In the tavern and the other places where people gathered and talked, Jerónimo’s restlessness and his lack of interest in having children became the main topics of conversation. In both cases his conduct was interpreted by the villagers as an affront and so he was targeted with snide comments, which he ignored, attributing them to the tyranny of rural life. He knew the villagers had no reason to fear him, that his attitude was just a quirk of fate or a plague come out of the mountain. But this he could not say.
When pressed to defend himself, he refused to blame his woes on his wife’s obsession with having a child. Convinced there was an appropriate moment for conception, Maninha afforded him no respite when the time came, summoning him to do the deed several times a day, in the fields or in his workshop, from sun up until sundown, with nothing left to chance. This continued until the last day of her cycle, when she was forced to make new calculations and draw up fresh plans of attack.
Five years, two weeks and a day had passed since Jerónimo had first made Maninha a woman in his workshop in the backyard, meaning she was entitled to go and seek a cure in the city, the ‘honour period’ having passed. Three years was considered the standard term for a married woman to wait before seeking pharmaceutical help in getting pregnant. The midwife had already authorised her trip to the city, but Maninha kept postponing it, wanting to prove to everyone that she and her husband didn’t need the city’s technologies to achieve insemination, a position she was fond of repeating to show off the complicated term Loja had taught her.
Nobody could recall a single case of a woman in the village getting married when pregnant, or of a newly-wed giving birth less than four years after her wedding day. For a long time the villagers thought this was the normal amount of time it took a woman to get pregnant. They marvelled at the ease with which females of other species begot their offspring; the male just brushed up against the female and that was that: job done. The only exception was cats. Mother cats in Serrano also had to wait several years before they had their one and only kitten, meaning there were very few cats in the valley, though the existing ones were much loved, especially by the men. Not to eat, just to have around the house. Indeed the villagers loved their cats so much that when they found out they were not like cats elsewhere, at least in terms of reproduction, they resolved to build them a special home. Erected at the entrance to the valley, and considered quite a curiosity, the cat hut had five evenly-distributed alcoves where cats could sleep, when authorised to do so by their owners, those villagers who’d adopted them as pets or as guard cats. Yes, guard cats: everyone knew what damage a Serrano cat could do with its venomous claws.
Maninha was consumed with envy for all the women in the village who’d already had children. She comforted and fooled herself by going through her collection of baby clothes, which spilled out of her trunk to also fill a large plastic bag and a shoebox. The hoard grew and evolved every week, with an item added or an adjustment made: a flower embroidered here, a frilly hem fitted there; a new blue bow or a lace ribbon. Through all her years of frustrated waiting, Maninha had spent every penny she had on her future child, not once buying anything for herself. ‘I’ll have a big tummy soon and nothing will fit, so what’s the point?’ she would say. She continued to dream, expanding the baby’s wardrobe and washing nappies that hadn’t been used but had grown musty in the trunk.
After every sexual encounter with her husband, which she ensured lasted for as long as possible, she followed the midwife’s instructions and performed the test her more experienced female neighbours had advised, sticking her hand inside herself as far as it would go to see if it was hot. It was usually like an inferno and she would scream, loud enough for the whole village to hear, and with no thought for decency: ‘This time, you bastard, this time you did it!’
Filled with joy, she would wait until sunset the following day before washing herself, thus allowing sufficient time for the two elements to combine. Then she would go to see the midwife, only for the midwife to shake her head and confirm that Maninha’s uterus was still free of the desired load. Maninha would cry her eyes out and make a million pledges to a million deities, ready to try again in the next moon phase.
Some months she would take to her bed and lie there in silence with her legs slightly raised, listening for the sound of the seed Jerónimo had deposited in her fusing with her own. She would spend a week in this position, attended to by a sympathetic friend. Then, having heard no tell-tale sound, she would reluctantly get up and go and wash in the spring, hoping the seed was a late developer, reminding herself that in the fields some grains took longer to sprout than others. But soon she was pummelling her abdomen when it remained stubbornly flat and scratching her insides when they innocently, fatefully, bled.
Jerónimo begged her to be patient and to accept that the gestation rate in Serrano was just somewhat low, but he was wasting his breath.
The concept of depression was unheard of in Serrano, but Loja diagnosed Maninha as suffering from an acute bout of neurasthenia. Only the famous herbs of the midwife were able to rouse her enough to do the household chores and run errands that involved interacting with the other women in the village, who out of spite made sure to talk of pregnancies, births and sterility whenever she was around. What if she was sterile? No, she couldn’t be. Her name meant ‘barren’ in the local language and it was too much to think that her christening had cursed her womanhood. You only had to look at her to see there was nothing amiss with her womanliness! Her body positively burst with health, and all her sisters, aunts and cousins had managed to conceive. Maybe she should consider the city’s solutions after all.
Too much thinking was making her head sore, so like any good Serroanoan, she stopped. The villagers weren’t inclined towards puzzle solving. They did sometimes consult the mountain, but other than as a place for burials, they weren’t sure how to read it. What lurked inside its crater, that cavernous, dark womb? Where did the rocks disappear to when they fell inside?
The Madwoman of Serrano, who knew the villagers’ foibles well, would yell, on apparently random days, that the mountain was going to erupt and bury them because it could no longer stand their foolishness. The villagers pretended not to hear the disturbed young woman, but as soon as she was out of sight they rushed to light torches and fires, to sacrifice a goat or a rooster, or if they were feeling particularly desperate, to toss a cat or two into the mountain’s crater, hoping to pacify the beast and satisfy its hunger. After taking these precautions, the Serranoans only let their guard down once they’d heard the madwoman’s cackles echoing around the crevices, a sign that the mountain had been satiated, for now.
Jerónimo took part gamely in his wife’s pregnancy initiatives. He said prayers and novenas with her; drank teas, herbal remedies and potions, each one more disgusting than the last; made pledges, kept promises, followed advice and showed solidarity. Until one day when her demands became too much, or it became too much to ignore their futility, and he held her and shook her and screamed that he loved her, with or without child, flat or fat-bellied, breasts gushing with milk or dry. When his words reached his own ears, he was shocked by their enormity, but his sense of desperation was greater than his shame, so he yelled again, even louder this time, so that the whole valley could hear, that he couldn’t care less about having an heir, male or female, horned and clawed or toothy and smiley. He stopped short of telling Maninha to forget about having children altogether only because it was a woman’s responsibility to manage matters of procreation in Serrano and he didn’t think he had the right to ruin her dreams. And because, when it came down to it, he believed in miracles as much as the next Serranoan.
After this outburst, Jerónimo went back to working continuously in the fields and in his workshop, stopping to eat when he was hungry and to release some tension whenever he got the urge. Maninha was a good woman. Why was she so desperate for a child?
It had became something of a ritual for Serrano men to go fishing together on nights with a new moon. They often chose a spot on a section of river where it had been said a dam was to be built, though they refused to believe anyone was capable of such an outrage. If rivers had been shut off elsewhere, bridges built and springs diverted, that was because those rivers brought death, which their river did not. Only once had it washed away a body, and that had been the body of a savage soul, a beast-cum-woman. They crossed themselves whenever they thought of Gremiana, having recategorised her as an animal in order to clear their consciences. No crime was committed: an animal had attacked them and been killed, that was all. The men told versions of the Gremiana story to fit the logic of their defence, but without looking each other in the eye, out of shame and in the knowledge that they were only deceiving themselves.
No, nobody could be so cruel as to rob them of their valley, they thought, forgetting their guilt and the curse that had been put on them. But the mountain hadn’t forgotten.
At first there were considerable intervals between each fishing trip: five outings in five years; seven in seven. But gradually they came to be more frequent, until the amateur fishermen were gathering three times a year.
The women did not join the men to go fishing. They used the nights to perform tasks of a mysterious nature, unknown even to the Madwoman of Serrano, the main and only expert on the valley and its history. That said, it was also rumoured that a tacit agreement had been reached with the madgirl at birth, wherever and whenever and however often that was, whereby she would honour the women’s biggest secret and preserve the umbilical chord that connected the village to the universe, the march of time and the evolution of life.
When the men came home on fishing nights, they lay down on the floor beside the beds where their women slept. Not a word was exchanged between husband and wife until the sun came up, by which time no one seemed interested or able to recall what had happened the night before.
On one such evening, the fishermen reached the river and spread out to their usual spots. The hours passed by slowly and in silence, with only the occasional murmur travelling down the riverbanks and along the water’s ripples, the faintest hint of dawn breaking somewhere. Nobody seemed willing to disturb the peace by starting up the nightly conversations – monosyllabic, of course – that usually echoed around the village and out to sea.
Jerónimo couldn’t explain it, but the silence felt especially heavy that night. It was as though only he experienced it. He found himself chewing hard on his pipe, overcome with anguish but unable to identify the cause. He wasn’t one for premonitions, but he sensed both a magnificent calm and a shiver of expectation, coming from the same direction, unsettling and humbling him. He looked at the sky. Were the heavens about to open? The very thought of it! Rain at this time of year, God forgive him, now that would have been a miracle.
The sky remained hugely present and leaden, ready to swallow him up, and he felt afraid and strangely absent. He only returned to reality when a fish took his bait and in the ensuing battle he forgot about his earlier experience, just as if it had never happened.
Jerónimo’s father moved his pipe from one side of his mouth to the other, freeing up enough space to emit a sound along with the exhaled smoke: ‘Get yourself a woman who’ll give you a child,’ he said. ‘Maninha has no reason to be offended, you’ve been together for years now, no one was to know she was dry.’ He spoke quietly, forcing Jerónimo to lean in close to hear what he was saying. It was the nearest he’d ever been to his father and he was shocked, both by the physical intimacy and by what he thought he’d just heard him say. Sleep with another woman and get her pregnant… Jerónimo struggled to follow his father’s reasoning. For a moment he wondered whether he might be imagining things, suffering hallucinations due to Maninha’s sorcery.
‘Do as I ask,’ his father whispered, as much to God as to Jerónimo, hoping at least one of them was listening.
Jerónimo felt ashamed to have put such words in his father’s mouth and moved away nervously. His father couldn’t have said such a thing. Maybe he hadn’t even opened his mouth, hadn’t even looked at him. Another woman… Why should he find himself another woman? For the same thing to happen? Who said he wanted a child anyway? These things were written, he thought, in the book of life. It was no man’s business to intervene.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the mountain, there was a tremendous roar as a red flash ripped through the sky. Birds took flight and animals ran madly in all directions, often straight into snares, though some got away safely. A plane had come down, snapped in two and become engulfed in flames. A few hours later, local news reports would speak of one of the worst plane crashes in history.
The fishermen knew nothing of this because the mountain range that enclosed their village, river and inlet shut them off from the rest of the world, and would do for as long as they could keep it that way. They carried on fishing. Jerónimo felt emptiness return to his body, replacing the hurt of before. When he got home later that night he lay down on a blanket on the floor beside the bed. Maninha, as tradition dictated, betrayed no sign of having heard him come in. What had been exchanged that night between father and son was never mentioned again. The chapter was closed before it had fully opened, and life returned to its former rhythms.
Elsewhere, the families of the victims did everything in their power to recover the bodies of their loved ones from the plane crash, but the devastation was such that their remains were a mess, as intermingled as the young lives that had perished and the dreams they’d shared until the last.
Fire ravaged a large section of the surrounding area along with the hulk of the plane. No survivors were found and the few items that were spared by the flames and not washed away by the sea were recovered in such a state of disfigurement that it would have taken a very special kind of hope, a hope born of great love, to think anyone could have made it out alive.