Filipa approached eighteen without seeming to feel pressured to become a woman and without having shown any obvious signs of teenage angst; there was none of the outrageous outfits or rebellious behaviour that might have been expected given her unsettled upbringing. She’d avoided confrontation in every family she’d lived in by accepting whatever attitude they’d shown to her, and if some saw this as weakness of character, a blankness even, the truth was she just wanted to reach adulthood and independence as painlessly as possible. This meant people were rarely ever hostile towards her, and she was generally liked, but close relationships were never allowed to form. Being separated from Jerónimo had been a great loss and life’s subsequent ups and downs seemed like minor joys and setbacks by comparison. She rarely complained about anything and was more restrained and less exuberant than most, but on the whole she was a fairly typical girl and she did allow herself the occasional moment of revolt: ‘Today I wanted to grind my foster father’s head into mince meat and make him into croquettes to feed to the dog,’ she once told Renata. ‘But I couldn’t be bothered in the end, and besides, the dog might have got a taste for humans and tried to eat me!’
‘Why don’t you ask the lawyer to find you a new family?’
‘All families are the same.’
Deep down she knew this wasn’t true. Jerónimo had been different. He’d acted like a real father, even if he wasn’t one. She’d tried desperately to arrange a reunion, begging Diegues, the family lawyer, to let her go back to Serrano for a visit, but he’d said the village no longer existed: a dam had been built and the villagers had fled. There was no sign of Jerónimo.
Filipa had heard talk of the dam project when she lived in Serrano, but it was spoken of as if it belonged to a bygone era, a time hundreds of years ago when men wearing glasses and hats and carrying wires and ropes had come to do some kind of topographical survey. Everyone knew the story about the village being named, and the fact that as soon as the midwife had uttered the word Serrano she’d closed her eyes and taken leave of this world, her job on earth evidently done.
The Madwoman of Serrano always claimed, often at the top of her voice, that the old-old lady had in fact been punished for christening the place, because the spirits had decreed that the village should never be named, along with the spring that gave them water and the mountain that housed their dead. All were part of the same curse that prevented the villagers from becoming unique individuals.
Not understanding the bit about unique individuals, Filipa asked the madgirl about it and pointed out that everyone said she’d actually been the one to name the village. Her friend became indignant. She said she’d merely come to the rescue of that fool-for-a-midwife, who couldn’t think of anything for herself, so that the villagers didn’t look stupid in front of the strangers.
The Madwoman of Serrano was also fond of proclaiming, in rants or lullabies depending on her mood, that one day at sunrise waters would come and rid the world of the stupid Serranoans. Unsure whether to believe her, the villagers would go and ask the midwife if there was any truth in what was being said by the hysterical girl who turned up in the village as a vulnerable child but soon became the living embodiment of the threat that hung over them. For this, and for other reasons, she was despised.
One morning, when it was so frosty they had to hug each other to keep warm, the madgirl told Filipa that everyone had a destiny to fulfil, it was the price you paid for being born, but that she was having to pay twice over, for herself and for her parents, who’d flouted nature after it created them. She would be gone forever one day, she said, but first she had to complete her journey and slowly shed her burden. The tragedy, she added, tenderly stroking Filipa’s hair, was that her burden was so heavy that no single body could carry it for long. This was why she had to leave her body before it got too old and come back in a younger one, reincarnating over and over again until she’d completed the cycle of her existence.
Filipa didn’t understand most of this, but she cherished their conversations like prized possessions and never told anyone else what her friend had said. She kept several drawings of the madgirl’s eyes in a drawer and was impressed with how different they looked to all the other eyes she’d drawn. They were eyes with a face and a name and knowledge of some distant future; eyes with history, perhaps the entire history of Serrano. They were also very dark eyes. In only one of the drawings was there even a droplet of light, like a smudge that wouldn’t come out.