At night, after the take had been divvied up, while Maricallo was drinking and went begging around the taverns, collecting nothing more than the jeers of vendors and farmers, the blind girl clutched the apron full of coins as she lay on the dry straw of the hay shed that was her home. The girl with the face that was scarred by the measle blisters daydreamed and, in her fantasies, became the handsome woman starring in those old romances. She might have been dreaming that Einhard, the king’s kind page, visited her in her princess’ bed and that with her scent of roses, she had stolen all his color. She was probably dreaming about a beautiful romance when the ugly brute came and emptied himself in her, the girl who was homely and poor, alone and defenseless.
When he realized she was pregnant, Maricallo wanted to take her to A Pella, the witch of Francelos, who was very skilled in the art of ending pregnancies using parsley. He argued that he couldn’t take her back home in that condition nor with a baby in her arms, because he’d promised her mother he’d watch out for the blind girl. He insisted that the road was hard enough without having to walk with a baby in her belly as well. But Pepa the Mole refused to end the life that was beating inside her. Maybe, when the pregnancy was advanced and it was hell to get around, the romance of Einhard had been replaced in her dreams by the Virgin about to give birth, on the road to Bethlehem in accordance with Caesar’s order.
Because, Xoana, my great-great-grandmother, I’m quite sure, Xoana, you who haven’t been born yet, did not carry my great-grandmother cursing the man who left her in that condition. She simply dressed him in the garments of a figure of dreams, Einhard, the protagonist of a Carolingian romance who, if he had in fact been real, would have already been in the great beyond for about a thousand years. But my great-great-grandmother, who knew nothing about these things, knew that a child has to be born out of love and that was why she imagined it so.
One July afternoon the trickster and the girl arrived at the hut they shared. He was laden with the few belongings they had tied in a bundle; she had a canvas sack where they kept the violin, hanging from a piece of twine over her shoulder. Rosa was born a few days later.
Pepa the Mole was quick to return to the road because it was the only way she had to support her baby, but she returned as often as she could to check on the little one, to see she was growing up almost healthy and happy, at the knees of a grandmother who’d been hardened by work and hunger. The child would wait for her mother, who always brought her honeyed sweets and trinkets she bought from the hawkers at the fairs after they’d been picked over. And she waited most of all for the warmth of the kisses of her not very attractive mother, who lulled her to sleep with stories she told in the most beautiful voice. But the blind woman never wanted to return to Monterroso.
Remember, Xoana, you descend from Pepa Pérez, nicknamed the Mole, who was blinded by the pox and impregnated by Einhard, the page whom Charlemagne, after finding him in bed with his daughter and thrusting his very sword between the two sleeping lovers, would later interrogate with the intention of punishing him by death.
The boy roamed the halls of the palace, looking like a ghost, terrified by the discovery of a love that could never be, when he ran into the king: Where are you going, Einhard? You look so sad and pale. His reply saved his life: The fragrance of a rose devoured all my color.
What I’m trying to say, Xoana, is that you descend from the greatest poverty and the most brutal act, but also from the beautiful dream that filled the mind of my great-great-grandmother that night in November. That dream, greater than her misfortune, was what she nurtured, perhaps so as not to die from rage, or perhaps so she could protect the life within her. Without knowing, she did what the oyster does: she wrapped an affliction with the purest of material until it was transformed into a pearl. A pearl that is the second link – my great-grandmother Rosa – in this chain that I hope to forge for you, Xoana, in case at some point, when you’re older and life is painful, you need strength that is greater than your own.
