Like the other men in the village, Jerónimo had learned to accept whatever was thrown at him without explanation or complaint. This, he claimed, was why he met the fact that Maninha couldn’t get pregnant with indifference, whereas it was a great drama for her.
The men said only women could fail in procreation. There obviously couldn’t be anything wrong with men when their sexual mechanisms were so plainly visible; it was self-evident that a child – dozens, hundreds, thousands even! – could be born every time a man’s apparatus filled and emptied. ‘Soil is either fertile or infertile and the female is the soil. Some uteruses are just arid,’ the men said when they struggled to produce offspring, and yet when children did then appear, they accepted it as normal, indeed with no little pride. Serrano men were not in the least bit curious about how their women, after several fruitless years and without having undergone any overly complicated treatments, could suddenly fall pregnant after brief exposure to pharmaceuticals in the city, nor did they wonder about the technologies the specialists employed to miraculously transform their wives’ bodies and egos. City folk were just assumed to know these things.
On returning to the valley, the women would insist on frequent sexual relations as part of their therapy, one of the very few times they insisted on anything as it happened, and they stood up to their men without fear, protected as they were by the authority of the midwife. What the women themselves thought about these miracles is not recorded, for great secrecy surrounded the way the midwife and her senior assistants helped out young women whose lives had become unbearable from beatings and betrayals, threats and humiliations, sex being withheld or violently forced, and all because of their supposed inability to procreate.
On her wilder days, the Madwoman of Serrano would yell from her hiding place behind the spring that pharmaceuticals were a woman’s revenge. On other, more forlorn afternoons, she would say they were a woman’s greatest sorrow.
The women suffered because their men wanted offspring and so the women were sent to the city to placate their men, or to awaken their own hidden egos, whichever came first or worked best. The only woman ever to rebel against village policy was Gremiana. One afternoon when the sky was so low you could feel the breath of the clouds on your face, she confronted the whole village after hearing Valentim, the man she’d lived with since the age of thirteen, bragging in the tavern about all the children he could have had if his woman hadn’t been defective. He went on to accuse Gremiana of being false and shameless because she cheated him every time they lay down together by rolling around like a bitch on heat and faking that fever men can sense in women when they successfully detonate an offspring. He then proceeded to replicate the noises she made for the benefit of the other men in the tavern, and concluded by saying her duplicity was so complete that he, a wise man, had been taken in by her declarations of love. Gremiana had never accepted the midwife’s advice that she should deal with her husband’s abuses by seeking a pharmaceutical in the city, nor had she shown any signs of even wanting a child. But that day, as dusk fell and Valentim offered up their intimacies for the amusement of the entire village, while proclaiming his own virility and denouncing her inadequacy, she forgot she was a self-effacing humble woman, she lost her fear of flying fists and she laid out a few home truths. All of them in fact, until the men – husbands, fathers, brothers, friends, enemies, relatives and distant acquaintances; the young and the old; the upstanding and the down-and-out; the drunk and the sober – turned on her and chased her, armed with insults and sticks, all the way from the village square and the House of Light to the riverbank where the currents ran fiercest, shouting like men possessed that Gremiana was a shameless tramp with a hollow belly. Their power compromised and their masculine pride wounded, the men screamed out all their hatred for Gremiana, their voices betraying the fear that so debilitated them, which was ultimately their hatred for all the women of Serrano, and by extension all the women of the world. The midwife locked her door and hung a black ribbon from her window.
A good night’s sleep beckoned with just a slither of a moon and a cool breeze, but after dozing for a quarter of an hour, Jerónimo began to stir again. From then on, sleep proved elusive. Every time he was about to drift off it was as if someone lifted up his eyelids and blew on his eyeballs. Lying there wide awake, aching from so much tossing and turning, he decided to get up, though the sun had yet to rise, and set out early for work. As he walked he felt tired, but also anxious, with a foreboding that the day was going to bring surprises rather than the certainties of routine.
Before picking up his hoe he thought about how a farmer’s life should not be so tough. He felt an almost violent urge to turn his back on the land and never have to get up at dawn or worry about frosts again. Life would not be so unpredictable if he were a mechanic, he thought, and then immediately felt the farmer side of him bristle with indignation.
The hot sun appeared and before he’d done much work he found himself by the river, wading into the water, not knowing quite how he’d got there. It must be the lack of sleep, he thought, for he felt drunk, though he hadn’t touched a drop of the bottle in his bag. He gathered his strength, shrugged off his disquiet and went back to work. Determined to make up for lost time, he threw himself into it, but still felt strangely on edge.
Towards the end of the morning he took a break to eat, then returned to work, resisting any temptation to try to make sense of his insomnia and restless thoughts. It was then that he heard a noise coming from the back of the lemon grove, a group of trees that stretched back a few dozen metres and provided him with plentiful fruit and leaves to chew on. The leaves were a tonic he turned to whenever he felt despondent, chomping through kilos of them over the course of a morning or an afternoon, or a whole day or sometimes two, until he felt restored, refreshed by their taste and rejuvenated by their zest and perfume. And their bitterness.
He didn’t pay much heed to the noise: animals often passed by that way heading for the river. That usually happened earlier in the day, but he assumed some animal had changed its habits or split from the pack in a bid for freedom. This brought a sort of smile to his soul, for he liked to think of himself as a wild animal with no master or herd, with no land he was tied to or area that contained him.
The river, the spring, the sky, the wind and the weather; he didn’t feel attached to any of it. Yet this patch of land, which didn’t flow or trickle or blow hot and cold, enslaved him like nothing else. When he’d promised not to abandon his father, he was also thinking of his favourite patch of land.
He stopped what he was doing for a moment and leant on his hoe, wondering what might have caused the animal to isolate itself and what it would do with the solitude it had gained.
He felt refreshed following these thoughts of freedom and solitude, which were one and the same thing to him. He returned to the task in hand, determined to finish off the work the land was demanding of him. This plot required more attention than all his other plots put together, indeed it seemed to double or triple in size the more he worked it, like a witch’s needlework. But it was the best patch of land in the world, as far as he was concerned. There was much more to his relationship with it than the simple ties that bind peasant to earth, something special but that he never sought to define for fear of what he might discover. A plague perhaps, he mused, thinking back to his military service and a woman he’d been introduced to by his army commander.
This was no easy plot of land. Every year it put up a fight and tried to make him throw in the towel, but once broken in, it became almost effortless to work, more like tending a vegetable patch than a large field. The secret was digging deep enough to bring out its goodness. The surface of the soil looked healthy enough, but if it were not thoroughly turned over then not a seed would sprout. Once he’d learned its ways and earned its respect, Jerónimo and the plot got on well: it worked him hard at tilling time, but it played fair and always yielded a bumper crop.
Nobody else could understand why Jerónimo kept a plot that was so difficult to work and he wasn’t entirely sure himself. Yes, it was ultimately quite productive, but there was something else that drew him to it, that made him dig as deep as he could, turn the soil over and over, till it and re-till it until he became disturbed by his own need to keep on burrowing, kneading, peering into its soul, expecting to see something more than the bonanza it delivered at harvest time. Then he’d stop, embarrassed, like a child caught in the act. An act of boundless love.
One day he would dig the perfect hole in his favourite plot and climb inside it to wait for a flood to come and bury him once and for all.
The noise in the lemon grove had put him on guard again, the same sort of alertness that had been distracting him since the night before. This bothered him because he was the sort of person who needed a little enthusiasm to get things done, or at least a little bit of focus. He could pretend, of course, he was well-practised at that. Having learned that nobody took any notice of anything genuine and true, pretence had long been his preferred approach to dealing with himself and others.
He’d forgotten about the animal heading for the river when he heard the noise again. This time, his ears pricked up: it sounded as if something had got caught in the barbed wire fence that enclosed the plot. He went over to investigate and found he wasn’t far wrong: a trapped creature stared back at him with a blank look of abandon, its startled gaze fixed on nothing. But it wasn’t an animal: it was a girl.
Not wishing to frighten her any further, Jerónimo put down his hoe and approached very slowly. He reached out and placed his hand on her forehead, but this gentle gesture seemed to finish her off: she crumpled into the mud and seemed to lose consciousness.
The situation was baffling and Jerónimo froze. He had to make a big effort to compose himself and then he picked the girl up. The poor little thing was like a tiny bird in his arms and he wondered how anyone could have become so weak and what she was doing so far from home. Yes, she was a long way from home, he knew everyone in the valley and he’d never seen her before. He carried her to the cabin where the men slept during planting and harvesting seasons and where they kept a few tools. He was too preoccupied to notice that the door stood open when usually it was bolted shut.
A pair of dark eyes followed his every move from behind a tree.
He lay the girl on a mattress and began cleaning her wounds, wetting her parched lips and dabbing her forehead, which was on fire, as was the rest of her body. Then he covered her with a sheet and sat down on the bed beside her, watching her and waiting for her to wake, praying she wouldn’t die. He picked up and held the least damaged of her two hands.
She was so young. What could death gain by taking someone so unfledged, so lacking in age and experience, a life so un-lived, with nothing to confess and no sins to atone for? Were some people fated to pay for the sins of others? Was he one of them, sentenced to a joyless existence at the world’s end? His sins were nothing special, yet he paid for them by working himself to the bone every day. Or had he committed sins he didn’t know about? Had his spirit escaped him one day and gone on the rampage?
Maybe he’d committed some heinous crime in a previous life and that was why his appeals to the gods were ignored. Perhaps this girl who lay innocently before him on a crude mattress was also making up for sins in her past. Still, he would not let her suffer. He had never served any real purpose in life, never done anything important, anything that made him feel proud. Even the mission of honour his army commander had sent him on had ended in failure. He’d always been hopeless, but here was a chance to make amends. He would not let the girl die, even if he had to join forces with her and give her half his own life. He’d experienced plenty in his twenty-four years, he would have no regrets in donating half of himself to the poor creature who lay hunched before him, waking, whimpering, unsure where to direct her gaze.
She sensed his presence and recoiled, as she had done at their first encounter. She scrunched up her eyes. Though unable to stop her lips from trembling, she forced some control on her breathing, slowly exhaling trapped air from her throat. She was in a bad way. Her body was covered in cuts and sores and many of them were open and infected. But he didn’t think she’d die. She did not have that look of the condemned animal in her eye, or so he told himself. He broke an orange into bite-sized pieces, but she refused them by hiding herself under the blanket.
Most days Jerónimo struggled to find a reason to thank God for being alive, though he did try, the better to fend off thoughts that anything might be preferable to such a dreary life. But now, kneeling beside the bed, words of prayer emerged from his mouth and chest, words full of strength and emotion, a far cry from the usual pallid pleas he addressed to the Lord above, via the mountain, the mother of the valley.
He was pleased with his entreaties, the conviction in his voice and the way he’d spoken, knees on the ground, hand on his heart. Surely God, or better still the gods, all of the gods, wherever they were, would appreciate the sincerity, beauty and substance of his prayers. Surely they would not refuse him his request, for if they did, they would have to ignore every plea that followed, no matter who it came from, and if they wished to be considered superior to mortals then they had to respond to emergencies. Satisfied with the conclusion he’d come to, Jerónimo returned his attention to the girl. Patiently, as if they had all the time in the world, he continued to treat her wounds while speaking softly to her. He wiped away the dirt and bathed her skin with oil extracted from a plant that grew wild beside the cabin, as he’d seen the midwife do. When he’d finished he sat back and watched her. The girl lay prone, in a state halfway between sleep and consciousness, until eventually her eyes closed and she fell asleep.
Jerónimo forgot about his home, his plot, his hoe, the seeds he was supposed to sow and everything else. When not tending to the girl he stood outside the door to the cabin under the branches of a lemon tree, his mind going round in circles trying to understand what was happening. He’d lost all interest in work, as if farming were incompatible with nursing; as if planting and harvesting weren’t bound by strict deadlines.
In the village he was considered a thinker, but his daily life did not require much thinking. Everything between getting up in the morning and going to bed at night was pre-programmed: eating, working, existing. Whenever he did need to think he felt dizzy. Since his promise to remain in Serrano, he’d decided the less thinking he did the better, for all concerned, but especially himself. If questions did pursue him, he beat them away, often so forcefully that anyone overhearing him would have thought he were performing an exorcism. At other times he fled to his favourite plot of land, his black patch of earth, as if answering a call, where he would dig and dig until his forehead poured with sweat and his hands burst with heat. Then he would climb into the hole he’d made and wait there, hidden, ignored, alone and damp with tears, until his inner turmoil passed.
Now, sitting beside the girl, he wanted to think, but found himself ill-equipped and out of practice. He felt enfeebled, too, by a strange and confusing emotion, an unfamiliar sensation that made him grateful for the gift that lay before him. He felt other things too, less placid things, which frightened him.
He did not know how the other villagers would react to the girl. As a rule they showed solidarity towards relatives and neighbours, but open hostility towards strangers. What if they refused to help? What if they banished her? He would not allow her to come to any harm. How could anyone hurt such an inoffensive and frightened little thing? She clearly meant the good men and women of Serrano no ill, he told himself, not yet aware that he would agonise over the same questions the next day and for many next days after that. He was likewise unaware that his pained expression, seen through the half-light of the room, was what persuaded the girl not to try to run away or sink into a terminal sleep.
Fearing his rough bearing might scare her, Jerónimo made himself small and softened his voice to ask her her name and what she was doing in the forest. She made no answer, but let herself cry without restraint, unburdening herself. He told her she could trust him in a tone so steady, simple and pure that it confounded the very nature of Serrano, the madwoman would later say.
The girl seemed to have no notion of whether she was asleep or awake. It apparently made no difference to her if she closed her eyes and disappeared into a dream or opened them to a world that was utterly unfamiliar. She spent most of the time open-mouthed, oblivious to everything other than the presence of Jerónimo.
He spent several days treating her wounds and repeating the same words to her, trying to build up her awareness and her confidence in being around him. If he came too close for too long she shied away, wrapped herself in her blanket and curled into a ball.
At such moments Jerónimo would have liked to have stroked her, but he held back. He persisted, though, and he tried hard to read her gestures. He sensed there was something she wanted to say, but couldn’t find the voice to express.
A month passed. A gash on the girl’s leg still required attention, but her other injuries had mostly healed and she had gained a little weight. Jerónimo turned to the mountain in appreciation, feeling his prayers had been answered. He wanted to take the girl in his arms and hold her tight, but he kept his distance, wary of frightening her. He talked to her instead, telling her things about the village. He called her Fernanda, for she had a locket around her neck with the words F. San Martin engraved on it. He didn’t know any other Fernandas and he thought it a nice name. She did not answer to it at first, but in time she understood and turned her head when he said it, responding more with her body than with her eyes, mouth or face.
Where could she have been going to have ended up lost in Serrano? Jerónimo had heard stories of things local men had done to women, women like Fernanda, or Gremiana, the girl who’d rebelled. Stories that would make anyone shudder.
The Madwoman of Serrano always said that after Gremiana’s long, strong body disappeared among the rapids and rocks, the skies opened, the river ran red, the wind blew fierce and all the men and women of Serrano were forced to hide away from the agonising cries that rose from the waters, battered the riverbanks and echoed around the mountains. When the cries finally stopped, the men retreated into silence, like humbled mice, and the women took to prayer, unable or unwilling to do anything else.
The villagers never spoke of the young woman again, by day or by night, but whenever the river ran wild and rushed over the riverbanks, a shrieking sound emerged from the waters and filled the air, and everyone knew it was Gremiana crying out in defiance.
Older women in the village recalled being told that while Gremiana floundered in the currents, knowing her time was up, she did not beg for help but rather bellowed that all Serrano men were hypocrites and cowards and that she would not give Valentim the pleasure of salvaging his pathetic male pride by lying under a man she had no feelings for.
Serrano’s women feared at first that the men might grasp what Gremiana was saying, but they soon relaxed: the men only heard what they wanted to hear. ‘Men never notice anything unless it suits them to, much less in the midst of an uproar,’ said the Madwoman of Serrano, who felt no loyalty either to the men who disdained her or to the women who excluded her.
The madwoman seemed to see everything through the prism of despair, her own and the village’s. Filipa always remembered there being great radiance in her eyes, but it was perhaps a secret radiance, only existing between friends.
On bleak days the old women would say in hushed tones that on the night of the crime, and for forty-nine nights afterwards, no man sought to couple with a woman for fear of falling victim to Gremiana’s curse. This was much to the relief of the women, for they still had Gremiana’s howl ringing in their ears and saw the image of her being dragged under whenever they closed their eyes. It was said that the blood-stained river rose up and splashed the women’s garments and that the red never came out, reminding them that they had neither spoken up in her defence nor lifted a finger to save her, to save themselves.
Knowing the hatred the villagers had for outsiders, Jerónimo feared for Fernanda. He would feel ashamed of this fear and decide he was being unfair on his fellow Serranoans, for despite their intolerance and dislike of strangers, they would surely be incapable of mistreating such a vulnerable creature. But then the image of Gremiana would appear before him, though he didn’t really know what she looked like, and advise him against telling his family about the girl for now. He accepted her advice with a clear conscience.
Fernanda progressed quickly and became strong and agile enough to follow Jerónimo into the field where he worked, holding back but coming close enough to hear him talk. She spent hours watching him. She was entirely unaware that, with her health restored and her hair no longer wiry and tangled, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. She was even prettier than the girls he’d seen on billboards in the city during his military service, prettier still than the girl he’d seen in a film at the cinema and fallen immediately in love with.
Jerónimo gradually began to understand the strength of his affection for the girl, evident in the way he treated her with such care, was so reluctant to leave her at the end of the day and so impatient for morning to come so that he could set out on the path back to the cabin. He found endless excuses not to sleep at home. He wondered why he’d never felt like this before. Something had shaken him and tossed him to the wind. He felt weak, as if Fernanda were sapping him of energy, but he liked it too, indeed he delighted in his new way of being.
There was Maninha to consider, of course, but he thought it best not to mention Fernanda to her. What was to be gained from telling Maninha there was only one woman for him in the world now? That he felt elated at the mere thought of her? That this woman was really just a girl? He didn’t dare and he didn’t know how.
He wasn’t entirely to blame. Maninha didn’t make it easy for him to open up to her. She never asked him why he spent so much time tilling the land, why he kept going fishing on his own and never brought back any fish, why he awoke so eagerly at dawn, why he no longer sought her embrace. There were so many whys she might have uttered but didn’t, denying him the opportunity to confess.
He would wait a little longer, then talk to his father. Fernanda could not remain hidden in the cabin for ever. What if she fled in the night and an animal attacked her? What if a wicked man passed by? Such thoughts tormented Jerónimo. Every day, as soon as morning broke, he got up, grabbed his bag and made for the cabin. Once there he would sit down in a corner so as not to wake her. He didn’t know that out of sight, the Madwoman of Serrano watched over the hut and protected their guest.
He lay down with Fernanda only once. He didn’t do it again, for she became agitated, incapable of understanding. He felt ashamed.
Eventually his father picked up on Jerónimo’s restlessness and noticed his frequent and unnecessary trips to the field. The old man wondered whether the seed he’d sown in his son’s head on their fishing trip might have taken root. When his wife nagged him about how their boy was acting strange, he felt his suspicions had been confirmed and thanked God for answering his prayers. Jerónimo didn’t know it, but he’d gained another accomplice in keeping Fernanda safe in the cabin.
One day Jerónimo and Fernanda were sitting on the riverbank when he struck a match to light his pipe. She let out a scream and leapt into the water. The current was strong and Jerónimo jumped in after her, panic-stricken. He managed to catch her and pull her back to the riverbank, holding her tight. Afterwards he realised how much his body wanted to hold her again. He hugged her to him and promised he would tell his family about her that very night. Fernanda stared back at him, wiping drops of water from his forehead and running her fingers through his unkempt beard.
Using arts that only women know, Jerónimo’s mother quickly discerned that the girl he’d brought to the house was pregnant. She immediately bragged to the neighbours of her son’s machismo and began making clothes for her new daughter-in-law. Her only regret was that the girl seemed to have lost her memory.
Just under seven months later, a baby girl was born. They called her Filipa. Jerónimo’s mother said she had her son’s eyes.
Jerónimo thought about telling his father that the child wasn’t his, but he imagined the old man flying into a rage and driving Fernanda out of the village. So he said nothing. God had sent her to him to look after and in order to do so he would have to maintain a degree of subterfuge. The baby was registered with the name Filipa San Martin, in keeping with the surname engraved on Fernanda’s locket, a locket that would one day hang from Filipa’s neck on a leather cord fashioned by Jerónimo.
Filipa’s birth certificate showed only her mother’s name. Jerónimo assured his father that as soon as Fernanda regained her mental clarity they would add his name to the register. The old man reluctantly agreed, but asked that they keep this arrangement to themselves. Nobody need know that the child did not yet bear the family name.
What little memory Fernanda had, she seemed to lose during childbirth. Concerned by her erratic behaviour, Jerónimo’s mother found a goat to suckle the baby while Fernanda spent most of her time sitting by the spring, lost in mysterious thought. The villagers decided the foreigner, as she quickly became known, was muddled in the head, like the Madwoman of Serrano, who she seemed to get on well with, without actually speaking to.
It no longer made sense for Maninha to follow the midwife’s advice on how to get pregnant: her husband had made it abundantly clear he had no trouble impregnating any woman he wished to. Green with envy, Maninha had no choice but to endure the village talk of how lovely the little one was, how well she was doing, how stupidly happy Jerónimo seemed.
Not long after giving birth, Fernanda hid inside a pedlar’s cart and was carried off to a small town near the capital. There she fell in with a group of artists who were working on a photography project. She became particularly attached to a young photographer, who was in turn fascinated by the girl with the sweet, blank face, who barely spoke and who wouldn’t tell him her name. She seemed to embody the environment he was trying to capture: wild, abandoned, vulnerable, timeless; threatened by the advances of mankind. She appeared in many of his photos, surrounded by untamed landscapes, or ‘Forgotten Worlds’, as the exhibition would be called when Sílvio Luxemburgo got back to the capital and displayed his photos.
Fernanda was nowhere to be seen on the morning Sílvio left town. He knew he would miss her warm spirit as much as her ease in front of the camera. He often asked her to wear primitive, scruffy-looking clothes, utter rags compared to what city women wore, and she was a natural, it was as if she’d been posing for photos all her life. It made it easy for him to contrast the natural beauty of the girl and the landscape with the crudeness of her man-made garments, hopefully highlighting the need to protect the area from environmental attack.
A large industrial complex was going to be built in the region and ecologists were doing whatever they could to raise awareness and prevent an area of great natural beauty from being destroyed. Sílvio knew his photos were unlikely to change anything, but maybe one of his images would at least make the developers pause for thought. He was doubtless being naïve, but poets have to believe in their dreams.