The Winterlings (14 page)

For many days he was nervous, but the week before the test was a nightmare. He prepared for that exam like his life depended on it. At the tavern in the evenings, he told everyone he was constantly studying with books, although Meis' Widow revealed that this was not true; he spent his day overwhelmed, staring out the window. Lately, all people could ask him about was the exam. They said they had no doubt he would pass, and patted him on the shoulder. These signs of affection made his stomach churn.

Finally, the day arrived.

It was the day they'd been waiting for.

The Winterlings had seen him going, very early in the morning, towards the square to catch the bus, wrapped up in a corduroy jacket and a clean shirt with a stiff collar, breathing heavily. ‘There goes the teacher,' they said to each other while they threw the feed to the chickens. ‘Yes, there he goes.'

Throughout the whole day, the entire town had been gathering to wait for him. And just a little after Dolores arrived at the tavern, he came down cautiously along the road.

‘Here he comes!' yelled someone standing by the door of the tavern. Everyone rushed surreptitiously to the bar, and a ring of attentive listeners formed around it. Hanging on the results of the exam was the future of their children's teacher and the school in Tierra de Chá. But it was more than that. In fact, having a teacher and a school was the least important part.

‘It all turned out for the best!' yelled Rosendo to the gathered listeners, very serious as he pulled at the shirt-button restricting his neck.

The townsfolk let out a sigh of relief.

‘Thank goodness! And what did they ask you?

‘First allow your teacher something to drink,' he said with affected restraint. ‘I'm as dry as a bone.'

They put a glass of wine on the bar. Uncle Rosendo knocked it back in one gulp. The others looked at him expectantly.

‘Well, they asked me,' he said after burping, ‘if you buy three pine trees for one peso each, how much does it cost? That sort of thing, you know.'

‘Yes, yes, we know, three pesos! Easy! And what else?'

Uncle Rosendo became very serious. He gestured for more wine with one hand.

‘Well, after that,' he continued, stroking his chin, ‘it was a difficult exam, I'm not going to lie to you; next they asked me what elements might constitute a forest. And I answered “trees” or “wild beasts”.'

The men in the tavern burst into applause. They howled with pleasure and celebrated his response, toasting it with their glasses of wine. They were truly proud of everything their country teacher knew.

‘Well said, Uncle Rosendo, well done! And what else did they ask you?'

‘Next they asked me how much is seven by seven.'

‘And?'

‘Well, here I didn't realise we'd gone back to mathematics, I thought we were still on geography, and my answer was the Miño River.'

There was a general silence. A fly landed on the teacher's nose. He opened his palm, caught it, and pulled one of its wings off.

‘So of course, I put my foot in it there …'

He let the fly go. Everyone watched it walk along the counter. Because it couldn't fly, it skittered from side to side.

‘But at least you passed?'

Uncle Rosendo hiccupped twice.

‘I passed.'

Despite the general excitement and all the toasting on account of the teacher's story, Dolores managed to pull Tristán aside to talk. As was usual, the rooster raiser was in a hurry (
I have to get home much earlier than you can imagine)
but she managed to convince him to come by and have a look at the chickens.

And so, in the middle of the afternoon on the next day, Tristán arrived at the house just as he had promised, followed by one of his capons and a rooster with white legs. As he explained, he was short on time because he had to take the rooster to Arzúa to sell it, and the capon was with him because it was still very young and would need to be fed soon.

First up, he wanted to ask some questions about the business at hand.

‘Are they cantankerous, your chickens?' he asked.

The Winterlings said yes, that when they tried to shoo them out of the corner to feed and water them, they were irritable and wouldn't move.

Next Tristán asked if there was a rooster in the yard. The Winterlings replied that they had introduced a rooster a short time ago, but that the local piñeira chickens had been broody since the dawn of time, and that they had always laid eggs without the intervention of any rooster.

Tristán started nodding again as he looked at his watch.

‘How long has this rooster been in the yard?' he asked.

Several weeks. The rooster must have been among the group for a few weeks, because Dolores had bought him more or less when Saladina began going to Tenderlove's clinic. Saladina smiled, showing the gaps in her gums. They also told him that since this rooster had come along, the other chickens had lost the habit of cleanliness. The worst was the poop all over the place.

The rooster raiser went into the yard and observed the chickens: he went to and fro, hunched over, clucking and crowing so as not to disturb them. He felt them from head to tail, examining their beaks, crests, wings, and feet. He could tell from the touch if there was anything out of place, any damaged feathers or crests, and he touched their bellies and guessed, correctly, what they had eaten. It looked like he felt good in there, as if he were in his element. But then he looked at his watch again (
I have to get home much earlier than you can imagine)
and said with alarm that he had to get going.

On the main road, on the way to the market at Arzúa, he came across the priest, flat on his face. Don Manuel was in a terrible mood, on his way back from asking the Winterlings for the contract for the sale of his brain, which they appeared to have forgotten. They made up a thousand excuses: the chickens, their sewing, the curd cheese … and what's more, they said they had no idea about the whole thing!

The priest had told them he would be returning, that they would need to speak calmly about many things. He'd also told them that if they were thinking about going to the seven o'clock mass, they shouldn't, because he wasn't feeling at all well. While he was walking down the road, he felt such heaviness in his head that it kept pulling him forward and eventually dragged him to the ground — surely it was some kind of flu.

‘Answer me this,' said Dolores, once they were alone again.

‘What?' answered her sister.

‘Do you think that woolly caterpillar suspects something?'

Saladina went over to the cupboard and took out the box of odds and ends.

‘The priest?'

‘The priest.'

‘About our little secret, you mean?'

‘Yes, about our little secret
.
'

But Saladina didn't answer. Once again, she seemed to be in another place. She picked out some blue flannel, wondering out loud about the jacket she was making.
It'll look good with this material, won't it? And where are my glasses, Dólor? Ah, here they are, how silly of me
.

She got out the spool, sucked on the end of the cotton a couple of times, and threaded it.

2

July dragged on endlessly in the sticky humidity of Tierra de Chá. The bats flew low, drunk on heat and lust, the meadows glowed yellow, and the cicadas sang. The flies sought shelter in the houses, and bugs stuck to the skin.

Greta the cow mooed at five in the morning.

Saladina opened an eye, pulled an arm out from under the sheets and, moved by a habit acquired over many years, felt the nightstand for her dentures. Then she said to herself, ‘You idiot, you don't have them anymore!' She got up. She dragged the porcelain chamber pot out from under the bed and put it in the middle of the room. She lifted up her nightdress, bent her knees, stuck her bottom out ceremoniously, and prepared to relieve herself. As the first jet hit the porcelain, she let out a large sigh.

The sound woke Dolores, who stayed in the foetal position, pretending to be asleep or dead, her gaze fixed on the leaky roof, an elephant, a star, a flower. The light was streaming into the bedroom, and for a while she stayed like that, intently watching the details and delicate movements that the damp had left on the whitewashed walls. Resting her ear on the pillow, she amused herself by counting her heartbeats. Another day. Another day in the company of her sister. The cow, the mountain, the Singer. Mending, sweeping, pulling down the cobwebs, and scrubbing. The same thing she did yesterday and will do tomorrow. For a while now, she had begun to think that the routine that had offered them so much consolation upon their arrival in Tierra de Chá was now nothing more than a way to grow old.

While she listened to the numbing stream of urine coming from her sister, she began to think about the movies, and the movies made her think of Ava Gardner. She could already begin to smell the sour, dreadful urine vapours, but she couldn't get the idea of Ava Gardner coming to Spain to make a movie out of her mind. For that film they'd be looking for body doubles, tall women with wavy hair who could speak English. She was thinking about what a good double she would be, when her sister's urine splashed her in the face. Why did she have to put up with this life? She covered herself with the sheets, and turned over. Her sister clicked her tongue and moaned with pleasure as she inspected, between her open legs, the abundant foam that floated on top of her urine. She had finally finished.

Since she had heard the news, that afternoon in June when she was feeding the chickens, Dolores had not stopped thinking about how being an actress was what she had always wanted, and that the film they were shooting on the Spanish coast was her opportunity. Again came the stream, like an open floodgate, Niagara Falls. Hadn't she finished already?

She was splashed again, this time on the shoulders. How disgusting. Would Saladina be on the pot all morning long?

Under the pretence of having to milk the cow, Dolores got up and went to the cowshed. Greta was in the corner, breathing calmly. Sitting on a stool, with her face to one side, Dolores rested her right cheek against the cow's flank. Lately, the cow had lost so much weight that her ribs were sticking out like the side of a galley, and you could surmise from her steely gaze that she was sick. To account for this thinness, the Winterlings had worked through thousands of possible excuses. Perhaps she was too old, perhaps going up and down the mountain had been too much exercise … But there was some other reason; strange things were going on in the village, and Greta was a victim too.

It wasn't just the village. Something had turned in the universe in which the two women had comfortably lived up until that point. Signs of a secret and domestic tension were floating in the air. Gone were the childish, innocent affairs of days gone by. They lived together, worked together, and slept together like a pair of friends who don't really know each other, increasingly aware that something was coming between them. Between the comings and goings to the mountain, the arguments and moments of warmth, discontent was taking seed in the hearts of the two women. For some time, the universe had been turning — but now it was
twisting.

Every day, Dolores asked at the tavern if anyone knew the exact date that Ava Gardner was supposed to arrive in Spain. Nothing. Nobody knew a thing about it. They didn't even know who Ava Gardner was. Then one day, Dolores went up to the bar for a jug of wine, and the mistress of the house, who always watched the television, said that on the newsreel they'd announced that an American actress had left New York and was currently in a hotel in London, preparing to come to Spain. Was that the actress she'd been asking about the other day?

When she got home, Dolores found Saladina eating figs in the kitchen. She was still waiting for Tenderlove to call her, to put in the teeth that were missing. She hadn't seen him since that day that he had brought her home drunk, so she still had three empty spots in her gums. That morning, making the most of the fact that her sister had gone to the tavern, she had put two jars of homemade jam in a basket, along with a few figs and the flannel jacket that she'd just finished. With the basket on her head, she went off to Mr Tenderlove's house.

But the dental mechanic wouldn't even open the door. He limited himself to yelling at her from the window that he didn't have her teeth yet, that he'd call her.

‘Can I come in for a while, Tender?' she asked timidly. ‘I've got some presents for you.'

‘I'm very busy,' came his reply. And then he shut the window.

Saladina went back home with the basket on her head and entered the kitchen. She was sitting there, eating figs mindlessly, when her sister walked in. She picked them out of the basket, pulled off the stalks with her gums, and spat them on the floor. Then she put them in her mouth whole and swallowed them, barely chewing.

Her sister watched them travel down her gullet —

Gulp

And then the lumps disappeared.

Saladina didn't even look up when Dolores entered. She had been waiting for her, but while she was doing so, she began to feel sick. She felt alone and abandoned, feeling absence like a bolt through the heart.