Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop (12 page)

Doña Consuela's Kitchen, with her lodging quarters above, was the first port of call for the mayor when he arrived in Rosas Pampas and he always felt comforted by Consuela's hospitality. On his recent visit it was to Consuela whom he had turned to vent his fury at the sight that had confronted him. Rosas Pampas had in the time since the mayor's last visit quite simply reinvented itself. The town, and Consuela's Kitchen in particular, were now awash with foreigners. They were everywhere. The shops surrounding the less-than-impressive central plaza, which even lacked a church, no longer offered the obligatory mix of tinned fish, dried pasta, beans, washing powder, candles, soap, beer, boiled sweets and unsavoury biscuits. Instead they boasted opportunities for the visitors to buy the rare handicrafts for which the region was now apparently renowned. Woven bags with
A gift from the historical town of Rosas Pampas
embroidered across them in blue and pink lettering; and bowls, cups and ashtrays with
I love Rosas Pampas
painted on them in gaudy lettering, now filled the shops.

What had really infuriated him beyond speech, however, was
shop after shop stuffed with brightly painted dolls. Small dolls, large dolls, dolls that winked, dolls with halos whose lights flashed, dolls with tears that streamed down their cheeks, dolls that repeated. ‘Bless you, bless you,' when they were touched. Dolls that all claimed to be faithful replicas of the ‘lost Virgin of the Swamp'. Some of the more enterprising young men had set up stalls on the edge of town selling bits of rock with postcards claiming them to be ‘the last remains of the ancient town of the Virgin'. The accompanying literature told how the town had slid into the swamp years ago along with the treasured Virgin, and despite many expeditions into the forest – on which most of the brave explorers had apparently died – she had never been found. They also offered excursions by donkey to hunt for the remains of the town of the Virgin, which, judging by the maps that marked the various routes to be followed, clearly led the unsuspecting and intrepid tourists in quite the opposite direction to where the real Valle de la Virgen slept, oblivious to the slur on its existence.

‘Bastards,' the mayor spat as he lamented to Consuela. ‘Dirty, lying bastards.'

Consuela listened to the mayor's distress and then waved her hand in the direction of her assistant, who brought over two more cups of coffee.

‘It isn't right, Consuela,' the mayor moaned, wondering why his usual order of beer had been replaced by the insipid coffee. ‘They're stealing our business.'

‘Oh Rodriguez, I doubt that really,' she replied, surveying her heaving establishment with pride. ‘Let's face it. Nobody ever goes to your neck of the woods, apart from you people who live there, of course. Who is going to risk being eaten by the swamp to get to a small, forgotten place with nothing to offer them?'

‘Nothing to offer them? Nothing to offer them?' the mayor repeated in indignation, spraying his coffee – which Consuela was now inexplicably and rather pompously referring to as
cappuccino
– as he spoke.

‘No, Rodriguez, you have to face it,' she continued, ‘if they were going to come to you, they would have got there by now.'

‘But
we
are the town they have come to see,' the mayor said. ‘
We
are the real thing. We don't need to sell them fake dolls. The only problem is they don't know where we are. But I'll soon fix that.'

‘But Rodriguez,' Consuela said, delighted to share her wisdom with her friend. ‘What is it that you think these people come here for?' The mayor had been asking himself exactly the same thing ever since he had arrived.

‘Well, it's obvious,' he replied. ‘They want to see the treasures of our ancient town.'

‘Wrong,' said Consuela, watching the queues building up outside her café.

‘They want to see the Virgin.'

Consuela shook her head.

The mayor was fast tiring of this game. ‘They want to take photos of the Virgin weeping?' he said now more as a question than a statement.

‘No, no, no,' Consuela said, banging the table with excitement as she directed her assistant with a nod of her head to make sure that the tables were being cleared quickly enough. ‘Will they be able to take your precious Virgin home with them? No. You have it all wrong, Rodriguez. We are offering them the mystery of the lost town. They would much prefer that to trekking all the way to the real one just to find out that it is no more mysterious than where they just came from.'

‘But –'

‘And after they have seen your precious Virgin, what then?' she continued. ‘You have to understand what these people want.'

‘So tell me what that is,' the mayor said, defeated.

‘Banana pancakes and computers,' Consuela replied. ‘That's what keeps them here,' and she banged the table again with delight. The mayor only had to look around him again to see at last that Consuela was right. Doña Consuela's Cyber Kitchen was humming. At last he understood what made the foreigners flock to the far-flung corners of the world. Consuela had the answer: pancakes and computers. These people would happily, willingly and diligently come to the depths of the remotest and most primitive regions as long as when they got there they could buy a cup of milky, frothy coffee and spend the rest of their day in a dank smoke-filled room sending messages home. Pancakes and computers they wanted. Pancakes and computers it would be.

Nicanora had been wondering for some time how she was going to raise the question of the hat shop with Don Bosco. The healthy wad of notes she had now saved from the rent money the Gringito was paying her was forming a lump under her mattress that was beginning to disturb her sleep. She had rehearsed the conversation with Don Bosco over and over in her head, never managing to get it to sound remotely acceptable or reasonable. ‘Don Bosco, you are looking tired these days,' she would begin, or, ‘Don Bosco, don't you think you have been a barber for quite long enough?' No matter how she imagined starting the conversation, it always sounded careless, contrived or downright rude. She had not planned when she
would make her offer; when it happened, it could not have been done with less finesse.

Don Bosco had been standing in the doorway of his shop observing her conversation with the mayor and Ramon. As they left he beckoned her over to him. In recent weeks, Don Bosco's remarks had focused on the Gringito's antics in the plaza. ‘Nicanora, it's such a joy to have a visitor to our town after all these years,' he would say, ‘and it's down to the efforts of your own dear son. I dare say that the mayor will one day dedicate a bench in the plaza to Ernesto for his endeavours in transforming our little town from a centre of peace and tranquillity to a place truly humming with eccentricity.' Or he would call her over on her way to the market and ask: ‘Nicanora, I was just wondering, do you think a sensible girl like Nena really ought to be spending so much time standing on her head?' But today he took her off guard as he asked her in a more serious tone than usual, ‘Nicanora, what do you really think this Gringito of yours is doing here?'

‘I don't know,' she replied. ‘He only talks to Nena. I still can't understand a word he says. Nena says she thinks he's lost.'

‘Lost? Well he could be with us for some time then. I hope he's paying you handsomely for your hospitality,' he replied with a wink. Then, with a look of concern and kindness, he added: ‘You do know what you are doing, don't you, Nicanora? You will take care, won't you?' And suddenly, standing in front her Nicanora saw the young man who had covered his shop in flower petals for her and she knew it was her moment.

‘Don Bosco,' she replied, ‘many years ago you offered me a share in your barber's shop, and I believe I did you a disservice in not considering your offer.'

Don Bosco dropped the razor he was holding and stared at her. He shook his head as if to clear the wax out of his ears.

‘And so,' Nicanora continued, unable to stem the torrent of ill-chosen words streaming from her lips, ‘and so I have been wondering whether you would be kind enough now to accept an offer of lunch at my house on Sunday.'

Don Bosco blinked, put his fingers in his ears to make sure all foreign objects were removed, and then said: ‘Nicanora, have I heard correctly? Are you saying that, after twenty years of living in the shadow of my rejected offer, you now want to make up for it by inviting me to lunch?'

‘Yes,' replied Nicanora. ‘We're having chicken.'

‘Chicken,' Don Bosco said.

‘I'll get Ernesto to kill a plump one.'

‘Chicken, you say,' he repeated again, staring at her as if his only consideration in accepting the invitation was what was on the menu.

‘Yes, chicken,' she replied. There was a long pause, the silence between them filled only by the distant humming of the Gringito. ‘Don Bosco, do you accept my offer or not?' she asked finally, anxious to bring the meeting to a close.

‘Yes, Nicanora,' he replied at last, ‘I gratefully accept your offer.'

All was not well in the mayor's house. The servants had been distracted during their employer's absence by the demands put upon them by his wife's increasingly erratic behaviour. Doña Gloria had taken to her bed after her sister and confidante, Doña Lucia, had generously shared with her the latest gossip circulating among Lucia's tea-sipping companions, and had refused all enticements from the servants to get up. The mayor, it seemed, had been seen in Rosas Pampas at a lodging house owned by ‘a woman of questionable morals', as Lucia delicately phrased it to protect her sister's sensibilities.

‘Screwing his bloody whores again – see if I care, the whore-loving bastard,' was Gloria's response to the news, and in a flourish of defiance she had locked herself in her bedroom refusing entry to everyone, including Lucia. Doña Gloria occupied her time writing long complicated daily menus, which she posted under the door for the servants, who left the requisite dishes on rows of trays outside her room to be devoured secretly in the middle of the night. Lucia, whose day could not progress without at least an hour's gossip at her sister's expense, adapted quickly to the situation by installing a
chair in the hall outside Gloria's bedroom and shouting daily news updates through the keyhole.

‘… And now there's a strange man standing on his head in the square humming to himself. He's a foreigner. Apparently Ernesto brought him here,' Lucia took great delight in informing her sister.

‘What's Ernesto doing back here?' Gloria shouted. ‘I thought he had gone for good. I expect he's going around spreading tales about me.' Recalling Ernesto's farewell party and her disgrace, Gloria descended into a flood of tears.

‘Don't worry about Ernesto,' Lucia soothed. ‘I'm sure he's forgotten all about it, as has everybody else. Anyway, he spends most of his time with this new doctor now.'

‘What new doctor?' Gloria enquired, calming down a little.

‘The one Rodriguez found.'

‘Don't talk to me about that whore-loving son of a bitch,' Gloria shouted through the keyhole, in another flood of tears. Then, after some time she enquired, ‘So what's he like, this doctor?'

‘I don't know. I've seen him sitting in the plaza. He's young, handsome. He seems shy. He has beautiful dark eyes though, sad eyes. He looks a bit like that film star.'

‘Which one?'

‘You know, the one in all those films. Remember … the one about the girl who falls in love with her brother's friend, but she can't marry him because he's married already, although he doesn't really love his wife, he just married her out of pity because she was poor and ugly – then his wife dies, but the girl has married someone else so she still can't marry him, even though he now realises he loves her. Then she kills herself. It made us cry, you remember.'

‘Yes, I know, what's his name?'

‘I can't remember. It will come to me. Anyway, he looks like him.'

‘Hmm.'

‘But Rodriguez won't be pleased when he gets back and hears we have a madman in the plaza,' Lucia continued, provokingly.

‘Serves him right, the bastard,' Gloria screamed. ‘Humiliating me like this again. Staying away for months while everyone knows he's sleeping with his whores.'

‘Well, the man is a brute, I give you that. But don't upset yourself. Remember, Mother always warned us all men are brutes at heart, so there's no point in getting upset about it.'

‘She was quite happy for me to marry him. She didn't think he was such a brute when he gave her those presents of jewellery.'

‘This is why I never married,' Lucia said finally. ‘You can't trust any of them.'

‘You never married because nobody ever asked you,' Gloria retorted, her vicious streak always stimulated by her sister's smugness.