The Winterlings

by Cristina Sanchez-Andrade

  Without thinking twice, the Winterlings paid their three pesos and entered the tent. They stood leaning against the wall for a while, taking stock of the conversation they had just had.

  The donkey was on the other side of the tent, very calm, with spectacles and a straw hat, from which a few plastic flowers dangled. In front of him was an open newspaper. They waited for a while, and nothing happened. But just as they were considering going out again and asking for their money back, they heard the donkey clearing his throat (he crowed, more like a rooster than a donkey) and reciting, in a clear voice, an advertisement from the newspaper:

  Pautauberge Solution. The most effective remedy against chest infections, recent and persistent coughs, and chronic bronchitis.

  It was the most solemn and velvety voice they had ever heard. When he said the line about the ‘chronic bronchitis’ he didn’t sound like a doctor, he sounded like a bishop. Saladina’s heart leapt. When the donkey had finished reading, she approached him. She thrust herself forward courageously — normally, she would never speak to someone she hadn’t met before, much less a donkey.

  ‘Hello, little donkey. I’m Sala, Saladina, the seamstress, and it’s a pleasure to meet you. I greatly enjoyed your reading, and I would be delighted to listen to you more often,’ she whispered.

  The donkey shifted in his seat. He raised his head and looked at the bewildered Saladina through his spectacles. His eyes were glassy, and bulging like those of a fish.

  ‘Even dressed as a donkey I wouldn’t visit with you, you hag!’ pronounced the same velvety voice that had read the newspaper.

  Saladina stood there frozen and smiling, like a stuffed animal, not knowing what to do. When she got out of the tent, she had to grab onto her sister’s arm to avoid falling over. She said she wanted to go home.

  Just then a young man in a frenzy interrupted them. He was thinking about going into the tent, and wanted to know if it was true that the donkey could read. Summoning the last of her strength, Saladina took two steps forward to answer:

  ‘He reads splendidly. Even the most complicated sentences. And he’s also a priest or a chemist.’

  Although the donkey’s words weighed on Saladina as the worst of all possible humiliations, her sister, who hadn’t quite heard everything that had been said, managed to convince her not to leave. For the rest of the festival, the Winterlings went from group to group introducing themselves.

  When the others heard them exchanging words in a language they didn’t understand, they asked them what language it was that they were speaking. The Winterlings said it was English, but the villagers of Tierra de Chá couldn’t believe it. An Englishman spoke English, a Frenchman spoke French, and someone from Portugal spoke Portuguese. They couldn’t understand how the Winterlings, who weren’t English at all, could speak that language.

  They also asked if it was true that over there, in England, priests could get married. The Winterlings told them that they could, because they were Protestant.

  Don Manuel, the priest, who was also very interested in that particular conversation, came over.

  ‘And is it true that all Protestants have tails?’

  The Winterlings told him that they did. England was full of beautiful cathedrals and Protestants with tails.

  ‘And what about teachers? Do they have country teachers in that land or have they all recertified their qualifications already?’ chimed in Uncle Rosendo.

  The Winterlings told him that they had no idea, but that they supposed that all the teachers had studied extensively and had many degrees, because they didn’t mess about in England. When he heard this, Rosendo felt his legs turn to jelly with fear.

  While a man approached Dolores to ask if he might buy her some churros, or invite her to dance, and she told him no, no thank you, she wasn’t hungry or thirsty or in the mood for dancing, she saw that her sister had slipped away from the crowd, and was stumbling through the darkness of the vestibule until she could stop and lean against the wall of the church. A few minutes later, the dental mechanic, Mr Tenderlove, came up to her. He was the only man who had shown an interest in her all night long. When she spoke to him, Saladina looked at the ground. What could they be talking about?

  On the road home, Saladina again felt the sharp sting of humiliation: a group of young men came up to flirt with Dolores, passing her by as if she didn’t exist. And although Dolores couldn’t help but feel flattered, she kept on walking as if she hadn’t heard a thing, so that her sister, who hadn’t been asked to dance all night, wouldn’t feel offended. But as they walked past the very last of the houses, she noticed that the blood had risen to Saladina’s face, and by the time they reached the apple trees, she had crumpled into tears.

  ‘Why are you crying, woman?’ asked Dolores. ‘If those men took no notice of you, it’s because you’re no use to them. It’s true! I should be the one crying. Listen, I’m still worried — do you think Little Ramón knows anything about our little secret?’

  ‘It’s because of my teeth,’ spluttered Saladina, ignoring the question. The tears were running down her cheeks and pooling on her shoulders. ‘Everything that goes wrong for me is because of my teeth. People notice that they’re fake, and that’s disgusting.’

  ‘They’re just teeth — God!’

  ‘They’re disgusting, I’m telling you! I’m a toad!’

  ‘You’re a thousand times better than a toad, and that’s why you have to wait for your chance. You heard Violeta da Cuqueira; you’ll fall in love soon.’

  This last comment, the only intention of which was to lift her spirits, was a true insult to her sadness; Saladina’s eyes rolled back, and she began to sway.

  With huge strides hurried by embarrassment, with sweaty palms and a stiff body, she managed to get to the house. Then she went straight to the shed. She came out with the ladder and the shears, climbed up, and, by the light of the moon, began to prune the fig tree.

  Click, click.

  She didn’t come down off the ladder until there were no more branches left to prune.

  ‘Here we go,’ her sister consoled her, taking her arm and leading her inside like a little girl. ‘It’s bedtime now.’

  14

  Saladina was so exhausted that she submitted to Dolores’ ministrations. Her sister took off her dress and put on her nightdress. She let down her hair, removed her dentures and placed them in a glass of water, then put her to bed and pulled up the covers lovingly, telling her the story of Taragoña Express, who ran all over the countryside wearing nothing but a loincloth.

  Just when it seemed that she was going to fall asleep, she poked her head with its wild hair out of the sheets. She stretched out her arm, grabbed the dentures and put them in, plop.

  ‘Well ...? Did you like being a sheep?’ she asked through her sniffles.

  Dolores shrugged. She was used to her sister’s ironic turns, and wasn’t surprised by the question.

  Saladina jumped out of bed in a flash, and got down on all fours.

  ‘Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool? They’re nothing more than sheep!’

  ‘You’re all worked up, Sala, calm down …’

  ‘And did you notice, Dolores, that no one wants to talk about our grandfather?’

  Dolores didn’t answer.

  ‘As soon as you bring it up, they go silent and start fidgeting. And then there’s this business about the old lady’s piece of paper. Do you think it’s true that our grandfather bought her brain?’

  Dolores didn’t know what to say. She opened her mouth and kept it that way, as if she’d been interrupted. Saladina got up and sat down on the bed.

  ‘And this nickname they’ve given us, the Winterlings, how about that …’

  ‘They give nicknames to those who keep secrets in all villages,’ reasoned her sister. ‘It makes sense.’

  ‘Yes, it makes se
nse.’

  ‘Because of our little secret …’

  They heard a noise coming from the cowshed. Dolores opened the trapdoor and had a look. She spent a while with her head hanging down through the hole, looking and listening carefully. Then she said: ‘It’s just Greta, the horseflies are eating her alive.’

  They sat in silence. The crickets began chirping. Saladina’s face was shiny with sweat, and she was very agitated.

  ‘I was talking with Mr Tenderlove,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘I saw you.’

  Saladina’s throat gurgled like a blocked pipe.

  ‘You saw me?’

  ‘I saw you.’

  ‘I see. Well, listen, Dolores … what if I got some new teeth?’

  Dolores gave her a prolonged and penetrating look. Then she set about folding the sheet back under the mattress. Sitting next to her sister, she felt the welcoming and friendly warmth that her body exuded. It wasn’t love that she felt for her. Affection; tenderness, perhaps. But really, what kind of nonsense was she on about; how could she not love her? Her bad moods exasperated her, her grunting and her shrill voice as well, but it was a gift to have someone to laugh and talk with every day. Saladina needed her, almost like a mother, and Dolores hung on to that need. She needed that need. That was it, plain and simple.

  She would never again confuse her feelings. Once had been enough.

  With a quiver of fear, she remembered that night, two or three days after they had arrived in Tierra de Chá. They had just gone to bed; it was that time of night when the colours in the sky settle and the stars are pulsing. Through an animal or even biblical instinct, they had realised that they needed to feel each other. This instinct was like a deep yearning for them: they tore off their nightdresses, knocked over the night-stand, and pulled the little iron beds together, coming together in a warm embrace.

  They were intimate with each other only once.

  Beneath the crucifix and the smiling portrait of Clark Gable, the mattresses filled with cornhusks creaked away through the night.

  The next day, they were embarrassed. They apologised to each other: ‘Forgive me.’ ‘No, you forgive me.’ ‘Forgive us both, Clark.’

  They didn’t speak to each other again until nightfall the next day.

  It never happened again.

  Now Saladina was waiting for an answer. Aside from the tense expression she had when she was alone — when she sewed or when she threw the feed to the chickens and she thought no one was watching — she had one other expression, which was of patient expectation, in which she pressed her lips together with a horrible noise, her upper dentures hanging between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. This was the expression she wore at that moment.

  ‘New teeth, you reckon?’

  It wasn’t love she felt; it was fear. Because sometimes fear shows itself in unpredictable ways: it can be monstrous affection. That’s what had happened that night. Fear breeds confusion. When the worst things occur, fear bewilders you. Dolores needed her sister’s obsessions, her ascetic discipline, her way of being in the world, somewhere between madness and the void. There was a mixture of chaos and order in Saladina that fascinated her.

  Greta the cow let out a long moo from the cowshed.

  With so many developments, no one had remembered to milk her.

  15

  At the same time, Mr Tenderlove entered his clinic. His house was behind the village, tucked away in the trees of the forest. To get there you had to walk down a road lined with chestnut trees that ended up at a stone building eaten away by moss and silence. Upstairs he had his clinic, a spacious and airy room that he used as a kind of laboratory.

  As soon as he switched on the light, a sense of pleasure took hold of him: the gratifying tingle of knowing that this was his space, his little nest, his home. Just like every other night, he prepared to take stock and clean his equipment. On top of that, he wanted to check if he had all the pieces he had chosen in his mind for the Winterling.

  Saladina the Winterling.

  Next to the revolving chair where the patients sat there was a long table with drawers of different sizes. From one of them he pulled out a brush, some scissors, a file, and a hammer. From another, slightly larger, drawer he slowly pulled out the spatulas, the callipers, and the prostheses. This was always the first thing he did; he loved having the table overflowing with things. His objects mitigated the void, making him feel better because deep down he knew that he’d never learn to live alone. He slowly placed the instruments on the tabletop and counted them. Then he stood up on his tiptoes to look at himself in the mirror that hung from the wall. He shook his head, and a lock of hair came loose. He tried a half-smile, and making a face he’d never tried before, not even in front of the mirror, and he told himself that yes, nearly all of them were there.

  As a young man, Tenderlove had been active in the Popular Front, and had dreamed of sharing out wealth and changing the world. But when the war started, after he was arrested and tortured, he understood that this was an impossible ideal and that there was no point getting caught up in a battle that he was bound to lose anyway. He swore he would never again meet with anyone who had anything to do with politics, and fell back into his work.

  His father had been a good mechanic, and had taught his son everything there was to know about the craft. But ever since he was a child, Tenderlove had shown a dark passion for dentures. He knew each and every mouth in Tierra de Chá: dark pits in which teeth sharp like a crocodile’s rotted away; hills separated by valleys and topped with golden crowns; unfathomable and decaying grottos; fixed and hanging bridges; caves like a great abyss, with stones and pebbles that gave off a putrid stench. Soon enough, he realised that his future lay in those toothless mouths.

  And so one day, when he was helping his father fix a motor, he thought of combining his knowledge of mechanics with his passion for the mouths of others.

  Soon after the war broke out and he was arrested, he was transported in a covered wagon with a dying comrade, who asked him to take a love letter to his wife as a final favour. In return, the man said, he could keep his gold tooth when he died, seeing as he had nothing else to offer. Tenderlove didn’t think he’d be able to pull anyone’s teeth, much less those of a comrade from the Popular Front, but when the poor kid died, he got out some pliers and, one by one, pulled out the teeth, which he then kept in his pocket.

  When he returned to Tierra de Chá and delivered the letter, he began his new life. While his former comrades joined the underground resistance, stealing through the mountains of Galicia with their rifles and daggers, he set about putting together the set of teeth he had been keeping in a glass of milk. He never told anyone where he got the teeth. In the meantime, he observed people’s mouths, and learnt all he could about chewing and swallowing.

  At the Festival of the Virgin, Tenderlove and Saladina had spoken at length. As soon as he saw her he noticed that she used false teeth, and while he didn’t make any direct comments, to avoid hurting her pride, he did tell her that in his house he had some teeth that were as white as pearls from Japan — teeth he’d made himself, he clarified — so that he could make a set of false teeth on his own at any time.

  To start with, the idea of getting new dentures seemed frivolous to Saladina. Then, after she’d thought on it for a while, she realised that plenty of other people in Tierra de Chá had done it. Mr Tenderlove’s reputation for skill was such that it was almost fashionable in the village and its surrounds to have your real teeth pulled and dentures put in.

  ‘New teeth like pearls from Japan,’ she explained to her sister, her eyes wide and shining. ‘New teeth, Dolores. Don’t you think it’s a good idea? What do you say?’

  Dolores stared at her. It had been quite some time since she’d seen her sister so engaged. Little by little, life had snatched her dreams away from her, and since they had returned
from England, she barely enjoyed anything. Her eyes lit up with irony.

  ‘Get them,’ said Dolores.

  ‘You really think so?’

  Dolores had always understood that her sister’s dissatisfaction stemmed from this absence, from the shame of having lost her teeth when she was little more than a child.

  ‘Don’t hold back.’

  16

  When Saladina walked into the clinic the next day, she found the dental mechanic with a magnifying glass in his left hand and a file in his right. The task of filing down teeth so that they fit snugly took the concentration and patience of a Benedictine monk, and for this reason he didn’t hear her.

  He didn’t sense her presence either until she touched his arm.

  Tenderlove dropped one of the callipers onto the floor.

  ‘Winterling!’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting you so soon.’

  Saladina stood there mutely.

  ‘I knew you’d come along in the end, everyone eventually does, but — so soon!’

  She nodded timidly. By the light of day, Tenderlove was much more attractive than when she had seen him at the festival. He wasn’t too tall, he was well turned out, had a tanned complexion, a muscly build, and curly hair. He used brilliantine in his hair and parted it to one side, plastering it to his skull. He smelt faintly of jasmine, or was it roses? His shirt was partly unbuttoned, showing his chest. There was something deeply brooding and mysterious about him that caused Saladina to step back a little and wait for him to give instructions of some sort.

  ‘Don’t worry, young lady. I already told you that nearly everyone in the village has my teeth. That bread they made with stones during the war caused a lot of grief. Take a seat.’

  He sat her down in the revolving chair.

  ‘I was already picking out the teeth for you. Open your mouth.’

  Saladina opened her mouth.

  ‘Take those dentures out.’

  Saladina closed her mouth.