According to one of the city doctors, Filipa would speak when she was good and ready: her talk was simply trapped by nerves and would come out as soon as she lost her inhibitions. Which was pretty much what happened: when Filipa started talking it was as if she’d just been waiting for a particular date to do so.
Alas, the joy proved short-lived. She fell ill soon afterwards and was unable to leave the house, not even to go as far as Jerónimo’s workshop, which had always been a favourite place of hers to play. She withdrew from the world and retreated back into the silence that had marked her first half-dozen years. She no longer laughed and she lost her habit of giving Jerónimo a kiss when he got home from work, a habit he knew she must have inherited from her mother, because people didn’t kiss in Serrano.
Loja, sticking his nose in as pedlars do, and thinking himself quite the expert on the human soul, made several attempts to measure the degree of abandon that Serranoans reached when in the throes of passion. Curious to know whether they shed their usual coldness and indifference, what he learned was that they never even kissed, that the act simply didn’t feature among their intimate practices and desires. The women, the only villagers bold enough to speak about such things to outsiders, offered no justification, they simply told him kissing was not a social custom in Serrano. As far as they were concerned, there was nothing voluptuous about two mouths seeking each other out. Mouths in Serrano were condemned to performing purely practical tasks, like spitting and swearing.
This was in keeping with the way they welcomed the perverse pleasure of being able to behave irreverently at funeral ceremonies only, a freedom more learned people might have seen as a subtle form of restriction. Wanton behaviour was thus limited to rare occasions and otherwise forgotten or suppressed, in public and in private, in reality and in thought.
The Serranoans had no notion that the sense of fantasy that surrounded an intimate encounter was the main opportunity life afforded them to let themselves go, to forget the dangers that hung in the air and weighed over their heads. Perhaps if they’d known how to use the midwife’s powers to bargain with the mountain things would have been different. Certainly the village would have enjoyed a different fate and there would be no reason for anyone to remember it today, for common people and occurrences attract little attention. But ancient anxieties meant the Serranoans were loyal to their suffering: they never sought to test the limits of the sentence they were condemned to or free themselves from the valley’s perils.
People would later say that there was little evidence that the Serranoans lived by the same lores that governed human beings elsewhere. The villagers never embraced imagination the way others did; they never looked around corners or sought to conquer new territories; they never explored new means of existence or ways of casting off their shackles. Such things happened only beyond Serrano’s borders.
Jerónimo couldn’t remember kissing Maninha the first time they were carnal in his workshop. If he did, it certainly never happened again, because sex in Serrano didn’t start with the head. The villagers were content to imitate the approach of oxen, dogs and horses, and they were grateful for the instruction, though it pained them to see the animals with their offspring, so easily produced and of such striking resemblance to them. Serrano children never looked anything like their fathers. Any of the children could have belonged to any of the men, and if this blunting of lineage didn’t bother them as much as it might have done, it caused them to scratch their heads, curiously enough, whenever they saw a jet of steam come out of the spring.
If Jerónimo couldn’t recall kissing Maninha, nor could he remember the taste of Fernanda’s mouth. He frowned at the thought, but his only memory was that she smelled intensely of wild perfumes because he’d bathed her so often in eucalyptus oil, used to heal wounds in the valley, and covered her in lemon tree leaves and flowers, giving her the fragrance of the riverbank and his trusty black patch of land. He’d been obsessed with Fernanda, fixated on the kisses he withheld, and other desires besides, initially attributing his infatuation to her being an outsider, perhaps from the city. He never touched her the way he would have liked to and he kissed her only once, on the lips while she slept, so softly she didn’t notice or stir. Having realised she was weak in the head, he sought no more intimacies. How could you squeeze someone so sick? How could you touch someone with such great emptiness in their eyes? He might have been an ignorant brute from a forgotten hamlet, but he had principles.
‘Ignorant and a fool,’ he spluttered angrily one day, many years later and a long way from Serrano. He’d found his way back to the city but hadn’t found a woman to quicken his pulse and had all but given up on intimate affections. All but. He still slept with his wife. Maninha was so very female and she continued to throw herself on him the same way she’d always done, and before he knew it he’d be inside her, listening to her satisfied moans, and he’d only return to his senses when she tried to kiss him, the way she’d seen city women do. Then he’d stop and stand up. No kissing. He would never kiss anyone again in his life, no matter how many women he had.
When Filipa had still lived with them in Serrano, she’d blown kisses to him and waited for an affectionate gesture in return, sometimes a simple wink. Maninha would become incensed watching them. She’d tell the other women at the spring that she’d never seen such a provocative girl, that there must be guile in her blood, inherited from that city bitch.
Every local remedy was tried when Filipa fell sick, followed by those recommended by the pedlars who roamed the rural areas offering scientific knowledge for a low price: board and lodgings or other favours that even the Madwoman of Serrano was reluctant to elaborate on. All the usual prayers were said for Filipa, as well as some rarer ones, but colour and strength seemed to have deserted her. Until that point the adults of Serrano had shown no interest in her, not even in why she’d finally started talking after so long, but as soon as she was struck down with a severe illness, they began to pity the poor little mute girl. The Serranoans were strange people, they seemed to need a scene of terrible suffering to unlock their affections. It was as if unhappiness alone was worthy of their attention.
Nevertheless, when it became clear that Filipa was not responding to treatment and was merely awaiting her death, they returned to type and ferociously opposed her going to the capital for assistance, arguing that no one had ever had to leave the village to restore their health before. Loja, the self-declared sociologist, said that deep down the Serranoans were wary of their weaknesses being exposed, or perhaps they were just worried about missing out on a burial. The matter was of course brought to the midwife’s attention, the possible death of the first half-native, half-foreigner in the village being a serious matter.
Jerónimo resolved to take Filipa to the capital and, after much insistence, he gained the approval of the older villagers who saved face for Serrano by saying the girl had deep roots in the city, so perhaps the cure really did lie there and not in the valley where her mother had appeared out of the blue one day or night, it had never properly been explained. There had been no contact from Filipa’s mother in the seven years and three days that she’d been gone. She hadn’t sent any word or any person, a relative for example, to come and get or even meet her abandoned daughter.
On their fishing trips, the men, pretending to be masters of their own destiny, would say how they did right not to open themselves up to city folk. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the valley, the women would huddle around a camp fire and ask themselves if it really made sense to live so far removed from places that seemed to hold the keys to happiness. They repeated what the pedlars said, doubtless in part to boost their professional worth, that of all the settlements they visited, Serrano was the furthest behind the rest of the world.
During one of these discussions, a spark leapt from the flames into Maninha’s lap and she cupped her hands over it and made a wish. She asked for an opportunity to run away to the capital and forget about her husband and everyone else who had chosen the foreigner over her, a hale and hearty attractive woman. ‘What does it matter that I haven’t got pregnant yet?’ she thought to herself, beads of sweat running down her face, despite the coldness of the night, and landing on the baby blanket she was wrapped in. She took the blanket everywhere she went and had, over the course of many years, embroidered a series of animals and plants along the hem, chief among them a white butterfly. She was glad the darkness prevented the other women from seeing her shame.
Filipa had lost a lot of weight being ill and looked more like a tiny bird than the strong-limbed girl who’d once charged around the village.
‘Poor little yellow thing,’ said the woman sitting next to Maninha. ‘It pains you just to look at her.’
‘It’s the bad blood of that foreign bitch,’ Maninha replied. ‘I knew something like this would happen sooner or later.’ Maninha never tired of slighting the woman who had cast a shadow over her marriage and stolen her husband. All Jerónimo had to offer her now was a guilty look.
‘She was foreign and muddled in the head, but shrewd,’ Maninha continued, ‘you could tell by the way she stuck up her nose, all comely and cunning. Oh yes, it takes cunning for an imbecile to rob a healthy woman of her man.’ She fell silent for a moment, then started up again: ‘Sly, that’s what she was. She just came along and took him from me, without a fight, without even saying a word, just came and took him. For ever, Auntie, for ever…’ Her words tailed off. She picked up a stick and threw it on to the fire sending thousands of orange stars flying.
The women reflected on what Maninha had said and wondered whether Serrano’s females should go to the city and spend a little time there, as little as possible but enough to learn a few of the city women’s tricks. It would be an apprenticeship of sorts, to equip them with the skills they needed to fend off future attacks. There was no need for the men to go; men were all the same and came fully formed, but women could become more knowledgeable. They could learn new arts from more worldly women, improve their techniques of seduction, learn how to pucker their lips and roll their eyes the way foreigners did, master the feminine wiles, because otherwise any old wench, even the most feeble-minded, was liable to come along and rob them of what was rightfully theirs.
‘We’re at a disadvantage and seem incapable of doing anything about it,’ said Maninha, who of all the women, felt the keenest need for an apprenticeship.
‘Fool! You’ll never keep hold of Jerónimo,’ blurted out the Madwoman of Serrano, who’d been listening to the women’s conversation hidden in a corner, apparently putting the finishing touches to a patchwork of banana leaves she’d been sewing for three years with a needle fashioned from a scrap of iron that Filipa had given her.
‘But what you said last time did the trick, Auntie,’ said Maninha, pretending not to have heard the madgirl she so despised. ‘I gave him a piece of my mind, insulted him in fact, God forgive me but he deserved it, and he looked at me just as meekly as a dead fish and performed his duties as he ought to.’
Maninha had been at her wit’s end. It had been more than eleven months since the foreigner had left the village and still Jerónimo hadn’t come to her in bed. The older woman advised her to have it out with him and get everything off her chest, so that night, spurred on by the strength of her desire, Maninha unleashed her pent up fury. Her need had become so absolute she had to squeeze her legs together until her bones, muscles and nerves hurt, not to mention her pride, trampled all over by the foreign woman.
She had no problems with her husband after that, at least not of the conjugal kind. Relations between her and Jerónimo were never the same, of course, there would always be a before and after the foreigner, but Maninha’s feminine side no longer went hungry. ‘And yet God forgive me, but what am I to think?’ she added, going on to confess her shame at having to put up with such a lifeless beast. ‘He does it to punish me, I know he does. He never initiates things, it’s always me who has to start and stimulate it, have you ever heard of such a thing, Auntie? Have you ever heard the like of it?’ Maninha removed the scarf from her head and started to tie it up again, then stopped, anxious and humiliated.
‘I’d love to know what city women do when their husbands ignore them,’ she continued. ‘Though I’m not sure I’d trust them! In fact I wouldn’t trust them one bit! They’re all as sly as foxes and out to take us for a ride – Loja told me, he swore on it.’
Maninha was unable to open her heart, sealed as it was with the pain of not having a child of her own, rather than some other woman’s, especially that woman’s, that foreigner bitch, who might have been very far away but still slept with Jerónimo every night. Maninha had known Jerónimo since they’d both been very young and although they’d never discussed it she’d always known he would never betray her for another woman. But then that crafty cow had come along, he’d fallen for her tricks straightaway and no cure or spell could bring him back.
The foreigner had taken Jerónimo’s spirit, Maninha didn’t need the midwife to tell her that. Any woman could feel whether her partner was or wasn’t really there. The midwife had always encouraged her to seek a pharmaceutical in the city, but that was before the foreigner appeared bearing Jerónimo’s baby. She gave pharmaceuticals no further thought and never mentioned the matter again, despite the incredulous looks the foreigner’s pregnancy drew from the other women.
As soon as plans were made to send Filipa to the capital to get better, Jerónimo decided it was unfair that he was being asked to give up the only thing he possessed, the one true feeling he had left. But after spending the night on his patch of land by the cabin, in a hole that had taken him a week to dig and that was protected from intruders by barbed wire and mud from the spring, he awoke feeling calm and collected and realised he could not keep the child. He battled his cowardice and prepared for the journey, telling himself there was no need to be anxious because Filipa had been talking for more than a year now and was better able to express herself. She would surely send him lovely letters: she’d learned to write at a young age. She’d started out by writing on every leaf she found, until Jerónimo decided he ought to buy her a notepad and pencil so she could learn the proper way. He taught her when he could, and when he couldn’t she copied and wrote on her own. But what Filipa liked doing best was drawing, in particular drawing eyes. She drew no other part of the face or body; never lips or hands or arms or legs, only eyes, drawn with great precision. She drew eyes of every colour and kind, small ones and large ones, mean ones and very mean ones, sad ones and very sad ones, and always belonging to someone instantly recognisable. The eyes leapt off the page as if searching for the face that had deserted them.
Everyone in the village had their eyes drawn at some point, but Filipa mostly focused on the Madwoman of Serrano and Jerónimo, and whether they were happy or sad, serious or angry, they were always beautifully depicted. One drawing showed Jerónimo’s eyes weeping tears, though he couldn’t remember ever having cried in front of her. Maninha’s were the only eyes Filipa never drew. And then when she started talking she stopped drawing.
With Filipa in the city, Jerónimo’s life would become a void. He had never told anyone how he felt about Fernanda, not even God, so his feelings remained whole and grew. By not sharing them, he made sure that no one could break them apart or steal them, but nor could they help lessen his load. His feelings remained as intact as the locket Fernanda had placed around his neck in her innocence one day.
When Filipa started walking, he gave the locket to her. It hung from her neck by the leather strap he himself had made, the original having frayed and snapped soon after Fernanda’s arrival. He remembered that while he was making the new strap he’d asked his mother if Fernanda would be capable of giving birth and his mother had said that every female knew how to push out a child, that when the time came the baby ceased to be precious and became a pain that had to be removed.
Jerónimo bound the two ends of the strap together with cow fat mixed with soap and put it out to dry in the sun. There it remained, tucked behind a pot, for a fortnight before being covered in ash for twenty-eight days and exhumed when the moon had made a full turn. It shone like polished copper and felt smoother than a woman’s hair, smoother even than Fernanda’s hair, the woman who’d run away and gone back to the city.
He’d made two straps for the locket in seven years. The second he’d fashioned not five months ago, the first one having lasted for six years and nine months. He thought about keeping the locket for himself, because he sensed that Filipa wouldn’t be coming back, that her mother’s family would hold on to her once they had her in their sights. But he recalled how lovingly the girl had fondled the locket whenever she was happy or sad, so he gave it back to her and made her promise not to take it off under any circumstances.
‘This way I know she’ll always have something of me with her,’ he said to himself afterwards.