The early morning gloom brought out the colours in the landscape and made the valley look mysterious and defiant. Beautiful though it was, it failed to stir the villagers, who preferred the brash brightness of an afternoon sun heading to its death on the horizon.
Jerónimo liked overcast days, the way their dull, damp cloak sheltered him from prying eyes. He was a man of few words, knowing there was no point in asking questions in the village, for they would not be answered, and that it wasn’t thought manly to be intimate, though whether sharing a simple opinion could really be considered intimacy was a moot point. The men believed that ideas were best preserved through silence, that bringing them out in the open was to expose yourself and risk being crucified. It pained Jerónimo to acknowledge it, but he thought they were probably right, though he knew the madgirl said it was really because they were cursed with foolishness and didn’t know how to think.
This might have been why the men favoured cheap substitutes for language, such as pointing a finger at whatever interested them, or alternatively a chin, which could be combined with the neck to resemble a giant finger. The conversation of the villagers was limited to goings on in the valley and dealings amongst themselves, generally concerning things that had already happened or would happen soon. The men also talked about women, all of whom they hated with a passion.
The Madwoman of Serrano, born anew every thirty-three years, but with the memories, face and fortune of the woman who had preceded her, said that the source of the villagers’ humiliation was that they had been given bodies but no brains.
This was impossible to prove, but it was true that almost everything was considered a threat by the poor villagers, and that any sign of danger became an omen of epic proportions, sending people into hiding, peeking out only as much or as little as their fear or perversity would allow. But if one paid attention to certain things, the ramblings of the madwoman, for example, or throwaway comments from the pedlars, it soon became clear that the women of Serrano differed from their male counterparts in that they were a little less foolish and a lot less timid. The women sometimes told Loja that if the men of Serrano had the women’s courage, they would long ago have taken up arms and invaded a faraway city, or gathered up their tools and clothing and moved to a remote spot beyond the reach of the valley and the plagues that came out of the big, black mouth of the mountain.
In Serrano, weather meant sun or rain and it was either planting time or harvesting season. The villagers did not care for the in-between and the indecipherable. But Jerónimo, the farmer-mechanic, was fond of murky weather. He found it a balm to his body, and although he appreciated the sunshine, he always kept half an eye out for a bit of shade and impatiently awaited the arrival of autumn. He distanced himself from the others and this enabled him to sometimes show a side of himself he usually kept hidden. When he was with Filipa he would regale her with tales of Serrano’s history or teach her to mould pots and carafes out of the clay that formed beside the spring. When he was on his own he would launch into long monologues, allowing his words to form bridges, to travel new roads or to take flight, all of which gave him a profound sense of pleasure.
The years he’d spent in the military had caused him to evolve a little more than his fellow villagers, but as soon as he’d returned to Serrano he’d abandoned his city ways and rediscovered the valley’s traditional, uncommunicative habits. He did so radically, in fact, as if the punishing nature of the place had been designed especially for him, or as if his personal hell had to be greater than everyone else’s.
He still liked talking, though it could hardly be described as an intellectual exercise, for he’d long ago abandoned the kind of intelligence required for debate. It was more about seeking the impossible, trying to recapture the intimacy he’d shared with Fernanda. He felt no shame in talking to himself, or rather the constant shame he always felt diminished when he tried to relive, through speech, certain situations he’d experienced or imagined. He laid himself bare, warts and all, and faced up to himself, to his strengths, weaknesses and failures.
Just as nothing had intimidated him when he was with Fernanda, he felt safe when he was with Filipa. While she played the games she was always inventing, he would talk aloud and unselfconsciously to himself, proclaiming exploits he felt worthy of recognition or chastising himself for his shortcomings, before inevitably moving on to his biggest regret in life (being deserted by Fernanda), his biggest disappointment (that she had not been in touch with him since), and his concern that Filipa still could not talk.
Filipa never said a word, not even the most basic sounding ones. If she’d at least managed a ‘Dad’, Jerónimo would have been a father like any other, albeit with a daughter ten times better than the rest. If only she’d run to him at difficult moments crying: ‘Dad, Dad, Dad!’
Filipa followed him around, but she didn’t speak. If the other kids hit her all she could do was growl, her eyes bulging with pain and revolt, powerless to do more. God forgive him, thought Jerónimo, but any other affliction would have been easier to endure: to be mute was to be vulnerable, unable to defend yourself or cry out if something hurt; it was to be confronted by your situation every time you tried to speak and to risk throttling yourself if you tried to force the words to come. When Filipa tried too hard, it was like she’d swallowed her tongue and might choke and die. When she recovered, she would run away through the trees and rocks, only stopping when she reached her favourite spot beside the spring. That was where she went when she needed to escape other people’s talk. It was also where she met the Madwoman of Serrano, who would calm her down by telling her the story of the village, which was the story of all the Serranos of the world, places cursed and held back by foolishness.
Sometimes the madwoman would be in an especially sensitive mood and decide the villagers deserved a little pity, living as they did with a constant threat of some catastrophe erupting. But then she would remember their inability to open up their hearts to a little girl, their way of dismissing her as the foreigner’s daughter, and her pity would be replaced by anger, until she called upon the wind to deliver them curses and plagues.
Jerónimo felt powerless to help Filipa with her sickness. The madwoman had told him the girl would start talking one day, when the sun was halfway through its journey, having risen and fallen a good many times, but he was neither convinced nor prepared to simply wait. He began his quest to find his daughter’s voice.
He consulted the midwife, who had a cure for all maladies, asking her what Filipa was being punished for and begging her to do something to give them hope. The midwife remained unmoved, in fact she gave no sign of having heard what Jerónimo had said. It was as if there was just no room for the mute girl in her magical mind.
Jerónimo ignored the midwife’s rebuffs, just as he ignored the madwoman’s reassurances, and he made appointments with doctors in the neighbouring towns. None of them found anything wrong with Filipa’s young head and slender body. They advised him to consult a specialist in the capital.
The capital was a far-flung place and Jerónimo initially dismissed the idea, but he became increasingly worried about the girl’s future, imagining her dependent on the charity of others when he was no longer around. What would she do to earn a living? Work in the fields like another mute girl once had before committing suicide? Filipa’s hands were small and didn’t look like they’d ever be strong enough to hold a hoe. Perhaps it would be better to train her to be a housemaid in the city? He didn’t want to raise her to serve others, but Loja said city folk were more sensitive towards the disabled than the villagers were. Jerónimo didn’t know why the Serranoans harboured so many grudges and felt so persecuted, but he knew they took their vengeance out on the mute because they were the only people they considered beneath them.
No boy in the village would marry his daughter; no man in the valley had ever married a mute woman. An outsider might even rape her and leave her for dead, as had happened to the girl who’d ended up killing herself. Only the women had attended her funeral because funeral rites were different for suicides, or so the midwife at the time had said, the same old-old lady who’d christened the village. A female suicide required female mourners to make sure that whatever happened on the way to and from the burial was sealed in silence. It was said that an ancient old man had once taken his own life, death seemingly having forgotten to come for him, and only the men accompanied him to the mountain. It was one of the laws that ruled over Serrano. The madwoman would say, in a whisper or a yell, that the lack of inhibition showed during funeral marches was even greater for suicides than for natural deaths, because in their desperation the villagers were prepared to try anything to pacify the mountain and reconcile it with the valley.
The truth of this was never confirmed and those who did not simply ignore the madwoman accused her of speaking out of envy, because she was excluded from the village’s religious activities but allowed to join the other women at funerals for suicides, so long as she followed seven metres behind. The Madwoman of Serrano countered, speaking into a hole in the ground she’d dug to broadcast truths too painful for the villagers to hear, that fate had spared her from having to take part in acts that demeaned anyone blessed of tongue or soul.
Who could have got Fernanda pregnant? Did she take any pleasure from being in his arms? She hadn’t seemed like an easy woman, indeed she’d been no more than a girl at the time, she couldn’t have been married. Perhaps some man had found her wandering through the forest before she’d reached the cabin and forced himself on her. She was so nervous of people, especially men, that this could not be ruled out.
‘Whatever happened, she must have suffered a lot for her head to have become so confused,’ Jerónimo told himself, unable to stop thinking about the matter. ‘But why make my little Fip mute? Give her a mouth but deny her words, good God, was that not just pure cruelty? Why should a child pay for the sins of its mother, or of a rapist?’
Jerónimo had to stew over his concerns alone, without support from his family or the rest of the village. The villagers were hostile towards anyone who bore misfortune, though they revelled in the existence of such people as it meant there was someone more miserable than themselves. Jerónimo knew the valley’s hypocrisies only too well, so he suffered in silence, loving the woman who’d left him without saying goodbye, but hating the mother who’d left him with a daughter. Such thoughts came to him thick and fast and were too complicated to stick.
He did all he could to protect Filipa from the contempt of the village, including assuming fatherhood of the girl. He said nothing to contradict his mother and Maninha when they assumed he’d kept Fernanda hidden in the cabin for three months, given how pregnant she was. As long as they were convinced he was the father, Filipa would be safe, for despite his age he was respected in the village, though not as respected as he would have been if he’d joined the other men in telling lewd stories about their women.
Then, without warning, Filipa began to talk. Jerónimo had no hesitation in declaring it the happiest day of his life, relegating all other previous high points. It was much, much better than when he’d first had a woman, or rather when a woman had first had him. That had been the midwife, as tradition dictated, though not the same midwife who’d delivered him, for she’d met a tragic end when taking a basket of herbs outside to dry in the sunshine. For the first time in history, basket and woman would not fit through the threemetre-ninety-nine by seventy-one centimetre door, and the midwife got stuck. She tried to dislodge herself by going back inside or forcing herself out, but the door seemed only to narrow, and soon the midwife and her basket of herbs were squeezed into a warm embrace reminiscent of the moment when she would hold a newborn baby close to her chest, two hearts beating as one, before presenting it to the people outside and to the daylight, which entered no other house in Serrano without first passing through the House of Light.
The midwife liked babies that had just been born, their smell of innocence, their marks of separation from their mother, their total dependence on her, the godlike status this afforded her. But she knew she was not a god, or a goddess, because although she foresaw the future of every baby she delivered, and whispered that future into their ears, she could not foresee something far greater, which was the fate of Serrano itself, and without foreseeing it she could not control it.
Many people passed by the midwife while she was trapped in the door. They greeted her, but with lowered heads, reverently seeking her blessing and avoiding the sun, which shone fierce at that time of day. They didn’t expect a response from her, for they knew she usually said her prayers in her head, her mind whirring with thoughts of a person’s present and future, and they assumed she was just leaning against the door with her plants soaking up the sun’s energy.
Returning from the fields with a huge sack of yellow and red herbs, her god-daughter found the midwife standing there, limp and cold despite the warm sun, and promptly screamed to announce the poor woman’s passing.
The women of the village arranged themselves strategically and began a monotonous chorus that celebrated death’s victory over life, while a group of older women, wise in funeral matters, searched doggedly for signs of suicide.
The election and coronation of a new midwife proved turbulent. At one point it looked like the village might never emerge from the dangerous stasis it found itself in, a state of affairs that would have ruptured the destiny of every living thing in the valley.
The village had no midwife for several months. The giant door of the House of Light remained shut and everything nearby began to die. The villagers feared they were facing some new kind of punishment, for the women had ceased to conceive, forgoing the need for a midwife, and the men had no thoughts of sex, forgoing the need for their therapist. Jerónimo was nearly fourteen at the time, ready to be initiated into the business of adult male activities, but unlike other boys his age he didn’t feel anxious about it. Nobody had thought to explain it to him and he simply refrained from thinking about his coming of age, absorbed as he was by talk of the missed harvest, the fruit that was falling rotten from the trees, the livestock that had stopped reproducing and the fish that had swum away to other waters. The valley became filled with sadness. Further catastrophes did not ensue only because the mountain was saving them for later.
Precisely seven months after the midwife died, a young woman by the name of Virgínia, who wasn’t known to have a husband and whose curious pregnancy had yet to draw any comment, appeared outside the House of Light holding her belly as if it were about to collapse and yelling that her waters were breaking. An older woman reached out to touch her and as she did so Virgínia’s shirt burst open to reveal a belly that appeared to contain a swimming child. Panic spread, for sleepy little Serrano still had no midwife. A tent was set up in the square and Vírginia spent five days and five nights in labour without a midwife to assist her. In the midst of her delirium, she recalled that the now dearly departed midwife had said she was carrying twins and had not been surprised when Vírginia claimed to have never coupled with a male.
Feeling utterly powerless, the Serranoans began to view the midwife’s demise as the beginning of the end. They were still struggling to articulate this thought when a man appeared with Gregória in tow, a woman who lived on the edge of the village. Her eyes bulged and she was giddy with fear, but she was unable to scream and refuse what was being demanded of her.
The villagers opened the magic door and shoved Gregória inside. Then they carefully carried Vírginia into the House of Light, her big round belly on display, and laid her on the narrow cast iron bed. Three women stayed to assist Gregória and the other women went outside, huddling up against the walls to accompany Virgínia’s howls of pain as she screamed that her babies would be born orphans if she died, for she was a virgin. The men looked on from further away, trying to comprehend what she meant. Their poor heads throbbed.
In the room where every previous midwife had delivered babies and healed bodies and souls, where every Serrano woman had given birth to every Serrano child, where every boy had known a female for the first time, every man had been for impotency treatment and every woman had sought a pregnancy cure, Virgínia writhed around on a bed that united the generations. She no longer had the strength to scream or even to feel pain, so exhausted was she by her never-ending labour. As she breathed what appeared to be her last breath, the women inside the House of Life let out a deep sigh. At this point Gregória stopped trying to escape the room, her hands relaxed and her mouth fell open. She turned towards Virgínia in a kind of daze and reached out to straighten the babies and set them in the delivery position. The three women filled and emptied pans of boiling water, the steam lending the room a mysterious atmosphere.
Silence descended on the women outside. The new midwife had been chosen. Those who had not been selected felt strangely inadequate, slighted at not being destined for a role they hadn’t wanted. Then the men looked up at the mountain and raised clenched fists. The women began to move around in circles, chanting as the men hollered and the children whistled and banged drums made out of tin cans, a time-honoured ritual that marked the baptism of a new midwife.
Inside the House of Light, Gregória did not take her eyes off Virgínia for a moment. Blocking out all other needs, she focused on the woman giving birth and became hypnotised by her pain. The babies had ended up one on top of the other, either reluctant to leave or to be separated, but having realigned them Gregória was able to pull them out, one by one, cut their cords and lay them down beside their mother. Then she fell asleep, though some say she fainted.
She awoke in the early hours to an empty house. In accordance with local custom, she’d been left on her own to better come to terms with the role destiny had assigned her. Feeling unworthy of the position, she tried to escape, but didn’t get very far, her feet refusing to move more than a centimetre at a time. Once outside, she leaned against the wall of the house and bent over to be sick. This seemed to relax her, but she still couldn’t understand where she’d found the strength to pull the babies out, for they’d planted deep roots in Virgínia, the virgin mother who the previous midwife had seen caught in the crossbeams of the sun and the moon, the wind and the earth, engulfed in a giant wave of possession and life.
Resigned to her fate, but still afraid to commit to it, Gregória asked her surroundings – the walls, the giant door, the tiny window and every stone she touched – whether she would be capable of absorbing all the power and wisdom bestowed upon midwives. She wondered aloud, and in total honesty, if she really was predestined to fulfil such a complex role. Her self-questioning gave way to bitter tears. In every shadow she saw herself and in every vision she saw a life of solitude, such as all the previous midwives had led, a product of the respect others would afford her and the reverence that was almost offensive in its call for distance.
Everyone knew that midwives were witches. Staring at her footprints in the dirt, Gregória accepted her destiny. She understood that in Serrano women who were witches were happier than women who weren’t. Or less unhappy at least.
Jerónimo had followed the commotion of the birth and the ritual that came after it and still felt drained from the fear that Gregória wouldn’t be able to save the babies stuck inside Virgínia’s innards. In thrall to it all, he had hidden behind the house to watch and remained there after all the other onlookers had gone. Seeing the woman who’d earlier been a mountain of strength now so fragile and doubt-stricken, he approached her timidly and touched her face. Gregória looked at him, stemmed her tears and in an explosion of unknown feelings took him in her arms and had him right there, making him a man and herself a woman. When it was over, all that remained between them was a memory of a coupling that, for the sake of both of them, was best forgotten.
After this second act, which according to tradition made her anointment official, Gregória raised her eyes to the mountain in acknowledgement that she was the new midwife of Serrano. She did so in full awareness of how important she would become to that pretty little village, and convinced that she would be able to harness the powers conferred by her position into something great and absolute.
She entered the House of Light, tied her hair into a bun and began to issue orders. She was thirty-three years old and had never had a man or seen a birth until that morning. She’d liked both things in the reverse order that they’d occurred. After that she forgot her name, lost her memory and became ageless.