in winter. Ay, that would be a fine destiny for this man, on his back, neck slashed from ear to ear, his blood staining the dried grass beneath him.
I don't understand, Doña María, why? Why do you want me to leave the house? Manuel asked knowing full well why and daring her to voice the words he himself dared not utter.
My reasons are my reasons, Manuel. At that very moment, she wished fervently for a lightning rod to descend from the sky and fry him thoroughly and completely. He was like an infection--a pervasive, insidious infection. Where had he come from? Why was he here? Away with him, away from this house, from her life, from the debris he had made of her most beautiful daughter! She was so incensed her whole body was shaking, a fact duly noted by the infection in question.
And my pregnant wife? You do remember Asunción, don't you, Doña María?
Cállate, animal! Don't you even dare speak the name of my child. I will secure a passage to Brazil for the both of you. I want you to take your wife and start a new life there, do you understand?
His dreams of Brazil finally realized, and by her, María, María la Reina, no less. He could hardly believe it.
Yes, I understand. But if I go to Brazil, I go on my own, just so you understand, Doña María, he told her coldly, sacrificing his wife and his unborn child in a breath. He cared little for Asunción and her childish tantrums when right there, in the same house, in the next room at night, lay his true love, María, a woman who so beguiled him that it took all of his willpower not to grab her again now and put an end to his waiting. It isall right though; he told himself. A little waiting is a good thing. All good things require a long period of wanting. So much better the having later.
As you wish, she answered him gravely. But if you leave alone, it is better that you think of never returning.
And then it was over, the agreement reached that he would depart for Brazil the following month, leaving his wife and unborn child in the care of the women. That very night he told his wife the news, lying about where he had found the money for the passage and promising that he would return for her when she started crying loudly and inconsolably. He was careful, though, to instil the right amount of fear in Asunción's heart so that she continued sobbing well into the night, keeping the entire household, and especially María, awake for the duration of it--a fact that made Manuel's rest all the more peaceful.




With the passing of time the popularity of the pensión of María la Reina had grown so dramatically that new furniture had been bought and the parlour had been expanded in fits and starts to accommodate the nightly reunions that took place around the large wood-burning stove. It would be Cecilia's fervent storytelling and her astounding creativity with fish and veal croquettes that would contribute most to the growing popularity of the pensión. It was her dramatic re-enactments of tales of death and destruction, love affairs conducted in secret hideaways, that would bring them all to her door--the expectation they had of hearing a new story or even of hearing an old favourite, told with the same flourish as if for the first time and all were ignorant of what was to come. Every night brought a different traveller to the pensión--contrabandistas from Lérida,students from Santiago, labourers on their way to find work in the streets of Madrid--eager for the warmth of the Encarna parlour, the delicious tales told by a dramatic Cecilia to whittle away the darkest winter nights.
Every evening, the townspeople of Canteira also began arriving at the pensión once dark descended, eager themselves for the talk that transpired around the giant wood-burning stove. There women would embroider and men smoke, listening enraptured as travellers related their own fantastic tales from their wanderings through Spain. Few newspapers existed then; there were few ways of finding out what was happening beyond Canteira except by way of these men, who offered not only goods for sale, but their own village gossip, news from Madrid, the fashions, the theories, and all the other bits and pieces that made up the larger, more interesting world. Still, despite all the news that arrived with the strangers, it was Cecilia's tales that drew the people most of all. Sordid stories of their very own, gossip that had travelled into Cecilia's ears and mingled magically with other information, with her dreams, and with the mysteries she claimed she could read in all manner of inanimate things.
Witness. Just down the way, she told the packed parlour on a particularly vicious winter night, when winds and rain howled furiously outside, just down the way there lived a woman years and years ago whose parents never tired of claiming was virtuous as a thousand nuns. White frilly woman with canary yellow ribbons in her hair. Virtuous, they said. So virtuous that on her marriage night she refused even her husband, told him that she was saving herself for the Lord. Days passed like this, with him begging, her refusing, until one night, standing it no longer, he forced her onto the floor. And then, guesswhat, good people? Cecilia would raise her hands, signalling to all that the drama was about to unfold. The woman, as the husband found out to his dismay, was no woman at all!
Screams greeted this revelation. Laughter and glee. Women ceased embroidering as Cecilia embarked on a yarn of her own. Visits to Madrid awaited the virtuous woman, exorcisms at the hands of the Bishop of Salamanca, rituals enacted by local meigas, who advised the parents to carry an empty casket across the Río Avellana in the dead of night and to feed their unhappy daughter chestnuts boiled in milk. Finally, just as mysteriously as the very ailment she suffered from, the woman was cured--but not before Cecilia had squeezed the last drop of blood from the story, described Satan down to his pointy red shoes, luxuriated in telling how that same woman, poor soul, went on to give birth to twelve children, only two of whom made it past the age of three.
Story followed upon story, retellings of events that happened, concocted tales more often than not. Tales of the supernatural, of the dreaded Santa Compaña, the procession of the dead, who emerged at the stroke of midnight, candles in their long, bony hands, announcing with their chanting who in town would be next to join them on the other side.
Winter nights passed like these. Women embroidering, men smoking, aguardiente plentiful, Cecilia's famous empanada passed from guest to guest. From the corner of the parlour, María watched and listened, unamused. She enjoyed Cecilia's tales as well as the next but had long learned to cloak any happiness she felt with a look of barely concealed distaste, and she was bothered by this congregation made up mostly of nonpaying guests. Yet despite her discomfort, María knew it was Cecilia's gossip, her habit of lacing every tale with an offer ofa bit of food, her dramatic rolling of the eyes, the heaving of her chest, that brought the paying guests there, that had allowed the pensión to expand since its establishment all those years ago.
So let her tell another story, another farcical tale told for the third night in a row. What mattered were the pesetas, the wealth that would stave off the uncertainty of winter, calm the sharp winds that tore through town and made cold nights even more so. By the wood-burning stove in the parlour, with men smoking and women embroidering the sheets for their daughters' trousseaus, at least no mention was made of the Encarnas' own lives--the tales that amused so many in town who congregated by the heat of other wood-burning stoves. Inside the warm parlour of the pensión, María could not hear those loud whispers, the titters that emerged here and there, the biting words spoken by gossips who, like Cecilia, found much to enjoy in the miseries of others, in the bad luck that at one time or another visits us all.




Of her early days, Gloria remembered the feel of embroidered sheets, the colour of mourning donned in honour of her dead father, the endless hours of bickering over neighbours, and an ocean of dreams full of indecipherable omens. In their house of Galician granite and silver-grey balconies, she spent her youth listening to the whistling of the wind, seeping through the cracks of doors and windows, delivering promises that never quite managed to materialize.
Her most potent memories were laced with the tangy smell of the sea. It was to the sea that she travelled every year with the great-aunts, her mother, and her aunt Matilde. Cecilia arranged these sojourns to the coast, obsessed by a ferventlyheld belief that an annual dip in the waters of the Atlantic was the only way to ward off the debilitating menstrual pains that had plagued all of the women in the family since time immemorial. Every July, the women would travel to the coast--all except for María, who dismissed Cecilia's belief in the curative powers of the ocean as horse manure, and who insisted in her best high-handed way that the other women suffer their monthly inconvenience as she did, with dignity. But she encouraged them to go anyway, savouring the thought of a month on her own without the crying of a child, the worries brought on by the platoon of women, and, above all, a month thank God, without the smell of Cecilia's strange and pungent cooking. Once at the coast, the women would walk up and down the sandy beaches near La Coruña, pausing only to dip their fully clothed bodies into the warm salty waters of the Atlantic and relishing the air that was a heaven-sent respite from the terse, foreboding mountain winds of Canteira.
It wasn't until she turned seven and joined Doña Gertrudes' small class of ten other girls that Gloria realized she was fatherless, and then only because of Carmelita Pereira, the mayor's daughter--who informed her of the fact with considerable relish during morning recess. You, Gloria, are the only one in all of Canteira without a papá, she had said. It wasn't really true. Many of the children in town had lost their fathers to emigration, had seen their fathers once, maybe twice in their lives, but the men were spoken of at home, were remembered by those they had left behind. Gloria could not remember ever seeing or hearing about a father, not from her mother, not from the great-aunts and certainly not from her Nana María, who was, in any case, too busy to talk and too intimidating to question.
That afternoon as she walked home, after being strappedinto her coat and berated by her great-aunt Carmen over the milk stain on her navy blue uniform, she noticed the existence of fathers for the first time. They were everywhere. They dressed in pants and smelled of tobacco and had whiskers and big hands, just like those of her great-aunt Cecilia. They said things differently, more gruffly, a bit like Nana María, actually, when she was angry, when she was screaming at the great-aunts, or lamenting her luck, or telling Edelmiro that he was a useless ass and a brazen sinner. Where had the fathers been until now? And, more important, where was hers hiding?
Once at home, she ran to her mother, tears streaming down her face, for she wanted the whiskers and the big hands, and felt suddenly deprived in the deep, devastating way felt only by children.
What have you done to my father? she asked her mother, her unhappy, distant mother. Her mother who seemed like stone, who forever failed to exude the comforting, warm breath of her aunts, though not, it was true, of her grandmother.
For years after, Gloria would fantasize about her father, imagining him tall and handsome one moment, warm and loving the next. For a long time, she even fantasized that her father was Angel Rodríguez, the richest man in Canteira and the owner of the very first car in the region--a black, regal machine with gleaming white interior, inside of which Gloria imagined herself seated next to him. Papá, she would say to him, and then not much else, for it was the name on her lips that she savoured, the thought that this absent, unknowable man was the answer to all of the questions in the universe.
Years later, when Angel Rodríguez was butchered by communist sympathizers during the final days of the Civil War--stabbed fourteen times and left to die like a dog on the side ofthe road--Gloria cried real tears for this man, for although she had never really known him, he was the only man she could ever call by the name of Papa, though she knew there was no foundation whatsoever to this wish.
Her real father, it seemed, was dead. Her mother told her so, on the very same day Gloria discovered that she was fatherless. Brazil and a train and an accident--kaboom, her mother told her, reenacting things--kaboom and adiós forever. It would be years before she stopped telling people that her father had been killed by Brazil--years before she realized that Brazil was a happy land full of people, and not an accident that had left her lost inside this murky world of women.
At eight, she was ushered into a new world by her aunt Matilde, the kindest woman of them all, no heart was as large as Matilde's, no eyes could determine more astutely the things that amused children best. It was then that Matilde took her to the magical spot, the prettiest spot in all of Canteira because from there the world seemed larger, the sun brighter, the possibilities endless. There, in the afternoons, as they tended to the cows, Gloria learned for the very first time of the existence of magical things, of things known only to her aunt because they spoke from within the covers of her secret books, the books Matilde hid from Nana María and shared only with Gloria, and only here in the prettiest spot, hidden next to the rock decorated with medusas and circles and other mysterious and impenetrable symbols. It was her aunt Matilde she liked best, Matilde and great-aunt Cecilia, with her cooking smells and her never-ending theories about saltwater cures and the meaning of signs that could be read in the cloud formations, about the need to cross a bridge seven times to ward off illness, about witches and demons and the wolfman who lived in the forest at theback of the house, waiting patiently for the chance to devour girls like her, girls on the threshold of becoming women.
Ay, hermana, Carmen would say, whenever she caught Cecilia telling Gloria such tales, if you continue with these stories, you know what awaits you. The infierno, hermana, the infierno.
Carmen could certainly never forget hell, could imagine the terrors to be found there ever since that fateful day with the decapitated virgin, terrors that strengthened her resolve to give her life up to God, just like one of those famous mystics, Santa Teresa de Jesus or San Juan de la Cruz.
I have become a bride of Christ, she had announced to the surprised women of the household one day.
The only brides of Christ are those nuns in the convent, said her sister María, who had no time for Carmen's religious fervour--nor come to think of it, for the ponderous sputters of the nuns of Canteira. But Carmen dismissed this statement as she dismissed most things that did not accord with her new-found worldview, reserving her strength for the task of memorizing all the saints and their deeds: Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians (why was her sister so afflicted by odours? she would wonder); Santa Monica, mother of her favourite saint, Saint Augustine; and especially Saint Benedict, whom she invoked on the darkest nights to ward off evil temptations--like the temptation to scream at María, to abandon the cows in the pasture, and, worst of all, those temptations she dared not articulate that focused, Ave María Purísima, on her niece's beautiful and now dearly departed husband.
Ridiculous, you are ridiculous! María would scream at her, whenever she caught Carmen praying into her rosary or pondering the dimensions of hell by the wash basins. You'd be wiser to concentrate on tending to the animals, Carmen.
María was forever fretting about the animals, worrying thatthe cows weren't getting enough sun, that the quality of the hay was inferior because it was a leap year, that the colour of the milk pointed to an insidious infection, that the chickens looked constipated and unhappy. Carmen knew that the insults were María's way of expressing her love, of telling Carmen that she was appreciated in the household, even though she was as skinny as a rake and was forever disappearing inside the folds of Cecilia's large grey and white aprons. Carmen knew that María's love came enshrouded in insult, tried to convince Cecilia of this fact, when she was wounded by María's words, left in pieces inside the kitchen to assuage her injured feelings with stewed rabbit a la Carmiña and sardine empanada.
It was Carmen who taught Gloria all the lessons of the catechism, Carmen who taught her each and every prayer, Carmen who prepared her for Holy Communion, for confirmation, and, years later, revealed to her what hell could really be like, destroying her faith and catapulting her into a life of questioning. But it was not the catechism she liked best, it was the stories told by Matilde and Cecilia of half-human, half-animal beings who preyed on young virgins, of witches and magical rocks, and of mysterious men dressed in black who arrived bearing silver trinkets, promising things that were never fully revealed to her.
It was to these two women that she retreated because her own mother was a silent, wounded mystery. Her aunt Matilde told her it was due to her father's death, that no sane woman can survive such a senseless and utter tragedy.
Your mamá is busy thinking about the patterns of life. Remember, Gloria, things happen always in circles.
Gloria remembered, would remember all of Matilde's theories with respect to her mother, without for a moment understanding even one of them. In Gloria's mind, her mother was foreverfloating away from her--a nebulous, unfathomable being, as beautiful and as unreachable as marble. Her real mama was a big lump of Encarna women; the cooking odours of Cecilia rolled into the religious fervour of Carmen, blessed and embellished by Matilde's imaginative stories and framed by the two unfathomable bookends--her grandmother who rarely smiled, rarely emerged from her state of black, and of course her mama, floating atop them all like a distant, unanswered question.




The resurrection of Gloria's father, Manuel Pousada, happened on a Friday as the bells tolled in honour of Santa Teresa, the patron saint of Canteira, whose lifelike effigy--constructed long ago by a local mason in a drunken stupor--stood at the border of town, welcoming all with a smile that seemed both lewd and cynical. It was Pedro Ruíz who saw him first, ambling along the main square, dressed in a white linen suit and a multicoloured cravat of silk and phosphorescence. On his arm, Manuel Pousada had one Gabriela Costa, a beautiful Brazilian, taller than any woman ever seen in those parts, and dressed so sparingly that the widows of the town--women in black outraged at the slightest indiscretion--began crossing themselves immediately at the sight, chanting Ave Marías, Padre Nuestros, and Holy Mother of God, what have we come tos?
Manuel Pousada, thought dead for more than nine years now, seemed oblivious to the commotion that had erupted all around him. After all, the sun was bright, this was the town of his birth, what are you looking at? he said with his eyes to the widows, to the shopkeepers, to those who remembered him and to those who didn't because they had been too young, had beenaway, were burdened with imperfect memories.
Pedro Ruíz, who could remember, and who stood there staring, stupefied as Gabriela Costa strutted her perfect golden body in front of them, was the first to finally say something.
Señores, he said with studied care, if this is death, let her come for me any time.
That night, the town came together in the tavern of Roberto Madriñán to discuss the extraordinary sight of the dead Manuel and the otherworldly woman who had walked by his side. There they reminded each other of the day when he had left, over nine years ago, of the ungodly rain that had fallen--torrential was the way one put it, a warning from the Lord himself, added Don José, the town priest, a dramatist of the best kind and well known for his habit of introducing God into every story told, every memory unearthed.
What they recalled above all else was the memory of his disconsolate wife telling the town of her husband's death in distant Brasilia. So devastated she was, said one. And so pregnant, added another, relishing the memory because this was no ordinary wife but one of the Encarna women--Asuncion Encarna, a strange creature, that one, a bit loose around the head. But an Encarna nonetheless, and no other family had given the town so much to talk about, so many vivid disasters to share on winter nights. No lives seemed as exciting, as shocking. And now this, one of their men had returned from the dead--oh, hands were rubbed in expectation of what was coming, the smiles beamed outwards as far as Madrid.
And did you see that woman on his arm? No, señor, that was no woman. That was a goddess, a goddess has come to town. So it was true. Manuel had indeed died, gone to heaven, and returned with a sample of what awaited them once they too were forced to face the music and what music, eh, señores? An Argentiniantango could not compare with this. All of this was said amidst great peals of laughter and loud snorts, as they celebrated this momentary respite from the harshness of their everyday lives, content in the knowledge that this event would surely unfold into a story of legendary dimensions, a tale to be passed on from generation to generation till the end of time.




The news of Manuel Pousada's resurrection did not take long to reach the ears of Juana de Castro, Canteira's most notorious gossip--a large woman with a moustache who, years before, in a tragic twist of fate, was one of the last to learn of her own son's death in Cuba of the cholera. Don José had received the news first, then told the butcher, who in turn told every farmer tending to every cow in the district until word reached Juana herself, who cried out in pain, fell to her knees, and was revived only by a good shaking delivered by Don Roberto de las Aguas, Canteira's only doctor. Even after the irony of this, after seeing her own tragedy bartered and traded among the townspeople, after experiencing the effects of sordid gossip firsthand, after all of these things, Juana continued as the town's most incorrigible talker, remained addicted to the telling of a story--the greater the tragedy, the better--and oh, how she relished the sight of the resurrected Manuel, how her heart beat madly in the anticipation of the telling.
It was Cecilia, in turn, who heard the news first from Juana--news she received with screams of shock and repeated mumblings of mamaciña, mamaciña as she held onto her expansive stomach, and then, in a final dramatic flourish, she fell to her knees, pointing her arms up in a mad supplication towards the heavens. Her loud and garbled shrieks soon brought Carmenoutside to see about the commotion, and then Matilde, and finally María, who quickly dispersed the group that had gathered by the drinking fountain with her loud demand of What in the demonios is going on here?
It was up to Cecilia to relate the news. Juana had retreated into the background, too afraid of la Reina to do the telling, but too much of a gossip to leave before she could see the look on María's face when she found out that her dead son-in-law not only had returned from the dead very much alive, but had returned in the arms of a tall, spectacular foreign woman.
As expected, the news of Manuel's return came as a shock to María, who responded by immediately ordering Juana to get off my property--even though they were, in fact, standing in front of the communal well and nowhere near her property, but who was Juana de Castro to argue? María then turned to her sisters and her daughter Matilde, huddling together horrified by the news and more nervous now that María had learned of it.
And what do you think you're doing, wasting your time with gossips like Juana? María barked at them. Get back to work! This is not a circus, nor is it a mass for the dead, and there are things to be done, animals to take care of.
Later, once the women had sat down to a meal of five courses--it was Cecilia's long-established habit to cook excessive amounts of food whenever a crisis loomed--it was María who divulged the news to an unsuspecting Asunción, who had wondered, it was true, just what was going on with all the food and the silent faces of the usually loud and irrepressible Encarna women.
It seems that lout of a husband of yours is back from the dead, María told her between bites of salpicón and Cea's famous corn bread, and without revealing any emotion whatsoever.
While Asunción stared at her mother dumbfounded, the otherwomen stuffed huge bites of food into their mouths, trying with all their might and powers of concentration to assuage the tension of the moment with their determined and exaggerated mastication.
How strange this visit from the dead, don't you think, Asunción? But then it seems that only the louts of the world ever do make it back.
More chewing from the women and then loud and inconsolable wailing from Asunción, who tried to get up from the table but was stopped by her mother's furious order to stay right where she was and tell the women, finally, what news had arrived in that letter so long ago, a letter, come to think of it, that no one but Asunción had ever read.
Don't make me talk Mamá, she told María, who continued to eat calmly as if nothing were amiss, as if this were just one more night like the rest and a dead relative wasn't roaming the streets of the town giving the people plenty to talk about.
But of course you must talk, Asunción, of course you must talk, María said, finally dropping her fork and with it the composure she had managed to maintain since early that afternoon. All around her, the women shook with emotion, with fear, with an overwhelming sense of trepidation.
How is it that a man who has perished in Brazil can show up, nine years later, dressed in a damned cravat and holding onto a godforsaken woman?
Mamá, you do not want me to talk, I promise you, Asunción told her between enormous sobs, so loud and dejected that they completely discouraged the women from their determined chewing.
Sí, I do, I do. I want to hear what was in that letter, Asunción! I want to hear it, I tell you.
María was on her feet now, pounding at the table with aferocity that shook the room and frightened the women who were already terrified by all that had happened and heartbroken to see Asunción--the tragic, no longer widowed but most certainly abandoned, Asunción--weeping inconsolably into the tableware.
But suddenly it was Asunción herself who was standing up and shaking a fork into the amazed face of her mother, screaming unbelievable and horrifying things. It was you, wasn't it Mamá, it was you who sent him away in the first place, you who paid for his ticket, you who seduced him, took him from your own daughter! And then other accusations, and more screams and gasps from the women at the table, who had no idea, could not believe, what a revelation!, while María, sombre, unflappable María who, good God, should deny such things, said nothing, sat down, stared silently and without emotion into the face of her enraged daughter.
Later, after Asunción had run from the table and into her bedroom where she continued to sob madly for hours, after the stone-faced María had forced the rest of the women to eat all of the food of all of the courses until they were bursting with unbearable nausea, after they had finally retired quietly and in terror to their bedrooms where they could not sleep, where they could not possibly talk, where they prayed silently and fervently that the day would disappear and with it the nightmare of Manuel and his Brazilian lover--after all of this had transpired, María, donning a black cape and wrapping a handkerchief on her head, set out into the cold early December night to have a word with the man whose sudden and unforeseen resurrection would alter her life forever.




Inside his room at the Pensión Nogueira, Manuel Pousada shuffledthe playing cards he had purchased in Rio one day, not long after his arrival in the land of his dreams, the ones he had kept close to his breast ever since--an amulet of sorts to ward off the evil spirits. And there were many according to the crazy Brazilians--the suspicious, magical Brazilians, the happy, beautiful people who had had the good graces to live up to all of his youthful expectations.
By now, he reasoned, María la Reina would know all about his return, would know about Gabriela, would be seething in her cold-blooded, arrogant way. He wished with all his might that he could have seen her face when she received the news, delivered gleefully, no doubt, by one or another of the town's many gossips.
In a chair next to him, Gabriela gazed into his face defiantly. This country of yours, meu amor, is a dark, unpleasant toilet. By her side, Natalia Costa, Gabriela's mother, snorted in agreement. She had accompanied them here not out of any desire to protect the virtue of her daughter, nor, for that matter, to stave off any talk that was sure to arise from Gabriela's transatlantic cavort with a married dead man. She had come with them because she felt it was her due to travel, to reap the benefits from her daughter's beauty for the few years that she could lay claim to them. And back home, in any case, there was nothing waiting for her.
Manuel had grown tired of the two women long ago, had come to regret bringing them here just so they could shock the town and drive María to the brink of madness, just so he could humiliate her daughter and the entire family so publicly and loudly that she would have no other choice but to see him. Gabriela and Natalia were impossible women, both of them forever whining, the daughter no better than the mother whenall he could contemplate, the only thing that mattered to him, was the thought of his reunion with María. María.
After he had settled in Brazil almost nine years ago, after the novelty of the experience had worn off in the country that had promised so much, that had dazzled him in his dreams during the dark nights of Canteira's impossible winters, after he had grown accustomed to the heat, surprising himself with how fast he had done so, he had woken one day with the sun streaming in through the window of one of the innumerable houses he had inhabited during the years, and had decided there and then that Brazil, just like one of the lovers from his turbid past, was nothing but a hollow shell of what he had imagined.
He grew depressed. He changed cities, still looking, taking on small jobs in restaurants where he was harassed by customers who pulled at his apron strings and made fun of his surliness, taking on work in countless hotels afterwards, until he was thrown out, inevitably, because of his laziness. Then he tried his hand selling furniture in one of the small shops of Brasilia, run by a Portuguese expatriate who complained about his carelessness, about Manuel's habit of accosting the women, and finally, in a fit of exasperation, drove him away as well. Manuel didn't care, he continued to be bored, continued to search the streets for that elusive something. Later, after years of aimless wandering, he would finally find his niche in construction--in laying down lines for the railway that was to connect remote regions of the country to other remote regions and in paving roads side by side with countless young children, enjoying the noise of the hammering and the soldering, the sound of endless building, the only racket that could silence his ruthless and punishing mind for even a moment.
Still, he could not stop thinking about María. Despite theongoing love affairs, despite the beauty of the women, despite the heat of Brazil, so seductive it could dissolve even the most potent obsession, still he could not stop thinking of her. In place of his youthful fantasies of Brazil--of the scent of the heat and the promise of the long days--there was now, exclusively, the image of the beautiful and haughty María. He was sure--could not live without the thought that deep inside the part of her that remained hidden from the world--María loved him as deeply and as passionately as he loved her.
I will tear the heart from your body, María, if it should be otherwise.
At that very moment, the object of his fervent desire was navigating through the back streets of Canteira, noticing nothing but the road ahead and the treacherous sky that hovered above her. It was a beautiful night, cold and dry, but thankfully--because it was December, the month of long nights when the famous depressions that afflicted the residents of Canteira were more pronounced and even more desperate--she bumped into no one. Most people were safely ensconced inside their kitchens, warming their feet by the wood stove, waiting for the long night to end and summer to arrive and with it some semblance of happiness.
Among the news disseminated by the gossiping Juana de Castro had been Manuel's whereabouts in Canteira. The owner of the Pensión Nogueira, a quiet and dignified man and one of the few people in town to see no value whatsoever in the peddling of a story, received María at the door that night without commentary or question. The first room on the right, he told her, disappearing so quickly and so quietly that she had no chance to thank him for his discretion.
It was Gabriela who answered the door, dressed in a whiterobe of silk and lace, her hair slicked back with brillantina.
What do you want, señora? She asked her, in her singsong way, in the tone of a woman bored and tired and exasperated by the circumstances of her life but incapable of dreaming of anything more pleasing at the moment.
María. Finally. Manuel appeared suddenly behind Gabriela, breathless and nervous, stopping only to order the two women to the adjoining room using a tight, controlled voice intended to discourage any discussion.
María, this is María? Gabriela screamed, between guffaws of disbelief, and motioned to her mother, who ran to catch a glimpse of Manuel's great love and saw, standing before her, a woman not much younger than herself--sí, beautiful in a jutting, aggressive way, but this was an old woman, not the young, spectacular creature she and her daughter had envisioned.
Old sí. But also decent never forget it was María's reply to the women, issued without even a glance in their direction and spoken in the language of the region, which so resembled Portuguese that the women understood not only the words but all of their hidden meanings.
Before they could utter a response and exacerbate the already unbearable tension, Manuel ordered them once more to Natalia's room, this time allowing for no discussion, and off they went resentfully, casting backward glances at María and, once in the room, immediately plastering their ears to the wall, intent on hearing every single word that transpired between them.
Manuel did not see an old woman. Yes, she had aged, he had been away almost a decade, after all. But time had passed for him too and many dreams had died, felled by force of circumstance, by the pressure of too much sunshine upon his skin. Before him stood not an old woman but the only dream left to him in thisunfathomable world, and he would do nothing to forsake it.
You were not supposed to return, Manuel, María said in a quiet voice, looking straight into his eyes so that he would know she was not afraid and would not concede defeat, though she felt it--deep in her heart and in the pit of her stomach, she felt it.
Have you heard? You have a daughter. To say nothing of a wife.
I have heard of the daughter, Manuel responded still breathless. As for the wife, it was you who drove me from her or don't you remember?
María shook her head. She was tired. Back home, her daughter was crying, was desperate, had suffered more today than she would perhaps suffer ever afterwards. María wanted this over with.
Now that you're back, I suppose it is better that you return to the house and assume your role as husband and father, Manuel. Though, as you must know, the thought of this is completely distasteful to me.
There it was again--the disdain. Perhaps what had inflamed his ardour all this time was this disdain, the ease with which she could dismiss him. This was la Reina, after all. María la Reina, tormentor of his nights, the inspiration at the heart of his miserable days and nights of longing. Could she not see how much he loved her? Did she not know how long he had waited for this moment?
Had you left this miserable town for even a week, Doña María, you would have learned something about the fine art of negotiation. Insults, he told her, his breathlessness now replaced by wounded anger, are not a part of this art.
You have not changed in the least, Manuel. You are still asdisrespectful as an Andalusian peasant.
At least I live truthfully.
He could not believe his ears. All his dreams of this reunion, of hearing María admit that she had thought every day and every night of him during his absence, dissolved into thin air, eliminated by her disdain--her very real disdain, it appeared, though even now he could not fully admit it. How could he have misjudged things so? She must be lying, he decided, lying to him as she had always done, unable to acknowledge her own feelings because of her fierce, ridiculous pride, the pride that would one day explode, leaving her wasted and withered.
I will return to the house if it is to be with you, he said now, exhausted by years and years of waiting for this moment, only to see it crumble into a thousand pieces before him.
How can you ask such a thing? How can your mind think such thoughts, your mouth utter such words of insanity? It was useless, she saw that now. She saw that her long walk in the night had served for nothing, that her daughter would never forgive her, that maybe her granddaughter, once she was older and was told of it, wouldn't forgive her either. Even though he had never touched even a single hair on her head, had never stood close enough to inhale her breath, people would always think otherwise. That was the way of the world, the manner in which all things unfolded. The situation was such that she would be damned with him in the house and damned without him. There was no God, there could not be a heaven, when the sacred love of a child could be threatened by the kind of man who stood before her.
She was wrapping her head in her black scarf when Manuel took a step towards her, a desperate man, seeing his dream disappearyet again, this time forever, and--Wait, he shouted at her. Don't go. Maybe I could learn to live in the house, in a world without sun, with a woman I do not love. Yes, maybe it can be done. At least it would mean being next to you, María--all of these thoughts, mumbled-jumbled in desperation, came tumbling nonsensically from his heart in a final frantic plea, uttered so loudly that the women in the adjoining room heard them clearly, and by then they had had enough. Out came Gabriela, screaming at him, You bastard wretch, bringing us to this horrible town just so we can listen to you humble yourself before this witch!
And to María, Leave now, leave before you live to regret it! Then she stopped suddenly because her mother had materialized behind them all and, grabbing the candelabra given to Señor Nogueira by a traveller from Almería, stabbed it into the shocked face of María, gouging out her left eyeball, and there was blood everywhere, and the cries that emerged from Manuel, Gabriela, and especially María filled the night, ceasing only after she had crumpled to a heap on the ground, defeated, silent, nearly blinded.
Can you believe the things that happen to those Encarna women? the gossips will ask each other gleefully in the days that follow. Husbands hanging by the hams, others resurrected with Brazilian whores by their sides. And María? What was she doing there that night? God knows how long the love affair between Manuel and María had been going on! Poor Asunción! Stabbed in the back by that arrogant mother of hers. See? That is what beauty does. That is what beauty brings. Thank God for María la Reina! Saving us from another season of despair and in the end only an eye paid for the privilege señores. A single, perfect eye.
THE BITTER TASTE OF TIME. Copyright © 1998 by Béa Gonzalez. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.