Filipa understood little of what appeared to be a complicated conversation between the priest and the woman introduced to her as her grandmother, but her ears pricked up when she recognised a word Jerónimo often used, always with a touch of sadness. She asked them what it was, this freedom they spoke of.
Her grandmother gave her an icy stare and said that Filipa had been born free because her mother had gone into labour without having the faintest idea she was pregnant, meaning Filipa had not been foreseen, much less planned.
Filipa didn’t understand any of this, but she didn’t like the woman’s coldness, so she returned to her daydreams, not bothering to listen to the rest of the answer.
When she’d been unable to talk, adults had simply ignored her. Then, when she’d learned to articulate questions, albeit in a faltering voice, they’d answered her curtly, as if she were incapable of understanding. For a long time people had treated her like a few pounds of unintelligent life, she thought, staring at the turkey. She prodded its breast with a wooden fork, until one of the teeth snapped. It wasn’t ready yet. She slammed the oven door shut again.
Why was she getting so worked up at a time of year that was supposed to be peaceful? December was one of her favourite months. Why spoil it with pointless soul-searching? Why not just accept that some people have no connections? The Madwoman of Serrano had talked of being born owing nothing to anyone, of having no ties, not even in dreams. Why not embrace that?
Filipa had been too young to understand her grandmother and by the time she was old enough, the woman was no longer around. Filipa had drawn a veil over the subject of her background, to the relief of most people, but she did later experience the freedom Jerónimo spoke of. He’d been talking to himself more than to her when he’d described freedom as a bird: ‘Who’ll give me the wings to fly away from here and take you with me?’ he said, his voice heavy with longing for the woman who’d abandoned him.
What did Filipa’s unforeseen birth have to do with a bird called freedom, she now wondered, thinking that in many ways she was still a little girl, unable to grasp what was being said to her. She went back to the oven. The turkey seemed to hiss and spit at her.
Her therapist thought it was time she met her mother. The bond that formed between them might not be love, the therapist had warned, indeed hatred might be the only emotion possible, but it would still be beneficial for them to talk and fill in some blanks.
That meeting would soon take place. Filipa had tried to prepare herself for the worst, to convince herself that any hurt that might result would be less than the hurt that already existed. ‘But maybe that’s impossible,’ she said to herself as she ate her ninth almond of the night.
Everything had been carefully planned. Filipa was almost tempted to believe that the spontaneous side of her character, which she kept buried deep, had been waiting for this moment her whole life and would now emerge with sudden joy. Occasionally she indulged her instincts and imagined, with childlike glee, unlikely scenarios that made her happy. As a rule, though, her life was one of controlled calm and almost total solitude, in which disappointments carried little weight and often amounted to no more than a gentle bruise to her pride, her most trusty companion.
Pride had always been her dominant emotion, but she kept it hidden, not wanting to wound or endanger it, protecting it for a brighter future. Yes, a brighter future. Even as a child she’d known that one day she would display her pride to others with the same confidence that she wore her locket.
The locket was her lucky charm. It accompanied her always and everywhere, initially having hung from her neck on a thin leather strap, now on a white gold chain. Her father had given it to her when she was a baby, the only keepsake she had, for giving presents had not been a custom where she was born. In truth, she wasn’t sure what the customs of her village were, other than the preservation of a deep peace that reigned even when cries pierced the air from animals giving birth or dying, or when lightning bolts ripped through the sky or the river smashed into the rocks and released Gremiana’s screams. But Filipa didn’t know if it really was peace or just quiet, or perhaps even a curse. Serrano was a place where parties, quarrels and noise in general had sounded wrong. Travellers attributed certain characteristics to the villagers on account of this, but the Serranoans themselves had never been interested in their own peculiarities. They were happy being the dough that never rises.
Conflicts were resolved away from the village. The men would go away and come back hours or days later, but no one would speak or celebrate victory. Occasionally one of them wouldn’t come back, but disappearances were rare and Filipa couldn’t remember anyone having gone missing in all the time she was there. Gremiana had been thrown in the river one dark afternoon when the skies were low, but that was a story the women only whispered in private and had happened a long time before Filipa was born. Filipa had heard Gremiana’s screams during thunderstorms, though: the Madwoman of Serrano often alerted her to them even before the weather had turned bad. Filipa would listen out for the screams amidst the howling wind and thunderclaps, through the rush of the river’s waters triumphantly conquering new paths, and then when she heard them she would tremble all over.
‘What if the midwife were to disappear one day during a storm?’ she sometimes thought, imagining the woman’s screams riding in on the winds that whipped through the valley. ‘Why don’t they throw Maninha in the river?’
Filipa had allowed herself these cruel, childish thoughts when she was on her own or with her friend, the madgirl, picturing life without the people she judged to be the most dangerous in the village. She enjoyed thinking such thoughts while throwing stones into the river, watching them disappear, imagining them following the current all the way to the sea.
Filipa knew she didn’t have very deep feelings and wondered whether it was because she’d been born and raised in Serrano, a place where people were miserly with their affections and devoid of dreams. She tended to cultivate a general sentiment to encompass everything she encountered. In this way she made no distinction between the food she ate and the people who fed her, the air she breathed and the atmosphere. She’d always seen everything as a whole and even now, as an adult, she was unable to break things down in order to assign them different weights. Her feelings, she surmised, were limp and unsubstantial. She sank further into the sofa.
The image of Jerónimo came to her, as it often did when she thought about her past. He stood before her, staring at her inquisitively, sometimes looking happy, sometimes sad. When she pictured him in this way he was never gesturing or talking, he was always silent, and yet she remembered all sorts of things he’d told her. What bond existed between them? Where was he? Was he alive or dead? She badly wanted to see him again, and it wasn’t just her being sentimental at Christmas.
As she grew older, she gave less thought to the people who’d shaped her childhood and the sadness she felt on rainy days. But her father, or uncle, or whoever Jerónimo was, had never left her memories. She remembered when he hugged her and told her to look after her locket because it was her talisman. It was the only thing anyone had ever said to her that she’d believed without having to understand or question it. And she’d never taken the locket off. A few hands had touched it, by touching her, and at first this had made her uncomfortable, but later she’d relaxed, deciding the locket was an integral part of her body. It had aged with her, shared her ups and downs, her joys and sorrows, and although it was made of gold, wear and tear meant its value was purely sentimental. She would send it to be cleaned in the new year, she decided, stroking its surface and tracing a finger around its edge, becoming emotional at the thought that it had both protected and named her. She looked at the engraving on the back: F. San Martin.
One day she would wear her pride along with her locket. She would venture out into the world and find a place where there were no memories to contend with, no screams to suppress, no people to avoid; a place where everything was new and nothing and nobody made her think of her past or her future. Now that would be freedom.
Filipa did not want to make the same mistakes her foster mother had made. Maria Helena loved telling friends, and anyone else who’d listen, that she only made mistakes out of love. ‘Out of foolishness more like,’ Filipa thought as she looked down on the tree-lined square in front of the hotel. She wondered whether love itself wasn’t a mistake. Hadn’t she been mistaken every time she’d fallen in love? Not that there had been many times, in fact was she even sure she’d ever been in love? There had never been total surrender, nor had she desired it.
When Filipa turned eighteen, Maria Helena made a speech praising her maturity and good sense and presenting her with her freedom. Filipa said nothing in reply, she didn’t even smile, though it had sounded like a joke. Maria Helena wasn’t interested in whether or not Filipa was ready to look after herself, let alone whether she wanted to. But she’d been right in a way: Filipa had long felt capable of taking care of herself. She’d always been drawn to different kinds of people, observing them with an almost obsessive interest in order to learn from them and be ready for a future without Maria Helena, without any Maria Helenas or the men who came with them.
Filipa remembered something she’d been told a long time ago, by a woman she could only remember from her eyes: ‘You’ll succeed because you’re strong.’
She’d never forgotten the phrase or the moment it was said. Jerónimo had been putting her in the truck that would take her to the city and the villagers had lined up to wave her off. She later realised they were more relieved than sad to see her go, but at the time she hadn’t realised it was a farewell. It was only when they reached the city, several hours later, and Jerónimo handed her over to the priest and gave in to his tears that she understood what was happening. She’d hated being separated from him and pleaded for him not to let her go. But the priest had taken her away and she never saw Jerónimo again. Every Christmas she hoped for some kind of greeting, but none ever came.
She had been a strong girl, even though she couldn’t speak, silenced as she was by trauma, and didn’t always understand what was going on around her. Then one day she realised she could talk after all, which meant she could also explain her laughter and tears and suffering like everybody else. Her hunger and tiredness and hatred and love.
‘Where do we draw the line between love and hate, between laughter and tears?’ she wondered. Sometimes we laugh until we cry or we hate to achieve release. Where had the barriers come from that had made her mute as a girl and unhappy as a woman?
She checked the turkey again. It still looked like a stupid dead bird.
When Filipa finally discovered how to talk, just as the Madwoman of Serrano predicted she one day would, she spent over a year delighting in her new-found power alone.
She’d initially made a big effort to talk, attempting to imitate sounds and noises, trying over and over again until forced to admit defeat. Then she’d run off frustrated into the forest, biting her tongue, punching her mouth and lashing out at the trees and plants in her path, in a silent display of fury. Having tired herself out, she would climb up a tree and slump into its welcoming arms. She’d return home like a wounded animal and Jerónimo would tend to her grazed knees and scratched wrists before rocking and singing her to sleep.
But eventually she managed to prevail over the deficiency that had diminished and disheartened her and made the world seem hateful. Once she’d made a breakthrough, she never rested, and if she managed to pronounce two separate sounds that seemed to fit well together – her first perception of beauty – she would repeat them a thousand and one times in private before joining them together and then adding a third sound, until she managed to form a word. She couldn’t remember her first word and she preferred not to, fearing that she’d become a hostage to it if she did, just as the Madwoman of Serrano said the villagers were hostages to the spring. Filipa became alert to the few words the other children used and to the monosyllabic vocabulary of the women. She took one word from everyone and joined it to another, then another and another, until, with great toil but also much pleasure, she assembled a phrase. She never repeated entire phrases she heard from other people, she only wanted their individual words. She also liked talking to the birds. ‘My name’s Fipa. What’s your name?’ she’d ask them. She repeated the same thing to the stones she found and to every branch on every tree. She liked the way laughter could blend in with a word and she’d raise the palm of her hand to her mouth to feel the breath of her giggle. Every word felt different. Some were hot, some were cold, all were lovely. Even the insults the other kids threw at her were lovely, better than birdsong, for there was nothing in the world so lovely as words. She put her hand on her locket at the thought and begged its pardon.
She catalogued the words she learned with the same glee, giving names to the ripples in the river and the leaves that blew in the breeze. Whenever she managed a series of phrases she liked, she repeated them everywhere, but only to herself, to other non-speaking things and to the madgirl, who’d once found Filipa talking to her echo in a cave.
When she decided the time had come to show her father that she was the equal of the other kids, she went straight over to where he was digging and said: ‘Jerónimo, I give you my voice.’
The other men stopped what they were doing and stared at her in shock. She stared back as if what she’d just done was the most natural thing in the world.
Then she suddenly became very tired and fell into Jerónimo’s arms. He lifted her over his shoulder and carried her home, leaving the earth, his hoe and his stunned companions behind. He whispered softly to her that she’d done it. Filipa liked the wet warmth of his breath on her hair.
She slept and woke two days later with the sun already high in the sky. For the first time ever, Maninha touched her on the face, and in the naivety of her seven years, Filipa thought only children who could talk deserved affection. But without saying a word to Maninha, she got up and went outside, just as she’d been doing for years.
She did not tell anyone, not even Jerónimo, about the hell she’d been through trying to be like the others; that the bruises on her knuckles had been from bites of frustration when she failed to pronounce things, not scrapes from playing in the street; that it had taken her hours, days, weeks and months to be able to mimic the sound of the water hitting the rocks without bursting into tears. The only person who knew was her friend, the madgirl, and even she didn’t know that Filipa had resolved to kill the next person who called her mute by screaming in their ears like Maninha had done when she’d called her mother a city bitch.
Once the pain in her ears had subsided, Filipa had thought long and hard about the difference between a city bitch and a country bitch. She became fascinated by the neighbour’s dog for a while, until her thoughts eventually moved on.
‘How tiny you are, Fipa! How precious you are, my little Filipa San Martin!’
It was time to give the turkey a drop of cognac.