Don Bosco stood patiently in the doorway, awaiting further instructions. The film crew were busy trying to fix a new sign above his shop. ‘I can’t get the damn thing to stay up,’ the man who was balancing precariously on a chair grumbled as he tried to hammer a nail into the antique fascia of the barber’s. ‘The wood is too rotten to hold it.’
‘Looks much better though,’ one of the men in the plaza shouted back. ‘You may just have to stand there and try to balance it from the side, if we can get you out of shot. Makes it much clearer to viewers that it’s a barber’s shop now. Looked more like some old junk shop before with all those hideous hats in the window.’ Nicanora and Gloria came and stood beside Don Bosco, watching the proceedings.
‘I don’t know why he’s looking so glum,’ Gloria said, pointing to the mayor under the tree. ‘He’s got exactly what he wanted.’
‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Don Bosco said.
‘I feel sorry for him,’ Nicanora said. ‘He’s been sitting out there for days now.’
‘Serves him right,’ Gloria said, but with no conviction in her voice.
‘He can’t do without you, Gloria,’ Nicanora replied. ‘Don’t you think you’ve punished him long enough?’
‘I don’t want him to think I’ve forgiven him too easily,’ Gloria said with a hint of petulance.
‘Well don’t leave him there too much longer,’ Nicanora replied. ‘You don’t want him to shrink in the rain.’
Suddenly someone shouted to Nicanora and Gloria, and one of the crew stepped forward and pushed them out of the doorway. A camera swung round and pointed at Don Bosco, who assumed the pose he had been instructed to hold, his razor held high to make it clear to the world that he was the town’s barber. As Nicanora looked at Don Bosco poised ready to tell his interesting story to the world, she saw a radiance emanating from him that she had never seen before.
‘He has a glow about him,’ she whispered to Gloria.
‘He’s standing in the bloody light,’ the camera man shouted. ‘Get that barber out of the light, quick, make him move to the left,’ and Don Bosco was roughly grabbed from behind and repositioned so that the camera could get the best shot.
‘Here I am,’ the interviewer began, walking slowly round the plaza with the camera following him, ‘on the corner of this plaza, in this humid, isolated, mosquito-infested swamp town quite forgotten by time. The townsfolk here are a simple and honest people, going about their business trying to eke out a livelihood in this hostile and inhospitable environment.’ The camera panned to a shot of the mayor sitting under the eucalyptus tree and Don Teofelo and Don Julio taking coffee at one of the tables outside the barber’s, which had now been cleared by all the film crews for the sake of the integrity of the image. ‘The townsfolk have lived for years in peace and tranquillity, with few outsiders even knowing that the place existed,’ the interviewer continued. ‘Suddenly, they have become the centre of a quite extraordinary case of mixed identity after a series of unfortunate blunders by the army, who believed them to be hiding the ringleaders of the rebel People’s Liberation Front. Despite the town having been under surveillance for several weeks, and there being no evidence of any terrorist connections, yesterday they came under sustained mortar fire during their very rarely celebrated fiesta of the Virgin. A little girl was hit, the Virgin was destroyed, and then a miracle apparently took place. I am standing here outside the unassuming barber’s shop that was the scene of so much activity yesterday. We will pick up the story now from the mouth of the barber himself. Mr Forest,’ the interviewer said turning to Don Bosco. ‘Tell us first about the foreigner who was staying here. It seems the army mistook him for the one leading the rebel group. But what do you really know about him?’
Don Bosco bristled slightly as the camera swung around to point at him. He did not like the accusatory tone of the interviewer’s question.
‘Nothing,’ Don Bosco said.
‘Can you tell us what he was like,’ the interviewer encouraged.
‘He was very polite.’
‘Yes, yes,’ the interviewer continued. ‘But who was he? What was his name?’
‘I really don’t know. He was a gringo.’
‘I understand he was here for quite some time. Didn’t you find out anything about him?’
‘No,’ Don Bosco replied, ‘nothing at all.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I had no reason to,’ agitation showing on his face.
‘So where is he now?’
‘On his way back home, I expect.’
‘Why has he gone home now?’
‘To take up where he left off.’
‘So what do you think he was doing here?’
‘I think he needed a different point of view for a while.’
‘So tell me about your own recent journey,’ the interviewer said, changing tack to see whether that would help to get more useful information out of the obstinate and, frankly, annoying little barber. ‘I understand you went to Puerta de la Coruña recently.’
‘I did.’
‘So tell me, why did you bring back all those hats?’
‘Because’, Don Bosco replied, ‘I had grown tired of cutting hair. So I thought I would buy a hat for everyone to cover their heads instead.’
‘And you had no idea that the army was watching you?’
‘Why would I?’ Don Bosco said. ‘You see, I know we are far from the centre of things here, but I had no idea that in our country today a man no longer has the right to buy hats should he wish to.’
The camera moved in on Don Bosco as Doña Nicanora and Doña Gloria edged closer to hear what he was saying. ‘He really has become very interesting these days,’ Nicanora whispered to Gloria.
‘You see,’ Don Bosco continued on live national television, ‘I hadn’t realised that an ordinary man going about his business was such a threat to our national security. That he would find himself unwittingly under surveillance and that the powers that be could misunderstand his innocent motives so much that they would risk his and others’ lives by indiscriminately shooting at him. Troubled as this country is, I had understood, until now, that a man still has the liberty to do as he wishes, as long as he is not harming others. I had not realised that the army would take such an interest in my personal affairs.’
‘So tell me, Mr Woods,’ the journalist said, trying to change the tone of the interview, ‘tell me again what happened that day, exactly as you saw it,’ and Don Bosco relayed once again the story of how the Virgin had been destroyed, Nena had been felled by a bullet and the townsfolk had been brought down by fear and grief as box after box of hats had exploded over the plaza.
‘So how did you feel?’ the interviewer asked quietly, with apparent emotion in his voice.
‘How did I feel?’ Don Bosco said.
‘Yes,’ the interviewer said slowly and slightly louder, so that the barber would understand. ‘How did you feel when you saw the little girl being hit? How did that make you feel?’
‘How did that make me feel?’ Don Bosco asked, lingering over the question. ‘You, an educated man, have come all this way to ask a simple man like me how it feels to see his town destroyed and have his feet washed by the blood of a child whom he has loved all her short life? Isn’t that a question that all humanity would immediately know the answer to? You certainly don’t need to come here with your cameras to ask me that.’
The journalist was silent for a moment before deciding to wrap up the interview. ‘So tell us about the miracle,’ he said.
‘Do you mean the miracle of the Virgin, or the miracle of life?’ Don Bosco asked.
Nena had lain cold and motionless in the bed above the barber’s shop. The sobbing Gringito had carried her there, away from the mayhem in the plaza. Nicanora kept vigil over her daughter, begging the Virgin, the ancestors, the doctor, the Gringito, whoever might have the powers to help, to give her daughter life. Arturo worked quickly and without hesitation, stemming the flow
of blood, Isabela never far from his side, helping him throughout the night, changing blood-soaked bandages, until there was nothing more for anyone to do but hope. Only the faintest sign of breathing indicated that for the moment Nena was still in the tenuous clutches of the present.
‘It is my fault,’ Arturo confided to Don Bosco as he left the room, allowing Nicanora time alone with her daughter.
‘How can that be?’ Don Bosco asked. ‘If that child lives it will be thanks to you; and you alone.’
‘No,’ Arturo said. ‘You don’t understand. It’s my fault that the army were here in the first place. I see it now. They were led here on purpose. The friend that I told you about, the one who came to me in the night, it wasn’t a dream. They were looking for her. She brought them here to put them off her scent. I thought she had come because she needed me, but she came to me for quite another reason.’
‘Who was she?’ Don Bosco asked.
‘Someone I once thought was very dear to me,’ Arturo replied. ‘Someone I once believed I could not live without.’
‘Were you her lover?’ Don Bosco asked.
‘No,’ Arturo replied sadly, ‘I was her decoy. I always have been.’
While Nicanora sat beside her lifeless daughter, the frightened townsfolk disappeared to the safety of their homes as a quiet calm descended on the town. Don Bosco and Don Teofelo worked alone into the night to clear the debris from the plaza, keeping watch for the forces encroaching on them from the forest. As all the hats were collected, the splinters of glass and plastic swept up, the leaves and petals removed, Don Bosco and Don Teofelo knelt silently side by side.
‘How could a child lose so much blood?’ Don Bosco said at last, trying to remove the last stains of the night from the stones of the plaza. ‘Yesterday we were preparing for a procession of the Virgin, with so much hope. Now I fear, come daybreak, we will be making preparations of quite another kind.’
Teofelo said nothing, but placed his hand gently on his friend’s arm.
‘How are we going to bear this, Teofelo?’ Don Bosco whispered at last. ‘How will Nicanora survive it after all she has been through? It is my fault.’
‘How so?’ Teofelo said gently. ‘How do you come to that conclusion, Bosco?’
‘Because I cheated everybody,’ Don Bosco replied. ‘I cheated the town, and I cheated Nicanora. You know that, as well as I do. I knew the Virgin was a fake and I said nothing. I let the procession go ahead and now Nicanora is being punished for my mistake.’
‘I didn’t take you for a superstitious man,’ Teofelo said. ‘I thought you were a modern man like me. I’m sure there is quite another explanation for what took place tonight, which we will find out soon enough. But you were acting in good faith. Surely that is as much as any man can do. And besides, don’t you think Nicanora would have realised herself that it was a fake?’
‘It was a foolish trick, Teofelo,’ Don Bosco said. ‘I should never have asked you to buy such a thing in Rosas Pampas, and I should never have tried to trick the mayor.’
‘I think the opposite,’ Teofelo said. ‘Whatever happened out here tonight, you saved her from destruction. Remember, Bosco, you only did it because you didn’t trust him to safeguard our Virgin in the first place. You seem to have lost your memory suddenly. You thought he was going to sell her to the antiquity hunters.’
‘No, Teofelo. I just thought I was better than him. And look where my lack of trust has got us. But do you know what the real shame of it is? I have quite forgotten where I hid her, it was so long ago.’
‘Well, we had better start looking then,’ Teofelo said, ‘before whoever it is who is out there finds their way to us.’ He picked up one of the hats as he stood. ‘These really are quite beautiful,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Don Bosco replied. ‘Puerta de la Coruña, it seems, is a town of expert milliners.’
Nicanora and the Gringito sat in the bedroom above the shop, neither speaking, barely breathing in the silence of the room, oblivious to all that was happening in the plaza below. The young doctor knelt beside the body of Nena, unable to take his hand from her wrist for fear of letting go for ever the faint hope of the echo of a pulse. Nicanora felt a surge of hatred for the bedroom that, with no apparent struggle, was so readily transforming itself into a funeral parlour. Her anguish let out its objection to the night in an unguarded moan of tears. ‘My little girl,’ she said as she rocked gently backwards and forwards, ‘my own little girl.’
Isabela clutched her mother’s hand, and then pressed her face into Nicanora’s shoulder, just as she had done as a child when she was too shy to speak to a neighbour, or when trying to deflect a scolding. The Gringito made a sound as if his voice were about to break in two in an effort to speak out and halt the movement of time. Nicanora looked up. ‘What did he say?’ she whispered to Isabela.
‘I don’t know,’ Isabela replied. ‘Perhaps he is trying to tell us that Nena is the only one who has ever really been able to understand.’
Don Bosco and Don Teofelo sat in the refuge of the church.
‘Think, man,’ Teofelo said. ‘She must be here somewhere.’
‘I’m trying,’ Don Bosco replied. ‘I’m doing my best, but we’ve looked in every possible place.’
‘Well, perhaps he did sell her then,’ Teofelo suggested.
‘Perhaps he did,’ Don Bosco agreed. ‘But somehow I think not. Either way I’ve failed everybody, and Nicanora most of all.’
The two men sat in silence as the rain that had been politely tapping on the windows started to thump on the decaying roof of the church in an effort to be let in. The sound of boots crunching on stones could now be heard in the distance, replacing the deathly silence of the plaza. As Don Bosco rose to greet the visitors for whom they had been waiting, he noticed a door at the side of the church swinging open with the winds of the impending storm. A small trickle of water, which had made its way down the centre of the pews and had been seeping through the holes in the toes of his shoes, ran from under door. A faint memory stirred in his brain.
‘I remember where she is,’ he said at last.
As Don Bosco and Teofelo searched through the dark recesses of the church and retrieved the sad, lonely figure of the rain-soaked statue from her resting place in the cupboard at the end of the forgotten corridor, the ghostly sound of the voices of strangers echoed through the pores in the church walls.
The two men gently placed their charge in her rightful position at the front of the church, and with a renewed strength went out to face the visitors. Nicanora, the doctor and the Gringito, who had all been caught in a brief moment of sleep, woke up with a start at the sound of the voices below. As they did, a more familiar voice drifted across the room.
‘You had better make sure that you close all the windows and doors,’ Nena mumbled as if from the depths of her sleep, ‘the heavy rains are about to start and will not stop for at least a month.’
In the plaza, the commander surveyed the town of his captives. ‘There’s nobody here,’ he complained through the crackle of his radio.
‘Well, why did it take you so long to get there?’ a voice barked back at him. ‘It’s been at least eight hours since the operation began. Why has it taken you so long to move in on them?’
‘We got stuck in the goddamn swamp,’ the commander explained, forlornly.
‘Well, what can you see?’
‘Nothing of interest,’ the commander replied. ‘Just two old men hanging around in the plaza, and a church with a statue in it. It’s raining so hard I could swear it makes the statue look as if she’s crying.’
As dawn finally broke over the plaza, the townsfolk awoke to the miracle. The church doors were open for the first time in years. There in the central aisle stood the Virgin, the gentle rain leaking from the roof washing the stains from her cheeks.
Don Bosco led Nicanora down the stairs into the shop, leaving the Gringito to say his goodbyes to Nena, who by now was sitting up in bed chattering. Whe
n they reached the bottom of the stairs, Don Bosco turned to Nicanora and took her by the hand. ‘I want you to close your eyes,’ he said, memories of a time long gone echoing in both their hearts. He led her by the hand into the centre of the shop. ‘You can open them now,’ he said.
There, in front of her, were hats of such beauty that she could not at first comprehend what she was seeing. Purple hats with the feathers of peacocks from distant lands sat on the barber’s basin. Hats that looked as if they had grown the wings of the condor and were about to take flight stood elegantly in the window. ‘There is a hat for every dream, or so I was once told,’ Don Bosco said as he picked one up and handed it to her. It was made of fine silk woven into strands. As Nicanora gazed at the hat in the morning light, its colour changed, slowly passing through the shades of the rainbow. Then Don Bosco got down on his knees in front of her.
‘Everything you see here is yours,’ he said, ‘regardless of whether you will have me or not. But you would make me the happiest man in the world if you would reconsider my offer of twenty years ago.’
Nicanora said nothing, the words silent in her throat.
‘Will you have me?’ he asked again.
She was still silent.
‘I can’t,’ she said finally in a whisper.
‘Why not? I’m no longer a barber,’ Don Bosco said, standing up and brushing the dust from his trousers and indignation from his voice. ‘And you are, and it doesn’t worry me.’
‘It’s not that,’ Nicanora said, and she took Don Bosco by the hand and led him to the back storeroom. ‘I need to make sure of something. I don’t think it is me who will really make you happy,’ she said. ‘If you love somebody else you must try to find her, no matter how far away she may seem right now. It’s the least you deserve.’ Don Bosco was now the one who was speechless as Nicanora opened the drawer to the little cabinet.
Dona Nicanora's Hat Shop Page 28