Jerónimo had managed to hide his feelings for Fernanda and appear indifferent to her departure, but he couldn’t do the same with Filipa. He let down his guard and wallowed in his grief, and if Serrano hadn’t been such an observational vacuum then even the slowest villager would have noticed how crushed he was. But no one noticed, so he wasn’t judged, but nor was he consoled, and he thought of Filipa all the more. He missed her and was lost without her, for she’d been his outlet in expressing his ideas and frustrations.
Sitting alone under a lemon tree, he carried out an inventory of the most significant events in his twenty-nine years of existence, hoping to come across a hidden detail that might give his life meaning. All he could think of was Fernanda and the moment he’d found her in the field by the cabin, a glorious day now painfully buried inside him. His thoughts turned to Filipa, her birth and her departure. He wondered whether, if he’d lived somewhere more life affirming, where things were less static, his longing for his daughter would have been less painful. Then he rejected the idea, thinking it a betrayal of Filipa and her illness. He would never fill her absence with something or someone else and that was what he’d tell his father if the old man dared to repeat his suggestion that Jerónimo either bring Filipa back or get himself another child.
Jerónimo knew that conversation couldn’t have been easy for his father because in Serrano people were encouraged to be passive objects, slaves to the curse that gripped the valley. Expressing one’s feelings was not encouraged, least of all feelings about life and death. But it was the second time his father had spoken to him about having children, as if it was urgent and imperative that Jerónimo, and everyone else for that matter, help perpetuate human life in the valley. Upon hearing Jerónimo’s doubts, the Madwoman of Serrano said she wasn’t sure either, but maybe the Serranoans thought having children was a way of placating the mountain: that for its curse to prosper, it needed a constant supply of villagers to menace. ‘Which would mean their desire for children is pure selfishness,’ she concluded wickedly.
There could be no denying that Serrano was a wonder to behold, nestled beneath an imposing mountain and tucked in between a river and forested hills, the whole place shrouded in the steam that rose up from the spring and seeped into everyone’s body and soul. But its beauty didn’t justify the burning desire of its people to make their presence there everlasting and their memory eternal. Anything that physically resembled mankind in the valley was prey to nature’s fickleness and also to its strength. If some of those qualities rubbed off on people, they also served to remind them, lest anyone be tempted to rebel, of who was truly in charge. At least that had always been the midwife’s interpretation of the situation, which the villagers passed on to the pedlars, Loja among them. It has since been speculated that if Loja, or one of his ilk, had lived a few centuries more, he would have supplanted the midwife as the village sage, because as it turned out, albeit too late, the villagers’ hostility to outsiders was just a façade: deep down they felt great admiration for any creature that came from elsewhere.
The first time Jerónimo’s father talked to him about having a child was while they were fishing, just before Fernanda appeared in the valley. The second time was early one morning when father and son were helping to deliver a calf. The mother cow looked at them with lifeless eyes while the calf, badly positioned and writhing in pain, struggled to get out into the world. It reminded Jerónimo of Filipa being born and how he hadn’t had time to get Fernanda to the midwife. Her due date had still been a long way off, according to the women, and her moaning and groaning was just a city girl’s inability to put up with a bit of mild discomfort, the sort of thing a village woman would hardly have noticed. But Fernanda’s agony continued. It lasted all day long and Jerónimo, not knowing what to do about something he was utterly unprepared for, went out into the yard and looked up at the mountain, begging it for help. The hours passed by slowly with the women chatting over the wailing coming from the bedroom, until there was one long scream and at the end of it a baby had been born, without a midwife or any help from anyone. Fernanda slumped back in the bed and when the women came in and saw how purple she and the baby were, they thought of Gremiana and the way she’d died because they’d shown her no solidarity.
But any remorse they felt for not helping Fernanda soon passed. She was a foreigner and didn’t deserve their attention, even if she had just joined the ranks of the most distinguished women in the village, the only criteria for which was motherhood.
News of the baby spread quickly and Maninha was one of the first to know, courtesy of the Madwoman of Serrano, who danced a tragicomic jig as she told her and laughed at her reaction. Stung by the foreigner’s triumph, Maninha cursed and punched her own belly and breasts, then slumped off home in resignation. However much the other women accepted her, she knew she would always be considered beneath a woman who’d given birth, even that muddle-headed cow who’d stolen her husband. This was a fact of life, passed down through the generations, incontestable and dogmatic. Serrano owed its existence to dogma and, though the villagers were loathe to admit it, to other things the Madwoman of Serrano screamed at them. Life in the valley was fragile and confusing and anyone ending up there by accident was liable to go mad, an outcome Fernanda managed to avoid only because her fate lay elsewhere.
The calf eventually came out of its mother and it was then that Jerónimo’s father decided to remind his son that if the heavens gave you something you shouldn’t reject it. According to the old man, Filipa’s coming had been prophesied by their conversation on that fishing night. If she were destined to live she might just as well be in the village as in the capital. Jerónimo ignored his father and focused on the calf, which was kicking its legs and gasping for breath. Meanwhile, on the other side of the house, his mother, wise to the customs of the place and bitter about her granddaughter having been taken away, picked herbs to make a brew she would give to the midwife as a tribute when she asked her for another grandchild.
The midwife had never opened her heart to Filipa after being denied the opportunity to deliver her, a blot on her copybook that she felt diminished her in the eyes of the villagers. ‘One day I’ll work out why my chest filled with anguish whenever Filipa was near,’ she muttered to herself while preparing her packets of herbs. Why had she been afraid to look the girl in the eye? What fate awaited the village and why couldn’t she see it? What did the Madwoman of Serrano have to do with whatever was going to happen?
Filipa and the madwoman were the only two people born into the world of the mountain and the spring without the help of a midwife. What this meant, the midwife did not know, but it tormented her and she doubled her prayers. Her life before becoming midwife and drinking from the sacred flask was a blank, but she worried she hadn’t received the full contents of the previous midwife’s past, the one who’d died stuck in the doorway. The sacred flask was made out of clay from the spring and lived in a dark corner on the windowsill of the House of Light. It refilled itself over time, nobody knew how, perhaps through the sweat of the clay, and would always be full ready for the next midwife to drink and become imbued with the necessary powers.
The midwife had gulped the lot down on her first day, but Serrano was suffering major complications under her reign and she wondered whether she hadn’t perhaps missed a drop of the magic potion. The bottle looked empty, but to make completely sure she spent the rest of the day lying flat on her back with it tipped in her mouth, hoping to eke out one last drip, some fragrance, anything to suggest that she’d finally imbibed the entirety of its wisdom.
Maninha couldn’t get pregnant and the problem was hers, so there was no point going to the nearest town for treatment. So said her mother-in-law, who wasn’t supposed to speak of such personal matters, but strange things were afoot, undermining the women of Serrano: the river had started flooding with increasing frequency; Maninha was sterile, the first case of its kind; Jerónimo was fertile and a mysterious foreigner had given birth without the midwife’s orations; a child had got sick and been sent to the city; the madgirl kept going missing for the first time in centuries and her absence unsettled the valley.
Serrano was not itself and if the midwife couldn’t decipher the signals, she was right to be wary. A profound danger was lurking that would compromise the valley and everyone in it.
Meanwhile, Maninha beat herself up and the other women, collectively or individually, rubbed salt in her wounds whenever they could. After all, pain and suffering was their way of life. Was Gremiana’s hurt not their most absolute and abiding memory?
Jerónimo wanted to tell Maninha that Filipa wasn’t his and she was still therefore free to go to the city and give pharmaceuticals a try. But he lacked the courage. Such a confession would mean accepting that Filipa was never coming back and opening a chapter of his history he preferred to keep closed. He didn’t know that every story in Serrano reflected another and that the mountain was like a mirror. He preferred to tell people that Filipa and her mother had moved abroad and they’d lost touch.
Filipa’s absence hit the Madwoman of Serrano hard too. She became even more hysterical and cried out for her friend whenever something upset her or when she emerged from one of her silent periods, which could last for several days.
Whenever she reappeared after briefly vanishing, she told people she’d been to see Filipa and that the girl would be coming back soon. Jerónimo, wanting to believe her, would follow her around for several days pressing her for a date, a month or a year, forgetting that time moved differently for the Madwoman of Serrano.
Jerónimo had been to the city a number of times and begged the priest to let him see his daughter. Usually he was fobbed off with a vague excuse, but one day the priest grew tired of seeing him traipse round the sacristy and told him to let the matter lie: the San Martins were powerful people and if he didn’t leave them alone, they would prosecute Jerónimo for raping their daughter, a minor who’d lost her senses.
‘For God’s sake, my boy, stay away from them,’ the priest said. ‘Filipa is fine, she’s living with her mother overseas. All you’re doing is courting trouble. Mess with them and you could have a saint for a lawyer and still go to jail.’
Jerónimo didn’t protest even then. He simply said: ‘I loved her, Father, I would never have done her any harm.’