This is the story of Serrano, a village of one hundred and ninety-three souls, including a young madwoman, several infants and three babies on the way, two of them twin girls, according to the midwife, who was peering through a crack in her warped shutters when she saw a woman’s shadow cross the square at the same moment the sun crossed the moon, sending deep vibrations through the valley and playing havoc with time. The relentless wind took advantage of the situation to remove the young woman’s dress, plucking it from her like a petal from a flower, and before the girl knew it the ground had gone from under her feet, the sky had disappeared over her head, her arms were dancing through the air, her legs were wading through the clouds and she was laid on the pungent earth, her hair fanned out in the fresh dew.
The midwife, at the centre of the scene, spread her fingers firm and wide and stroked her belly in a gesture of great sensuality, watching through her peep-hole, nostrils aquiver, mouth salivating, as the girl picked herself up – perhaps seconds, perhaps hours later, it was impossible to tell – and staggered over to recover her white cotton dress from the highest branch of a bush, where it fluttered like a flag signalling victory or surrender.
The midwife kept a watchful eye on the village square as the sun baked the ground, then gathered herself, preparing to let go of what she’d just seen and move away from the window. Finally she rose, pulling up the shawl that had slipped from her waist, feeling for the charms that were pinned to it, and tying it tightly at her hip. She lit a thick candle of pure wax, filling the house with scent – life with a hint of honey – then slowly raised the lid on a large coffer made of stone. Taking out a piece of flint, she carved two dashes into the lid’s polished underside, at the end of a row of other dashes, some of which were struck through halfway.
A few days later, Virgínia appeared at the midwife’s door complaining of sleepless nights and biting pains in her insides. The young woman, barely out of adolescence, was oblivious to the tremor that ran through her body as she spoke, but it froze the midwife to the spot and drew her gaze to the basin where a handful of leaves bobbed about, the only free-moving objects inside her cramped home, known to everyone as the House of Light.
Anyone observing the scene and unable to block out these visual distractions would have missed a number of sounds: the leaves swimming in the tepid water, Virgínia summoning the courage to continue with the consultation and the midwife exploring her own thoughts, recalling the scene she’d witnessed not thirteen days ago when her eyes had met the glare of the sun and the glow of the moon, fragments of cloud and a gust of wind, the dewy black earth and Virgínia’s naked body. In the aftermath of that strange encounter, the girl’s belly had shown a slight swelling of the skin beneath the navel on the right, the unmistakable sign of a uterus bearing more than one being, but not more than two.
Without taking her eyes off the basin, which seemed to be sucking the air out of the room, and speaking in the strange way Serrano midwives have always spoken – a whisper that added to the strange serenity of the atmosphere – the midwife told the unhappy young woman that, for better or worse, she was expecting twice over. The midwife then gave her some teas to take away and told her to come back when the fifth moon had set behind the mountain that overlooked the village, thus reducing the usually dominant peak to a bit part in the drama of the girl and the morning now broken. Virgínia barely had time to say she couldn’t be pregnant because she’d never had a mate. She was unaware of women the world over who’d fallen pregnant though men had never touched them, women who’d kept quiet and conformed so as not to incur the wrath of their incredulous fellow creatures.
The midwife closed the door, but remained glued to the back of it, practically boring herself into the wood, listening to Virgínia’s footsteps retreat as visions approached, visions that spoke of the end. She tried to work out what role destiny wanted her to play, but gave up fifteen hours later and dragged herself off to bed, exhausted.
Nobody questioned the midwife’s methods, for in all her years of practising she’d lost only one woman and one child, both on the same night, in that imprecise hour that’s no longer today but isn’t yet tomorrow, a time when human beings become powerless and situations can only be controlled through the saying of prayers, the wielding of amulets, vigorous chanting and careful vigilance. On the night in question, the midwife had been unable to draw out the necessary life forces to triumph over death because the pregnant woman’s waters had refused to break, even after she’d been made to drink a concoction of crow’s blood and black mud from the local spring, a foolproof remedy for sluggish fluids. The women who stood at the threshold of the House of Light accompanying the labour, and the men who awaited its outcome further away, had been on tenterhooks for over half a day and eventually everyone, including the midwife, her helpers, the dog that yelped to the pregnant woman’s every shriek, the pregnant woman herself and the creature inside her uterus, fell into a deep sleep.
In the final tick of the first minute of the following day, the midwife, her helpers and the dog awoke and rushed to the woman, who lay silent and shrunken deep in the bed, in the same position she’d been in when her stomach had contracted for the seventh and final time, a critical moment that had unfortunately coincided with everyone passing out.
There was no sign of the baby, but the young madwoman, who’d spent the night perched on the branch of a tree, claimed to have seen it flying away in the direction of the mountain, floating on the wind in its caul and leaving a luminous trail in the sky in the shape of a whale’s tail, proof it was a girl.
The midwife was not held responsible for the loss of life, it being the expected consequence of a much frowned-upon act. Nobody in the valley, where there were as many women as men and where hundreds of ways of satisfying bodily and spiritual needs were tolerated or celebrated, could recall a woman giving birth after incest without coming to harm.
The father of the baby was also found dead, several miles away, strangled by the rope he carried over his shoulder, which had leapt to life and gripped him in a possessive embrace. He’d put up a fight, but as the rope gained the upper hand the man’s anguish peaked and he saw, playing before him like a film, the two love scenes that had most marked his life. Horrified, he learned that the second Serrano woman he’d been intimate with was the daughter of the first, indeed the product of that first encounter, some twenty years earlier.
He remembered the second occasion very well. He’d been called to the home of a sick, pious woman in the middle of the night and been let in by her daughter. The girl was exhausted from several nights’ vigil and he too was tired after a long journey. Their eyes met, he smiled and she smiled back, and in the half-light they misunderstood the force of their attraction and moved to her bedroom. In the morning she was gone and he was left with a strange feeling of love, the same feeling he’d once had, he realised when he saw the sick woman lying silently in her bed, for the girl’s mother.
Thus the man’s final thoughts, before surrendering to the rope, were of the two anonymous women he’d once loved.
Besides being the village midwife and witchdoctor, it also fell to the woman who lived in the House of Light to sexually initiate the young men of the village, and to offer ongoing instruction whenever it was required, a service she provided willingly but discreetly, and with a certain pride in the knowledge that the entire valley had, at some point, relied on her superior skills in that department. Whenever a novice or former novice, especially the latter, found something to be compromising his masculine nature, the midwife provided therapy, with the discretion stipulated by centuries of tradition. Indeed barely a week went by without her prayers being interrupted by a timid knock at the door and a male of the species emerging from the shadows to seek solace of an intimate kind, or so the madwoman said.
It was also said that when performing this duty, deemed as respectable as any other by the villagers, the midwife’s voice, having turned nasal upon her appointment to the role, acquired the timbre of the tide at the bottom of a conch shell, and that her body no longer hunched forward as was its custom, and that her hair escaped its bun and flowed wild and wavy over her shoulders. In other words, she became a seductress, straddling the man in her care and stretching her arms and fingers into his flesh and muscles, reaching into his bloody innards, kneading and moulding them with her powerful hands until every last trace of whatever vague notion had incapacitated him was gone.
The treatment began the moment the patient stepped through the door, which was three metres and ninety-nine centimetres high and seventy-one centimetres wide and showed, despite the years, not the least sign of wear and tear, swinging on its hinges as freely as ever, creaking and slamming in response to the lives that passed through it. The midwife would meet her charge at the door, cover his eyes and lead him through the House of Light to the birthing bed. She never laughed during an initiation or therapy session and what, if anything, she said remains a mystery, because as soon as the man stepped over the threshold, everything vanished: past, present, future, night, day, the man himself, his afflictions, his resentments, his weaknesses, everything. All that remained was a male, born in that house and now reborn there, and a female, and together they scaled immeasurable heights.
Everything vanished, but one or two details did leak out, enough to suggest that the midwife, in her ability to deliver innocents into the world, initiate boys into adulthood and cure men of impotence, must have been in league with powerful occult forces, so extraordinarily accomplished was she at all three tasks. She also nurtured a plantation where she grew herbs that were much sought after for miles around. Those that were destined for outside consumption were put into little packets, labelled to identify the herb’s particular properties, and given to her god-daughter, who passed them on to the pedlars. So coveted were these herbs, which drew greater demand than even the village’s much-vaunted vegetables, that there could be no doubting their effectiveness. This only increased speculation about what went on in the secret world behind the midwife’s door, the only magical door in the valley, which seemed to adapt to suit the size of the body passing through it, or at the whim of its owner. That is until the day it got stuck, plunging pretty little Serrano into crisis.
Long forgotten by civilisation, Serrano was tucked between two remote trails; one that led to the capital and one that headed into the vast forest. It was a place steeped in strange customs, where pacts were made with underground and underwater worlds, where some animals never moved and where rocks with hard shells and soft centres could dictate the laws of the valley and change them from one day to the next.
It was thought that Serrano had first come into being in ancient times, when a giant stone woman was thrown into the sea and her extremities crumbled off to form islands all over the world. At least that was what Loja, the pedlar, said, though no one believed a word that came out of his mouth, chastised as he was for the crime of loving Serrano. All love affairs come at a price, the madwoman would sometimes muse, either for existing or by not being allowed to exist.
Among Serrano’s one hundred and ninety-three creatures were three dogs, jointly owned by the village’s twenty-nine families, dogs who shared in the village’s land, diseases – which were rare – salt, food, beliefs and everything else. There was also a spring, owned by nobody and known merely as the spring, though all the other springs in the valley had names, as if this one were a shooting star and the others fixtures in the firmament.
‘It’s only here on earth that we need give names to things,’ Jerónimo told his daughter one night as he directed her gaze to the madding stars. He marvelled at the millions of bodies moving about untouched by the sun’s rays, then quickly returned to his work, confused by such daring thoughts. The spring could be very demanding, so Jerónimo tried to ignore it and avoid becoming its slave, which he already was anyway, he just didn’t know it yet.
Serrano was turned in on itself, lost among trees and crags, allowed to breathe easily, half beautiful, half woman, half man.
It was a solid place too, no ordinary wind could blow it over, and its weak points, though it had them like everywhere else, went mostly undetected. Few visitors noticed the dirt beneath its skin and the rocks at the depth of its soul. One day the young madwoman, chased through the village by boys throwing stones, stopped in the middle of the square and, feeling furious and defenceless, turned to the mountain and screamed that Serrano had no blood.
No sooner had she said it than the earth trembled so fiercely that the entire village was nearly uprooted. The earth’s entrails were on full display for several hours, and were no sight for the faint-hearted, according to Loja, until a new tremor came and put them back again, returning Serrano to normality and bringing peace to the young woman who was never attacked again, at least not physically.
Another woman, Gremiana, was also said to have come close to destroying the village after she remonstrated with the men, their inability to put their heads together and discover new truths, their attachment to impossible dreams, their willingness to settle for scraps. Perhaps one day the men’s tongues would untie enough to recall the young woman who refused to be subjugated, who took flight even though she knew her wings had limited reach.
Rumours spread about Gremiana’s fate, but in low, mumbling voices, so that important threads of the story were lost and unravelled in the minds of the listener. Perhaps the truth would emerge one blessed or cursed day, bringing events out into the open and revealing the extent to which memories of the episode were shaped by the villagers themselves, and by the visiting pedlars, no strangers to the art of embellishment.
In the meantime, the men bristled with discomfort whenever Gremiana’s name came up, much as they did when the pedlars dispensed their worldly wisdom and advice. Indeed it often seemed to the villagers that the main thing the pedlars peddled was counsel, whether in order to seek some business advantage or just to flaunt their knowledge and feel superior to others, even if those others were the inhabitants of a village that for a very long time hadn’t so much as a name.
A few generations ago, on a day when the sun sat high and menacing, five men appeared in the village wearing hats and glasses and armed with binoculars and pencils and paper and briefcases and strange instruments that, it would later transpire, were to be used to register the place.
After many hours spent measuring and remeasuring the length and breadth and depth of the valley, shouting complicated calculations back and forth, endlessly purifying the local water, which their blood still rejected, and physically forcing their throats to breathe, a humiliation that put them at a distinct disadvantage, as their leader was quick to recognise, the outsiders finally stopped what they were doing and deigned to look at the locals. The villagers stared back astonished at the strangers who physically thinned before their eyes.
Their leader, a man in a black bowler hat, went back to his sums and multiplications, all the while dabbing sweat from his brow with a green-and-red-checked handkerchief larger than the tablecloths in the village tavern. Clearly inconvenienced by the manifold discomforts he was having to contend with, but determined to display all the airs and graces of a man recently promoted from steward to supervisor, he turned to the nearest villager and asked him the name of the place.
Anticipating an answer, the man in the bowler hat took a big red pencil out of his pocket and stood, hopping from one foot to the other, poised to register the village’s name on a sheet of paper that had been divided into seventy-five lines and covered in figures, many of them adorned with flourishes, including a zero with a serif on its head.
The villager he’d asked showed no sign of having heard the question and remained as pointedly silent and aloof as his companions. Their group had swelled in number, new arrivals having appeared from every direction, and they all now turned towards the midwife of the time, an old-old lady who lounged half-asleep, her body no longer caring to distinguish between vice and virtue.
After a few moments of personal reflection, and without interrupting his fight with the local mosquito population that had chosen him as its official blood donor, the man in the bowler hat turned to the midwife and posed the question again. His tone this second time round was, if not afraid then somewhat wary, on account of the frosty demeanour of the locals and the abrasive heat coming out of the ground, which obliged him to keep changing his standing foot lest the tender soles of his city shoes be fried.
The sense of confusion among the locals was understandable: it had never occurred to them that their unassuming home might warrant a name, nor had the place ever asked to be identified.
Anyone practised in the science of reading minds and souls in lesser-known regions would have recognised the look in the villagers’ eyes as one of anguish and noticed the way in which, upon hearing the presumptuous question for a second time, they edged closer to the midwife. The old-old lady herself was huddled up against her god-daughter, indeed practically fused to her. The girl stood as tall and strong as a marble column, static to the point of not even swatting away the three bees that had decided to make fun of her in front of the strangers.
The midwife moved the saliva around in her mouth and spat a gob of dehydrated spittle on to the ground. Her fellow villagers, watching her intently, inched a third-of-a-step closer, establishing a clear gap between themselves and the men with the strange implements.
The villagers would struggle to describe these implements to future generations, but it would eventually come to light that they were responsible for developments that shook the village to its very foundations, a chain of events that began in earnest when one of the rocks with a hard shell and a soft core escaped from the crags and fell into the wrong hands. How exactly this happened we will never know, because when the man with the wrong hands tried to explain himself, a violent pain took possession of his tongue, which having served him loyally for three dozen years now turned upside down and inside out and choked him. The man’s death certificate said he’d died after being poisoned by strange thoughts. No more than that.
The old-old lady midwife, whose name, like that of the village, had never been registered in any log book, ledger or courthouse, breathed deeply and steadily to a rhythm marked by her fellow citizens, drawing from each of them a little of the strength she needed to act in such a decisive moment. Her eyes bored a hole in the ground and she was clearly making more effort than there was energy in her frail body. She raised her head to the mountain for a brief moment that seemed to last an eternity, then closed her eyes and fell asleep.
When she awoke, from what the strangers took to be some kind of trance, she stated, in an assured voice that sounded very much like, in fact identical to the voice the madwoman used to howl on moonless nights, that the village was named Serrano.
The word, which meant ‘highland’ in the local language, reverberated powerfully in the villagers’ heads. Placing hands on hearts, they repeated it for hours on end, and were joined by the mountain, the wind, the river, the leaves in the trees, the spring and the other springs, and the animals of air, land and sea, until the name Serrano had become engraved on every living thing, and on every non-living thing besides.
The madwoman watched for a while, then turned her back on the proceedings. Little is known of village affections, but it’s said that for at least five days after being christened, the newly-named Serranoans treated the madwoman as one of their own. Then, moved by who knows what fancy, they repudiated her once more, though not before they’d crowned her the Madwoman of Serrano.
The assembled crowd, which by now numbered forty-nine, turned with a look of defiance to face the government officials from the capital. Yes, government officials from the capital, the men with instruments could hardly have been anything else given their contemptuous attitude. The officials took a step back, or a hop back, for they were still all standing on one leg, fearful that the transformation of the hillbilliesbecome-highlanders would continue and that a previously timid and helpless people might turn violent. The city men had no wish to meet their end so far away from home at the hands of barbarians who likely had no notion of what a funeral was.
Such concerns were muttered rather than raised, but one of the officials, sensing an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the boss, began a small speech hailing his leadership and, in his enthusiasm, took three steps backwards, thus isolating himself from the rest of the group. Alarmed by the distance that now separated him from his colleagues, he rushed back to join them, declaring that he’d seen no sign of a cemetery on his travels. The man in the bowler hat duly ordered a retreat, promising that his report to his superiors would clearly state that the next time they were sent to such a godforsaken place they would need a police escort, for the locals were savages and could not be trusted, indeed they constituted a visible threat not only to the lives of the officials, loyal servants of the realm, but to the success of a project that would benefit everyone, not least in terms of kickbacks. ‘That bit’s not for writing down, you idiot,’ he shouted at a fat man intent on registering his boss’ every last word, sniffle and breath.
Over the next few days all other activity was forgotten and it became a rather pathetic sight to see every woman and man in the village repeating ‘Serrano’ from morning until night, as if there was nothing more to life than the pleasure of chewing over that word.
A century or so later, the young woman who’d lent her madness and voice to the midwife in christening the place told Loja about the episode and he, pleased to have been spoken to in confidence by someone he esteemed, said that the villagers’ reaction to their being named showed they were perhaps not so different from other people after all.
In their excitement, however, the villagers forgot to ask the civil servants what they’d come for. It was only many years later that they found out, when another group came on a similar mission, this one benefiting from a military guard, though just the one soldier to protect the clerk whose duty it was to inform the villagers that the valley had been chosen for works that were deemed vital to regional development and national security. The Serranoans didn’t understand, but after showing some initial concern, they soon forgot the matter, dismissing it as an accident of history. For a start, the word nation meant nothing to them. The city men who’d obliged them to name their village were as foreign to them as people living on the other side of the planet. The villagers and the visitors had nothing in common, for even if they spoke the same language, the version the city men employed was difficult to understand. No, the whole business of their coming merely confirmed that the villagers were better off staying as far away from other people as possible.
They made a minor exception for the pedlars in order to trade, but kept them at arm’s length and sent them away as soon as their deals were done, feeling no need to be pleasant about it. When discussing such matters amongst themselves, the women sometimes questioned this hostility. They couldn’t put their fingers on why, but they felt less inclined than the men to celebrate the singularity of Serrano, a place that could go dozens of decades without adding so much as a comma to its annals and where history repeated itself to the loop of the sun and the moon, as if stuck in a time warp.
Deep down the women hoped that some of the things the pedlars said happened elsewhere might reach Serrano and shake up their lives. For this and for other reasons, they made the most of any chance encounters they had with the pedlars, on the way to the spring or on other thoroughfares, satisfying their curiosities and nourishing their dreams in exchange for a few meaningless gestures the foreigners seemed to like, or even love.
The men of the village knew nothing of hunger, epidemics, war or pollution, but they were also ignorant of the stimulation that came with formulating a new thought. They were alive, but they were neither happy nor sad, fat nor thin, tall nor short, hairy nor bald, and their smiles must have been buried in the darkest depths of their consciousness, for they were never put on display, despite their healthy white teeth, believed to be a consequence of the spring water, as other characteristics proved to be.
Nevertheless, life still regularly took the Serranoans by surprise, for anything out of the ordinary tended to confound them and prompt pompous talk of humility. The arrival of uniformed clerks to gather the names of conscripts, for example, a curse that befell the village a few years after the appearance of the men with the binoculars. The draftsmen came every year after that, bringing the same misfortune every time and reminding everyone of the old-old lady midwife who’d died when the city men first came and demanded a name. No sooner had she pronounced the word Serrano than she’d keeled over, as if her every thought and feeling in life had been building up to that moment, a sacred climax of christening and disembodiment.
It had taken several women to carry the midwife away, so heavy had her body become. She was taken up the mountain, as tradition dictated, from where she would continue on her final journey. The procession up the mountain took three whole days, for the climb was steep and most of the cortège preferred to rest at night, and because the coffin grew heavier by the day.
The Madwoman of Serrano had another explanation for why funerals took place up the mountain and lasted for as long as they did. Being confronted with death was disarming to the living for it reminded them that they were in limbo, awaiting the inevitable. Death entering their midst thus caused them to embrace life wholeheartedly, mingling during ceremonies in which men had no wives and women had no husbands, indeed bodies had no owners, they were mere vessels, unnamed and unidentified, of undefined origin, species and fate, and through this outpouring of creative energy they sought to tame the valley’s forces and gain some control over what the future held.
The real reason funerals were held on far-flung mountain slopes was that three days of walking allowed for three nights of merrymaking, or so the madwoman claimed. She told of a time when a year went by and then another and then ten and still nobody had died, until one night some of the villagers, the most desperate and depraved, or at least the most nostalgic for funeral services, resolved to kill a man, arguing that he hadn’t eaten or spoken for five hours and ought to be put out of his misery and given the burial he, and of course they, so richly deserved.
The old-old lady midwife, still alive at the time, learned of the villagers’ criminal intentions and called an emergency meeting where it was decided that as well as celebrating funerals due to natural causes there would be three annual excursions to the cemetery to visit graves and perform rituals everyone knew the nature of.
With unfathomable speed, lest the midwife change her mind, the leader of the nostalgics said everything was ready, not least a generous supply of the sugar and acid brew that was drunk at funerals, for the first pilgrimage to begin immediately. The first official day of the dead duly got under way.
Thus unknown forces, channelled through the midwife, who only spoke in public under extreme circumstances, managed to prevent a murder that would have undoubtedly been the first of many.
This is the story of Serrano, but it is also the story of Jerónimo, born a long-long time after the village was christened, a child of one of its twenty-nine families, which were really thirteen all told, bloods having mixed and drops splashed here and there to the point that there was a hint of everyone in everybody and people were routinely referred to as the son of the neighbour’s stepfather’s godmother and so forth. This practice wasn’t reserved for humans, but applied to anything that came into being in Serrano, perhaps the runt of the pedigree sow traded for a billy goat three rains past, or the frying pan made from a lump of iron taken from a particular spot, which might have looked like any other frying pan to the untrained eye. Labels, in other words, chosen to reinforce lineage or establish relationships between things, or sometimes just to satisfy the whim of the midwife.
The midwife would scoop up a newborn in the hollows of her hands, open the door to her house and hold the baby up to the dim light of the valley and to the villagers gathered outside. So began Jerónimo’s story.
Like all males in Serrano, he was registered by a civil servant from the nearest town, located several dozen miles away, and immediately informed of the day and hour his military service would commence.
When the time came, off he went. He loved city life and thought he would like to remain in the capital when his military service was complete, only to betray this ambition the moment he had to make a decision about it. Young and naive, he had no sense of willpower and succumbed to other demands and pressures, or perhaps not even succumbed, just settled for the life that was expected of him, a slave to the village and its obscure customs.
Unlike her predecessors, the midwife who delivered Jerónimo had but a short-lived reign, turbulent from start to finish. This left its mark on the generation she brought into the world, which proved singularly incapable of improving its lot, a phenomenon international specialists have felt compelled to study, albeit without coming to any conclusions, despite their use of sophisticated computers and crystal balls.
Jerónimo’s midwife succeeded one who disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Some say she suffered an accident after drinking too much water on a particularly hot afternoon, a day when the blood in her veins boiled and the hair on her head, and everywhere else, prickled unbearably. Screaming with thirst, she took it upon herself to play firewoman, a profession that had been outlawed in Serrano ever since a pigeon flew into a wildfire and spread a delicious smell of barbecued bird throughout the valley.
The Madwoman of Serrano, however, claimed the woman committed suicide by drowning herself in grog. Nobody sought to contradict the madwoman, for there were special funeral rites for suicides, extra commemorations and a day off for the men if the deceased was male, and for the women if she was female. Curiously, this was the only form of public holiday the Serranoans observed, and if they didn’t try to encourage more people to take their own lives it was only because they lacked the imagination to do so.
Jerónimo was made a man by the midwife, as tradition dictated, but not by the same midwife who’d presided over his birth thirteen years and nine months earlier. Instead he was initiated by a midwife formerly known as Gregória, who began her tenure on the very same moonless, cricketless, breezeless night that she defiled him.
This is the story of Serrano and Jerónimo, but also of Genoveva, a woman who turned forty-six without knowing much of what will be recounted here. She had lost her memories, many of them painful, and though she tried hard to recover them, they were buried too deeply. Then one stormy night, a strong wind blew her into an unfamiliar neighbourhood and brought countryside smells that reminded her of a spring she’d once known.
It is also the story of the young woman who helped the midwife christen the village and knew all of its secrets, secrets that have found their way into this narrative by means we cannot reveal. No man, woman, outlaw or beast would claim her for a child, adopt her as a daughter or make her a woman, and so she took her revenge by cursing every living creature in the valley, everything that had conspired against her and everyone who called her the Madwoman of Serrano.
Using unknown arts, she would disappear, or at least vanish from the land of the living, at the age of thirty-three, having seen all she wished to see and heard all she needed to hear. She would reappear again aged nine, belonging to no one, of no fixed time or abode, both woman and child.
This is also the story of Filipa, and how she got her name, which her grandmother claimed to be the result of a pledge the girl’s father had made to his favourite saint, San Martin, one fine morning that turned into several days of wailing and anguish over a birth believed premature. Filipa spent the best part of her infancy in the grip of silence and, even after her tongue broke loose, she refused to give voice to certain sides of her womanhood.
It is a story, then, like many others, of an unknown time and place, of everywhere and of always, a story in which women and men are crushed by too much beauty or, more commonly, too much cruelty.