Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop

by Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop (retail) (epub)

  ‘But, Lucia,’ she said, trying to find a defence for her husband’s behaviour, ‘you know he had to stay there all that time because he was suffering from a bout of the swamp fever. He couldn’t even get out of bed.’

  ‘I’m sure he couldn’t, swamp fever, and the company of two young sluts,’ Lucia said.

  ‘Oh, but Lucia,’ Gloria protested, ‘we have no proof of that. It’s just malicious gossip. Who could possibly have seen him there?’

  ‘Even the trees have eyes,’ was all Lucia would say on the topic.

  With the thoughts of the previous night in his mind, the mayor gazed at the mounds of paperwork on his desk, sat back in his chair and smiled to himself. His strategy to win back his wife’s affections had been executed with precision. He had resisted the urge to simply throw Lucia’s belongings out into street and demand that Gloria stop all her nonsense, unlock the door and let him back into the bedroom. Lucia’s influence had taken too firm a hold over his wife in his absence and he feared that unless he handled the situation with care, he might never have the house to himself again. It was imperative that Gloria should be the one to ask Lucia to leave.

  Unbeknown to Lucia, in the past few days he had started delivering little breakfast trays to his wife. Setting them on the floor outside the bedroom, he pushed love notes under the door to alert Gloria to their presence. The previous night, having built up the anticipation, he had made his approach. He had ensured that Lucia was dead to the world by slipping some sleeping pills into the evening cocoa taken to her by the maid. He then sat outside the bedroom and started whispering soft lovelorn murmurings at the door.

  ‘Are you there, my tender little peach?’ he sang.

  Gloria, who was sitting up in bed filing her nails at the time, at first thought she was hearing things, perhaps mice in the wardrobe. Over their long and tempestuous marriage, her husband had called her many things, but a tender little peach had never been one of them. She decided she would make a visit to the handsome doctor that Lucia had told her about, to have her ears looked at. The singing continued. She got up and moved towards the door.

  ‘My darling, my sweetheart. I can’t bear this any longer, I’m aching all over with my devotion to you,’ the voice continued. Gloria put her ear closer to the door as her husband’s eulogy floated into the room.

  ‘My darling, I’m wasting away. Please let me in and let me hold you close to me again, my soft little flower blossom.’ Gloria felt a tear well up in her eye.

  ‘My love,’ he continued, holding his aching back as he crouched by the door. ‘I know I’ve been a bad husband at times and a foolish man, but I’m falling apart.’

  He tried to move into a more comfortable position. As he did so, a muscle in his back, which had been slowly tightening after weeks of sleeping on his European ancestry, went ping. He slumped to the floor in agony. With no warning, he started to sob. He had no idea where the sobs had come from. He hadn’t even known that they had been bubbling in his heart, waiting to break out. Perhaps they were the result of the sudden pain in his back, perhaps of the growing tension he had been living under since his return home, or perhaps of the realisation that his life and marriage were a total disappointment to everyone involved.

  He had married Gloria on a whim. He had not wanted to marry at all, especially not at the age of nineteen. Doña Teresa had tricked him into it with creatively vindictive flair, to ensure that he would never leave the town. He had been brought up in the small but elegant coastal town of Manola, several weeks’ journey down river from the swamp in which he had languished for his adult life. His family had had high hopes for the young Rodriguez, the only boy out of their six children. His father, a respected lawyer, had devoted his life to establishing the family reputation in a town in which they were still considered to be relative newcomers, having lived there for only two generations. After many years of attending the right functions, wining and dining the appropriate people and having the most influential clients on his lists, he finally won his reward and was voted mayor, a position he had coveted.

  It was entirely expected that Rodriguez would follow in his father’s footsteps. Nobody had ever questioned the path his life would take. But the young Rodriguez did not choose his friends wisely. By the age of sixteen, he had taken to spending his evenings in the bars frequented by the sailors who came and went through the port. His parents, unaware of their son’s pastimes, were content with their delusion that he was reading legal statutes in the library. Instead, his studies were teaching him how to hold down impressive quantities of beer without falling over or throwing up, and he was beginning to be able to win beer-drinking competitions with a panache that impressed even the most hardened of sailors. It was during this time that he was introduced to the women who made their living in the little rooms at the backs of the bars. He felt more at ease in their presence than he had in the company of anyone for years. They listened to him, comforted him when he got maudlin, laughed when he cracked jokes, and asked nothing of him except a very reasonable payment, at a discounted student rate, for the pleasure of the comfort of their bodies at night.

  His father, unknown to him, was working on a plan to secure his son’s future, through marriage to the daughter of his influential and highly esteemed business partner. While Rodriguez was discovering the meaning of pleasure, his father was ensuring that his future, life and liberty were all neatly sewn up in a deal that would handsomely benefit both parties. Rodriguez had an inkling that something was afoot when the daughter of the business partner started to appear frequently at the house for afternoon tea. A pale, quiet, thoughtful young woman, she would look anxiously at her parents for approval every time she dared to open her mouth. After her visits, Rodriguez would disappear from the house, increasingly for several days at a time, seeking solace in the company of real women.

  It was during one of these absences that he managed to destroy his family’s reputation overnight. His father had fought and won his mayoral campaign under the banner of: Keep Manola pure: a town built on clean hearts and sound minds. As part of the purity campaign, his father had devised a plan to shut down all the brothels in the port area, which he considered a scourge on the town’s wholesome reputation, if not its income. A series of secret raids were planned with the police, to take place on a particular night, the police having taken advantage of the notice they had been given to warn their favourite madams to get the best girls out of town.

  On the day of the planned raid, one of the police officers, hearing that the mayor’s son was a frequent visitor to one of the targeted establishments on the list, sent word to the mayor to make sure Rodriguez was not on the premises that night. The mayor, outraged at the insinuation, went looking for his son among the law tomes in the library; but he was nowhere to be found. In growing fury, he decided to go to the brothel himself and remove Rodriguez before the raid took place. Unfortunately, the raid was brought forward two hours by the head of police, who was due to go on leave the following day and had a particularly early start planned. The mayor, who had gone to the brothel in disguise, was rounded up with all the other punters, having been caught in a room with a naked woman in the middle of an altercation with a young man. The police assumed it was a row between two regulars who had got their timings confused. Even more unfortunate for the mayor, the punter in the room next door was a journalist from the leading newspaper that had opposed his electoral campaign. The paper ran the story the following day with the headline: Hypocrisy governs Manola: Mayor caught with his trousers down.

  The next week, Rodriguez was sent away from the family home, to tend to the affairs of his widowed great-aunt in a town at the end of the world, where he could do no more damage to the family name. Rodriguez had at first gone willingly, prepared to ingratiate himself with his wealthy relative with the aim of inheriting her fortune, having been led to believe that she was unlikely to last the year out. More than thirty years on she looked exactly the same, and gave no signs of being inclin
ed to pass her fortune to anyone, least of all her great-nephew.

  Doña Teresa had introduced the mayor to Gloria during his first year in Valle de la Virgen. Gloria was a very flirtatious and fulsome young woman, and he had instantly felt at ease with her. His aunt had introduced her as the daughter of the neighbouring estate owner, and Rodriguez swiftly calculated that, if he played his cards right, he could be heir to most of the land in the province by the time the year was out. What his great-aunt failed to tell him, until the day after the wedding, was that Gloria’s father had played his own cards extremely badly. Having gambled his land away, he was desperately trying to marry off his daughters, who were becoming a drain on his dwindling resources and fragile nerves. What was more, Gloria was as good a match as any for the extravagant behaviour of her husband. And yet, over the years, despite all the failings of their lives and marriage, the mayor and his wife had found a way of accommodating each other, which at times was reassuring and comforting to both, and which, in brief moments of clarity, they recognised as love.

  It was the sobbing that did the trick. It was exactly what Gloria needed to hear. Suddenly the mayor heard the lock click. The bedroom door opened slowly and an eye peeped through the crack. With the swiftness of a cat bolting from a trap, Gloria’s head then poked out.

  ‘Rodriguito, my dear,’ she said softly. ‘Do you really mean what you say?’

  ‘Of course I do, my sweet,’ he said, scrabbling to his knees. ‘You are the world to me. Let me in now, my love. We have gone on too long with this, don’t you think?’

  ‘Say those beautiful things to me again,’ Gloria said softly.

  ‘What beautiful things are those, my sweet?’ the mayor asked, already having forgotten the poetic phrases that had come to his mind in desperation.

  ‘The thing about the peach,’ said Gloria.

  ‘What thing about a peach is that?’ the mayor said.

  ‘You remember,’ Gloria said, ‘the thing about me being a tender little peach.’

  ‘Please, let me in, my tender little peach,’ the mayor sang again, struggling to his feet. And for the first time since his arrival home, he was welcomed back into the bedroom. Before his wife had time to rearrange her hair, he lay down on the bed and fell into a deep sleep, his snores drowning out her tender words. He was woken in the morning by Gloria shaking him violently.

  ‘Wake up, wake up, Lucia mustn’t find you here,’ she whispered, as if they were young lovers about to be caught in the middle of a clandestine tryst.

  ‘It’s my bloody bedroom,’ he said, the husband of the night before having vanished.

  ‘Let me deal with Lucia,’ Gloria protested. ‘If she knows you’ve slept here, she’ll think you’ve forced your way in and will start spreading all sorts of rumours. Let me tell her today that I have forgiven you.’

  ‘As long as she’ll be gone from my house by tonight,’ the mayor said. ‘We need some time to ourselves, my sweet, my little peach.’

  ‘I’ll deal with her,’ Gloria said, determined that this was the day when she would confront Lucia and put an end to her insinuations for ever. ‘I promise that by this evening she will be gone.’ The mayor had then to face the indignity of climbing out of the bedroom window and creeping through the undergrowth and back into the sitting room, so that his sister-in-law would not know he had managed to have one good night’s sleep in his own bed.

  The mayor was so pleased with himself that he still knew how to win back his wife’s favours after all these years, that he felt obliged to share some of his manly wisdom with Ramon, when he scuttled back into the office an hour later in an agitated state.

  ‘Ah, Ramon,’ the mayor said. ‘How are things with you today?’

  Ramon was so flabbergasted by the unusual nature of the question that he was quite unable to answer it. Instead he busied himself tidying the mayor’s desk and, in so doing, knocked the mounds of unread paperwork into a heap on the floor, burying the letter marked Urgent that he had placed there several weeks ago and had failed to tell the mayor about.

  ‘There now,’ he said, having rearranged the documents. Forgetting what had brought him to the room in the first place, he made to leave as quickly as he could.

  ‘You’re not a married man, are you, Ramon?’ the mayor asked, stopping him in his tracks. ‘Very wise, very wise. It takes a man of experience to really understand what makes a woman like my wife tick.’ He winked knowingly. Ramon, horror-struck lest the mayor in his strange mood were about to divulge any more intimate details of married life, stood motionless in the middle of the room for a second, then suddenly recalled what had brought him there.

  ‘There’s a rabble in the plaza, señor,’ he said.

  ‘There’s always a rabble in the plaza, Ramon,’ the mayor replied. ‘What do you expect from this bloody town?’

  ‘No, there’s trouble brewing,’ Ramon whispered. ‘Don Bosco’s gone missing.’

  ‘Missing? How can he go missing?’

  ‘He’s gone. Just like that. People are saying he may have been eaten in the middle of the night.’

  ‘Good. Bloody annoying little barber,’ the mayor replied.

  ‘But I need a haircut,’ Ramon said pitifully. Seeing the look on his assistant’s face, the mayor began to take in what he was being told.

  ‘Well, where is he? A man like that can’t just go missing. Not at his age.’

  ‘He has. The shop is locked. It’s been locked since last night and nobody knows where he is. They are demanding that you come down and do something about it.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Address the crowd. Reassure them that he will come back. Organise a search party. Find him.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,’ the mayor said briskly. ‘I’m going to get that bloody shop back.’

  As the crowd began to amass in the plaza, a storm was brewing in the mayor’s house. Doña Lucia, who had been given notice to leave after breakfast, had broken down completely, confessing that over the years she had been engaged in a battle to fight off the mayor’s advances and preserve the integrity of her sister’s marriage. There was something in the tone of Lucia’s voice that troubled Gloria, making her doubt her judgement. But when Lucia ingeniously managed to find conclusive evidence of the mayor’s recent misdemeanours, Gloria could cope no longer with the humiliation of the apparent deception. A hurriedly scrawled love letter to an unnamed mistress and an extraordinary item of women’s underwear were revealed to her, the latter having been bought by Lucia many years ago and never having found a use, until now.

  ‘He has deceived us both,’ Lucia said, melodramatically.

  Gloria stood in the middle of the dining room holding the offending items in her hand.

  ‘What am I to do? What am I to do?’ she said, over and over again to herself, lamenting the tatters of her marriage.

  ‘Make him jealous, my dear,’ Lucia said with a flourish of the hand. ‘Shame him publicly. Make him realise the woman you are. Show him that you can live without him. That is all there is for it. I will be here to help you.’

  Gloria got dressed for the first time in weeks, grabbed a bottle of the mayor’s finest whisky from the cupboard, and left the house, uncertain where to go, and what her future held.

  Fifteen

  Nicanora had never seen the plaza so full. She had not realised that so many people lived in the town. Not even in her youth, when the vendors from the surrounding swamp villages made their weekly pilgrimage to set up their stalls in the Sunday market, had she seen the place so bubbling with life. She slowly made her way into the crowd, holding tightly on to Nena’s hand. Men were huddled together in conspiratorial groups. As she pushed past them, she caught the rumours as they were being delivered fresh from the wagging tongues.

  ‘I hear he’s dying of a broken heart,’ one man said to his neighbour, his tittle-tattle a bit too close to the truth for Nicanora’s comfort. ‘Apparently he’s had a secret lover for
years and now she has rejected him. Perhaps he’s taken himself into the swamp to die, like the sly old dog that he is.’

  ‘Yes, my dog did just that,’ his friend replied. ‘But that was because it had hurt its leg. It took me two days to find him. He was nestling under the roots of the old tree over there. Do you think perhaps that is where Don Bosco is?’

  ‘At least some things never change,’ Nicanora thought to herself. ‘They are the most useless bunch of gossips that ever were.’ She glanced warily over at the little shop. It remained dark and silent, the shutters down. A group of men stood forlornly outside like children who had lost their parents in the crowd, not knowing which way to turn. She spotted Don Teofelo in the middle of the group. He was talking to them and by the look on his face she supposed he was trying to calm the agitation among his friends. Teofelo’s apparent ease at the situation did nothing to quell her own rising panic. She had a sense that something was unravelling, as if an unrecognised vital thread had suddenly been pulled from the town and its whole fabric was about to fall apart.

  Women were now making their way from the market to the plaza, having left their fruit rotting on their stalls in the midday sun. It was the time of day when all self-respecting fruit vendors would normally slash their prices and take advantage of their clientele all gathered in one place. But nobody was trying to sell fruit today. Fidelia, having just spotted Nicanora, rushed up to her. ‘I hear Don Bosco has gone missing,’ she said. ‘Do you know anything about it?’

  ‘Why should I know anything?’ Nicanora replied, alarmed that she was already starting to be the target of the town’s gossip, and not for the first time in her life.

  ‘Well, you used to be good friends, didn’t you? Such a shame about him. He always had a soft spot for you.’