Filipa knew she would probably never be anything more than the manager of a small business, but she was well-established within her sector and made modest improvements to the hotel each year. She took satisfaction from having achieved what she’d set out to achieve and understood that running a major hotel had always been more of a student fantasy than a realistic aim or desire.
It was time to turn her attention away from her career and towards her other lifelong goals. She asked her friend, Olavo, Renata’s boyfriend, for help. She wanted to be reunited with Jerónimo. Not only that, she wanted to reacquaint herself with all the other people who’d passed through her life, not because she missed them terribly, but because she wanted to put names and faces to the eyes she kept in a scrapbook in her head. She felt she needed to free herself from the ghosts of the past; that she and they sought peace. She also wanted, though it was a lesser motivation, to introduce her daughter to some of her relatives. She didn’t want Matilde’s family tree to lead nowhere on her mother’s side. Mate deserved better.
‘As do you,’ said Olavo.
It wasn’t easy locating everyone, but Olavo commissioned a private detective and slowly but surely he tracked them down. Filipa got news of Serrano, the village she’d been born in but had heard next to nothing of for years. Secrets emerged like incredible tales from another planet.
According to the detective, one day the village had been emptied of people and the silence was so heavy that if a bird had tried to fly through the valley, it wouldn’t have been able to.
This the detective learned from Loja, the pedlar, who became increasingly incoherent after the village was gone, as if he’d lost his mind to the rocks and the water. Nobody believed the things he said, but he crossed his heart when he spoke and swore he’d never set foot in what remained of the valley again, or at least not until three lots of seven years had passed, or however long it took for the old spirit of the place to return.
His mind was addled, but Loja claimed his stories had reached him via the Madwoman of Serrano, who’d got drunk after stealing a bottle from his bag. Building work on the new dam had begun and an ultimatum had been issued to all the families who had yet to leave the valley, but Loja, loyal trader that he was, had promised to keep visiting Serrano until there was no one left to sell to or buy from. On what he suspected might be his last visit, he laid his bag down and went to refresh himself in the spring. He felt sad about the village’s demise because he’d always liked the Serrano women, the only women in the world who never mentioned his defects, faults the women in his own village never tired of pointing out. The Serrano women were perhaps not especially intelligent, but he had never met a more generous bunch.
When he came back to his bag, he found the Madwoman of Serrano holding an empty bottle, which had been full when he’d acquired it in a nearby village. She had always shunned him before, but now, drunk out of her mind, she proceeded to tell him the entire history of Serrano. The telling took over seven hours. She talked on as the sun warmed up and cooled down, and when she’d finished she fell asleep, as did he. When he woke, she was gone. The only thing he could remember with any clarity was that the villagers would soon face a day of reckoning, on account of them being so small-minded, foolish and lacking in ideas.
The rest was a blur. He couldn’t even say for sure whether the Madwoman of Serrano had really been there or whether he’d dreamed up the entire episode. The whole business disturbed him, not least the sight of the empty bottle, which he was convinced he hadn’t touched. He decided that whatever had been said should remain unsaid and whatever had not been dreamed should remain a dream. In other words he didn’t want to talk about Serrano any more. From then on, assuming he was lucid enough, he evaded questions about his experiences trading with the beautiful, wild village in the valley.
But stories nevertheless circulated about Serrano, the place and the people who’d lived there, those who’d got out in time and those who’d been swallowed up by the waters. It was as if the Serranoans, or their souls, only had the right to be remembered as myth. The dam had gobbled them up, it was said, along with the ground the village had stood on, after the villagers had come out of the caves they’d been hiding in. All the men and women who’d been unwilling to leave came out of their caves and went, apparently guided by a collective force, but actually led there by the midwife, to stand in front of the dam wall. There they stared up at the giant barricade and tried to understand what fate had in store for them. It was then that the disaster occurred, what the newspapers called the economic catastrophe of the century. The cause was never discovered, but so many learned men had assessed and inspected the construction that any kind of technical failure was ruled out. In any case, the dam burst with a blast so loud it was heard in the next valley, hundreds of miles away, and the waters came crashing down on the villagers, the old and the not so old, and swept them away in the current. Their cries and screams rang out in the mid-afternoon, which had been a calm one until then, and the sound was as devastating as the sight of them struggling against the tide, utterly alone in the world, desperately trying to cling on to something, a rock perhaps, but even the rocks seemed to reject them in their hour of need, abandoning them to their fates and their memories of Gremiana.
The raging rapids dragged them and everything in their path to meet with other waters and eventually out to sea. Something no one seemed to appreciate, or at least Loja never heard mentioned whenever the story was told, was that the one thing the Serranoans had always dreamed of was crossing the ocean. Emigrating, escaping overseas, or by air if necessary. Where to, nobody knew.
The Madwoman of Serrano was the only villager who refused to leave the valley who wasn’t washed away by the flood, having hidden in a hole in the foothills of the mountain. When Filipa heard this from the detective she remembered her friend saying that she’d live longer than Serrano, that even when the village no longer featured on any ordinance survey maps she would still be there, waiting for her life to run its course.
The detective went on to report that the dam, initially called the Serrano Dam, had been renamed the Gremiana Dam, or simply Gremiana, as the construction workers had come to refer to it on site. They had been given the name by the men who financed the project, rich businessmen from the capital who were originally from the village. These businessmen had commissioned a team of scientists to study fertility rates in the valley. The scientists had been most intrigued when they were told that children born in Serrano inherited none of their father’s features and that women only got pregnant after much prayer and visits to the city.
Water experts were sent for and the confidential report they compiled declared that the water in the Serrano spring, located to the south of the purple mine, had a debilitating effect on a man’s sexual performance, in efficiency as opposed to proficiency terms.
And so, many years after she was thrown into the river by the Serrano men and left to her fate by the Serrano women, Gremiana’s name rang out in the valley once more.
The wealthy businessmen from the capital, by now urbane, aged and beyond caring about their sexual prowess or shame, gathered for a dinner at which the document declaring their irreparable impotence was presented. The men, for only men were invited, decided it was time Gremiana’s good name was recovered, and that the only way they could truly show their remorse was by making a pilgrimage to the dam and renaming it in her honour. She’d been the only Serrano woman to refuse to sleep with a stranger simply to provide her husband with offspring, because she’d wanted more out of a man, even a Serrano man, than just a child. She’d wanted to feel something big, something like love.
The report was confusing, and because some of its pages were mislaid before anyone thought to make copies, the only scientific study of the water properties of the magic spring was soon lost. But the basic facts were not forgotten: any male who drank water from the spring in his first and formative months became permanently sterile. Because of this, even after the valley was flooded, men were wary of going anywhere near the place. Grown men raised elsewhere were in no statistical danger at all, but it was deemed the devil’s business and strange things were said to happen in the valley, so nobody drank the delicious spring water ever again. Eventually the spring dried up and the steam that had risen from it twice a day disappeared too. When Filipa heard the story, she thought of Jerónimo. She was comforted by the idea of the scourge in the water.
The curse on male potency was said to be part of a more general punishment meted out to men and their womenfolk many years earlier after they defied the will of the god in the kingdom they lived in. They’d been expelled and sent to Serrano, though it had no name at the time, having committed a crime so bad it could not be classified, meaning they were left in limbo, forever awaiting their sentence, and thus prevented from ever being happy. Or unhappy.
New stories were told while older ones were reinvented and revised. Every teller added their own detail or removed an established fact, until the truth had been twisted enough for universal laws to emerge and parables to form.
The detective kept on searching and sifting and coming up with names, until eventually he was able to tell Filipa that her mother was a local woman called Genoveva, a member of high society; that she was alive, divorced and had a son. Not long after that, Jerónimo was located: he too lived in the city. There was no sign of her biological father, not even a trail to follow.
Filipa was thrilled. She decided to invite Jerónimo and Genoveva to the hotel’s New Year’s Eve party, along with her grandparents and a few other people from her past. There she would present them to Matilde, like a giant bouquet of flowers. It would be up to her to decide what to do with the gift.
When the detective went to deliver the invitation to Jerónimo, he went to his old address and it was Maninha who answered the door. She too was invited to the party, but she informed the detective that unfortunately Jerónimo would not be able to attend: he’d died in a tragic accident the previous week. ‘He didn’t suffer, if that’s any consolation to his loved ones,’ she said. ‘It happened so fast there wasn’t even time for him to say, “Ow!”’ The detective said he’d pass the news on to Filipa San Martin, who’d been greatly looking forward to being reunited with her father.
Maninha had not forgotten Filipa or the woman who stole her husband, the best lover she’d ever had. He was sterile, of course, but after a few dalliances in the city she realised one thing had nothing to do with the other. Even when she had to force him to do his husbandly duties, even when his head had been turned by the foreigner, she’d still never known another man like him. Nobody, not even the man who’d finally given her a child, the sort of man the midwife liked to call a pharmaceutical, had given her so much pleasure. She’d discovered there were pharmaceuticals everywhere, to suit every requirement and taste, but she hadn’t managed to find another Jerónimo, be it out of bad luck or some hex put on her by the foreigner. How she detested that woman! She never wanted to see her again, nor her little mute daughter, and she’d do whatever she could to make sure Jerónimo didn’t either. Maninha seethed with hatred for Fernanda and Filipa, the two women who’d ruined her life and drained her of all happiness.
Fernanda, or Genoveva, had been luckier. She felt no hatred or love, but after years of exhausting counselling, she had overcome the trauma of her violent past. Besides, money had a strange habit of making women happy.
Genoveva rang Jerónimo to invite him to the New Year’s Eve party at Hotel Samar. Since they’d first met on that stormy night she’d been having flights of fancy about him like it was a teenage crush. But there was something else, something she couldn’t put her finger on, that connected the mechanic to the magic force she’d felt since their first encounter, and that had later caused her to recall episodes from her forgotten past.
The detective her father had employed discovered that she’d given birth to a girl in a village called Serrano. She’d been waiting for the final parts of the puzzle to come together so that she could go to meet Jerónimo and, for the first time ever, tell someone her life story. She remembered he’d told her he had a daughter called Filipa who was pretty and dark-skinned and looked like his wife, who’d died. In another life their daughters might have been friends.
She knew the invitation came out of the blue, but she told Jerónimo she’d been ill and then busy dealing with family matters. She started to ramble, but Jerónimo interrupted to thank her and say he’d be glad to accept.
And glad he was. Genoveva was the first woman since Fernanda he had felt unreservedly attracted to. He liked her much more than he’d liked the commander’s daughter. In fact he would have travelled to the end of the world to be with her.