The Winterlings (6 page)

Hearing this, the blood rushed to the priest's face. He had already packed up his holy oils and was about to leave.

‘It's time to kick the bucket, woman! Christ, that's what we're here for!' he bleated.

And then the old lady sat up, a little put off by his words. She said:

‘I can't, Father.'

‘You can't what?'

‘Die.'

‘Here we go. The piece of paper. You can't die because of a piece of paper you signed thirty years ago. But dying is so easy! People go and die every single day!'

The old lady asked the priest to come nearer. She whispered to him:

‘People are saying that Don Reinaldo's granddaughters are in town. That they have returned …'

‘The Winterlings,' said Don Manuel.

‘Exactly,' said the old lady. ‘Bring them to me. I have to talk to them to settle this business about the piece of paper. As soon as I have that sorted, I'll be out of your hair as quick as I can; you'll see, Father.

The old lady lay back down, and pulled the covers right up to her ears.

‘You're ugly, Father,' she said, uncovering herself a little. ‘And you stink.'

11

Don Manuel finished packing away the foodstuffs he had in the cart. He stood there with his fingers entwined, twiddling his thumbs.

‘The old lady says she wants to see you. She found out you're back in the area, and she wants to ask something of you. She says it has something to do with your grandfather and that until it's settled, she can't go.'

‘Go where?' asked the head that was still in the water.

The priest stopped twiddling and exhaled through his nose.

‘She keeps going on about some piece of paper she signed. I promised her you'd come with me tomorrow.'

While he waited for their response, the priest set to choosing a tasty morsel from what he had in the cart. That morning he had requisitioned some
filloa
pancakes, bread, a pot of honey, sugar, and a cabbage (did the baker's wife think she'd get away with little vegetables now?), and he was salivating at the prospect. Climbing Bocelo Mountain had whetted his appetite.

‘In any case, it's about time you came back into the fold,' he added, putting a
filloa
pancake in his mouth. ‘All that business had nothing to do with you two.'

He looked up, and there was the other Winterling. The exchange that then took place between the three of them was quite absurd: while the prettier Winterling made her excuses, the uglier one and the priest inspected each other like scared animals.

‘The what?' said the uglier Winterling.

While he thought about the answer, Don Manuel chewed the cake with his mouth open, not taking his eyes off her.

He hadn't always been like this: it began with the death of his mother. The Winterlings remembered that before leaving the village, around the year 1936, Don Manuel still lived with her. She was a sickly and gossiping woman. Because she never left the house during the day, the mother wanted her son to tell her everything that went on in the village. And after the idiot had told her in great detail all of the most intimate secrets of confession — like a certain person's case of adultery or the lechery of another — his mother always said the same thing: ‘Bah, is that all you've got today? Maybe one day you'll bring me something interesting!'

But that was all part of the past; that woman was now dead, and the priest only fulfilled one role now: glutton.

‘Exactly, that.' Repeated the priest, swallowing the
filloa
pancake.

‘What do you mean, ‘that'?'

The priest finally looked away.

‘I was saying that it's time you two got together with everyone else in the village …'

‘Are you calling us sheep?' said the Winterlings in unison. The priest took in everything with a glance: the house, the orchard, the chickens.

The fig tree twisted and sprawled over the house, its branches invading the windows without panes.

‘You're very lonely out here …'

‘We'd be even more lonely without loneliness,' they replied.

‘We're all sheep, or we end up becoming them. It's good to be part of the flock; it's warm and gives comfort,' said Don Manuel, taking up the handle of the cart again. ‘Tomorrow morning don't take the animals up the mountain; I'll come and get you, and we'll visit the old lady.'

And that's how it went. The next day, before the sun had even risen, Don Manuel was out the front of the Winterlings' house, waiting for them. When they saw him at the front door, the Winterlings wanted to flee through the back door. But there was no escape. Don Manuel had blocked the back door with his cart so that they couldn't slip away.

There was nothing else for it but to go up Bocelo Mountain with him. While they got ready to leave, they asked him inside to sit by the hearth. But when they came down from the bedroom, Don Manuel wasn't where they had left him. They found him snooping around the cowshed, checking out the cow.

‘The cow is fat,' he said, hearing them enter.

‘She certainly eats,' they said.

The Winterlings sidled up slowly; then, one on each side, they gently nudged him towards the door.

‘You've got a fair stench in here,' said the priest, still scanning the cowshed.

‘Just a regular stench,' they said somewhat nervously, still nudging him. ‘Just a regular cowshed stench …'

But the priest wrinkled his nose to sniff at the air, and did not appear to want to leave.

‘The thing is, it smells foul, but not like cows or manure or even gorse. It smells like …'

But before he could finish his sentence the Winterlings had him outside (
‘a woolly bear caterpillar,
that's what you smell of …'). They were ready to head up the mountain, the sooner the better, they had plenty to do — so what was he waiting for?

It was the first time they had been required to interrupt their routine, and this troubled them. Along the way, the priest wanted to make conversation. He asked them what England was like.

‘Drizzly and melancholy,' said one of them.

‘Drab …' added the other, looking at the ground.

Don Manuel also wanted to know if what he had heard was true: that priests over there could get married. The Winterlings told him yes, over there priests could get married.

The priest had no further questions.

They entered the hut, lowering their heads and treading carefully. They found the old lady sleeping. Don Manuel had to shake her several times.

‘I brought you the Winterlings, old lady.'

The old lady smelt of smoke. She didn't even stir. She seemed despondent. The priest uncovered her roughly, and began applying holy oils to her feet. She had big, cracked, dirty feet. At last the old lady croaked out:

‘Who did you say you brought?'

‘Here are the little girls,' yelled Don Manuel. ‘But they're not so little any more …'

Heaving herself up on her elbows, the old lady sat up to look at the Winterlings. For a good while, she eyed them from head to toe, with her tiny shining eyes. Wiping the fuzz above her lip with a sleeve, she said:

‘It's them. I need the piece of paper.'

Arm in arm and trembling a little, the Winterlings watched her in surprise. What piece of paper was she talking about?

And then the old lady spoke at length about the piece of paper she had signed for their grandfather, Don Reinaldo, which was now the only thing holding her back from dying. One day, when she was sweeping the doorway to the hut, Don Reinaldo came past on the way back from visiting a neighbour. ‘“Good day, old lady, how are we?” he said. “Terrible,” I answered. “How so?” he asked. “I'm so hungry I can't even think,” I told him. And then he kept on staring at me, and finally he said: “Well, you do have a brain, old maid.” And skipping around, first behind me, then in front of me to get a better look at it, he said “You've got a brain like the Cathedral of Santiago.” But of course I didn't understand him. “How would you like to leave hunger behind?” he asked suddenly. “That wouldn't be bad,” I answered. And then he made me an offer that I happily accepted: he wanted to buy my brain to study it. He would pay me, in advance, and I just had to give it over when I died.'

And so they fixed a price, and she made her mark on a piece of paper. Don Reinaldo paid her, and she was obliged to hand over her brain (in fact, someone would have to get it out for her) when she died so that he could study it. As Don Reinaldo explained to her, he was studying the furrows of, and differences between, the brains of men and women.

‘But now I've changed my mind,' added the old lady. ‘My brain is the best thing I've got; I'm not planning on heading to the next world without it. I might need it for reflecting when I'm up there. I mean, what if they have elections up there like we had here in ‘33? Fetch me that paper.'

‘No one is taking your brain away, woman!' interrupted Don Manuel. The whole time the woman had been talking, he had been distracted, gazing off into the countryside. ‘Don Reinaldo has been dead and gone for years, and what's more, it's against the law to sell organs.'

‘You can never be too sure,' countered the old lady. ‘Signed papers are tricky, and a brain on the loose could get up to anything. Did you know, Father, that in actual fact, inside of one brain, there are actually three of them? Don Reinaldo told me that too …'

She sat up a bit more. ‘Under here', she said, pointing with an arthritic finger beneath her mattress filled with cornhusks, ‘I have all my life savings. I don't weigh much. Lift me up between the three of you, and then grab them. I'll return the money, and then you two can hand over the piece of paper.'

The Winterlings just shrugged: they wouldn't be taking the money or looking for the piece of paper.

When they got out of the hut, the first thing the priest told them was that the story was a lie. The old dear was losing it, and, for a while now, she'd been obsessed with her brain, and talking a whole lot of nonsense.

‘Don't pay any attention to her,' he added. ‘One day, she's on about the piece of paper, and then the next it's something else.' He went silent for a moment, tracing circles in the dust with his foot. ‘So tell me the truth: those English priests, do they have children too?'

But that very same night, the Winterlings looked for the paper among their grandfather's things. When they had arrived in Tierra de Chá, they'd spent weeks combing through the mountain of old clothes, household knick-knacks, and books about herbs and medicines that overran the attic. Everything had been thrown on the ground — brooms without sticks, broken floorboards, an umbrella, boxes full of jumbled up papers — as if someone had been searching through there before them. Armies of bedbugs burst out of the cupboards and drawers, fleeing the light, along with notebooks, and papers with diagrams of skulls and measurements, not to mention linen and blankets reeking of petrol, a gas heater, and a washbasin smashed to pieces. There was so much stuff that there would be no question of looking through all of it in one afternoon.

That night, after seeing all those insects fleeing the light, Dolores said:

‘Do you remember that grasshopper we had in England, the one we called Adolf?'

‘Adolf Hitler … Yes, how disgusting!'

Dolores remembered. How could she not? Suddenly she said:

‘Maybe in the end it's not so bad being a sheep, like the priest said.'

Her sister was yanking at a drawer.

‘What did you say?'

‘Sheep hide themselves among each other.'

Her sister kept yanking at the handle of the drawer.

‘Here you go with your riddles. You make me miserable, Dolores. Speak plainly.'

‘What I mean is,' said Dolores, studying the edges of the massive drawer to help her sister, ‘that it's about time for us to get out of this house, to mix with the folks in the village.'

Saladina stopped what she was doing and stood stiffly.

‘And what about
our little secret
?' she croaked. ‘Might I remind you we can't just get about in the world as if nothing—'

‘No one suspects a thing about
our little secret.
We are young, we have crossed borders, rivers, bridges, cities, we speak English, we've seen the sea, and we've made a movie. What will become of us, hidden away here like bedbugs and closed off from the world, with magnificent secrets inside of us, like this drawer that doesn't want to open?'

Saladina gave the drawer a yank again.

Dolores stood pensively for a moment. There was fear. Sounds that crept in from outside, from the kitchen, from the cowshed, a whole world of sounds: voices, noises, thuds, animals that seemed to live inside the stone walls of the house. At night they were afraid, and they thought someone was scratching at the door. But it was also true that they weren't doing so badly in Tierra de Chá. The fruit from their orchard tasted better than any other fruit; the silence on the mountain in the company of the animals was invigorating. Each of them thought the other was looking prettier …