Filipa decided she would revive the family business. Whenever she dreamed about it, eyes open or closed, she pictured the guest house busy and thriving. Then she pictured a hotel, then she pictured a five-star hotel, the logical conclusion to her triumphant career. It was a long-standing dream and she delighted in the idea of finally bringing it to fruition, unlike other old dreams, which she tried not to think about. She marvelled at the power of dreams, the way they were only really there if you gave them shape.
As the days passed and the glow of her fantasies dimmed, she began to consider the practical implications. She courted other people’s opinions and tried to set aside her own emotions to look at the reality of the situation, life in all its messy complications. She began to wonder whether Maria Helena had not been right to recommend selling the guest house. She had been convinced it would never work, that the business was simply doomed. In recent years the place had been fully operational only sporadically, almost clandestinely, and for a very undemanding clientèle. It had long been subsisting on memories and the remnants of an optimism that had once been generated by the prospect of investment and renovation work, still announced by a sign on the door. Filipa weighed up her options for several days. She was keen but unconvinced, wavering over whether quitting college was really such a wise move, whether revamping the guest house would in fact work. Her ideas became increasingly confused, mixed up with Maria Helena’s counsel and thoughts about Bia.
Filipa had expected to miss her foster mother and semi-sister after so many years of living together, but independence proved a relief. She thought about her early foster families, about moving from one house to the next, and wondered whether each home had felt the same sense of release when she’d left as she was feeling now. At the time, she’d been insecure for a few days, but as soon as she’d unpacked her stuff and put it in drawers everything went back to normal. The hardest thing about moving families so regularly was the actual moving, the transporting of her belongings from one place to the next. No matter how little she owned, her bag always felt like the heaviest thing in the world, heavier than she was herself. But once she’d unpacked it was as if she’d unpacked herself, it made little difference whether she was living with so-and-so or what’s-his-name. Although that wasn’t quite true, the first few years when they couldn’t seem to find anyone appropriate to look after her had been the hardest. She’d even ended up living in a house out of town, a horrible place that had no river running through it or mountain to look up at when you got bored. She definitely preferred the city, but she remembered Serrano fondly too.
Then one day she was told it was gone, swallowed up by a dam. When Diegues gave her the news and said the villagers had been evacuated, he didn’t tell her that some people had refused to go. He made no mention of the Madwoman of Serrano. Filipa had taken comfort in the fact that everyone had got out and although she knew her friend would have stayed, she also knew she’d have found a safe space. Filipa often saw her friend’s eyes in the most surprising places – a fragment of cloud; a flash of light; a fleeting shadow – telling her not to give up. The Madwoman of Serrano never gave up. She would see her drama through to the end and exit her body for good. Filipa knew there was no way she would have let orders to leave the valley jeopardise her prospect of freedom.
One day, half-asleep and still stewing over whether to take on the guest house or not, Filipa thought she heard the Madwoman of Serrano’s voice: ‘Don’t be a fool! Nothing will ever change.’
Filipa snapped out of her reverie, distressed and disorientated. She decided she would tell Renata that she’d changed her mind, that she wasn’t going to relaunch the guest house after all. Renata had been the first person to learn of her plans and now she’d be the first person to know that she was going to stay on at college, that she just couldn’t get the hotel project off the ground. Maria Helena had always said dreams weren’t for doing, but deferring, perhaps forever. That was why they were called dreams. Filipa had always disagreed, but now she was wondering, reluctantly, whether her foster mother hadn’t been right about that too.
Another argument gnawed away at her: would it not make more sense to wait until she was fully qualified, a little older and more knowledgeable in the field? The guest house was all she had left.
After another disturbed night’s sleep, she decided to go and see Diegues. Her grandfather’s lawyer had always been friendly towards her, but it wasn’t a relationship of absolute trust. She was often left with the impression that he was hiding something from her and her attitude towards him couldn’t help but be shaped by the fact that he held the key to her maintenance. He was the link between her grandparents and her foster families and he made it his business to check in on her every once in a while. Whenever he asked how she was, she felt tempted to say: ‘Still alive, it would seem.’
She never did, she was polite and kept her head down. Yet things were different now: she was older and there was no foster family; she would visit him in his office and talk money. She liked the word money. She repeated it to herself twice. What if she did continue her studies, but hired someone else to manage the Brisa Guest House, someone she could learn from? Or what if she stopped deferring her dreams? She had the right to try and fail, though she didn’t like to think she might have to make big sacrifices and end up poor. Jerónimo must have felt something similar when she’d fallen ill and he couldn’t afford to pay for her treatment in the capital. She remembered him forlornly doing sums, measuring his life in monetary terms and realising his combined body and soul wasn’t worth a thing.
‘You either have lots of money or you don’t exist, because poverty comes at a high price, but not enough to buy anything with,’ he would say bitterly.
What if the business failed and she ended up destitute? If she went bankrupt and lost the property, she’d have nothing to fall back on. Well, that wasn’t quite true, she’d have enough to get by until she finished her studies and got a job, enough to lead a normal life. But she hated normal. All the foster families she’d passed through had led normal lives, as had their friends, lives they were all constantly trying to escape. No, she would not defer her dreams, no matter how far-fetched they were. She would tell Diegues precisely the opposite of what she’d planned to say. For a moment she marvelled at the power of thought and said to herself: ‘Now I want this, so I say no, but later I’ll say yes, then change my mind again and go back to the beginning, because people themselves are nothing, it’s their thoughts that count.’
Filipa had a good memory for words and for eyes – she never forgot a pair of eyes – but she was hopeless with faces. She would have to pay better attention now that she would be dealing with the public. In future she would say: ‘Hello, how has Sir been? We haven’t seen you for lunch in some time. Do you still favour the table on the terrace? It’s lovely to see you, in fact I was thinking of you only the other day when we were trying out our new dessert menu, the chantilly with grilled almond flakes is exquisite…’ She would say these things not just to flatter her guests, but because her clientèle really would be very refined.
‘Everyone likes personal service,’ her college teacher had told the class repeatedly.
She would ask Diegues to help her relaunch the guest house. He always greeted her with a big smile when they met. She liked seeing other people smile and laugh and often started laughing herself, not out of solidarity, but because she was moved by the shape of a smiling mouth, the sound of laughter and, above all, the sparkle it put in a person’s eyes. Even old people’s eyes shone when they smiled, although there was caution there too, and distant memories. When people cried it was often because they were remembering something good, or thinking about how they wanted to be able to laugh again in the future. Except in Serrano, where people never laughed because they didn’t even know they could.
Filipa didn’t think of herself as exceptional, the way Renata thought of herself, but she was comfortable in her own skin and could look at herself in the mirror and say: ‘Fipa, you’re turning into a charming woman. Not very very pretty perhaps, but very acceptable.’
She thought she was prettier than Jerónimo’s wife and prettier than his mother, maybe she was even as pretty as a real daughter of Jerónimo’s would have been. She’d once seen a film with an actor in it who looked just like Jerónimo. She’d been to see it five times, until she decided the actor didn’t look that much like him after all.
What had happened to Jerónimo? Did he have a real daughter now? What was she like? Did she have her father’s eyes and heart? She decided she didn’t like the idea and felt cross with herself for thinking of it.
For her meeting with the lawyer, Filipa wore dark green trousers that emphasised her curves and a light green patterned blouse with a red handkerchief in the left breast pocket. She wore low-heeled shoes to feel firm on her feet. Her hair was tied back, which made her look a few years older, and she wore minimal make-up. She liked the way she looked. She hoped to make a good impression on Diegues, who would see in her stylish appearance the hallmarks of a successful businesswoman. She filled her handbag with a selection of carefully chosen items. A handbag wasn’t her style, she preferred big shoulder bags that she could fill with everything she might need and liked to have with her, a few precious things included. Her foster mother thought this ridiculous. ‘A bag is supposed to be little, Fipa!’ Maria Helena used to say, and indeed the handbag she was using now had been a present from her foster mother, an expensive present Maria Helena had stressed at the time, a peace offering after some fight or other. No doubt Maria Helena had expected to keep it for herself, knowing it was too classic for Filipa’s tastes, but Filipa had smiled politely, exaggerated the bag’s attributes and promised to save it for special occasions. She’d hidden it away in a drawer and Maria Helena had never had the nerve to ask to borrow it. But coming across it recently, Filipa had regretted her juvenile behaviour, and it reminded her of Bia, who she hadn’t spoken to for a fortnight.
Filipa checked herself in the mirror half a dozen more times, correcting some perceived new blemish that had emerged where she least expected it. The business district was on the other side of town and she decided to drive there in her old mini. When Diegues offered her a lift home she wanted to be able to say, like a true executive: ‘Thank you, but I’m parked over there.’
It sounded good, an early display of her independence and standing.
The man on reception said that without an appointment Filipa could be waiting all week; the firm was in high demand and very busy. Nevertheless, he agreed to see what he could do and he came back a few minutes later to say the lawyer had agreed to see her, but only briefly. If Filipa had been more experienced she wouldn’t have allowed such an important meeting to be reduced to a matter of minutes: she would have waited for another day and the guarantee of enough time to present her ideas and, if necessary, to defend them; it never paid to talk to someone who had one eye on the clock and half a mind on how to wrap things up. But it was all new to her then and she agreed willingly, feeling grateful to be seen at all.
When she went into Diegues’ office she found a young man sitting at his desk. Picking up on her confusion, the young man introduced himself as Olavo and said a letter had been sent to her foster mother to inform her that he would be taking over some of the senior lawyer’s files. Filipa knew nothing of the letter and felt flustered by the situation. First her car had failed to start and now here she was caught unawares and talking to the wrong man. She was reluctant to deliver the speech she had prepared for it was tailored to Diegues, who she knew, and combined a defence of her arguments with a little emotional blackmail. Now she scrambled for new ideas and the conversation suddenly seemed very difficult. Maybe she should say she wanted to sell the guest house and the hotel licence after all. But did she really want to give up on the idea of running her own hotel? She became lost in thought, silent and distant, staring blankly at the man. She felt the urge to leave, to accept that her career as a high-flying businesswoman had fallen at the first hurdle. What had happened to the confident woman she’d seen in the mirror earlier? Weren’t the clothes she was wearing meant to make her feel powerful and self-assured? She would smash that mirror and throw the clothes in the bin as soon as she got home.
What would the Madwoman of Serrano say if she could see her now? She’d no doubt call her a fool, as she always called people from the valley. This thought sent a ripple of rebellion through Filipa. Almost without realising it, she found herself talking about her project. She began hesitantly, but grew in confidence and was soon outlining her plans as if someone were dictating the words into her ear. Such was her enthusiasm that Olavo looked down in confusion at the briefing notes he’d been given, which said she was rather dour and not very sharp. In fact she was full of verve and had clear ideas about how to revitalise the Brisa Guest House, ideas that made a lot of sense. Nevertheless, Olavo felt duty bound to discourage her: the firm had been instructed to ensure Filipa finished her studies no matter what.
Filipa realised her arguments were neither being contested nor embraced, so she stopped talking, crestfallen. Olavo said he had other clients waiting and invited her to lunch the following day. Thinking that a business lunch would provide her with another opportunity to outline her plan, she accepted.
Filipa and Renata spent all afternoon shopping for smart clothes. Having worn her only respectable outfit that morning, Filipa realised she’d have to replace her mini-skirts, crop tops and low cut jeans if she was serious about becoming a businesswoman. Saying her career plan out loud had only made her more determined than ever to give up on her studies and follow her dreams. She would first get a job in a hotel and once she’d gained enough experience she’d throw everything into pursuing her own project. She worried that she’d been a bit too open with Olavo – who seemed very nice, she told Renata – but there was no going back now. Renata, meanwhile, was rather awestruck by Filipa’s courage and conviction. She was considering quitting college herself to join in with her friend’s project.
Back home with her shopping, Filipa thought about how shocked her foster mother would have been to see her. The five items she’d bought were totally alien to the Filipa of old.
‘I’ll adapt my style to suit the occasion,’ she’d said when Renata had suggested she buy less neutral colours so as not to depart so dramatically from her previous look.
‘As of tomorrow, my past look will no longer exist except for on holiday,’ Filipa had said. ‘I have to impress this idiot Olavo, and all the other Olavos after that, and my wardrobe will be my ally.’
‘You don’t think he’ll accept your proposal?’
‘Judging by the obedient, good-boy look on his face, I can’t imagine him veering from whatever instructions are in my file.’
‘I’m sure you could find a way to win him round.’
‘I’m not very good at that kind of thing, and anyway, then he really would think of me as a silly girl, not ready for the big wide world. I’d make a fool of myself. It’s not the time for that, not yet.’
‘Did you like him?’
‘Yes and no. Yes, because he was cool. No, because he didn’t pay me as much attention as the man on reception did, if you know what I mean?’ The two friends laughed and went back to pairing up different items, seeking a killer combination for Filipa to wear the next day.
‘Maybe he’ll fall head over heels for you and agree to whatever you ask,’ Renata continued.
‘You didn’t see the way he invited me: “I’ll be away on business next week and you’ll be back at college so the sensible thing would be for us to meet for lunch.” He talks like a mini Diegues – who was nowhere to be seen, by the way. No, the only way I’ll have any joy tomorrow is if I sprout a moustache overnight! I’m sure the meeting would be very different then. He seems like the macho type.’
‘I’d like to meet him,’ said Renata with a giggle. ‘Machos amuse me.’
Olavo had picked a high-end restaurant for lunch. Filipa decided he was trying to intimidate her, to put her off by showing her the vast amount of detail that went into running a restaurant. She would have to sit there and take it for a few hours, then admit she didn’t have the training, credibility or funding for such a complex operation.
She was a bag of nerves, despite Renata’s pep talk about how to handle public appearances:
‘You need to relax, you’re like you get before an exam.’
‘Well I’ve never been this well prepared for an exam, yet I’ve never felt so daunted by one.’
‘Don’t worry, there are always resits.’
‘The world of exams and resits ends for me tomorrow,’ Filipa said drily.
Meanwhile, Olavo read Filipa’s case file from cover to cover. He recalled the reasons she’d given for wanting to start work and what she’d said about being an adult no longer constrained by mothers and fathers, that she alone knew what was best for her. He recalled himself saying that San Martin was a name of some distinction, indeed he’d said it twice, seeking a reaction. When he’d asked her if he might know any of her relatives she’d been standoffish. He began to wonder what this was all about: Diegues had been unusually unforthcoming, saying some details had to be withheld from Filipa’s dossier until issues with her benefactor were resolved.
As she got ready, Filipa wondered what Jerónimo would think of her abandoning her studies to start work. She remembered that he’d often said he’d do everything he could to steer her towards a career that took her away from Serrano. He was always encouraging her to learn handicrafts, but the only thing she showed any interest in was his workshop. When she’d started talking he seemed to forget about her learning a trade, for he never mentioned it again and was soon entirely focused on her declining health. She decided he would have approved of her decision: he seemed to like nothing better than working himself, from morning until night. Working and talking to her, at least when they were on their own and she was still mute. He’d stopped telling her things after that, as if her being able to talk had destroyed their intimacy or removed the need. She sometimes regretted having revealed she could talk, for she’d missed him telling her how beautiful her mother was and that one day she would come back to them. He would pick Filipa up in his arms, or take her by the hand when she was older, and talk to her aimlessly, but in a way she found intriguing. One afternoon he’d said to her: ‘A daughter is what I wanted most in the world, and God sent you to me.’
Another time she was playing in an old crate out of sight when he’d said: ‘What does it matter if she’s not my own flesh and blood? What does it matter if she doesn’t bear my name? I love her like a daughter and that’s all that matters.’
When she’d come out of the crate, he’d looked at her terrified that she might have heard, but she’d made a show of being utterly absorbed in playing with a spider trap. He’d gone back to his work, whistling nervously to try and hide what a fright he’d had. Then she’d had a funny thought and let out a laugh, and he’d asked her what she was laughing about, without expecting a reply.
Filipa had never forgotten that moment. When she’d learned to talk she’d never asked him who her real father was, out of fear of what he might say. But when they bid each other farewell as he handed her over to the priest, she’d said:
‘If it were the other way round I wouldn’t send you away, even if you’re not my real dad.’ They’d both cried.
Filipa and Renata rehearsed all of Olavo’s possible responses to her suggestion that she would get a job in a hotel in the city centre to gain some practical experience.
‘What you learn in a big hotel can be applied to a small guest house, though the reverse is not necessarily true,’ said Renata, who had fixed ideas about the hotel industry.
But it was Diegues who appeared for the lunch meeting, and he was determined to talk Filipa out of quitting college. Nevertheless, by the end of lunch she’d won him round, using the arguments and emotional blackmail she’d prepared for him all along. He even promised to help her find work and it wasn’t long before she was employed by one of the most prestigious hotels in town. She spent her spare time exploring the tourist district and eyeing up the competition. She soon decided there was nothing to rival what the Brisa Guest House would become. Every day when she got home from work, she looked pensively at the closed restaurant and smiled.
Her apprenticeship was a very active time. She lost weight and became a bundle of energy and enthusiasm, nothing like the old Filipa who’d been at pains to curtail her rebellious spirit.
She met Garcia, the hotel’s twenty-five-year-old sous chef, and he fell for her immediately, drawn to her at first by physical attraction and later by the many things they had in common, chief among them a fierce sense of ambition and a practical approach to getting on in life. They began seeing each other and sharing their dreams and desires, and although Filipa was alarmed at first to find her and her boyfriend’s plans converging, she realised she could adjust her project to include him without having to radically alter it. The dream was hers alone, but there was no reason why it couldn’t incorporate a first-rate chef.
Diegues had surrendered to Filipa’s spirit, but he was somewhat unnerved by it. He saw her behaviour as, if not driven by melancholy, then underpinned by an absence of affection, a coldness or even a mean streak, and he felt responsible for this because he had failed to find a foster family that truly loved her. Maria Helena had been a decent enough mother, but she had never really understood the girl. But Filipa was her own woman now and she seemed driven by a single goal: to relaunch the Brisa Guest House. If that was what would make her happy, then that was what Diegues would do, and off his own back too, without consulting Joana San Martin, who only ever spoke about her granddaughter to settle accounts.
Filipa told Diegues she wanted to reopen the Guest House and that she’d found the perfect business partner in the form of a head chef. Diegues laughed good-naturedly and said she’d go far, the sky was the limit; she’d clearly been destined to run a hotel. Filipa bit her tongue, but she was annoyed. There was no such thing as destiny. Her fate had not been decided by some guardian angel, and if it had been then the angel hadn’t been trying hard enough for her to end up with the Brisa Guest House and not the New York Grand.
The Brisa Guest House: even the name was ridiculous. Too light; too, well, breezy. She’d never liked it and now that the place was truly hers she could think about changing it. In fact no, she wouldn’t think about changing it, she’d do it. The Brisa Guest House would henceforth be known as the Samar Guest House.
She’d chosen Samar by combining the first few letters of her surnames, but when she told Garcia, he didn’t like it. He thought the two of them should have come up with a name together and proposed Sagar instead. She found this ridiculous. It only hardened her determination not to let him, or anyone else, interfere in decisions that were hers to make.
Changing the name of the guest house was the first thing she did and it made her feel that the future had finally begun. It was the easiest decision she’d ever made. The second easiest was marrying Garcia. Everything after that would seem almost inhumanly difficult by comparison.
Filipa began to turn the room that had once belonged to her foster mother into the marital bedroom. She got rid of the dark curtains and packed the lace bedspread away in a chest. Renata was always supportive of her friend’s ideas, but she made an exception with the wedding. She asked Filipa why she didn’t hold off for a while, wait to be truly swept of her feet in the way they’d always talked about.
‘We’re young, we have similar ambitions and together we can get where we want to go quicker,’ Filipa replied. ‘You might say we have just the right amount of the right ingredients. So why not try out the recipe?’
Renata was somewhat confused by her friend’s answer, but felt questioning her marriage plans further would be unfair. If she’d looked more closely, she’d have seen that Filipa’s enthusiasm was exaggerated, that her answers came too fast and that her eyes were busy distancing themselves from her words. Jerónimo would have said they’d shrunk to the size of pinheads.
When her apprenticeship ended, Filipa spent a week at home getting the house ready for her new life, then she got married. It was a simple ceremony. Renata was there with her new boyfriend, Olavo. He asked her if Filipa was truly in love.
‘Filipa is a woman with very particular feelings. I wouldn’t necessarily say Garcia has much of an impact on them, but why shouldn’t she be in love? I mean, why not?’ Renata’s tone became uncertain. Olavo gave her a sip of his drink.
A few days later, the new bride found out that her application for a mortgage-backed loan had been accepted, giving her the green light to reopen the guest house. She went to a café on her own to celebrate, allowing memories to come to the fore that she usually kept buried. She lost track of time and was startled when the waiter came over to ask if she wanted anything else. She heard the Madwoman of Serrano say everything would work out fine, before slipping away. Filipa went home and shared the news with her husband. He resigned from his job the next day.
The Samar wasn’t a spectacular success, but it comfortably survived its first year, thanks to Garcia’s cooking, Filipa’s endeavour and the expertise provided by Alexandre Soares, a supervisor hired by Diegues. Soares had retired from the hotel trade and gone to live in a small farmhouse a few miles out of town, but when his old pal Diegues told him about Filipa’s project he found the lawyer’s enthusiasm infectious. Soares had struggled to settle into retirement anyway and had no family commitments to prevent a return to work. Diegues had championed Filipa’s steely determination, and when Soares met her he saw she had burning ambition too and knew she’d be a successful businesswoman. He took a look at the guest house and liked its location and layout, as well as the fact that there was room for expansion. He also liked that most of his salary would be paid for by the law firm.
‘I’m in,’ he said upon signing the contract, ‘for better or for worse.’
‘For better,’ Filipa replied, ‘Because it can’t get any worse.’ She was beginning to face up to the magnitude of the task: it was not for no reason that the guest house had closed down three times in the last eleven years. But it would never close its doors again.
From birds to detergents to marriages, people like giving labels to things, and so Filipa and Garcia were described as the happy couple. One month after their marriage the gynaecologist informed Filipa that she was pregnant. She felt nothing in particular on hearing the news. She wasn’t one for strong emotions. Sex meant little to her. ‘Just the normal,’ she told Renata when her friend asked her about her sex life. When asked what she meant by normal, she said: ‘Once every Monday morning before getting in the shower.’ She’d laughed when she said it, but when Renata told Olavo he said it was a strange idea of normal, even if she was joking.
Pregnancy seemed to have very little effect on Filipa: her belly grew a bit and she looked a little less anxious. When people pointed this out, she said her anxieties had gone up to her head and become too compact to escape from her eyes. She did, however, change the way she dressed, and this helped the guests warm to her. So too the guest house’s suppliers, who had been inclined to keep their distance and beg her pardon at first, but gradually got used to her. She earned their respect through her actions and because she was advised and well-regarded by Alexandre Soares, a well-regarded figure himself.
The guest house was doing well, but Filipa was never satisfied. When Renata told her to scale back her ambitions because she could be impossibly demanding, Filipa realised how much Maria Helena’s lack of drive had affected her. She was determined to think big, to break free of the small-time mentality and romanticism she’d grown up with. She was infused with a different strength, one inherited, perhaps, from a woman with dark eyes.