‘Open it,’ she said.
‘Nicanora, what is this?’
‘Open it,’ she said again.
Don Bosco stood looking at the box and then removed the lid and peered inside. It was full of dollar notes.
‘Where did you get this from?’
‘The Gringito.’
‘He gave it to you?’
‘Yes, for staying here.’
‘But Nicanora,’ Don Bosco said, ‘this is a fortune. Why would he give you all this money?’
‘Ernesto said it’s what he would pay to stay in a hotel in Puerta de la Coruña. He wanted to come here and as there is no hotel, he wants to pay me. There is nothing wrong with that,’ she said, unable to remove the haughtiness from her voice.
‘Are you telling me the truth, Nicanora?’ Don Bosco asked.
‘Why would I lie to you?’ she said, shocked that he would not trust her.
‘What are you planning to do with it?’
‘I want you to have it,’ she said.
‘Me? Why? Why would I want it?’
‘I have been saving it. For you. That’s why I invited you to lunch. I wanted to ask you …’ and she stopped, terrified that what she would say next would cut through the unspoken cord of affection that had existed between them for so many years, and yet unable to stop herself now that the moment had arrived.
‘Ask me what, Nicanora?’ he said, catching his breath, uncertain of what his eyes were seeing and his heart was feeling.
‘I would like to buy your shop,’ she said at last. The words clattered to the floor like painted pebbles.
‘You want to buy my shop?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Don Bosco, twenty years ago you offered me a share in your shop, and I refused you. I now want to ask you whether you would consider selling it to me, so that you can retire and enjoy your life.’
‘You want me to take this money so that you can take my shop from me?’
‘No, Don Bosco, it is not like that,’ she replied. ‘I want you to have this money so that you can be free to follow your dreams.’
‘I have no dreams, Nicanora,’ he replied. ‘They left me years ago. My head is an empty vessel filled with shaving cream and nothing more. And you, what do you want to do with my shop?’
‘I want to sell hats,’ she said. ‘I want to sell grand elegant hats like the ladies in the city wear. I want to make the plaza a centre of beauty. I want people to flock here from all over the province to buy hats more beautiful than they ever imagined. You know they say there is a hat for every dream, Don Bosco. I want to fill our town with dreams.’
He looked at her and saw again the impetuous young woman who had stolen his hope from him, and felt an almost uncontrollable need to take her in his arms and hold her and cover her with kisses. He wanted to tell her that it would be all right, he would do whatever she wanted just so that she would die a happy woman after a life of false starts and missed opportunities. Instead he said, ‘A grand plan indeed. But where will you find such hats and who will buy them, Nicanora?’
‘Times are changing, Don Bosco,’ she said sharply. ‘We have the Gringito here and he’s brought money. We can get more of them where he came from. Even the mayor has plans now for the town and our Gringito can help him.’
Don Bosco was shocked by the harshness of her words. ‘Don’t tell me you’re now supporting that man; the man whose family has drained our town dry for generations? Have you been selling your soul as well as your floor?’ he said with unintended bitterness.
‘What do you have against the mayor?’ Nicanora asked, defiant as the brief hope that had flickered between them was snuffed out. ‘Why do you dislike him so much? Why don’t you have the courage to do something about it, to get rid of him if you don’t trust him? Take this money. You can be free to do whatever you want, you won’t have to work any more.’
‘I don’t want your money,’ Don Bosco said, and for the first time Nicanora heard real anger in his voice. ‘This is wrong, Nicanora, you don’t know where this Gringito got it from, or what he wants. I won’t take money from you, your Gringito or any other wandering soul who decides to make their home in our town. But I will give you my shop.’
‘You’ll give me your shop?’ she said, astonished.
‘Yes. On one condition,’ he said.
‘What condition is that?’ she asked, half anticipating, half hoping for the proposal that had been made so many years ago.
‘Make sure nothing bad happens to our town.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Nicanora said. ‘All I want to do is sell hats. Why are you saying that to me?’
‘Because, Nicanora,’ he said, ‘you have a gift. You know you have. Use it.’
‘What are you talking about, Don Bosco?’ she said in a whisper, her breath taken from her.
‘You have a gift, Nicanora,’ he said again. ‘I have always believed in you, when nobody else has, you must know that. I think the time might be coming when you will need to use it. Keep an eye on our town is all I ask.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, laughing off her fear and shame. He made to go and then looked back one last time.
‘Nicanora,’ he said. ‘You must have known that if you wanted my shop, all you have ever had to do was ask and I would have gladly given it to you. There is one more condition on which I give it to you now. That you call me Pepito as you once did.’ And he turned and walked away. She looked at his pink-and-blue stripy back retreating from her and felt lonelier than she ever had before.
Twelve
At the age of eighteen, a few months before she met Francisco, Nicanora was struck by lightning. She knew nothing about it until she woke in a darkened room two days later with her mother bending over her, asking her if she could tell her what would happen next week. Nicanora, without a moment’s hesitation, and with no understanding of the significance of the question, sat up in bed, eyes wide open, and said: ‘On Monday there will be showers. On Tuesday light winds will strengthen throughout the day to become stormy gusts by the afternoon. The winds will be so strong that Doña Felicia’s knickers will be blown across the plaza and come to rest on the roof of the church. On Wednesday the rains will start again. The water will seep under the kitchen door and all precautions should be taken not to leave any items on the floor that could be damaged.’ She then looked at her mother and asked, ‘Where am I, what happened?’, lay down, and fell asleep for another two days.
The lightning attack left burns down Nicanora’s right arm that with the careful application of her mother’s herbal ointments slowly healed, leaving only a darkened hint of misfortune on her skin. The effect of her uncannily accurate weather forecast left her with a deeper scar that she would spend many years trying to conceal.
‘You have a gift,’ her mother came home and informed her the following Tuesday afternoon, having just seen Doña Felicia’s underwear take flight across town and ingloriously lodge itself on the corner of the cross of the Church of the Virgin of the Swamp. ‘And if my underwear was as grey and torn as hers, I’m sure I wouldn’t have hung it out to dry in the first place,’ her mother added as an uncharitable afterthought to the announcement that her daughter’s auspicious survival had left her blessed by the ancestors. For several months following the incident, Nicanora’s mother set her daughter a series of surreptitious tests to assure herself that the gift had truly been imparted.
‘I wonder how much I will earn in the market next week?’ her mother said absent-mindedly while peeling the potatoes, and before Nicanora had control of her senses her mouth replied, ‘Next week will be a good one, you will earn at least fifty pesos a day. Be sure to get to the market early on Wednesday, as a travelling salesman will be passing through and will give you a good price for your oranges.’
Casual remarks from her mother such as, ‘What should I wear tomorrow?’ were enough to provoke an insightful warning from her daughter: ‘I’d wear your new pink blouse, even though you are o
nly going to the market, because by next week it will be ruined after falling from the washing line and being eaten by the goat.’
Despite her lack of control over her spontaneous predictions, Nicanora refused to listen to her mother’s insistence that she was destined to become the town’s next soothsayer and thereby fill a lucrative gap in the market that had been left by the untimely death of the old fortune-teller, Doña Nicolesa.
‘You should set up a stall in the plaza,’ her mother told her. ‘People need to be able to hear it for themselves.’
‘I’m not going to turn into an old hag like Doña Nicolesa,’ Nicanora argued. ‘She only told the future to earn money because she was too ugly to get married. Anyway, what good did it do her? It didn’t stop her drowning in the swamp.’
‘So, even a fortune-teller can have an off day,’ her mother retorted. ‘And since when have you been so proud that you are too good to tell fortunes? And don’t speak ill of the dead or they will come back to haunt you, and mark my words the last person you want haunting you for the rest of your life is Nicolesa.’
The more her mother insisted that she had been blessed with the power of the ancestors the more Nicanora struggled to suppress her predictive insights. It took an enormous degree of self-control to hold her tongue and not provide passing strangers with a full weather forecast for the following month, or offer her neighbour a warning not to walk across the plaza on Tuesday morning as she would slip on a piece of rotting vegetation and sprain her ankle. Her efforts to remain firmly attached to the present were still not enough to prevent her mother’s ambitions from getting out of hand.
‘You could be a wealthy woman, if only you would apply yourself,’ her mother scolded. ‘People came from miles to see Doña Nicolesa, that’s how she could afford to wear a new shawl every day. If you could just tell people something useful, they would come flocking to you.’ And that was the problem: no matter how long Nicanora sat in a darkened room asking important questions such as where she would travel to or who she would marry and whether she would be a rich woman, the answers would come back blank, a void, denying her expectation.
She began to see some sense in what her mother was saying. If she really was able to develop her gift she could use it to plan her escape from her backwater home. She could become anybody and anything that she wanted to be. She embarked on a concentrated programme, secretly trying to hone her skills. Sitting by the edge of the swamp, away from watchful eyes, she would burn offerings to the ancestors in the hope this would make them give her some useful pieces of information on which to build her future. ‘Tell me, knowledgeable Mother,’ she would mutter as she burned leaves and sweets and poured alcohol on the ground to loosen the tongues of the dead, ‘how should I find a rich man to marry? Where will I live and what will I be doing in ten years’ time? And what, after all, is the meaning of life?’ The more profound the question, the more banal the response she received. After a furious argument with her mother one day, Nicanora fled to the swamp, poured in two bottles of aguardiente for good measure and then screamed at her ancestors, ‘Please, please tell me something useful. Is there any hope for me? Will I ever leave this rotting, stinking place?’ The request was met with a clear response: on Tuesday her mother had better take care of her oranges as a freak wind would whip up a minor tornado and wreak havoc in the market, making her fruit fly across the street and land in her neighbour’s cauldron of fish soup. It wasn’t the answer that Nicanora wanted or expected. She wondered momentarily whether feeding her ancestors two neat bottles of aguardiente before asking such an important question had been a good idea. In the end she had to face the truth. She had been blessed with the power to foresee the completely inconsequential, with a particular talent for accurate weather prediction.
Nicanora stormed home possessed of a fury the like of which she had never experienced before, fuelled by her ancestors’ refusal to tell her anything remotely useful. She had made her decision. She was going to bury her gift and her mother’s ambitions for her as a teller of mundane and banal fortunes once and for all.
‘You’re right,’ she told her mother, ‘I do have a gift and it is time that I proved it to all the gossips in the market and beyond.’ She borrowed her mother’s brightest shawl and an old crate that she used for packing her fruit and by six o’clock the following morning had set up a makeshift stall in the middle of the plaza. Above her head wavered a huge sign made out of a piece of rotting cardboard that she had mounted on a stick and on which she had scrawled: Nicanora’s predictions for the future – what everyone wants to hear. No matter is too small for my attention – weather forecasts a speciality. Her mother had been right about one thing at least: the town certainly had a predilection for fortune-telling. By lunchtime the queue for her predictions had reached twice round the plaza and was beginning to stretch up the hill. Nicanora also gained some insights into why her ancestors remained firmly committed to imparting trivia to her. If the questions asked by her fellow townsfolk were anything to go by, it was because they had never troubled themselves to think about anything else.
‘When will my goat give birth?’ was the first question asked by her neighbour. It took Nicanora enormous control not to reply accurately that this event would be delayed for yet another two weeks and would be a trouble-free affair. Instead, she told her neighbour to go home immediately and not leave her goat’s side as the event would be imminent, problematic and require her skilled attention to prevent her precious animal from dying.
‘When will my Aunt Lola make her next visit?’ asked another anxious neighbour, desperate to avoid the torrent of criticism that always accompanied the arrival of her relation at an unexpected hour in the middle of the night. ‘You have nothing to worry about for another three months,’ Nicanora reassured the exhausted woman as a vision of the tyrannical aunt making her way over the hill, ready to descend upon her well-meaning niece in the early hours of the next morning, appeared before her eyes.
‘Who will win the football championship?’ was the question on the tongues of most of the menfolk, who had recently set up an illicit betting club that met weekly beside the tree in front of the church, under the watchful eyes of the Virgin.
‘It will be Don Aurelio’s team, for sure,’ Nicanora told one gullible soul, while reassuring the next that his hunch that Don José’s Jaguars would walk away with the title of Champions of the Swamp was the right one and worth the investment of a great many pesos. The task of giving false predictions was far more exhausting than imparting the very real tittle-tattle that was beginning to pass through her head. What Nicanora hadn’t anticipated was that by inviting her neighbours to ask for her insights she had started to open her channel of communication with her ancestors, to the extent that she was becoming finely attuned to their continual quarrels. Nicanora began to be able to recognise individual voices, the loudest and most forceful of all belonging to her great-grandmother, Doña Alicia-Maria.
The story of the sad demise of her great-relation had been passed down the generations like a hideous family heirloom. Alicia-Maria had been born in a small, cold village in the mountains at a time when the tin mines were starting to clatter and boom. It was the same village that had been home to Nicanora’s mother for the first twenty years of her life until a handsome young man from the lowlands passed through the mines and swept her away to the swamps with the offer of love, warmth and exotic fruit. Since then, not a day had gone by when Nicanora’s mother had not bemoaned her impetuosity. ‘If only I had stayed where I belonged,’ she would mutter under her breath. ‘Women didn’t need to earn money where I come from. My mother got whatever she wanted for free. Milk, eggs, bread, she would go to the store and they would just give it to her. But here,’ she spat the words out, ‘everything is just money and work.’
‘If it was so wonderful there, why on earth did you drag us here to this godforsaken piece of rat-infested swamp?’ Nicanora asked.
‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that, yo
u ungrateful child,’ her mother snapped back. ‘Your father and I have always done what is best for you and your sisters, even though we sacrifice ourselves for you every day. For one thing, I didn’t want you to end up like poor Alicia-Maria.’ And so the story of the demise of Alicia-Maria would be retold, each time with a new embellishment demonstrating the dangers of the mines and the future that would have lain ahead of Nicanora, had her mother contented herself with being a miner’s wife.
Alicia-Maria had something of a passion for men. She was the godmother of many a riotous fiesta, and a local symbol of abundance and fertility, having given birth to fifteen children by the age of thirty-five, none of whom bore any resemblance to each other. Alicia-Maria had been taught by the missionaries that all men were equal in the eyes of God; taking a truly egalitarian approach to her pursuits, she considered any man fair game for her charms. Consequently she was adored by all the men in the neighbourhood, and despised by every woman within the twenty-mile radius of daily gossip. ‘You have to understand,’ Nicanora’s mother explained to her, ‘the mines are full of envy. There are people there who can make witchcraft with the devils that live deep in the caves.’ Nicanora would sit enthralled by the tales of devils and witchcraft that her mother would then relay to her in defence of her departure from the village.
Alicia-Maria, while providing a joyous interlude in the lives of many men, made her husband’s life a misery. She not only tormented him at home, but also shouted at him in public. Victor was a gentle man, and so completely bewitched by his wife’s womanly allure that he could refuse her nothing, not even his humiliation at being the only man in the town’s history to be sent out to fetch the eggs and milk on a regular basis. Victor would occasionally offer a mild protest against the unseemly challenge that carrying out such womanly tasks posed to his manhood. Alicia-Maria would respond with such enthusiastic confirmation that he was still a man where it mattered that he would forget his embarrassment and rush energetically from the bed to the market, brandishing a new shopping list.
Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop Page 12