The Winterlings Read online

  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:

  ‘My feet brought me here, but I don’t know where I am …’

  This was before he disappeared for good. And before the Winterlings disappeared.

  Others alleged to have seen him disappear like the wind in the cornfields, along the road that leads to Portugal.

  And others still said that it was the girls themselves who had dug his grave.

  Sometimes they spoke of everyt
hing from the past that related to the war in Tierra de Chá. They were times of lies and confusion. One day was white, and the next was black. One day, the villagers got up as supporters of the Left, and the next, without any scruples at all, they belonged to the Right. One day, a few of them banned the priests from accompanying the dead to the cemetery, and the next day, the very same people would declaim with fervour to the others that if it didn’t rain in Tierra de Chá, or if a frost settled on the cabbages, it was because nobody prayed and God was upset. And so they’d get to praying.

  One thing for sure was that the church was fuller every day, and the priest, Don Manuel, was delighted.

  Even before the war broke out, Don Manuel had lost the confidence and faith of his congregation for a variety of reasons.

  First, no one appreciated the way he feasted while the majority of people had nothing to put in their mouths.

  Under the pretext that the church needed money for wine, holy bread, and ornaments, he went about the village pulling a cart that creaked like the devil, asking for offerings. Nobody was obligated to give him anything, but even if it were snowing outside, not a day went by without Don Manuel heading out with his cart. If there was no bread, he’d get a pail of corn, some potatoes, a wheel of cheese, a few ounces of chocolate, or a pot of local honey. He always got something.

  And then there was the pungent stench he gave off. Just because he was a priest, did that mean he didn’t have to wash? When you saw him coming along, you’d cross to the other side of the street.

  But during the war, the church became a place of refuge for many. Some went to ask for protection from God, and others went to let themselves be seen there. One day, some of the villagers, walking by the mountain, sang something about the priests and the monks, and the beating they were going to give them. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, what you might call a song, just words they made up as they went along, and that were borne off by the wind. The next day, they sang heavenly songs. They proudly wore their Saints’ medals, which were covered in mould, and had been found by their wives in the bottom of some drawer.

  People said that if the Popular Front won, the rich folks would have to share their wealth. The poor folks liked the sound of this. But once the war started, there was no sharing out of anything; instead, hunger and fear became routine.

  In people’s homes, anything that could be added to the bread dough that wasn’t poisonous was added: straw, wood chips, toads, and stones. The village was dying of hunger; no one had anything to eat, and, even still, everybody complained about the bread and how hard it was. Folks lost a lot of teeth trying to chew on it. The Winterlings remembered that sensation, too; they’d forgotten many people’s faces, but they remembered the bitter taste of the bread.

  Cabbages, tomatoes, and collard greens were all scarce. Even the potato crop began to dwindle. Only the gorse bushes kept growing, fierce and solitary, unfazed by a lack of cultivation or the privations of war. They spoke of all this in the first days of the war by the hearth in their homes. While they shucked the corn, and mended or made sweaters, rumours and bits of news of a very different kind began to swirl. All of this went on, and then, after a while, they arrested Mr Tenderlove, the dental mechanic. He was released after a twelve thousand real fine for pulling the teeth of dead people he found lying in ditches. That’s what people were saying, although no one could believe it.

  A few weeks into the conflict, the body of a man shot to death by a firing squad appeared by the river. By the hearth, they talked about his death with fear and anger. Some of the villagers who had voted for the Left in the elections no longer left their houses.

  Several of the young men from the village were called to the front. The rest were in Brazil or Cuba, or had fled to Portugal.

  When the war came, they stopped celebrating their festivals, and people began to be fearful of whom they went around with and what they said aloud.

  People stopped greeting each other in the street. They met each other’s gaze for a second, and then straight away looked at the ground. No one asked questions. No one understood it. No one knew if doors were open or closed, if they were heading up or heading down.

  And then there was the matter of the watches. During the war, not a single watch kept the same time in Tierra de Chá. If at one end of the village a watch said it was six o’clock, at the other end it was a quarter past two.

  Uncle Rosendo, the teacher, had the best time of it. He found his own personal refuge in making the children draw maps so as to be up to date with the conflict, with a well-defined border between Nationalist Spain and Republican Spain. At the head of the bodies of troops, he’d draw the arrows, the yoke, and the national flag, and sometimes, he’d paste on the photo of some bigwig general he cut out of the newspaper. Next to the arrows he’d write ‘First Year of Triumph’ or ‘Second Year of Triumph’ or ‘Victory Year’.

  The children didn’t live in fear of the war so much as in fear of Uncle Rosendo’s maps.

  That was when they took away the Winterlings’ grandfather. They held him for a week and then brought him back home. The practise of healing and magic was banned in Tierra de Chá — it was argued they were arts of the communist persuasion — although to tell the truth, more and more mysterious and extraordinary events took place in the village every day.

  Greta the cow mooed for a third time.

  ‘Open up, it’s us, the women from the village.’

  One of the Winterlings opened the door.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said.

  5

  So much waiting, spying from behind the curtains, deliberating over where the Winterlings could be — rumour had it they were overseas, perhaps in gloomy, rainy England. Now they wanted to know why they had come back. Above all, they were sure that the sisters would never have come back with bad intentions.

  ‘We don’t even know our own intentions,’ they said in unison.

  And that’s what it looked like. Since their arrival, each day had passed strangely in the same way for the two women. As if they’d never even left.

  As if they’d always been there — with the sky, the earth, the flowers, and the moon of Tierra de Chá.

  At dawn, after breakfast by the warmth of the fire, (one takes coffee with milk, the other bread with wine) they link arms (one is slightly taller than the other) and leave the house, dressed in doublets, skirts, and jackets, with scarves over their heads, and clogs on their feet.

  The one who breakfasts on bread and wine squints at the sky and sniffs at the air. Resting a large, bony hand on her sister’s shoulder, she sighs deeply.

  ‘Let’s see what the day has in store for us,’ she says. Or perhaps she says, ‘Only God can tell what shall come to pass’ or even, ‘Give me patience, Lord, to suffer these trials’.

  Which is all nonsense because nothing ever happens.

  God doesn’t ask patience of them nor does He put them on trial. Their strength is to be found in the push and pull of repetition.

  In the village, everyone knows each other, and everyone greets each other. Each family knows everyone else’s family history, the names of their parents, their grandparents, and what goods and property they own.

  The village is laid out like a fishbone diagram.

  It consists of one main street that is a bit wider than the rest, running into a town square with a big stone cross. On both sides, there are alleyways clotted with dark two-storey stone houses, with black stone tiles on the roofs. There’s the church with its vestibule carpeted in bones, the communal oven, and the tavern. There are also carts and beasts of burden. Cows tied to a rope walk slowly over to drink from the river.

  The grove of lime trees.

  And behind curtains, eyes. The same eyes as always.

  Everything there takes place according to the season. In summer, they thresh the grain and pick the grapes; in September, they sow an
d they harvest. On the evening of the first day of November, they roast chestnuts and eat them with wine. After All Saints’ Day, it’s the festival of the fiadeiro and the esfolladas, or the spinner and the shuckers, when all the young men and women end up dancing in the kitchen. After that comes the season to slaughter the pigs: sausages and sausage meat. Filloa pancakes and dried apricots. All year long, they go up the mountain to collect gorse, watch over the livestock, gather kindling, and mix the manure in the square.

  Always the same old faces. They are convinced that the whole world ends just around the corner from the main street, when you can no longer see the houses in Tierra de Chá.

  The same faces, the same wine, the gorse, the women’s stockings strangling their calves. The sweet smell of manure spread about the square.

  The same signs of boredom. Everything has the same flavour as before.

  The same people, and new people as well, watching the Winterlings. Looking for something to do while they watched them.

  Among the dogs and the children, who clear a path for them, they head up the mountain, one Winterling in front, the other behind, followed by the cow and four sheep — that’s all.

  The women, and the animals.

  The mountain.

  (Their feet remember,

  and they let them walk.)

  They return at dusk, enveloped by the sound of cowbells. They sow some potatoes, draw water from the well, feed the chickens, grill some meat, and make soup.

  They feel comfortable in this slowness. The less they talk, the better. Words entangle, confuse, and deceive; you don’t need words to feel. They are comfortable, and the mere fact of being together, being alone, sharing their surrounds, a soup, an anise, makes them feel good. They do not expect more, and they do not wish for more.

  Everything astonishes them: a chicken lays an egg, or a plant shoots up from among the clods of earth, and they are overcome by the certainty that God is right there.

  Life seems like a miracle.