Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop (8 page)

‘If it wasn't for people like me, with a bit of experience of the
outside world, this town would be dead on its feet,' Don Teofelo retorted. ‘My only concern now is what the mayor is up to. I tell you, changes are afoot. I keep telling you this but you're all too caught up in your little lives to listen.'

‘Well, why don't you do something about it then?' Don Arsenio added to the debate. ‘Especially as you're so much better than we are.'

‘Now, now,' Don Bosco said, opening another bottle of chilled beer to cool readily heated tempers. ‘But, Teofelo. We are not clear. What is your point?' asked Don Bosco. ‘It seems to me you are confused. One minute you tell us how we are small-minded people who are stuck in our ways here and never open to change, and the next you tell us to beware because changes are afoot. I'm not sure you can have it both ways. I can't see how the arrival of a doctor from the city is a sign of disaster for our town, can you, doctor?'

Arturo was uncertain, but was spared the effort of answering as Don Teofelo cut in.

‘My point is quite simple, even for you. All I am saying is, things should be done in the right way, and we need to be careful. What is the mayor's intention? That's what I'm asking. He's never shown any concern for the welfare of this town before. You people have a short memory. Don't forget his family owned the estate that sucked the lifeblood out of our fathers and grandfathers. There are ways and means of going about things.'

‘Well, I have never understood why Bosco here would never stand for mayor,' Don Alfredo said.

‘Hear, hear,' Don Arsenio added in support of the suggestion.

‘Well, I'm not sure about that,' Don Julio suddenly interjected. Everyone looked at him. ‘I mean, I'm not so sure about progress. You say, for example, that a bigger school with a well-qualified
teacher from the city would be a good thing for our children. On the other hand, I've heard of this happening in other places. The children start to see the world in a different way and they begin to argue with their parents and the next thing you know they're leaving in their droves, not just a few at a time. Eventually all you have left is a lot of old people sitting around on benches in the plaza discussing how sad the town is now that there are no young people left. So, doctor, the question I am asking myself is this. If we've managed for so long without you, are we really going to be better off having you here? I only ask this out of interest. I mean no disrespect.'

‘So, you would stop progress for our children because you're afraid of becoming a lonely old man?' Don Teofelo challenged him provocatively.

‘Don Julio is only saying that because he's afraid of what a doctor might do to him,' Don Bosco added. ‘He's been suffering from toothache for the past two months and I've offered to pull his teeth out. He won't have it, you know.' Don Julio smiled sheepishly at the doctor, revealing a row of black stumps. Arturo suddenly wished that he had paid more attention to his emergency dentistry classes.

‘Well, I have never needed a doctor yet,' Don Alfredo said. ‘The medicine man was good enough for my father and his father before him, so he's good enough for me.'

‘Thank you, Alfredo,' Don Bosco said with a hint of impatience in his voice. ‘I suppose the question we are posing to you, doctor, is this. Is your presence a good or a bad thing for our town? I suppose that is also what you are here to find out, is it not? You are most welcome and I am very pleased to make your acquaintance.' And with that, Don Bosco shook Arturo's hand again and disappeared back into the barber's.

‘I'll take you to see Ramon now,' Don Teofelo offered.

Arturo stood up and shook hands with the other men. He then whispered quietly to Don Julio, ‘If you come up to the clinic I promise I can take your tooth out for you without it hurting at all. I have an injection I can give that will stop the pain, you won't feel a thing.' Arturo was surprised at the confidence with which he offered a service that he had only ever performed once in his life, and then with much bloodletting and a good deal of screaming.

‘That I will, doctor. It would be good to be free from the pain,' said Don Julio, holding his face. ‘Thank you for your advice.'

Don Teofelo led Arturo away in search of the elusive Ramon.

Don Julio's promise to let the doctor sort out his aching tooth developed into nothing more than the subject of daily banter.

‘And how is the tooth today, Don Julio?' Arturo would ask as he passed the barber's on his way to the market.

‘Still hurting, thank you, doctor,' would come the reply.

‘Good, good. Make sure you visit me soon, I'm waiting for you up there.'

The ritual came to an end one day when Don Julio proudly announced that the tooth was no more. The pain, so the story went, had become so unbearable that Don Julio had become completely delirious in the middle of the night and had tied a rope around his neck and started pacing the house in search of a suitable place from which to hang himself. His wife, hysterical with fear, had run to Don Bosco's house, waking up the neighbours in the process, screaming that her husband was possessed by a devil, or maybe even two. With great presence of mind, Don Bosco had
rushed to Don Julio's house and yanked the offending tooth from his friend's head, apparently without spilling so much as a drop of blood. The story had become a favourite at the barber's shop, and Don Bosco was particularly fond of retelling the bit about how he had managed to restore health and sanity to his friend with the aid of nothing more than a good deal of common sense and a large pair of pliers.

‘And so, doctor,' Don Bosco said to Arturo playfully, ‘the old ways sometimes are the best, don't you agree?'

Arturo had almost forgotten about the mayor's threatened visit until one morning Ramon arrived at the clinic. He appeared just after Ernesto had gone home for lunch and before Arturo was about to set out on his daily walk to the plaza. He stayed long enough to deliver a letter informing Arturo that the mayor had arrived back in town and would be making an official visit to the clinic in the next week. He also handed him a little batch of letters that had been delivered by donkey a few weeks previously from Rosas Pampas, including a letter from Arturo's parents and a card from Doña Julia. Most disturbing of all was a note from Claudia written in a hurried scrawl implying that she was in serious trouble and warning Arturo that she would be leaving the city imminently.

Arturo had first met Claudia at a family picnic party. They were both eight years old. Claudia had shown him that the world could be seen from another point of view entirely, and from the moment they met he had lived with the conviction that their fates were intertwined and that she was the person with whom he was destined to spend his life. His father had other ideas. Claudia was the daughter of a cousin of Arturo's father, several times removed. Her father had been a known communist agitator, a writer of dubious fiction, a womaniser and a drunk. Arturo's parents considered Claudia to be possessed with the same reckless spirit as her father. Although she was a frequent visitor to the house during Arturo's childhood, she was tolerated only because her mother – having eventually separated from her ill-chosen husband – had become a prodigiously influential civil servant with the power to make or break a man's career. Loretta Camacho was a force to be reckoned with. Under her protective matriarchal shadow, Claudia's untamed spirit ran riot throughout the Aguilar household, taking Arturo with her.

Arturo had been a timid child. Having no siblings, he was
overanxious to please his father, and lived in constant fear of the wrath he would encounter whenever he fell short of his father's expectations, which happened daily. In the presence of Claudia, he became filled with a confidence and a bravado that both terrified and excited him, and which departed with Claudia as soon as she left the house. Alone, he faced his father's icy disapproval.

‘Did you and that girl go into my study?' his father asked sternly, after Claudia had dared Arturo, yet again, to go into the forbidden room. ‘You are nothing but a disappointment to us. You know that, don't you? You will be the death of your mother. If you ever dare to do that again, we will give you to the monks.' And Arturo was sent to his room in disgrace.

After Claudia's visits to the house, Arturo's parents started to notice that small items had gone missing. An old snuffbox that had belonged to Arturo's grandfather disappeared from the mantelpiece, and the cleaning maid was instantly sacked on suspicion of the offence. Then a little book with pressed flowers that Arturo's father had treasured since his childhood – and which he had foolishly shown to the children one day to impress Loretta – went missing from the bookshelf. After that, Dr and Señora Aguilar realised that countless small and insignificant items such as pens, teacups, notebooks, tablemats and ashtrays mysteriously vanished after a visit from Claudia and Loretta Camacho. Then objects started to go missing from Arturo's mother's bedroom: her tortoiseshell comb was suddenly nowhere to be found, neither were her favourite lipsticks; a vanity mirror her mother had given her and other pointless trinkets given to her by her husband over the years all disappeared.

Arturo's father could not bring up the matter of Claudia's kleptomania with Loretta. He was greatly indebted to his cousin for her
help in furthering his career and was also very proud of his connection to her. Under her patronage he had been given a place on all the important committees, with the added financial bonus of being made head surgeon at the Santa Maria Memorial Hospital, the most prestigious private hospital in the city and the one used by all the important generals, politicians and foreign diplomats as well as visiting dignitaries laid low by the demands of altitude and the excesses of formal state visits. Loretta Camacho's house calls became more frequent as her influence over Dr Aguilar grew. He provided her with a useful and authoritative voice on the various committees on which she had installed him, eloquently advocating the initiatives she supported even when he passionately disagreed with them.

Rather than daring to raise the issue of Claudia's thefts, the Aguilars started clearing away all small and extraneous items from the main rooms of the house and locking them in the cleaning cupboard before a visit was expected from Loretta and her daughter. Eventually, the hiding and rearranging of household knick-knacks became so tiresome for the domestic staff that it led to the threatened resignations of some of the most reliable amongst them. After that the Aguilars adopted a more minimalist approach to household interiors, keeping their ornaments permanently locked in the broom cupboard and starting a fashion that was much admired and copied by many in their social circle, with the exception of Loretta Camacho.

Despite the upheavals caused to the Aguilar household by Claudia's presence over the years, Arturo became increasingly besotted with her. By the age of twelve he was hopelessly in love. He became listless and unable to eat on the morning of a visit. As soon as Claudia arrived he would disappear with her into the
far reaches of the house or garden, and she would fill his mind with notions of a life he would never otherwise have dared dream of.

‘I'm going to do something great when I'm older,' she told him. ‘And I'll only be able to love you if you come away with me and do something brave and daring as well.'

‘Like what?' Arturo asked, breathless with excitement.

‘I'm going to the lead the revolution,' Claudia said proudly. ‘And if that doesn't work, I'll become a film star in Hollywood.'

‘But my father wants me to stay here and be a doctor,' Arturo said meekly.

‘Don't be such a baby, Arturo,' Claudia replied. ‘There's a world out there, you know, in which people do heroic deeds. I'm not going to stay here and grow fat like your parents.'

It thrilled and terrified Arturo to entertain the possibility that his father was wrong and that there could be another view of the world. He was consumed with guilt at the exhilaration he felt after one of Claudia's long rants, which inevitably left his father lined up against the wall and shot along with all the other fascist pigs. Claudia was never very clear in her explanation of what a fascist pig was, except that she was certain that her mother was one and Arturo's father was another.

Claudia gave Arturo the courage to carry out unthinkably daring deeds, such as stealing swigs of his father's imported malt whisky when their parents were in the garden having their afternoon tea, or breaking into his father's study to look at the pictures of naked bodies that littered his medical books. Arturo never let Claudia know that the books filled him with the utmost horror and disgust, some of the bodies they giggled over having the most grotesque deformities and diseases imaginable. He became more and more
convinced that the last thing he ever wanted to be was a doctor and spend his life looking at such monstrosities.