Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop (26 page)

‘Do you think Don Bosco will be coming back?' Nena asked her mother as if tapping into her thoughts.

‘Of course he will,' Nicanora replied. ‘Why on earth wouldn't he? Don Teofelo will know where to find him.' But the words sounded strangely hollow to her ears as she spoke them.

‘What are you going to do about the shop?' Nena said.

‘Nothing,' Nicanora replied. ‘It's Don Bosco's. He was just being foolish. I'll give the key back to him as soon as he comes home tonight and the mayor won't be able to do a thing about it. But I need to talk to you', she said, ‘about the Gringito.'

‘What about him?'

‘I think it is time he went,' Nicanora said in her usual blunt manner.

‘Why?'

‘He has been here long enough. This is a small house and it's very cramped.'

‘But that's not fair,' Nena said, ‘he hasn't done anything wrong. Are you angry with him for sitting at Don Bosco's table?'

‘No, it isn't that,' Nicanora said. ‘I'm worried about him, Nena. I don't think it's good for us to have a stranger staying here for so long. After all we don't know who he is or why he's here. I should never have let him stay in the first place.'

‘It hasn't bothered you until now,' Nena said petulantly. She
looked at Nicanora as if she were about to say more, but they were both silenced by the sound of men's voices and footsteps in the front yard.

‘It's them,' Nicanora said, ‘they're back,' and she ran to greet the search party. A group of men were standing in front of her as she opened the door. At first she could not make out their faces as they stood in the unlit yard. She counted five figures. Five darkened shapes on her doorstep and her heart leapt with relief. She searched for Don Bosco among the group, wondering whether she could run up to him in front of his friends and tell him how pleased she was that he was safe. As her eyes adjusted to the dark after the light of the house, she realised that one of the men she had counted in the group was the shadowy figure of the Gringito, who had slipped out into the yard after dinner to smoke a cigarette. She suddenly felt overwhelmed with hatred for him. There were four other familiar faces looking at her. Finally, Ernesto stepped forward out of the darkness. ‘We're back,' he said quietly and walked past her into the house. Don Teofelo stood in front of her, his head bowed. The two other men, whom Nicanora now recognised as Don Julio and the young doctor, turned to leave, patting Teofelo on the shoulder as they did so. Don Teofelo stood alone in front of her. The Gringito had retreated into a corner of the yard.

‘Where is he?' Nicanora asked, searching Teofelo's face for an answer. Teofelo said nothing. He just stood with his hands behind his back, staring at the ground.

‘Where is he? Please tell me. Where is Don Bosco? Where did you find him?'

‘We didn't,' Teofelo said finally, not meeting her eyes.

‘But …' Nicanora said, and stopped herself from saying, ‘you promised you would.'

‘I was so sure I knew where he would be,' Teofelo said. ‘I thought he would be waiting for us by the road. But he wasn't there.' He was talking more to himself than to Nicanora. ‘We searched the swamp as far as we could go.'

‘So where is he?' Nicanora asked again, refusing to hear what Teofelo was telling her.

‘I don't know,' he said. Then, stepping into the light, he brought his hands forward and handed her something. ‘We found it by the old tree,' he said. Nicanora reached out and took hold of Don Bosco's hat. It was battered and covered in mud.

‘He wouldn't go anywhere without it,' Teofelo said quietly. ‘I think he would have wanted you to have it,' and he quickly turned his face away and bade her goodnight.

The shop smelt cold and lonely, as if it had been left alone for much longer than a day. The key that Don Bosco had given Nicanora only worked in the back door. She wondered whether he had kept the front-door key for himself, knowing that he would soon be coming back. The candle in her hand cast an outsized shadow over the small back room, which looked as if it contained years of old bric-a-brac. I hadn't taken Don Bosco to be a hoarder, Nicanora thought to herself, as she tripped over the wheels of a broken bicycle. She was still not sure what had driven her to the shop in the middle of the night. Perhaps it was to pay homage to the man who in her heart she simply could not believe was gone for good. Maybe it was the hope that the shop would hold a clue to where he was and, more importantly, when he would be returning. Or perhaps it was simply her curiosity getting the better of her after a day of holding the key, an opportunity to find out more about the man who had been there in the background of her life for as long as she could remember and who had provided her with a steady, secure sense that somebody really cared about her.

When Nicanora thought about Don Bosco, she realised that she
did not really know him at all. Even in their more intimate days she had felt that he held something back from her, which at the time she had put down to him being older and wiser. She had never had a conversation in which he had revealed anything of himself to her that would explain why he had chosen the life he had, the life that he had now so suddenly walked out on. Perhaps she also harboured a hope that the shop that had been offered to her once with so much love still held her future happiness at its heart.

It was clear that Don Bosco used the back room as a store cupboard. The shelves were cluttered with old pots and jars, which Nicanora supposed contained the alchemic secrets of the barber's trade. The floor was covered in bits of old scrap metal and wood. I wonder what he was planning to use all this for? she thought to herself as she picked her way through the mess. She banged her elbow on the corner of a little wooden cabinet as she went, knocking some of the bottles and barber's brushes that had been piled on top of it on to the floor. It suddenly seemed strange to her that she had never in her life stepped inside the shop, apart from on that one occasion when it had briefly turned itself into an expectant marriage parlour. The memory of that day filled her with so much regret that she had to sit down and draw her breath. She could not bear to think about how deeply she had hurt Don Bosco in her careless rush, all those years ago, to discover the disappointments that were awaiting her in life.

She wondered whether any other woman had ever been inside the shop; she had certainly never seen a woman go nearer than the doorstep to peer in to look for a lost husband. What would Don Bosco say if he knew she was here now? With that thought she was overcome by an unsettling anxiety. What if Don Bosco was
upstairs asleep in his bed? Maybe he had just been playing a trick on his friends and had been waiting to see whether they would come and get him. What would he say to her if he found her snooping around? What would he think of her? Could it be any worse than what she supposed he thought of her already?

Nicanora reached across, picked up the candle and carefully made her way from the back storeroom into the front of the shop. It had the smell of yesterday's washing, left neglected in a corner to go damp and mildewed. In the dim light it took her a while to focus on what was really unsettling. The shop looked exactly as it would in the middle of a busy working day, as though it had been left in suspended activity, waiting for Don Bosco to pick up where he had left off. The sink was full of stale water, with foam floating on the surface. The barber's razor was lying on the tabletop, open and ready for use. An old damp towel hung limply on the back of the chair, and cuttings of hair lay scattered on the floor as if freshly hewn from their owner's head. I would have thought he would have swept up after him before disappearing like that, Nicanora said to herself as with her foot she pushed the curly grey bits of human debris, which from the look of them were offcuts from Don Julio's hair. This was certainly not the shop of the fastidious man Nicanora had known – or thought she had known – for all those years. And yet Don Teofelo had not given her the impression that Don Bosco had left in a hurry. At least he had given enough thought to what he was doing to have packed a small case. It was only then that Nicanora realised that she was standing in the middle of the shop still clutching Don Bosco's hat in her hand. It felt strangely intimate, even more intrusive somehow than having broken into his property in the middle of night to make critical comments about the state of his cleaning. But he did give
me the key, she reminded herself. He must have known that I would come here. And Nicanora carefully put the hat on the pole that Don Bosco always left outside the shop to show he was open, placed the candle in a jar on the table, rolled up her sleeves and set about clearing up.

Momentarily lost in the task, Nicanora forgot about her unease that Don Bosco might be asleep in bed upstairs, until she became aware of a gentle tapping coming from the room above the shop. She stood still and listened. The tapping stopped. She went over to the window and peered through the shutters, to see if anyone was outside. The familiar plaza, the plaza she had known all her life, looked uneasy in the dark. The church on the corner assumed gigantic proportions in the middle of the night, and the vegetation covering its front gave the appearance of the forest trying to break in and take the Virgin as its own. The trees cast unholy shapes around the building, which was buried in a deeper tone of dark to the rest of the night. She felt overcome by an inexplicable terror.

With a shiver of foreboding running through her, Nicanora quietly made her way up the rickety staircase at the side of the shop, to where the tapping had come from. She stopped at the door that she supposed led to Don Bosco's bedroom, and listened carefully. She could hear nothing that hinted of a human presence. The tapping started again. She slowly opened the door and looked in on the most private corner of Don Bosco's life. This was certainly not the bedroom of the man who had left the shop downstairs in such an untidy state. A neatly made bed nestled in the corner. The few books on the shelves were all lined up in order of size. A pair of shoes was tucked under a chest of drawers; the heels exactly level with each other. The tapping that had assumed such portentous
meaning in Nicanora's mind could now be attributed to a simple source. It was the only indication that Don Bosco had departed from this room in an untidy state of mind. The window beside the bed had been left slightly ajar and the shutters were banging against the frame with the ebb and flow of the night breeze. Nicanora could not contain her curiosity. She opened one of the drawers. Don Bosco's old white barber's shirts were still there, carefully folded. They smelt of starch and fresh ironing. In the wardrobe there hung a single pair of trousers. Suddenly, she had an unwashed, sullied feeling, looking through a lonely man's paltry possessions.

She ran downstairs with the fury of guilt rising inside her. What have I done? she said to herself. Where could he have gone? It felt as if the comforting eye that had watched over the town for years from its unassuming home had now shut, and without it anything could happen. With that thought the little shop was suddenly overwhelmed with the scent of wild rose blossoms and a vision of the room as it had been the last time she had stepped foot in it filled her senses. She knelt down on the floor, put her hands among the phantom petals, and wept.

Nicanora knew exactly what she needed to do. It was Don Bosco who had reminded her of it. What had his parting words been – before asking her to call him Pepito? ‘Make sure nothing bad happens to our town,' that was what he had said. ‘You have a gift. Use it.' What had he meant by it? She had never mentioned ‘the gift' to her children, hoping that all traces of it and the early humiliation it had brought her had been buried alongside her mother. Indeed, she had never given her ancestors any thought since her teenage years and had never again tried to make contact with them. They, for their part, had also left her well alone. But since Don Bosco had uttered those words she had felt a deep disquiet at the core of her
being. The feeling was difficult to describe, but she was sure somebody was trying to tell her something, and that it was something that she really did not want to hear. She had a sense of a familiar voice saying to her very faintly, over and over again: ‘There is trouble ahead, Nicanora.' What made her most uneasy was that this thought had come to her with greatest clarity while she was standing in the plaza with Nena, watching the Gringito writing the postcard. Don Bosco had never seemed comfortable with having the Gringito in town. Did he know something that he had not told her? It felt as if the Gringito, simply by being there, had altered a delicate and imperceptible balance in the life of the town, so that all the unseen strands of the web that had held things in their place for years had been shaken, and an unpredictable force was entering. Did Don Bosco know the Gringito in some way? ‘That is absurd,' Nicanora said out loud. ‘Don't listen to yourself. This is the night talking.' Whatever the questions were, Nicanora knew there was only one answer. The Gringito had to go.

Certain of what she had to do next, Nicanora went into the storeroom and searched among the shelves. It took her some time to find what she was looking for, but eventually hidden in the midst of the dusty jars she found a small bottle of neat alcohol. She supposed that Don Bosco used it for cleaning his razors, or at least she hoped that was what he used it for, but it would do for the purpose. She went back into the shop, the ghostly waft of rose petals having now been replaced by the fresh smell of soap from her cleaning efforts. She pulled some leaves out of her pocket, placed them on the ground and poured the alcohol over them. She then knelt down and whispered: ‘I am very sorry not to have been in touch for so long. I hope everyone is keeping well.' Even to her ears the words, once spoken, seemed rather ill fitting to the
occasion. She then waited. There was no reply. After some time the faint tapping in the room above started up again, as if it were an obscure sign from the ancestors. Nicanora waited patiently for a few minutes and then she shouted at the top of her voice: ‘Where has he gone? Why won't you tell me? Is he ever coming back? Why have you never told me anything of any use?' Suddenly, out of the deep fug that now filled her brain, she heard a very faint, but familiar voice.