Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop (18 page)

‘You should set up a stall in the plaza,' her mother told her. ‘People need to be able to hear it for themselves.'

‘I'm not going to turn into an old hag like Doña Nicolesa,' Nicanora argued. ‘She only told the future to earn money because she was too ugly to get married. Anyway, what good did it do her? It didn't stop her drowning in the swamp.'

‘So, even a fortune-teller can have an off day,' her mother retorted. ‘And since when have you been so proud that you are too good to tell fortunes? And don't speak ill of the dead or they will come back to haunt you, and mark my words the last person you want haunting you for the rest of your life is Nicolesa.'

The more her mother insisted that she had been blessed with the power of the ancestors the more Nicanora struggled to suppress her predictive insights. It took an enormous degree of self-control to hold her tongue and not provide passing strangers with a full weather forecast for the following month, or offer her neighbour a warning not to walk across the plaza on Tuesday morning as she would slip on a piece of rotting vegetation and sprain her ankle. Her efforts to remain firmly attached to the present were still not enough to prevent her mother's ambitions from getting out of hand.

‘You could be a wealthy woman, if only you would apply yourself,' her mother scolded. ‘People came from miles to see Doña Nicolesa, that's how she could afford to wear a new shawl every day. If you could just tell people something useful, they would come flocking to you.' And that was the problem: no matter how long Nicanora sat in a darkened room asking important questions such as where she would travel to or who she would marry and whether she would be a rich woman, the answers would come back blank, a void, denying her expectation.

She began to see some sense in what her mother was saying.
If she really was able to develop her gift she could use it to plan her escape from her backwater home. She could become anybody and anything that she wanted to be. She embarked on a concentrated programme, secretly trying to hone her skills. Sitting by the edge of the swamp, away from watchful eyes, she would burn offerings to the ancestors in the hope this would make them give her some useful pieces of information on which to build her future. ‘Tell me, knowledgeable Mother,' she would mutter as she burned leaves and sweets and poured alcohol on the ground to loosen the tongues of the dead, ‘how should I find a rich man to marry? Where will I live and what will I be doing in ten years' time? And what, after all, is the meaning of life?' The more profound the question, the more banal the response she received. After a furious argument with her mother one day, Nicanora fled to the swamp, poured in two bottles of
aguardiente
for good measure and then screamed at her ancestors, ‘Please, please tell me something useful. Is there any hope for me? Will I ever leave this rotting, stinking place?' The request was met with a clear response: on Tuesday her mother had better take care of her oranges as a freak wind would whip up a minor tornado and wreak havoc in the market, making her fruit fly across the street and land in her neighbour's cauldron of fish soup. It wasn't the answer that Nicanora wanted or expected. She wondered momentarily whether feeding her ancestors two neat bottles of
aguardiente
before asking such an important question had been a good idea. In the end she had to face the truth. She had been blessed with the power to foresee the completely inconsequential, with a particular talent for accurate weather prediction.

Nicanora stormed home possessed of a fury the like of which she had never experienced before, fuelled by her ancestors' refusal to tell her anything remotely useful. She had made her decision. She
was going to bury her gift and her mother's ambitions for her as a teller of mundane and banal fortunes once and for all.

‘You're right,' she told her mother, ‘I do have a gift and it is time that I proved it to all the gossips in the market and beyond.' She borrowed her mother's brightest shawl and an old crate that she used for packing her fruit and by six o'clock the following morning had set up a makeshift stall in the middle of the plaza. Above her head wavered a huge sign made out of a piece of rotting cardboard that she had mounted on a stick and on which she had scrawled:
Nicanora's predictions for the future – what everyone wants to hear. No matter is too small for my attention – weather forecasts a speciality.
Her mother had been right about one thing at least: the town certainly had a predilection for fortune-telling. By lunchtime the queue for her predictions had reached twice round the plaza and was beginning to stretch up the hill. Nicanora also gained some insights into why her ancestors remained firmly committed to imparting trivia to her. If the questions asked by her fellow townsfolk were anything to go by, it was because they had never troubled themselves to think about anything else.

‘When will my goat give birth?' was the first question asked by her neighbour. It took Nicanora enormous control not to reply accurately that this event would be delayed for yet another two weeks and would be a trouble-free affair. Instead, she told her neighbour to go home immediately and not leave her goat's side as the event would be imminent, problematic and require her skilled attention to prevent her precious animal from dying.

‘When will my Aunt Lola make her next visit?' asked another anxious neighbour, desperate to avoid the torrent of criticism that always accompanied the arrival of her relation at an unexpected hour in the middle of the night. ‘You have nothing to worry about
for another three months,' Nicanora reassured the exhausted woman as a vision of the tyrannical aunt making her way over the hill, ready to descend upon her well-meaning niece in the early hours of the next morning, appeared before her eyes.

‘Who will win the football championship?' was the question on the tongues of most of the menfolk, who had recently set up an illicit betting club that met weekly beside the tree in front of the church, under the watchful eyes of the Virgin.

‘It will be Don Aurelio's team, for sure,' Nicanora told one gullible soul, while reassuring the next that his hunch that Don José's Jaguars would walk away with the title of Champions of the Swamp was the right one and worth the investment of a great many pesos. The task of giving false predictions was far more exhausting than imparting the very real tittle-tattle that was beginning to pass through her head. What Nicanora hadn't anticipated was that by inviting her neighbours to ask for her insights she had started to open her channel of communication with her ancestors, to the extent that she was becoming finely attuned to their continual quarrels. Nicanora began to be able to recognise individual voices, the loudest and most forceful of all belonging to her great-grandmother, Doña Alicia-Maria.

The story of the sad demise of her great-relation had been passed down the generations like a hideous family heirloom. Alicia-Maria had been born in a small, cold village in the mountains at a time when the tin mines were starting to clatter and boom. It was the same village that had been home to Nicanora's mother for the first twenty years of her life until a handsome young man from the lowlands passed through the mines and swept her away to the swamps with the offer of love, warmth and exotic fruit. Since then, not a day had gone by when Nicanora's mother had not bemoaned
her impetuosity. ‘If only I had stayed where I belonged,' she would mutter under her breath. ‘Women didn't need to earn money where I come from. My mother got whatever she wanted for free. Milk, eggs, bread, she would go to the store and they would just give it to her. But here,' she spat the words out, ‘everything is just money and work.'

‘If it was so wonderful there, why on earth did you drag us here to this godforsaken piece of rat-infested swamp?' Nicanora asked.

‘Don't you dare talk to me like that, you ungrateful child,' her mother snapped back. ‘Your father and I have always done what is best for you and your sisters, even though we sacrifice ourselves for you every day. For one thing, I didn't want you to end up like poor Alicia-Maria.' And so the story of the demise of Alicia-Maria would be retold, each time with a new embellishment demonstrating the dangers of the mines and the future that would have lain ahead of Nicanora, had her mother contented herself with being a miner's wife.

Alicia-Maria had something of a passion for men. She was the godmother of many a riotous fiesta, and a local symbol of abundance and fertility, having given birth to fifteen children by the age of thirty-five, none of whom bore any resemblance to each other. Alicia-Maria had been taught by the missionaries that all men were equal in the eyes of God; taking a truly egalitarian approach to her pursuits, she considered any man fair game for her charms. Consequently she was adored by all the men in the neighbourhood, and despised by every woman within the twenty-mile radius of daily gossip. ‘You have to understand,' Nicanora's mother explained to her, ‘the mines are full of envy. There are people there who can make witchcraft with the devils that live deep in the caves.' Nicanora would sit enthralled by the tales of devils and witchcraft
that her mother would then relay to her in defence of her departure from the village.

Alicia-Maria, while providing a joyous interlude in the lives of many men, made her husband's life a misery. She not only tormented him at home, but also shouted at him in public. Victor was a gentle man, and so completely bewitched by his wife's womanly allure that he could refuse her nothing, not even his humiliation at being the only man in the town's history to be sent out to fetch the eggs and milk on a regular basis. Victor would occasionally offer a mild protest against the unseemly challenge that carrying out such womanly tasks posed to his manhood. Alicia-Maria would respond with such enthusiastic confirmation that he was still a man where it mattered that he would forget his embarrassment and rush energetically from the bed to the market, brandishing a new shopping list.

Victor's mild manners were contrasted in every respect by those of his sister Genara. Genara was not only appalled by her brother's very public ridicule but eaten by jealousy at the popularity of her sister-in-law. She detested Alicia-Maria with as much passion as her sister-in-law adored men. Genara also harboured suspicions about where her husband disappeared to with such regularity on Tuesday evenings. ‘Jealousy', Nicanora's mother informed her, ‘is a ravenous beast. It grows like an overfed pig until it consumes everything in its path.' And so it was for Genara. The envy that had at first been a mere source of discomfort in her relationship with her sister-in-law grew over the years to such grotesque proportions that it finally filled every waking moment of her day and then started to inhabit the darker corners of her dreams. Genara finally could cope no longer. First she talked to her friends and confidantes, who consulted the coca leaves. Then she consulted the ancestors and the Mother
Earth. Finally, she consulted the
bruja
in the neighbouring town, renowned for her highly creative and innovative acts of witchcraft. The
bruja
listened to Genara's outpourings, brewed a cup of tea to soothe her agitated nerves and instructed her to return with an agile young toad and a handful of Alicia-Maria's hair. Capturing a young toad proved to be far less of a challenge to her ingenuity than surreptitiously clipping a lock of her sister-in-law's hair. For one thing, Alicia-Maria proudly wore her hair in two tightly plaited pigtails, which she was not in the habit of leaving lying around unattended.

Fortuitously, Genara's subconscious had started to work with as much malicious intent as her conscious mind and in one inspired dream the solution came to her. It so happened that it was soon to be the ceremony of the first haircutting of Alicia-Maria's youngest child. The first haircut was always a lavish affair. Friends and neighbours were invited to partake of as much alcohol as they could consume while a pair of large scissors was passed around the party for all invited to take a hack at the child's locks, on condition that they first laid down a large sum of money on its head.

Genara was the first guest to arrive for the haircutting, carrying a bottle of
aguardiente
that she had filled with water and from which she took ostentatious swigs. ‘You watch your sister,' Alicia-Maria hissed at Victor in the kitchen, ‘she's making a show of herself. She's taken to that bottle like a baby to the breast, and what's more, she isn't offering it to anyone else.'

Genara, who had mastered the art of acting at an early age, offered an impressive performance as a drunken aunt, and as the party progressed so did her good humour. Genara waited her turn as one by one her neighbours took their drunken swipes at the little boy's head until he could bear it no longer and ran bawling and clutching
at his ears to the comfort of his mother's lap. Genara seized her opportunity. Lurching precariously towards her sister in-law, she swiped the scissors out of the hands of the priest, who had just taken his second drunken turn, and with uncanny precision chopped off one of Alicia-Maria's prized pigtails. Alicia-Maria stood silenced for a moment and then let out a scream, the like of which had only been heard before wrenched from the mouths of the devils deep under the ground. Dropping the child on his head she ran at her sister-in-law. In the confusion, Genara grabbed the dislocated pigtail and rushed from the room and on to the neighbouring town, stopping only to pick a bright young toad out of the watery green detritus by the side of the road.

The
bruja
, so the story was told, took a small doll and, placing a few drops of water on its forehead, christened it Alicia-Maria, and then buried it in a box along with the pigtail and the toad. Genara and Alicia-Maria never spoke another word to each other again, but at first all else seemed as it had been before. Then slowly Alicia-Maria began to notice small changes occurring in her body. First her legs began to swell; then her eyes grew bigger until they looked as if they were popping out of her head. She took herbs, she consulted the healer and the travelling doctor, but nothing helped her. Her legs grew so large and bent that she could no longer walk. Her skin covered in warts, turned hard and lumpy, and the only chastisements that she could offer her husband were harsh croaks in which the words were now indistinguishable. Alicia-Maria finally died of frostbite after she took to lying in puddles by the side of the road during the final months of her life.