The Winterlings (2 page)

For years in the village, they laughed about the girl suckled by a nanny goat, and as soon as Esperanza was old enough to think about it, she swore to herself that the first thing she'd give to her child would be the breast (
a breast like God intended
, she used to say) that was never given to her.

And so it had gone for seven years, until the day of the weaning, when Don Reinaldo brought it to her attention.

The Winterlings remembered how he had gone up and down the whole village that day, spouting his opinion. Mrs Francisca, a baker and mother of eight children, put in her piece:

‘Give him mashed stew, woman.'

Along came Aunty Esteba, who was in charge of dressing the deceased, and said:

‘He'll suck you dry.'

Gumersinda, limping along, pointed with her finger and pronounced:

‘You'll have him hooked on there your whole life!'

The priest came and advised:

‘Pray — that always helps.'

The mother of the child shrugged. To everyone she gave the same reply:

‘If it's not for nipple, the kid won't open his mouth.'

A few days later, the grandfather came back with a little bowl filled with an ointment he had prepared himself with bitter herbs, ash, and lemon juice.

‘Tomorrow, smear this on your breasts,' he ordered. ‘And you'll see how the kid will never suck a nipple again in his life.'

The next morning, the woman smeared her breasts with the ointment. Soon enough, the kid came over with his stool and sat down to start suckling. He gave it three or four licks, but then he pushed the nipple away with a look of disgust.

‘Well, then? Little Ramón?' The women asked mockingly. ‘No tit today?'

Much later on, when Esperanza had died, and Little Ramón was just Ramón and had become a sailor, and had once disappeared on a ship for two whole years, he still gave the same response:

‘The tit's terrible today.'

They remembered this, and many other things besides, while they set up the house again.

Tears falling into the soup.

The Winterlings.

3

Now they slept like they had as children: snoring with their mouths open in a bedroom with a wet and leaky roof, a window that looked out over the plots, a crucifix, a photo of Clark Gable, and two little iron beds with mattresses filled with corn husks. They slumped over the beds like prehistoric lizards. No one had bothered them since their arrival. Then early one morning, disturbed by a noise, one of them opened an eye suddenly.

‘Hey, what was that?' she said to her sister.

And she stayed like that for a while, with one eye open and the other closed, her hands like paws over the turned-down covers, still and cold as a lizard.

The other Winterling, who had finally woken, got up straight away. Sitting on the bed, she strained her ears to listen.

‘I can't hear anything …' she said.

‘That's because you're still half asleep,' answered the other.

‘You make it your business to know everything,' retorted the first one. She stretched out an arm and began to feel her way along the nightstand. ‘What would you know about my sleep? My sleep is mine, not yours. Where are my teeth? Did you take them?'

‘And what would I want with your revolting teeth?'

The one who had just spoken yawned, and the other one saw right into the roof of her mouth, which was red like the entrails of a pig.

‘I don't know why you have to be so mean,' said the first one. She kept feeling along the nightstand until she found her dentures. She popped them in abruptly with a hollow sound:
plop.
Then she jumped out of bed, pulled out the chamber pot from underneath it, and lifted up her nightdress. ‘Nobody in their right mind would put up with you,' she continued, squatting to relieve herself. ‘You're lucky you've got me.'

When she finished, her sister took her spot atop the chamber pot.

One of them standing, the other squatting, they strained to listen again.

‘And what if it's the Civil Guard coming to get us?
They'll
surely come along some day …' said the one who was squatting. She stood up, adjusted her nightdress, and hid the chamber pot back under the bed.

‘It's just Greta,' said the other soothingly. ‘She's been driven mad by the horseflies.' She went over to the trapdoor in the floor and pulled it up: like the revelation of something hidden, the acrid and seeping stench of the gorse used as bedding by the animals in the cowshed suddenly floated up. There was the Galician Red cow, which instead of being called Marela, or Teixa, like all the other cows in Tierra de Chá, was called Greta. Greta Garbo. Once she saw the cow's rump encrusted with muck, and its tail switching back and forth to swat away the flies, the Winterling sighed calmly.

For a while she stayed like that, crouching, her head hanging down through the trapdoor. She listened to the creaking of her jawbone and whispered maternal words to the cow,
don't you worry, Little Greta, here we are
… She would never use sweet little words like those with people, but she was sedated by the penetrating aroma that overcame her — overcame both of them — and went out through the door and spread through the forest, continuing on, on into the north. It was a forest in which you could spend days and days without being found, just as they had that time they got lost. She snapped the trapdoor shut: ‘It's Greta, nothing more than Greta. Greta and the horseflies.'

‘Horseflies my foot!' said her sister, standing up. ‘I'm talking about that sound of dry leaves rustling. Someone's coming this way.'

The other Winterling's eyes were shining with fury, ready for battle.

‘Shut your trap, scarecrow!'

They stood there listening a while longer. Tenacious, heavy flies buzzed around all over the place: in the kitchen, in the living room, on the floor and in the beds, and even inside the drawers. Greta Garbo had the advantage of having udders as stiff as carrots, always full to the brim with milk. But she had an irritable temperament, much more like a mule than a cow, and nothing infuriated her more than flies. When the flies got to her, she'd kick her hind legs and groan, sometimes biting people. But for now the cow was silent.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Winterlings! Open the door, Winterlings!'

Overcome with fear (or maybe excitement) the two sisters clung to each other.

‘What did they call us? Chitterlings?' whispered one of them with her nose pressed into the bosom of the other.

‘Winterlings,' said the other. ‘I think that's what they called us: Winterlings.'

‘Winterlings …' repeated the first one, pensive.

‘That's right, Winterlings. And don't wipe your runny nose all over my jacket, if you please.'

They started running down the staircase. Lagging behind, the first sister threw herself into the other to push her along; the second sister tried to catch her, but she couldn't. They fell down, rolled along the floor for a bit, and then got back up.

They ended up in front of the door, all over each other, bodies pressed together, without daring to open it.

They were quite different from each other, the Winterlings.

The elder one was dried-out and bony; she had a pointy face and an aquiline nose. The bitterness of time passed had borne away the tenderness and sweetness of her child's heart, her faith in herself and others, leaving nothing but sheeplike inertia and a rigid routine. Closed off in her personal universe of magazines, soap operas, and melodrama, she had a single passion: an unhealthy need for security and to be left alone. For this alone she would get up, work, then go to sleep without thinking of anything else at all. And so, day after day, this is what she would call her ‘beautiful routine'. By the time she was twenty, she looked like she was forty. By thirty-five, she looked like she was outside of time.

The other sister was remarkable for her wavy jet-black hair, her narrow figure, her fleshy lips, and above all her gaze: those green eyes with golden flecks around the iris. Her sister would raise her voice, and she'd stay quiet; she followed and kept up with her sister's timetable, not because she especially liked routine, but because it was all she had, and it assured her a tranquil life without drama and upheaval. She had always been very patient, that patience being both her best quality and her greatest weakness.

Who were they exactly? They weren't young girls. Nor were they old women. They had, however, reached the age at which they wished to live in peace. But in peace from what?

‘Who's there?' they said in unison.

The cow mooed again in the cowshed.

4

Since the Winterlings had arrived, the folks in Tierra de Chá hadn't taken an eye off them — all they did was go about spying — but no one had had the courage to come and speak with them in person.

Uncle Rosendo, the country teacher, recalled that as children they had taken a long time to learn to read. No one knew how old they had been back then. At school, they didn't play with the other children. They stuck together in the corner, with tiny spiders and butterflies hanging from their hair, in that languid and distracted way of theirs, staring at their feet as if plants or something were growing out of them.

But everyone remembered their grandfather perfectly. According to the priests, he was both devoted to the Saints and possessed by the devil. He knew of the secret herbs and plants that bloomed in subterranean gardens. According to the old folks, he was an
arresponsador
, who knew the right prayers and incantations to ward off penuries and misfortune. But according to the other
arresponsadores,
there was no way he could be one of them. According to some, he was dangerous; for others, he was a beast from the hereafter; and for the rest, he was no more than a humble man, equally magical and rational. What everyone
could
agree upon was that he was gifted with an acute perspicacity, such that from the first glance he could diagnose what was wrong with a sick person in front of him.

He went from house to house resetting bones, listening to the gurgling of intestines, and whispering poems to cure the evil eye. He knew how to talk to animals and how to scare off wolves. Even the mention of Don Reinaldo left an unexpressed emotion floating in the air, of deaf and mute admiration.

Because of this admiration, he came to have a large clientele, and in his last days, he dedicated himself entirely to the art of healing. Sick people from all over the place arrived at his house. They might be overcome by hiccups, which he cured with deathly frights, or experiencing cravings to eat stones and dirt, which was a common affliction in Tierra de Chá.

Everyone remembered the time a deaf-mute laywoman from Villafranca went into his house and came back out again reciting the Gospel, blowing kisses to the gathered crowd.

Don Reinaldo knew the secret laws that govern the relations between this world and the hereafter, and even the sciences against the evil eye, but he would speak only of simple and profound things: everyday things like nature and nothingness, fear and death. Was death a relief? Yes, death was the one true and inevitable relief of man. Death was the snow of another story.

But what Don Reinaldo knew how to do best was listen. He had an extraordinary gift for listening, and an aptitude to serve as confessor that had always provoked the jealousy of the priest, Don Manuel.

Sitting by the bed of a patient, one leg crossed over the other, he'd get out his tobacco pouch, roll a cigarette, and begin to smoke.

‘Well then, friend, tell me about your kidneys,' he would say.

He'd spend over an hour listening to the sick man.

The patient would tell him about all his troubles, which he would just about always blame on some external element: the winter, the rain, a woodlouse, bad food, his wife, or the jealousy of a neighbour.

After listening carefully, Don Reinaldo would say:

‘What's happening to you is no fault of your wife, your neighbour, the winter, or even the woodlouse. It's not even because of jealousy.'

He was convinced that all ailments have their source in oneself. Jealousy of someone else's success, dreams, failures, a nasty thought, regret or an unsatisfied desire — these are all to do with past troubles that were never resolved. With time, these things accumulated, and then hardened into a cyst, ending up as a sickness.

The cow mooed again in the cowshed.

‘It's us,' called the women at the door, again and again, ‘the women from the village.'

But no one knew what had become of their grandfather. According to Uncle Rosendo, the country teacher, he had quite simply gone mad because of the war.

Often, as he chatted with the other men in the shadows of the tavern, Uncle Rosendo recalled Don Reinaldo's final days, when he came back simple and happy. One day, he noticed that Don Reinaldo was thinner. Two days later, he was wandering back and forth with a string of snot hanging out of his nose. He became moody, he stopped eating, he shooed away his granddaughters. He arrived at places without knowing where he was. He would stop the first person he came across and tell them worryingly: