The Winterlings (22 page)

At one point, it crossed the teacher's mind that she might be pregnant, but two minutes later, he rejected the idea — his wife had had those kinds of fantasies before.

She had always had her fantasies, yes, and she had always insisted that until Rosendo gave her a child, she couldn't forget her dead husband.

But after a few days of watching her carefully, he thought it over again: the Widow's wrinkly old face had softened, and was covered with a youthful patina of freckles. Isn't that what happened to women when they were expecting? Something bubbled and blossomed in his wife's insides, he was convinced of it, just like that fragrant plant she went to gather every day on the mountain and bring back in her wagon. And her stomach was beginning to swell …

In the tavern and by the communal oven, the rumour began to circulate that Uncle Rosendo had at last ‘fished out his tackle box', and they all praised his virility, asking him if his wife was lugging around any extra weight.

A few days later, Meis' Widow told them all the news they'd been waiting to hear.

Despite having suspected it, no one believed her, and the children even lifted her skirt, looking for a pillow. Then the Widow told her husband that she'd called for the doctor in Sanclás. He came after a few days, and, after examining her, started slapping Uncle Rosendo on the back.

‘Incredible but true,' he said. ‘Sometimes surprises of this nature occur. How old are you anyway, Widow?'

‘Fifty-two,' she said proudly, as she zipped up her skirt.

‘Incredible,' said the doctor, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Of course, strange things are known to happen in this village …'

Uncle Rosendo looked back and forth between the two of them. He couldn't give his opinion because he'd been left speechless. His wife was pregnant. He was going to be a father. A kid! To tell the truth, he couldn't recall having relations with his wife, either recently or long ago, and yet …

‘And my husband is sixty-three,' said the Widow, settling that old question once and for all. ‘But he's always been quite well endowed.'

If the doctor said it was so … This doctor was no quack. He'd studied for his medical degree in Santiago.

The Widow stopped going up the mountain to cut grass with her wagon. She got bigger and bigger, and there were no doubts about her pregnancy.

But Uncle Rosendo wasn't quite at ease. The more he thought about it, the stranger it all seemed. That's why he decided to go and see the priest. Surely he would have some explanation. Life was so stupid! He needed to know why his wife had gone sweet on him all of a sudden, and why she was treating him better than ever. The doctor from Sanclás was right when he said strange things were happening in the village.

He found the priest in the living room of his house. When he heard someone ringing the doorbell, he quickly turned off the television and covered it with a dark cloth. The maid went to open the door and informed him that it was the teacher, who wanted to speak with him. Don Manuel was delighted that a parishioner wished to seek his counsel.

The maid led Uncle Rosendo into the living room. It was a room always cloaked in shadow and smelling of old things: there was an armchair, a table with a clock on it, damask curtains, two paintings depicting hunting scenes, and the covered television. On top of a wooden sideboard, there was a portrait of Don Manuel's mother. The old woman's gaze followed you all around the room.

Uncle Rosendo caught his breath.

‘Father, the Virgin Mary …' he began.

‘Yes?' responded the priest.

‘The Virgin Mary …' stuttered Uncle Rosendo. ‘How does that work, exactly?'

‘How does what work?'

‘Well, you know — the Virgin bit.'

Don Manuel shifted in his chair.

‘Get to the point, Rosendo.'

Uncle Rosendo admitted that in fact he couldn't care less about the Virgin Mary; then he explained what had happened to his wife, and that he was worried by her change of attitude and the strange things that were going on in the village generally.

‘It's not that I've noticed anything in particular,' he added. ‘But I get this feeling that something is about to happen; many things, in fact.'

Don Manuel listened to him with his eyes wide open.

‘Me too,' he said after a long while. ‘And I think …' he cleared his throat. ‘I'd venture to say that it has a lot to do with the arrival of the Winterlings in Tierra de Chá. They say one of them abandoned her husband …'

‘
Abandoned
?'

‘Call it what you will. And the other one makes strange lists with the names of everyone in the village.'

‘Our names?'

‘Our names.'

Rosendo agreed. He was convinced that after so long away, they hadn't come back without a reason. They had come back for revenge. He sat looking at the priest intently.

Don Manuel swallowed.

‘Revenge, you say?'

‘It's a real pity what you did to Don Reinaldo. He was my friend, you know. He didn't deserve that … Just because you couldn't last a few days without something to eat …'

The priest stood up and began pacing impatiently about the room. Then he sat down again.

‘You're not entirely innocent either, Rosendo.'

‘But I had solid reasons,' replied the teacher. ‘Don't you remember that every time they came for him and couldn't find him, they beat me up, just because I was the village teacher and because one time I said that poetry would save the world?'

The priest glanced over at the portrait of his mother.

‘That's not the reason you did it, and you know that as well as I do,' he said. ‘There's a reason you're here.'

‘That is the reason I did it,' said Rosendo. ‘I have a clear conscience. If they hadn't carried him off, they would have killed me instead. That's the truth. It's no mystery.'

Don Manuel's chin began to tremble. He pulled a plate of churros toward him that the maid had set down. But then he pushed it away again.

‘Behind gluttony lies fear,' he said suddenly.

‘No way,' Rosendo rebuked him. ‘Stop making excuses: gluttony doesn't hide fear, it's just gluttony — a sin, plain and simple.'

The priest sighed with a sense of relief, and looked again at the portrait of his mother.

‘It would be for the best that … that they don't stay around these parts.'

‘Who?'

‘Those women.'

‘The Winterlings?'

They both looked at the floor in silence.

‘They won't go,' said the teacher heavily.

Then Don Manuel looked up and into Rosendo's eyes, clearing his voice.

‘We'll see about that! I also believe that … things being the way they are, you shouldn't worry at all about your wife, in fact, quite the contrary,' he said with a renewed voice. ‘If she says it's your child, then there's nothing to discuss. The birth of a child is always a blessing. And it wouldn't be the first time a woman's disposition changes when she is with child. When is she due?'

14

From that point on, little by little, like a fog that finally lifts, Uncle Rosendo began to celebrate the news and think about the baby. With such a decaying specimen by his side for so many years, the desire to be a father had been steadily eliminated from his mind. But now, seeing his wife's swelling belly, and receiving the felicitations and flattery of the folks in the tavern, a humble and domestic happiness overcame him. A child in those lives was like a ray of sunshine on a rainy day. Perhaps what had not been achieved in years and years of marriage could be achieved now with a child.

A child to whom he could read Rosalía de Castro's poetry.

He stopped drinking. In the evenings, instead of going to the tavern, he went to his shed: he was building a wooden crib. He cleaned out one of the rooms in the house and installed it there. He also collected toys that the children at school no longer wanted.

All this happiness went up in smoke one afternoon when the married couple were sitting in the living room. Throughout the morning, the Widow had been very taciturn, as if she wished to say something important, and she kept staring out the window.

Finally, when Rosendo was about to finish off the room with a wooden rocking horse he'd rescued from the trash, he heard her voice.

‘Listen, Rosen, are you busy?'

She had never called him by his name and certainly never by a pet name. Merely hearing that ‘Rosen' in his wife's mouth set him to trembling. So that his wife would think that he was busy, he didn't respond.

‘You hear me, Rosendo? I want to talk with you.'

At last, a tiny voice could be heard from the shadows of the room.

‘I'm listening …'

‘Look, I know all this business about the child makes you happy …'

‘Well, of course, woman! I can't stop thinking about it. We haven't exactly enjoyed our marriage, Mei … Meis' Widow. The years have gone by, and we've only become bigger strangers to each other. We haven't made much of a life together but … Look, I think that this baby will bring us together. The kid will get the best of each of us, you'll see, little Widow. You'll see how well it goes. Look at this beautiful little rocking horse I found yesterday, I'll fix it right up and— '

‘That's what I wanted to talk to you about,' she said.

Silence.

‘About the rocking horse?'

‘About the child.'

There it was; the cat was out of the bag. Here came the moment in which Uncle Rosendo would have to hear that the child wasn't his. Well, of course, what was he thinking, that babies come along just like that, without marital relations? He didn't care whose it was. In the eyes of everyone in the village, he was the father and he would continue to be.

He heard the Widow's voice.

‘At first I thought it was all different … But now I know that it's not. I wanted to tell you that nothing has changed between us and nothing ever will.'

Uncle Rosendo didn't respond. He tried to decipher the meaning of the words he had just heard.

‘I don't understand,' he said.

‘There's nothing to understand. Everything stays the same.'

‘Yes, except that there will be three of us now,' said Rosendo.

‘Four,' pronounced the Widow.

Then Uncle Rosendo set about enlarging the rocking horse.

He thought it would turn out even better than new.

15

Mr Tenderlove visited Saladina from time to time, and the Winterlings were more and more convinced that it was he who had paid old Violeta to cure her with rubs and washes. His false teeth business was booming; he had clients from all over, not just from the village but also from Sanclás and even further afar. Thanks to this, he'd bought himself a red SEAT 1400, and he spent the whole day driving about town, blaring the horn so that everyone would know he was the richest man in the village.

He hid his feminine side less and less often, and one day, he even dared to go into the tavern in a floral dress, with his hairy legs and high-heeled shoes.

By then he'd been called ‘faggot' so many times that the word was hollow; it didn't bother him any more.

That is, if it had ever bothered him in the first place.

As he had done for a very long time, in the evenings after his last client had left, he went down the hallway and into the room with the pink walls, to put on those colourful dresses and high-heels, and look at himself in the mirror.

For many years, while he searched for teeth, polished them, and tried to match them like puzzle pieces, while he leant over the putrid mouths of his clients to put the new teeth in, that moment of furtive intimacy had been his secret reward. Now things were different. Now the secret was meaningless, simply because everyone knew exactly what he did once he closed his clinic, everyone knew who he was …

One day, he stopped the car out the front of the sisters' house, and when he saw that Saladina was sitting in the sun in the orchard, he offered to take her for a drive. With the windows down, they passed by the fields and the communal oven, jolting over the gravel and waving to everyone by the lime trees. It was the first time in a long time that Saladina had gone out and enjoyed herself. She even let out a hearty laugh when Tenderlove stopped the car and turned around to grab something from the back seat: a bottle of local herb spirits.

‘I don't need any anaesthetics anymore,' she said when she finally managed to stop laughing.

‘So what?' he answered, offering her the bottle.

They each took a long swig. Then they sat there pensively, contemplating the lime trees.

‘It doesn't taste the same, you know?' said the dental mechanic.

‘I was just about to say the same thing. It's a bit tainted …' Saladina hiccupped twice. ‘It tastes like … it tastes like cork, or dirt, or—'