Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop (35 page)

Ramon, under the mayor's instructions, had been busy all morning preparing the plaza with the help of a few of the more obliging men of the town. A large banner made out of old sheets had been hung above the town hall saying: ‘Valle de la Virgen welcomes all visitors'. In order to make the point as clearly as possible, Ramon had also pinned a large notice to the eucalyptus tree with the words ‘Tourist spot' written on it. A makeshift podium had been erected in the centre of the plaza out of orange boxes. On top of the podium sat the lifeless computer. An impromptu flagpole had been erected, which towered over the plaza like a watching antenna.

Ramon raced into the mayor's office red in the face, his preparation list in his hand. ‘Where have you been?' the mayor demanded, making last-minute amendments to his speech. ‘They will be here in an hour.' Ramon was about to answer and then took another look at his patron.

‘Señor,' he said, ‘I hope you don't mind me asking, but have you had a shave this morning?' He did not want to say too much on the subject, but even by the mayor's standards he was looking decidedly dishevelled. The mayor had not told Ramon about his night sleeping on the doorstep of the barber's shop, and his last bid to stop Gloria from entering. As he had seen her approaching he had tried to bar the doorway and had only relented and let her past after Gloria had threatened to welcome the visitors chained to the barber's pole. He had then adopted a softer and far more effective
tactic. ‘But my dearest,' he had pleaded, ‘this may be the greatest honour you will have in your life. Surely you don't want to miss such an opportunity because of a silly argument, and Lucia's malicious lies. You still have time to go home and put on your best dress. You will be the star of the show.' He had been so persuasive that he had almost succeeded in breaking Gloria's resolve, until disastrously he reached inside his pocket for a handkerchief with which to wipe his face and brought out the offending underwear. From that moment on, war on the visitors had been declared very loudly from behind the barber's chair.

‘Are we running to schedule?' the mayor asked Ramon.

‘We are, señor. We are indeed,' Ramon said walking around in circles, reading from his preparation list. ‘Exactly to schedule, exactly to schedule. The school band is ready. They will be assembling soon. The podium is constructed and we have finally managed to make the banner stay up. I just have to get the gourds.'

‘Gourds?'

‘To hang around the visitors' necks.'

‘Hang around their necks?'

‘I think we have to give them a gift.'

‘You can't hang bloody great gourds around the visitors' necks, Ramon. You will decapitate them.'

‘Oh,' said Ramon, ‘what shall we give them then?' and he rapidly crossed gourds off the list.

‘I don't know. Something unique. Something they will remember us by. I thought you said you had it in hand.'

‘Not gourds then,' Ramon said.

‘Think, quick. What do we have that we can give to them, that symbolises what is really important about the town?'

‘How about a bit of the church wall?'

‘We are not giving our visitors a bit of crumbling old wall to go home with, Ramon.'

‘I know,' Ramon said, quick as a flash. ‘Don Bosco's hat.'

The mayor took a step towards Ramon as if to hit him. ‘Go and get one of the schoolchildren to pick some bunches of wild flowers, Ramon. Have you got that bloody computer working yet?'

‘I'm working on it, señor,' Ramon answered. ‘The problem is we need to plug it in.'

‘Well of course we need to plug it in, Ramon. How did you think the bloody thing works?'

‘I mean we need a cable, señor, that is long enough to stretch from the town hall to the podium. We can't run it from the barber's shop as Doña Gloria is currently blocking the door, although she has put up a nice banner above the shop.'

‘Has she indeed?' the mayor said.

‘And is the doctor ready?'

‘The doctor?' Ramon said, as if it were the first time he had thought about him.

‘Have you got a group of women and children ready to be at the clinic?'

‘Yes, señor, yes, I have done that. I went to the market this morning and paid them all just as you asked me to.'

‘So the doctor is ready at the clinic?'

‘Well, señor,' Ramon said, wondering how he could avoid telling the mayor that, in all the rush of preparations he had so effectively put into action, it had slipped his mind until an hour ago to make the visit to the doctor to warn him of the guests' arrival. When he had got there, the doctor had been nowhere to be seen.

‘I am sure he is. I am sure he is,' Ramon replied, but the mayor was distracted and had wandered over to the window to look at
the final preparations. ‘I'll show that bloody Nicanora woman that she can't steal my thunder,' he said. ‘By this time tomorrow, I will have her out of that shop. I just don't want Gloria making a fuss in front of the visitors. We can use this to our advantage –' And then he screamed, ‘Where is the bloody
hipi
?'

‘What bloody
hipi
is that?' Ramon said. The mayor looked at him as if he wanted to kill him.

‘How many bloody
hipis
do we have in this town, Ramon?' he bellowed.

‘One,' Ramon replied, and rushed to the window to stare at the vacant spot under the eucalyptus tree. ‘He's gone,' Ramon said, horrified.

Nicanora stood next to Gloria, observing the proceedings in the plaza as the time of the planned arrival approached. The exasperated mayor was still trying to raise the flag, which was as defiant in its determination not to move up the pole as Gloria was in her resolve not to leave the shop. Suddenly the waiting crowd started to clap as the national emblem ascended in uncertain, jerky movements.

‘I'm sure it shouldn't be red,' Nicanora said to Gloria. The mayor turned and glared at Ramon.

‘It was the only colour I could find,' Ramon explained. ‘I painted one stripe on the top and then I couldn't find any yellow paint for the next stripe. I hung it out to dry overnight, but it seems to have run a bit.'

‘Well, it will have to do. They will be here any minute now,' the mayor said. And the townsfolk gathered to welcome their foreign guests as the red flag flew high above the town of Valle
de la Virgen. The school band started up as the clock struck eleven, which everybody knew meant it was noon. Nicanora suddenly saw Nena rush across the plaza ready to take her place in the welcome party. Nicanora called her over.

‘Where have you been?'

‘I just went for a walk,' Nena said.

‘Nena,' Nicanora said, ‘I hope you haven't been into the swamp alone again. What were you thinking of?'

‘It's all right,' Nena said. ‘I didn't go far.' She was about to go off and join the band when she turned back with a worried look on her face and said to her mother, ‘There are green men in the forest and they are talking to themselves.'

Arturo received a visitor in the night. He had been half anticipating the knock on the door, although he was not sure from whom it would come. He had never become used to the dark of the forest nights, darker than any of the childhood tales that Doña Julia had spun for him and which now retold themselves in his dreams with the terrifying rationality of an adult mind. Alone in the dark, his sleep was visited by the spirits that invaded the slumbering bodies of unsuspecting souls. He dreamt of the pregnant woman who gave birth to an anaconda after having taken fright one morning when she woke to find a snake in the bed beside her instead of her husband. He saw himself attending the labour as the unending body of the serpent progeny tore the woman's womb apart.

He sat up in a cold sweat, his thoughts involuntarily turning to Don Bosco wandering alone in the forest night. The haunting image of the barber's half-submerged body appeared in his mind, not for the first time. He was no longer sure whether it was the product of nightmares or whether he had truly seen it lying there covered by the undergrowth, floating face down, bloated, swarming with
flies, mud oozing from its pores. He had heard about such things in his medical training. Shock can make a liar of an honest man, obliterating all sense of what is real in the world, turning facts into fiction and fanciful stories into God-sworn truths. He tried to push the vision of the body from his mind and to think more comforting thoughts. The picture of the hat on the barber's pole floated in front of his eyes. He had seen it as he walked through the plaza earlier that day, a totemic representation of all that was good and precious about the town: to him it symbolised the very being of the place. He wondered how long the townsfolk would go through a period of denial before the grieving process would really begin. What a brave, kind woman Doña Nicanora is, he thought. He did not have the heart to tell her that he was certain that a man like Don Bosco could not have survived lost in the swamp for days. He fell, once again, into feverish dreams, this time plagued by the apparition of Doña Gloria teasing him with her ghostly ailments.

He lay drifting in and out of sleep. Earlier that evening he had allowed his body to be washed by the freshness of Isabela's touch, and his mouth had tasted the sweetness of her kisses. She had come to him, the night of his return from the search party, and she had sat and listened to him, and consoled him, comforting him that if it was not Don Bosco's time to be found, nobody could have done any better. Isabela's visits were now a frequent, and eagerly anticipated, occurrence. She would arrive just after her brother had left, with some tasty titbits from her mother's kitchen, and help Arturo prepare a meal for two on his lonely gas ring. She was not now the playful, flirtatious young woman with whom he had been confronted at first: she was quickly becoming his confidante, his soulmate. ‘It doesn't really matter to me if you aren't a hero,' she had told him as she left that evening, ‘I like you just as you are.'
Then, as she rose to go home so that her mother would not miss her from the house for too long and start asking questions, she turned and said to him, ‘You know, you are the only person who listens to me without judging me. You are the only person who sees me for who I really am.'

Arturo lay thinking about Isabela, consumed with the guilt of his infidelity. And then came the knock on the door. As if called by an unknown duty he got out of bed, lit a candle and went to let in the visitor. A young man in an army uniform stood in front of him. In the candlelight, Arturo could make out the shape of a gun slung over his shoulder.

‘Are you the doctor?' the young man asked.

‘Yes,' Arturo replied.

‘My name is Don Carlos,' he said and reached his hand out to shake Arturo's. Then he raised his gun. ‘You're coming with me,' he said.

Carlos stood grinning sheepishly at Arturo, not sure what he was supposed to do next, as if he had obeyed his orders but had no idea how to enforce them. ‘I've heard a lot about you, comrade,' he said, filling the awkward silence as Arturo stood staring at him. ‘We need medicines. We need your help. She said to tell you to bring your things. It is time now. Time for you to leave. Your work here is over,' he said, giving a disparaging glance around the little clinic.