CHAPTER TWO

Señorita Pura was forty years old when she gave the fertile adventure of giving birth a pinch. Forty years as robust as the sticky substance of olive trees. She carried them well, they would hardly have been suspected by anyone who didn’t know the truth about her birth, back in 1909, which is when the medication that brought an end to centuries of the “French disease”, of syphilis, was discovered. Years later, she would say her birth and the discovery of Salvarsan, the medicine that cured that hateful disease, had a lot in common. She would argue it was thanks to her that humanity was delivered from the worst possible epidemic – that brought by the Spanish conquistadores of America and sown throughout Italy by the troops of the French king Charles VIII. The bug that assassinated without aforethought but with complete efficacy whoever fell between its crystal teeth.

Señorita Pura had it that Paul Ehrlich, the scientist who discovered a cure for syphilis that year, had visited Ébora when her mother was several months pregnant. He tried out on her a product that would later give rise to Salvarsan. She got better. She recovered from a case of syphilis she had contracted thanks to the father, a disappeared Frenchman. A protracted love story known only by the oldest in that place, those who maintained in their memories the unthinkable things that made Ébora such a fruitful and strange place. Señorita Pura had been born a strong and vigorous child, contributing, by such a healthy birth, to the advance of modern science, its definitive escape from the abysmal pits of obscurantism and superstition, its flight from the unsuitable forms that wouldn’t permit the full development of methods and deductive techniques whose core and immaterial essence resided in the elaboration of hypotheses and empirical verifications.

At the age of forty, nobody would have said she was more than thirty, and they certainly wouldn’t have thought she was the daughter of a woman who had suffered the French disease: well combed, with shiny, soft skin, upright, without a hint of tiredness, agile, energetic, disposed, restless. Some say only a woman such as this could have withstood the expulsion of the creature in her entrails: large, enormous, as voluminous as a wicker basket. The child, Libardino, sticky and plump, weighed almost seven kilos. The neighbouring women who assisted at the famous childbirth claimed never to have seen anything like it: round as a loaf of wheat bread, large, rotund as the curved figures of early Romanesque, without a drop of fat and with plenty of hair, blond, blond as the rays of the ruddy, ferocious midday sun. That was what caused a rumour to course through the town concerning the child’s paternity: one of the few blonds to inhabit that place was the priest, Don Blas, about whom no lack or neglect was known in the precept of carnal abstinence that priests must assume on account of their condition of indissoluble and everlasting marriage to the lofty and underappreciated divine spheres we humans imagine so we can illumine the many shadows that surround us and do us down. What was more, one of Don Blas’s favourite themes in conversations with the young lads and lasses of Ébora centred precisely on decorum and the total absence of practices that might be conceived to transgress norms prescribed by the Sixth Commandment, the definitive commandment for distinguishing good from evil, correct from incorrect behaviour, those in life renting perennial rooms in heaven from those buying tickets for an extended stay in hell, that space governed excessively and imprudently, cruelly, by Beelzebub.

To back up his statements, the priest would have recourse to a little book entitled A Catechism of Christian Doctrine by one P.M. Jerónimo de Ripalda, he would read it aloud with dogmatic, majestatic and solemn emphasis: “How can the flesh be subdued?” And he himself would reply, “By deprivation and fasting.” Two seconds later, almost in unison, the children would repeat, “By deprivation and fasting,” though none of them knew what was meant by “deprivation”, let alone “fasting”, Ébora had always been a town overflowing, even in periods of scarcity, and nobody there went without sampling the nutritious meat Ripalda held in such contempt.

The priest would say that touching and feeling “pubic or adjacent zones” had terribly grave secondary effects, which could not be hidden from a man of the cloth, however hard the children might wish to conceal their touchy-feely behaviour, it would be impossible, the priest would quickly sort out the abstinent from sinners, the feelers from those who were pure and clean. So it would have been unkind to think that Don Blas could be Libardino Romero’s father and yet, despite everything, Señorita Pura’s continued and frequent visits to the church, the aforesaid capillary feature, so notorious by now, decreed an immoral and sinful relationship between the priest and one of his favourite daughters, so religious, attentive and helpful. Energetic as well, capable of stamping on the face of the man or woman who might question her integrity and modesty.

Suspicions regarding clerical paternity were only increased by the inconsistent explanations Señorita Pura gave concerning her son’s origins – explanations she gave on only one occasion, one midday in August, in the mist of the eve of the Assumption.

That day, Ébora celebrated its patron saint and a hellish, raging fire settled on the hot leaves of thirsty alders. The wind carried in its embrace all the sun’s flames, seemingly increased by the ardour of a pot of oil burning in the heavens, blown on by nonconformist saints who thus expressed their rejection of the means of celestial government, tyrannical and authoritarian. It is well known that on days of such intense heat, heat that causes moisture, people’s minds cease to function normally and uncontrollable situations arise: murders, passionate amatory encounters in public places, exhibitionisms of varying intensity, visions of shadows that upset the heart’s rhythm. Señorita Pura, under the influence of such torrid temperatures, had heard ill-intentioned remarks aimed at wounding her unscathed grace. She repressed her anger. She didn’t go straight out to slap the originators of such insults in the face. She contained her rage because otherwise she and her unruly energy would have slapped the whole of Ébora in the face, including those ghosts and the Holy Company that walk on winter nights between the trees and the sickle-like moon, so tiny, that peeps over hills touched by cold and solitude.

Word had it that, five months before giving birth, she had travelled south in order to spill the contents of her stomach and, regretting her decision at the last moment, she had returned to Ébora to bring Don Blas’s child into this world of trouble and woe. That was what was said, and Señorita Pura, who wasn’t stupid, found out, indirectly, thanks to the neighbouring women who accused each other mutually. “Do you know what so-and-so said?” And so-and-so would say, “No, Pura, no, it was her and that other,” and that other would rejoin, “No, Pura, no, it was that one,” and that one would add, “I’m surprised, Pura, you should think that of me, it was those ones over there…” and so on and so forth until reaching the infinite, irreversible curse that arises from and leads nowhere.

Tired of all these outrages, and so as not to slap the whole of Ébora in the face, Señorita Pura took a decision. On leaving High Mass, the one that starts at twelve, she shouted out in the churchyard, “Come here, you neighbours, men and women, I’ve some interesting news you can use to spur the cords of your tongues.” She had always been an energetic woman, pious but energetic, and, according to those who heard her words that summer’s midday, her voice didn’t tremble when she affirmed, “My Libardino is the son of the deceased husband of the one talking to you.” “You’re not married!” shouted one of the old, blessed bees that inhabit Ébora, with her head down. Señorita Pura dissembled the aggression that ran through her bones and, with all the pomp and ostentation her clear tongue could occasionally summon, replied, “I got married in Granada, at five in the Lorcan and Federican afternoon of a Monday in August, to a pendular bullfighter who was in love with me.”

On such afternoons of heat, anything can happen, including the rapid transformation of truth into falsehood, or vice versa, and of reality into fiction, unreality into observable certainty, perhaps that was why the people listening to Señorita Pura’s slow, serene voice remained motionless in their places and, enduring a Saharan sun, heeded the lady’s words. “I went for a rest in the south, on medical advice (when she gave birth, Dr González, who turned up several days after the first television was installed in the mayor’s house, had yet to settle in the town), because it’s a well-known fact that the humidity we generally suffer in Ébora is not very beneficial for those of us who are afflicted with bone diseases, I can show you a certificate from the doctors who examined me at the time, a little worse for wear, many years have gone by, but here it is, take a look.” And it seems the men and women listening to her opened their eyes a little wider to take in a crumpled piece of paper Señorita Pura was holding in her hands. Panting, finding it difficult to breathe, she asked for a little water in order to continue with her account. She went on, “It was a spring day, and the first thing I saw on arriving in the city was a poster announcing a bullfight that very afternoon; among the bullfighters was the name of the one who would later become my husband: Tomás Romero Small Tail. It was some kind of intuition that made me head in the direction of the bullring, pay for a seat in the shade, endure that atrocious spectacle: blood, pursued animals, obscene postures. And yet when I caught sight of Tomás, all my impressions changed, I felt renewed, possessed of a sensation I had never experienced before, something akin to those moments when you enter into direct contact with the supernatural, something you just can’t understand. It was love. The feeling I had never known before. Love. The love that went hand in hand with his bull-like gait embellished with lyrical gestures, pendular, as I said before and now reaffirm rotundly and without fissures.”