Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop (38 page)

‘He looks too small to be a doctor,' Dolores whispered to Ernesto. Then she turned on her four-inch pink stilettos and led her guests inside the house.

‘Aunt Dolores?' Arturo whispered into Ernesto's ear as they passed through a small courtyard in which a group of men sat drinking beer at plastic tables. ‘Since when have you had an Aunt Dolores?'

‘Found yourself some new young friends, Dol?' one of the men shouted, provoking a burst of exuberant laughter from his companions, which was swiftly silenced by an elegant gesture of Dolores's hand. She led Ernesto and Arturo into a room lit with sporadic flashing lights, and sat them at a table covered in cigarette ash and beer stains. With a click of her fingers she summoned a young woman with a tray of beer and then sat down next to Arturo.

‘So you're a friend of Ernesto's,' she said in a voice as rich and deep as molasses. ‘You are most welcome.' Arturo gazed at their hostess. Huge hoops of metal hung from her ears, making large circular movements as she turned her head to speak. Her dark brown thighs spread out liberally over her bar stool, and her skin glistened with bright succulent beads of sweat. She said something
to Arturo that he could not hear over the noise of the bar, her eyes laughing as she spoke. Arturo watched her red lips mouthing words: they looked as if they could suck him in.

‘You look like a child,' she said warmly into Arturo's ear as the music died down for a moment. There was another burst of laughter, followed by shouting and breaking glass from the front yard. Arturo watched as Dolores moved through the smoke-induced fog towards the commotion. The bar throbbed with discordant waves of music. Salsa was being piped through loudspeakers, while a drunken old man was singing, ‘
Dónde están mis zapatos blancos
?' through a karaoke machine in the middle of the room. A small mariachi band roved in and out of the courtyard, competing with the karaoke and barking out a ballad about a woman who met a sad and bitter end because she had failed to make her husband's heart sing and his shoes shine.

Arturo could hear the men in the front yard shouting and swearing as he peered through the haze. Several young women moved with efficiency between the tables, serving beer from battered tin trays, winking and laughing in response to the cursing and barbed banter of the men. One of the men had risen to his feet, grabbed one of the young waitresses around the waist and was dancing with her between the tables. The girl, taken by surprise, had dropped a tray of beer, soaking the man's drinking companions. Arturo caught a brief glimpse of her face. She was smiling and laughing, trying to appease her impromptu dance partner, but her eyes were unable to hide the fear that flickered behind them. The soaked man rose to his feet and grabbed his friend by the ear.

‘
Hijo to puta
,' he shouted. ‘She is my girl. Put her down – and you have soaked my trousers.'

‘Don't blame me for your being soaked, you horny old bird,'
his friend laughed as he continued to salsa roughly around the tables.

The karaoke came to an end. A hush descended on the bar as Dolores moved languidly towards the scene. The girl had started to struggle slightly with the dancing man, trying to get free from his grip. ‘Enough, Don Carlos,' she said, ‘we have danced enough now. I will go and get you some fresh beer.' The dancing man grabbed her tightly around the waist and swung her, knocking his friend on the head as he did so. The man with the wet trousers stood up again.

‘I'm warning you, Carlos,' he shouted, ‘put her down.' And without giving his friend a second chance he thrust a clenched fist into the middle of his face, bringing the salsa performance to an abrupt end. The dancing man, blood streaming from his nose, picked up a bottle from the table and was about to bring it down on his drinking companion's head when he was grabbed from behind and raised from the floor, his legs kicking in mid-air. Dolores, towering over him, carried him out of the bar, into the street and placed him in the gutter.

‘I will have no more of your cursing in here tonight, Carlos,' she said.

‘Don't you worry. I mean what I say this time,' he shouted at her retreating figure. ‘I won't come back to this stinking hellhole of whores.' And then he broke down weeping, holding his bleeding nose.

‘Be certain that you don't,' she said over her shoulder. ‘Or I will be sure to shave your moustache off this time,' she added as a last insult to his manhood. The karaoke started up again, with a slow, sad rendition of ‘I Am No Longer the Man I Used to Be'.

‘Don't worry, they're just writers,' Dolores said, returning to Arturo, ‘they get over-wrought sometimes. Pay no attention to them. Their problem is they have nothing useful to do with their
lives, so they get drunk and talk rubbish. So tell me,' she said, now addressing Ernesto, ‘what brings you so far from home again? We have another visitor here from your neck of the woods. Have you come to take him back with you?'

‘A visitor? From our town? Is it the foreigner I met here?' Ernesto asked, realising that somehow the Gringito must have managed to make his own way back to Puerta de la Coruña.

‘Well, he's not our usual sort of customer, that's for sure,' Dolores replied. ‘But he's certainly not a foreigner. One of our regular punters brought him here last week. Apparently he had hitched a lift with him on the road.'

‘What's he like?' Ernesto asked.

‘He's very polite and quiet. I'm a bit concerned about him, to be honest. He keeps himself to himself. He goes out in the morning and comes back every evening with some boxes. He takes a beer and a bite to eat and then goes to his room and refuses any company from my girls. I asked him whether he wanted me to find more suitable establishment for him to stay in. But he said that he was perfectly comfortable and enjoying his visit. He told me he's on a journey to find out about life. He seems a bit too old for that, if you ask me.'

‘What does he look like?' Ernesto asked, not believing what Dolores was telling him.

‘He's quite small, tubby, balding, with kind smiley eyes,' Dolores said. ‘He's a real gentleman. Shall I take you to meet him?'

The mayor slowly unlocked the church door for Nicanora. It was only the third time in her life that she had been taken to see the Virgin. Nicanora had gone to the mayor with her tribute as the
crowd had dispersed from the plaza. ‘Please, will you take me to see her?' she said, as she handed him the shoebox. ‘This will pay for the fiesta and for the upkeep of the church for the next few years.' The mayor had opened the box and then looked at Nicanora, and his eyes had told her that he was finally defeated. The computer and the flag remained in the plaza, symbols of his unfounded hope. ‘Maybe she will be able to help you as well,' Nicanora said to him gently as he let her in.

The air in the church smelt of damp feet and lost time. In the dim candlelight, Nicanora could see the outline of the Virgin at the foot of the crumbling altar. Bats circled overhead, their dark sanctuary disturbed by the intrusion of the visitors. Nicanora, overwhelmed by the occasion, allowed the mayor to slowly lead the way between the crumbling pews, until they stood in front of the Lady. ‘It's some years since I've been in here myself,' the mayor confided to Nicanora. He crossed himself and knelt down in front of the statue. As he did so, his hands pressed lightly on the feet of the Virgin and she sprang into life. Lights flashed on her halo, tears streamed down her cheeks, and an unearthly voice rang out from a dark corner of the church: ‘Bless you, bless you, bless you.' The mayor clutched at his heart. Nicanora ran forward with the candle and gazed at the Virgin in dismay, and then at the mayor. Clearly written across the plinth on which the statue was standing were the words:
A gift from Rosas Pampas
.

Don Bosco sat in the front of the pickup, wedged between Arturo and Ernesto.

‘Well that was quite an adventure,' he said at last. ‘I still can't believe you turned up and found me, just like that.'

‘It is a very strange coincidence,' Arturo agreed.

‘I'm touched, touched,' Don Bosco said, ‘that everyone would be so concerned that they would think of having a fiesta to bring me back. I do feel a bit of a fool, though, returning after only a week. Do you think people will mind after all the trouble they have gone to?'

‘No, no, not at all,' Ernesto and Arturo said together, concerned to reassure him in case they lost him again.

‘I hope I will live up to expectations after all this fuss,' Don Bosco said. ‘You know what it is like. A person disappears, and for a time they become somebody else in people's minds. All their irritated features turn into the most endearing traits overnight – until they are brought back to life to annoy everybody again, that is.'

‘Are we agreed?' Ernesto said. ‘We'll keep you a secret until after
the procession. The fiesta is sort of in your honour and we don't want to spoil it.'

‘I suppose, though,' Arturo said, ‘that strictly speaking it is because of the Virgin that you are returning anyway. If Ernesto hadn't come here to buy the beer and fireworks, we wouldn't have found you.'

‘Indeed,' Don Bosco agreed. ‘It was starting to trouble me how I would get back home. And then from nowhere you arrived. So perhaps the Virgin did send you.'

‘I still can't believe we found you at Dolores's Karaoke Bar,' Ernesto said. ‘It's the last place in the world that I would ever have looked for you.'

‘But what I don't understand,' Arturo said, ‘is how your hat came to be in the middle of the swamp.'

‘Well,' Don Bosco said, at last enjoying the opportunity to tell at least one interesting story. ‘To be honest I set out uncertain in which direction to go. I had thought of perhaps walking through the forest to Rosas Pampas. As I was sitting on a tree stump taking a bite of breakfast, a wind blew up from nowhere and took my hat clean off my head, over the trees and into the mud, just out of arm's reach. I am not really a person who takes guidance from the ancestors, but this seemed to me to be a sign if ever there was one. It was clearly telling me that I was going in the wrong direction. And so I started to wander along the road, my head bare, thinking about what to do next, when out of nowhere a truck appeared. It was apparently going to Puerta de la Coruña and the driver kindly gave me a lift all the way here. It couldn't really have been easier. He stopped at your Aunt Dolores's lodgings. I thought, well if this is where chance has brought me, this is where I will stay. And you see I was right to
have followed my instinct. Just when I had finished my business here, you arrived to take me home.'

‘And so what have you been doing?' Ernesto asked, looking at Don Bosco's boxes. He was still slightly put-out that it had taken an hour to load them all into the back of the pickup and that they had taken up so much room he had been forced to leave one crate of beer behind with Dolores.

‘Buying supplies,' Don Bosco said.

‘What sort of supplies?'

‘For the barber's.'

‘So that is it?' Ernesto said.

‘That is what you have been doing?' Arturo asked.

‘Yes,' Don Bosco said.

‘Shopping,' Ernesto and Arturo said.

‘Yes,' Don Bosco replied. ‘I've been on a little shopping trip.'

The three men sat in silence for some considerable time as the pickup made its way slowly out of Puerta de la Coruña and along the upward bend of the valley. As it reached the fork where the road split, one path heading for the city and the other for the swamp, the truck came to a halt. Arturo sat staring ahead, not moving, his mind wandering between Isabela, Claudia and the radio reports of the army closing in on the PLF. Where was Claudia heading? Where was the army following her to? What would life be like without Isabela?

‘So have you decided what you are going to do?' Don Bosco asked, breaking through his thoughts. ‘Which way is it to be?'