Loja was the only pedlar who could consider himself close to the villagers. He’d earned certain rights the other pedlars didn’t have, having done business with Serrano for so long. A natural extrovert, he enjoyed drinking in the tavern with Jerónimo and on one such occasion he found himself wondering why his friend had taken refuge in the village when moving to the city had once been his favourite topic of conversation. As the beers flowed and darkness fell, Loja grew bolder and eventually asked Jerónimo outright: ‘What are you doing stuck here in the back of beyond?’
Jerónimo winced. The very same question often winked at him from the bottom of his beer glass, baiting him with cheap jibes and taunts that he explain himself. He tried to shut himself off from such thoughts by letting his head fog over until he’d lost sight of where he was. The fog was his protective barrier, but occasionally he saw through the haze and imagined a life elsewhere. When this happened he was flooded with frustration and despair, and that was how he felt now, faced with Loja’s question, which seemed to mock his dreams while also suggesting he could still leave if he were just more ruthless and daring.
The time had come to declare war on the demons that hid beneath his skin and fed on his weaknesses, demons that tried to make him break the promise he’d made to his father. It would be a fair fight, man to man, the better to draw a line under the issue, for he was sick of it draining his spirit and denying him peace of mind. The idea of being happy again flickered before him, but instead of bringing comfort, it made him feel bare, like the tree beside the spring that never had any leaves.
What would life be like without anxieties niggling away at him? Was it fair to blame the Serranoans for their inability to be creative and thrive? Was partying and fooling around to commemorate deaths and new moons enough for them to be considered humans?
Feeling threatened, Jerónimo raised his fists to Loja, but then a dog ran under the table, knocking over their glasses and breaking the tension. All that was left was the night’s shadows, Loja’s startled expression and the voice of the Madwoman of Serrano as she bathed in the moonlight.
Jerónimo lowered his fists and shrugged his shoulders. He was shocked by his own behaviour, but tried to make light of it and called to the bar for another round of drinks. He hadn’t been brought into the world to consider what pleased and displeased him, only to live and work as best he could. Were fruit trees ever asked if they were happy? They had lives too, yet they were cut down, bled dry and burned, and they just watched in silence. It ought to be the same with men. Were men any better than trees? Than fish or goats?
He stopped himself, wary of thinking about things that pushed him to his limits. If he was tempted, on occasion, to test those limits, that was his other side. Yes, there were two sides to every man, he was fond of telling himself, indeed he sometimes said it out loud, albeit in a low voice, as he dug the earth or tinkered with a cart, talking to himself in order to remain semi-alive or semi-conscious.
These ventures into the realm of his private thoughts were brief but disconcerting. He either wasn’t capable of following his own arguments through, or was but feared the consequences. He repressed such thinking by throwing himself into his work with ever increasing vigour, with fury even, or by sinking to the ground or into the water and waiting for the storm to pass, for his other side to take over. After the incident in the tavern, he decided to avoid the pedlar in future and turn down his offers of a drink.
Jerónimo drew sustenance for himself and his wife from the good black earth of Serrano, as did the other men of the village, including his father, an upright man as stubborn as a ram. One day Jerónimo had made his father a promise, a secret promise he returned to in his head every single day.
It happened one night after Jerónimo’s military service, when he was back in Serrano but couldn’t sleep for all the noise in the valley. He got up and went out into the backyard and was astonished to see his father sitting under a tree, crying his eyes out.
Jerónimo didn’t go over to console his father or ask what had upset him – his father clearly thought he was alone and appeared oblivious to everything but his own convulsive tears – but he promised he would never do anything to make his old man weep like that. He remembered a phrase simple men used to explain away tears: ‘A man only cries in the small hours when his suffering is unbearable.’
Jerónimo set himself a trap. He wasn’t long back in the village and hadn’t yet rebuilt his defences against Serrano’s mysterious forces. Dreams were generally stillborn or died young in the village; Jerónimo’s had at least got as far as packing their bags. But he killed them off there and then, promising not to cause his father further pain, even if a son moving to the city really shouldn’t have caused much more than the occasional tug of longing.
When word got out that Jerónimo was thinking of leaving, his father came to see him and asked if it were true that his son had been tempted by ‘the world of civilisation’. The old man’s voice was no more than a stutter, as if the strength required of him was too much, and he placed fearsome emphasis on the final word, his lower lip trembling in a way Jerónimo had never seen before, for his father usually spoke crisply and to the purpose.
Jerónimo didn’t reply. He acted as if he hadn’t heard him, just as he’d acted as though he hadn’t seen him sobbing in the backyard.
‘I’m such a fool,’ he said to himself years later, thinking back to the promise he’d made. It was his first promise and his last, because as soon as he’d made it he realised he’d relinquished the greatest thing he had: his freedom. He regretted that promise so much that the mere memory of it, his moment of weakness, distressed him.
Jerónimo tried to make his daughter understand that you should never make promises; that promises were for gods, not mere mortals incapable of keeping them.
‘You see, Fipa, a promise implies committing to something much bigger than yourself and doing something you wouldn’t ordinarily have the strength to do,’ he told her. ‘Otherwise, why promise? You’d just say what you thought you’d do and that would be that. But you promise, entrusting in a force mightier than the human will, and then you end up the unhappiest person in the world, because people with principals do keep their word. So never promise, Fipa, it’s not natural. In fact it’s a sin. It’s a sin against yourself and that’s the worst sin of all, because there’s no one to blame but yourself.’
There was a time when Jerónimo didn’t lack for words or imagination. During the four years he lived in the city he had his aspirations, just like any other young man, and he planned to become a mechanic. ‘Follow your calling,’ the man who taught him the trade used to say, ‘The bigger the stage the better.’
But as Jerónimo watched others leave Serrano he felt a decreasing sense of bitterness. His own dreams simply hadn’t burned bright enough, he decided. If you were prepared to wait until the time was right then your heart wasn’t really in it. ‘The promise I made merely confirmed what I already knew,’ he told himself. But to Filipa he said: ‘When you really want something you must stop at nothing to get it. You have to shut everything else out. You won’t be able to see anything else anyway because wanting something is all consuming, even things like eating and sleeping become a means to an end, things you do to give yourself strength to get where you want to go, to achieve your goal, realise your big idea.’
His daughter looked at him wide-eyed. He took hold of her shoulders, unaware of how firmly he was gripping her, and stared back, as if he might transmit this important lesson to her though his eyes.
Thus he shared his story and his long-lost dream with her, while blocking out all thoughts unconnected to his daily routine. What he failed to appreciate was that by refusing to entertain these thoughts, he wasn’t just denying himself a chance at a new life, but depriving himself and his daughter of the very things that made existence on earth divine.