The Lady of the Soler Colony
Translated by James & Marian Womack
Rocío Rincón is a writer and reviewer who lives in Barcelona. Her work has been published in Timey Wimeys, The Best of Spanish Steampunk, Brujas: IV Antología de Relatos Fantásticos, and elsewhere.
HIS TIN FINGERS against my bedstead, metal against metal, like rain on the pipes. That was how my brother woke me every morning for the seven years we worked at the Soler textile colony.
This was also how he woke me the day that the colony collapsed like an old empire, sunk in water, rubble and thick lludllitz, ridiculous under the implacable eyes of The Lady.
Guillem seemed to start each day with his body perfectly prepared for work, while I rubbed my eyes in front of the day’s gruel, sometimes served with butter and sometimes with honey. Leaving the street where the workers’ houses were, everyone stood in line for the communal bathroom in the corridor, then stood in line to get into the factory, then stood in line for the foreman to make a note of us as we came in. Most people’s faces showed sleepiness and resignation, but not my brother’s. For those seven years, Guillem always went ahead, pulling on my hand as we went to the factory, his eyes bright and a smile on his face because he was going to see The Lady.
Although they were all around twenty metres tall, and their sarcophagi were made from the same darkened, slightly iridescent metal, each one of the Ladies of the nine Catalan colonies was unique. The Lady of the Saltmartí Colony was like a Roman statue, with wide inexpressive pupil-less eyes. She stood high over her factory in a regal pose, wearing a pleated tunic from which sprang thick stems and thorns, like those of a rose bush. The Lady of the Espader Colony, nicknamed La Teresina, had her eyes closed and her mouth open, as if she was singing, and from her tunic came many long arms, with hands to help and bless all those who looked upon her.
Our Lady, The Lady, was a little different: younger, curvier, with an insolent expression, and curls that snaked around her face in the shape of a heart. Perhaps because of this, because she was so pretty, Mossèn Francesc didn’t make us sing all that many hymns to her, nor did he allow us to swap cards with her picture at the gate to the church. The poor Mossèn, the colony’s priest, reminded us regularly that The Lady’s official name was Carmen, named after the patron saint of seafarers, but The Lady did not seem like someone to whom one should pray. She stood like a fisherwoman, with one hand on her waist and the other held out, beckoning. She shrugged the shoulder that lifted up out of her swooping shirt, raised an eyebrow like a star, and her close-lipped smile twisted one side of her mouth. She wore a bell skirt over her wide hips, and tentacles and seaweed grew from her belly, then changed into tubes which carried the steam into the factory’s workings. Complicated and crude workings that in no way resembled the delicate shape of The Lady.
It is not good, a cult based round a machine, the Mossèn had said to Señor Roval, the teacher, on the morning when the roof of the factory exploded in a rain of glass and broken ceramic. When the Mossèn had taken the last of the workers from the colony to Olistany station, the teacher had sunk under the weight of so much worship, so much machinery, so much lludllitz.
For all that the Mossèn didn’t like it, hymns were sung to The Lady in the workers’ accommodation, round the stove, far from mass. Her picture was pinned at the head of all our beds. Families recalled, in whispers, the first time they had heard her soft moaning, in the first days of the colony, when we didn’t even have a bakery. Back then we didn’t have a night watchman, and the first foreman, a man with a sarcastic smile, had attempted to force himself on a girl. That night, The Lady’s singing had woken the neighbours. The Lady sang most often on rainy nights, when the water came in through the little skylight and poured over her curls, her cheeks, down her breast. Her voice, that warm reverberation that sometimes was a ditty and sometimes was a sob, sounded to us like justice.
Only once had The Lady sung while the sun was out, the day my brother lost his hand, when the factory had been operating for scarcely three months. Guillem, who couldn’t have been more than eight years old, was watching the thread on the shuttles, to know when he should put in more. I remember that with the noise of the machines and the shouts of the workers nobody heard my brother screaming until an urgent noise came from the body of the Lady herself. Mother was the first to see my brother’s bloodied fingers, staining everything they touched, ruining the cloth. When they finally got my brother out from under the loom, separating threads of cotton, flesh, and metal, the Lady’s voice died away with the sound of a fading bell. A few minutes more and Guillem would have lost his arm.
The Guillem of those days, the one I remember with affection, rarely frowned. The Guillem of today never smiles, except to himself or at clients. He is not sweet now, but affectionate, and everything that he seems to find important is too far away, or else hurts Mother.
After the surgery, Guillem had to spend several months in bed, as no one knew if his body would accept the metal prosthesis. However, he would spend the afternoons out with Señora Soler’s little metal horse, and she would position him on its back with an almost maternal air. Back then the owners had not yet returned to Barcelona, and Señora Soler, the young señora, would walk through the colony with her flounced white dress and her blonde chignon and ringlets. Señora Soler was pregnant and said that coaches and trains made her dizzy and that she was too tired to walk. That was why they had brought one of those fashionable horses over from Africa, with its large metallic hindquarters, long pastel-coloured mane, and golden eyelashes. It seemed like a gigantic toy, which rather than trotting moved with erratic and tentative paces, halfway between a mad dance and a dressage leap. It was such an advanced model that its tin heart even beat, although it did occasionally bolt for no reason. There was a stable boy whose only job was to spend hours winding it up, just in case Señora Soler wanted to go out riding at dawn, or at teatime, or before going to bed. On horseback she would ride every Sunday between the church and Olistany, the nearest village. She was like a little girl, too delicate for the colony and for that belly, much younger than the workers who were bent over with age. She had no calluses on her hands and nothing to worry about.
She was one of those delicate spirits, the kind that rich people can allow themselves to be. She would have cried to see that candyfloss-coloured mane dyed with a strong-smelling black liquid. She would have cried more than for Señor Roval, I believe, to have seen her horse fall to the ground, with its once-powerful hooves moving clumsily. Mother saw the horse on the day we left as well, its belly cut open revealing the bright coggy metal guts. She did not say anything at the time, but I know that she held tighter onto Guillem’s good hand.
One time Señora Soler came to our house to speak with Mother, after one of her rides with Guillem. We children had to go outside to play, and when I came back I saw Mother crying discreetly, with dignity, as she packed the bags for us to leave. When we reached Señor Soler’s house, the one who was crying was the owner’s wife. We stayed in the colony, as if nothing had happened, but Mother spent weeks sunk into a stubborn silence, her jaw tense. Señora Soler now only took the horse out once a week to ride to Olistany, and after she had given birth she went back to Barcelona.
When Guillem went back to work at the factory he no longer had to keep an eye on the shuttles, he had been set to work at one of the looms. My brother had changed, he went to work every morning with a new determination. He rested his new hand on The Lady’s skirt, on that metal which seemed as warm as human skin. When the factory was running at full speed and the operator who ran The Lady went in through the little side door to see that everything was running well beneath her skirts, steam would come out of the irises of The Lady’s eyes, through holes little larger than a penny. Guillem always saw when this happened and frowned, as if he were seeing an animal that was being made to work too hard. I had joined the mechanics at that time and I also noticed The Lady more, as she was the only machine in the whole colony that I was not allowed anywhere near.
Of course, Guillem had not been born when The Ladies of The Factories came to Barcelona, in boats that were so large that they seemed to be islands docking. He did not remember that the workers tried to boycott them in the beginning, that lots of people disappeared during the protests. For the first years, people saw The Ladies and remembered the pale sunken faces of those who had come back from the expedition into Russian waters.
When The Ladies came, Father was still alive. I remember this because it was a Saturday afternoon, when mother was working in the sweetshop. We went to the port to greet the brave adventurers, back from the Antarctic after months of work. We saw The Ladies approaching as if they themselves were floating, gigantic bodies that became even more impressive when they reached the land, bearing with them their terrible dignity. The tubes that came from their bellies fell heavily onto the decks of the boats, with nothing to connect them to. The sailors got them unloaded and then headed for home or the nearest tavern, but they argued first with the owner of the boats who spat on the ground and then disappeared into the dazzled crowd. People were scared and surprised, like a little child who hears a creaking door in the dark, at Christmastime.
I know that Guillem always thought that it was Señor Soler’s fault, when he decided to build a huge waterwheel that, he assured us, would double the colony’s productivity. They had to cut down the little wood that grew up round the main factory building and divert the course of the Velet River. No one was really happy with the plans because who knew if they could adapt themselves to the new rhythm? No one ever mentioned hiring new people, just effort and enthusiasm.
As a mechanic, I was there throughout the whole installation process. I remember the hours of frustration when the plans did not fit with the result we had hoped, the nights of sitting up worried because the parts that we needed to fulfil Señor Soler’s deadline had not arrived. We mechanics had spent days drinking milk of magnesia to calm our stomachs. And I remember the day before the inauguration when our tests made The Lady sing. A thick steam came out of her eyes and you could hear rhythmic thumps coming from her chest, getting ever faster.
At the inauguration, on a fine morning, Señor Soler gave a speech accompanied by a few of his investors and the mayor of Olistany. The children were in their Sunday best and the adults all looked serious. When the speeches were over, they all went home to change and then go to work, more rapidly than usual. The teacher and the Mossèn stood on either side of Señor Soler, who made grandiloquent gestures with his arms and hands. The river flowed over new ground and the magpies settled on the factory roof. My brother closed his eyes, insisting that he would not participate in this. I remember this as a scene from a mural, static and brightly lit. Ephemeral.
The survivors insist that it was the moment when the holy water hit the river that it started. When the Mossèn blessed the waterwheel the air started to taste of salt and a scream that would have bloodied any human throat came from the factory. It was not the singing voice we remembered, but a complaint, the denunciation of an abuse. The heavy sound of falling machinery accompanied the groaning noise. We were all still and a girl at my side vomited the castor oil they had made her take that morning.
As soon as he was able to react, Guillem ran toward the factory with my mother behind him. I followed them, covering my face, with my back soaked in a cold sweat, while the glass fell and the people screamed. I got there just in time to see The Lady’s coffin opening slowly, surrounded by warm salt steam.
I still do not know what it was that kept us still, while a huge creature, the size of Our Lady, squirmed elastically amid the wreckage of the building where we had worked for seven years and which now collapsed as she passed over it as if it were a sandcastle. Perhaps it was the kind of fear that takes charge of a nocturnal beast when the lights are suddenly turned on, the white terror that paralyses all your limbs. Perhaps it was the sight of that oily mass, like the sea during a storm, a bluish black with green and purplish tints that took up the space that The Lady had previously occupied. The creature was howling, deafeningly so, with a mouth that at times was as tiny as the eye of a needle and sometimes so large that its deformed head seemed to lack both nose and eyes. The creature stood like The Lady had stood, but the hand on its hip had fused with its waist and its shirt. It seemed to be forgetting, moment by moment, the shape of its sarcophagus, and it rapidly transformed itself. The seaweed and tentacles in her belly seemed to have taken on a life of their own and set off from the body, touching the walls, touching the ceiling and the floor quickly, as if palpating them, leaving a blackish sticky residue behind them.
‘Lady, go back!’ Guillem shouted as he ran after her, a child once again under her imposing form, trying to catch hold of her skirt with his metal hand, but unable to find anything to hold on to. The monster to whom we had prayed so much, our kind and bountiful Lady, turned her head at an unnatural angle and looked at him with an intensity that was almost curious. After a few terrifying seconds, she turned her head back and carried on walking. As she moved, the metal slowly fell away. Some debris reached my face, and though I remember that the blow hurt less than it should have, we still had no option other than to run.
Standing by the river, the people saw a kind of thick liquid building up in the back wall of the factory, crossing through the porous material of the façade. When The Lady came through the wall, Señor Soler had his back broken by a falling column. As the creature crossed through it, the river rose up and swept away the people who were closest to the shore. The creature walked straight across and then started to head downhill.
The Mossèn was the first to react, coolly and with common sense enough to save many lives. The sad-faced man whose boring sermons had made all of us youngsters laugh in secret got the survivors to the train station with short and direct orders. We followed him, trying not to look back, not to see where the creature was headed. Nothing we did seemed to matter in the slightest to The Lady, who carried on straight toward Barcelona.
Among all the confusion, no one realised that my brother’s metal fingers had stayed on the floor of the factory, in a shining pool that looked like mercury. The old reddened stump with its dry skin was now a young hand once again, well-shaped and complete. Luckily enough no one noticed, because the change had taken place when he had sunk his fingers into the gelatinous skirts of the creature, the same creature that had drowned our master and crumbled our home to the ground. My brother looked at The Lady without blinking, with his eyes open and with the same expression of adoration as always. Looking at him, as hot blood slipped from my hurt lip down my chin, I stopped feeling scared for us, and started to feel scared for him.
In Olistany station, our muscles aching from the tension, we took one last look at the hill where the remains of the colony stood. Inside the skeleton of the factory, with the machines half melted like ice under the sun, The Lady’s sarcophagus stood wide open. There was no kind of mechanism inside; all we could see was an empty carcass.
We shivered in a heap on the train when the sky suddenly filled with the shouts and songs of the other Ladies, like the calls of exotic birds, or the wind blowing through a badly-closed window. Apparently they were responding to Our Lady’s calls, and they moved with the same trembling step, their bodies, made of the same strange material losing their original shape with each step. Those of us who were by the windows saw them leave. Like eroded walking mountains, they walked down into the sea and carried on walking until they were lost from sight.
There was no damage caused to the city, they left no remains as they had done in the various colonies. The people who saw them said that they slipped between the buildings, barely touching them, like benign tornadoes, like the smoke from a fire, flexible and discreet, but dark and fearful as well. When the seven Ladies went into the water, the sea-level rose so much that boats ended up being lifted onto the pier.
No one could return to the colonies, which had been filled with this highly toxic material that was inflammable and destroyed any metal with which it came into contact. Soon woods grew up where our streets had been and life prospered without us.
The Russians, fast and clever, christened these remnants that covered our colonies Лед слизь, which we turned into lludllitz. There were some people who thought of it as a kind of Luddite action, flesh against machinery, as if the whole atrocity had been planned as some kind of social protest. It was a feeble attempt to try to get back a degree of the control we had lost when these beings looked at us and decided to turn their backs on us forever.
For my mother, lludllitz was something absolute, a moment from which there was now no return, a sign of the need to abandon physical objects, to move forward or to drown.
We knew that the metal that made the bodies of The Ladies had been drawn from Lake Vostok. The sarcophagi had been based on a popular actress, something that was painfully obvious once we were told. What we never knew was whether they returned to their distant lake, perhaps because that is what the international investors had decided, who left Barcelona along with their money and their promises, to see if the Italians had better transport systems or a better workforce. No one blamed them; they did not have the strength left to do so.
Mother went back to work at the pastry-stall on the market and a few months later married her boss, a well-mannered but shy man, a widower, who treated us with a respect to which we were not accustomed. We went to live in a little house with draughty walls, cold in the winter and warm in summer, but much better than the charity wards where a lot of the former workers at the Soler colony were living.
I found work in the fisherman’s guild, working from the Barceloneta, and I am still there, soldering, repairing. I lost my colony girl accent and now speak like one of the workers, many of whom are from Andalucia. Although the pay is not very good, it is enough to live on. When I could save up a bit of money, I built one of those metal warehouse boys to help in the pastry stall. Although it looks a little rudimentary, it can use its hooks to pick up and unload packages and save my mother’s bent back. We take it once a week to the public charging point in the middle of the market. Guillem never comes to the steam generator, neither does he use the warehouse boy. He has become sensitive now, surrounded by technology, as if he had forgotten his mechanical hand. Or as if he still remembered it.
For me, the lludllitz is the chance to come back to the surface after having touched rock-bottom, having lost a great deal. I don’t know if I’m happier in the city than in the colony, but this life is enough for me. My brother no longer wakes me up, and he looks at my tools with mistrust.
Guillem is the only one who has not mentally overcome the collapse of the Colony. He walks through the world like a visionary: slowly, touching everything gently, his eyebrows bent in an eternal question. His hand never hurts, not even in bad weather. When he says he wants to go to Antarctica to study lludllitz and the sarcophagi that are still there, my mother argues with him for hours. He pronounces the word like the Russian scientists do and has scratched it in Cyrillic all over the house.
What he finds in lludllitz are truths that are whispered to him in the dark, like prayers, about regimes that fall, about ethics, charity, pain. For Guillem, lludllitz is more to do with Señora Soler and her little metal horse than with our family.
Occasionally, but less and less often, my brother brings a girl home with him when he comes for Sunday lunch. Sometimes, more and more often, the girl has wavy hair and a twisted smile. We are all quiet, and if we are lucky, the noise of rain on the pipes fills the silence.