When the detective informed them that Jerónimo was dead, Renata and Olavo tried to talk Filipa out of making the New Year’s Eve party a family reunion. She didn’t seem to have especially fond feelings for her other relatives and, as Olavo put it, somewhat bluntly, memories could easily turn sour, it was sometimes best not to dwell on them. But Filipa insisted it was too late to change plans and she didn’t want everyone to have wasted so much time and energy. The party would go ahead and whoever had been invited would come, but it would just be a promotional event for the hotel, like every other year. Filipa was able to compartmentalise things in a way that Renata never could. Some feelings were eternal while others had a fixed lifespan, enough time to be experienced then cast aside. Her love for Jerónimo, for example, was eternal, she’d just never thought about how long eternity might be.
By mid-afternoon, the preparations for the party were complete. The hotel’s function room looked like a film set awaiting the cry of ‘lights, camera, action’ for the music to kick in. Filipa was walking round the room checking details and taking everything in when she became suddenly fraught with emotion and sent a flower arrangement crashing to the floor. ‘Was it worth it?’ She reeled as she reflected on all the work that had gone into putting a group of people in a room, people who happened to have passed through her life and had, in some cases, treated her worse than a stray dog. People tended to at least look at a stray dog when they saw one in the street, whereas she’d often been totally ignored. ‘As if I was invisible,’ she thought.
She might have been mute as a child, but she’d had exceptional hearing and a good memory. She knew who’d come into and out of her life, and who’d excluded her and how. Jerónimo had died and her desire to see her grandparents, foster parents, birth mother, guardians, brothers, sisters, cousins, husbands and whoever else might come to the party, had died with him. Her heart had drained of feeling. She didn’t even have the energy to enjoy the idea of showing her guests that they may have once controlled her life, but now she controlled theirs. It was a very minor revenge, for one night only. Her only true friend in the room would be the Madwoman of Serrano, who would surely come to talk to her and protect her, as she always did. She was her real mother. Filipa felt pleased with the revelation. Someone else must have done too, because there was a sudden sense of movement in the empty room and then a smell, the smell of her new mother, the Madwoman of the Valley.
Filipa went upstairs to rest. In the quiet of her bedroom she found thoughts that had previously tormented her now came and went freely, as if they no longer had to compete with others to make themselves heard.
Her life had always been unsettled. The sector she worked in was volatile, her future was forever uncertain, but problems never unduly concerned her. It was as if she just sensed that they would eventually be resolved. She realised she’d always been more afraid of what might come back to haunt her from the past than what might come up in the future. She thought of Serrano and the villagers living in perpetual fear of the unknown punishment they’d face for the sins of their ancestors.
Olavo, her best male friend – manager of her emotional caseload, as he put it – had suggested she read all the information the detective had compiled about her family before the party began, to minimise the chance of nasty surprises and unsavoury scenes. But Filipa had stood firm.
‘My people are strong, Olavo. I’m telling you, we can face up to the worst kind of hell with a smile on our faces. We foreigners, as they would say where I was born, are wicked and capable of being reborn or resuscitated. Only good people die.’
She decided to put off meeting her relatives until the very last minute of the last day of the year. She pined for Jerónimo. When she’d learned of his death, she’d thought of leaving her past behind and giving up on the idea of meeting the others. For the first time, at least consciously, she’d felt a great sense of hatred for them. But hatred couldn’t compete with death and she’d spent the rest of the afternoon mourning Jerónimo in her room, the one place in the house safe from Matilde’s chaos and disorder.
She no longer felt any curiosity about meeting the people who had influenced her life story, as well as the colour of her eyes and the shape of her teeth. A great calm washed over her. She must have inherited very little from the San Martins and her anonymous father, she concluded. No more than her physical features, because everything she felt, everything she was and why, she’d got from Jerónimo and the Madwoman of Serrano. They were the ones who’d put their stamp on her, given her her rage, her toughness, her kindness and, quite possibly, her madness.
The madgirl had screamed in the middle of the night, desperate for someone to pay her a moment’s thought, even if just to curse her. Jerónimo had known no hate, not because it never reached him, but because he channelled all his emotions into a single feeling: his love for Fernanda.
‘Small resentments make people mean and sad,’ he would often say. ‘Never cultivate small feelings, Fipa.’
By the time she wondered whether it was acceptable to cultivate large resentments, she’d forgiven all manner of offences, got over all kinds of injustices, become a woman. She’d also lost contact with Jerónimo. She was never able to ask him what she should do with those bigger hatreds, so she buried them inside her, without naming them, and let them remain there indefinitely.
Now Jerónimo was gone, and with him all that tied her to her past. The realisation made her feel sick. A sharp pain stabbed at the back of her head, making her dizzy. She lay down seeking respite, but couldn’t find it and sat back up, only to feel herself dragged back down again. She struggled to open the drawer of the bedside table and take out a bottle of pills. She stuffed them in her mouth and swallowed. Jerónimo hadn’t taught her how to cope with pain this big.