The weather invited a night of home comforts or a trip to the gym to face the cruel schemes of her fitness instructor. Filipa tested her mood by putting on her tracksuit, but felt as listless as a stagnant pond. She changed into her warm, petrol-blue nightie and peeked through the curtains at the square below. Not a soul. She collapsed on to the sofa and switched on the TV. Making herself comfortable, she reached out for a bowl of dried fruit, forgotten for the rest of the year but restored to dignity every Christmas. She set her alarm for the morning, just in case, and prepared to lose herself in some action film. It was the only way she knew to escape her thoughts, which streamed in relentlessly, affording her no respite, distracting her from her routine and disrupting her plans. She refused to believe her anxiety was just tiredness brought on by the Christmas period: she was in good shape and accustomed to an intense workload. If anything she’d slowed down over the last year, able to trust in a team that continued to surpass itself in upholding the company’s hard-won reputation. Her hotel now accounted for a significant share of the local hospitality market.
She tried to relax, rolling her shoulders, brushing her hand through her cropped hair and shifting position. She told herself the film would soon work its magic and bring her racing mind to a halt. But she couldn’t settle. After unsuccessfully rearranging herself one more time, she was forced to admit that the events on screen were not holding her attention. With every new scene she felt more distant from the action and closer to her own thoughts, which crowded in with no regard for her well-being.
She felt defenceless, as if a door had blown open and allowed unwelcome guests to march in and occupy her head. People she’d stood up to hundreds of times before who were now hell-bent on revenge.
She also knew it would be an exaggeration to attribute her sense of unrest to a bout of emotional instability. She felt none of the suffocating anguish that usually preceded her slumps, which were thankfully rare, but could leave her panic-stricken and send her crashing to the floor, or even deeper, half-a-metre below ground, trapped and silenced.
The first time she’d felt that way was when she was pregnant. Feeling faint and hypersensitive, she’d waited until the pressure became unbearable before going to see the specialist. The mild temperature in the consultation room contrasted with the aggressive cold outside. As they prodded her belly, which had been like a barrel for months, all she could think of was whether she’d ever go back to being the agile and intrepid girl she’d once been. Her foster mother, sitting beside her, interrupted her thoughts to say, in her infinite wisdom, that a child was a blessing from God. Filipa, nineteen at the time, had struggled to accept she was pregnant, let alone work out how a child could fit in with her future plans. She left the clinic none the wiser, for no sooner had she started to formulate these thoughts than the anaesthetic kicked in, plunging her into deepest solitude.
That was thirteen years ago. Looking back, Filipa wondered what her foster mother had got out of this ‘blessing from God’.
Gunfire snapped her back to the here and now, or rather to the present world of the film.
The extra demands of the Christmas season usually inspired Filipa and brought out the best in her, or at least the perfectionist in her. Being very busy was like climbing a mountain and finding it easier to spot and snuff out danger from the top.
Garcia used to say, in the first and only years of their short-lived marriage, that the harder things got the more beautiful she became. He said the more her blood pumped the less she looked like the Statue of Contemplation, a private joke that referred to a ‘work of art’ they’d been given by a young architecture student in exchange for a weekend at their guest house.
Filipa adjusted her position on the sofa and turned the volume on the TV up extra loud.
She knew that after a while she’d stopped responding to her husband’s jokes, indeed she’d stopped reacting to provocations from anyone. What Garcia had failed to realise was that Filipa’s supposed cold-bloodedness, what people took to be her way of dealing with the challenges of running a business, was really the powerlessness she felt in the face of certain aspects of her life, things she couldn’t just put off or file away because they were as important to her as her career. She’d never told her husband that it took her a long time to be able to express her emotions, and he’d never teased open the more private side of her character, perhaps because he was incapable of opening up himself, perhaps because they hadn’t spent enough time together to truly earn each other’s trust. In the end, Garcia had been a temporary resident in her life. She was just grateful he hadn’t taken more of her with him when he left.
Deep down, she knew what this agitation was about. She’d postponed making certain decisions for too long and now she was facing the consequences. She was bad at dealing with stress unless it was work-related, she concluded, taking a handful of nuts. She’d become accustomed to putting off things that didn’t threaten her immediate survival or that of her business and thus got used to swimming in a false sea of tranquillity, pretending she’d attained a positive work-life balance.
December, Christmas and the dawn of a new year always raised tensions and expectations. The last two months of the year were always filled with events, but whereas Filipa usually hosted them or took part with a fair amount of enthusiasm, this year she found herself questioning people’s unthinking devotion to dates, occasions, markers and company.
She observed these celebrations for the same reasons everyone else did, but also to forget a childhood that had been shaped by silence. She lived her life in a whirlwind, the better to distract herself, but the chaos also prevented her from ever truly knowing herself and those around her. Her own life sometimes seemed so remote to her that she had the impression she must be getting very old.
She let her right hand slip under her body and move instinctively down from her chest to where it felt warmest against the leather of the sofa. When it found the desired spot it lingered there until her body filled with comforting sensations.
She tried again to concentrate on the film, which appeared to be some kind of detective story, but her efforts to grasp what the actors were saying and recall the previous scene were in vain. She gave up. She let the film run, but focused on her own train of thought. New Year’s Eve was fast approaching, there was no way of stopping it. Events would run their course and she had to be prepared to accept whatever happened, no matter the consequences.
A few more years and it would be the end of the century. A few years after that and it would be the end of her life. But what if there was no real end? What if she just fell asleep one day and never woke up, how would she know how her life had ended? What if her life ended now? If it did, could anything really be said to have happened in it?
She was off again, all pensive and pretentious. Why was she so ready to analyse everything around her yet so ignorant about her own life? How much can people ever really know about themselves?
She was preaching to herself when no one had asked her for a sermon. Besides, she knew full well that this kind of thinking was only ever an attempt to boost the ego or seek some advantage. Either that or it was just idle, aimless musing. Why waste time seeking hidden meaning for what she did and who she was? Why feel compelled to tie up the loose ends in her life instead of just living it?
She hated this sort of thinking, it reminded her of the hotel porter and his pseudo-philosophical sayings. She refused to indulge in self-reflection; it was a waste of time and she had better things to do, like running the business that she and several other people relied on for their livelihoods. If she needed to feel better about herself there were plenty of happy memories she could turn to. But this troubled her. She tried to avoid making assumptions about her past or her future. Thirteen years ago her therapist had helped her to regain enough self-confidence to get through each day, and Filipa had promised to take better care of her feelings, which she was never comfortable sharing.
Filipa dragged her thoughts back to the present and the coming festivities. She didn’t just want the hotel’s New Year’s Eve party to be special, she wanted it to be completely unlike the usual mix of music and fancy dress - ‘and false laughter and faint praise,’ added a petulant voice inside her head.
This year’s party would be very different anyway, because she’d been putting it off for years, waiting for all the ingredients to come together to make it an unforgettable night. Now everything was ready and the big day loomed. The big day. Without exploring the many obscure and obvious reasons why she was doing it, she’d staked all her happiness on one day, one throw of the dice on December 31st that could condemn her to starting all over again or declaring her case closed, each outcome as painful as the other. But if the worst did happen, it wouldn’t be the first time she’d had to pick herself up after a fall, nor would it be the last, nor was she the only person these things happened to. Every twenty-four hours the day and night by turns fell away, and millions of souls were dragged down with them.
‘That’s life,’ as the hotel porter would say. Every morning when she entered the building he jumped up to call the lift, then regaled her with his latest wisdom and the neighbourhood gossip. He was remarkably well-informed for someone who hardly ever left his post.
Waiting for the lift was his time. But what about her? When would her time come? She was almost thirty-three; she deserved her one big day. She’d waited so long, invested every last hope in it. She thought of the Madwoman of Serrano, who died when she turned thirty-three only to be immediately reborn, nobody knew where, and reappear in the valley aged nine, just when people had started to forget about her.
Filipa remembered sitting with the madgirl by the spring one day. Filipa saw a dead fish and started to cry, but her friend said there was no suffering in death. Life was much more painful, she said, especially when you lived a life you hadn’t been destined to live, like she did. She’d had a curse put on as a newborn baby when, still in her caul, she’d been flying to her new home under a new moon and been interrupted in her journey by a man.
When Filipa had eventually left the village, the madgirl, more disturbed than ever, told her that one day she would be happy; that hundreds of moons would have to pass and great obstacles would have to be overcome, but she would find her place. Filipa still didn’t know whether the madgirl had been talking about herself or about Filipa.
Filipa had tried to forget her friend, as she’d managed to forget so many other people and events, but forgetting the Madwoman of Serrano had proved impossible.
The image of the girl came to her now on the sofa, so vivid it made her shiver. Were these real memories or something else? Filipa scanned the room, unafraid, seeking signs that her friend had been there. All she noticed was a faint scent of the countryside. She breathed it in as deeply as her lethargy would allow, bathed her insides with it and told herself it came from the houseplant she kept in the corner. Come to think of it, she should buy fertiliser: she’d seen some advertised in a brochure that came through the door.
‘Where will my place be?’ she wondered, trying to get a grip on her thoughts, which were still coming thick and fast.
She had tried to find it. She’d eased off in her search over the past decade, mortgaging her life and curtailing her rebellious spirit, but she was giving it everything now, throwing caution to the winds, determined to succeed.
The idea of success suddenly gave her pause for thought. Why did it always seem to be tinged with sadness, as if success and sadness were two sides of the same coin? Triumph for someone meant defeat for someone else. There was no great sense in framing her current concerns in this way, but it was true that past triumphs had left her with a bitter taste. These were thoughts she kept to herself, lest they tarnish the image she’d built of herself.
She thought about her father. Why had she lost him? Why did he always get the sad side of the coin? Who was the woman who’d left him feeling so devastated? He’d told Filipa about the woman one day, about how much he loved her, pouring out his heart in a mixture of joy and pain, convinced she couldn’t understand him because she couldn’t speak herself. His love was the desperate kind, the love of a man who’d chosen solitude as his means of dealing with unfulfilled emotions. He’d hugged Filipa tight when he finished, apologising profusely in a flurry of unfinished sentences.
Filipa’s first seven years were her main point of emotional reference. Anything that happened after that was a mere appendage. There were important things, cherished and bitter memories, but they lacked the force of the events that had shaped her childhood.
She’d never told her father how much she loved him. At first her voice was imprisoned, then when it was set free she hadn’t felt she needed to say it, that it would be enough to direct the first words she’d ever said to anyone at him. Jerónimo. The first man in her life. There hadn’t been many; very few people in general had entered her life. If someone were to look back on it one day, the way she was looking back on it now, they wouldn’t have much to go on. They’d say: ‘Filipa was a woman.’ Oh, if only they would! They’d more likely say: ‘Filipa was an unrepentant hard worker who achieved a modicum of success through sheer bloodymindedness.’ But she’d failed as a woman. She had no scars, no unforgettable moments, no grand love affairs, no roller-coaster romances that raced through heaven and hell towards death or new life. Or new lives. She didn’t feel like a failure, it wasn’t that, but all she’d done as a female was give birth, and even then she’d experienced none of the labour pains that were said to rip through a woman’s insides, nor had the sharp stiletto of childbirth sliced through her and marked her for life.
Her foster mother had been at her side when the doctor put her under. They pulled the baby girl out from inside her and nobody noticed when she came round and forgot to ask after her child. She learned later that most gestures were just manufactured rituals anyway.
The living room became filled with Serrano; its lives and livelihoods, its people and their secrets. These were the truths and lies that comprised Filipa’s life so far.
Jerónimo had never stopped working. He busied himself from morning until night, day in, day out, as if he could block out his troubles through work, or as if he would never find what he was looking for if he stopped for even a moment. Maybe he was looking for the woman, Filipa’s mother. Who could tell?
Sometimes he didn’t go to the fields but stayed at home and tried to mend bits of junk in the backyard. Filipa would then be by his side. One day he said: ‘There’s nothing your father likes more than working with motors and scrap.’ Then he went quiet, regretting having articulated such a thought, as if the fields might hear and punish him for it.
If Filipa followed him when he went to the fields, he slowed down when she got tired or stopped when she needed a rest, and then he would tell her things, without expecting a response. The characters in his stories were always called Fernanda, Filipa and Jerónimo. Perhaps there were others, but after all these years these three were the only ones she remembered. He also told stories about Serrano, though when it came to tales of the village she preferred listening to the women. They paid no attention to her, believing her incapable of following the conversations they had amongst themselves or with the pedlars. In this way, without anyone realising, Filipa acquired a vast amount of information, which was later confirmed or refuted by the young madwoman, who would also have been listening, hidden among the trees or behind some rocks.
The film’s closing music started to blare. Filipa switched off the TV. The countryside smell was gone, the smell of the Madwoman of Serrano.