The Winterlings (19 page)

‘It' referred to ‘the time when your grandfather was alive'. In the past, things had happened that no longer took place, no longer existed, and of which nobody wished to speak. But one day, Tristán was in the tavern, and he started running his mouth. Someone called him a ‘greedy hermit, grumpy and strange like his capons' to which he replied that it was thanks to him and his capons that they'd all survived when Don Reinaldo had imposed the rationing of goods.

As soon as the war started, oil, sugar, and tobacco became scarce in Tierra de Chá, and that's when Don Reinaldo began to get everyone organised. Taking advantage of the cover of night, he shared out the goods (he mostly took them away from the priest and gave them to the others) and organised the division of farm work. Even Don Manuel was forced to grow potatoes, with his cassock tied up around his waist. One night, a pair of Civil Guards came to the house and broke up the meeting, then took Don Reinaldo to spend a night in prison.

Upon his return, the priest spoke with him. He told him that all this equal redistribution was going to cause them a lot of problems.

‘But why?' Don Reinaldo wanted to know. ‘Didn't Christ preach something similar? If we don't share our supplies, then they'll just belong to a handful of landowners, and, in the end, to you.'

Don Manuel reminded him that they'd done the same thing in a nearby town, and that the government had forced them to hand over everything they owned.

‘Don't you understand?' added the priest. ‘We'll be left with nothing, and what's more, we'll have made a name for ourselves.'

‘There are already plenty of people who have nothing.'

But Don Manuel, fearful of going hungry, kept grumbling.

‘Don't be so stubborn, Reinaldo.'

In the village, there were more and more checkpoints and searches. The villagers still took their animals to graze on the mountain, but now there were guards patrolling the meadows with orders to shoot on sight. At dusk, a truck arrived and two men jumped down with pistols tucked in their belts. They yelled out ‘Long live Spain!' and everyone rushed out into the plaza, theirs arms out straight in salute and repeated ‘Long live Spain!'

One night, a poet-friend of Don Reinaldo's arrived by the hearth. He said that in Coruña, the military had overthrown the Civil Government. Meis' Widow, Gumersinda with her limp, Aunty Esteba, and Esperanza the maid all burst into tears.

People said that ever since the King had fled, the world had stopped turning.

They began to take people away in trucks, corpses appeared in ditches, and there were checkpoints on every road. One day, Don Reinaldo, who was on his way to attend to a sick woman, came across Tenderlove on the road. ‘What are you doing?' he asked, seeing him down in a ditch. ‘You're not “prospecting” again, are you?' Tenderlove answered him by saying: ‘It's a donkey.' And Don Reinaldo replied: ‘Donkeys don't have gold teeth.'

They'd already taken Don Reinaldo away once, and rumour had it that if they came back for him again, he'd never return. That was when he told his granddaughters to run away, far, as far as possible, and not to come back for as long as they could. He prepared some packs for them and left them in the forest. But a few days later, the girls had already returned.

The people in the village were restless. It was rumoured that Uncle Rosendo was going to be taken away as well, for reciting poems that conflicted with sacred Catholic values. Don Manuel spoke again with Don Reinaldo. The priest was hungry, and had even lost weight. It just wasn't possible for all that food to be requisitioned. If he didn't eat, he couldn't give mass. ‘So don't give it,' replied Don Reinaldo. ‘You can see how little good it does in times like these.' A voiceless hatred grew between them.

Then, at dawn one day, they came back for Don Reinaldo. They came looking for him, and when they couldn't find him, their first response was to beat the living daylights out of Uncle Rosendo. The military had occupied the square, and it was rumoured that they'd killed some of the poor folks in nearby Bocelo. The whole village was terrified, and nobody wanted to leave their homes. Near the main road, under some scrub, the abandoned bodies of a poet and a left-wing councilman appeared. Someone had pulled out their teeth.

Don Reinaldo spent nearly the whole day in hiding. Only Don Manuel, the priest, knew where he was.

The whole village felt threatened, although nothing had happened yet. One day, Mr Tenderlove went to see the priest. He asked him if he was hungry.

‘Well, of course!' said the priest, relieved that someone else was also thinking about food. ‘I can barely think. My guts are rumbling and my legs are wobbly.' He looked at Tenderlove out of the corner of his eye. ‘And yourself? Aren't you hungry?'

‘Very,' he replied.

Then Don Manuel said that there was a solution. ‘In his stockpile, Don Reinaldo has tins of sardine, pasta, bacon, chorizo … who knows what else! It's time to get it all out and share it around now. The war won't last long.'

Tenderlove agreed, and said he would be telling this to Don Reinaldo. He'd try to reason with him. But there was one problem: only the priest knew where he was hiding.

9

One morning, shortly after the episode of her sister's flight and dramatic return, Dolores got up with the feeling that before things got any worse, she had to go to Coruña to tell a few lies to that judge who was on their tail.

So she put a few things in a bag and went down to the square to wait for the bus. Two hours later, she was in Coruña.

It was difficult to find the person who was looking for them, mostly because she didn't know —
or wasn't sure she knew
— why he was looking for them in the first place. But after going round and round through the corridors of the courts, they finally told her that there was only one judge for the county she lived in, and that he was just over there, working in his office.

The interview lasted a little more than twenty minutes. When she went back out into the street, Dolores adjusted her skirt and sighed with relief. The judge hadn't wished to interrogate her about Tomás, her Tomás, but about Ramón, the maid's son. At the end of the day, he had died in their cowshed, and the judge was obliged to ascertain the circumstances of his death.

On the way to the station, where she intended to take the bus home, she once again felt a cold shiver climb up her spine. An idea was forming in her mind, but she couldn't quite tease it out. A few days ago, she had come across Uncle Rosendo in the fields. They talked about the weather, the chickens, and the harvest, and then the country teacher asked her about that idea she had had about auditioning to be a double in that American movie. ‘The Ava Gardner movie?' asked the Winterling. ‘That's the one,' said Uncle Rosendo, and with great assurance he added: ‘don't forget to go.'

There, in the middle of the fields, beneath the clouds and the sun of Tierra de Chá, next to the unmoving cows that grazed in the meadow, the country teacher told her about the moment of truth in everybody's lives. ‘That's yours,' he said. ‘And because you're not there auditioning as a double, you'll never again have the opportunity to be an actress.' That Ava girl didn't come to Spain to get away from Frank Sinatra. Oh no. She didn't even come to make a movie. Nothing ever just happens, and Ava Gardner had come to Spain exclusively so that she, Dolores the Winterling, could have the opportunity to meet her and become an actress. That's how the moment of truth works.

‘Yes …' Dolores said thoughtfully. ‘It was only on an off-chance that I was feeding the chickens at the time I heard the news …'

Uncle Rosendo said that chance does not exist.

Then Dolores told him that this kind of talk scared her. Uncle Rosendo replied that just like there's no smoke without fire, fear was the hint of a hidden emotion. He said that fear, like failure, formed part of the mechanics of the moment of truth. That's exactly what he said: ‘mechanics of the moment,' as if he were speaking about the cogs of a watch.

Then he told her something that he had never revealed to anyone about that day he had gone to Coruña to requalify as a country teacher. He told her that at the moment when the tribunal asked his name, at that exact moment, something terrible had happened: he wet himself.

‘Yes, you heard right — I wet myself. They said “name” and I said “Rosendo”. And I can't remember a thing after that. I wanted to say my surname, but I couldn't get it out. I couldn't remember my surname, or where I came from, or even how old I was or how long I'd been teaching. My vision went blurry, and then I felt the warmth. And then the wetness. And even so, I passed.'

At the ticket counter, just as she was about to buy her ticket home, Dolores smiled and remembered the story. What if Uncle Rosendo's theory was true? She let the people behind her pass in front, and sat down on a bench. She put her bag down on the ground. Without realising, she began squeezing her breasts through her blouse. She'd seen how the judge was staring at them. She got back in the line for the ticket counter, feeling the beginnings a powerful force growing inside her. Then, instead of saying ‘one ticket to Tierrá de Chá' she came out with ‘one ticket to Girona'.

Three or four days later, back in Tierra de Chá, as she came down the path, she saw that her sister had been pruning the fig tree. The chickens were still scratching in the same spot (there they all were, stupid and insistent) as if there were no more to the orchard than that tiny patch of dirt, as if that tiny patch of dirt covered in poop, feed, and stale bread was the entire world. She found her sister in the kitchen, her head down, her nose running, and her face as dark as a storm cloud.

‘I know where you went,' she heard as soon as she opened the door.

As she went inside, Dolores looked around at the house: the chairs were turned over, the table was covered in dirty dishes, seeds, and juice; squashed figs littered the unswept floor, and the shutters were half-open. As far as she could tell, Saladina hadn't done a thing besides cry and eat figs for the whole time she had been away.

‘They chose me,' said Dolores with a smile, collapsing into a chair. ‘And they paid me. Heaps of money, Sala. We can do whatever we want with it. We won't have to sew anymore.'

Saladina raised her head slowly. A flash of blood flicked across her eyes.

‘They chose you?' she croaked. Dolores smiled timidly.

‘I'm an actress. Albert, you know … he's promised to give me more roles. He's already thinking about his next movie and …'

‘Albert?'

‘Albert Lewin. The director of
Pandora.
He's also the director of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
— you remember that movie where a man sells his soul to the devil in exchange for eternal youth? We saw it in Coruña. It turns out that the painting gets older but he doesn't …' Dolores paused, looked her sister over, and then kept talking. ‘Lewin is a producer for Metro Goldwyn Mayer.'

‘Sure he is …'

‘In about two months, he's going to write to me with a firm offer for a romantic number in Technicolor! And listen … I've been dreaming of this moment for years. This time I'm not going to let the opportunity pass me by.'

‘For the love of God!' screeched her sister, clutching her stomach. ‘So … did you do the nude scene, when Pandora comes out of the sea in moonlight covered only in a ship's sail?'

Puzzled, Dolores said yes, that she had done the nude scene, that everyone had agreed that she had an amazing body, with curves, even better than Ava Gardner's some of them said, and … ‘But how did you know there was a nude scene? Only those who auditioned as extras know about that scene!'

Her sister writhed in pain.

‘My stomach's a mess,' was her response.

Dolores stood up.

‘Answer me! How do you know about the nude scene? How? How do you know?'

Saladina stood up as well. She stumbled over to the couch and collapsed on it.

‘The rooster raiser came for his contract too!'

She went silent for a moment, then her guts let out a sad squelch.

‘My guts hurt, Dolores.'

Dolores hurried over to help her. She stood there thinking for a while.

‘Again with your stomach? Did you eat lots of figs?'

‘I swear I didn't! I haven't eaten figs for ages!'

‘It couldn't be to do with your new mouth?' said Dolores. ‘The mouth and the stomach are one and the same.'

‘That's not it,' sobbed Saladina. She was silent for a while. ‘You don't love me like you used to, Dolores.'

‘Don't start with that old story now,' she said, staring at her.

‘You don't love me like you used to, Dolores, you go and you leave me here alone, you put stones in my lentils, you don't love me …'

The next day, Saladina wasn't better but a lot worse. Dolores went to speak with Mr Tenderlove, who told her that her sister had been complaining about her stomach for a while now. He assured her that these pains couldn't have anything to do with her new dentures, and recommended that they see a doctor. There was no doctor in Tierra de Chá, so the Winterling had to call one from a nearby town, who promised to come by as soon as possible.