Serrano’s beauty made less of an impression on people with every passing year, including the villagers themselves, who had once looked upon their home with reverence and, although they struggled to translate feelings into words, no little pride.
The village remained as unspoiled as it had been on the day that it was christened, with the same smells, the same spring emitting the same hot steam on cold days, the same plants, the same stones, the same people. Nothing had changed, yet it had lost its capacity to inspire awe, like a beautiful but jaded woman. Yes, Serrano was becoming jaded, as if its time was running out.
Self-absorbed, the villagers increasingly resembled caricatures of themselves, rusty old machines lying abandoned in the grass. They hung around the tavern and the square complaining about how the young folk no longer came back after their military service, how the men had got so old and the women so fed up. They grumbled about public works projects too, which included the building of a dam.
If there was a positive side to all of this, it could be said that having a tangible threat to contend with forced the villagers to finally articulate one or two ideas about their situation. This was a major accomplishment and if other events hadn’t intervened it could well have led to the discovery of laughter, hugging, wordplay, perhaps even to the defeat of the lethargy that had always prevented them from taking control of their own destiny. But other events did intervene and the Serranoans had to make do without such luxuries.
The villagers had never quite grasped the magnitude of the proposed project to build a dam, so when the order came to evacuate it was as if the mountain had erupted and come crashing down on their heads. There were cries of defiance, impossible negotiations, warning shots, the roar of machines and, finally, the arrival of progress.
Defeated, the Serranoans gathered up their belongings and went to live in tents on the outskirts of a nearby town. In the absence of the midwife, who had fled, there was no one to give the land they’d been allocated a name, and without a name it became a mere extension of the town itself. The colony was slowly absorbed into the municipality’s registry and fate, while the Serranoans awaited assistance to build ‘definitive’ facilities. Definitive was a word the resettlement agent used repeatedly when handing out aid. It sounded strange to the villagers and filled them with terror, though they weren’t sure whether it meant something brief or a dozen lifetimes long. Nevertheless, there was something about being away from Serrano that allowed fresh thoughts to come into their lives, for new words to be tried out and theories to take shape, rudimentary theories to be sure, but theories nonetheless. They soon reached the conclusion, much sooner than they ordinarily would have, that the government was to blame for their plight. They demanded the state give them back the advantages they’d lost, quickly identifying the government as their new master, a superior being that would reign over them and take responsibility for them. With this great leap, the villagers achieved normality and took their place among the parasites of the world.
Jerónimo seemed to be the only Serranoan who wasn’t upset about the dam works. For him, being evacuated meant being released from the promise he’d made twenty years earlier. He was happy, even though the valley would disappear along with the river and Gremiana’s rebellious voice. He contacted the garage where his old mentor worked and was promptly offered a job. He and Maninha headed straight for the capital and Jerónimo was confident he would be able to hold his own there, for he’d always worked hard, though he knew he’d miss his lemon trees and favourite patch of land.
‘The more work the better,’ he told himself as the bus took them away from the valley and swallowed his memories one by one: the village, the mountain, the river, the spring, his workshop, the cabin, the Madwoman of Serrano, his love affair, real or imagined.
Maninha heard him and nodded encouragingly, interpreting the phrase as she saw fit. When they came to a sign for the city she smiled in anticipation of a fresh start and snuggled up closer to her husband. He accepted her appeal for affection and held her tight, without her realising that with that gesture he was really saying farewell to his old self. He no longer cared about exciting her female body.
At the same time Maninha and Jerónimo were entering the city, Filipa, aged thirteen, was arguing with the latest woman who had been paid to foster her, and Genoveva, or Fernanda, was being met by her husband, Sílvio Luxemburgo, outside the clinic where she’d spent the last two weeks recovering from depression.
Sílvio was about to go away on a trip, as it happened to the town where he’d first met Genoveva, though he’d never told her the name of the place. That was on his mother-inlaw’s orders, for Joana San Martin was concerned that her daughter might get it into her head to go there and then suffer a relapse. The photographer thought Joana’s fears unfounded, but it was true that Genoveva experienced episodes of anxiety, so he complied, unaware of his mother-in-law’s true motivations. Sílvio and Genoveva had an eight-year-old son who, unbeknown to them, looked a lot like a young Filipa.
Genoveva had recovered her health and her easy-going attitude, but some things about her had never been the same since the accident. She had an unusual way of interacting with people, as if she were waiting for them to reveal some secret about herself to her. She would stare at people’s lips while they talked, a tick only her husband was aware of, for he looked at her so often and so lovingly.
At first Jerónimo, still marked by the rhythms of pretty little Serrano, found it hard to adapt to the pressures of city life. But his survival instinct took over and after a few years he only thought about the village when he was alone, when he allowed himself to wallow in the past or when he felt stung by the rejections that came with life in a foreign environment. He and Maninha got on better as a couple in the city. She soon lost her fear of the local transport and learned to dress and talk like a city woman, the dressing coming more quickly than the talking. She got to know the neighbours, many of whom had also been born in far-away places, and gradually softened in her attitude towards her husband, who was neither as good or as bad or as unique as she’d thought. Then she fell pregnant. Jerónimo wept.
One night she awoke in a pool of blood. Jerónimo took one look at it and told her she’d lost the baby. He said it coldly; not even a miscarriage and the spectacle of his wife’s happiness evaporating in such a dramatic fashion could snap him out of the detached way he’d been treating her, or move him to express his own anger and hurt. Maninha was devastated, a child had been the only thing missing from her picture of happiness, and she was physically pained and angered by her husband’s lack of sensitivity, for she remembered very well how sick with worry he’d been when Fernanda, the foreigner, had suffered from labour pains. Maninha launched into a tirade, one that easily surpassed all her previous outbursts about Fernanda or Filipa and would have been beyond the capabilities of a woman in Serrano.
‘I’m sterile,’said Jerónimo in reply. ‘I can’t have children.’
He sat back and took a puff of his pipe. Then he added: ‘The father of that child could have been any man in the world but me. In Serrano we might have called it a miracle, but Serrano doesn’t exist any more.’
He stood up and went over to the fridge to get himself a beer, his mind travelling back to his years of military service.
As a healthy-looking country boy, polite and modest, he’d caught the eye of the commander’s daughter. She was desperate to have a child, but her husband had been incapacitated in a road accident and she remained too attached to him to have an affair with someone who might embrace her in a loving way. Worse still, the accident had been her fault. If she hadn’t been fooling around and grabbed at the wheel of the car, they wouldn’t have ended up under a lorry coming the other way and her husband would still be the perfect specimen she’d married a few days before the crash. Now she needed a male, someone she didn’t know, who wouldn’t touch her beyond the necessary and who would disappear from her life as soon as he got her pregnant, an exploit he would be financially rewarded for. The further away he went the better, to make it less likely they would ever accidentally meet, and if he were to die tragically, felled by friendly fire, then better still. This was what she told her father, begging him to help, brooding for a child and prepared to do whatever it took.
Jerónimo had thought he’d spend a maximum of thirteen months in the army, as was standard for all recruits, but his superior informed him that a new law stipulated a minimum of ten years service. The armed forces needed fit, strong men like him, the commander said, but added that if he did what he was told he might only have to stay on for a few extra months. Jerónimo wasn’t sure why his commander seemed so protective of him, but assumed it was because of his skills as a mechanic. It was then that the commander asked him to help a friend, a young lady whose car wouldn’t start.
Jerónimo fixed the problem, a trivial matter, and became the woman’s regular mechanic. Indeed she seemed to find something wrong with her car every day, until eventually she invited him up to her apartment. He was delighted that such a distinguished woman would pay him any attention and from there it was just a small step for him to fall completely in love with her. But distinguished city women were not like the women he knew in Serrano, especially not like Maninha, who had always been voracious, as if she wanted to gobble him up. The city girl was very distant when they went to bed – she’d corrected him when he’d said she was cold – and if it hadn’t been for the fact that she’d initiated the relationship, he would have sworn that she hated him. Whenever he tried to hold her or kiss her, as he’d seen city youngsters do, she recoiled as if repulsed. Regaining her composure, she’d say they didn’t know each other well enough for that yet, such displays of affection were considered the ultimate surrender in her social class, something that only happened after many months or even years together. Sometimes it never happened at all, she added, her voice trailing off.
Jerónimo thought he understood and was happy to chalk it off as a lesson learned in his apprenticeship with civilised folk, for he found the matter of cultural differences fascinating. He therefore didn’t think it strange that as soon as the deed was done, the woman would rush into the bathroom and disappear under the shower, shouting to him that he ought to get going, not even giving him time to recover his strength and poise. The young lady must love water, he thought, as he stood by the bathroom door on his way out, listening to the running shower and imagining her naked and steamy. He’d never seen her naked or steamy, and he never realised that she was in fact crying or vomiting, because the noise of the shower muffled the sound and the image of her wet and nude blocked out other thoughts.
In what proved to be the last of their encounters, Jerónimo asked his lover why she spent so long under the shower. She became nervous and evasive, mumbling something about different customs. Ignorant in regard to other people’s feelings and keen on self-improvement, Jerónimo tried to make the most of the little time they spent together by watching and learning from her. He looked forward to the day when he would finally be able to kiss her.
He’d known other women, but this one was different, perhaps due to the sadness in her eyes, her look of resignation and despair. He didn’t know she was married and that when they were together she wasn’t thinking of him or even of her husband, but of the child she was so desperate to conceive. Nor did he know that she avoided physical contact with him lest she confuse him, in the heat of the moment, with the man she’d destroyed. ‘People do like to make life complicated,’ the Madwoman of Serrano would say many years later, when she learned of the young mechanic’s adventures in the city.
One day the commander summoned Jerónimo to his office, told him he looked frail and sent him to a clinic for tests. Jerónimo had no way of knowing the humiliation these tests would result in, from the doing of them to their results. The doctor informed Jerónimo that he was conclusively and irremediably sterile. Stunned, he heard his lover, the commander’s ‘friend’, yell at him from the corridor that he was a worthless piece of shit and a failure.
‘I had to do several more years military service because of it,’ he told Maninha, ‘But I must say the sadness of knowing I couldn’t have children soon passed. I learned to fix cars from the best mechanics in town and I wanted to stay on afterwards and take up the job they offered me, but I went back to the valley to marry you because I’d promised I would, and although I knew I wouldn’t be able to give you a child, Serrano was a land of miracles, as the Madwoman of Serrano would say, and I thought a miracle might happen for us too.’
On hearing this, Maninha went berserk. She hurled every insult she knew at her husband then eventually collapsed on the bed, sprawled in her own blood. She drew on her last bit of strength to cry: ‘Gremianaaaa!’
She had no memory of the ambulance coming and taking her to hospital, but by the time she came home her husband had moved out. She did not go in search of him or seek reconciliation. She felt deeply betrayed and wanted him to disappear, to die along with his sterility and her memories of him. She’d made a mistake in falling for the prettiest boy in the village and had paid for it dearly: countless wasted years of living together in the same house, sharing the same bed; being ditched first for Fernanda, the foreigner, and then for Filipa, the imbecile. She felt vindicated. It was good that Jerónimo had learned from her pregnancy that she may not have been fancy like his foreigner, but she was still desired by men, city men no less.
Jerónimo felt free for the first time since Maninha, almost a child at the time, had told him he had to marry her because he’d deflowered her. He’d played his part, as he always did. Whatever part he was assigned, he played it unfailingly, yet nobody but Filipa had ever given him anything in return. And she’d given him the best present a father could ask for: ‘Jerónimo, I give you my voice.’ When she’d said it her soft lips had pressed against his rough face and the effort had exhausted her.
The owner of the garage soon suggested Jerónimo become a partner. He accepted the offer gladly and got used to the capital’s habits, gradually learning to fit in. He would never be mistaken for someone born and bred in the city, but he was able to blend in, go to the bar, make friends, socialise, tell jokes, attract new customers and turn down marriage proposals.