Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop (9 page)

Arturo's friendship with Claudia came to an abrupt end one day when his father caught them in the study, Arturo with his pants around his ankles and Claudia with her blouse wide open. The adults had as usual departed into the garden to take tea, leaving the way clear for at least an hour. Claudia had convinced Arturo to take a swig of whisky before creeping up to the study, and he had impressed her by taking four, which had proved to be a fatal mistake, leading him to let his guard down completely. After ten minutes giggling at a book which contained pictures of pregnant women with huge breasts, Claudia had announced that she was now growing breasts herself and hers were much more impressive than anything in the books and she would show them to Arturo if he would take his trousers down and show her what lay beneath. Arturo, in a haze of alcohol, anticipation and fear, stood with his mouth open as she unbuttoned her blouse and showed him her small but perfectly formed breasts. He was transfixed. He reached out and touched them, gently, as if they were the shells of rare eggs about to break in his hands, and from that day on he was unable to get the image of Claudia's breasts out of his mind. Unfortunately, at the point at which Claudia had demanded her side of the bargain, Arturo's father had unexpectedly returned to the house to retrieve an important document. Arturo had been frogmarched to his room with his trousers still round his ankles and Claudia returned to her mother's charge with no explanation but that Arturo was unwell and would not be joining them again that day.

Arturo was forbidden to spend any more time alone with Claudia. At first their communication was carried out through hidden notes and furtive glances across the table during their parents' weekly tea
parties. Then, at Claudia's instigation, they began illicit meetings in the park. Arturo would sit holding her hand, whispering words of adoration into her ear, while she would fill his head with radical ideas.

‘Promise you'll marry me and have my children,' he begged her as he unbuttoned her blouse and gently felt inside.

‘I can never marry you if you live the parasitic life of your parents,' she replied sternly. ‘Show me that you're a man who follows his belief and I'll go anywhere in the world with you.'

Then, suddenly, at the age of sixteen, Claudia moved to the United States, and Arturo's secret world was torn apart. Claudia's mother had been offered the chance to take up further studies, followed by a prestigious posting in an American university. After finishing high school, Claudia had stayed on in the States, signing up to study politics and philosophy at one of the leading universities. Claudia and Arturo continued to communicate by letter. Arturo wrote long poetic declarations of his love and she replied with long philosophical tracts on the injustices of the world.

Her letters were at first cheerful, peppered with American slang:
Hola, Arturo, como estas? All's going great here, college is awesome.
But as they continued they became more strident in tone.
You know,
she told him in one letter,
the longer I am here in the land of the gringos, the more appalled I am by them and the way they've treated our country and those around us. It is clear to me that the gringos are our oppressors. They always have been and always will be. It's people like your father who continue their oppression with his supposed science, which he practises only for the benefit of the rich. I hope you will be strong enough to break away from your bourgeois life and follow a path towards truth and freedom, as I will.

Arturo, who had been deliberating his future for some time, finally plucked up the courage to explain to his father his complete
abhorrence at the idea of becoming a doctor. He was terrified by the sight of blood and although he never wanted to hurt his parents, he would rather be a historian or a writer. His father had become so apoplectic with rage that he had to be hospitalised for several weeks with a suspected stroke. Arturo wrote to Claudia in a confusion of guilt over his father's poor health and pride in being able to tell her that he had finally found the courage to defy his parents' wishes and follow the life of a poet. Several weeks later he received his anxiously awaited reply.

My dear Arturo,
Claudia wrote.
I have to tell you that I am very disappointed in you. I don't understand what good you think yet another bourgeois writer will do for our country. Don't you think there are enough already? Anyway, what do you have to write about? You have seen and done nothing. I have been reading a paper for our politics course on the function of the doctor in the fight for liberation. Although I don't understand medicine, I do understand the needs of our country. You may think I'm changing my mind, but it's just that my thoughts are getting sharper. If you were really brave you would become a doctor, challenge the Establishment that your father is a part of, and start to try to understand our people and the conditions they live in. I have to go now for my consciousness-raising group, and then to a party with some new friends. I'm sure you would love to meet them, they talk about these things all the time. Your trusted friend, as ever, Claudia.
Arturo read the letter over again looking for a hint of the tenderness and passion that he had poured into his own to her, and found none.

Devastated by Claudia's response to his decision to be a poet, and unable to defy his father's wishes any longer, Arturo resigned himself to entering medical school and trying to please the two people he loved and admired the most. He was not very good at his studies, easily distracted by irrelevancies, and he took longer than most to graduate. His contact with Claudia started to diminish over the
years, with longer and longer gaps appearing between his letters to her and the replies he received.

Then, in the last year of his course, Claudia suddenly reappeared back home and Arturo's passion was reignited under her guiding hand. Claudia had taken a job teaching politics and sociology and was beginning to be associated in the newspapers with the frequent student demonstrations and teachers' strikes that were plaguing the university. Arturo's desire for her, fuelled by guilt, was stronger than it had ever been. She terrified him, but she taught him to enjoy a pleasure beyond anything he had ever known. Secretly, sometimes playfully, sometimes tauntingly, in the darkness of the bushes of their teenage meeting place, she showed him how to be a man.

‘Promise me we'll get married when I've finished my studies,' he begged, after each liaison.

‘Take care,' she whispered back seductively, ‘I believe I have the power to make you do anything.' Then, as they were getting dressed, she would chastise him. ‘Remember, Arturo, there is more to life than personal satisfaction. You shouldn't get too attached.'

He would leave their assignation confused, intoxicated with the softness of her touch and the harshness of her words. He knew that any knowledge of his continuing contact with her was likely to kill his father, and yet when he was in her company he was possessed by a passion that was beyond his control.

Arturo's father had his contacts and eventually got wind of his son's renewed relationship with the young political agitator. Fortuitously, Arturo was coming up for his year after qualifying, in which he was required by the authorities to do twelve months' medical service in the rural provinces. His father started to ask around among his acquaintances for a suitably isolated location to
which to arrange for his son to be sent, in the hope that this would break the affair with Claudia. Through a close friend of Loretta's he heard of a little-known and inaccessible town in need of a doctor. Within a month he had made all the necessary arrangements for his son's posting. Arturo's spirits were lifted only by Claudia's admiration for his dedication to serving the poor.

‘I'm proud of you at last,' she told him. ‘Arturo, promise me you'll never become a pampered professional like your father, taking care of the privileged classes and performing unnecessary operations for imaginary diseases resulting from their idle life.'

‘But I'm only going for a year,' Arturo objected, never having really contemplated what Claudia's ambitions for him meant. He could not conceive of a life away from the comforts of his cherished home.

‘Will you visit me?' he asked, quietly defying his father's wishes.

‘I'll try to join you in your work, once I've finished mine here,' was all she said. ‘Don't let me down.'

His father, on the day of his leaving, sent him off with a similar warning: ‘I have pulled important strings to get you this job, son. Don't ever forget it. If you fail in your duties, I will never forgive you.'

With these parting words from Claudia and his father, Arturo left, secure in the knowledge that if he was to win the approval of one, he would lose the love and respect of the other for ever. He remembered with guilt how his mother had cried for three weeks before his departure, pleading with her husband not to be so harsh on their only son and to arrange for him to be posted to one of the towns close to the city so that he could return home at least once a week for a bath and to have his washing done. Arturo's father would not listen to any of it, saying that he had a simple choice between this posting and af five-year stint in the army.

Señora Aguilar was too distressed to say goodbye on the day Arturo left home. It was Doña Julia who hugged him and kissed him as he left, giving him a rich fruit cake she had just baked to help him on his way. As he kissed her goodbye, she pressed a tiny doll into his hand, telling him that if he took good care of it, it would look after him and would see that no harm came to him. With that, she wiped her eyes on a small lace handkerchief that Arturo had saved up his pocket money to buy for her as a present many years ago. The handkerchief looked as new and freshly pressed as on the day that he had proudly presented it to her. As he finally turned to leave, Doña Julia put her hand on his arm to draw him back to her one last time and said quietly:

‘Arturo, you were always a kind boy and you'll be a good man. Don't be anyone's toy or puppet any more. Just be yourself.' It was not for some time to come that Arturo really understood her words.

The mayor wiped his face with his shirtsleeve, dislodging a large drop of sweat from the end of his nose. He heaved his body into his swivel chair, which lurched at a forty-five-degree angle, threatening to tip its occupant on to the floor. He picked up the phone and shouted down the crackling line to his assistant: ‘Ramon, has that bloody doctor arrived yet?'

‘Hello, hello, who is that, is there anyone there?' came a faint and incoherent reply. The mayor slammed the phone down in a fit of rage. He was not a man to take an insult lightly and was still smarting from his humiliation in front of the insipid district officer at the hands of the People's Popular Participation Vigilance Committee, which the mayor preferred to call the ‘bloody upstart peasant group'.

‘Perhaps you would like me to let you know when I plan to fart next?' he had suggested during a heated discussion with their president, who had declined the offer, saying that would not be necessary as it did not come under the mandate of the PPPVC.

The mayor opened his office door and bellowed down the corridor to Ramon, who had already dutifully appeared, before the demand for his presence had been made.

‘How can I ever expect to civilise this town when the bloody phones never work?' the mayor growled at his assistant. ‘I've only been away for a few weeks – what's wrong this time?' But before Ramon could answer that rains and landslides in another part of the province had, once again, brought down the telephone lines and rendered Valle de la Virgen out of contact with the outside world, the mayor interrupted him with another tirade of fury before asking:

‘What's that bloody noise?'

Ramon listened carefully to the usual cacophony of sound that milled around the decaying building, and replied diffidently, ‘Which noise in particular is that, señor?'

The mayor's assistant always knew when his patron was in a fouler mood than usual because, as his temper rose, so did the quantities of spit that he sprayed as he spoke.

‘That infernal humming. It's been going on all bloody morning.'

‘Is it perhaps your ceiling fan?' Ramon enquired.

‘It can't be the bastard ceiling fan, Ramon,' the mayor spat. ‘That's been lying on my office floor since it tried to decapitate me this morning. I told you to get the damned thing fixed before I went away.'

During the weeks of the mayor's absence from the town, Ramon's work routine had become progressively slacker. His recent efforts to tidy the many piles of documents on his desk, which were about to create their own mini landslide, had resulted in the fatal loss of his list marked ‘Essential things to do before the mayor's return'.
At least his memory had now been jogged about one of the twenty items on the list.

‘It could be a cicada caught under the floorboards. Or perhaps you have a small sandfly caught in your ear, señor. My aunt got a sandfly stuck in her nose after travelling through the forest and it began to eat her nose away –'