The Winterlings

by Cristina Sanchez-Andrade

  That was when Dolores got up and walked across the room. She felt nothing.

  Slowly, she went down the stairs and into the basement. What lay down there below in the basement had always been tempting. Down there was the kingdom of shadows, but also all the cast-off odds and ends, the hidden treasures. Down there were all the household knick-knacks, little bits and bobs, hooks, lines, nylon, old tackle boxes, the remains of some whale-like creature, the uncured octopus. Down there was the most remote, the most dust-covered stuff: there lay everything rotted by brine and dampness, the forgotten and the feared things, the things that should remain hidden. There lay the most opaque shadows, and while Dolores searched for the light switch that day, she thought that sooner or later, we all go towards them.

  She found the octopus on a table. She picked it up and went back up the stairs.

  When she arrived upstairs, she saw Saladina’s smiling face as she sat next to Tomás.

  ‘You have to cure the octopus,’ he said as he stared at the ground. ‘It’s all hard, you can’t eat it like that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dolores with a dry voice. ‘Turn around.’

  ‘Turn around?’ he said. ‘What for?’

  Dolores had gone quiet. She trembled next to him.

  ‘It’s a surprise,’ said Saladina.

  Tomás turned around. No one had ever been so attentive to him.

  Then Dolores smacked him over the head with the octopus so hard that he stumbled around and collapsed onto the floor.

  ‘The octopus is cured,’ said Saladina, seeing how the slimy legs of the octopus hung down by her sister’s knees.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dolores, still out of breath, dropping it to the ground. ‘And my husband is dead.’

  The wait was dragging on forever. How long had they been talking in the bedroom? Five minutes? Three hours? Hearing the door, Dolores got up quickly. Don Manuel came down the stairs heavily. His face gave away nothing, but Dolores thought that in his eyes danced an inchoate but rotund victory.

  The priest limited himself to saying only that Saladina had made her peace with the Lord.

  18

  Unhinged by her mental breakdown, Saladina wandered about the house all day. She was always watering the geraniums and feeding her cricket, whom she had affectionately begun calling Adolf Hitler. She babbled in English about ‘stupid Margaret who is equally pure and virtuous as a cat’ and ‘poor little Dennis’. ‘What can we do, Dolores, to make him feel better?’

  In the mornings, they sat down to eat breakfast together. But Saladina, who was immersed in the production of her interminable lists, barely even spoke.

  ‘Sala, do you remember much about our grandfather?’ Dolores asked her one day.

  Saladina was absorbed in her list, her tongue hanging out as she wrote.

  ‘Oh yes. I remember grandfather.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Grandfather? Well … He was a delight.’

  Dolores sat in silence as her sister crossed out and added new names to her list.

  ‘And do you know who I am?’

  ‘You’re a delight as well,’ said Saladina, without looking up from her list.

  ‘Yes … But who am I?’

  ‘Well … you …’ Saladina looked up at her sister with surprise. ‘You’re … you’re my sister.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dolores. ‘But what’s my name?’

  ‘How would I know?’ exclaimed Saladina, and went back to completing her list.

  Dolores sat there looking at her. For just a moment, while she contemplated the tatty locks of hair covering her sister’s face, her fragile hand filling up the piece of paper with useless classifications, a hint of an idea flashed across her mind. If Saladina were dead … nobody would find out about our little secret, and then nobody could stop me fulfilling my destiny. Two seconds later, the terrible weight of regret came over her. The same weight she had known for years. How could she have such thoughts when her sister was ill, very ill? How could she think of leaving so selfishly when Saladina needed her more than ever? And then, she had confessed to the priest. What could she have told him? Thinking about that drove her mad. She was sure that the priest knew everything, and that he was just waiting for the right moment to reveal it.

  She brushed the hair out of her sister’s eyes and kissed her forehead.

  ‘Would you like me to tell you a story?’ she asked. Saladina looked up from her list.

  ‘Yes, a story.’

  ‘Once upon a time, there was a very bad wolf who lived in the forest. One stormy night—’

  ‘No, not that story.’

  ‘I’ve told you the one about the Taragoña Express about a thousand times. Why don’t you let me tell you the one about the wolf who gets struck by lightning?’

  ‘No, not that story.’

  Dolores sighed.

  ‘Once upon a time, there was a man who was all skin and bones, with a long scraggly beard just like Jesus Christ who …’

  Then Dolores thought that no matter what happened in her life, she’d never become an actress.

  Doing that would be worse than betraying Saladina. It would kill her.

  And so life went on: care, patience and warm embraces. Soon, visitors began arriving.

  One afternoon when Dolores had gone off to the tavern, Saladina sat on the bench by the door to wait for her. She heard footsteps on the road and got up to receive her sister with a hug. She took a few steps forward, intending to surprise her by meeting her at the end of the road, but instead she stood there staring. Dolores wasn’t coming back alone. She and her companion, who was none other than Albert Lewin, the director of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, stopped a few metres from the house and started kissing. Saladina went upstairs quickly and hid under the covers. Dolores came up twenty minutes later and kissed her on the forehead.

  ‘How are you, Sala?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Saladina felt strange.

  The next time, Saladina opened the door to find Dolores tangled in the sheets with Mr Tenderlove, who smiled at her over her shoulder.

  First thing in the morning, her hair in a mess, she told her sister all this, over and over again in English.

  ‘I had visitors last night, Dolores,’ she also said. ‘Lots of people walking around my bedroom … You were there too. What were you doing in my bedroom?’ she added in a serious tone.

  She forgot how to sew.

  She let Adolf the cricket die, and the geraniums dried out.

  She forgot how to write and no longer made lists.

  She prayed. She prayed endlessly, and ate omelettes with cheese.

  Don Manuel, the priest, came to see her every day. He brought the sacraments and prepared her for the Last Rites.

  She was a frail thing. Her skin had shrivelled up; she was barely a bag of bones.

  Violeta da Cuqueira was right — the illness had come back with a vengeance.

  She died a few hours after the cow. Greta too had gone from bad to worse. Ever since the day she had woken up bleating like a sheep, she had barely eaten and spent most of the day sleeping. One night, Dolores was surprised that she couldn’t hear shuffling and mooing in the cowshed. With a terrible premonition, she went down to the cowshed. Greta had keeled over on her side, lying dead on the bed of gorse.

  Dolores crouched down and sat there for a while breathing in her scent. She felt her warmth and the thrumming of flies around her. She went upstairs for a sheet and some cord, then wrapped her up completely and tied her off. She cleared the gorse away from one side of the cowshed, and, with the pick and the shovel, dug for quite a while until she had a decent sized hole. She covered her with earth and branches.

  When she finished, she looked out the window. The world at dawn revealed itself to her: the burbling of the river, distant echoes from t
he forest, sharp and terrifying shrieks from little creatures. She doubled over, trying to contain her sobbing.

  She burst into tears.

  She cried for the cow, but most of all she cried for what she knew was lost from that moment on. She cried for Saladina making fig jam in the kitchen. She cried for the sound of her teeth clicking in the mornings, for the smell of her hot urine. She cried for the ferocious odour of her loins. She cried for the mashed banana sandwiches that they used to eat in England and for the stench of stale popcorn in the cinemas. She cried for the roosting chickens and for the sound of the cowbell as they went up the mountain. She cried for the yellow resplendence of the gorse flower. She cried for the film she would never star in, for the sound of Mr Tenderlove’s red car wending through the back roads. She cried for Tierra de Chá.

  She cried for life.

  She cried for her.

  Finally, she wiped away her tears with her apron, went to the kitchen, then made breakfast for her sister before taking it up. She found her sitting up in bed, wearing those thick glasses she used for sewing. She put water in a bowl, and left it on her sister’s lap so that she could wash her hands. She dropped in a bar of soap, and left her hands in the bowl too. For a while, their hands intertwined in the soapy water, seeking each other out like fish, brushing against each other.

  ‘Are they my fingers or yours?’ said one Winterling.

  ‘What difference does it make?’ answered the other, after some thought.

  They both started laughing.

  Once the bowl had been cleared away, Saladina drank her cup of anise and ate a bit of cheese omelette, but she didn’t have the strength for much more.

  ‘Did Greta …?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Dolores.

  Saladina took off her glasses and sat watching the countryside from the window. The wind shook the cornstalks ferociously. From time to time, it carried the echoes of church bells.

  ‘No one will ever know that her real name is Teixa,’ said one sister.

  ‘Or that we stole her,’ said the other one. ‘So many secrets! Do you remember how scared we were that someone would recognise her?’

  Silence fell over them again.

  Outside, a crow croaked.

  ‘You never told me the reason for all that running,’ said Saladina after a time.

  ‘Greta’s running?’ asked her sister, puzzled.

  ‘No, the Taragoña Express,’ she answered.

  Dolores the Winterling sat thinking on it for a while. So many years telling that same story, and she herself and had never stopped to think why that man ran about day and night.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said her sister. ‘I don’t even want to know anymore. We’ve had some good times together, haven’t we, Dolores?’

  ‘We sure have.’

  ‘We had fun, didn’t we?’

  ‘I think so …’

  Then Saladina made a gesture for her sister to come close and whispered a single lucid sentence in her ear, ten words that Dolores would never forget and that, in truth, she never knew quite how to interpret: ‘You can go to Hollywood now to become an actress.’

  Dolores began to hiccup.

  ‘Are you giving me your blessing? Really? And what about our little secret? What about my little secret? Does the priest know? What did you tell him? I have to know!’

  But Saladina went silent; she fell into a deep and peaceful sleep, and shortly thereafter, she passed away.

  Dolores watched over the body all night. Then she tried to sleep a little.

  She felt terribly relieved.

  19

  The next morning, after sleeping for a couple of hours, Dolores went down to the kitchen. Her sister lay still on the stretcher she had prepared for her.

  ‘Sala, can you hear me, Sala?’

  The mute presence of Saladina filled the room.

  Dolores went silent, then began talking excitedly.

  ‘I know I need to get a move on … But I’m confused … It’s difficult, you know? We always did everything together …’

  She waited again in silence.

  ‘Don’t you worry, I’ll take off that nightdress and put something pretty on you. But let me just ask you one thing …’ Her pulse quickened, she stopped, and then started again with a feeble groan. ‘Do you still think I should go, Sala? I don’t want to do anything you don’t approve of, now that …’

  Dolores spent the whole morning thinking about how she would arrange for her sister’s burial. At around midday, she wanted to move the body, but it had begun to stiffen and was difficult to move. She grew more and more confused and weary. Then she heard a knock at the door.

  It was the priest, accompanied by nearly the whole village. When they saw him going past with his bag of holy oils, once again in the direction of the Winterlings’ house, the villagers couldn’t help but follow. Along the way, others joined them.

  When she opened the door, Dolores felt herself give in to happiness, feeling the most absolute gratitude. Seeing all those people there, she felt she had been mistaken. Deep down they were good people after all: they were prepared to help out and bring comfort in difficult times. And so while she let them in, she explained in a trembling voice that she needed help to go to Sanclás to buy a … then she’d have to come back and …

  ‘My sister is dead,’ she announced at last.

  There was a general silence. Don Manuel crossed himself.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ said Meis’ Widow, covering her mouth with her hand.

  They came into the house and filed slowly by the body. Some of them kissed her knees and feet.

  ‘She looks sad,’ said Aunty Esteba, screwing up her nose.

  ‘And thinner,’ added Meis’ Widow. She still had her hand over her mouth, as if that way she might avoid throwing up.

  ‘What a shame!’ said the gaitero, the local bagpiper from Sanclás, who by chance was in town that morning. ‘All those new teeth and barely any time to use them.’

  ‘Considering how expensive they are!’ said Tristán. ‘I was thinking of getting some myself, and look … What’s the point? We all end up like her.’

  They stood silently while the priest prayed in Latin. Dolores noticed then that three or four women were whispering and looking over at the priest, waiting for his signal, and then they dashed out towards the shed. Don Manuel stopped praying for a few seconds. Moments later, the women came back with a pick and a shovel, and went down to the cowshed.

  ‘Where are you going with those? Stop that!’ he screeched, wiping beads of sweat off his forehead. ‘I’m telling you, you should wait for the Civil Guard.’

  The women stopped dead in front of the cowshed door. They turned around and stood next to Dolores, the stretcher with Saladina on it and the group of villagers surrounding them. But they were impatient, and didn’t put down the pick or the shovels.

  ‘My sister is going rigid,’ said the Winterling. ‘We have to shroud her and put her in the coffin right away. I haven’t got … I haven’t got a coffin yet.’

  The priest kept praying without taking much notice, his fingers entwined in his lap, visibly excited. The women, who hadn’t stopped whispering and fidgeting among themselves, decided to ignore the priest’s instructions and head into the cowshed. For a good while, you could hear them scratching away in the gorse: ‘Have a look here,’ said one; ‘Move that branch, what a stink,’ said another, and then more moving of branches and crunching of dry leaves; ‘Phwoah, it has to be here, get digging, yes, dig away…’; ‘But didn’t he say it was in the cowshed?’; ‘Yes, here, it must be around here — look, here the earth has been turned over …’

  From time to time, Don Manuel opened his eyes, listened in, then let out a sigh, shaking his head. ‘I told them it would be better to wait for the Civil Guard to begin the search,�
�� he whispered to himself. The other men also listened to the hubbub with interest.

  And then everything went silent.

  Horribly silent.

  Suddenly, the group of women marched out, leaving the pick and the shovels abandoned on the ground. They looked like they’d just seen a ghost; they pushed each other in their rush to get out. Meanwhile, the priest began to make way between them: ‘What’s going on?’ he yelled. ‘There’s nothing here, what did you see? I told you to wait for the Civil Guard!’

  ‘But your sister told me he wasn’t here!’ he said, addressing himself to Dolores.

  ‘This has nothing to do with my sister,’ she said calmly.

  ‘She told me what she had done …’

  ‘Then she lied to you.’

  The priest wiped the sweat from his forehead again. He began to stutter.

  ‘But, dear woman … How could you?’

  ‘And what would you have done in my place?’

  Those who had been waiting in the living room began to grow impatient. The circle of people around Saladina’s stretcher melted away. The Widow said that it wasn’t as if she didn’t want to help, God no, but she had never liked being around the dead. She was followed out by Uncle Rosendo, who shrugged as he excused himself, what was he supposed to do? Where there’s a captain, a sailor gives no orders. Aunty Esteba suddenly remembered that she had left bread baking in the oven, and went off, saying that she’d be back later. At the end of the day, she was the one who always dressed the departed, and she had no problem with helping out. Only the priest, Tristán, the bagpiper from Sanclás, and two other villagers remained.

  The two villagers and the bagpiper were of the opinion that a woman who had lost her sister would need solitude and time to reflect, and that it would be best if they left. Tristán looked at his watch and left also. At the door, he turned around and confusedly muttered something about his birds squawking. Then the priest, who for some time now had had one foot out of the door, decided that the best thing would be to call Mr Tenderlove, who could take Dolores in his car to Sanclás to buy a coffin. And so he set off to find him.